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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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04 Dec 2021
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Want to Boost Your Creativity and Be a Better Collaborator? Think About Why the Sky Is Blue

It’s probably been a long time since you lay on your back in the grass, looked up and wondered, Why is the sky blue? Or since you took the time to consider a question as difficult as, Where does the universe begin, and where does it end?

In 2013, education innovator Sugata Mitra received the million-dollar TED Prize to develop an online learning platform for schoolkids, based around big questions like these. But the big secret is: It’s actually fun for adults. By tweaking Mitra’s idea, you can get in touch with your inner child — while building important skills. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Set aside an hour to recharge your curiosity.

At the heart of Mitra’s School in the Cloud is a simple method known as a SOLE session. SOLE stands for Self-Organized Learning Environment, and it capitalizes on two incredibly abundant commodities: curiosity, and information on the Internet. A session begins with an open-ended, thought-provoking question — for example, What would happen if insects disappeared? or, Why do languages die out? Kids spend 40 minutes doing online research in groups of four or five, sharing one computer and jotting down their findings. Then all the groups come together for 20 minutes and discuss their discoveries.

Why should a busy adult take the time to pursue a blue-sky question like this? Because most of us spend our days living in our own information silos, and it’s good to step outside of them. In pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, you’ll undoubtedly learn something new — or maybe you’ll revisit a subject you’ve avoided since high school (hello calculus!) and shake the cobwebs off your old learning, or reignite a passion you’d forgotten about. In doing research for the session, you’ll be forced to consult multiple sources and quickly find credible information — skills that are essential for critical thinking. And in the process of working with others, you could pick up tips, whether it’s a keyboard shortcut you never knew existed or a great YouTube channel to follow.

Step 2: To come up with a question, think big — really big.

By the time we’ve reached adulthood, we’ve long since stopped posing knotty, complicated queries — there are just so many more pressing professional and personal questions to answer. “Adults are more curious about the practical aspects of life,” says Mitra. “If somebody says, ‘Here’s a cheaper way to buy a house,’ we’re interested. But if the same person asks, ‘Why do we live in houses? What made us move out of caves?’ that isn’t as intriguing.”

So how can you find your own meaty questions to unpack and explore? The easiest way: Ask a kid, or think of the last stumper — Why do we hiccup? How does a car work? — that a child threw at you. What’s essential is to use a question that no one in the group can answer easily. It’s OK to pick one that’s related to your work, just as long as it’s not one that goes through your mind on any given day. For example, Mitra recently ran a SOLE for school principals in Hong Kong and their question was, What is the future of exams?

Step 3: Agree to disagree.

A SOLE is a safe space to practice what management expert Margaret Heffernan calls “constructive conflict.” Disagreement and friction, far from being forces to avoid, can fuel learning and innovation by making you consider alternate opinions and approaches. Before beginning a SOLE, participants should be reminded to speak their minds and not worry about butting heads, Mitra says. This prompting can help us adults transcend standard politeness, and get us over another potent fear: looking dumb in front of others. “With adults, there’s often an initial period where everybody’s stiff. Someone will say, ‘I’m not very tech-savvy’ or ‘I don’t know anything about this’ and takes a back seat,” Mitra says. Assure people that any and all answers are welcome.

Step 4: Draw on the wisdom of the crowd.

One other major obstacle you may encounter: competition. Many adults are simply accustomed to working solo — to us, working together often means doing our own tasks while colleagues focus on theirs — not, usually, all of us doing the same thing together. If we have the same duties, we tend to compete, consciously or subconsciously. A SOLE, on the other hand, is about discovering and deploying the expertise of the entire group of people. “When ants build a bridge, it’s not each ant working alone,” Mitra says. “It’s a thousand of them building it together.”

In a session that Mitra ran with a group of 15 professors at the UK’s Newcastle University (where he is a professor of educational technology), he spotted a problem right away: “After getting their question, they each took out their computer and started working alone.” His quick fix: He restricted the group to a single computer per small group — the same setup as in the eight School in the Cloud learning labs in India, the UK and the US — and the dynamic changed. “They appreciated the fact that in a group, they could get to a more nuanced answer more quickly,” says Mitra.

Step 5: Repeat as needed.

Besides using SOLE as a team-building exercise at work, you could focus a session on brainstorming potential uses for a new piece of software, device or tool, says Mitra. Another potential application that he is exploring: SOLE in senior centers. At a nursing home in the UK, the participants in a session impressed him with how adeptly they drew on each other’s strengths while researching the question, What will be the effects of Brexit? “In one group, there was one woman and three men. The woman had Parkinson’s and said, ‘My hand shakes too much to use the mouse, but I can read very well,’” recalls Mitra. “So one of the men operated the mouse, and she read out loud.” The group ended up having a lively discussion that pushed far beyond standard answers.

“It’s a strange thing, how our minds change over time,” says Mitra. “Life seems to take away that wild curiosity we have as kids.” This, he says, is a shame. “I’d rather hold on to the big questions.” Wouldn’t you?

 

 

Original article here

27 Nov 2021
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The seven types of rest: I spent a week trying them all. Could they help end my exhaustion?

“Are you the most tired you can ever remember being?” asks a friend. Well, yes. I have it easy – my caring responsibilities are limited and my work is physically undemanding and very low stakes – but I am wrecked. The brain fog, tearful confusion and deep lethargy I feel seems near universal. A viral tweet from February asked: “Just to confirm … everyone feels tired ALL the time no matter how much sleep they get or caffeine they consume?” The 71,000-plus retweets seemed to confirm it’s the case.

But when we say we are exhausted, or Google “Why am I tired all the time?” (searches were reportedly at an all-time high between July and September this year), what do we mean? Yes, pandemic living is, objectively, exhausting. Existing on high alert is physically and mentally depleting; our sleep has suffered and many of us have lost a sense of basic safety, affecting our capacity to relax. But the circumstances and stresses we face are individual, which means the remedy is probably also individual.

The need for a more granular, analytical approach to fatigue is partly what prompted Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, a physician and the author of Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, to start researching and writing. “I wanted people to take a more diagnostic approach to their fatigue. When someone comes in and they say they’re hurt, I can’t treat that without having more details: what hurts, where does it hurt, when does it hurt?”

Sacred Rest dates from before the pandemic, when Dalton-Smith’s practice was already full of tired patients. “People would come in saying: ‘I’m tired all the time’, ‘I don’t have energy’ … lots of non-specific complaints. Nothing where you could give them a pill; things that needed lifestyle changes.” Simultaneously, Dalton-Smith was struggling to combine intense career pressure with parenting two toddlers. “I was experiencing some burnout-type symptoms,” she says. The book starts with an extremely relatable account of her lying on the floor, her kids snacking in front of the TV. “I never knew how hauntingly healing cold wooden planks could be,” she writes.

Her fatigue prescription is to incorporate seven types of rest into your life: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative and spiritual. I am dubious. Sacred Rest has a classic off-putting self-help book cover (a jetty shrouded in mist), talks about the “bread of self-disclosure and the wine of community”, and focuses heavily on God (there’s a clue in the title). Then there is the fact that any attempt to take a break over the past 18 overloaded months has left me feeling miserable and unmoored. I confess this when I speak to Dalton-Smith over Zoom.

“I don’t like resting,” I tell her. “I get listless and sad and feel a failure.” She is not surprised. “For some people, rest is almost uncomfortable. It’s almost as if their psyche fights back against it because of the new sensation.” She would never, she says, recommend a three-day silent retreat to a completely frazzled patient. “For someone who is actively burned out, that’s almost traumatic.”

The book is not, in fact, about that kind of complete withdrawal; it is about incorporating enough moments of rest to stay functional. That may be a depressing indictment of end-stage capitalism: Dalton-Smith is thoughtfully critical of society’s inability to take a preventive approach to its “burnout culture”, commoditising sleep (“It’s a billion-dollar industry, we have speciality pillows, weighted blankets, all of this stuff”) rather than focusing on the root problem. It is, however, refreshingly realistic. I gave the seven types of rest a whirl over a week, to see whether I would feel less tired – whatever that actually means – afterwards.

Physical

As a lazy, desk-based homeworker, I am rarely physically tired. I do, however, get stiff and achy, sit for far too long and pretzel my body into terrible shapes. Dalton-Smith advises incorporating “body fluidity” into my day with hourly small movements. It’s easy and rewarding to set a phone reminder to roll my neck, clench and unclench my hands, or stand up and rock on my heels. Even better is the advice to “choose to be still on purpose for five minutes while lying down.” I do this on the sofa, under a blanket; the hardest part is getting up after five minutes.

I am a poor sleeper, so Dalton-Smith’s “bedroom routine” advice (the usual: dim lights, comfy clothes and no bedtime screens) is mainly stuff I do already. I follow her recommendation to add some stretches before bed; I sleep well the first night but after that I am back to my usual tossing and turning.

