Larry Levan Playlist
Archival 1967-1987
Larry Levan was an influential American DJ who defined what modern dance clubs are today. He is most widely renowned for his long-time residency at Paradise Garage, also known as “Gay-Rage”, a former nightclub at 84 King Street in Manhattan, NY.
24 Returning - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel April 18, 2026
Going in and out untroubled, friends come…
Chris Gabriel April 18, 2026
Judgement
Going in and out untroubled, friends come. He goes his own way, and returns after seven days.
Lines
1
Returning from nearby.
2
Returning to rest.
3
Returning and turning.
4
Returning alone on the middle path.
5
Returning the favour.
6
Missing the turn.
If you use the army on this path there will be a great defeat.
Even the King will suffer. After ten years you still won’t be forgiven.
Qabalah
Gevurah to Binah: The Path of Cheth. The Chariot.
This hexagram shows us light returning after a period of darkness; the crack of dawn and the coming of spring: The turning point. We can see it depicted in the hexagram itself, where the single light yang at the bottom breaks into the five dark yin lines. Thunder under the Earth is the natural energy which drives plants forth out of the darkness of the Earth, thus the Spring. The ideogram shows us walking in the manner of the sun, or in the matter of folded fabric - both images of repetition. No matter how dark a time or difficult a journey, the turning point comes and things change.
Judgement: Here we see the repetitive cycle shared with friends, going to the same places, even when one strays for a time, they return.
1 After only a brief darkness, returning to light. This is like making a wrong turn but catching yourself before you go too far in the wrong direction,
2 Returning to rest is going back to sleep, keeping things in place for a time: to recover and restore one's energy.
3 This is going a long distance, reaching your destination, returning home again, then doing this again and again. While the previous line was a restful return, this is a restless return. This is a long commute, or an unprepared journey. A difficult but often unavoidable situation.
4 When you are in the wrong place among the wrong people it is good to return home alone.
5 When we go on a profitable venture it is good to return home with gifts for those who helped us make the journey.
6 The timing of a return is extremely important, if we miss certain turns, we can add hours to a journey. In war, if one acts at the wrong time, they ensure they will be defeated.
While the Sun knows exactly when to return, humans do not. We constantly make mistakes that could have been solved if we only knew when to stop and when to go. With the hexagram being connected to the tarot card of the Chariot, the lines strongly call to mind driving a car. All drivers have experienced each of the situations depicted here.
When we look to the opposite hexagram on the path of Cheth, that of Excitement, we see the driving force behind the initial journey out. In excitement we can thrust ourselves into a journey, only to find ourselves far from home, and needing to turn around.
The images here are simple and mundane, but we can understand the higher meaning as “Seeing the Light”. Even after a life of sin, we can turn our lives around, not just our cars. This is a moment of “enlightenment” which will set us in a radical new direction. This is Saul on the road to Damascus blinded by the light of Christ, who converts on the spot, ending his persecution of Christians.
Therefore, let us have the wisdom to see our path clearly, and know when we have strayed from it. To know when it’s time to turn around and return.
Hannah Peel Playlist
Archival - April 15, 2025
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.
Sacred Geometry and White Magic
Flora Knight April 16, 2026
Sacred geometry is rooted in the idea that God is the ultimate mathematician and that the mathematical patterns observed in nature are signs of divinity…
A detail from Hirschvogel’s ‘Geometria’ (1543).
Flora Knight April 16, 2026
Sacred geometry, the concept that divine mathematical patterns underpin the universe, has profoundly influenced various religious and mystical traditions. It is rooted in the idea that God is the ultimate mathematician and that the mathematical patterns observed in nature are signs of divinity. These sacred patterns manifest in numerous ways, such as mandalas, religious architecture, and symbols across Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Yet in witchcraft, it is the pentagram that has been most prevalent. Alongside its other interpretations, the pentagram embodies the principles of sacred geometry, a cohesive and balanced symbol, simple, repeatable and divine.
White Magic has long been fascinated with sacred geometry, particularly drawing inspiration from the Temple of Solomon’s design. This structure has significantly influenced the geometric architecture in witchcraft. The intricate designs and patterns seen in the Temple of Solomon have become a cornerstone for many later structures, reflecting the importance of geometry in magical practices and teachings. Various white magical institutions have adopted these geometric principles as a core part of their teachings, emphasizing the connection between spirituality and mathematics.
The caretaker at Newgrange, 1910.
One significant site that highlights the importance of sacred geometry is Bru’gh na Bo’inne, or New Grange, in Ireland. This ancient burial site, one of the oldest Western structures, dates back to ancient history and served as a burial place for Irish kings. New Grange incorporates sacred spirals in its design, which were later espoused by Fibonacci. The entrance of this structure features right-hand spirals, known as Deosil, which are used by priestesses when casting a holy circle. This counter-clockwise movement symbolizes holiness and positive energy. As one progresses through the corridors, the spirals shift to a clockwise direction, known as widdershins, which represents movement away from goodness and aligns with the sun's movement. Each chamber within New Grange symbolizes one of the three worlds of Celtic magic: the sky world, the middle world, and the underworld. This structure parallels the Temple of Solomon in its representation of the fourfold nature of the universe.
