In the spirit of Jungian synchronicity, are movie studios now mimicing our meme? Hundreds of millions have been invested in these feature films, and the producers branded them by using either the word “Soul” or “Code” in the titles — and on the cinema marquee:

Source Code

Three stars! This metaphysical, sci-fi thriller in the Inception and Limitless style stars Brokeback Mountain guy, Jake Gyllenhaal; Fast Five gal, Michelle Monaghan; and Up in the Air femme fatale Vera Farmiga. Long before Source Code was even written in treatment-form, and being shopped to Hollywood studios, we reserved SOURCE@SoulsCode.com as the general e-mail address for this site. Both the movie and this website explore the question, who are you?

Soul Code

Maybe our lawyers at Orrick, Herrington should have taken out the studio and distributor of this flick for trademark infringement. But they didn’t have to: The reviewers took down the movie instead. Soul Code wanted to be Source Code and Inception. Instead, this 2010 movie went direct to DVD. The heroine figures out a way to download and transfer a person’s memory. “Soul Code” telegraphs what happens when her memory is placed into a much younger woman’s body. Search the title in Google. Our site still comes out as the top result, thanks to our premium content and premiere practitioners like author and psychotherapist David Richo.

Soul Surfer

It’s 127 Hours — but on water. An against-all-odds 2011 docu-drama about an all-American girl in Hawaii, Soul Surfer tells the story of Bethany Hamilton who lost her arm at the age of 13 when a tiger shark bit it off at the shoulder — but did not lose her faith. (American Idol spawn Carrie Underwood plays a minor role).

Soul of Sand

Is a Bollywood drama about a watchman at an abandoned mine near Delhi who is drawn into a love triangle by a wealthy landlord’s daughter and her lower-caste lover.

The Source

It made a splash at Cannes 2011. It’s religious. It’s political. It’s a controversial, modern-day fable exploring female empowerment in the Arab world.

BY PAUL KAIHLA — In her short, unintentional life, Paris Hilton has performed at least one spiritual good deed: In 2007, after being sentenced to 45 days in jail for . . . whatever, she exited her L.A. home carrying a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now.

That single act, and famous photo, gave Tolle’s best-selling book of spiritual haiku a second life. It zoomed up Amazon.

The take on Paris among the Soul’s Code community of helping-professionals goes something like this: she’s a harmless person who puts herself out there — but not “in” there — as in, herself. Or what Carl Jung called “the Self,” free of an excessive degree of self-concern.

When she was sentenced, we publicly prayed for Paris’ new inner life — or at least that she’d undergo what another American icon, Dwight Eisenhower, called “an agonizing reappraisal.”

It didn’t work.

Paris now has a new reality show — this time on a cable network called Oxygen.

It has the generous, self-effacing title, The World According to Paris.

Here’s a segment:

Paris says on camera without a hint of irony:

“My friends and I call people who crave attention, hungry tigers — and believe me, Kristin is the hungriest of them all.”

If any of us who aren’t on reality TV ever said that about anyone in our social orbit . . . um, I think that our family, friends, priest, psych or mentalist would call us out for our projections. But when a media parasite like Paris — who isn’t a Hilton Hotel heiress by any business measure, by the way — recites those lines, it’s only moreso.

A spiritual teacher named David Richo has a brilliant take on the ego. Richo came by it honestly: He was a Catholic priest who resigned his office to become a psychotherapist, and then blended the model of Christ with Buddhism for his personal practice.

Your identity is fragile, cracked easily, and bereft of power, says Richo. The more devoted you are to your self-image, the more easily and often you react.

Paris possibly posed with the Power of Now for two reasons: she got a personal recommendation to read the book, and it was publicly useful.

The Power of Now was already a bestseller by Tolle, who lives in Vancouver, Canada.

On a suicidal night three decades ago, Tolle had an ‘enlightenment,’ or permanent shift into another state of mind.

Tolle’s realization is that the act of thinking itself is not the fundamental denizen of reality, or even a great tool to empirically measure reality. Thinking is a small slice of life, confined to the cognitive capacity of the machine parts that make up the brain.