Mental

Mental fatigue – that befuddled, nervy, brain-fog feeling; forgetting what I was doing, and missing important things because my concentration is shot – is my constant companion. “Brain like damp Weetabix,” a friend calls it, which feels about right.

It is chastening how easy it is to improve my focus with a basic technique: time spent blocking out “low-yield activities”, such as email and social media, and periods of concentration. It dovetails well with the hourly movement breaks from physical rest, too. I am quickly conscious of how instinctively reactive I am to the most recent – not the most urgent, or the most important – demand; how the chime of a WhatsApp message chips 10 minutes off my concentration, leaving me foggier. I feel idiotic not to have realised this before. Usually when I try something for an article, however beneficial, I abandon it instantly once I finish, but the 25-minute focus, five-minute distraction timers on my phone have become a permanent fixture.

Emotional

Dalton-Smith has an online “rest quiz” to work out your rest deficits; by far my worst score is for emotional rest. It also turns out to be the area I find hardest to address. One suggestion is to identify people who “drain” you; as an introvert, I fear that’s everyone. Another tip is to “risk vulnerability”, against which I have an almost physical reaction: my mask is there for a reason! The third is to “cease comparison”, but comparing myself unfavourably to others is my main hobby. None of these are exactly quick fixes. I probably need therapy, but failing that, I ask Dalton-Smith for help.

She suggests writing down what I am feeling, if confiding in others feels too exposed. I sit in a cafe and write down everything I can think of that makes me feel angry, scared, ashamed and sad. It takes a while and I really hate it: it feels as if I have forced all my worst thoughts to the surface without any plan for what to do with them. Maybe it doesn’t have to feel good to do me good, and maybe if I sustain it for a while, I’ll feel the benefit? I am reserving judgment.

Social

I assumed “social rest” would mean opting out of socialising for a while, but Dalton-Smith’s social rest means spending time with people with whom you can be your unvarnished self.

Thankfully I am seeing my hairdresser this week (as a wig wearer, this is a very rare treat). We have known each other for 25 years and he sees me at my most vulnerable: bald and scared of what he’s about to do with his scissors. He is also wonderful company. Punctuated by the totally misused phrase “long story short, Em”, he treats me to a two-hour monologue on a variety of feuds, scandals and gossip so entertaining I leave feeling more energised than if I had had a transfusion of something unethical in a Swiss clinic.

After that, I have a leisurely lunch with my best friend, the woman who knows my worst qualities and nastiest thoughts. We eat like pigs, lapse frequently into silence, and discuss both really important stuff and the rising tide of water in the bottom of our fridges. It’s deeply restorative. She’s my emotional rest too, I realise.

Sensory

I know exactly what sensory input exhausts me: sound. Almost any noise – the battery bleep from a neighbour’s fire alarm, a distant engine, the bathroom fan – can obliterate my focus (while writing that sentence, I told the dog off for licking himself too loudly). My husband has been a brilliant WFH pandemic colleague, but the man is loud: a volcanic sneezing, expansive yawning, loudspeaker telephoning one-man band. It has been challenging.

This is no surprise to Dalton-Smith. Analysing data from her quiz during the pandemic, she saw “a huge uptick in the number of people who were experiencing sensory rest deficits”. People confined to the house with small children in particular, she says, were exposed to constant noise and even some adults “irritated each other to death. That non-stop hum of somebody talking in the background causes you to get agitated. That’s what sensory overload does to us.”

I am pretty much on top of my noise sensitivity: this article comes courtesy of a “peaceful piano” playlist that masks my least favourite noises without commanding my attention. But this week, I also try to ensure I appreciate the moments of silence when they happen, and to be conscious that when I feel depleted and stressed, noise is often the reason.

Creative

I haven’t had a decent idea for at least two years, so I think it’s fair to say I am creatively burnt out. I instantly love Dalton-Smith’s advice to “build sabbaticals into your life”. That’s not a month-long writer’s retreat; it can be as little as 30 minutes, doing something you choose, away from the grind.

I decide on lunch at my favourite cafe, then a gallery trip. After checking my email on the bus – a mistake – my lunch becomes a working one, as I do an urgent job. But after that the fun starts. I wander slowly around a ceramics exhibition, which is both transporting and inspiring. Afterwards, I drink a hot chocolate as the late autumn light fades, looking at people and shop windows and even having a conversation with a man about his dog. I feel like a different person for a while, as if there is more space in my head. I still have no good ideas, but looking beyond my usual environment and doing something I have chosen feels wonderful.

Spiritual

Dalton-Smith is clear that you don’t need to share her – or any – faith to incorporate “spiritual” rest into your life. “At the core of spiritual rest is that feeling that we all have of needing to be really seen, of feeling that we belong, that we’re accepted, that our life has meaning.” That might come through voluntary work, or other activities.

I have no faith, and finding what gives me those feelings seems a longer-term undertaking. Instead, I turn to the only spiritual thing I know well: a Quaker silent meeting. I was educated by the Quakers, a faith group whose conception of God is simultaneously so expansive and so minimalist (they believe there is “that of God in everyone”), it’s hard to feel uncomfortable about it. Silent meeting – an hour of silence, interrupted occasionally by anyone who feels moved to speak – is the only kind of meditation I can manage. I turn up, get a warm, no-fuss welcome, sit down, and enjoy the silence. Sometimes I examine my thoughts; sometimes I look at people’s jumpers. I can see the blue sky out of a window; mainly I look at that. It’s the deepest peace I feel all week.

Do I feel more rested? I am not miraculously restored and razor-sharp, but that’s not a realistic goal, or even the aim of the book. It is another week of poor sleep, but I feel as if I have a bit more in the tank than usual, which is pleasant. I find it useful, too, to analyse what sort of tired I am, and to have a toolkit to address at least some kinds of fatigue.

Of course, there is an unavoidable flaw in this experiment: I am resting for work purposes. That gives me sort of “permission” to rest, while still, actually, working. Could I embrace rest purely for myself? I should: this is basic maintenance, not self-indulgence. We can’t function forever fuelled by adrenalin and caffeine, fogged brains scrabbling to function, nerves frayed like a cheap phone cable. Sure, we can sleep when we’re dead, but a little rest before that would be nice.

 

Original article here

 

 

16 Nov 2021
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How To Start Connecting With Your Higher Self

All over the world, people are awakening to the fact that we are more than bones and flesh. We sense that there is more to life than what we see. The word “consciousness” is losing its unreachable meaning, and we look for ways to go inside ourselves and find inner peace.

How do I connect with my higher self, you may be asking? There are different ways, I will tell you about a few here.

Practicing yoga is very good for your physical body, but also for your soul. There are different types of yoga; all work, and their benefits are widely known and studied by science. If yoga is not for you, practicing Pilates is an excellent alternative. It has helped me with my body and my soul.

Meditation is one of the most powerful tools that exists to connect us with our higher self, with divinity or God, if you want to call it that. I will teach you a very simple way to start meditating:

  • Sit comfortably, preferably on a chair
  • Close your eyes and start counting your exhalations every time you breathe
  • Breathe normally, count to ten and start again
  • If you lose count, start over
  • Let thoughts pass and keep counting
  • Do this for at least 10 minutes a day.

You will see that each time, your attention and concentration improve, and a sense of peace and calm comes over you.

Praying is another way to connect with the divine. Repeating a prayer every day will have the same results as a meditation. It does not have to be a formal prayer; it can be a deep conversation with the divinity. This is also a way of praying.

Mantras are words or phrases that are repeated as litanies to support meditation or to connect with the higher realms. They are used in Hinduism and Buddhism. One of the best-known mantras used by many spiritual leaders, who attribute numerous spiritual benefits to reciting it, is “Om Mani Padme Hum”.

Do you like to sing? Music is a powerful way of connecting with your soul. Of course I mean calm, joyful and restorative music. I know people who go around humming a tune all day, and coincidentally they are always optimistic people.

Activate your inner powers by learning different activation methods, like pineal gland activation and heart activation and breathing techniques. One good and simple breathing technique to start with is to sit down and inhale through your nose in a deep and slow way and exhale slowly through your mouth, relax your shoulders and expand your chest. Do this for 3 to 5 minutes.

What is most important with all of these tools is to stop in your daily life and reflect on where and what we pay our attention to. The important things are within us. We are energy beings, and it is from this knowing that we create our world. Becoming aware of it will necessarily lead us to correct mistakes and create a better world for ourselves.

Take that step ahead. The time is always now.

 

About the Author:

 

Veronica Sanchez De Darivas is Chilean-Australian, now living in the UK and a proud mother of teenage twins. A spiritual awakening teacher, bestselling author, pineal gland (third eye) activator and Certified Instructor for the Cyclopea Method, Veronica is currently the only instructor in the world teaching the Cyclopea Method in English.

