BY DAVID RICKEY — January in northern California is usually a time of rain, cold, and a psychic hangover from the double-barreled Christmas and New Year holidays, which can tend to be anything but Holy days. After getting swept up in the maelstrom, let’s step back a bit a get some perspective. Thanksgiving is a good place to begin as both a word and place in time.

Being grateful for what we have, for what we experience — even for who we are — has a major effect on our daily life.

Gratitude comes from an awareness that this is not all just an accident. This morning, as I left for work, at about 5:30am . . . I was greeted by a clear night sky pocked with stars. Recently I read that we are “recycled stardust,” that the elements that make up our bodies had their origins in the ancient unfolding of the universe.

1,000 points of meditative light

Looking up at those stars I could feel a sense of belonging, that all that, out there, produced “me.” And you!

And probably other life forms that we don’t have the cognitive capacity to comprehend. This isn’t an accident. Scientists are discovering evidence of a directionality, a purpose that you and I participate in. Part of this purpose is consciousness.

We are here to experience this amazing universe. And what a gift that ability is!

An awareness of our emerging out of this 15-plus-billion-year evolutionary process can make us grateful for all that has gone on before our being here. And it can be the source of celebration of all that has emerged with us and supports our journey: the food we eat, the specially-blended air that we breathe, the exact temperatures and seasonal balances that support life here on Earth. It can also be the foundation of a sense that this is not so much about us, but that we are part of a process that is still unfolding, evolving now through our choices and actions.

Seeing light waves as the carrier of the cosmos’ intelligence

Christmas then becomes a celebration of the light that is the source of our life, and our wisdom.

When we speak of the “Light that shines in the darkness” we can recognize that Light is the essence of everything, the currency that transmits all intelligence and information, if you will.

The divinity that we participate in is now expressed in human form. The wisdom has incarnated. We may see this in Jesus, or in other great sages, but it is our truth as well. It is available to each of us if we will only quiet our chattering thoughts and tune into the greater wisdom that is our essence and has brought us here, and that urges us forward in responsible growth and expansion of capabilities.

The cyclical aspect of life, that gives expression in each New Year, shows us that there is forgiveness and the chance to “try anew.”

We too are evolving, and hopefully learning as we go. With gratitude for what brought us here, with a celebration and honoring of the wisdom that is available to us, and with the acceptance of both our failings and the possibilities of doing better and learning from our mistakes, we have all that we need to contribute to the future, to be an active part of the evolution of consciousness, of creating new and better life.

In this way, these holidays can indeed be Holy Days, days where we touch again the sacred truth of who we are and why we are here. This holiday can become a template for each day, living in gratitude, with wisdom, forgiveness and new resolve.

David Rickey is an Episcopal priest, Soul’s Code co-founder, and counselor in San Francisco who holds a weekly ministry at a residence for the elderly in northern California. Read David’s previous articles for Soul’s Code: Church for the 21st century: an oral and aural buffet we can all savor, and Mosques and the masks of God. Follow David on Twitter.

BY DAVID RICKEY — One of the miracle stories about Jesus that probably has actual truth behind it is the account of how he fed 5000 (or an additional 4000, according to Mark and Matthew). It’s framed as a miracle to impress upon us that Jesus is a powerful guy.

The version of that story that appears in Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 14:13-21) lends itself to a different interpretation, one that might hit closer to home.

The tale

The story begins with Jesus showing compassion for the multitudes who come to him and healing the sick among them. Late in the day, Jesus’ disciples come to him and say: “It’s late. Send the people away so they can get something to eat.” Jesus responds: “You give them something to eat.”

I find this interesting. Christ seems to be encouraging the disciples to perform a miracle themselves. They had been with Jesus for some time, studying, hopefully learning from him about the way life truly works. This is the time to see what they had learned. But their immediate response is: “There isn’t enough! Just five loaves and two fish!” I can imagine Jesus feeling frustrated—they haven’t gotten it yet! When he says “Bring them to me!” Jesus then prays, tears the loaves into pieces and gives them to the disciples, who begin to distribute them along with the fish.

