Soul's Code

Soul’s Code exclusive: One of today’s leading spiritual teachers shares her prescription for feeling great

A companion piece to Pamela Wilson’s first column for Soul’s Code, Age of Sorrow, Age of Wakefulness, this meditation invites you into restorative rest and gratitude for every granule of your being. Invite someone close to you to close their eyes, and try reading these words to them sotto voce.

BY PAMELA WILSON — Sit quietly and look inside, feel the sensations in your chest.

Author Tony Samara insists that anyone, anywhere, anytime – in a cancer hospice, or on Afghan battlefields – can be in bliss. A new excerpt from his book, From the Heart.

BY TONY SAMARA — Whether your suffering is a low-grade depression or a paralyzing fear, you can rise above it. From the Heart is a collection of satsangs (Sanskrit for “association with truth”) from live workshops with spiritual seekers from around the globe. In this excerpt, a uniquely-simple way of overcoming one particular source of pain in our lives: the mundane.

How would you survive the loss if your best friend, mentor or shrink were crucified? You’d have to awaken your own inner guru.

DAVID RICKEY — His career was short and ended with his crucifixion. It looked like failure. What had Jesus accomplished? At most a few miracles, healings and teachings. That was it. Or was it?

Like a CEO who doesn’t feel ready to retire, Jesus could at least take comfort in the succession planning of his time — his passing of the baton to a dozen floundering but well-meaning and capable followers.

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.

Are our motivations for action spiritual or messianic?

DAVID RICKEY — Russell Bishop, on HuffingtonPost,  lists seven signs that the new millennium is becoming more “spiritually focused.” He lists movies and movements from The Secret to Kabbalah, trying to demonstrate a type of third great American “awakening.”

Let’s look at another progression. In 2000 we (at least some) were afraid of a computer meltdown. When it didn’t happen, we breathed a collective sigh of relief, only to watch the Twin Towers almost literally melt down on 9/11/2001. The fear and the puzzlement grew but was overcome by an excessive patriotism — it was scary for any of us who were asking the serious question, “What did we do to cause this?”

The decade was a roller-coaster.

What appears to be an increase in spirituality, may then, from a different perspective, really be an expression of the desire to be rescued from an overwhelming sense of doom and gloom.

A real hockey mom shares her search for exercise that tunes her body and soul.

BY MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE — I am not tough. If a gang of men with sticks repeatedly pelted me with a rock-hard projectile you might find me on the ground in the fetal position, pleading with them to stop.

What I actually mean by that is that, unlike Sarah Palin, I am a real hockey mom. I live in Canada. And when I first saw my husband play goal and assume the iconic, fearless “bring it on” stance, I was in awe. As well-rounded as I consider myself to be, in that moment I saw that in my non-athletic development I had missed out on something important.

The fittest of the fit are sublimely aware that for the mind to be in optimal shape, so must the body, and vice versa.

In this economy, not many feel like captains of industry. But we are still obsessed with controlling, listing and working overtime to achieve our goals. The difference between trust and control.

BY DAVID RICKEY — A song by Alanis Morissette called Thank U, which may be a surprising cite given that I am a 60-something priest living in San Francisco and have an iTunes library loaded with chamber music, channels a stunning spiritual meme:

The moment I let go of it, is the moment that I got more than I could handle.

Every time that I let go of wanting a particular outcome, the results far exceed what I imagined.

From the choice of a small college to major in music, switching majors and spending a year in Japan, to the cross-country motorcycle trip I took in 1995, to the move to San Francisco after getting run over by a car in the Blue Hills west of Sydney, Australia (after a much shorter motorcycle adventure there), none of my adventures worked out as they were “supposed to.” Yet all had amazingly wonderful outcomes.

“Not to do a Mel Gibson but most wars are among peoples influenced by the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). What they have in common is a belief in a personal soul that survives death.”

BY DAVID RICKEY — George Bush’s November media blitz to promote his new autobiography, Decision Points, got me thinking about the distinction between the mindless ego and the mindful one, which W lacks. His new book is as myopic and self-servingly spun as his presidency: Even after public testimony before the 9/11 Commission and Congress proving that the CIA had warned the president of an al Qaeda offensive inside the U.S. a month before the World Trade Center attack, Bush deludedly declares that he had no clues that it was coming.

But while Bush’s personality is an exhibit on public display of the ego at its worst — for its self-deception, narcissism and so many other reasons — the ego at its most elemental is a necessary virtue.

To the ears of many Soul’s Code readers and practitioners defending the ego is the spiritual equivalent of saying, “greed is good.” In mystical traditions, the ego is officially verbotten — an entity that needs to be nuked in the name of knowing and liberation.

But I could not be writing this, and you could not be reading it, without an ego.

Living through physical and emotional pain is a gift to the collective consciousness — and ultimately, the cosmos.

BY DAVID RICKEY — Being Human, at the present time, inevitably involves experiencing pain, both physical and emotional. As much as we may try through sex, drugs, relationships or meditation, there is no escaping this “given” of life.

Other manifestations of life also experience pain and the opposite of peace, from quails to quasars. But what makes pain uniquely painful for we humans, though, is the capacity of the mind for self-reflection, and the attempt to avoid with the reflexive thought-form: “This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

Take a step back from that concept, and let me explore why there is a universal imperative for the pain we feel.

God is greater than you can imagine — and so are you!

BY DAVID RICKEY — The very idea of God is, by its nature, beyond the comprehension of “mere mortals”. So, we tend to conceive of God in ways that are limited by the level of our own evolution.

Deepak Chopra, in “How To Know God” describes various attributes of God that actually reflect the level to which our own awareness has moved. For example, if we are still basically functioning at a “fight or flight” level, we conceive of God as warring, defending or protecting.

Mystics, from Meister Eckhart to Eckhart Tolle, and some quantum physicists are able to perceive a “God” who is much more at one with all of the universe. Indeed, the astrophysicist Bernard Haisch, in his book “The God Theory” speculates that the Universe is really God — infinite conscious intelligence — seeking to express itself and experience itself.