Film

Egyptian Magic and The Seven Octaves of Vibration

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Molly Hankins October 9, 2025

The  ancient Egyptian deity known as Ptah embodies the concept of a primary creator as the source of all there is. When Hungarian author, mystic and yoga teacher Elisabeth Haich began remembering her past lives in Egypt as an initiate and priestess, she attributed her devotion directly to Ptah, who came to her in the Earthly form of Ptahhotep. In her 1994 book Initiation, Haich describes one of these past lives growing up as a daughter of the Pharaoh Atothis, and niece of a high priest in the mystery school of Ra, Ptahhotep. She sought initiation as a young girl, but her uncle Ptahhotep insisted she was not ready. After she asked him to be initiated for a third time, Ptahhotep had to give her permission because, according to rules governing initiates, asking three times for initiation is a sign that it’s a requirement for her soul. Knowing she lacked sufficient life experience in that incarnation to safely begin the process, Ptahhotep began teaching her the universal truths which she describes throughout Initiation.

The basis of these universal truths is the divine law of nature. Ptahhotep explains this using what he calls the seven octaves of vibration, through which life expresses itself in the material world. Like most spiritual belief systems, the ancient Egyptians believed the world of form was a small piece of the far greater expression of the spiritual world. “The fact that the creative force manifests itself on each and every level of innumerable possibilities means there are countless different wavelengths, wave forms and frequencies,” Haich tells us, recounting the words of Ptahhotep. “And as long as we are in the body, with its limited perceptive ability, we can perceive only a certain number of these wave forms because our organs of sense are limited. Whether some form of vibration appears to us as ‘immaterial energy’ or as solid ‘matter’ depends upon our own idea and the impression of something which is basically nothing but movement, vibration or frequency.” 

According to Haich, Ptahhotep claimed that shorter energy wave forms correspond with matter, while longer wave forms with ideas and the divine creative force. This is paradoxical because in the physical world of form, shorter wave lengths correspond with a higher rate of vibration, which is traditionally associated with divinity rather than physical matter. However, only when we really consider this paradox do we begin to close in on universal truth beyond the material world of duality we currently live in. If we imagine the occult axiom of, “As above so below and as below so above,” as being akin to a mirror, the reversal of how shorter and longer wavelengths express themselves in the material vs. the spiritual world begins to make more sense. The source of these vibrations, known as God or The Creator, are radiated into our world by our sun, and Ra is the sacred sun god of Egypt. Explaining these seven octaves of vibration, Ptahhotep shared how all divine energy radiates in all directions from a center, such as the sun, to take form in different wavelengths. 

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“In the material world, we are living amidst the vibrations that emanate from the spiritual into the physical, and developing our consciousness so as to be able to cause effect is at the heart of magical practice.”

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The chemical composition of matter determines the vibrations it can hold. In communicating this information, Ptahhotep was preparing Haich’s past life body to be able to hold the vibration of initiation. Receiving and integrating this knowledge begins the alchemical process of preparing any initiate for the “higher octaves of consciousness” that allow us to begin practicing magic, defined as being able to cause change according to will. Magic is far more efficient and effective when practitioners can hold and transmit a wider range of vibrational states. Everything radiates the vibration it embodies from its center, and that vibration corresponds to its state of consciousness. The first four octaves of vibration correspond with matter, vegetation, animal and human life, while the last three, accessible to humans who take responsibility for their vibrational state, correspond with personal intuition, embodiment of wisdom and universal love, and finally reunion with the mind of God. All seven of these states are available to us while we’re in our human form, according to Ptahhotep. 

“Matter, the very lowest degree of consciousness, manifests itself only through contraction, cooling off and hardening. The plant manifests itself on two levels, the material level and the level of force - vegetative force - that gives life to it,” he explained. “The animal manifests three forces, the material, the vegetative and the animal. It has a body, it seeks out its food, eats and digests and is conscious on the animal level: it has emotions, instincts, urges, feelings, sympathy, antipathy and desires. The animal is conscious in the third developmental stage, only one degree lower than man. The average man stands one octave of vibration higher, he is conscious on the mental level. He has intellect and the ability to think. But at the same time he manifests the three other levels,” writes Haich quoting Ptahhotep. 

