Soul’s Code

Noah’s llama: Endangered fish escape doomsday on the backs of furry mammals.

Biblical proportions: Humans have an unhealthy risk tolerance for highly unlikely and highly catastrophic events like Fukushima’s imminent meltdown.

Grand Old Planet: Republicans who believe in climate change are an endangered species.

Oprah and Lady Gaga may be today’s spiritual role models for self-actualization but our devotion to suffering remains a national faith.

BY JOHN PTACEK – Why did a tsunami flood Japan? Why can’t politicians tell the truth? Why did it have to rain on my wedding day?

If humans really had power, CEOs would be immune to cancer, holy men wouldn’t sin and Michael Jackson would still be alive. But we don’t call the shots.

Reality baffles us.  We question it every day and keep waiting for people to be good, for governments to be just, for life to be fair.

Edible idols: Chubby Christians question the Church’s role in obesity.

Snacking on dopamines: Is food your drug of choice?

Mouths of babes: Young overeaters are unlikely to live as long as the adults in their lives – and those adults are to blame.

Find this guy a wife for $10K: Chas McFeely promises $10,000 to whoever sets him up with his life partner.

But hurry . . . Offers pouring in for big-ticket bachelor prize

One wife is not enough: A landmark case in Canada could decriminalize polygamy

Financial infidelity: One out of three American couples that pool their resources keep financial secrets from one another

In treatment: A dot.com VC and a trophy wife

Advance excerpt: author Jonathan Lowe recreates the launch of Eckhart Tolle’s career as a global spiritual superstar. His first audience was in a public park.

Soul’s Code — A well-dressed TV reporter is seated on a park bench next to a man who looks homeless. Guardians of nearby children eye the pair with suspicion. Ball players grin mockingly at them through a fence. But by now the reporter, Valerie, is more intrigued by the man than wary of him.

That’s one of the poignant scenes from The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott, author Jonathan Lowe’s fictional tribute to Eckhart Tolle, inspired by the bestseller The Power of Now. The novel begins with a man’s near-suicide – much like Tolle’s real-life experience that led to his international acclaim as a spiritual author, teacher and speaker.

Over-enthused: When does passion cross over to addiction?

Outshining Sheen: Would-be NFLer Erik Ainge says his addiction history blows away Charlie’s.

India’s new gods: Bollywood celebs are so revered they’re getting away with crime.

In Japan, a death toll approaching 10,000; tens of thousands of fatal US car crashes every year; more than 100 million babies born in the world every year

BY DAVID RICKEY — A snippet of one of Dylan Thomas‘s great poems has been popping into my mind a fair amount recently:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees 
is my destroyer.

To me it’s about the “life force” that will also eventually bring about my end. In some spiritualities, like Hinduism, there is a “god” for both creation and destruction (Brahma and Shiva). I prefer to think of it as one force.

Jimmy Kimmel and dot.com sports mogul Mark Cuban are hooked: Sheen’s “surprise” late-night comedy apotheosis

Tiger-blood royalties: Analyst upgrade and bull-run on Sheen T-shirt stock

Curing life’s ills, addicts and Wynona Judd: Not-a-goddess embraces ‘Brain Training’ technology — a computer and EEG

Law of attraction: The more that Charlie Sheen goes fringe, the more that fringe people join his flock

Soul’s Code analyzes co-dependency: Addicted to the addict

How religion came to be about who has the biggest kahunas

BY DAVID RICKEY – We’ve always gotten it wrong. The “religio” in religion means “to connect.” That’s what religion has always meant, but we’re connecting to the wrong things.

Early humans first came up with religion as a way of trying to understand the world and their place in it, and trying to control two things: survival and death. Humans had evolved enough to realize that existence was complex. We intuited meaning and systems such as cause and effect. The problem was that we had also developed an ego, and tended to interpret our intuitions in images that reflected that ego. So we developed the idea of a personal God, and attributed to it many of our own emerging attitudes: anger, jealousy, possessiveness and the need for power – all aspects of ego.

Another problem arose as civilizations evolved: man’s testosterone.

Wall Street Journal: “You will feel as if you’re going to die. I guarantee that.“

Spiritual seekers who paid five-figures for a spiritual retreat are now on the stand: “Defense Works to discredit Sweat Lodge Statements”

CNN: “Choosing to go in the sweat lodge, I believe she had something to prove to James Ray.”

The Daily Beast: “Oprah has no relationship with James Arthur Ray”

FLASHBACK: Oprah still silent

The original sweat lodge: The pagan origins of the Finnish sauna