 

 

13 Nov 2021
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Steadfast

There is so much angst in the air these days that we may all be feeling more sensitive, exhausted or even more despondent than usual. So much so, that I feel a lot of folks are at the end of their tether, overwhelmed by the vast onslaught of confusing emotions and free-floating anxiety in the telluric atmosphere.

Steady, folks! Simply ignoring what is unfolding isn’t optional. However, grounding and staying centered in our core Being is a choice we do have, hour by hour, and day by day.

This past Wednesday there was an unusual astrological alignment. At the same time our planet has been undergoing a mid-level geomagnetic storm from more solar flares that erupted last weekend. On Wednesday Saturn and the Moon met up at 7 degrees of Aquarius, and Mars and Mercury joined up at 7 degrees of Scorpio. The Mars-Mercury gang was also opposed by Uranus retrograde at 12 Taurus.  This configuration is as rare astronomically as it is astrologically. The message in it is this: “…when push comes to shove”, or “enough is enough”, or “I am tired of this s**t”, or even “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

The manifestations of this seemed to erupt in synchronous fashion globally, but were more focused in the USA, UK and Europe. In the days leading up to this strange square in the sky between Mars in Scorpio (“I’m going to get to the bottom of things, and you can’t make me do what I don’t want to do!”) and Saturn in Aquarius (“You must submit to the mandates or lose your job.”) various unions representing the police, firemen, teachers and health care professionals in the United States started court actions against forced inoculations. Of course, to suddenly try to force anything on these folks, after they’ve been on the front lines for 16 months without the need for such an experimental medical intervention does not make much sense. Nor does it make any sense to risk losing these dedicated people by coercing them into having to choose between their ethics (and perhaps medical or scientific knowledge) and their livelihoods. The video below is about an RN in British Columbia, Canada who is going through this exact scenario.

Here in the U.K., on the very morning of said weird astrological event, the government announced that all NHS and care home employees would have to be vaccinated or be let go.  By yesterday morning 60,000 care home staff had been let go, and the care homes informed the National Health Service that they would be unable to accept any patient transfers from NHS facilities. That was standard practice during the early months of lockdown in 2020. Now it is the turn of the NHS frontline staff to choose where they stand. I have spoken privately with some nurses from our local NHS Trust hospital, and they feel it is simply wrong-footed to make the jabs mandatory.

Of course, there are other aspects to these developments, and I although I would like to address them here like bullet points in a lecture, I won’t do that. I’m not here to lecture anyone or tell them what I think they should do, or not do.

After a relatively quiet weekend and beginning to next week, we have a few more rings of fire to leap through.  Next Wednesday Mars in Scorpio comes into an exact opposition with Uranus in Taurus retrograde. This occurs at 12 degrees of each sign. The energy of any Mars-Uranus aspect is volatile, unpredictable and intense. I know because I live every day with Uranus square Mars in my natal blueprint. Saturn is also in an applying square to Uranus, which will be exact on December 24th, 2021, the last square between these behemoths in those signs for quite some time to come.

On Friday, November 19th, there will be a partial Lunar Eclipse in Scorpio-Taurus.

This lunar eclipse event may further galvanize and embolden those questioning the official narratives and mandates.  The confrontation between Mars and Uranus squaring Saturn will alert those in charge that their tactics are having less of an effect than desired. This may result in further and perhaps more draconian restrictions in December, especially after the Total Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius (self-righteousness). I am still taking the long view and holding zero expectations as we move from now to the first exact Pluto Return station to the USA Natal Chart Pluto in February 2022.  Now that will be a subject of deeper delving in January 2022!

The upshot of all of this from my perspective is that this is a time for steadfast resoluteness and preparedness. Lots of folks I know are “prepping”, something I’ve been meaning to do for a few months now since supply chains have been disrupted and fuel has gotten scarcer. However, the spiritual and soul-base perspectives are of primary importance in these challenging and confusing times.

Ever since Halloween and the November 4th New Moon I’ve detected an uptick in psychic interference and fatigue.  Some of that is due to the fluctuations in the planet’s magnetic fields, but hey, the veils are still very thin now.  People energy, including thoughts and emotions, seem to be bleeding through boundaries much easier than before. This is creating some personal friction that is straining working or friend relationships. Very touchy when it is someone close to you that you feel you need some space from. By extension I am also picking up on a lot of astral interference and other static. Clearing oneself daily is a useful activity, and only takes a few ticks to accomplish. Some symptoms to be alert for are undefined irritability, low-grade depression, self-talk, blaming, complaining, dissociative or addictive behaviours, a longing to be somewhere else, and general doubt or fear.

Although lower emotions like fear, guilt, shame and anger are generally to be eschewed, anger can be a creative energy when approached in the correct attitude. Anger is one of the most misunderstood and avoided emotions on the planet, or conversely, one that is over-indulged in far too often.

The one message anger can have for us is that our Soul Core is alerting us to some person, situation or thing that violates our sense of Self, or our core values. As such, anger is then your friend, and an ally in helping you in choosing and activating healthy boundaries. In a climate such as we have now, people’s right to say “NO!” is even being taken away. To someone experiencing physical, mental or sexual abuse, we would be appalled if someone were denied the inherent right to say “NO!, that is does not feel good and I will resist!” This is when anger can give us the courage to stand up for ourselves and by saying “no” we are saying “yes” to what feels right and good for us.

It will be increasingly essential to observe what is going down without it dragging you down with it. It is also becoming apparent that we may have to act in a firm and steadfast way to preserve the life we have chosen to live, and not acquiesce quite so easily to what others tell us to do. This Saturn in Aquarius cycle will be with us until March 2023, so we’ve still going to see this type of attrition carrying on for a while yet. By that time Pluto will be done with the transit to the USA chart and will be about ready to head into Aquarius itself. That should be of larger concern than what we currently are experiencing. Even so, it is vital that we look to staying as much in the now as possible.

There are many things to be currently thankful for, and to celebrate. If you have your health, good food, shelter and loving family and friends, then appreciate that…deeply. Hold fast to the vision you have for your life and choose the path that brings the most peace to you, not the most material gain or comforts. The pressures we are seeing have been designed by us, and for us, to awaken and galvanize us to take full responsibility for our happiness right now, and for the future.

This is also the Planet’s shaking and waking us out of the nightmare that is capitalism and consumerism.  I recall when I was channeling Archangel Ariel that she’d remind folks that moving into 5D would mean no more Wal-Mart’s or McDonalds. We cannot blend our current culture or beliefs with a higher order society. Our technology is owning us, and we are slowing realizing that that is now so. We also can feel how dehumanizing our institutions have become (humans are NOT a resource). The good news is that we are at choice, and in fact that is where our true power resides.

Choice.

Don’t leave home without it, and refuse to submit your power of choice to another.

 

About the Author

Isaac George is an internationally recognized intuitive mentor/coach, evolutionary astrologer, conscious channel, self-published author and musician. After a life-altering spontaneous kundalini awakening in 1994 he explored various healing modalities, including hypnotherapy and Reiki. In 1998 he began spontaneously channeling Archangel Ariel and other dimensional intelligences.

Originally from the United States, Isaac currently resides in the UK and offers Spiritual Mentoring sessions and programs and Evolutionary Astrology consultations.

03 Nov 2021
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Aunt Allie’s Full Moon Ritual

Last year, I met an extremely gifted medium in California: Allie Barkalow. If you don’t know what a medium is, it’s a person who communicates with spirits from the other side. I heard about Allie from my dear friend, Carolyn Miller, who is a psychic and known for her amazing tarot and aura photography readings. Carolyn told me that Allie is one of the best psychics she knows, and I figured if she’s anything like Carolyn I had to meet her.

I was immediately drawn to Allie with her bold and honest demeanor and witty sense of humor. She reminds me of a favorite aunt or wise-woman that calls the shots as she sees them with practical, straightforward advice. After the reading (which was astounding), we struck up a conversation and she shared some really useful information. She told me how to clear a house of negative energy using her sea salt smudge recipe and how she protects herself energetically during a psychic session. She told me why it’s important to sage your pillows every month since, apparently, we dump a lot of psychic stuff into our beds when we sleep!

At the end of our talk, I mentioned the full moon coming up and how I could really use a simple ritual to do with some friends (it was right before the pandemic when we could still gather). Of course, she had one. In fact, she shared with me a tried and true ritual she’d been doing for over 40 years. I was giddy with excitement and needless to say my friends and I had an amazing little shindig that weekend under the full moon in my backyard with Aunt Allie’s recipe.

I’d like to share her full moon ritual with you here — Allie said it’s okay. This ritual is specifically for letting things go. I hope you tuck it away and enjoy it for many moons ahead.

