Soul’s Code has sung the praises of female mystics and spiritual teachers since our inception —  meet our inspirations, Pamela Wilson, Byron Katie, Caroline Myss, Katie Davis, Vaishali Love and Karen McPhee

Test your S-factor, as in, the measure of the soul:

1.  According to transpersonal psych studies, women have an edge when it comes to remembering, understanding and relaying their mystical experiences. Why is that?

A.  Women are smarter than men.
B.  Women have better communication between the left and right sides of the brain.
C.  Men have fewer mystical experiences than women.
D.  Men censor themselves more than women, and will not admit to having mystical experiences.

2.  Who believes (or believed) in the “spiritual goodness of poverty?”

A.  Joan of Arc
B.  Marianne Williamson
C.  Mother Teresa
D.  Kim Eng

3.  Who has been known to provide lectures and workshops free of charge?

A.  Byron Katie (pictured at right)
B.  Kim Eng
C.  Caroline Myss
D.  Pamela Wilson

4.  Eckhart Tolle’s work heavily influenced which mystic, who is also his friend?

A.  Vaishali Love
B.  Catherine Ingram
C.  Katie Davis
D.  Marianne Williamson

5.  Who said, “Keep your honor code between you and God,  you don’t break that, no matter who’s not looking. God is.”

A.  Mother Teresa
B.  Caroline Myss
C.  Byron Katie
D.  St. Teresa of Avila

6.  How many people is Hindu spiritual leader Amma reported to have hugged over the past 30 years?

A.  50,000
B.  1 million
C.  21 million
D.  30 million

7.  How much will it cost you to buy a Caroline Myss “Myss hat?”

A.  $15
B.  $20
C.  $30
D. Free with proof of a donation to a charity of your choice.

8.  Who released a child’s book called Tiger-Tiger Is It Time in November 2009?

A.  Kim Eng
B.  Byron Katie
C.  Amma
D.  Karen McPhee

The answers you seek: 1. B, 2. C, 3. A, 4. C, 5. B, 6. D, 7. A, 8. B.

SOUL’S CODE —  We don’t mean that Byron Katie is literally beating up on Oprah. The only reason we make the comparison between the two is that Byron Katie, who is a post-modern mystic, made a rare live appearance in the San Francisco Bay Area the same day that Oprah’s show hyped the movie The Secret and its gospel, the “law of attraction.”

The difference between Oprah and Byron Katie is that Oprah explicitly caters to America’s victim-culture — millions who don’t like their looks, their job, their love-life, their personal history, etc. Oprah pitches a grocery list of prescriptions to fix the personality’s grievances.Byron Katie, on the other hand, offers a radically different way out of pain.

Why would you care? Katie, as she goes by, comes as advertised. We won’t write that she has ‘achieved enlightenment’ — that is, a person who is free of internal conflict — because we can imagine her rejoinder. Katie would turn one of her famous four questions back on us, and ask:

“How would you know? Can you absolutely know that that’s true? Do you have any proof?”

No, we don’t. We have an impression from being in the hall this past week in her presence. This woman is utterly fearless, and radiates a clarity of mind that electrifies through the room and sparks mini awakenings in the audience.

Katie’s point about the “law of attraction” business is that it’s likely another forum for the mind to be at war with itself.

If you make your ‘spiritual’ practice a meditation visualizing the more money and happiness mantras from The Secret . . . the reason that self-messaging feel like such a chore is because you have a whole history of not believing that things will work out for you.

You can’t change your belief system because you saw a movie, or an episode of Oprah. We still have an undercarriage of streaming thoughts driven by the values we’ve interjected decades ago.

The above is paraphrasing of Katie; Better to put it in her own words:

“You’re thinking that you should believe in this (positive laws of attraction), what you’re visualizing up here, but you really don’t believe in it,” Katie told the audience. “What you really believe is these other thoughts deeper down that you keep having. And after a while you’ll think, ‘Oh, I’m not manifesting success and all these other new things — I’m failing.’

“Or alternatively, your life might suddenly get better and you’ll say, ‘See! I manifested that — and I’ll show you how you can do it, too.’

“Man, you can build an identity out of that for a lifetime.”

Actually, that ego-building exercise sounds exactly like the “story” that The Secret’s main producer, Rhonda Byrne, puts in her online brochure-ware:

And on that spring day in 2004, when a small, old book called The Science of Getting Rich was put into her hands, and Rhonda’s whole life suddenly pulled into spectacular focus, she knew exactly what her mission was to become. She was going to take this knowledge to the world. She was going to make a movie to carry joy to every corner of the Earth. And so the great journey that was The Secret began.

