Soul's Code

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.

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.

The gospel of LOST: Steeped in mystical memes and Einstein’s deconstruction of time, here are 12 reasons that LOST was the most “enlightened” show on TV

BY PAUL KAIHLA — In the 2011 liturgical calendar of American TV, what have we got? Jersey Shore ?! Millionaire Matchmaker? They make Sarah Palin look seriously spiritual. And they strip all shame from the vapid Lloyd Braun-Marc Cherry content called Desperate Housewives. Also an ABC product.

In this 2011 season of Lent, we still long for LOST. Why bring up religious matters?

LOST was a religious experience. Here are 12 reasons why:

We’ve expanded our slide show, Transcendental Movies, from 9 classics to 12. Our new additions: Fur, Being John Malkovich and Last Year at Marienbad

BY SOUL’S CODE — That last choice, Marienbad is set in a mid-century, is a 1961 classic by the French “new wave” director, Alain Resnais). Set in an upper class Grand Tour-like spa in Germany, it is the oldest film in our pantheon of spiritual cinema — and about our favorite because of its parallels with an ABC TV series that came along four decades later.  LOST

The holy man I met, “Swami Ji”, has no organization, TV show, or book. His name simply means “great teacher.”

BY SMADAR DE LANGE — How would you describe the experience of falling in love? For me, meeting with Swami Ji (personal name: Krishnamurti) was like falling in love. I fell in love with love itself, and this love had no limitations of being channeled into one person only.

What are we looking for when we are going to meet those who are labeled as spiritual teachers? Do we look for an end for our sufferings?

David Rickey reports on the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia, and his dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Pujya Swamiji, Amma, and other leading lights of enlightenment

BY DAVID RICKEY — I’m happy to report back on an amazing week I spent at the Parliament of the World’s Religions where I saw and heard, up close, the Dalai Lama, Swami Chidanand Saraswati (Pujya Swamiji), Amma Sri Karunamayi (Amma) and many others. Those others included some wonderful young people who are not potential leaders of the future, but leaders now!

There were two significant messages which I brought home with me, and which I offer to you: First, you as an individual, have the power to change the world. And second, it is important that  we all begin doing so immediately.

Congratulations to Xuan-An Thai, an upwardly-mobile seeker from Texas who took a clandestine trip to Cuba — and stumbled upon a smokin’ (cigar, that is) smiling Buddha

First, we asked everyone in the world to send Soul’s Code an image of a person, place or thing that inspires or “enlightens” them.

Then, some in our Soul’s Code circle may have quietly imagined  . . . ‘Megan Fox meditating at Machu Picchu’?

Still others may have projected: modern-day shaman, Tony Samara, imagining satori in San Francisco?

But we suspect that you fell in love with the winning entry (left) because Xuan-An’s moment of Zen-lightenment in Havana, Cuba is such a pristine revelation of the  serendipitous, sublime, shit-happens quality of being that defies linear thought.

The German-born mystic, Eckhart Tolle, should host Saturday Night Live. He is already a rock-star of enlightenment

BY PAUL KAIHLA — You’d think that U2 was playing San Rafael, CA on the second Saturday of March 2008. There were traffic jams for miles. There were state, local police and private security managing crowds and cars. There were scalpers in front of the sold-out Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium selling TicketMaster e-tickets for more than $100.

Amazing that a turnout typically reserved for rock-gods was actually for a pudgy, middle-aged man who sat solo on stage — and without any musical accompaniment, special effects or AV — held a rapt audience in a semi-trance state for almost three hours relying on nothing more than the power of his personal presence. Eckhart Tolle’s popularity . . .

We’re not in the business of using other people’s pain as a source of entertainment. So let’s reel this out and look at it as a mirror for what happens when any one of us falls into a rabbit hole of unconsciousness.

Here is a gallery of intelligent people who took the road less traveled, so to speak. Now they’re in a conflict that first went public with the publication of the book, Enlightenment Blues, a critique of Andrew Cohen, editor of a magazine that covers mysticism and transpersonal psychology. Then came the launch of a companion blog to the book. Here’s an entry from one of the contributors:

Legacy of Scorched Earth

Reflections from a former student

By Susan Bridle

I was a student of Andrew Cohen for ten years, and worked very intimately with him for many years in my work as a writer and editor for What Is Enlightenment? Magazine and other Moksha Press publications… I left Andrew’s community a little over three years ago, and while I am busy with new academic, career, and spiritual goals, I am still “digesting” my experience of my relationship with Andrew and my time in his community. Bottom line, I experienced so much that was truly profound and transformative – and that I will forever be grateful for – and also so much that was really abusive and twisted – and that still deeply saddens me. The lightest light and the darkest dark. Both. All tangled together like miles of black and white yarn entwined in a big ball at the pit of my stomach. I guess for me, I feel my work is to digest the whole thing, tease it apart… One thing that continues to strike me with painful irony is the fact that Andrew would, almost tearfully, lament about other teachers who had shown such great promise, whose passion for the spiritual life and searing dharma inspired so many spiritual seekers to abandon “the world” and give their entire lives to a spiritual revolution – but whose abuses of sex, money, power, and other addictions in the end disillusioned thousands of seekers and instead promoted cynicism about the whole endeavor. This is, in fact, the reality of the situation now with Andrew.

Last week, Cohen launched a counter-blog featuring a five-page inaugural post. Excerpts:

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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