I was reminded that not everyone knows about rituals and how to do one. Rituals are an ancient way to honor the sacredness of high holy days and important moons — full and new — and to clear and to invite.

The full moon is the time of ending and releasing. It is the perfect time to end cycles, release old patterns, habits, behaviors, and thought-forms. If you are working on your ascension, such as trying to elevate your vibration, be a better person, etc., the full moon is a fabulous opportunity to let go and use your consciousness to move forward, get lighter in being, and take back your power. This is not the time to ask for anything!! That is the new moon.

This ritual is a simple one, in accordance with the native way of honoring this sacred time. Feel free to use your own prayers, words, and/or name of God.

Full Moon Ritual

What you’ll need:

  • Paper and pen for yourself and extras for friends if doing this as a group
  • 1 tea light candle and a fireproof container, such as a cast iron skillet
  • 4 extra tea light candles and 4 small bowls to place the candles in to make a sacred circle on the ground
  • 1 stick of incense
  • Cup of water
  • Pinch of tobacco
  • Handful of cornmeal
  • Smudge stick such as sage, cedar, or palo santo
  • Lighter or matches
  • Compass to determine the directions

Directions:

  1. Make a list of what you are ready to let go of in your life. This may be personally, professionally, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially, etc.
  2. Make sure you know when the exactitude of the full moon is. Go outside one-half hour before with everything on a tray. If you cannot go outside find a quiet place in your house where you will be undisturbed.
  3. Light the smudge stick and smudge yourself, fanning the smoke from the top of your body and going downwards, getting the back of your body and under your feet. If doing this in a group, have your friends do the same. (This is important to do at the start of any ritual).
  4. Make a rough circle, then place the four candles in the four bowls at the four points: north, south, east and west. Pour a tiny bit of water into the bottom of the bowls.
  5. Cast the circle by lighting each of the candles at the four cardinal points and invoke the angel/guardian of each direction. When done face west, the direction of endings.
  6. Ground yourself, bringing attention to what you are about to do. Invite your highest self, teachers, guides, and angels to witness.
  7. Smudge the four directions, starting first with the east. Next, smudge Mother Earth, and make a tobacco offering. Smudge to Father Sky / God / Goddess
  8. Turn to face west. Hold your hands up and face the palms out. Take a deep breath and say: “At this time of endings and completions, I now release <insert list.>”
  9. When you are finished with your list you might also include war, hunger, pollution, ignorance, poverty, lack, and loss, fear, etc. for yourself and the entire world.
  10. Make a cornmeal offering to the Earth spirits and devas. Make a water offering to the water spirits and devas. Light your incense and make it an offering to the air spirits and devas.
  11. Finally, light your tea light. If it blows out after you light it, just put it down. It has been accepted by the fire beings. If it stays lit, make sure it is in a container that will not tip over or start a fire.
  12. Ground yourself again. Make sure you have included every area and everything you are ready, able, and willing to release from your life experience.
  13. Thank the angels, teachers, guides, devas, Mother Earth, and divine self for witnessing. Ask their help in releasing and clearing those vibrations from your life and your aura. Ask their assistance in keeping those things away from you re-taking them back.
  14. Bless yourself, Mother Earth, and your life. Release the circle by walking from the east counterclockwise one full circle and ending in the west.

Turn around, and do not look back. You can go out tomorrow to pick up the candleholders. Your magic is now set and working! Blessed Be! Love, Allie

 

Kristen Bala is the founder of the Deep End, an online community that supports spiritual learning and well-being. She enjoys writing about her many passions including astrology and holistic healing. To learn more about her work, visit www.findyourdeepend.com or contact her at kristenbala@gmail.com

 

Original article here

25 Oct 2021
Comments: 0

What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy

Much of modern economic theory is based around a simple idea: Human beings maximize utility. But what is utility? Many people think of it as happiness or pleasure; British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of utilitarianism, conceived of it this way. But this isn’t how modern economists think of the concept. To an economist, utility simply means how much people want something. If an economist observes people working hard and making sacrifices to buy houses, then the conclusion is that houses must have lots of utility to those people.

Modern economists tend to assume that utility is good — that people should get what they want. When economists talk about the notion of consumer surplus, they just mean the utility that consumers derive from getting a good deal on consumer goods. Welfare economics, which deals with the question of how much the economy benefits humanity, often conceives of social welfare as a function of the extent to which people satisfy their wants. More egalitarian economists will tend to value the utility of the poor and disadvantaged more than the utility of the wealthy, but fundamentally it’s still about giving people what they desire.

There are certainly reasons to criticize this philosophical approach. First of all, people sometimes make choices they come to regret. Smokers know they should quit now, but they put it off and years later end up wishing they had shown a little more fortitude. So should society care about people’s present selves, or their future selves? This question is very important when discussing whether to ban electronic cigarettes. If Juul Labs and other vape makers get young people hooked on nicotine in ways that they’ll later wish they hadn’t, it might make sense for government to bar those people from satisfying their wants.

But there are deeper reasons to question whether society should just feed human desires all the time. Bentham’s utilitarianism conceived of a good society as one that makes its people happy. But what if the things people desire don’t bring them happiness?

There’s no clear consensus on how to measure happiness. Some neuroscientists have tried to link it to various measures of brain activity. But economists tend to use a method that’s a lot cheaper and quicker — they send out surveys and questionnaires asking people how happy they are.

Happiness research has led to some surprising and troubling discoveries. People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy.

One of these things is Facebook, by far the world’s largest social-networking site. In a 2019 paper, economists Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow investigated how much money they had to pay Facebook users in order to get them to deactivate the Facebook app for one or two months. They found that the median amount was $100, and the average was $180 (the latter being larger because a few users really loved Facebook).

This suggests that Facebook, which is free to use, generates a huge amount of utility — more than $370 billion a year in consumer surplus in the U.S. alone. This bolsters the argument of those who believe that free digital services have added a lot of unmeasured output to the global economy.

But Allcott et al. also found that the people who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression and anxiety. The change was modest but significant — equal to about 25 to 40 percent of the beneficial effect typically reported for psychotherapy.

Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they’re compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness.

Another example of the disconnect between happiness and utility might be commuting time. Economists and other happiness researchers consistently find that longer commutes are associated with unhappiness. Yet people still pay quite a lot to live in far-flung exurbs. Economist Robert H. Frank has found that the larger houses that come with exurban life don’t compensate for the longer commute times in terms of happiness. House size and commute time aren’t the only factor in the choice of what neighborhood to live in, but this might be another case like Facebook where things that bring utility don’t bring happiness.

There may be a number of such cases. A paper by economists Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Alex Rees-Jones found that on surveys, people usually predict that the things they say they’d pay money for would also boost their happiness — but not always.

So what should society do about the disconnect between utility and happiness? The question raises the thorny issue of paternalism and whether it’s government’s role to push people to do things they don’t want to do, simply because they might be happier as a result. Basing policy on happiness surveys might also be a mistake if these surveys aren’t good measures of true happiness. Such surveys might reflect cultural expectations of what people think they ought to say, or people could gradually lose their ability to gauge how much happier or sadder they are now than they were in the past.

But it also unwise to simply dismiss the disconnect between happiness and utility simply because happiness is hard to measure. If people are consistently making mistakes that lead to a less happy society, it’s a problem that should be addressed. Bentham and the original utilitarians would demand no less.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Original article here

18 Oct 2021
Comments: 0

14 Colonial-Era Slang Terms to Work Into Modern Conversation

Hope you’re kedge and not gut-foundered, but if you are don’t get too macaroni, a simple snack and some Adam’s Ale should do the trick.

When you think of Colonial America, soldiers marching to fife and drum and Benjamin Franklin flying a kite are probably what come to mind. But the Colonial Period—which stretched from roughly 1607 to 1776, starting when America was just a group of colonies on the east side of the continent and ending with the Revolutionary War and the signing of the Declaration of Independence—was a fascinating but complicated time in which settlers from England forged a proud new identity. These new settlers brought the English language with them when they came, and whenever English finds a new home, it often takes on a new life. America was no exception. Here are 15 slang words that were recorded in and around this period of American history.

 

  • Kedge

What It Meant: Doing well

In you lived in a country town in Colonial-era New England and someone asked how you were doing, you might have replied, “I’m pretty kedge.” It’s a bizarre but wonderful term that essentially means in being in good health—but it also kind of sounds like something a teen in an ‘80s movie would say.

  • Cat’s-Paw, or to Be Made a Cat’s-Paw Out Of

What It Meant: To be a dupe, to be used as a tool.

This colorful expression came from a fable, The Monkey and the Cat, where a monkey persuades a cat to pull chestnuts out of a fire, promising the cat its share. Spoiler alert: The cat doesn’t get any. So to be used for someone else’s gain is to be made a “cat’s paw out of.”