Beyond architectural marvels, sacred geometry finds its application in geomancy, a form of divination that became widespread in medieval Europe. Originating from Arabic and Persian traditions, geomancy involves interpreting patterns formed by tossing earth or stones onto the ground or making marks in the sand. By the medieval period, geomancers began using pen and ink to draw random lines of points, creating a Geomantic tableau. This method of divination became second in importance only to astrology during the Middle Ages.
Symbols of Geomancy.
In geomancy, the practitioner draws 16 lines of points while contemplating a question. These points form groups called the 'Mothers,' which generate the 'Daughters,' then the 'Nieces,' and finally the 'Witnesses and the Judge.' The Judge represents the answer to the question posed. Each figure in the Geomantic tableau is associated with a planet, zodiac sign, time of day, and element (earth, air, fire, or water). Figures that point downward are considered stable and arriving, while figures pointing upward are seen as departing and movable.
The question posed in geomancy is assigned to one of the 12 astrological houses, each governing a different aspect of life such as riches, health, marriage, and journeys. For instance, a question about marriage falls under the 'wife' house, while a query about a ship's safe passage falls under the 'journeys' house. The geomancer interprets the tableau by examining the figure in the relevant house and considering its properties to determine the outcome.
Sacred geometry's influence on witchcraft and divination is profound, reflecting the deep connection between the mystical and mathematical realms. It rejects the idea that the universe exists in chaos, and rather points to a truthful order, available for all those willing to look.
Flora Knight is an occultist and historian.
It’s Gonna Rain
Derek Simpson April 14, 2026
By the time Steve Reich released It’s Gonna Rain, splicing and looping strips of audio tape was a technique well known to the champions of the avant garde…
Hans Glaser. 1554.
Derek Simpson April 14, 2026
By the time Steve Reich released It’s Gonna Rain, splicing and looping strips of audio tape was a technique well known to the champions of the avant garde. A handful of composers had long been manipulating prerecorded sounds, challenging the idea that music is defined by rhythm, melody, and harmony. These composers had been laying the foundations of electronic music since the late 1940’s in a style known as musique concrète or ‘concrete music,’ creating works defined by their unidentifiable source material.
A single sound may originate as a 3-second recording of laughter, for example, but in the final composition, the laughter would be slowed and stretched to 20 seconds, emulating an engine being ignited in the distance. Another sound, a train passing by, may be sped up, layered on top of itself a few times, and looped, creating a 3-minute chorus of metallic frogs. The idea was to create a subjective musical experience, to compose works that were fully made up of these abstracted sound recordings. The work was a success if a listener could hear something totally fresh to their ears. Reich’s 1965 composition flips this idea on its head. Using the same basic tools as a piece of concrete music, the sample and the loop, Reich underlines and accentuates his piece’s source material: a single recording of a human voice—that of Pentecostal preacher Brother Walter.
“He began to warn the people! He said: ‘After a while, it's gonna rain after a while, for forty days and for forty nights!’ And the people didn't believe him…” Brother Walter’s sermon booms through San Francisco’s Union Square, “And they begin to laugh at him! And they begin to mock him and they begin to say: ‘It ain't gonna rain!’" He preaches about Noah, a righteous man called upon to preserve life on Earth after God decides to cleanse the Earth with a massive flood. God advises Noah to build an ark, one that can fit his family as well as pairs of each animal to repopulate after the flood. In the time it takes Noah to build the ark, he tries to warn others about the impending flood, but as Brother Walter reminds us, Noah was considered a fool for his concerns.
And then it rained.
About half of Steve Reich’s roughly 17-minute composition features loops of Brother Walter’s proclamation “It’s gonna rain! It’s gonna rain! It’s gonna rain!…” over and over and over again. The main loop is duplicated and played on two tape machines. One is panned to the right ear while its twin loop is panned to the left, each slightly out of sync with its counterpart, creating a swirling effect upon playback referred to today as ‘phasing’. The result is a masterwork in balance—the Organic (human voice) and the Machine (regenerative tape loops) provide perfect support for one another as the piece gradually phases into oblivion.
“The answers may not immediately be so obvious. They may even be hard to hear at first, whispers in a crowded room.”
Sixty years later, the Machine has completely flooded the music-making process and the industry that surrounds it. Samples are conserved and archived in their own libraries, looping has become a popular compositional tool embraced by all genres, and the laptop serves the independent artist as the sole affordable means to write, arrange, record, produce, mix, master, distribute, and promote their own work.
Musical ideas can now be expressed faster than ever before without the supposed hassle of learning to play an instrument. A talented prompter can prompt an AI model with their musical idea, and the model will translate their idea in under a minute. Being trained on all available recorded music to match any and every specific artist’s musical aesthetics, the model will present you with a song containing your own musical ideas, convincingly performed by an artist you love, or by a totally new ‘artist’ whose style is informed by those you love.
Artists themselves have become the raw source material they once used, getting their own likenesses sampled for songs they wrote that sampled songs that someone else wrote that sampled songs that were based on songs that some other people played. It’s gonna rain, it’s gonna rain, it’s gonna rain.
For the moment, the Organic has lost its footing in music-making. Whether Reich’s composition was a divinely channelled warning in and of itself is entirely up for debate, but the fact remains: if we’d like to consciously preserve any shred of the Organic while the Machine continues to flood the arts, we must create the balance ourselves.
If we focus on creating and maintaining this balance, we can remain mindful of our fascinations. When a shiny new toy presents itself, we can watch our interactions as we become more and more familiar with it, paying close attention to how we feel as we use it. If we haven’t applied that kind of attention to our interactions with an older piece of tech, we can certainly apply that same watchfulness each time we use it from here on out. It’s never too late to be mindful.
We can also maintain awareness of our relationship to convenience. If a new software is promising to provide an ‘easier way’, we can explore its exciting features all the while asking ourselves important questions like “Do I have as much fun creating when I use this?” or “Is this making the work better?”. The answers may not immediately be so obvious. They may even be hard to hear at first, whispers in a crowded room. Or they could be loud answers that surprise us. Listening as closely as possible to whatever comes up is key.
When we come to our creative process with the intentions outlined above, we are not interested in vilifying anything that could potentially be of use. We are not looking to label anything as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We are instead using the contemplative space we inhabit in that moment of exploring the Machine to bring us closer to our intuition. If we can hear our intuition loud and clear, then we can trust in the creative decisions we are making as a result. If we can trust in our creative decisions, then we are gifted with a deep, knowing sense that we are doing our best and most honest work in each moment, both as artists and as human beings. No matter what new technologies we embrace from this contemplative space, balance is maintained without extraneous effort. Any flood can continue on and we can respond accordingly, preserving the Organic in all its undeniable glory.
Steve Reich. "It’s Gonna Rain, Part I (1965)" Early Works, Nonesuch Records, 1987, https://music.apple.com/us/album/its-gonna-rain-part-i-1965/79577208?i=79577204.
Steve Reich. "It’s Gonna Rain, Part II (1965)" Early Works, Nonesuch Records, 1987, https://music.apple.com/us/album/its-gonna-rain-part-ii-1965/79577208?i=79577206.
Boosey & Hawkes. "Steve Reich on Composing "It's Gonna Rain"" YouTube, uploaded by Boosey & Hawkes, 17 August 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQFh85RY03c.
Iggy Pop Playlist
Iggy Confidential
Archival - May 18, 2025
Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”
23 Stripping - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel April 10, 2026
Stripping, don’t go too far…
Chris Gabriel April 10, 2026
Judgement
Stripping, don’t go too far.
Lines
1
Stripping the bed of its legs.
2
Stripping the bed of its frame.
3
Stripping it.
4
Stripping the bed and stripping the sleeper.
5
One catches the favour of courtiers like catching fish.
6
A great fruit goes uneaten. The Sage finds a way out, while the small are stripped of their homes.
Qabalah
Netzach to Malkuth: The Path of Qoph. The Moon.
The hexagram gives us the image of a landslide, both with a mountain losing earth, and visually . The ideogram shows us a carving knife, the image of stripping away, peeling, and cutting. This is the subject of the famous William Blake line:
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
Judgment: When walking on eroding soil, one must be careful or the whole structure may collapse. Further, if one is cutting something, they must not go too far or risk cutting themselves.
1 A thorough cleaning. The legs of a bed are stripped and a weak foundation is strengthened.
2 The bedframe is now undone, the continuation of the foundation’s strengthening.
3 Beyond the bed, this is a stripping away of surfaces and appearances. Blake puts it well: melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
4 A strange and humorous image, after one has removed the sheets from a bed, they remove the clothes of the one in the bed. A thorough stripping.
5 The image changes a great deal, away from the bed motif. Now rather than taking something apart, we are bringing something together. This is the animal magnetism of Mesmer, the ability to energetically attract.
6 The image changes again, cataclysm comes, what had been saved is lost, a wise man escapes, but everyone else loses everything. This is a natural disaster. Consider the food perfectly preserved by the explosion of Vesuvius in Pompeii.
It is important to dig into the image of the bed that repeats through the lines; the place of sleep and dreams, the place where we are unconscious. This is the thing that must be cleansed, rearranged, and understood clearly. As stated before, this is the “cleansing of the doors of perception”, the stripping away of surfaces to see what truly lies below. David Lynch says it well: the sleeper must awaken.
Both individually and as a species, we must awaken. We undergo personal catastrophes to grow stronger and more aware. The same is true of worldly catastrophes. The wise hunger for this learning, but most fear traumatic growth. Should our tribulations not awaken us, the last line warns us that coming catastrophes will strip us of everything.
Personal disasters are the most common source of awakening: break ups, car crashes, near death experiences, and deaths. These strip away the monotony of our lived experiences and reveal the gnashing maw of reality in vivid detail and provide us with a truth that cannot be easily ignored or repressed.
Even God had to engrave and strip himself to create the world. This is described in the first verse of the Sepher Yetzirah:
With 32 mystical paths of Wisdom
engraved Yah
It is through engraving the divine that he made space for reality to be created. This is why writing is so significant in the text, being that words were cut into clay or stone.
The hexagram corresponds to the Path of Qoph, which is the image of the back of the head, and to the tarot card of the Moon. This shows us clearly that the subject is the Unconscious mind. This is the realm where things grow dirtier and dirtier, and where we sink all our unpleasant perceptions. It is the veil between the conscious and the Unconscious that must be pierced and stripped away. Jung put it perfectly:
Until you make the Unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Film
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John C. Lilly: Solid-State Intelligence Rebel
Molly Hankins April 9, 2026
Scientist, poet and author Dr. John C. Lilly was a controversial figure, best described in a new documentary as a man “determined to get his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness”…
The Centre of the Cyclone, Justin Todd. 1972.
Molly Hankins April 9, 2026
Scientist, poet and author Dr. John C. Lilly was a controversial figure, best described in a new documentary as a man “determined to get his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness.” Working tirelessly throughout his life to synthesise science-fiction and metaphysics into hard science, Lilly is most well-known for his work studying dolphins and his theory of self-programming, a radical take on neuroscience proclaiming that the brain is a ‘programmable human biocomputer.’ To pack his life story into a single film is a tremendous undertaking, but John C. Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, directed by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens and released this year, takes it on fearlessly. The film delves into a lesser known portion of Lilly’s work, his obsession with rebelling against what he called ‘solid-state consciousness or intelligence’ in order to free his own mind.
Lilly identified what he believed to be a malevolent force in the universe, which he referred to solid-state intelligence (SSI). During his many psychedelic trips, often taking place in a sensory-deprivation floatation tank of his own design, Lilly perceived that life on Earth was playing out amidst a mythological battle of good and evil. Solid-state intelligence was antithetical to an opposing, benevolent force he believed to be extraterrestrial-powered called ECCO, an acronym for Earth Coincidence Control Office, and the name of the Almereyda and Stephens’s documentary. He believed this force of good used coincidence and synchronicity as invitations to disengage from the ‘consensus simulation’ of the solid-state reality, and begin to merge with higher-dimensional intelligence.
‘Coincidence control’ refers to Lilly’s idea that internal states appear to orchestrate external events, which is what we experience as synchronicity. He believed this was a false interpretation of reality, one that actually feeds SSI by keeping us locked into a worldview where our Earthly experience is all there is. Such synchronistic experiences, Lilly claimed, were actually the work of a caring, extraterrestrial intelligence base that exists in higher dimensions in order to remind us of our spiritual nature. He also believed ECCO was transmitted through the frequencies emitted by whales and dolphins. Lilly said SSI was an artificial force that seduces us into forgetting ourselves as spiritual beings by beckoning us further and further into the consensus simulation of human limitation and cutting us off from our true, unlimited nature.
ECCO, on the other hand, served as a cosmic guidance system he came to identify as a more refined concept of the Creator. In Italian, the word ecco translates roughly to ‘here you are’ or ‘this is it.’ Lilly said, “I call God ECCO now… I finally found a God that was big enough.” His experience of ECCO registered to him as being alien in origin, but as he had more psychedelic experiences both in and out of the sensory-deprivation tank, he began to experience samadhi, the cosmic bliss and total peace from realizing our connection to all of life. His fascination with cetaceans led him to wonder if dolphins and whales experience some version of this state of being throughout their lives. As a young scientist, he set out to learn how a highly intelligent, non-technological species that doesn’t build anything evolves. He concluded that their social nature and individual states of being, must become very advanced and that they’re transmitting the information field of those advanced ways of being through sound.
Lilly spent much of his later years iterating protocol to counter the work of SSI, and describes working with Ram Dass on this matter in his autobiography Center of the Cyclone. Ram and Lilly developed meditative affirmations to help connect with ECCO. It began first as Lilly declaring himself to be the meta-programmer of his own human biocomputer in an effort to disidentify from his physical form and opinion of his Earthly self. It then evolved to: “I am not the biocomputer. I am not the programmer. I am not the programming. I am not the programmed. I am not the program.” From this point on in his meditations, Lilly was able to identify more with the universal intelligence of ECCO and witness his human-self more objectively. “Let me just be me - hereing and nowing - accepting what is, and what is not, equally as true,” he wrote of this turning point in his own evolution. It’s the state of being he hypothesized to be baseline-consciousness for cetaceans.
“To transcend one’s limiting set, one establishes an open-ended set of beliefs about the unknown.”
Lilly’s use, and what many would argue was abuse of L.S.D., P.C.P. and ketamine, destroyed his reputation as a scientist. But he claimed that there was only one role in the quest for true self-understanding, that of an explorer. He aspired to be a dispassionate scientist, but found that to be fraught with SSI limitations. As an explorer, he seemed to tap into what he described as “very deep and basic truths about realities that are not ordinarily experienced.” This exploration took him further and further away from the aspirational objectivity of the scientific method and further into becoming a philosopher and mystic. To him, every trip further removed him from the false matrix of solid-state living, strengthening his connection to the beyond-Earth intelligence of ECCO.
Another role Lilly played throughout his life besides explorer, was that of a poet. He penned his most famous poem, In The Province of the Mind, when he was in high school. It contains profound foreshadowing of his life’s work, certainly regarding his focus on understanding consciousness, and maybe even alluding to the unconventional methods he would use to explore both its limited and unlimited nature. According to the documentary, when asked what happens when we die Lilly said he’d like to reincarnate with five other souls into the body of a sperm whale. This poem charts the course of his life’s work, a multi-decade rebellion against the limited perception inherent to our solid-state in the world of form, hopefully leading him to his next incarnation as a 50-ton whale with his most beloved companions.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits, to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are beliefs to be transcended.
Hidden from one’s self is a covert set of beliefs that control one’s thinking, one’s actions, and one’s feelings.
The covert set of hidden beliefs is the limiting set of beliefs to be transcended.
To transcend one’s limiting set, one establishes an open-ended set of beliefs about the unknown.
The unknown exists in one’s goals for changing one’s self,
in the means for changing,
in the use of others for the change,
in one’s capacity to change,
in one’s orientation towards change,
in one’s elimination of hindrances to changes,
in one’s assimilation of the aids to change,
in one’s use of the impulse to change,
in one’s need for changing,
in the possibilities of change,
in the form of change itself,
and in the substance of change and of changing.
The unknown exists in one’s goals for changing one’s self,
in the means for that change,
in the use of others in the changing,
in one’s capacity for changing one’s self,
in one’s orientation towards changes,
in the elimination of hindrances to changing,
in one’s assimilation of the aids to changing,
in one’s impulses towards changing one’s self and undergoing changes,
in one’s needs for changes,
in the possibilities for change,
in the form of the changes themselves,
and in the substances of the changes and of changing itself.
There are unknowns in my goals towards changing
There are unknowns in my means of changing.
There are unknowns in my relations with others in changing.
There are unknowns in my capacity for changing.
There are unknowns in my orientation towards changing.
There are unknowns in my assimilation of changes.
There are unknowns in my needs for changing.
There are unknowns in the possibilities of me changing.
There are unknowns in the form into which changing will put me.
There are unknowns in the substance of the changes that I will undergo, in my substance after changes.
My disbelief in all these unknowns is a limiting belief, preventing my transcending my limits.
My disbelief in all these unknowns is a belief, a limiting belief, preventing my transcending my limits.
By allowing, there are no limits;
no limits to thinking,
no limits to feeling,
no limits to movement.
By allowing, there are no limits.
There are no limits to thinking,
no limits to feeling,
no limits to movement.
That which is not allowed is forbidden.
That which is allowed, exists.
In allowing no limits, there are no limits.
That which is forbidden is not allowed.
That which is not allowed is forbidden.
That which exists is allowed.
That which is allowed, exists.
In allowing no limits, there are no limits.
That which is not allowed is forbidden.
That which is forbidden is not allowed.
That which is allowed, exists.
That which exists is allowed.
To allow no limits, there are no limits.
No limits allowed, no limits exist.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
In the province of the mind there are no limits.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true.
There are no limits.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
Jeff Harmon
2h 21m
4.8.26
In this clip, Rick speaks with Jeff Harmon about how creativity is inhibited for most people due to the need to work for a living.
