Soul’s Code

The Eckhart Tolle of Europe asks us a question: Why don’t we really like change?

BY TONY SAMARA — We each have an ego. And that busy ego plugs into, let’s call it, control systems.

Yes, we do have what the enlightenment philosophers called free will but we seem to make this choice every day. It’s an unconscious choice.

Control systems compromise the free aspect of ourselves. They always want things to be the same way — in the words of the 1980′s band the Talking Heads sang — the same as it ever was.

On the butt end of bullying? A spiritual argument against turning the other cheek.

BY JIM BOUCHARD – What if you could look inside the soul of a bully? What would you find?

Conventional wisdom says that the bully is insecure. He finds some sense of power and control in the world by using force to get his way. He’s often the progeny of a bully himself, was raised to bully others or at least knows no other way.

Katie Davis is a female mystic, fellow traveler of Eckhart Tolle’s and teacher of the kind of love that makes relationships last

GUEST COLUMN: KATIE DAVIS author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment— All love is one Love and when we fall in love with one another, it is said that we are experiencing the divine. Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi poet, defines love as a mystical moment, when two spiritually-connected individuals meet.

We call it love at first sight.

In this meeting of eyes, Rumi romantically writes, we not only experience the union of two loving souls but also the Love that is the crux of the universe.

Buying into 2012 as more “doom and gloom” is a collective projection. A new solar year is a sacred event that can ground you.

BY DAVID RICHO, author of Daring to Trust and 14 other books about spirituality and psychology — Annual planting among ancient peoples began with prayer that recalled how the gods performed this same task at the beginning of time. The human lifecycle, thus, became a repetition of a primal religious event.

Whatever happens every year becomes a promise in perpetuity, and thereby the phases of life and the seasons fit into a spiritual framework.

Among ancient peoples this fostered a sense of belonging here on earth.

Repetition and participation give humans roots: “I am real because I am part of something. I have a grander meaning than is outlined by my fragile body.”

One of the most profound new spiritual teachers in Europe shares an excerpt from his newest book

BY TONY SAMARA — Meditation is not just a repetition of your characteristics that you put into practice in everyday motion and life. Meditation is being a revolutionary. It is being a rebel and breaking free from what is holding the space in this negative little world that we believe to be the truth. To be different takes a little bit of courage.

Can our brains evolve fast enough to solve the problems that the un-evolved mind has created

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.

Islam means “submit.” I’ve used the code of my adopted faith to accept, and turn, public opinion

GUEST COLUMN: REBECCA JONES *— When I met my husband, then-roommate, he was living in the basement of our shared student apartment. We became friends simulating Star Wars battles with toy light sabers and fell for each other watching a Ghostbusters marathon. Sheltered from the world, we seemed to have more similarities than differences.

To be quite honest, it still sits strangely when I hear people say I married a “Muslim man.” I feel like I fell in love with a boy who happened to be Muslim. That was almost 10 years ago.

But just because I fell in love, didn’t mean I fell in love with his faith.

* Rebecca Jones is a pen name requested by the author to protect her family from any potential backlash.

She’s pretty American

BY PAUL KAIHLA — In her short, unintentional life, Paris Hilton has performed at least one spiritual good deed: In 2007, after being sentenced to 45 days in jail for . . . whatever, she exited her L.A. home carrying a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now.

That single act, and famous photo, gave Tolle’s best-selling book of spiritual haiku a second life. It zoomed up Amazon.

The take on Paris among the Soul’s Code community of helping-professionals goes something like this: she’s a harmless person who puts herself out there — but not “in” there — as in, herself. Or what Carl Jung called “the Self,” free of an excessive degree of self-concern.

When she was sentenced, we publicly prayed for Paris’ new inner life — or at least that she’d undergo what another American icon, Dwight Eisenhower, called “an agonizing reappraisal.”

It didn’t work.

Robert Louis Stevenson called it Mr. Hyde; Jung called it the personal unconscious. The great sages say we heal when we own the denied part of ourselves.

BY MICK QUINN AND DEBORA PRIETO, 1st of 2 parts — Picture the ecosystem of relationships that hold you in this time and place, from lovers to office politics and friends and family. Ask yourself six questions:

1. Are the ways in which other people act emotionally disturbing to you?

2.Do you sometimes feel that other people don’t seem to care enough?

3. Do you question the insensitive ways of others?

An anti-anxiety antidote from Katie Davis, a spiritual teacher and peer of Eckhart Tolle’s

SPECIAL TO SOUL’S CODE: KATIE DAVIS author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment — Through spiritual awakening, we realize that virtually nothing is as it seems. Previously, we believed that we were a tiny fraction of individuality that was limited to an, “I am the body,” idea.

In mis-identification with the false “I,” which is the ego or mind-made self, it seemed like we were separate bodies that lived in a world of other separate people and things.

That individuated ego only knows separation, so it can only perceive separation and its lack. This delusion is the source of all suffering, and what we call the misery of the world.