The volume of trading on the New York Stock Exchange dropped to one-sixth of its usual rate while the golfer Tiger Woods was holding his press event the other day. It appears that his treatment for sexual addiction is based on the well-trodden path of the 12-step program—the staple diet of recovering alcoholics.

In addition to this program, Woods—embracing his mother—promised to return to her Buddhist teaching from which he had “drifted away.” Amusingly, when questioned,  the revered Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama confessed ignorance of the impossibly public tale of Tiger and his matrimonial difficulties.

So what is it that Tiger Woods is embracing in his effort to get back into everyone’s good books? For one thing, the 12-step program, patterned after that of Alcoholics Anonymous:

1. We admitted we were powerless over sexual addiction—our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer  and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to sex addicts, and to practice these principles in all our activities.

Then, concerning Buddhism, the Dalai Lama said:  ”Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline—that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.”

Buddhism teaches nothing about God. It is a philosophy founded on the core belief that life involves physical suffering (pain, disease, old age, and death) and emotional suffering (loneliness, fear, anger, etc.). This we can meet with acceptance, leading to understanding.  Suffering also comes through our inner cravings and desire for other people’s acceptance. These lead away from happiness. But suffering can be overcome and happiness restored. We can achieve restoration by following the Buddha’s eight-fold path: focusing our attention, being fully aware, and refraining from intemperate action (including sexual misconduct). The end result of our conforming to the rigorous discipline of the teaching, and following the Middle Way between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-denial, is that we may attain wisdom with compassion.

WODEN SAYS:  “O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! “

In today’s world our sexual way of life has become more open, and much more tortured. When Tiger confesses, the NYSE almost grinds to a halt—imagine that! Yes, it really happened. So entrenched is our guilt, so all-pervasive our voyeurism, that it takes the detachment of the Buddhist leader for someone not to know (and, presumably, not to want to know) about Tiger’s tangled troubles.

Can any sex addict trust in God and confess himself or herself out of it? Or is it better to meditate, take the Middle Way, and train to be wise and compassionate?  Well, of course, one method or another may help a lot of troubled people, the 12-step program providing a starting point, and Buddhist meditation providing a lasting philosophical solution.

My viewpoint is somewhat different. It sees sex addicts like actors on a stage, playing roles  they have freely chosen for themselves, seeking to understand the nature and the pain of addiction.  The Buddhist is right that life involves suffering, but we chose to suffer and to cause other people suffering. We are actors, remember, and as actors we are not guilty of sin, even though we may have embraced what the whole world decries as evil.

The Spirit Masters are very clear about this. When we have truly realized that we have chosen the negative pathway, and have now learned our lesson from it, then we are quite free to choose a different path if we wish. Overwhelmingly powerful sexuality is a tough choice to have made. But we need only do one thing—go within ourselves and listen to the eternal soul speaking through our intuition.  And the soul, which shares in the divine nature, will tell us whether we can be free at last and take the road to recovery, or must plough on, tortured and beguiled by the sirens on the rocks of life, until, finally, true understanding leads us to that wisdom which is our ultimate goal.

Winter Olympics luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili died in an accident on a bend in the track at the Whistler Sliding Center, Vancouver, Canada, before the opening of the games. The sled he was riding came off the track and the young man was catapulted into an unpadded metal support beam and perished.

According to his father, David, the 21-year-old Georgian team member had previously expressed his fear of the track in a telephone conversation they had after a practice run in training he had made. The Wall Street Journal reported that he said, “Dad, I’m scared of one of the turns.” The young man is known to have been a relatively inexperienced slider.

The luge, a Swiss invention from Savoy, is a small coasting sled for one or two athletes. In Nodar’s case it was designed for one person; the young man lay on it, face up, steering the sled’s runners with his feet. Lugers do not race physically against each other, but seek to win on a timed basis. Speeds of up to 90 miles (150 km) an hour are common in competitions. Taking the high-banked bends at that speed increases the centrifugal pull on the body, estimated as being up to a force of 7G. Despite this challenge, after Nodar’s death lugers in other teams expressed their conviction that the Canadian slide was not unusually difficult or dangerous.

WODEN SAYS: My condolences go to Nodar’s family, friends, and team mates in their loss of this talented young man.

As usual, the spiritual comment I need to make will appear sharply different from the sort of response with which many of you are familiar. We should express gratitude that Nodar’s soul achieved its objective in fulfilling the contracts it made prior to coming down to planet Earth, and we honor it for its achievement. We are grateful to learn from our guides that Nodar’s soul has returned Home to unconditional love. It is now on track to comfort parents and friends alike in this time of grief.