  • Chuffy

What It Meant: Surly or impolite

If someone is short with you, tell them they don’t have to be so chuffy. It’s a strange, old word with obscure origins, and one that sounds a bit softer than “jerk.”

  • Scranch

What It Meant: To crack something between your teeth

Though this apparently “vulgar” term sounds like it was named after what it sounds like to crack something with your teeth, it supposedly comes from the Dutch word, schransen.

  • Gut-Foundered

What It Meant: Very Hungry

This word, which dates to 1647, is believed to be regional Newfoundland slang. Gut-foundered could easily become a new hyperbole for us pampered moderns to employ, like “starving.”

  • Fishy

What It Meant: Drunk

Possibly no one invented more ways to say “drunk” than colonial Americans. Benjamin Franklin alone compiled 200 ways to say it. Fishy was meant to also imply the way the drinker looked: “Bleary eyes and turned-down mouth corners make a drunk resemble a fish,” writes Richard M. Lederer, Jr. at American Heritage.

  • Macaroni

What It Meant: Fancy

When Yankee Doodle called that feather hat “macaroni,” he wasn’t being a weirdo. Macaroni was a term used at the time to refer to a particular men’s fashion from England that was intentionally flashy, over-the-top, and androgynous.

  • Twistical

What It Meant: Unfair or immoral

This word—which according to 1848’s Dictionary of Americanisms was primarily used in New England—feels like it could just as easily have been invented today. Slip it into conversation in the next time you experience something unjust.

  • Savvy, Savey, or Sabby

What It Meant: To know or understand

While we still use this word to mean something like “literate” (computer-savvy), in Colonial times, it was actually used more like the way Jack Sparrow uses it. So you might say, “I don’t want to come to work anymore, savvy that?” According to Merriam-Webster, it’s derived from sabe, which means “he knows” in Portuguese. This became sabi in Creole, and later, “savvy.”

  • Adam’s Ale

What It Meant: Water

If you’re feeling thirsty for water, try using this slang term that was popular on both sides of the pond in the Colonial era. To quote a 1792 American poem by Philip Freneau, “In reason’s scale his actions weigh’d / His spirits want no foreign aid / Long life is his, in vigour passes / A spring that never grew stale / Such virtue lies in Adam’s Ale.”

  • Shaver

What It Meant: A young or adolescent boy

To call a boy a shaver was to imply that they were young enough that they just started shaving. Which is fitting, if a little condescending—like they’re not embarrassed enough already!

  • Jollification

What It Meant: Celebration or merrymaking

It’s hard to even say jollification without sounding like a reenactor at Colonial Williamsburg. And though jollification sounds like it would be a good thing, it seems like there was also such a thing as too much jollification: The August 10, 1772 edition of The Pennsylvania Packet used the word in a morality tale about a man named Hilario: “What jolification [sic] could be complete without Hilario? Cards succeeded cards every morning to invite him to dinner, to routs, to dances; his only excuse was prior engagement, and he had not resolution to withstand the temptations.” By the end of the tale, according to Children In Colonial America, “a life of cards, women, and wanton spending slowly whittled away his wealth … no woman would marry him, and even his good looks had failed him.”

  • Simon Pure

What It Meant: The real deal, authentic, untainted

A delightful phrase that rolls off the tongue and could be dropped into many modern sentences. And when someone asks you, “who the heck is Simon?” you tell them that Simon Pure was a Quaker character who has to prove he’s the real Simon Pure in a 1718 play by Susanna Centlivre called A Bold Stroke for a Wife.

  • Circumbendibus

What It Meant: Roundabout

Of all the ways to describe something unnecessarily roundabout— like someone telling a rambling story or taking a weird road when driving somewhere—this word, which dates to 1681, might be the most delightful. It also shows how much we fun we had and still have with language, combining prefixes and suffixes to make new words.

 

Joe Gillard is the author of The Little Book of Lost Words, and the founder of History Hustle.

Original article here

15 Oct 2021
Comments: 0

How to Cope with An Existential Crisis

Has the world gone grey? Are you wondering what life is for? Kierkegaard’s philosophy could help you rediscover your zing.

by Skye C Cleary

Need to know

Are you exhausted from rushing through life doing the same monotonous things over and over again? Perhaps those things that were once meaningful now seem vacuous, and the passion has burned out. Do you feel that pleasures are short-lived and ultimately disappointing, that your life is a series of fragments punctuated with occasional ecstasies that flare up and then, like a firework, fade into darkness and despair? Perhaps you are lonely or pine for past loves. Or you feel empty and lost in the world, or nauseous and sleep-deprived. Maybe you are still looking for a reason to live, or you have too many confused reasons, or you have forgotten what your reasons are. Congratulations – you’re having an existential crisis. Sometimes, the questions ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What’s it all for?’ haunt you gently like a soft wingbeat with barely a whisper, but sometimes they can feel as if they are asphyxiating your entire being.

Whatever form your existential crisis takes, the problem, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) saw it, was that living without passion amounts to not existing at all. And that’s bad for all of us because, without passion, rampant waves of negativity poison the world. Kierkegaard thought that one of the roots of this problem of a world without passion is that too many people – his contemporaries but, by extension, we too – are alienated from a society that overemphasises objectivity and ‘results’ (profits, productivity, outcomes, efficiency) at the expense of personal, passionate, subjective human experiences.

In his journal, Kierkegaard wrote: ‘What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know … the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.’ Finding this truth, this passion, was what Kierkegaard thought could unite an existence, overcome melancholia, and help you to become more fulfilled. Kierkegaard had some ideas about how to harness the anguish of what we have come to think of as an existential crisis. Reading Kierkegaard won’t necessarily solve all problems, but it can help you understand some of the sources of your malaise and to see new possibilities for your life.

Sometimes, Kierkegaard is called the first existential philosopher because of his emphasis on the individual and subjective experience. Existential philosophers stress freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of your choices, and certainly one of the quintessential existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), found this vein of thinking in Kierkegaard’s writing. For existentialists, it’s up to you to decide the kind of person you want to be and how to live your life meaningfully. But these choices leaven despair because of the pressure that comes when you realise you’re free and responsible and have no one else to blame, no excuses for your behaviour. Anxiety, or despair, Kierkegaard wrote, is the ‘dizziness of freedom’. Despair is a kind of vertigo we get when overwhelmed with possibilities and choices. Kierkegaard described it as a similar feeling to standing on the edge of an abyss. You might be afraid of falling, but anxious when you realise that jumping is a possibility.

We are forced to make choices all the time, whether we like it or not. Consider toothpaste: there are so many types and it’s difficult to choose the one that’s best for your teeth. Whitening or stain-removal? Cavity protection, anti-plaque or enamel repair? What’s the difference? Why isn’t there one that does everything? It’s hard to know what the outcome of choosing one over the other will be. While choosing the wrong toothpaste probably won’t devastate your life, when you face more profound choices – such as what to study at college, whom to marry, whether to end a relationship, which career to pursue, whether to try to save someone who is drowning, if you should turn off a loved one’s life-support system – the closer you come to the edge of the abyss, the dizzier you will feel about your possibilities and responsibilities. Sometimes you live in ignorant bliss about your options but, once you become aware of them, wooziness is inevitable. As Kierkegaard wrote in The Concept of Anxiety(1844):

He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.

Sometimes, the dizziness of your freedom is so overwhelming that you might feel compelled to step back, to shrink from making a choice. Making no choice, or letting someone else choose for you, can feel easier. The greater the stakes, the deeper the abyss, and the further you have to fall if you misstep. But your personal growth depends on your ability to handle big choices yourself and not to shirk them. For Kierkegaard, bravely facing up to our choices and learning to channel our anxiety in constructive ways is vital: ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’

During his lifetime, Kierkegaard made authorities nervous because he was an iconoclast who encouraged people to think for themselves. He challenged readers to break themselves free from the brainwashing of churches and community groups that preached what to do and what to believe, particularly the Lutheran Church of Denmark, with which he was at loggerheads for much of his later life. Kierkegaard also might have been deeply suspicious of today’s social media and advertising that tells us where to spend our money and time in the elusive pursuit of happiness. In a criticism that seems to have pre-empted online trolls, he proposed that ‘the crowd’ or the public is ‘untruth’ because it enables people to be anonymous, irresponsible, cowardly, and creates an impersonal atmosphere.

Kierkegaard was a Christian, ‘albeit a maverick Christian’, as the philosopher Gary Cox put it, because Kierkegaard emboldened people to develop a personal relationship with God instead of unreflectively assuming what the clergy sermonised. For Kierkegaard, living the truth is infinitely more important than objectively knowing it. At Kierkegaard’s funeral, the archdeacon who gave the eulogy told the huge crowd not to misunderstand or accept what Kierkegaard had written because he went too far and didn’t know it.

