Soul's Code

My mother’s first hospitalization for attempting suicide came before I even knew what the word meant

BY SUEANN JACKSON-LAND — I can close my eyes and see myself at around 8 or 9 years old, sitting with my knees scrunched under me on the floorboard of a 1974 Dodge Coronet. The first poem I wrote was a prayer. Rounding the corner in that same old big brown boat that disguised its ugliness as a car, I can also clearly remember hanging on to the interior door handle as the door swung open and I looked at the pavement racing past me.

The cosmic side of Courtney Cox; B.F. Skinner and Arthur Koestler redux; Does ABC’s Amazing Race have any grace?

I wasn’t yet 10 years old and — in a flash — my childhood was over

BY SUEANN JACKSON-LAND — March 26, 1975 started out like any other day. It was a school day and I was in the 4th grade in Ms. Royer’s class. Ms. Royer looked like a great grandma. She was thin and gray, and secretly, I thought she was a professor instead of a 4th grade teacher.

The school bus pulled up to Oxford Drive and my neighbor Joel and I got off the bus. We were walking together, the same way we did every day. I stopped. Just stopped right in my tracks and I remember saying to Joel that something was wrong. I had a strange sensation like dizziness, but not dizziness; something else, instead. We continued up the road to my house and I unlocked the door and let myself inside.

Why you won’t wear Jeffrey Dahmer’s sweater

People, it turns out, are naturally hard-wired to be superstitious, regardless of their faith, or lack thereof. Bruce Hood, author of Supersense, tells Time magazine that superstition is born from an inherent need we have to find order in the world. That’s why you won’t walk under a ladder, break a mirror, or wear Jeffrey Dahmer’s sweater even after repeated dry-cleanings. (Well, maybe if it’s J. Crew.)

Obama passes up Karma

There’s only so many times you can make the karma/dogma gag, so we’ll just play this one straight: It seems President Obama passed up a stray named Karma to be first pooch in favor of the more chi chi Portuguese water dog, Bo. Video here.

Looking for solutions? Meditation, Self-Improvement and Chainsaws…?

Two quick lists for you: 10 virtually instant ways to improve your life and 4 Powerful Reasons to Meditate and How To Get Started.

Homer Simpson has appeared next to the ancient pagan fertility symbol of Cerne Abbas, according to the BBC.

Notes from around the Internet about the physics and metaphysics of the ABC series, LOST episode, “Through the looking glass”

BY SOUL’S CODE — You never know how good something is until you’ve lost it. For lost viewers, we’ll be without the show until February 2008, writes Entertainment Weekly. The end of the third season represents the mid-point of the show, which will run for another three seasons before its end.

J. Wood has a brilliant analysis of the episode, citing it as an an inversion point. “The narrative itself twists inside-out, with the locus still on the island yet the flashes happening in the opposite direction. Like the White Queen of Carroll’s text explains, we’re seeing the future and its impact on the present,” he writes.

Up until this point we see how the past has influenced the present. Each person has a back-story that has brought him or her to the Island and affects their decisions.

But now we see the influence the future has on the present. The episode is chock full of trippy flash forwards, showing life after the rescue. And for some, it’s not all that hot. But they may not have been “forwards” so much, explains J. Wood. “A physicist named Minkowski realized that by considering time as a component of space, Einstein’s special theory of relativity . . .

Poets who commit suicide use “I,” “me” and “mine” in their writing more than poets who don’t take their lives, according to a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine. Discover Magazine picked up the study in 2006, which compared 156 poems by nine poets who committed suicide to 135 poems written by poets who didn’t take their own lives. The “stable” poets used words such as “talk,” “share” and “listen” more as well. Discover compares “An Appearance,” by Sylvia Plath to “The Ache of Marriage” by Denise Levertov and the difference between the two is telling.

“Pain bodies don’t like to be looked at . . . they thrive in non-attention,” spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says in the short video below.

It speaks directly to the psychology of Seung-hui Cho, a child immigrant from South Korea who grew up in the Washington suburbs — and this week, transformed himself from a Virginia Tech English student into a mass-murderer.

Tolle’s point in the video is that there is an addictive quality to the thoughts of anger that cycle through each of our heads — and our consumption of external images in news, TV and movies (like Taxi Driver) of angry characters acting out violent scenes. They feed a little entity in each of us, an unconscious program we’ve embedded in our personalities. Tolle’s term of art for it is “the pain body.”

Cho’s pain-body seemed to thrive in an atmosphere of extreme inattention, due both to his loner social-status and lack of a center in his own psyche.

According to a report compiled by the L.A. Times, Cho had no close friends, gave people who addressed him one-word answers, and didn’t date — although he was reported, and treated, for stalking behaviors.

The historical roots of the comedian is the court jester, the fool who is able to stealthily sway the ears of the wealthy and the powerful. Richard Jeni never had access to the powerful but he delighted his Baby Boomer fans by modeling his humor on gestalt psychology and parodying mystical practices. He paced his skits with eastern meditation poses and mantras.

Yesterday, Jeni committed suicide. And today, his surviving family revealed a diagnosis from a doctor that said, “psychotic paranoid and clinical depression.” Jeni joins a litany of counter-culture celebs like Hunter S. Thompson, Abbie Hoffman, Spalding Gray, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway who took the same way of escape. May their souls be sanctified.

For those of us who remain in corporeal being, do you realize how many in your midst have contemplated the same exit strategy? The National Mental Health Association estimates that more than half a million Americans attempt suicide each year — and 30,000 are successful. “Completed suicides are more likely to be men over 45 who are depressed or alcoholic.”

Jeni was 49, and had a self-publicized history of heavy drinking and random violence. Ironically, he doubled as a motivational speaker about his liberation from those afflictions.