Afterward, there is enough left over to fill twelve baskets. That’s the miracle! Isn’t Jesus amazing! But—maybe not. Looking a little deeper uncovers another reading that’s still miraculous, but something we could strive to attain in our own lives.

America’s debt scare and zero-sum-pie mindset

There was clearly a large community of people at this gathering, not just a lot of individuals waiting to get their share. Jesus first tells them to sit down; I imagine this was to get them to relax. Then, as the disciples started sharing the bread and fish, maybe someone in the crowd who also had a little bread and fish was moved to share what they had with people around them. And then more got the idea and started sharing what they had. Enough of this could have happened throughout the crowd that everyone ended up having enough and some to spare.

The disciples began from a position of scarcity. There isn’t enough! But as they began to share, to give away some of what little they had (five loaves and two fish would have been more than enough for Jesus and the disciples, others began to get the spirit and share what they had as well. And in fact there was an abundance, or at least enough to satisfy everyone with some left over. The miracle was that people in the crowd, and hopefully the disciples, learned to share.

This interpretation came to me while preparing for a Sunday sermon and watching the spectacle in Washington over the “debt crisis.” In reality, we’re not suffering from scarcity–nor abundance. Rather, we have a perception of scarcity and an underlying fear of loss of abundance.

Miracles are more like acts of viral inspiration

Spiritual teachers consistently point out the power of our thoughts. How we think governs our reality. On one very deep level this has to do with quantum physics and the Heisenberg Principle. But on a level I can actually wrap my mind around, this has to do with how my thoughts and beliefs affect the way I behave. When I am afraid that I won’t have enough, I tend to be less willing to share with others. And when enough of us share that fear, there actually isn’t enough to go around. Have you seen the ads for food savers telling about how much food we throw out? Most us buy more than we need because we fear that we’ll run out. In fact, I had a birthday party a few days ago, and the freezer is half-full of food I never got around to serving.

I believe that Jesus wasn’t trying to show off with the miracles he performed. Rather, he was trying to show us that the universe doesn’t work they way we fear it does. And the real miracles happen when our human consciousness changes. But as with the disciples, it doesn’t change until we experience the new, true reality. Perhaps that was why Jesus had the disciples pass out the bread and fish instead of doing it himself.

We have to experiment with new behaviors before we discover that they work. We are, I believe, in a new time of forced experimentation. Clearly the old ways aren’t working. Do we have the courage to try something new? True faith is not believing that Jesus performed miracles, but our having the courage to try performing a few ourselves.

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 DAVID RICKEY and RICK LEED — As we evolve, both scientific researchers and esoteric healers have advanced new therapies to treat our bodies and our minds but when we first hear of some of them we make a snap judgement that this sounds too wacky to be legit. We use words like voodoo medicine or magical thinking.

Think back to examples like quinine and willow bark — the former a tribal medicine used by Peruvian Indians, the latter an ‘old wives’ remedy. In the modern age, the first was prescribed by doctors as a treatment for malaria and the second in derivative form as aspirin.

Hundreds of health technologies — from acupuncture to hypnosis and artificial heart transplants to the freezing of cord-blood — were once thought to be voodoo and later proven to possess medical value. In that last example, we first read sketchy sounding reports a decade ago that people were having blood extracted from umbilical cords of their newborns cyrogenically frozen so that, in the event of illnesses like diabetes, doctors could later harvest miracle cells in the amniotic fluid for gene therapy.

It was a new science that few could wrap their heads around.

Saving your cells

Many laughed, and called it voodoo or exploitation of anxious, vulnerable new parents. But those who laughed and passed on that opportunity, lost out — or at least their kids did. Now radical new research is giving those parents a second chance. Will they laugh again when they read about a company called StemSave? It says that the promise of medical miracles from stem cells is locked within your family teeth: StemSave is generating a lot of chatter by harvesting the wisdom of DNA from wisdom teeth.

According to research published in peer-reviewed journals, the stem cells in our teeth are among the most powerful in the human body.  Stem cells from teeth replicate at a faster rate, and for a longer period of time, than do stem cells harvested from other tissues.