But you don’t need to be religious to glean practical wisdom from Kierkegaard’s work. He inspired many atheist philosophers. Sartre, as I’ve mentioned, deeply admired Kierkegaard. He called him an ‘anti-philosopher’ because Kierkegaard sought ‘a first beginning’ by pushing back against boring and abstract philosophies, such as G W F Hegel’s and Immanuel Kant’s, which were very popular during Kierkegaard’s time.

Kierkegaard wrote in unconventional ways. He was witty and came up with quirky pseudonyms such as ‘Hilarius Bookbinder’. Kierkegaard wrote pseudonymously not because he wanted to hide his authorship – pretty much everyone knew which books he’d authored – but to distance himself from his work; to challenge us to question the ideas he presents; to take responsibility for interpreting the text’s meaning; to inspire us to come to our own conclusions; and to create our own subjective truths. The strategy is called ‘indirect communication’. The effect of Kierkegaard’s work is that, instead of dictating and moralising, he provokes – because you can’t tell if he’s being serious or not – and invites readers to dance with ideas.

Kierkegaard uses indirect communication in one of his most famous works, Either/Or (1843), a fictional collection of letters and essays written by different characters and presenting different points of view: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. These three views, or phases, provide a possible framework for how to endure and overcome an existential crisis. The phases are not rigid steps, but rather offer a scaffolding of possible experiences on an existential journey to reinvigorate our passion for life.

Think it through

Enjoy the aesthetic elements of your life

Kierkegaard suggested that the first mode of living is the aesthetic sphere. Aesthetic living is fun and impulsive, focused on sensual satisfaction, like a child who is discovering the world with awe and wonder. The aesthetic sphere is a beautiful phase of life, passionate and sparkling with possibilities. Consider the thrill of falling in love, the delight of seeing your all-time favourite musician live in concert, the elation of sharing a delicious bottle of wine or meal with a good friend, or the exhilaration of skinny-dipping on a whim. These experiences can be intoxicating, extraordinarily interesting, and make you feel like your life is transformed if you submit to them.

Don Giovanni – the protagonist of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787), a legendary seducer who is also sometimes known as Don Juan – is, Kierkegaard suggested, the ultimate archetype of the aesthetic mode because he lives for immediate sexual gratification and sensuality. Don Giovanni is a player. He is handsome, seductive and exciting. Women find him irresistible: he has slept with more than 2,000 women whose names he records in his not-so-little black book. Don Giovanni seeks pleasure above all else, and dances through his hedonistic life.

How can you live aesthetically? Make your life as interesting and enjoyable as possible. Fall in love a lot. Rotate crops – meaning that, if you’re bored with your life, don’t be afraid to leave behind what doesn’t serve you and start planting seeds for fresh projects and new relationships that energise you. Be impulsive. Live for and in the moment. Cultivate arbitrariness for the sheer pleasure of it: go to the theatre but watch only the middle of the performance; pick up a book and read a random passage. Enjoy experiences in disruptive ways, different than what others are spoon-feeding you. Practise the art of remembering the joys of your past. Practise the art of forgetting unpleasantness by focusing on the silver linings of your misfortunes. Burn the candle of your life at both ends.

Make existential commitments to live ethically

However, an aesthete’s actions can be self-sabotaging, because, as Kierkegaard pseudonymously writes:

As when one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths, that is how Don Giovanni dances over the abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.

Don Giovanni gets his comeuppance in the end when a ghost in the form of a statue of the Commendatore, the father of one of his conquests and a man whom Don Giovanni has killed in a fight, drags him down to hell. You might not be dragged to hell by a ghost, but living purely in the aesthetic mode – though it might offer temporary respite – puts you on the fast track to a further existential crisis.

Why is this? The answer is that the aesthetic lifestyle demands a high price. Aesthetic living can be a source of existential despair when you become overly dependent on its distractions to fill the voids in your life. The aesthetic mode is dangerous when you live in a state of immediacy and instant gratification, constantly overindulging in such pleasures as social media scrolling, shopping, television, busyness, alcohol, drugs, serial romancing or casual sex. At a certain point, these activities cease to offer the enjoyment they promise, and the world turns grey.

Wallowing in such distractions only entrenches your alienation more deeply and pushes you more squarely into dungeons of unhappiness. As soon as you’ve satisfied one pleasure, you’re chasing the dragon of newness for the next high. Sometimes you’re so excited about taking risks on new possibilities, so in love with starting new projects and relationships, that you’re constantly flitting from one to the next, never finishing anything. Constantly on the move, you are like an ocean wave, surging powerfully, cyclically, with raw primal energy.

But waves froth and fizzle away indefinitely. If you’re constantly and busily churning through life, your existence amounts to a sum of moments without any real cohesion. Excitement fades and leaves in its wake disappointment and loneliness. The aesthete in Either/Or is envious of insects that die after copulation because they are able to indulge in the pinnacle of sexual ecstasy and then escape life’s greatest anticlimax – the ‘petite mort’ becomes a real one. An aesthetic life will inevitably leave you morbidly tired.

Kierkegaard’s aesthete is plagued with such soul-crushing tedium and torturous despair that he is numb. Because he isn’t truly engaged in life, he lives as if he were dead. Living void of passion makes him feel both chained by his anxieties and also cast adrift, like a spider plunging and flailing around, unable to grasp hold of anything:

What is to come? What does the future hold? I don’t know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.

So if living aesthetically can only be a short-term solution to an existential crisis, how can you go beyond that and live ethically? Stop skimming over life like that stone. Slow down and do what you can to carve out pockets of time for reflection. Cultivate the space to become less robotic. And stop using aesthetic activities as a distraction from facing up to your existential despair.

‘Despair!’ Kierkegaard’s pseudonym writes. Despair is the entry price for transitioning from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere. Learning to love despair is an adventure in moving to a higher mode of self-development. Don’t hide from your existential crisis because choosing despair means choosing yourself. To cosy up to your despair is to choose against being beholden to your animalistic, aesthetic impulses, and towards becoming a definite and solidly grounded individual. Choosing yourself means making meaningful commitments, such as dedicating yourself to a vocation. It means setting goals and sticking to them. Dodging commitment means you’re simply hovering over life, not truly living, and as empty of substance as those waves.

To choose despair also means to choose humanity. In the ethical mode, you recognise that you live in a world with other people, that they matter, and that every choice you make must reflect a responsibility towards them. You act with honesty, open-heartedness, understanding and generosity. You focus more on what you can give to others and less on what you’re getting out of them. To cultivate your humanity, go people-watching for an hour and consider the beauty in each individual. Appreciate every person you meet in their particularity – their tasks, challenges and triumphs. Join a club and build a community of friends. Act more charitably. Help people. Commit to making the world better for others.

Choosing this kind of despair also prepares you for marriage in a way that a life of seeking sensual gratification is unlikely to. Getting married – ideally to your first love, in Kierkegaard’s analysis – reflects an ethical decision because marriage is a serious, definitive and life-changing choice. Marriage calls for a more sophisticated awareness of your existence than a life driven purely by sexual instincts. Sure, you can always get divorced, but Kierkegaard’s ethicist suggests getting married helps people take love more seriously than an aesthete would, by focusing on creating a relationship that’s stable and constant. In the ethical sphere, you actively rejuvenate the love with your partner, instead of skipping to the next relationship for thrills and a confidence boost as soon as your first one gets tough.

Face your existential abyss bravely because, Kierkegaard suggested: ‘Anxiety is the organ through which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it,’ and ‘indeed I would say that it is only when the individual has the tragic that he becomes happy.’ The key to the ethical sphere is to use your despair to galvanise you to overcome your sorry dark states, refresh your enthusiasm for living, and arouse your appetite for something more meaningful in your life. You develop yourself by being patient with existence, seeing the beauty in stability, and recognising that you are your own source of happiness and creativity. You don’t need to seek excitement constantly from new external stimuli as the aesthete does. You don’t need a dance floor to dance, to enjoy life; your dance floor is inside of you, wherever you are. You nurture the ethical attitude by living intentionally (not accidentally, like the aesthete), and living each day as if it were your Judgment Day.

Leap to faith

The ethical mode can help stabilise you, but it might not be enough to resolve your existential crisis. Living ethically might even be another source of existential calamity because fulfilling your social duties can be onerous. Kierkegaard’s ethicist says of the duty of marriage: ‘Its uniformity, its total uneventfulness, its incessant vacuity, which is death and worse than death.’ Marriage doesn’t make love stay. People change and break promises, making any commitment insecure. Given how many other people are unjust and immoral, being ethical might also throw you deeper into despair. And sinking too heavily into reflection can thwart your enjoyment of life. Philosophers tend to be guilty of overthinking, and Kierkegaard’s aesthete quips: ‘What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.’