In early 2005, when The Secret was simply a name and a (momentous) vision, Prime Time Productions was made up of Rhonda, Producer Paul Harrington, and Director Drew Heriot. Paul, who had worked with Rhonda at Prime Time Productions virtually since its beginning, and Drew, who had directed several projects for the company as well, became, with Rhonda, the foundation for The Secret team.

As for Katie, she said she had no personal interest in practicing the tactics touted by The Secret.

“I’m a woman without a future,” she said. “I don’t need one. If I needed a ‘tomorrow,’ I’d imagine one.”

My mother used to refer to this time of year as the “down hill road to Spring”. But that was because we lived in Western New York state and we were getting tired of the snow and ice. Out here it’s different. No snow, but grey days interrupted by deliriously blue skies. Bare trees and dead leaves, but almost too vibrantly green grass emerging on the hills of Sonoma along 101.

A beauty for all seasons

To reverse Ecclesiastes, “To every Season, there is a thing”, a beauty and uniqueness that can lift the spirits and gladden the heart. One only has to look, gather the impressions all around, and let them play in your mind’s eye.

Byron Katie teaches us to “love what is”, which means finding a beauty in the reality of life and of all creation, discovering a such-ness that just IS. Our minds tend to judge and make distinctions: the grey sky is dull, the blue sky is dazzling. When in fact both just are and have their own beauty and rightness.

The sky forms a backdrop for the fractal design of trees – trunks and thick branches giving way (and support) to smaller branches and then finely-tipped twigs. The green of the grass offsetting the brown of the dead leaves. The worm giving nutrition to the robin, while it also aerates the soil. Even the child raking the leaves, only to be rewarded by jumping into the pile. And the smells!

Such is life, and how wonderful that is. To every season there is a quality, a richness, a living “Is-ness.”

Lasting impressions of beauty

Ravel wrote Le Tombeau partly in homage to the great Baroque French composer, François Couperin, but he brought to it his own unique impressionist style. So what we hear isn’t “old” but quite new and refreshing. Our lives, too, honor and reflect the “old”, but each moment can bring something fresh and new. We honor the loss of what has been, by being present with that memory in the present moment.

The past is a backdrop to the Now. The past informs our experience now but shouldn’t determine it. Learning to receive each impression with a freshness and present clarity that it demands, because it is only now; this is what brings joy and peace.

Delighting in what ever is here now, not wishing it were different, because it isn’t and won’t be anything other than what is. This allows a lightness and a delighting in each moment.

Winter isn’t a downhill road to anything.

It is!

David Rickey is an Episcopal priest, Soul’s Code co-founder and counselor in San Francisco who does a weekly ministry at a residence for the elderly in northern California. Follow David on Twitter.

BY SMADAR DE LANGE — Three top tropes of the New Age are “interconnectedness”, “oneness” and the general notion that ‘reality’ has different ‘levels’, or frames — say, like a video game or the TV series Lost. The buzzwords are sign-posts: they point to a reality that is not ordinarily perceived in the realm of our work-a-day world.

The perennial question, What is reality? — what a concept — dogs us because we humans have always resided on a plane of interconnectedness and non-duality, yet we experience isolation and separateness as facts of life. But loneliness and the pangs you feel, say, after a break-up do not imply that oneness isn’t the prevailing baseline of your existence.

Think of your experience of separateness like the settings on your phone or TV remote. Loneliness and abandonment are content loaded by an arbitrary set of inputs, the biography of our senses and psychological inputs.

Having said that, the true grit of our daily perceptions does not make them less real — one might even say that the opposite is true.

But in the consensual reality we share in our day-to-day office space, our perception is partial. The whole of what you can perceive is constantly streaming into you through a wider spectrum. This is what spiritual teachers call, “non-duality”.

Byron Katie explains the phrase at book-length in a practically-unknown title called, Losing the Moon.

The premise of non-duality is that there is no need to strive towards achievement of reaching a place which is different from where one already is.

In fact, “achievement” takes one further away from being at one with one’s birth-right, the experiencing of the realm of non-duality.

The biggest obstacle that stands between one’s experience of separateness and interconnectedness is one’s own mind — an instrument designed mostly for survival tasks.

That’s the main reason there is such a huge marketplace of techniques, magazines, videos — and let it be said, websites — applied to working with the mind.