At the fifth octave of consciousness development, man makes a great leap as he enters the plane of causality. In the material world, we are living amidst the vibrations that emanate from the spiritual into the physical, and developing our consciousness so as to be able to cause effect is at the heart of magical practice. The sixth octave is where God’s divine love radiates from, and as we begin to access it, we begin to integrate the wisdom of universal love and bring it into our daily lives. The seventh octave is described as the completely conscious God-man who becomes a center radiating purely divine, creative energy. Ptahhotep says, “All other forms of revelation manifest only in transformed vibrations, only part of God. A God-man is a person who manifests God - his own divine self - completely and perfectly through a perfect consciousness; one who experiences and radiates the divine creative forces in their primordial, untransformed vibrations and frequencies.” 

Only those who evolve their consciousness to the level of the seventh octave can make conscious use of these primordial, divine waves of energy. Developing our physical bodies and consciousness to be able to hold these higher octaves makes up much of any occult initiate’s work. Ptahhotep reminds us that while the bodies of different beings in the world of form may look the same, they differ chemically based on the level of consciousness development of the soul embodied within that form. When undertaking any occult work, particularly without the direction of a teacher or established magical order, it’s essential to remember that it takes time and diligence to evolve our consciousness to be able to hold the energies of higher octaves of being. Divine frequencies can shock and even harm our physical, mental and emotional bodies, so a slow and steady approach is always recommended.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Film

M.I.A.

Film

Holy Water (1977)

Opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1913.

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For all of the complicated politics around water in the American West, Didion focuses more on its physical movement — through aqueducts, dams, pumps, and reservoirs — and the psychological hold it exerts. Written first for ‘Esquire’ magazine in 1977 and then featured in her seminal collection ‘The White Album’ two years later, this is a deeply personal, meditative study of survival, of California, and of the overlooked infrastructures that make life possible. She is gleefully reverent when describing the hydraulic systems, seeing in them a lifeline, and a testament to the human drive to survive, to conquer, and to find control in a world of dust, drought, fire, and chaos. Water, for Didion, shapes not just landscapes but identities.

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Joan Didion October 7, 2025

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. 

As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Gun Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand - the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before - and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy. 

I suppose it was partly the memory of that delirium that led me to visit, one summer morning in Sacramento, the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project. Actually so much water is moved around California by so many different agencies that maybe only the movers themselves know on any given day whose water is where, but to get a general picture it is necessary only to remember that Los Angeles moves some of it, San Francisco moves some of it, the Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project moves some of it, and the California State Water Project moves most of the rest of it, moves a vast amount of it, moves more water farther than has ever been moved anywhere. They collect this water up in the granite keeps of the Sierra Nevada and they store roughly a trillion gallons of it behind the Oroville Dam and every morning, down at the Project's headquarters in Sacramento, they decide how much of their water they want to move the next day. 

They make this morning decision according to supply and demand, which is simple in theory but rather more complicated in practice. In theory each of the Project's five field divisions - the Oroville, the Delta, the San Luis, the San Joaquin, and the Southern divisions - places a call to headquarters before nine AM. and tells the dispatchers how much water is needed by its local water contractors, who have in turn based their morning estimates on orders from growers and other big users. A schedule is made. The gages open and close according to schedule. The water flows south and the deliveries are made. In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418. In practice it might be necessary to hold large flows of water for power production, or to flush out encroaching salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the most ecologically sensitive point on the system. In practice a sudden rain might obviate the need for a delivery when that delivery is already on its way. 

In practice what is being delivered here is an enormous volume of water, not quarts of milk or spools of thread, and it takes two days to move such a delivery down through Oroville into the Delta, which is the great pooling place for California water and has been for some years alive with electronic sensors and telemetering equipment and men blocking channels and diverting flows and shoveling fish away from the pumps. It takes perhaps another six days to move this same water down the California Aqueduct from the Delta to the Tehachapi and put it over the hill to Southern California. 

"Putting some over the hill" is what they say around the Project Operations Control Center when they want to indicate that they are pumping Aqueduct water from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley up and over the Tehachapi Mountains. "Pulling it down" is what they say when they want to indicate that they are lowering a water level somewhere in the system. They can put some over the hill by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its Univac and its big board and its flashing lights. They can pull down a pool in the San Joaquin by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its locked doors and its ringing alarms and its constant printouts of data from sensors out there in the water itself. From this room in Sacramento the whole system takes on the aspect of a perfect three-billion-dollar hydraulic toy, and in certain ways it is. "LET'S START DRAINING QUAIL AT 12:00" was the 10:51 A.M. entry on the electronically recorded communications log the day I visited the Operations Control Center. "Quail" is a reservoir in Los Angeles County with a gross capacity of 1,636,018,000 gallons. "OK" was the response recorded in the log. I knew at that moment that I had missed the only vocation for which I had any instinctive affinity: I wanted to drain Quail myself. 

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“This is a California parable, but a true one.”

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Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day. "Indirectly" is not quite enough for most people I know. This morning, however, several people I know were affected not "indirectly" but "directly" by the way the water moves. They had been in New Mexico shooting a picture, one sequence of which required a river deep enough to sink a truck, the kind with a cab and a trailer and fifty or sixty wheels. It so happened that no river near the New Mexico location was running that deep this year. The production was therefore moved today to Needles, California, where the Colorado River normally runs, depending upon releases from Davis Dam, eighteen to twenty-five feet deep. Now. Follow this closely: Yesterday we had a freak tropical storm in Southern California, two inches of rain in a normally dry month, and because this rain flooded the fields and provided more irrigation than any grower could possibly want for several days, no water was ordered from Davis Dam. 

No orders, no releases.

Supply and demand. 

As a result the Colorado was running only seven feet deep past Needles today, Sam Peckinpah's" desire for eighteen feet of water in which to sink a truck not being the kind of demand anyone at Davis Dam is geared to meet. The production closed down for the weekend. Shooting will resume Tuesday, providing some grower orders water and the agencies controlling the Colorado release it. Meanwhile many gaffers, best boys, cameramen, assistant directors, script supervisors, stunt drivers, and maybe even Sam Peckinpah are waiting out the weekend in Needles, where it is often 110 degrees at five P.M. and hard to get dinner after eight. This is a California parable, but a true one. 

I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one. When it became generally known a year or so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their swimming pools. In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: A pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye. 

It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently In my memory California summers were characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees, and flooding on the first floor. Even now the place is not all that hospitable to extensive settlement. As I write a fire has been burning out of control for two weeks in the ranges behind the Big Sur coast. Flash floods last night wiped out all major roads into Imperial County. I noticed this morning a hairline crack in a living-room tile from last week's earthquake, a 4.4 I never felt. In the part of California where I now live aridity is the single most prominent feature of the climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea. There will be days this winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four. Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a hundred times a day by dried bougainvillea drifting in my driveway. The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry. 

"The West begins," Bernard DeVoto wrote, "where the average annual io rainfall drops below twenty inches." This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion. As a matter of fact I have explored, in an amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting. A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation. The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. Some fifteen years ago I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall. This fragment of paper is now on the wall of a sixth kitchen, and crumbles a little whenever I touch it, but I keep it there for the last stanza, which has for me the power of a prayer: 

It is raining in California, a straight rain 
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough, 
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow, 
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile, 
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green, 
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. 

I thought of those lines constantly on the morning in Sacramento when I went to visit the California State Water Project Operations Control Center. If I had wanted to drain Quail at 10:51 that morning, I wanted, by early afternoon, to do a great deal more. I wanted to open and close the Clifton Court Forebay intake gate. I wanted to produce some power down at the San Luis Dam. I wanted to pick a pool at random on the Aqueduct and pull it down and then refill it, watching for the hydraulic jump. I wanted to put some water over the hill and I wanted to shut down all flow from the Aqueduct into the Bureau of Reclamation's Cross Valley Canal, just to see how long it would take somebody over at Reclamation to call up and complain. I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big board with the lighted checkpoints. The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes behind me. The Delta tidal report was coming in on another. The earthquake board, which has been desensitized to sound its alarm (a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the north) only for those earthquakes which register at least 3.0 on the Richter Scale, was silent. I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day. I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still.

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Joan Didion (1934 – 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She was one of the pioneers of New Journalism whose sharp, insightful essays gave a voice to modern American life.

Film

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The I Ching

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A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet.

Chris Gabriel October 4, 2025

What is the I Ching?

If you have interacted with the I Ching, you may know it as a book of poetry used for divination. You throw coins, draw the hexagram, and check the guide in the back to find the number. You read the six line poem and contemplate. This is a very modern means of interacting with the oracle and misses the soul, the meat, and the true purpose of the work!