The only way truly to conquer an existential crisis is with a leap. A leap is what Kierkegaard calls an ‘inward deepening’, which recognises that the world is uncertain, but you can make a bold choice about the kind of life you want to lead. A leap is beyond the realm of feelings (aesthetic sphere) and commitments (ethical sphere). A leap is an act of will to transform your life. It’s the decision to design an existence to which you can enthusiastically devote yourself and that will uplift and sustain your being.

Kierkegaard’s leap was guided by the commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’. In Works of Love(1847), written under Kierkegaard’s real name, he proposes that universal love, or agapē, is the secret to happiness because it overcomes the fleetingness and insecurity of aesthetic and ethical relationships. Love is Ariadne’s thread of life because, as long as you love, as long as you commit yourself to being a loving person, you’ll be safe from being hurt and alone. Kierkegaard thought that this sort of unwavering faith reflects a supremely developed human being.

Perhaps you live in the aesthetic or ethical modes of life, and you’re perfectly happy and see no need to leap. Or perhaps you inhabit these realms and find comfort in your melancholy. But the rub with existential despair is that, once you have caught a glimpse of it, intentionally or not, it’s extraordinarily difficult to unsee it. If that’s you, Kierkegaard’s ideas might be a way to help you find your footing. But the only thing that will alleviate an existential crisis is to find the truth that is true for you, the subjective truth, the propulsion to leap that lies in the innermost depths of your heart. If you’re not sure what your subjective truth is, Kierkegaard suggested: ‘Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer.’

Ultimately, though, a passionately lived life isn’t about an either/or choice. You can’t be all frivolous or all serious all the time. A fulfilling life is about enjoyment and ethical commitment and leaping. Your life needs some of the sort of energy, pleasures and possibilities that Don Giovanni’s life exhibits (though not necessarily indulging these in the ways he does), otherwise the world would be very dull. And the world is boring without him. You also need something of the ethical: you need to acknowledge how your choices affect other people and to take responsibility for your actions, otherwise you’ll end up alone and sad. You also need a leap to find that thing that you can devote yourself to that unites the splinters of your life, even if, for you, that isn’t a leap into religious faith. The point is to see these different dimensions of life, the ruts you might be falling into, the potential sources of ennui and malaise that stem from the way you live your life. But, ultimately, it’s up to you to choose how you juggle these spheres and how you spark your own fire to bind the fragments of your life together into a coherent synthesis. That’s the point. It’s for you to shape your life.

Key points – How to cope with an existential crisis

  • Living in the moment can be fun for a while but can also be a source of existential despair if it becomes a distraction from reflecting on our lives.
  • Avoiding existential despair doesn’t bring happiness.
  • Overcoming an existential crisis calls for bravely facing up to our melancholy, looking at its roots, and using that understanding as a platform to build stability.
  • Slowing down, cutting back on busyness, and cultivating idleness or novel perspectives on the world are vital steps in creating space for inward reflection.
  • Existential despair can be a force for good when we galvanise it to overcome our sorry dark states, refresh our enthusiasm for living, and arouse our appetite for a more meaningful life.
  • A fulfilling life calls for playful enjoyment, ethical engagement and a leap to something that can fuse together the fragments of our existences.

Why it matters

One of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms writes: ‘For a book has the remarkable property that it can be interpreted any way you wish.’ You might very well interpret Kierkegaard differently, and that’s what he wanted. Maybe. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym also suggests that, whether you do something or you don’t do something, you’ll regret it either way. So read Kierkegaard or don’t read him. Perhaps you will regret both, but perhaps you’ll also find a path towards edification.

It’s worth remembering, though, that not even Kierkegaard followed this advice completely. He never married, for example. He broke off an engagement with Regine Olsen, who was devastated. Kierkegaard was melancholy and didn’t know how to love her and God at the same time. He said he felt ‘a divine protest’. Instead of being an adult and trying to explain his feelings to Olsen, Kierkegaard thought it would be better if she hated him. So he told her he was breaking off the engagement in order to sow his wild oats. He said, condescendingly, that he was awful to her for her sake, although it seems he thought this was the easier option for him.

Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or shortly after the breakup, and the book included a fictionalised account of the relationship. He portrayed the incident in the section known as ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ in terms of a psychopathic sexual predator conniving to seduce a beautiful and innocent young woman. Olsen went on to marry someone else, and Kierkegaard obsessed over her for the rest of his life. Only later did he realise, after all his thinking and writing about existential crises, how he might have reconciled his aesthetic, ethical and religious lifestyles with Olsen. Kierkegaard saw himself as a philosophical midwife, like the goddess Diana, who could guide people to give birth to more fulfilled versions of themselves. Let us let Kierkegaard’s wisdom inspire us on our own journeys.

Kierkegaard’s journey was a definitive leap to religion. He went into great depth about different modes of religiousness in works such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and Sickness unto Death (1849). Kierkegaard worried that atheists won’t know if they’re right until it’s too late, but other existential philosophers made very different leaps. For example, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) leapt into writing literature and political advocacy.

How do we figure out where we might leap to? One tool that Kierkegaard hinted towards, for seeking possible leaps, is poetry. Music vanishes in time, painting is static in time, but poetry, Kierkegaard thought, is a higher artform because it exists both in the moment and beyond the moment. It exists spontaneously when you read and write it, and it exists across time because you can return to it and develop it. The most important role of poetry is that it can remind you to be both the composer and the composition of your life.

Poetry can be a tool to help you to stop and reflect on your being, to sit with unhappiness, to process existential dread. Poetry can act as a conduit of aesthetic beauty, preserving flavours and textures of love and frivolity in language. Poetry can teach you to be patient with your life, and to create an internal history for yourself. Your history is part of who you are but doesn’t determine who you are becoming. Poetry can help you to not forget your misfortunes (or to remember their silver lining) like the aesthete would, and to come to terms with your past. Poetry can also help you to explore possibilities for your leap, by encouraging you to turn inwards to clarify that thing that can unite your existence in a genuinely passionate upsurge of being.

 

Original article here

 

 

06 Oct 2021
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Japan’s Unusual Way To View The World

Withdrawing my hands reluctantly from the slowly spinning bowl, I watched its uneven sides slowly come to a stop, wishing I could straighten them out just a little more. I was in the ancient pottery town of Hagi in rural Yamaguchi, Japan, and while I trusted the potter who convinced me to let it be, I can’t say I understood his motives.

Smiling, he announced, “it has wabi-sabi” – and whisked the bowl away for firing. I sat, contemplating the lack of symmetry and wondering what on Earth he meant.

As it turns out, failing to understand this phrase is not unusual. A key part of the Japanese Aesthetic – the ancient ideals that still govern the norms on taste and beauty in Japan – wabi-sabi is not only untranslatable, but also considered undefinable in Japanese culture. Often muttered in moments of profound appreciation, and almost always followed by the word muri! (impossible!) when asked to expand, the phrase offers an unusual way to view the world.

Originating in Taoism during China’s Song dynasty (960-1279) before being passed onto Zen Buddhism, wabi-sabi was originally seen as an austere, restrained form of appreciation. Today it encapsulates a more relaxed acceptance of transience, nature and melancholy, favouring the imperfect and incomplete in everything, from architecture to pottery to flower arranging.

Wabi, which roughly means ‘the elegant beauty of humble simplicity’, and sabi, which means ‘the passing of time and subsequent deterioration’, were combined to form a sense unique to Japan and pivotal to Japanese culture. But just as Buddhist monks believed that words were the enemy of understanding, this description can only scratch the surface of the topic.

Prof Tanehisa Otabe, professor at Tokyo University’s Institute of Aesthetics, suggests that the ancient art of wabi-cha, a style of tea ceremony established by tea masters Murata Juko and Sen no Rikyu from the late 15th to 16th Centuries forms a good introduction to wabi-sabi. By choosing common Japanese pottery over the popular (and technically perfect) imported Chinese examples, the men challenged the rules of beauty. Without bright colours and ornate designs to rely on as signifiers of accepted beauty, guests were encouraged to study subtle colours and textures that would previously have been overlooked.

As to why they sought imperfect, rustic pieces, Prof Otabe explained that, “wabi-sabi leaves something unfinished or incomplete for the play of imagination”. This opportunity to actively engage with something considered to be wabi-sabi achieves three things: an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of the piece; an acceptance of the power of nature; and an abandonment of dualism – the belief that we are separate from our surroundings.

Combined, these experiences allow the viewer to see themselves as part of the natural world, no longer separated by societal constructs and instead at the mercy of natural timelines. Rather than seeing dents or uneven shapes as mistakes, they are viewed as a creation of nature – much as moss would grow on an uneven wall or a tree would curve in the wind.

