While wealthy stars may have allegedly inherited the earth, they are often as spiritually-impoverished as any of us.

Driven by their demons and DUI’s, public break-ups and private meltdowns, the rich and famous seek instant-karma in everything from crystal energy healing and kabbalah to talk therapy and tantric sex.

Or in Paris Hilton’s case, they parachute a Hollywood holy man into their entourage (Maxie Santillan).

We invite you to test your knowledge of celebs who may, or may not, have soul in a material world.

Soul’s Code — A well-dressed TV reporter is seated on a park bench next to a man who looks homeless. Guardians of nearby children eye the pair with suspicion. Ball players grin mockingly at them through a fence. But by now the reporter, Valerie, is more intrigued by the man than wary of him.

That’s one of the poignant scenes from The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott, author Jonathan Lowe’s fictional tribute to Eckhart Tolle, inspired by the bestseller The Power of Now. The novel begins with a man’s near-suicide – much like Tolle’s real-life experience that led to his international acclaim as a spiritual author, teacher and speaker.

BOOK EXCERPT: BY JONATHAN LOWE — Unexpectedly, he took both of her hands gently, and clasped them together, lacing her fingers, making a ball.

“What are you doing?” Val asked, tensing.

“Imagine that this is your mind. It’s about the same size too, by the way.” He repositioned her hands, gently. “Now try imagining that your thoughts come out this hole made by the thumbs.”

The wary guardian turned, stopped, and then watched from a safe distance, her disapproval hardening into borderline horror. Val tried smiling, albeit nervously. Yet the woman continued to stare.

“Watch the hole for the next thought that escapes,” David continued.  “Concentrate on it, and nothing else. The very next thought.”

He released her hands slowly, as if a bomb was inside them. Val looked down. She blinked, staring. After a moment she looked up again.

“Well?” asked David.

“I don’t. . .”  She glanced up to see who else might be watching. “What’s supposed to happen?”

“Try again. Empty your mind.”

She concentrated this time, closing her eyes until her face relaxed and she felt somewhat calmer. Then she reopened her eyes, and finally shrugged.

“I’m not sure. I had an idea. Sorry.”

“I’m not judging you.”

“Everyone judges,” she heard herself say, then realized she’d almost sounded like a teenager. With the added word me, she would have. “Or prejudges,” she quickly added, instead.

David just looked at her. “Only because they trust their thoughts.”

Rather than instantaneously take on the quiet aura of a Buddhist monk, Valerie lets her reporter self take over. She tries to dig a story out of this stranger who lives in the moment and professes to have no past…

They began to walk together toward the Reid Park lake, which was really only a manmade pond, but called a lake due to the scarcity of water in the desert. Val fought against any discomfiture, walking so closely to a man who looked homeless, even if he wasn’t. Yet the fight wasn’t difficult. Although she looked for reaction in the faces of the few retirees they passed, there wasn’t much of it. Not even from the old geezer who left the lake’s edge, carrying a fishing rod in one hand and an empty bucket in the other. The old man only seemed to smile wryly at the incongruity of their apparent association.

Which wasn’t much to endure, was it? she wondered. For an interesting new friend?

Soul’s Code Pain-Body Index: A Slideshow

“Would it help to give you the Reader’s Digest version about me?” Val asked, in an attempt to ignore the distraction of being observed. “I studied journalism at Columbia. A sonority brat, you might say. My dad was a newspaper man before he retired last year to travel. Only child, so you can imagine how that was too, right?”

“I suppose,” David said, a hint of suspicion in his tone.

“Yeah, I guess that’s a stretch. Mom and I didn’t get along much. Argued over the men I chose. We won’t get into that, though. Much. Anyway, suffice it to. . . what I mean to say is. . . I wasn’t good at that.”

“At what?”

“Romance.  I was pursued, of course.”

“Of course.”

Val laughed.  “No, but I mean just knowing how men think.”

“Too much.”

“Right. And not just with their minds. But, I mean, the one track, it’s not like us at all. I’m not really complaining, though. Or maybe I am. It’s pretty obvious, they’re more ‘focused.’ Simple surface creatures, men.”

“Like me?”

“Well, sure, in a way. ‘Don’t think, just be?’ Nice work if you can get it.”

Jonathan Lowe’s book The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott will be released as an audiobook and ebook in April, 2011.