The I Ching is by far the oldest “book” in the world. In primordial times, the story goes, a dragon named Fu Xi sat patiently and studied nature. While looking at the shell of a turtle, the Trigrams came to him as an eightfold set of elements. From these, he constructed the I Ching and taught humanity his wisdom.

The Chinese written language is one of the oldest, nearly 5,000 years old, yet the trigrams predate it, and are in fact the basis for it. 

The Trigrams alone existed for a long time, then the 64 hexagrams came about, a stacking of two trigrams. Long after that, they were numbered and named. Far later, the accompanying poems were written. By our modern focus on the writing, we are essentially missing the whole picture.

In this exploration of the I Ching we will focus on the symbolism of the Trigrams, and the ideogrammic study of their names. By focusing on the oldest, and most visual parts of the text, we will illuminate the oracle.

This Translation

I studied the I Ching for 7 years before I started this translation in 2022. After reading Carl Jung’s work on the I Ching, I was moved enough to buy a copy, though I found the text academic, and harder to grasp than the visual Tarot.

It was after studying Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s “Ideogrammic Method” of interpreting Chinese characters that I began to grasp the nature of the I Ching as a  set of natural images, much like the Tarot, but “Eastern” enough for the ‘Western’ world to  be blind to. 

We are reading what we should be seeing.

Aleister Crowley recognized the 64 hexagrams as a direct mirror to the 32 paths of the Qabalah. He mapped the Tao, the Yin and Yang, and the eight trigrams to the Tree of Life, but did not follow through with his translation and commentary. I sought to complete the work he began, and as such have created the first fully corresponded I Ching.

My study of Nursery Rhymes then gave me the profoundly simple and effective language with which I could express the “simple and easy” truths of the text. I sought to make the I Ching accessible to anyone.

The Cosmology of the I Ching

As with all things, we start with the Tao.

1
Form of Tao
The Tao that is spoken
Is not the Tao

The Name that is Named
Is not the Name

The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The Name is the Mother of the ten thousand things

The Desireless sees its marvels 
The Desirer sees only its shadows

Two move as One
Yet their names are different

One is Mystery; Mystery within Mystery
This is the gate to all marvels

-Tao Te Ching

From the “Creative Nothing” of the Tao, duality emerged. Magickally, this is expressed as 0=2, but we can understand it also as, Yin and Yang, a feminine and a masculine energy. These are the black and white halves of the whole. Yang is light and masculine and is symbolized by a solid line —, Yin is dark and feminine and is symbolized by a broken line - -.

Within these halves exist a dot of the opposite, these are the “four elements”. Younger Yang is two solid lines, while Older Yang is a solid line topped by a broken one. Younger Yin is two broken lines, while Older Yin is a broken line topped by a solid line.

These four also mirror the first line of the I Ching: 

Heaven Origin Prosperity Reap Pure

The four characters following the first fill the rest of the book endlessly, they are essentially the four elemental virtues of the I Ching.

元 -Yen

亨 -Heng

利 -Li

貞- Ching

元
Yen depicts a Man with a big Head.

This is often translated as some form of “Origin” or, “Generation”, etc. It is “first”, in the way that the Head of an organization is - , the Capo.

亨
Heng depicts a Child and a Shrine.

Often translated as “progress” and “prosperity”, this is the prosperity in the way that the children of God, the Sons of Heaven experience prosper. Or, progress and prosperity through child sacrifice is an equally possible understanding.

利
Li depicts wheat and a knife

It is “harvesting” and “gaining”, reaping rewards gains after sowing work.

貞

Ching, or Ding depicts a vessel.

It is purity, like the Grail.

They can mapped to the Western elements as:

Fire: Yen, Younger Yang
Water: Ching, Younger Yin
Air: Heng, Older Yang
Earth: Li, Older Yin

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

David Whyte (Part 2)

Film

The Power of a Heavy Sigh

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Analogical Diagram, Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah.

Vestal Malone October 2, 2025

 A mirror, a polaroid selfie, the surface of a cool mountain lake pre-immersion… we see ourselves in these reflections, but they don't explain who we are, or why, or how others perceive us. Bodies, images,  faces, names, styles, reputations, and qualities of character; all a part of some definition of ourselves, yet none truly capture the whole. Only the mind's eye, carefully listening from the inside out with breath as guide, can see the physical and emotional self in their entirety.

