Soul’s Code

September 21st, the fall equinox, is the UN’s International Day of Peace — not to be confused with Global Orgasm Day, to be celebrated on December 21st, the winter solstice.

Old enemies team up: Execs from adidas and Puma will shake hands for the first time in six decades, and play football for peace. (Peaceoneday.org)

The Dalai Lama edits a newspaper for peace: The Nobel Peace Prize winner takes over The Vancouver Sun for a day, September 26, and hosts a global conference on loving kindness

Superstar clans that have lived with trauma and scandal look to bury the past in very different ways.

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Grief is a very private affair. But this week, it’s going very public for the loved ones of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy. May they rest in peace —  and for the rest of us, may we share the Dalai Lama’s brand of guidance and comfort.

The loss of a loved one is a shock to your system. It’s useful to remind yourself that you’re in trauma. A being who took up a Grand Canyon worth of space in your psyche is gone. The vacuum their loss has left leaves you confused – and reeling. So do drugs, alcohol, addictions, affairs and other escapes. You don’t need any more momentum in that direction.

You’ll keep asking yourself, “What do I do now?” Don’t even try to answer that question. You can’t.

Lost meets Bladerunner

Let’s start with Darryl Hannah to help you make this connection. She played Pris, the “pleasure model” android in Bladerunner, Ridley Scott’s dystopian translation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Bladerunner, Hannah hides out with the same supporting actor who popped up last week as a mad scientist in the Dharma Initiative on Lost.

His name: William Sanderson. Twenty-seven years ago in Bladerunner, Sanderson played J. F. Sebastian, the prematurely-aged geek who invents FX-like toys. The title of Lost‘s season 5, episode 10, “He’s Our You”, is actually about Sanderson’s character.

Dalai Lama: Tibet has become “Hell on Earth”

Speaking yesterday in Dharamsala, India, on the 50th anniversary of Tibet’s foiled uprising against Chinese rule, the Dalai Lama warned that Tibetan culture faces extinction and that authoritarian rule has made life in the Himalayan nation “hell on earth.”

It’s one of the boldest announcements that the Peace prize winning leader has yet uttered against the government that claims its policies are designed to do just the opposite – create a post-faith, materialist heaven on earth.

The platypus, a baboon’s behind, and The Housewives Tarot prove that the universe has a wild sense of humour

 GUEST COLUMN: AMY LEASK — As an undergrad, I took an English seminar on women and nature, which included a number of traditional stories from Canada’s “First Nations” communities. Eyebrows went up when we were assigned a piece entitled “Snot Boy”, and as we read about the first man on Earth being created from mucus, we guiltily stifled our giggles.

It was an incredible relief when our professor pointed out that even the most sacred of stories could still be told with humour. Life, after all, could be incredibly strange and funny, and it wasn’t a sin to acknowledge that fact — even in sacred writings.

We can see and hear thousands of angry demonstrators jamming San Francisco’s financial district and waterfront along its famous bay as we write this. It’s a miraculous outpouring of support for the Dalai Lama, and his campaign to reclaim Tibetan self-rule — and his homeland’s status as a sanctuary for Buddhist practice. The heat of what’s happening outside has been ratcheted up several orders of magnitude by . . .

His Holiness says physical love spells “trouble.” A priest responds: in its highest form, sex spells “At-One-ness.”

DAVID RICKEY — Sex is a many splendored and often-splintered thing. The Dalai Lama, in a rare interview on the subject, focuses primarily on the splinters:

Naturally as a human being, some kind of desire for sex comes but then you use intelligence to make comprehension that those couples are always full of trouble. And in some cases . . . suicide, murder.

Speaking purely biologically, sex is the sine qua non for the survival of the species.

Forbes.com recommends yoga in the conference room as one of its 10 ways to reduce stress at work. (picture from Forbes.com)

Newsweek reviews “Away From Her” a movie about losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s.

The Phoenix Center blog offers five tips for “Getting your act together.” My favorite is Number 5: “Go out of your mind, and come to your senses.” The idea is from Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy.