Soul’s Code

This week’s hottest viral email uses Sarah Palin’s resume to ridicule Republican attack lines

In the section of Soul’s Code called Email Inspirations — look way up, and in the middle of the navigation bar that runs across our banner — we curate viral emails that people are forwarding to friends and family around the world. We pick ones that have a spiritual or mind-bending psychology. Or that simply make you smile.

We went for political humor with the newest one, The Obama-Palin paradox.

Part 3 of 7 in a Soul’s Code series about codependence

BY DAVID RICKEY and PAUL KAIHLA — In our description of the Stage 1 of codependence we talked about how common it is for people who had childhoods with an abusive, dysfunctional or weak parent to carbon-copy that dynamic in adult relationships — or compensate for it.

As it happens, both of the 2008 presidential candidates fit the mold with their fathers. Barack Obama (in the B&W photo with his mother, step-father and half-sister) never really knew his father, except by myth.

BY HUNTER REYNOLDS, resident astrologer at California’s celebrated, Harbin Hot Springs, does a reading of the Democratic nominee for president

Choosing a president is embarrassingly similar to courting a mate. In the initial stages, the temptation is to disqualify, or idealize. The astrologer’s job is to help you find the middle path. As passionately supportive as I am of Barak Obama, when I stare at the symbolic map of his psyche and consider his unique blessings and blind spots, I am sobered. He — like all of us — is a cracked vessel.

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  It was 40 years ago today in the late, great 1968 that Robert Kennedy was martyred by Sirhan Sirhan at LA’s Ambassador Hotel (the venue was demolished in 2005). The man with the unconscious gun was a Palestinian born in Jerusalem who was initially sentenced to death in a California gas chamber, and is now 64. He has spent his adult life in a nasty CA cell.

When the assassin was raised, there was no Israel. Palestine was a creature of the British colonial office.

The Kennedy clan has served as a crucible for some of America’s most noble ideals — and downside projections (adultery, addictions, affairs).

Today we join the prayers at Arlington Cemetery, and for all who were touched by the pain of this loss.

Both Oprah and Obama were members of Reverend Wright’s church. She quit out of careerism, early. Less calculating, Obama hung in until he ran for president

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Whenever I open my mouth about Oprah!, scud missiles rain down upon my space (link to the Led Zep-tune, Kashmir).

Usually, those scuds form their craters during conversations with women who are totally focused on their careers.

Maybe . . . probably, it’s a projection. Do we feel a “missing-ness” in our jobs, yet throw so, so much of our energy into making them so, so good?

What does this have to do with Oprah? She pitches to that careerism that’s alive in each of us, and reflects it. She’s the most successful double-minority, media careerist on earth.

The shadow side of careerism is a sense of missing-ness. Missing this, missing that. Missing that which we really love. Because we’re at work, and selling our precious time for a pay-check. Are the highest highs you’ve ever felt in life produced by your job, an experience at work ? Not bloody likely.

The reason I do not trust Oprah as a trusted source on how to resolve that tension, and instead see her as a self-serving opportunist, was reinforced by this week’s Newsweek.

It shows once again how deeply Oprah is cathected in a self-image that morphs into fame and fortune. Like Barack Obama, she too was a member of Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago church. But unlike Obama, expediency prompted Oprah to cut out after a couple of years — while the future presidential nominee naively hung around for 20.

From Newsweek’s Oprah kiss-up: “Something Wasn’t Wright”:

“Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost,” said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey’s personal sentiments. “She’s always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn’t be smart.”

It’s natural to take offense, defend Oprah — and have affection for her. You want to be rich and famous? Great! Memo to Oprah: Don’t strike a pose as spiritual, a way of being that — by definition — is aimed at obliterating and undermining the very identifications that holds a mass audience in your thrall.

I follow Oprah’s movements, I respect Oprah — I do not trust Oprah. I trust the women that this site calls The New Female Mystics.

What’s the difference? Spiritual teachers like Byron Katie, Pamela Wilson and Catherine Ingram seem like they have surrendered what Oprah has not — and have little interest in promoting a self-image.

Why isn’t the same deference, fierce loyalty and emotion that Oprah enjoys extended to the likes of Byron Katie, Catherine Ingram and Pamela Wilson ?

They occupy a place of peace and acceptance that media celebrities can only imagine. They have a knowing. They do not have money, or media profile.

Is is that what they have is actually not wanted — and what they do have, really isn’t?

The “bitter” quote? The elitist rap? The Democratic primary is a proxy war between a low-chakra candidate (with beer below) and a high-chakra one

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  John McCain argued that Barack Obama’s reading of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvannia is “elitist,” and represents a “fundamental contradiction of what I believe America’s all about.”

At the umpteenth Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said Obama is “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

In the argot of public relations firms, those were killer ‘key messages’ to put Obama in a reactive mode for his candor at a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6 (listen to the recording). But if you pull the camera back for a moment, Obama’s take on Reagan Democrats who go right-wing on social issues exquisitely mirrors the received wisdom among leading figures in transpersonal psychology and the spiritual self-help movement.

Freud was raised in Vienna, Austria — and died in London.Jung was born in Switzerland three decades later, died in Switzerland two weeks after the outbreak of WWII.

Who can America claim as a founding father of modern pscyh? James Hillman is probably the best candidate: born in New Jersey, intellectually-bred by Jung — and still breathing.

Hillman is using his incredible cred to boost Obama — and carpet-bomb Hillary.

Barack Obama’s memoir and manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has echoes of The Cloud of Unknowing

BY PAUL KAIHLA — That’s the headline for the excerpt from Obama’s new memoir, which is featured on the cover of Time magazine. An accompanying news story by Joe Klein, the journalist who wrote Primary Colors, compares the junior senator from Illinois to an earlier political messiah, Bobby Kennedy.

Obama was raised by a single mother but not an overtly religious one. “She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life,” he writes.

Obama is driven by an intense intellectual curiosity – what else would you expect from a Harvard-trained lawyer? And he’s so comfortable with ambiguities and uncertainties that it calls to mind the 14th-century classic of English mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing.