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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.

 

 

07 Nov 2021
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The 11:11 Gateway

by Gillian Macbeth Louthan

 

To me the Season of Light begins as November comes out of her multicolored cocoon, stretching her wings of light to become the beautiful season of Love. As the Light begins her descent upon the planet Earth we enter the true Season of Love. A season born of Timeless Miracles, myths and Magic, a season of Light that seeks to be embraced in the hearts of all humans. It asks humans to stop making excuses as to why one does not celebrate what is Holy, what is good, what is a Gift. Life has become virtually gridded creating a separation far from the One Heart. Too many reasons not to love or not to give, not to believe. This season of Light is thick with promises, filled with free-formed miracles. Miracles that take form and actively seek vessels to gift.

The number 11:11 was issued to earth in 1992 as a ‘Beginning Light’ activation. It is a doorway, a gateway into your greatest potential as a human. This activation number asks you to seek divine memory. The ‘One’ seeks itself through a mirror reflection. This 11:11 doorway offers an opportunity to surpass all limitations you have unknowingly set for yourself and others, to clear the slates of your heart and soul. One to one to one… we enter the Oneness we all share in common.

11:11 descends upon the Earth like the spirit of a dove that lands softly in the hearts of mankind. As the 11:11 energies are birthed let them purge you of what has been solidified and blocked. All of heaven known and unknown enters through this Gateway. Align with all you know to be love. A flooding of the heart allows you to rise above previous emotional tide lines removing the barnacles of the past. Holiness goes beyond religion and sacred teachings. It lives deep in the bones of every human on earth for it is through the very breathe of Holiness that earth is alive. Humanity has virtually lost part of their heart. It is easier to touch an emoji than to touch the wounded hearts of others. Like a training pigeon they swipe through the air with the greatest of ease hoping their heart filled characters will land in the cloud somewhere.

11:11 is a powerful number initiation sequence. It signals to the light-sequence within, that it is time to wake up and smell the cold brew coffee. Each time that you see 11:11 on a clock, a license plate or a grocery receipt you are being given an opportunity to walk into a ‘Gateway of Instant Manifestation.’ The universe has just taken a snapshot of your thoughts, which are manifesting into the physical realm per your thoughts. Every time I see 11:11 in any form I stop instantly and align with the light and the thought that needs to be birthed. Eleven-eleven is the number of Light Masters. It is an encoded light structure of Remembrance.

Life and day-light shortens itself like a dog on a lead, as the 24 hours of Earth time now shifts into a denser mode demanding more than before. Many possibilities come, invisible of nature, camouflaged like a hunter in the fall leaves. The heart demands complete opening in this powerful season of light. The Christ heart within humanity awakens with a holy dialogue. The light that comes is thick like a mist that actually has a shadow. This shadow dance comes to teach and redefine its light. This living 11:11 light comes to soften our shadow edges, sculpting and honing us, polishing us, asking us to shine brighter and more often. This Holy season asks you to stand up for light, to escort miracles down your street, to have lunch with the angels.

11:11 Gateway — Enter the Chamber of the Christ Light

In 1997 when we were still wild and woolly, I took a group of very powerful individuals to Egypt. It was a trip that broke all the preconceived rules of what Egypt was supposed to be, as a culture and spiritually. 24 years later those 26 people are still scratching their bald and solver head trying to figure out what actually happened to them in those lost 17 days in Egypt. After being held by the Egyptian government in Dendara Egypt We barely made our flight back to Cairo to get to the Great Pyramid by 11:11 at night to do ceremony. Our mission of light as a group of 26 was to go to the great pyramid bringing ‘our all-knowing light’ to this Great Pyramidal Light of Oz that needed our mere mortal essence to save the world (or so we thought) before the year 2000, which was a tipping point.

It was powerful beyond time to enter that great living pulsing stony timeless being of light. It was vast beyond my understanding, as it seemed to extend beyond the sky into the stars that night. As I stood in the entrance to the great pyramid giving thanks for being there I learned more in that 1 minute passing through the entrance of the great Pyramid then I had accumulated in my entire life. Everything was shown to me in an instant like a life review and then the slate was cleared empty, awaiting being filled again. I entered the Great Pyramid as pure as a Virgin stripped of everything she once knew herself to be. The empty chalice of me at that moment in timelessness was ready to fill with the gifts of the great pyramid, which were beyond my ability to fully consume.

Light markings within the Great Pyramid showed themselves as the red granite continued to alter us, allowing doorways that appeared silent and invisible to open. We saw the many lives of the Great Pyramid as she lifted her veil of secrecy. We all saw within the great Pyramid a vast hidden room of light, secreted in plain sight. This room was referred to as the ‘Christ Chamber’ by the energies that escorted us there. It was many years later that the actual Christ chamber itself was discovered but not entered. It is this place, the invisible place the sealed place within each of our own Pyramid of light that awakens as the vibration of 11:11 begins the holy healing matrix.

After that night everything in Cairo changed it rained and the Sphinx cried for the first time in years, the locals knew it was an omen of something to come. As soon as we left Egypt the Great Pyramid was shut down for over a year. They kicked the camel police off the Giza plateau and the lost boys had to find new tourists to charm. The Egyptian government had there own reasons for shutting everything down, but no one is talking or telling. The reason I bring this up now at this 11:11 gateway is that starting November 11th, Great Planetary Light activation will transpire in the Great Pyramid, within the unseen Christ Chamber of Light. This inner planetary healing light that comes from the heart of Mother Earth moves upward and outward thru the Christ chamber within the great Pyramid and activates the most High Heart of humanity.

11:11 and the Master Numbers

In 1992 the number 11:11 was issued to humanity as a trigger number. That powerful numerical vibration escorted us as a planet safely into a new place of Higher Light. The numerical signature of 11:11 still follows us to very this day. 11:11 is a doorway a gateway an old friend in the form of a star-portal. The ‘oneness’ seeks itself through a mirror like reflection of the world around it. This doorway offers an opportunity to surpass any limitations you have unknowingly set for yourself. One to one to one, enter the light that lives in the center point of your soul.

Everything on earth is defined by a numerical configuration. All life can be reduced and explained by numbers. The currents of these numerical sequences bring into alignment a series of new considerations that will help earth to adjust and balance. Each numerical infusion is tailored to fit the needs of each human. As the brain adjusts to these new energies a lifting occurs allowing the individual to exit the human/animal ratio and be lifted into the human/light equation. Numbers and humans go hand in hand. From the beginning of time known we have been defined by a numerical equation whether age, birth date, weight, or the number of wives and camels we have. Numbers have always seemed to be our not so silent partners.

MASTER NUMBERS accentuate the meanings of single digits (111,222,333 etc.).

When a number shows itself in double and triple digits they are then considered to be a numerical oracle.

00, 000, or 0000

This is the ‘The Great Void’, the unknown what is yet to be, that which has not been birthed; that which holds all possibility. This numerical pre-configuration as you to move thought into a higher dimensional fluidity. This is the portal of Creation before Creation. A reminder you are always one with the universe. Feel yourself within the center embraced by the Creator as you are held and loved unconditionally. Walk around the inner circle of self-completing what needs to be completed.

11, 111, or 11:11

This is ‘The Gateway to All’ that is riding within a hair of instantaneous manifestation. This master number asks you to let go of man-made expectations and manifestation and move your creational thoughts up the ladder of light. Doorways open, doorways close, and you are in-between all dimensional shift. This is conscious creation with 11-second intervals of thought; holding your thought long enough for the Universe to take a snapshot of it, escorting it into manifestation.

22,222, or 22:22

This is an important numerical vibration coming up for earth. 222 is the highest number of manifesting without the frustration. All words thought deeds and intentions will take seed within this number with or without rain to help them grow. This number asks you to acknowledge your soul light in all of its forms. It asks you to move out of the neighborhood of polarity. This vibration shows one Time moves forward with or without them. This powerful creation sequence tells you ‘Do not create by default.’ Do something, anything, have a say so in your life. Keep a holding pattern with your resolve, know and trust what you have planted by your words, deeds and actions. Trust they will heal and bloom in accordance with the heavenly seasons.

33,333 or 33:33

This powerful number offers you a choice. The holy trinity is activated within the tetrahedron (3 sided pyramid) in your early DNA structure. This number offers an opportunity to connect with highly evolved spiritual beings/ masters/Angels. The trinity is the holiness within all of your choices. It is Your body, mind, spirit in agreement with your Soul’s evolution. Within 333 you are not allowed to straddle the razor blade fence of indecision. This number asks you to stand in your soul light without fear of falling, Allowing you to see the sacredness in all of your choices no matter what the outcome. Three is the holy trinity of heaven and soul.

44,444 or 44:44

Four is such an earthy number, strong and balanced, it fortifies what needs reinforced. To me it is a masonic number decreeing a foundation of light is being cemented for you. With this vibration new opportunity comes without being asked. It allows you to Build your future thought by thought, brick by brick. Do not allow those of too much wind to blow down your dreams with their negativity. Believe deeply until you see the proof. Hold on through all choices and deviations. Stay balanced in what you know to be divine truth and the platform of light will solidify.

55, 555, 55:55

This numerical powerhouse is all about humanity and how it interacts. This vibration is about movement and adjustment. The universe that is driving this big ole cosmic wheel is making changes for your betterment whether you ask for them or not. The heavens are changing your course with love. This change may be an answer to some long forgotten prayer. The future is hidden for a reason Allow the currents to take you into a new future full of possibilities created just for you.

66,666 or 66:66

The vibration of 6 has changed into a vibration that is fully aligned with the heart healing of the earth. For too long now humanity has been branded with the thought that anything associated with the number six is negative, dark, dense and inner earth. Look at the beauty on this magical planet. Look all that she has given you since you were born. The number 6 is asking you to come back to the original seed and blueprint of light and life with a reverence. There is a beautiful holiness to the number six as its extension asks you to move your awareness upward in a grand sweep of expression. By aligning with the true beauty and healing of the number six you will find a softness and coherence in your special time on earth.

77, 777 or 77:77

This unassuming number asks you to take a high dive into your life. This is the vibration of the spiritual warrior. One who walks a narrow path within self and soul. Seven works for the light, by the light and with the light. Their vows are laced in time. Sevens eat drink think and speak what is deemed holy within the cosmos. They embrace the spirituals aspect of everything. Sevens are not permitted to stray outside the boundaries of light for more than a fleeting thought. They know all about cosmic 2 X 4’s, having learned the hard way. Seven escorts your awareness into a place where miracles are an every minute event. The Seven energy is a place where wonder, magic and miracles live. Seven is your natural state of being.

88, 888 or 88:88

The vibration of this energy takes you places you didn’t even know you wanted to go. It is made of continual cosmic movement, ‘As above so below. This configuration gives to you the infinity portal escorting you past all pervious perceptions. It asks you to fly to the moon and stop by the Milky Way on your way back. It is pure spiritual atomic energy, an atomic power source. This energy gives to you well earned prosperity with the added flavor of universal blessings. Eight is a Star-gate a place of intersection and crossing. Like two starry lovers meeting in the center of time.

99, 999 or 99:99

This energy displays Cosmic and personal completion, the end of one experience the being of another. Entering the next level of love of heart, of soul and service to the planetary evolution through healing self, a place of vast opportunity; Free-falling from the height of the nine into a new dimensional understanding. Enter and exit all in the same breath. A substantial leap into the unknown. Are you ready to see and be more than you are at this minute of time? Nine is the photo finish on the heavenly track of multiple choices. If you believe you have won, you have.

 

About the Author:

Gillian Macbeth Louthan is a Visionary, a Seer, born with the gift of knowing. She is a clairvoyant psychic with advanced channeling abilities since an early age. She has been a Metaphysical Teacher, Messenger and world known Trance-Channel, for over 40 years She works with the Councils of Light, Mary Magdalene, Merlin, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Mother Mary, the Pleiadians and many other energies of the Christ Light.

Original post, here

 

 

 

 

 

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
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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

15 Oct 2021
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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

 

 

09 Oct 2021
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Our Brains Tell Stories So We Can Live

We are all storytellers; we make sense out of the world by telling stories. And science is a great source of stories. Not so, you might argue. Science is an objective collection and interpretation of data. I completely agree. At the level of the study of purely physical phenomena, science is the only reliable method for establishing the facts of the world.

But when we use data of the physical world to explain phenomena that cannot be reduced to physical facts, or when we extend incomplete data to draw general conclusions, we are telling stories. Knowing the atomic weight of carbon and oxygen cannot tell us what life is. There are no naked facts that completely explain why animals sacrifice themselves for the good of their kin, why we fall in love, the meaning and purpose of existence, or why we kill each other.

Science is not at fault. On the contrary, science can save us from false stories. It is an irreplaceable means of understanding our world. But despite the verities of science, many of our most important questions compel us to tell stories that venture beyond the facts. For all of the sophisticated methodologies in science, we have not moved beyond the story as the primary way that we make sense of our lives.

To see where science and story meet, let’s take a look at how story is created in the brain. Let’s begin with an utterly simple example of a story, offered by E. M. Forster in his classic book on writing, Aspects of the Novel:“The king died and then the queen died.” It is nearly impossible to read this juxtaposition of events without wondering why the queen died. Even with a minimum of description, the construction of the sentence makes us guess at a pattern. Why would the author mention both events in the same sentence if he didn’t mean to imply a causal relationship?

Once a relationship has been suggested, we feel obliged to come up with an explanation. This makes us turn to what we know, to our storehouse of facts. It is general knowledge that a spouse can die of grief. Did the queen then die of heartbreak? This possibility draws on the science of human behavior, which competes with other, more traditional narratives. A high school student who has been studying Hamlet, for instance, might read the story as a microsynopsis of the play.

The pleasurable feeling that our explanation is the right one—ranging from a modest sense of familiarity to the powerful and sublime “a-ha!”—is meted out by the same reward system in the brain integral to drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. The reward system extends from the limbic area of the brain, vital to the expression of emotion, to the prefrontal cortex, critical to executive thought. Though still imperfectly understood, it is generally thought that the reward system plays a central role in the promotion and reinforcement of learning. Key to the system, and found primarily within its brain cells, is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that carries and modulates signals among brain cells. Studies consistently show that feeling rewarded is accompanied by a rise in dopamine levels.

This reward system was first noted in the 1950s by two McGill University researchers, James Olds and Peter Milner. Stimulating electrodes were placed in presumed brain reward areas of rats. When allowed full unrestricted access to a lever that, when depressed, would cause the electrodes to fire, the rats quickly learned to repeatedly depress the lever, often to the exclusion of food and water. Realizing that our brains are capable of producing feelings so intense that we choose to ignore such basic drives as hunger and thirst was a first step toward understanding the enormous power of the brain’s reward circuitry.

Critical to understanding how stories spark the brain’s reward system is the theory known as pattern recognition—the brain’s way of piecing together a number of separate components of an image into a coherent picture. The first time you see a lion, for instance, you have to figure out what you’re seeing. At least 30 separate areas of the brain’s visual cortex pitch in, each processing an aspect of the overall image—from the detection of motion and edges, to the register of color and facial features. Collectively they form an overall image of a lion.

Each subsequent exposure to a lion enhances your neural circuitry; the connections among processing regions become more robust and efficient. (This theory, based on the research of Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb, a pioneer in studying how people learn, is often stated as “cells that fire together wire together.”) Soon, less input is necessary to recognize the lion. A fleeting glimpse of a partial picture is sufficient for recognition, which occurs via positive feedback from your reward system. Yes, you are assured by your brain, that is a lion.

An efficient pattern recognition of a lion makes perfect evolutionary sense. If you see a large feline shape moving in some nearby brush, it is unwise to wait until you see the yellows of the lion’s eyes before starting to run up the nearest tree. You need a brain that quickly detects entire shapes from fragments of the total picture and provides you with a powerful sense of the accuracy of this recognition.

One need only think of the recognition of a new pattern that is so profound that it triggers an involuntary “a-ha!” to understand the degree of pleasure that can be associated with learning. It’s no wonder that once a particular pattern-recognition-reward relationship is well grooved into our circuitry, it is hard to shake. In general—outside of addiction, that is—this “stickiness” of a correlation is a good thing. It is through repetition and the sense of familiarity and “rightness” of a correlation that we learn to navigate our way in the world.

Science is in the business of making up stories called hypotheses and testing them, then trying its best to make up better ones. Thought-experiments can be compared to storytelling exercises using well-known characters. What would Sherlock Holmes do if he found a body suspended in a tree with a note strapped to its ankle? What would a light ray being bounced between two mirrors look like to an observer sitting on a train? Once done with their story, scientists go to the lab to test it; writers call editors to see if they will buy it.