How do you feel after you make love? (forget, Paris)

Euphoria. No thought. Your body, your being, is your ‘mind’, so to speak.

In fact, if you grok that the very act of reading these words is a narrowing state of mind — kind of like what physicists do when they collapse quantum particles into a fixed position by measuring them — then you get Tolle.

Paris picked up his book, and hung out with a Hollywood guru, but here we are.

America may have great leaders and creators but half of the society is the most parochial on the planet — next to Japan. (Full disclosure: I’m an American).

Half of this place is also a profoundly fearful nation. What happened the month of 9/11? Restaurant, retail and travel sales plummeted. These people aren’t Rambo’s. They “cocooned” in their homes, scared shit-less. True story.

What does this have to do with Paris Hilton?

The behavior reflects a collective unconscious informed by desperation and anxiety, or what Soul’s Code and Eckhart Tolle call “the pain-body.”

It is any wonder, then, that one of the most famous women in our culture is on an energetic frequency — or to put it in Oprah-speak, attracts into her life the following people and places via the Laws of Attraction:

• Allows herself to be recorded with a video camera having intercourse and oral sex with a freak named Rick Solomon, then signs a mutual release to earn royalties from the pornographic video — and then as late as June, 2011 presents herself as a victim of sexual exploitation
• has only two real friends, as she claims in The World According to Paris, and unconsciously hosted a reality series in *three* countries, My New BFF
• her current love interest was arrested for drunk driving, acts out with possessive and paranoid rage at Paris, and works as a club promoter in — of all  of the most glamorous and cultured cities of the world — Las Vegas.

Paris is now the subject of media and blogger ridicule because MTV booted her, and her Oxygen ratings suck. The only factor giving The World According to Paris any fumes at all is Brooke Mueller  — and by inference, Charlie Sheen.

Let’s get real, this is the first we’ve ever read in the whole history of the Internet that Paris Hilton even knew Brooke Mueller. Sheen’s ex was retained for the reality show to keep Paris alive as a reality TV actress, and parasitically ride off of Sheen’s notoriety and PageRank.

Talk about exploitation: It’s the Hilton brand.

They’re as desperate as the rest of us.

It’s the torments of the Ego — excessive self-concern, the constant making of comparisons and continuous seeking — that made Tolle’s Power of Now a hit in the first place.

We all want to escape the kind of neurotic-hell that Hilton has so poignantly portrayed in The World According to Paris.

And I for one will pray that Paris picks up the Power of Now again.

1. 9th Company, the Russian side of “Charlie Wilson’s War”

Hulu.com, the website where you can play TV and movies for free, finally has a foreign flick worth watching. (Actually, make that any flick).

Hulu just posted 9th Company, “9 Рота” in the original Russian — the first time that a mass American audience has been exposed to the best movie we’ve ever seen from the post-Soviet Union (and in that spirit, it’s a co-production with Finland and the Ukraine).

Yes, the movie does has subtitles. But think of it as the Rus version of Platoon with the nitty-gritty psychological naturalism of Stanley Kubrick’s Natural Born Killers. But it’s actually based on a true story.

Dateline, 1988: The Red Army’s boot-camp for paratroopers, which makes Navy SEAL 6 look like a Disney Jamboree. The squad deploys to Afghanistan for the end-game of the Soviet occupation of the stone-age Muslim state. As we’re drawn into this experience, we identify and sympathize with the characters — and then it dawns: Oh shit, this is our war. As in the Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts vehicle written by Aaron Sorkin, Charlie Wilson’s War. Meaning, the U.S. and its allies are supplying the other side.

Second level of awareness: These humble Russian peasant soldiers from Siberian cities like Krasnoyarsk are actually  fighting our war, Act I  — that is, Obama’s current war in Afghanistan. In the movie, the mujahedin are not politicized, 9/11-wise. It’s left to us to realize who they are: 9th Company was fighting Bin Ladn and the Taliban 13 years before the World Trade Center.

2. Addiction: Stoned (as in Rolling Stones)

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards founded the Rolling Stones. Right?