BY DAVID RICKEY — When Time magazine wants to engage with its readers, they do articles like, “What Happens When We Die? Their take:

A fellow at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia … and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind “out-of-body” experiences.

The Soul’s Code take:  please don’t ignore the spirit.

The study that TIME cited has a good intention: understand the experience of awareness while being “clinically dead,” as measured by brain waves (or, more to the point, the lack thereof).

Examples abound, after all, of people reporting awareness of what is happening around them while brain activity has ceased.

And there are even corroborating reports from people who were with the “dead” at the time. One incredible case is described in Lawrence LeShan’s “The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist“: A woman who went into cardiac arrest during surgery reported much of what had happened during her “near death” time — right down to recalling one of the surgeons mismatched socks. The kicker: This woman had been blind since birth.

So who, or what, is doing the seeing? That’s not a biological question but a spiritual one.

Mapping the brain has aided understanding of where and how thoughts are stored, but scientists have not been able, so far, to map conscious awareness. As the Rig Veda says (paraphrasing), “Not the seeing but that which is aware of seeing.”

Rupert Sheldrake, the biologist and writer, has postulated a mind “field” that extends beyond the body. It could very well be that this field continues to perceive even when the biological brain ceases to function, and that the brain is simply, though very complexly, the agent that decodes or processes the awareness in a form that can be communicated.

And it gets better. In a large number of near-death experiences, people speak not only of great peace but of a deep sense of purpose for their returning. In other words, they often come back with a “mission.” It seems that while freed of “ego structures” and unbound from time and space and, for that matter, cause and effect, people become aware of a deeper reality. We can describe it as an “ultimate reality,” which is at once peaceful and intentional, and what we here can call the Soul’s Code.

Another piece of the death-and-spirit mystery: Just what do we know, when, about whom?

There are numerous reports of pre-cognition by those who are near death, as the body and the ego start falling away. There are many stories of awareness of events at a distance. For example, a friend of mine says that she knew her grandmother died the moment my friend’s plane landed at JFK after a trip to Europe.

Back to the Time article, “What Happens When We Die?”

It describes the process, but it misses the mystery I experience every time I am at the bedside of someone who is dying. *

The personality, encased for a time in the body I have seen and known, is about to depart — never to be experienced again. The loss is physical, real, and worthy of grief and mourning.

Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher and best-selling author, recounts a story of a monk asking his teacher, “Is death real or an illusion?” After a pause, the teacher responds: “It’s a very real illusion.”

The biological question posed by the Time headline-writer misses the deeper question, raised by Stephen Levine in his book, “Who Dies?”

Who is the “We” – the “I” – that is dying? Evidence is mounting that the answer is: “the body.” And that the true “I” of awareness, consciousness doesn’t die but is transformed once it is freed from the strictures of the body.

We humans live in the tension between “reality” and the very real illusion of the “form” we call “Me” and “You.”

Our task is to know our true nature as consciously as possible, while delighting in the manifestation, the incarnation of the form that we, in this time, embody. Not clutching too tightly, but just enjoying this amazing mystery.

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.

Jesus’ words “Love your enemy,” from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, Chapter 5 , speak more to the point. Jesus is calling for a transformation of consciousness beyond the more tribal mindset of vengeance and vendetta, most famously framed in the code of the ancient ruler of present-day Iraq, Hammurabi (karmic loop, unavoidable).

I have heard too many people say, “He does not deserve to have the same rights as an American citizen.”  On the surface, the sentiment poses as moral justice. Beneath, it derives from a primal, collective fear.

The expressed fear is that, through some loop-hole in American judicial procedure, this man and his co-conspirators might actually escape justice. Example: if even one juror fails to vote “guilty” then the death penalty will be voided. Or, the defense will use waterboarding at the Guantonimo military prison where KSM and others have been held without trial to have his confessions thrown out (notwithstanding that KSM fessed up to the details of his 9/11 authorship in an Al Jazeera interview before his 2003 capture).

America through a glass, darkly? That’s the prism through which al Qaeda and Iraqi paramilitaries want the world to see

It raises a much bigger question. Which picture of America will we the people collectively choose to project to the watching world, especially to those whom we consider our enemies?

Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth, describes his difficulty with the whole “war on … FILL IN THE BLANK” approach. As soon as we declare war, whether it be on a country, on “Terror,” on “Poverty,” or on “Drugs,” we have set ourselves up against the “other”.