Once again, we need to review the whole basis of why we are all here. Our objective as souls is to learn lessons that will teach us more about our own loving nature. These lessons are chosen in advance in line with the need each one of us has for negative experiences. Not only do we freely choose the lessons we want to take on in our next lifetime, we also commit ourselves to learning those lessons, so that if we fail to do so in one lifetime the same lessons will be presented to us again in a subsequent lifetime. We freely commit ourselves, but once committed, we must do it.

Next, we involve other souls in our life-lessons, and they in ours. If a soul wishes to experience abuse, another soul must volunteer to be that soul’s abuser; if tragic loss, then another soul must be the one to die. Souls are like actors playing roles. Sometimes the roles are like the baddie in a Hollywood movie. Sometimes, as with a little baby dying in its cot, the soul’s life is over soon after it has begun. We all volunteer to take roles on one side or another during the procession of our lives. We do so to grow in knowledge and wisdom.

Life-lessons are chosen, but the actual experiences that present them to us come as a surprise, with the possible exception of some lessons inherent in getting older. We have amnesia, which is deliberately given to us, concerning our choice of lessons. When we have a lesson presented to us it is usually largely negative. The death of Nodar Kumaritashvili causes widespread grief, some anger, fear, depression, and the other human reactions we all experience. It may on the positive side also result in safer luge tracks, better training, and so on.

The contracts made by other souls with the young athlete did not wickedly cause his death. In spiritual terms there are no accidents. His soul voluntarily agreed to make a speedy return Home. Only the body died, the soul did not. You cannot kill the soul. The fears he expressed to his father may have been Nodar’s soul preparing itself for its own transition. But the young man consciously knew nothing of that. In no way did he willingly give up his physical life. But when it happened, his soul was speedily out of the body well before his physical death—of that we may be certain.

So we are grateful that Nodar’s soul did this for us. It gave life-lessons to millions of people. Lessons we will not forget, and which will help us all to grow in wisdom—which is the purpose of our being here. Thank you, Nodar. Well done!

The Japanese car manufacturer Toyota has recalled millions of defective cars to fix an accelerator problem: “We’ve halted production of [new] models this week to focus on fixing the problem for the vehicles that are on the road. Our entire organization … has been mobilized. We’re doubling our quality control efforts. Ensuring your safety is our highest priority.” Following this announcement, however, Toyota also recalled its flagship vehicle, the Prius, for a serious but unrelated software problem. Both mechanical defects are potentially life threatening.

Now for two high profile marital breakups: Former presidential candidate John Edwards said that, despite fathering a child by a mistress, which had resulted in the separation of himself and his wife, “I love my children more than anything and still care deeply about Elizabeth.”

According to okmagazine.com, Tiger Woods, once the world’s highest-paid golfer, and his Swedish wife Elin Nordegren, appear to be getting together again, now that Tiger has undertaken an initial course of sex therapy at an addiction treatment clinic. However, Elin (her name means “nymph”) is said not to be wearing a wedding ring, and is rumored to have bought a house on an island in her homeland, Sweden.

WODEN SAYS: Gammer Gurton’s 1810 “Garland … for the amusement of all little good children who can neither read nor run” contains the first publication of a famous nursery rhyme as follows:

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.                                                                                                                   Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more,
Cannot place Humpty Dumpty as he was before.”

As everyone knows who has dropped an egg on the floor, it can be hard to start over. Hard but not necessarily fatal. Toyota has many more than threescore men and women trying to replace the parts and mend the public relations nightmare. The two sad cases of marital breakdown are basically a matter between the partners, their kids, and others intimately involved.

The spirit world looks on such failures as opportunities. First the folks at Home on the Other Side tell us to do away with judgment. “There is no right or wrong,” they say. Most people speeding towards a brick wall in an out-of-control Toyota would vehemently disagree. Presumably Mrs. Woods, smashing up her husband’s car with a seven iron (or was it a putter?), would disagree also—and Elin is no nymph but an angry wife and mother. William Congreve wrote in “The Mourning Bride” (1697):

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned                                                                                             Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

So, failure incites fear of loss, and fear incites anger, and anger incites judgment. An unhappy train of very human emotions. Which is exactly what our souls are here to deal with. The incarnate soul came here with a purpose, which is to get to grips with negative energies and experiences to understand them and to relate to them positively.

When a car company falters, good people lose their jobs through no fault of their own; designers have to re-think their designs, marketers must redouble their efforts, and competitors may step into the breach and turn things to their own advantage. Was it pride that caused Toyota to fall like Humpty Dumpty? Was it greed in cutting corners? Idleness missing an obvious problem? We’ve had a rash of such things recently. Wall Street’s Lehman Bros. could not be put together again. Will the American economy still take a tumble?