Madhyamika tradition (Mahayana Buddhism) generated many of the techniques that have informed some of the clearest minds. One approach involves working with opposites, a practice designed to free one from the domination of the mind.

Byron Katie, a modern non-dualist, also works with the techniques of opposites: She calls it a turnaround.

Using the turnaround technique, you dig under a feeling or thought-form that arises in the mind such as, “I am angry at you” — and discover that its opposite might be equally true in a turnaround variation such as, “you are angry at me” and “my thought is angry at myself”.

Krishnamurti, one of the great spiritual teachers of the 20th century, also emphasized the concept of opposites.

He explained that the root of one concept, thought or feeling lay in its mirror opposite. Thus, the opposites are connected and depend upon each other.

When one wants to be free from one opposite, the path to freedom would not be the other opposite but seeing through the opposites — seeing that all is bound by a common fabric of intelligence and knowingness.

The phrase evoked most often by non-dual teachers and practitioners = what is. It invites us to be at peace with a deep acceptance to what is — being in the experience without the interpretations the mind applies to what happens.

Another practice for slicing through paradoxes and polar opposites is allowing a fierce clarity that sees things as they are, free of preconceptions, beliefs and ideas.

One of Katie’s seminal phrases in the book, Losing the Moon is: “I believe nothing about you — that is love”.

In relationships, when one sees the other with no preconceptions, ideas and beliefs — that is true love.

Smadar is a gifted intuitive and somatic therapist who has 14 years of training in transpersonal psychology and spiritual advancement. She is currently completing her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at Santa Barbara’s Pacifica Graduate Institute.

BEING THERE: DAVID RICKEY — I have always thought of “AHA” moments as those times when suddenly we “catch on” to a deeper reality, when we suddenly “get it” – the “it” being a deeper truth, or a clearer insight into “ultimate reality.” These experiences are sometimes caricatured by a light-bulb turning on. Suddenly we see something that had been invisible, or un-graspable before.

On a personal level, the “A-Ha” may be an answer to a problem or question that has been plaguing us; a sudden awareness of a solution or a new perspective that hits us, seemingly from nowhere, or “out of the blue”. From a deeper level, however, “A-Ha” moments, I believe, are breakthroughs in consciousness where an old, more limited, perspective gives way to an expanded awareness of what is really going on, our part in it, and then a summons to change our choices, behaviors, intentions to align better with this new awareness. Spiritual teachers speak of “waking up”, indicating that what came before was a state of “sleep-walking”, behaving and choosing without awareness.

To me, it is this summons that is the key. Unless insight produces action it is useless — or at best, self-serving — because it only serves to make us feel better. As others here have pointed out, to speak of “A-Ha” moments in the same context that we speak of looking better in tight jeans, or having fewer wrinkles, calls into question the motivation for seeking an “A-Ha”.

I believe that the fundamental purpose of the “life force” is the evolution of consciousness. From the moment life began (and probably before, but that’s another discussion) there has been an energy that has “pushed” towards greater and greater awareness. First awareness of “self”, then awareness of self in relation to “otherness” – first reactive, then responsive and intentional. Then, awareness of self in “connectedness” to “other,” not only in physical and social interdependence but ultimately in spiritual awareness of oneness — what the Apostle Paul expressed as “The Body of Christ,” or Ralph Waldo Emerson and Meyer Baba called the “over-soul”. The second “commandment” Jesus quoted from the Torah – “Love your neighbor as yourself” – really means to recognize and love your neighbor because your neighbor is yourself.

Essentially, then, “A-Ha” moments are those moments which move us along on our journey to recognize that unity and consciously to choose to live from that recognition. Thus, the best preparation is any work that seeks to transcend the limited identity of Ego. We don’t create “A-Ha” moments, we simply prepare the awareness to receive what the “life force” is always trying to communicate. Our work is only to break down the resistance, soften the boundaries, poke holes, if you will, in the membrane that appears to separate us.

Teachers like Ram Dass, Ramana Maharshi, Byron Katie, Caroline Myss, Eckhart Tolle, seek to instruct us in the techniques that prepare us for these “A Ha” moments. And it is possible that the “greater consciousness” knows that for many of us it takes the “lure” of looking younger, or becoming more “successful” to entice us into considering a larger purpose for our life than any of those lures. To paraphrase what I quoted elsewhere: “To give us what we [think we] want to prepare us to receive what our souls truly seek.”

As unique as each of our “soul-codes” is, I believe that the fundamental encoding is the same – to seek awareness of the unity of all life. For only when we get that “A-Ha” will we stop killing each other and strive only for serving each other.