We implicitly positions ourselves as combatants, and explicitly position the “other” to fight back. We can see the dynamic from Iraq and Iran, to Gaza and Afghanistan.

An “enemy” can gain resolve and recruits by pointing out the worst that we do, or are even perceived to do.

The best way to end “Terror” is to undermine the terrorist’s position by being compassionate

For example, perhaps we should look at our behavior, either towards other countries or even the sub-classes of our own country, and ask: “What does this specific action say to other people about what we value?” Then, work to change that behavior and the perception. There would be less foundation among those who claim to hate us on the merit of their talking points.

There will always be twisted minds that seek power over others. But they only ever succeed because they can recruit others who are wounded, or psychologically open to a message about a bad “enemy.”

A similar teaching of compassion can be found in the Dalai Llama’s response to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, which did not invite an armed insurrection like that of, say, the Kashmir-coveting Lashkar e Taiba, which was responsible for the terror in Mumbai in 2008.

We cannot engender compassion in the world if we do not live by the same teaching. As Ghandi said: “Be the change you wish to see.” This doesn’t mean that we don’t seek justice, but it means that justice must be combined with compassion.

Consider the world’s response to Obama’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize. The world is watching, and has high hopes that he will lead this country and the world in peaceful efforts that will take us all beyond the war, fear and judgment of the recent past, presenting a strong, compassionate message to all.

By treating even the alleged “masterminds” of the 9/11 terrorist attack with the best the American judicial system has to offer, we demonstrate to the world the highest values of law and of compassion that we hold. It is highly unlikely that we would allow a loop-hole that would end in a mistrial or an aquittal. Perhaps, the death penalty would not be imposed, but would that be a bad thing? Isn’t the death penalty itself an outmoded expression of tribal vengeance and Hammurabi’s eye-for-an-eye code?

I believe we can be far more persuasive in the world if we seek constantly seek to demonstrate to the world the highest values we espouse. This will take a lot of soul-searching, but it will also cause a lot of soul-searching on the part of others. As the UC Berkeley classicist Michael Nagler has articulated so eloquently, there is remarkable evidence that non-violent compassion, communication and action actually changes not only ourselves but others.

It is the way we evolve, and it is the way to bring others along on the evolutionary journey. You cannot beat others into higher consciousness. You can only love them into it.

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.

Last year, Oprah featured Tolle’s books, The Power of Now, and A New Earth on the Oprah Book Club, and then devoted 10 weeks of webcasts to interviewing Tolle himself.  Fundamentalist Christians got their knickers in a knot at the thought of Tolle’s “New Age” teachings becoming accessible to anyone who has a computer or a TV. Test your knowledge of these spiritual bed-fellows:

Check your answers at the bottom of the page.

1. Who publicly denied rumors in 2006 that they were in a same-sex relationship?

A. Eckhart Tolle
B. Jim Carrey
C. Oprah
D. Suze Orman

2.  Which star made an appearance on Oprah’s TV show during her 10-week series of live webcast classes with Tolle in 2008?

A.  Tom Cruise
B.  Jenny McCarthy
C.  Kirstie Alley
D.  Tina Fey

3.  Who has the most Twitter followers?

A.  Oprah
B.  Eckhart
C.  Deepak Chopra
D.  Jesus Christ

4.  Name the spiritual celeb who said: “As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you — the first time around.”

A.  Eckhart
B.  Oprah
C.  Dalai Lama
D.  Tony Robbins

5.  Which British Isles pop star is a huge Tolle fan?

A.  Bono
B.  Elton John
C.  Paul McCartney
D.  Annie Lennox

6.  Who shares his/her home with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Maya?

A.  Oprah
B.  Eckhart
C.  Dr. Phil
D.  Caroline Myss

7.  Who, as a child, was beaten on a regular basis?

A.  Eckhart
B.  Oprah
C.  Alice Walker
D.  Mother Teresa

8.  Who said this about his/her school days?  “I’d done well because I was motivated by fear of not being good enough, so I worked very hard.”

A.  Eckhart
B.  Oprah
C.  Rick Warren
D.  Marianne Williamson

9.  How many homes does Oprah own?

A.  two 
B.  seven
C.  six
D.  three

The answers you seek: 1-C; 2-B; 3-A; 4-B; 5-D; 6-B; 7-B; 8-A; 9-C