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Carnunthum Meditations (167 A.D)
Marcus Aurelius April 7, 2026
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial…
A Roman Emperor and a stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius wrote twelve short books across his life intended only for personal as a source of guidance and self-improvement. Made up mostly of maxims to live by, these works were collected and published some centuries after his death and came to be known as ‘Meditations’. Today, ‘Meditations’ is one of the worlds most enduring works of philosophy, and serves as a bedrock of our understanding of stoicism, a philosophical movement based on self-determination, discipline, and morality. In this book, written during his time in Carnunthum, Aurelius tells us that by focusing on our own mind, acting with purpose and integrity, and aligning with nature’s order, we can remain undisturbed by external events, pleasure, pain, or the opinions of others. The text presents a Stoic acceptance of mortality and impermanence, arguing that a life guided by reason, gratitude, and inner coherence is sufficient for tranquility, regardless of fate.
Marcus Aurelius April 7, 2026
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is, air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer either be dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.
All that is from the gods is full of Providence. That which is from fortune is not separated from nature or without an interweaving and involution with the things which are ordered by Providence. From thence all things flow; and there is besides necessity, and that which is for the advantage of the whole universe, of which thou art a part. But that is good for every part of nature which the nature of the whole brings, and what serves to maintain this nature. Now the universe is preserved, as by the changes of the elements so by the changes of things compounded of the elements. Let these principles be enough for thee, let them always be fixed opinions. But cast away the thirst after books, that thou mayest not die murmuring, but cheerfully, truly, and from thy heart thankful to the gods.
Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.
Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.
Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of honouring thyself. Every man's life is sufficient. But thine is nearly finished, though thy soul reverences not itself but places thy felicity in the souls of others.
Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around. But then thou must also avoid being carried about the other way. For those too are triflers who have wearied themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every movement, and, in a word, all their thoughts.
Through not observing what is in the mind of another a man has seldom been seen to be unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.
Theophrastus, in his comparison of bad acts- such a comparison as one would make in accordance with the common notions of mankind- says, like a true philosopher, that the offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger. For he who is excited by anger seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and unconscious contraction; but he who offends through desire, being overpowered by pleasure, seems to be in a manner more intemperate and more womanish in his offences. Rightly then, and in a way worthy of philosophy, he said that the offence which is committed with pleasure is more blameable than that which is committed with pain; and on the whole the one is more like a person who has been first wronged and through pain is compelled to be angry; but the other is moved by his own impulse to do wrong, being carried towards doing something by desire.
“For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him?”
Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? But in truth they do exist, and they do care for human things, and they have put all the means in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils. And as to the rest, if there was anything evil, they would have provided for this also, that it should be altogether in a man's power not to fall into it. Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse? But neither through ignorance, nor having the knowledge, but not the power to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.
How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are- all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child. This, however, is not only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the purposes of nature. To observe too how man comes near to the deity, and by what part of him, and when this part of man is so disposed.
Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbours, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him, and to reverence it sincerely. And reverence of the daemon consists in keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men. For the things from the gods merit veneration for their excellence; and the things from men should be dear to us by reason of kinship; and sometimes even, in a manner, they move our pity by reason of men's ignorance of good and bad; this defect being not less than that which deprives us of the power of distinguishing things that are white and black.
Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him? These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.
Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was said, if a man receives what may be got out of it as far as it is true.
The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumour on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. In the next place, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any man, or even moves towards him with the intention of injuring, such as are the souls of those who are angry. In the third place, the soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain. Fourthly, when it plays a part, and does or says anything insincerely and untruly. Fifthly, when it allows any act of its own and any movement to be without an aim, and does anything thoughtlessly and without considering what it is, it being right that even the smallest things be done with reference to an end; and the end of rational animals is to follow the reason and the law of the most ancient city and polity.
Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher.
Hannah Peel Playlist
Archival - March 24, 2025
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.
22 Shining - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel April 4, 2026
Shining is prosperity. Go a little way…
Chris Gabriel April 4, 2026
Judgement
Shining is prosperity. Go a little way.
Lines
1
Shining his toes, he gives up the chariot and goes on foot.
2
Shining his beard.
3
Shining so it glimmers.
4
Shining white. On a flying white horse, like a thief in the night.
5
Shining in the high garden, a tiny tiny thread of silk.
6
Shining bright.
Qabalah
Tiphereth to Netzach: The Path of Nun. Death.
Tiphereth illuminates the love of Netzach
The hexagram gives us the image of fire at the foot of a mountain, and the resulting beauty and illumination. The ideogram shows grass, and a cowrie shell - the currency of ancient China, Africa, and India. Just as gold was used for both money and jewelry, so too were cowrie shells. The image is that of a cowrie shell necklace; something to make the face shine.
Judgment: Jewelry and beauty are a sign of prosperity, but one should not go too far lest they risk being gaudy.
1 When we make our feet beautiful, walking is a joy. Consider the excitement of a child with new shoes, ready to show them off.
2 A beard on its own is a sort of ornament to the face, when we decorate it further, it can show power. We can think of the Postiche, the golden false beards worn by ancient Egyptian Pharaohs.
3 Jewelry can become dull when worn regularly, in which case we shine it to make it glimmer and sparkle again. The shine is the valuable part of jewelry, consider how jewelry mirrors the natural glimmering of water.