People and science are like bread and butter. We are hardwired to need stories; science has storytelling buried deep in its nature. But there is also a problem. We can get our dopamine reward, and walk away with a story in hand, before science has finished testing it. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the brain, hungry for its pattern-matching dopamine reward, overlooks contradictory or conflicting information whenever possible. A fundamental prerequisite for pattern recognition is the ability to quickly distinguish between similar but not identical inputs. Not being able to pigeonhole an event or idea makes it much more difficult for the brain to label and store it as a discrete memory. Neat and tidy promotes learning; loose ends lead to the “yes, but” of indecision and inability to draw a precise conclusion.

 

When we make and take incomplete stories from science, there are moral consequences.

 

Just as proper pattern recognition results in the reward of an increased release of dopamine, faulty pattern recognition is associated with decreased dopamine release. In monkeys, the failure to make a successful prediction (correlation between expected and actual outcome) characteristically diminishes dopamine release exactly at the time that the predicted event is anticipated but fails to occur. Just as accurate correlations are pleasurable, lack of correlation produces the neurotransmitter equivalent of thwarted expectation (or worse).

Once we see that stories are the narrative equivalent of correlation, it is easy to understand why our brains seek out stories (patterns) whenever and wherever possible. You may have read or heard about the famous experiment in which University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Simons asked subjects to watch a video and count the number of times a ball is dribbled by a basketball team. When focused on counting, the majority of viewers failed to see a woman in a gorilla suit walk across the playing area. In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear.

Because we are compelled to make stories, we are often compelled to take incomplete stories and run with them. With a half-story from science in our minds, we earn a dopamine “reward” every time it helps us understand something in our world—even if that explanation is incomplete or wrong.

Following the Newtown massacre, some experts commented on the killer having Asperger’s syndrome, as though that might at least partially explain his behavior. Though Asperger’s syndrome feels like a specific diagnosis, it is, by definition, nothing more than a constellation of symptoms common to a group of people. In the 1940s, Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger noted that a number of patients had similar problems with social skills, eccentric or repetitive actions, unusual preoccupation rituals, and communication difficulties, including lack of eye contact and trouble understanding facial expressions and gestures. The 2013 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome from its guidebook for clinicians, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-V), for failing to conform to any specific neuropathology, underscores the all-too-common problem of accepting a clustering of symptoms as synonymous with a specific disease. Syndromes are stories in search of underlying causes.

Similarly, studies of psychopaths have shown a diminished volume of gray matter in specific regions of the prefrontal cortex. But these findings aren’t the sole explanation for violent acts. Because it is impossible to stimulate a specific brain region to produce complex and premeditated acts, we are left to conclude that while certain brain conditions can be correlated with a complex act, they are not necessarily causing it. Likewise, brain scans that reveal abnormalities in mass murderers may help us understand what might have contributed to their behavior. But the abnormalities are no more the sole explanation for violence than childhood neglect or poor nutrition. They are stories, albeit with a detailed neurophysiological component, but stories nonetheless.

When we make and take incomplete stories from science, there are often moral consequences. How much personal responsibility should we assign to an individual with a damaged or malfunctioning brain? What is the appropriate punishment and possibility of rehabilitation for such a person? Only when we openly acknowledge the degree to which science is presenting its observations in the form of story can we address this moral dimension. We must each work out our own guidelines for when we think scientific data has exceeded its bounds and has morphed into the agenda and bias of story. Of course this is always going to be a challenge in the absence of a full array of scientific data.

But we can begin by being aware of the various ways that storytelling can insinuate itself into the presentation and interpretation of data. Good science is a combination of meticulously obtained and analyzed data, a restriction of the conclusions to those interpretations that are explicitly reflected in the data, and an honest and humble recognition of the limits of what this data can say about the world.

 

Loose ends lead to the “yes, but” of indecision and inability to draw a precise conclusion.

 

As members of the public, we need to ensure that any science we accept as truth has passed through the peer-review process. We should also understand that even peer-reviewed data is not always accurate. In 2011, Nature reported that published retractions had increased by a factor of 10 over the last 10 years, while the number of papers published rose only 44 percent. Also in Nature, scientists C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis wrote that their colleagues at the biotechnology firm Amgen could reproduce only six of 53 landmark hematology and oncology studies from the scientific literature. Similarly, scientists from Bayer reported in 2011 that they could not consistently reproduce about two-thirds of oncology studies relevant to their work.