In the case of a broken marriage the hurt party (or parties) can usually walk way from the mess. That is often the best spiritual answer, as it speaks of self-love. Maybe the seven-iron car window smashing treatment was a burst of self-love. Never stop loving yourself, Elizabeth and Elin. But that is the same spiritual answer for John and Tiger and Toyota people. Never stop loving yourself—never, never, never—whatever you did.

Starting over again is always possible, providing we realize that our soul is loving and sound.  The things we do, or fail to do, with our egocentric conscious mind may cause us to fall and break. But our eternal soul takes note of it all and, hopefully, learns the lessons that are in the experiences we have cooked up for ourselves.

In the end, the souls—on both sides—have gained wisdom from the bad experience which need never be repeated. Maybe next time around we won’t be playing Humpty Dumpty. Just maybe.

Almost certainly it was the liberal English writer Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911) and not, as popularly thought, Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli, who first said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Recently, in a joint session of the US Congress on healthcare reform, Representative Joe Wilson startled the assembly by calling out “You lie, Sir!” in response to one of President Obama’s statements. Just a few days ago, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was caught on video silently mouthing the words, “not true!” during the President’s State of the Union address to Congress.

The US President may be taking the heat, but the two major political parties in America are both struggling with high mountains of falsehood on both sides. This issue is not going away anytime soon. The more lies the politicians tell, the more people believe them. This places limitations on the ability of each to work with political opponents for the good of all.

The issue of veracity has rarely been so important. From Tony Blair’s lack of regret during the British government’s Iraq war inquiry, to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s palpably false intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s imagined weapons of mass destruction, damned lies and statistics abound in the public arena. And the “terminological inexactitude” (Churchill) just keeps on coming.

Lest it be thought that lying is only a Western sport, just ask the guides in Tiananmen Square Beijing to pause in their description of  the Gate of Heavenly Peace and talk about the uprising in the Square in April of 1989. According to the Red Cross, the revolt resulted in the deaths of as many protestors as there were innocent victims in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001. The guides will tell a completely different tale, a bland one of government-sanctioned propaganda.

Wherever you live: Burma, Tibet, Ukraine (you name it), big lies abound. We put up with  political lies, business lies, legal lies (the old legal adage “Hard cases make good law” was refuted by Churchill in 1945), and media lies—but please don’t let me get started on them!

In the rundown of the falsehood-based Iraq war, and in the rapid escalation of Mr. Obama’s “just war” in Afghanistan, which is consuming so many lives and causing so much hardship, another thought comes to mind as the coffins come home to grieving relatives and friends. It is of an older, equally senseless conflict, and an older lie, which cannot be forgotten.

Wilfred Owen, the great poet of the “war to end all wars” (a pious lie), took what was then a popular quotation from an ode by the Roman poet Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Translated, the Latin reads: “It is sweet and right to die for your country.” In his poem Owen called this “the old lie.” Owen himself proved the truth of that comment, dying in action at the Battle of the Sambre-Oise canal in France on November 4^th, 1918, one week before the war ended. The news of his death reached his home town as the local church bells were noisily celebrating the peace.

WODEN SAYS: Lies are like smoking.

In my interview of the soul of Eleanor Roosevelt for Talking with Leaders of the Past, we talked about alcoholism. She commented that “there are people who need to experience addiction, so they [may] go through all the associated problems, learn their lessons, then renew their strength, so they can move on.”

There is truth in that remark. I found it out when I was a young divinity. Before I became an avatar of Anglo-Saxon ideas about a Supreme Being, I wanted to copy my goddess mother who smoked. She did not smoke much, just enough to have an unopened packet of cigarettes on a side table in the best room for a month or so. Finally, I gave in to my craving to be cool and took one. Next thing I knew, a metaphysical committee of enquiry had been set up and young Woden (me) was in the celestial witness stand.

Mother Goddess: Did you take a cigarette?

Teenage Divinity: No.

Mother Goddess: How do you account for there being one short in the box?

Teenage Divinity: (sweating) Perhaps the manufacturers made a mistake.

Mother Goddess: (refrains from giggling) Then I will write to them and complain.

(Exit Mother Goddess, who in disgust immediately gives up smoking—for eternity.)

No more was ever said. I was so ashamed of myself that I learned a great lesson about telling lies. However, to claim that I then totally gave up lying would be—a lie! Giving up smoking also took a long time.

So, what should we do with all the lies, damned lies, and statistics poured at us every day?

We must stop telling lies to ourselves. When that’s done we can stop telling lies to other people. Meanwhile, we shouldn’t base our opinions and our life on the lies and half-truths told in society, but trust our intuition to give us all the truth we need to live by. And, maybe, we should think twice about training to be a statistician!

Yes, lying is like smoking. It really is hard to give up. I know, I’ve been there and done that.