4 Here we see an echo of Bellerophon riding a winged Pegasus and then falling, or perhaps more vividly, Christ on a White Horse from Revelation 19:
11And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. 12His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.
And as he appears in 1 Thessalonians
2 For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.
This is the shining of the Divine.
5 Though the thread of silk is small, it is very strong, having greater tensile strength than a comparable steel wire. It looks weak on its own, but will make something fit for a king when put to use.
6 Here there is shining without a source, the white light of what is beyond the shining sun and stars. An almost universal feature of near death experiences is the vision of endless white light.
Mankind has left behind an endless history of beauty. From primordial times when we gathered the smoothest rocks and shells, to the modern day mining of gold, silver and jewels, we have always valued what shines. In the luminous we see the divine, and hope for life in the hereafter.
The correspondence with the Path of Nun and the Tarot card Death is significant here, from it we can see the beautification of the dead - a vital practice for the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, who fantastically decorated the bodies of the dead, their tombs, and their graves (even pyramids are graves). This is also the simple act of putting coins over the eyes of the dead.
Adding “Earth” to the titular ideogram gives us the word for Grave: 墳. A grave is beautified earth.
Film
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The Architecture of Dreams
Robin Sparkes April 2, 2025
Carl Jung, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis, tells the story of a patient who dreamt of a golden scarab…
Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Strip (Aerial Perspective), Rem Koolhaas. 1972.
Robin Sparkes April 2, 2026
Carl Jung, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis, tells the story of a patient who dreamt of a golden scarab; a luminous, rare beetle. As she recounted the dream to Jung, he heard a tapping at the window behind him. He opened it and in flew a scarab-like beetle, the closest analogue to the golden scarab found in their region. He caught it and placed it in her hands. Her dream breached reality and became a foundational example of what Jung described as synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle where the psyche and the material world fold briefly into one another in correlation. An inner image manifested into matter. Synchronicity proposes that meaning is constructed as it is encountered, appearing at the precise intersection of inner intuition and outer event. Jung believed dreams were an amplification of the self and advocated writing them down, building a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind.
A bridge.
When I was 23, I moved from an old Victorian house along Burgess Park Camberwell, in South London, to Leonard and Power Street in Brooklyn, New York. In both cities I was one bridge away from the centre. In London, the Thames, in New York, the East River. From outer membrane to temporal nucleus.
My first evening in New York was April Fool’s Day and I walked home late from Manhattan, crossing the bridge back to Williamsburg. At the apex of the suspended passage, something blurred. I forgot my new life in New York. In my tired eyes I imagined crawling into my bed in Camberwell, sightlining through the window to the tennis courts of Burgess Park. I was listening to Surround by Hiroshi Yoshimura.
By the time I reached the end of the bridge, Manhattan folded into Brooklyn, and I felt I had crossed the street from Borough Market to Broadway. For the next four years I lived half the year between London and New York with recurring dreams that they were the same place. I never spent enough time in either city to feel fully at home. There formed a liminal metropolis in the unconscious, an archetypal interior where distance dissolved. My transient life was rearranging space in my dream field of the sister cities. I would leave a rave in South London and cross a bridge to arrive in Midtown. Friends from both cities occupied the same rooms, as though the psyche were composing their own compensatory geography. Streets overlaid one another as tracing paper over a plan. I began to rethink my relationship to architecture. What is architecture in psychological space?
After Brooklyn I moved to Harlem. Then back to Camberwell. In December 2019, I returned to New York and stayed in a mystical woman’s apartment in a building called the School House in Chinatown. She left dried leaves on the counter and insisted I drink them in hot water each day. Over lunch I told a friend in the building about how I would dream about living simultaneously in London and New York. I found myself scanning his shelves. My hands landed on a large chrome volume, 1,344 pages heavy, called S,M,L,XL by the architect Rem Koolhaas. He said he’d read it in Toronto, explaining how a running dictionary moved through the book, continuously cross-referencing itself. A few months later, I bought the same book at the Architectural Association Bookshop in London.
Over the Covid lockdowns, I returned to New York and took S,M,L,XL with me to Alphabet City’s towering complex blocks lining the FDR. I took up running, traversing from the east village to central park, where I would lay on the grass and stare at the clouds. I was sitting along the east river, when I read the prologue to S, M, L, XL, which begins with ‘Once, a city divided in two parts.’ Koolhaas proceeds to discuss the bridges over a river, which axis London, a surreal reorganisation of the centre. Synchronicity. A bridge as mediator. Time folding back on itself. Inner condition and external structure streaming parallel.
“How do we measure the timeline of synchronicity, that does not begin or end?”
Many metropolises are established along rivers, where waterways functioned as primary logistical corridors for trade and extraction. An infrastructural spine for commerce, circulation, and territorial growth. Architecture is a necessity.