Actually, the original leader of the group and most photogenic member, was Brian Jones. But by the mid-1960′s, he’d failed to record new music as fast as Jagger-Richards, and he abused his girlfriend — the German version of Catherine Deneuve, Anita Pallenberg. Jagger took over the band, Richards periodically took over Jones’ girlfriend Anita — and what happened to the real golden boy of the Rolling Stones is documented in cinema for the first time in the slyly-titled bio-pic, Stoned.

It’s a Tarentino-stylized  piece of cinema that serves an investigative journalistic purpose: Empirically answers — without the help of courts and police, who were conned in this case — the question of who killed Brian Jones. The founder of the most famous band on earth.

What’s new about this ? If the movie had been about an America singer-songwriter (Johnny Cash), and produced by a Hollywood studio (Fox), it would have been as big as Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix). You can now watch Stoned for free on American TV (Showtime).

3. Social psychology: Gods [dioces]

Surprise, Peru actually has wealthy people instead of the shanty-towns we are always shown in the media. And they’re as hot as Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. But they are also parasitically perched at the top of a supply-chain of wealth-creation that looks like this: Peru produces the coca base; Colombia is the CEO; Mexico, out-sourced transportation; and America is the end-market, the most addicted people on the planet.

Gods, the movie, shows how a person can coast to the top of Maslow’s famous pyramid showing the human hierarchy of needs with not much more than luck and beauty.

Reminiscent of Vitti’s movies from the 1960s, a bourgeois Lima family is living la dolce vita like Italians on the Amallfi coast: the maid marries the patriarch, and then has an Aha realizationl after she buys into — and then sees through — the narcissistic obsessions of the trophy wives who are her new best friends.

It’s not a new film but it’s new to us in North America. Best place to screen it: Virgin America, which just put Gods in the foreign film section of its on-board, movies-on-demand.

4. Peak experiences: Discover the Gift

Released on June 14, 2011, this spiritual travelogue is by a Hollywood director but is decidedly not a Hollywood film. Demian Lichtenstein, who made 3,000 Miles to Graceland, does his own version of the 1979 film, Meetings with Remarkable Men, with some of the flavor of The Secret. In fact, Secret star Michael Beckwith is not only in Lichentstein’s Gift: he hosted a special screening at his L.A. church. But the film goes beyond prosperity preaching and also features the Dalai Lama, Ravi Shankar and Marianne Williamson’s work on A Course in Miracles. The theme is closer to that of a famous book that happens to have a similar name to this site, The Soul’s Code — psychologist James Hillman’s meditation on how to access the essence of your individual role in Being.

5. Ecology: If a tree falls

The newest release on our list is also the only thriller. If a tree falls takes its name from an existential koan: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to here it, does it make a sound? But the subject is eco-terrorism, not metaphysics. Based on a true story, the Earth Liberation Front is a modern-day version of the Weather Underground: it burns and blows up anti-green targets like timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a ski lodge at Vail, Colorado. The arsonists are captured in a post-9/11 crackdown by the FBI, which calls them “America’s number one domestic terrorism threat.”

Caption: Eckhart Tolle (middle) with author

SPECIAL TO SOUL’S CODE: KATIE DAVIS author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment — Through spiritual awakening, we realize that virtually nothing is as it seems. Previously, we believed that we were a tiny fraction of individuality that was limited to an, “I am the body,” idea.

In mis-identification with the false “I,” which is the ego or mind-made self, it seemed like we were separate bodies that lived in a world of other separate people and things.

That individuated ego only knows separation, so it can only perceive separation and its lack. This delusion is the source of all suffering, and what we call the misery of the world.

Upon awakening, we realize that the mind is only a mirror. It will reflect whatever is within you.

The difference between wealth and enlightenment

In other words, if you are experiencing lack in your life situation, it is reflecting the lack that exists within the divided mind. No matter how real it may seem, there is no lack and suffering within the world; its source is within you, as ego or the collective ego.

The ego’s reference point is the fraction that is lacking its wholeness. The world of form is only a self-projection; a mirrored opportunity to realize the ego’s mistake in identity.

Perhaps an example serves best. When you wake up in the morning, perhaps you walk into the bathroom and look into the mirror to see that your hair is quite a mess.