“The aesthetics of wabi-sabi opened our eyes to everyday life and gave us a method of handling what is common in an uncommon, aesthetic way,” Prof Otabe said, highlighting the importance of acceptance in Japanese culture, a society forced to contend with devastating natural disasters on a semi-regular basis. Rather than casting nature solely as a dangerous and destructive force, it helps frame it as a source of beauty, to be appreciated on the smallest of levels. It becomes a provider of colours, designs and patterns, a source of inspiration, and a force to work alongside, rather than against.

It is the inevitable mortality embound in nature, however, that is key to a true understanding of wabi-sabi. As author Andrew Juniper notes in his book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, “It… uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent”. Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, but in understanding their context as transient items that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become profound.

This idea brought to mind a story a Japanese colleague told me when we discussed wabi-sabi. Visiting Kyoto as a teenager, she had hurried through the grounds of Ginkakuji, a wooden Zen temple with quiet gardens, eager to see the more famous Kinkakuji, an ornate temple covered in gold leaf and perched above a reflective pond. Bright, stunning and glamorous, it lived up to her expectations, a far more impressive beauty than its traditional sister temple.

A few decades later, however, she returned to find the gold garish and, while it was certainly eye-catching, there was little beyond the immediate gratification of the gold leaf. Ginkakuji, however, offered a new fascination: the aged wood held countless hues and patterns, while the Zen moss and dry sand gardens offered a frame for nature’s many shapes. Unable to appreciate these things as a child, she had grown to see the ravages of time as a deeper source of beauty, far greater than a two-dimensional flash of gold.

Intrigued by the personal element of this appreciation, I contacted artist Kazunori Hamana, whose unique pieces are often considered to have an element of wabi-sabi. As we walked through the grounds of his tumbledown farmhouse in the rural idyll of Izumi in Chiba prefecture, he agreed with the need for age.

“You have different feelings when you’re young – everything new is good, but you start to see history develop like a story. After you’ve grown up, you see so many stories, from your family to nature: everything growing and dying and you understand the concept more than you did as a child.”

This appreciation for the marks of time is a key feature in Hamana’s works, which he chooses to display in derelict Japanese farmhouses. Explaining that the wooden doorframes have been blackened by years of smoke from the irori (an indoor hearth) and pointing out how the mud walls have started crumbling, he says he feels the history of the houses lend a fitting backdrop to his pieces, avoiding the cold duality of impersonal white gallery spaces.

Creating sculptures with natural clay from Shiga, an area with a reputation for high-quality clay and a long history of pottery making, Hamana embraces the important wabi-sabi concept of mutual creation between man and nature.

“I design a little at first, but clay is a natural thing, so it changes. I don’t want to fight with nature so I follow the shape, I accept it,” he said.

Not only does he allow nature to aid in the shaping of his pieces, but in their later appearance too. In an overgrown bamboo forest in the farmhouse grounds, he showed me the pieces he’d chosen to leave outside, buried in the undergrowth for years at a time. There they’ve developed unique patterns from extreme temperatures and surrounding plant life, as well as being occasionally broken. Studying them closely, I found that this simply added to the beauty of each piece, with the cracks offering another opportunity to add to the story.

Often associated with wabi-sabi is the art of kintsugi – a method of repairing broken pottery using gold or lacquer. The process highlights, rather than conceals, the cracks, allowing them to become a part of the piece, too. When his daughter accidentally broke some of his work, Hamana said, laughing, he decided to leave the pieces outside for a few years, allowing them to be coloured and shaped by nature. When it was repaired by a local kintsugi specialist, the different colours created a contrast so subtle, so uneven, that could never have been intentionally created. Embracing the effects of nature and allowing family history to be visible in a piece creates a unique value for something which would, in many cultures, simply be discarded as worthless. 

In fact, the term ‘perfect’, which stems from the Latin perfectus, meaning complete, has been placed on an undeserved pedestal in many cultures, especially the West. Prioritising flawlessness and infallibility, the ideal of perfection creates not only unachievable standards, but misguided ones. In Taoism, since no further growth or development can take place, perfection is considered equivalent to death. While we strive to create perfect things and then struggle to preserve them, we deny their very purpose and subsequently lose the joys of change and growth.

Although seemingly abstract, this appreciation of transient beauty can be found at the heart of some of Japan’s most simple pleasures. Hanami, the annual celebration of cherry blossoms, involves parties and picnics, boat rides and festivals, all beneath the often already-falling petals, considered as beautiful in their haphazard patterns on the floor as they are on the branches. The pure acceptance of a fleeting beauty that would garner no more than a few photos in the West is something of an inspiration. While the appreciation may be tinged with melancholy, its only lesson is to enjoy the moments as they come, without expectations.

The dents and scratches we bear are all reminders of experience, and to erase them would be to ignore the complexities of life. By retaining the imperfect, repairing the broken and learning to find beauty in flaws – rather than in spite of them – Japan’s ability to cope with the natural disasters it so often faces is strengthened. When my bowl from Hagi arrived in the post months later, its uneven edges were no longer a defect, but instead a welcome reminder that life is not perfect, and nor should I try to make it so.

 

Original story here.

28 Sep 2021
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Moving from potential to possibilities … Becoming a limitless creator

I’ve been studying, teaching, coaching and writing about transformation for the last 35 years. It fascinates me … always has, even as teenager. How can someone fulfill their potential and become the best of themselves in life?

Potential is that part of you that’s sort of already there with you, just not popping and shining in you yet. In other words, you’re born with it and then you get to live into it.

I spent years working with potential, in myself and in others. I tried the corporate ladder and followed the rules of success. I got exhausted and frustrated and finally left all that to follow a different route. On that different pathway I discovered that there is so much more than potential available to us all. That actually one of the easiest routes to fulfilling your potential is to move onto the playground of limitless possibilities.

Possibility is what isn’t yet, perhaps has never been before. It’s new and fresh. Here you play with limitless creation to innovate who and what we can become, as individuals and as a world.

Now I know for some reading this you might go ‘Oh for gosh sakes, that’s too out there for me.’ While others will be shouting hurray and diving in to read on. So let me put it into simple terms to show you how this move from potential to possibilities can show up in your life.

I’m a coach, a trainer, an author … things that are the fulfillment of my potential as a human being. I’m pretty happy with how my life has gone so far. But me as limitless possibility, well that’s a whole other ball game.

As I entered the possibility playground, I discovered the flow of genius through me. I became a consciousness innovator and a future creator. I truly doubt that that was in me when I was born. I began to morph who I know myself as. No longer this, that or the other, I discovered that I could be anything I wanted to be. I began to create myself as opposed to being stuck with who I was born as. I no longer occurred in my world as my mother’s daughter, with definitive genetics and family history to shape me. I no longer strived to become more successful in life. I began to flow, to create, to fall wildly in love with the possibilities of me, us and this beautiful world. I went bigger in terms of visions and creations. I allowed myself to do things I never thought I would or could.

I leapt beyond all the boxes that contain what it is to be a human being. The concept that we are of mind, body and soul to discover myself as a limitless creator of all that I might become. I discovered I could talk to animals, trees, oceans and the Earth. The universe and I became great buddies, filling me with new insights and understandings as well as providing things like synergistic connections and brilliant opportunities at just the right time.

I finally realised joy in my life and began to play with effortless abundance. I laugh a lot now and am breathtaken by the beauty of this world and the people and life forms in it. I am undefinable, ever morphing into the next new levels of what is possible for me and for us all. As I do this I realise that I am part of the redesign of what it is is to be human on Earth. I call us Earthians as a new way to talk about loving being alive on Earth while being an infinite creator of possibilities for life. The term Earthian also allows me to feel a kinship with other life forms on Earth, whereas the term human tends, in my view, to make us feel separate from other inhabitants of this wonderful world.
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Today I get to hang out with the most wonderful of creators across all areas of life. Not just writers and artists, musicians and dancers, but inventors of new possibilities and innovators of how technology can benefit our world. Because once you access the state of limitless creation, once you understand how genius flows and innovation works, you want to do things that uplift, elevate and empower the world to be more awesome by the day.
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While some might think that too daunting a task to undertake, the opposite is actually true. The more you dwell in possibility and creation, the more excited you become about the future of our world and your part in making a world of kindness, generosity, connection and of course limitless creation. The whole thing is a giant paradox you see. Letting go of a defined self, surrendering to a genius universe, making a greater difference in life … these are the things that vitalise us, that bring us alive, that make us smile and rush into our days with excitement for the possibility of who and what we might become all together now on this amazing planet.

 

About the Author:

 

Soleira Green is passionate about innovating a new future now, bringing genius, connection, greatness and the miraculous into the game for us all.