The perfectly divine design machine of the human body may appear symmetrical but its balance is asymmetrical: our liver,  gallbladder, the “good side” of our face for the family portrait, right or left handed, goofy foot or regular, all contribute to a lack of balance within ourselves. Even those that appear symmetrical - the kidneys, lungs, eyes, legs, ovaries, and arms - have subtle differences. And the gray matter, balanced atop the spine, encased by the skull, with the duties that control every aspect of our existence – the sacred left brain, the mundane right brain – separate yet united, floating and dancing with the breath. The simple wisdom of this twin organism can create a breath and relax the body without the mind's conscious choice getting in the way. The heavy sigh.

To begin to know the self from the inside out, one must invite the mind to follow as breath fills the lungs, like a pitcher filling with water. Focus and notice the body's details, truly observing each cell, and you can begin creating an opportunity to hit the “pause” and then “reset” button allowing the body to harmonize itself. The heavy sigh.  

Sitting at the office or in traffic, dancing, surfing, receiving bodywork or practicing yoga are all opportunities to follow the breath with the mind, bring oxygen, and clear stagnation. The breath is the best chiropractor, especially lying or sitting still. As the lungs move to inflate and then release, travel along the mind's path until the focus blurs and flow begins. The body is designed to release itself, but it needs the mind to get out of the way as it waits for the heavy sigh. It can't be controlled, only invited, and when it comes, a powerful release to mind and body happens in the exhale.

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After her University education (BA in English Literature and philosophy, minor in music),  Vestal Malone followed the call to study her hobbies of yoga and therapeutic touch a the Pacific School of Healing Arts and continued in the Master's program of Transformational Bodywork  with her mentors, Fred and Cheryl Mitouer, and assisting with their teaching. She went on to teach her own Therapeutic Touch workshops in Japan,  hatha yoga in America, and study Cranial Sacral Therapy with Hugh Milne and John Upledger. She has had the honor of doing bodywork with professional athletes, laymen and nobility for over 25 years. Vestal is a mom, a backyard organic gardener, and sings soprano in her church choir on a little island in the middle Pacific ocean. She hails from Colorado and Wyoming and migrates every summer to her family ranch to ground in the dust of her roots.

Film

David Whyte (Part 1)

Film

How To Speak Poetry (1978)

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Leonard Cohen was always a reluctant songwriter. As a young man in Montreal, he published collections of poetry and a handful of novels that were critically very well received, but commercially unsuccessful. In 1966, the year his novel ‘Beautiful Losers’ was published, Cohen made the decision to abandon the printed word and focus on music. He released his first album the following year, and four more in the following decade, becoming a new voice of his generation and establishing himself as one of the finest songwriters of the era. In 1978, following the release of his album of the same name a year before, Cohen returned to his first love and released the poetry collection ‘Death of a Ladies Man’. A dialogue with himself, each poem is accompanied by a meta-commentary or companion piece of writing. Amongst the poems is the short essay featured here. A guide to reading poetry aloud, Cohen’s directions are applicable far beyond their intention; it is a plea to respect the written word, to understand that vulnerability comes not from over-emoting but from the straightforward pursuit of truth, and to embrace our imperfections as compelling, interesting, and beautiful.

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Leonard Cohen September 30, 2025

Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material.

What is the expression which the age demands? The age demands no expression whatever. We have seen photographs of bereaved Asian mothers. We are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. We have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. Everyone knows you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there. You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. This should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser. Do not shout at them. Do not force a dry entry. That is bad sex. If you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. And remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. What is our need? To be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. Do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. The bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. They have also destroyed the stage. Did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? There is no more stage. There are no more footlights. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.

This is an interior landscape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. Be good whores. The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition.

Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don't peep through them. Just wear them.

The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers' Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.

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Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016) was a Canadian songwriter, singer, poet, and novelist.

Film

Quantum Entanglement and the Ho'oponopono Prayer

Two carved Hawaiian figures, J. M. Booth. 1930s.