Wisdom teeth have smart cells

The irony is that living stem cells found within extracted teeth are routinely discarded by dentists every day as medical waste; In the next decade, perhaps any dentist who does that will be seen as out-dated as GP’s who once-upon-a-time suggested cigarettes as a sedative. StemSave enables you to save these cells for future use in developing medical treatments for your family.

Other expressions of the same ethos abound. RegeneRx, with the support of the National Institutes of Health, is making huge strides in applications that can turn cells on — and change the course of certain diseases.

Healing “technowledgies”

In the “soft” healing sciences, conventional institutions on the cutting-edge like Kaiser Permanente and Dr. Michael Benson’s Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston are breaking new ground in incorporating the last technowledgies (our word) in Bio- and Psycho-Spiritual medicine.

Closer to home, check out our own teachers, like Vaishali or many of the articles in the Soul’s Code Science and The Brain category.

What do Spirituality and Science have to do with the Big Bang?

St. Paul, throughout his letters, disparaged the “flesh.” A much more enlightened writer, Teilhard de Chardin, said that we are Spiritual beings on a Human journey. One way or another, we are “stuck” in this fleshly body as long as we inhabit this planet. The “Good News” is that we now know a whole lot more about our “flesh,” and how it works then either of these two teachers. As our knowledge of being human evolves so do our treatments for these human bodies.

Being human is an amazing position to be in. We have evolved the ability to look at ourselves, our souls and bodies, and make ever more wise decisions. No other animal has come this far. In the last century we have discovered the interplay between our thoughts and our bodies, and we have uncovered some of the deepest secrets of our very flesh, even these genes which direct our growth and govern natural selection.

But at the same time, traditional medicine has reached a kind of limit as to what it can do to enhance or correct human existence. Our western hospital-health insurance model has become a bureaucratized medical industrial complex.

And it becomes more dysfunctional as it seeks to wrestle with rising costs, demands and diminishing resources, both in terms of care and the ability to embrace new therapies. Added to that is the “unevolved” mentality of some practitioners and funders, complicated by the spiritually unenlightened resistence to advanced study of the human being. There is the perceived notion that humans are somehow sacred and separate rather than just the latest stage of an evolutionary process going back to the big-bang.

There is no separation

Instead, we believe that the whole process is sacred. Divine Wisdom is inexorably unfolding in the physical reality of our universe. That deep wisdom needs to be applied to the advancements in genetic research and psycho-spiritual awareness.

The capability of tuning into that wisdom is part of the very process evolutionary progress in which we partake.

The final question: Will we evolve fast enough to heal ourselves and the Planet? Time will tell, but will we be here for the telling?

David Rickey is a psychotherapist, Episcopal priest and Soul’s Code co-founder; Rick Leed is a media mogul, investor in health sciences and chairman of Soul’s Code.

BY DAVID RICKEY —Einstein said that the level of consciousness that created a particular problem cannot solve the said problem.

A hot new book by sociobiologist Rebecca Costa, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking our way out of extinction, illustrates Einstein’s point by documenting how our rate of social and technical change is out-stripping evolution.

Look at the economy: we have developed complex computer programs that can trade stocks in milliseconds. We have developed virtual ways of making money, and created a subculture of the super-rich. At the same time, we have  had a largely negative impact on the planet.

When we human beings come now to confront these problems, we resort to ideologies rather than reach into the most evolved recesses of our brains to solve them. Without working on our thought patterns, we will continue to fail at finding solutions.

Man versus the machine

Costa gives us insight into why this is the case. Our brains have not evolved enough to deal with the complex world in which we now live. How many of us can wrap our minds around even one of the major issues facing the world today? Instead we feel a mixture of bewilderment, frustration and anger.

When this frustration rises, our brains automatically revert to prior belief systems that seemed to work before, but then block us from having insight into more creative solutions.

In North Africa, we see the “Arab Spring”: people beginning to rise up against the governments that oppress them. But many are asking why that isn’t happening in the more developed countries.

The Tea Party, for example, is merely an attempt to push an old ideology as a reflex to a time of fear and loathing.