You would never pick up your comb and try to comb your hair on the image in the mirror. The mirror can only reflect what is. There is no pragmatic way to fix the mirror image.

It is precisely the same in the life situation. What you hear your mind judge in your life situation or within the world is sourced within you. So at last, we take responsibility for the mirror. This is why it is said so often that the key to world transformation and your life situation is within you. We have been looking for answers in all the wrong places.

You have nothing new to attain

Through self-inquiry, you can discover that the ego never existed in the first place. Your beautiful body (and its given name) is still there in the mirror, with all of its inborn talents and unique expressions; just no longer limited by ego’s lack and suffering. The false “I” dissolves its altered state of consciousness into the pure consciousness that it genuinely is right now.

Pure “I” — or what some call the heart, pure awareness or true self — is the totality that is supremely fulfilled, abundant, perfectly peaceful and the abode of unconditional love. You are that now, but you may not yet be conscious of the fact. What I am saying is that there is nothing new to attain. We have only to become conscious of what authentically already is.

The only apparent difference between the sage and the ego who still believes that their individuality is their true identity is that the mind of the sage is illumined through enlightenment, and therefore absolutely still. The quiet mind provides a still, perfect mirror.

It is able to perfectly reflect the heart and its perfection. Whereas, the divided mind of ego and its compulsive thinking creates waves and ripples upon the surface of being. It is like a circus mirror that reflects an untrue, distorted image.

It reflects the altered state of consciousness that is suffering the pain-gap between the fulfilled heart that it genuinely is, and its perception of lack caused by the idea of being a fragmented individual; “me” vs. “world” vs. “God.”

Becoming free of time and becoming aware of the present moment are helpful first steps and essential to the discovery of the inner body; the pathway to realizing the truth. However for the sake of humanity, it is time to cut to the chase.

The most direct manner to self-realization is self-inquiry.

What I experienced in my awakening

While the initial awakening is extraordinary and powerful, I am inviting you to complete the journey. It is the only enduring resolution for humanity and the world of form.

Initially, this awakening does appear to be an individual affair. In the end, it is realized that there is only the greater awakening. The miracle is that consciousness is no longer losing itself in the world of form.

Through “your” awakening, it is dissolving its altered states. Just as the ego fell apart in its “individual” awakening, we are now witnessing the collective ego as it falls apart and world structures, such as financial institutions, falling away.

I invite you to be a part of the living answer, rather than adding fuel to the negativity of the collective. Fear attracts fear and the delusion grows stronger.

In truth, just as the ego does not exist, the collective ego is also a delusion. It is all a dream of the divided mind. Now, I recognize that the falling apart is required, and I see it as a miracle. Rather than seeing this as destruction, consciousness is in fact birthing the new.

Just as the cocoon of the butterfly must fall away for it to fly to freedom, we are presently witnessing the New Dawn of the world transformation. Realize completely who you really are and remain steadfast as that perfectly divine peace.

Desire and fear are vanishing along with the phantom, named ego, to which they belong. Keep still, while the mirror clears. It is all happening by itself.

Who are you when you are free of virtually every thing? What remains? I say that another name for you is conscious freedom and never-ending joy.

Katie Davis is author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment.  Her website has free downloads, e-books, videos, and newsletters about being now, awakening, enlightenment, non-duality, advaita and self-realization. Read Katie’s previous article for Soul’s Code: All love is one love.

Spiritual IQ Quiz

It’s hard to imagine a topic any more obscure than the ancient languages and elaborate invented mythologies of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe.

After the improbable success of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, however, it’s hard to imagine a hotter Hollywood property — if anything Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a much more cinematic tale than his Rings epic.

The entertainment and gossip rags are abuzz with every piece of news connected to the two-part film production. This week’s development: actor Elijah Wood has agreed to reprise his role as Frodo.

There’s another strand running through this cultural event, however. Tolkien had a deep spiritual life, and his tales are a rich expression of it. Take this quiz to find out how much you know about the spiritual world Tolkien created, a world that will very soon generate yet another Hollywood blockbuster.