When reading science reports, we should also search for information on the limits of the data. Were assumptions made? What do the “error bars,” or graphic representations of variable data, say? We may not always understand the data limits, but we should be worried when some discussion of them is completely absent.

In the end, scientists have the tools, language, and experience to tell us informed, engaging, and powerful stories. In turn, we should judge their studies in the same light in which we judge other artistic forms. Like a literary critic, we should assess the preciseness of language, the tightness of structure, the clarity and originality of vision, the overall elegance and grace of the study, the restraint with which they present moral issues, how they place their studies in historical, cultural, and personal context, and their willingness to entertain alternative opinions and interpretations.

The methodology of science remains one of the great advances of humankind. Its stories, properly told, are epic poems in progress, and deserve to stand alongside the great stories of history.

 

About the Author:

Robert A. Burton, M.D., a neurologist and novelist, is the author of On Being Certain: Believing That You Are Right Even When You’re Not, and A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves.

 

Original article 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.

 

18 Sep 2021
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Let the Healing Begin

“The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted.”

~ Eric McLuhan

“So much of the sickness is in our heads.”

~ Eric Clapton

Presence, Bliss, Tranquility. They are qualities of experience and states of being to be sure, but they do not arise only in the ethereal planes of awareness. They can exist while we are in embodiment as well. Carrying on from last week’s theme about our letting go, this coming weekend, and the early part of next week will afford us ample opportunities for accessing more of our divinity, while in our embodiment. This Monday-Tuesday, we get a breather, a blessing…a Full Moon in the expansion and dreamy sign of Pisces. Already we’re experiencing the forerunners. Strange or magical dreams and night-time dramas, restless sleep and bouts of feeling lethargic and tired, and a sense that one is walking in a fog bank. It will be helpful to reflect on these myriad states we’re entering before the exact moment of the Full Moon. That occurs at 00:54am British Summer Time. Subtract 5 hours for America’s East Coast, and 8 hours for the West. Hence why this lunation crosses over a day/night boundary.

This space will be super important to take advantage of, as the planetary and energetic aspects that unfold shortly. Next week there are some more intense energies afoot…mostly from Thursday onwards. We get a few little breaks in the action, until Mercury turns retrograde in Libra on September 27th. The real action will begin on October 1st, and reign through the whole month. But I get ahead of myself.

I inserted the quote from Marshall McLuhan’s son Eric as a reminder of why this Full Moon is so different than our abnormal digitized state of perception on the planet. This is an opportunity to connect or reconnect more deeply with our divine spark within. Whether you refer to it as your Higher Self or something else does not matter so much. You and that which is eternal are always together, always equals, and share a common awareness. No separation whatsoever! But in today’s world we may feel very hard-pressed to feel and know that Presence on a moment-to-moment basis. Now is a good time to re-establish the Foundation of your Being in the ways you feel drawn to do so.

The Eric Clapton quote is from the interview he did about his adverse injuries after having had the AZ jabs and having COVID anxiety prior to his accepting the jabs and after. Very honest and courageous man, and an amazing musician whom I’ve followed since 1966. I include it here to illustrate the (scientifically verified) fact of how we can be made to feel ill from just our thoughts and/or emotions, or from taking in toxic ideas from outside ourselves. This is about more than being a hypochondriac. One type of this condition is called psychogenic illness, and it can spread to millions of people in a matter of days or weeks…as we have seen.

With Sun in Virgo and Moon in Pisces, the themes of healing arise, especially emotional and psychic pains or wounds.  Allow your feelings to flow and don’t hold anything back or judge them, no matter how messy or chaotic they might be. It’s part of the healing from releasing we all need…a cleansing. Virgo is all about the body, and about the sacredness and beauty of the divine in human form. Revere your body as such, and it will respond to your healing thoughts. Too much of humanity has forgotten what their bodies are for.

Lastly, I suggest using this time for artistic pursuits, resting, walking in Nature, Qigong, Tai Chi or yoga, meditating, chanting, listening to music (or playing it yourself!). Tuning in to the deeper knowing that is you is the key. If you are looking for information or answers outside of yourself (Sun-Virgo), okay. But come back into yourself and let your heart and spirit discover what is right for you.

 

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.