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Molly Hankins September 25, 2025

The ancient Hawaiian Ho’oponopono forgiveness prayer was brought to modern attention by Dr. Hew Len, a clinical social worker who used it with great success while working in a ward for the criminally insane. He learned the simple prayer from his family, and it had an enormous impact on his patients at Hawaii State Hospital, which he wrote about in the 2007 book Zero Limits. In ancient, tribal Hawaiian culture, whenever a member of the Kahuna tribe came to any harm or did anything harmful, everyone in the tribe would sit in a circle around that person and psychically send them the message, “I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.” When Len began using it with his patients, he found their issues began resolving more easily, that they were getting along better day-to-day and, overall, were exiting the ward more quickly. 

The effectiveness of Ho’oponopono is based on the principles of quantum entanglement, which theorises that particles of the same origin, if once connected, always stay connected - even across space-time. If we apply the same principle to human beings, it means we’re influencing each other on an ongoing basis whether we’re aware of it or not. It could take the form of holding each other in some form of psychic bondage through our perception of each other, either consciously or unconsciously. It could also take the form of judgment, envy, or any negativity held towards the person experiencing harm. Regardless of how this negativity expresses, the premise is the same - we cannot escape the impact we have on others as individuals or as part of a collective, but we can cleanse our impact to make it positive by engaging in this practice. 

For the prayer, the words are sent telepathically rather than spoken because it is  communication that happens beyond the world of form that reorganizes reality at the quantum level. Len would repeat the prayer in his mind while looking at his patients’ file until he felt a lightness towards them, then he would move onto the next file. His Zero Limits co-author Joe Vitale realized Len had distilled the complex Kahuna ritual into a simple, ten-word prayer that was having profound and sometimes immediate effects on recipients. They were receiving the benefit without having any awareness of why, and Vitale posits that the prayer lifts a veil of negative perception, freeing patients from their past. Positive regard becomes the organizing principle at the quantum level instead of negativity or disregard, so the recipient of Ho’oponopono begins to perceive themselves subconsciously in a new, positive light. They have not changed, they are just operating from a new baseline, which is feeling the support of interconnection within community and with their true selves.

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“The divisions between us are only in our imaginations. Although bodies and actions appear separate, the mind that is expressing through all of us is the same. All behavior is either an expression of or a call for love. So love is the cause of everything, and the cure at the same time.”

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Each line of the prayer combines to create this alchemical reaction, beginning with “I’m sorry.” The apology needs not to be for anything in particular that’s happened in this life, it could simply be apologizing for our souls’ choosing to experience separation from the divine and for all the suffering that choice caused. The next line, “please forgive me”, affirms the idea that forgiveness alleviates much of the suffering we create by choosing to play the human game of separation. It is a gift we’re always in a position to give ourselves and each other. Author David Ian Cowan has his own take on the impact of this line in his book Navigating the Collapse of Time. He writes, “Please see me as an undiluted, invulnerable, eternal and forever joyful spirit, as I now choose to see you. I see you as spirit, who through the majesty of your own creativity and freedom, has created this opportunity to awaken and remember love, and I trust you to love me and forgive me my illusions.” By passing conscious awareness of another’s transgressions, Ho’oponopono allows us to see each other with fresh eyes at the quantum level.

We acknowledge both our unity with others and self-love when we say, “I love you.” According to Cowan, this line recognizes our oneness, that we’re all drops in the infinite ocean of consciousness, and that we serve as mirrors for each other, so to give love to another is to give it to ourselves. By this logic, to judge or condemn another is to judge and condemn our own soul, so choosing love and forgiveness for another heals them and ourselves. Cowan writes, “The divisions between us are only in our imaginations. Although bodies and actions appear separate, the mind that is expressing through all of us is the same. All behavior is either an expression of or a call for love. So love is the cause of everything, and the cure at the same time.” The final line “thank you” shows gratitude for both the opportunity to heal the relationship and for the change of any misperceptions we may have of one another as being anything less than divine. 

Len believed Ho’oponopono had the power to restore the mind to its higher purpose and connect with the truth of creation and interconnectedness of all things. When love, forgiveness, humility, and gratitude entangle, they generate an organizing pattern of reality that moves us beyond identifying with our perception of duality to become pure vessels of divine creation. It effectively functions as a non-duality spell, because the only way to perceive duality is by stepping outside it, and Ho’oponopono by its very nature is based in non-duality. By sending this blessing to another, we take a step outside of duality. Each time we do, we come back into the polarized world of form able to embody more non-dual divine intelligence. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Film

Tony Hawk