Civilization’s most vital organ

Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge, who wrote The Brain That Changes Itself, has proven that we are capable of rewiring our own minds. Through concentrated effort — meditation, for example — we can change the pathways and the way we think.

Costa suggests that we can work to develop a higher capacity of insight and ability, and discover new solutions. This takes effort and courage. It requires the ability to risk letting go of the familiar.

This is not the ego’s strong suit. Indeed we can trace much of the problems of this complex world to the ego being unwilling to consider solutions that are not observably self-serving.

A universe coded with intentention

But here’s another area of hope. As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution Of God, there seems to be much evidence of an intentionality in the universe toward insight that is directed by human “self-interest.” By looking at the larger picture, we discover that it is in our best interest to care about others’ well-being, and the well-being of our planet. Even the pain of our present predicaments may be (and I believe are) the way the Universe is pushing us toward more egalitarian solutions.

Evolution is painfully slow. But we can speed up the pace by working on our brains, literally doing brain exercises and consciously choosing to step back and observe the larger picture. Indeed, if the Wisdom of the Universe is behind all this, then we have an amazing ally for this process.

So instead of feeling overwhelmed by present events, it may be much more beneficial to see them as encouraging signs of support for the work we are here to do.

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.

DAVID RICKEY: I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to say that Meditation is important for spiritual growth. Ken Wilbur claims that it is the quickest way to advance spiritual evolution. But it might come as a surprise that I don’t meditate, at least not in any classic way. I could say “I don’t have the time.” But the truth is I have never had much discipline. So, I have a form of meditation that takes no real time and requires only a bit of discipline.

The first step is simply to notice that you are thinking. Just learning to observe your thoughts, to watch them from a slight distance changes your relationship to them. In psychology this is called developing an observing ego. Rather than just having thoughts, you begin to notice the process of thinking: An event (either inside or outside) triggers a thought or a series of thoughts. These thoughts then start an action, either inside in the form of ruminations (going over the event and the following thought process over and over) or outside in the form of some action: expressing anger, resentment, or, my personal favorite, a judgemental attitude.

At first you just notice the process. It’s the beginning of being self-aware. It also provides a little gap or space between the thought and the action.

The next step is to recognize that it isn’t a pure “cause and effect” system. In that space you can realize that you have a choice about what comes next. We have an expression “Don’t go there!” In this space, you can realize that you don’t have to “go there”. Often, not yet always, I can pull myself back and say “I don’t want to go there.”

My experience is that there is a real pressure to “go there”. I can feel it. It’s probably a bit of adrenalin. It feels very visceral. However, when I notice the feeling, and realize it’s probably a chemical coursing through my blood stream, I also discover that I can breathe and wait, and the pressure subsides.

Although I said this doesn’t take much discipline, it does take some. And more than that, it takes a certain will to change. For me, this will comes from the sense that I don’t like watching me “go there”. It may be satisfying for the moment, but I don’t like it in the longer term, and I don’t like how people experience me when I give in. Partly this is an image issue – I am supposed to be a spiritual teacher after all – but I also believe that by not “going there” I can actually have an effect on the course of evolution, if only a small one. I value the teaching of Gandhi “Be the change you want to see.” I really do want the planet to evolve and become a better place of all life. When I “go there” I become (or continue to be) part of the problem, not of the solution.

If you want, you can take the further step of noticing what part of you (your sense of self-importance, goodness, righteousness, etc.) is fed by “going there”. This can help you be even more self-aware. I caution you to do this with self-compassion. It can strengthen your will to behave differently.

I really believe that human beings are a high expression of the entire evolutionary process. We are the first animal that has a developed ability to observe our self and make adjustments. (Dolphins and even elephants show capacity to recognize “self”, but don’t seem to have the ability to self-correct or choose.)

So, next time you’re driving or navigating a grocery aisle (my two favorite places to practice), start watching your mind, with gentleness and love. Then, after some practice, try changing course–and give yourself a little credit when you do. That reinforces the behavior change. Then laugh when you watch your mind react to giving yourself credit. The laughter makes the whole process lighter.

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.