Soul’s Code

TED Conference: Tony Robbins calls Al Gore a “son-of-a-bitch” . . . to his face!

BY PAUL KAIHLA — The 2007 “TED” conference — an eponymous acronym for ‘Technology Entertainment and Design’ — drew celebs-with-substance like Philippe Starck and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the conference center in Monterey, CA this weekend. It’s slugged as a summit of “icons, geniuses and mavericks,” but it’s really a Silicon Valley boondoggle that parades as Davos Lite.

Few geek/policy-wonk conferences deliver YouTube-able entertainment. But this high-powered, high-tech, Meet-Up totally delivered thanks to the presence of Al Gore, the sole member of Google’s advisory board, and Tony Robbins. The one-time TV infommercial schtick-man used the forum to re-brand himself, up-market.

Here’s the news-making line Robbins shot back after Gore humorously heckled him:

He’s broken my pattern, that son of a bitch.

You may have noticed from our last few posts that some of the biggest brands on the enlightenment circuit are criss-crossing the continent right now. We’ve put all the links we’ve scattered around Soul’s Code in one place here. Click on a speaker’s name for their full tour schedule, which we’ve annotated with highlights.

Caroline Myss, the author of Sacred Contracts tours a new book, Entering the Castle

• March 8 Jacob Javits Convention Ctr., New York
• March 21 L.A. Convention Ctr., Los Angeles
• March 23 Masonic Center, San Francisco

What we see in this video of her is 98 % hardcore teaching. Roberson has seen for miles and miles, viz. her searing epiphany: “Who you are really can never be taught. If it could be taught it would be a thing that could be extracted, objectified and learned. And by this time we would have all learned it . . . If you’re of a particular sub-group you’ve heard that ‘you’re radiant light,’ ‘you’re God’s child,’ ‘you’re free,’ ‘you’re safe.’ But to hear it . . . to memorize it, to hope it’s true, is not enough. It has to be discovered directly.”

But what her recent back-story illuminates is that while mystics may live in an elevated psychological state, they do not live in elevated circumstances. When it comes to problems in relationships, they’re like the rest of us. Whew, what a relief that is. Juxtapose the video above with this newspaper story and this thread on the blog Guruphiliac about the affair 3 year-long affair Roberson/Gangaji’s husband Eli Jaxon-Bear – a spiritual teacher in his own right — had with a disciple in their jointly-administered spiritual commune.

Byron Katie is a post-modern mystic = someone who has realized an elevated state, and done so in the maelstrom of contemporary American society — incubated totally outside of organized religion, essentially by spontaneous combustion.

With the release of her third book, A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie receives standing ovations usually reserved for rock stars as she tours U.S. cities. But this isn’t an Oprah-ego personality cult. This material is challenging stuff — not feel-good, ratings-boosting melodrama.

An excerpt from the new book: Here is Katie’s way for un-plugging from the pain of 9/11, an American drama that lives in us with the power of a group induction or spell:

I read an interview with a well-known Buddhist teacher in which he described how appalled and devastated he felt while watching the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. While this reaction is very popular, it is not the reaction of an open mind and heart. It has nothing to do with compassion.

Eckhart Tolle, the Grandmaster Flash of spiritual teachers, has been living the reclusive and contemplative life we kind of expect of a post-modern mystic. He hasn’t made a public appearance for more than two years. (One of the very last was recorded as this talk in the fall of 2004 in Santa Rosa, CA). His publisher, Penguin, blew eight head valves when he declined to do a single signing, speech or interview to promote his 2005 book, A New Earth. And we loved it! There’s a definite symmetry between that style and Tolle’s teachings, which revolve around the connection between being and silence.

But today, Tolle entered a new phase when he posted the itinerary for a speaking tour that will take him from Dallas to Denmark — and a fundraiser on Feb. 22 in Beverley Hills that has stars like Rosie O’Donnell, Ben Stiller and Paula Abdul attached to it.

After hearing my friend K talk about her marriage this week, I had this thought that psychological pain is a master of disguises.

And another thought: Isn’t the path of pain like water damage in a house or apartment? Water can seep into the building from wherever, lurk in the joists and studs for a while – and then blister the basement wall or crater the kitchen ceiling.

This thing we call pain plays with the same energies. It hides out because it’s not wanted. Yet it’s a living thing. It finds a back door. Or broken pipe.

A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’

In this series, we introduce some of the leading lights of the sage sex, and their teachings

Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been women and the teachers men; From Jesus to Gurdjieff and Rumi to Ramana Maharshi, enlightenment has been a male-dominated business. But figures like Byron Katie are in the vanguard of an astonishing advent in the mystical tradition: she is a leading light in a scattered coterie of women who have propounded a radical, new esoteric spirituality and seem to have leap-frogged ahead of male counterparts in the pursuit of the sacred.

Their work, if you want to call it that, isn’t wholly cribbed from Indian gurus or apprenticeships in Asian monasteries but forged in a homegrown fashion in the crucible of the modern, over-caffeinated, high-tech West – sometimes as a result of frustration with oriental traditions. Alongside Katie, these self-schooled spiritual masters include Oregon-based Catherine Ingram, Santa Fe’s Pamela Wilson, and Calgary, Alberta-based Karen McPhee (pictured above).

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