There are many paths to spirituality. While some might find the solace they seek by adopting a map that travels the most conventional of routes, others discover their truest selves in a pottery class. Or between the pages of an Oprah magazine. Or at the mall. One of the coolest ways in is shamanism, an ancient pseudo-religious phenomenon that folks have been trying to explain for a couple of hundred years....
And just like that, above the din of a sonic boom heard the free world over, the self-built media icon with the bizarre first name is gone. Oprah, released to the graveyard of cancelled and closed-up television programs, a desolate place where George Costanza knocks elbows with Hawkeye Pierce, aired her final show this week. In strong contrast to the vast celebrity love-ins that characterized the last couple...
A scientist approaches God and says, “Listen, we’ve decided we no longer need you. Nowadays, we can clone people, transplant hearts and do all kinds of things that were once considered miraculous.” God hears the guy out before replying. “All right,” he says. “To see whether or not you still need me, why don’t we have a man-making contest?” “I’m in,” says the scientist. “Now, we’re going to do this just...
“Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.” So said Lady Macbeth to her nervous husband on the eve of their planned regicide. And while the rest of us may not have king-murdering schemes written across our features, all of our faces are vast repositories of information about the personalities that lurk behind them. Personology is the science of reading faces, wherein a person’s...
Something there is about a list. Its orderly encapsulation of trailing bits of knowledge appeals to our inherent desire to categorize, to contain in neat packages the glut of the world’s information. If we can catalogue it, we can imagine it. To wit, the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, a compilation recently published by an esoteric British publication called The Watkins Review, applies a sense of...