Shelter. Infrastructure. Circulation. Dreams construct spaces not because we require them for survival, but perhaps because we long for them or symbolically relate to them through time looping. In my dreams, bridges unfolded beyond their structural connections, becoming temporal architectures attuned to my body’s rhythms, marking cycles of sleep and wake, shifts in alertness, and the flow of circadian time.
After Covid, I took a turn in my career path and I moved permanently back to London. I no longer dream of London and New York merging.
Perhaps the architecture of our dreams reveals our most honest urbanism, one governed not by capital or infrastructure, but by longing. When I stood on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, imagining Camberwell, was I recalling or forecasting. Was I building a future self who would one day return? Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams are a theatre of memory, where past experiences and desires fold into the present dreamscape. When we imagine constructing a theatre from an architectural perspective, how do we perceive the ways it differs from a brain. Both organise space, filter light,create thresholds, andmediate between inside and outside. In dreams, micro and macro collapse and the universe extends above and within. Do our dreams operate in four dimensional space? Albert Einstein proposed that time is a dimension like space. If so, the dream may be a spatial mirror, allowing past, present and future coexist in the same corridor.
Hour Glass Theatre for Listening, Bojan Kostović.
A painter renders an image from the inner eye. A dreamer constructs a place from memory and anticipation. Both contract imagery into form, both edit reality. A friend once described dreaming of a flea market that felt as if it were a neverending city, with shiny objects stretching infinitely. Another described dreaming, without color, of an infinite tower with a spiral staircase, standing on an endless road. These are architectural typologies, the market, the road, the tower. But in dreams they are unbound by gravity or planning permission, they are spatial metaphors. “Dreaming is the doorway,” writes Eric Wargo, who discusses time loops as retrocausation and precognition. Are we dreaming forward or remembering backward? Is there a possibility that we are beyond a myopic now? Is what we consider the ‘now’ just a glimpse of synchronicity over an expanded lifetime, and how do we measure the timeline of synchronicity, that does not begin or end?
If architecture is the organisation of space across time, perhaps dreams are a radical form of architecture: structures without matter, cities without borders, bridges that span oceans. We are living in a world of scarce resources. If architecture is shaped by need, and dreams are shaped by desire, we must ask ourselves what our intention is toward those desires. Can our dreams reveal what our environment is asking of us? Can they expose the excess, the longing, the imbalance between what we require and what we consume. What are we building, and why?
Perhaps synchronicity is not only a poetic coincidence, but an ethical signal. A moment where inner imagery meets outer condition and responsibility. If our dreams are architecture without material limits, they move freely and without consequence. Waking architecture, by contrast, always carries consequences. In a time of ecological strain and spatial inequality, desire cannot remain abstract. It must be examined. Redirected. Refined.
Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.
Jonah Hill
1h 54m
4.1.26
In this clip, Rick speaks with Jonah Hill about social media and social pressures caused by it.
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The Book Cover Review: The Chrysalids
Thomas Sharp March 31, 2026
There were two ways that people living a very long time ago would leave handprints on the walls of caves.
Thomas Sharp March 31, 2026
There were two ways that people living a very long time ago would leave handprints on the walls of caves. No doubt you’ll have used both methods as a child, when your imagination was emergin and mark-making was a daily activity.
The first is a stencil, drawing around outstretched digits. Picture our ancestors placing their hand against the rough stone and precisely spitting pigment at it. And the second method is to leave a solid print, as we see on this 1964 paperback edition of John Wyndhams’s The Chrysalids.
The dogma of decades was that prehistoric artists were men. More recent research begins tounpick this dominant narrative (someone had the good idea of measuring finger ratios),fixing women at the centre of the cultures’ creativity.
‘When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city – which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was.’ So opens this beautiful, melancholic, thrilling coming-of-age story. It is set in a time post ‘Tribulation’, the reader inferring this to be some ancient nuclear catastrophe caused by the godless Old People, misremembered in religious tracts of deity vengeance. Humans have rebuilt small communities, trying to coax an irradiated land to produce crops and animals.
The inevitable arable and livestock mutations are rigidly rejected by the dominant, dogmatic ruling men as ‘abominations’ and ‘blasphemies’. To be alive but to fall outside the mainstream narrative is to live as an ‘offence’.
Main character David has his own mutation, one he is able to hide from the terrifyingly conservative family he is growing up in. One day he meets another child, Sophie. She has a more visible blasphemy, a sixth toe. Her family survives secretly on the outskirts of the village. To be found would mean banishment to the Badlands – an unlivable wasteland.
I admire our cover artist, Bryan Kneale, for ignoring the fact that Sophie’s genetic anomaly is on her foot, rather than her hand. In fact I’m not sure anyone in the book is described as having six fingers. But here we are – a downward facing black/purple extra-pinky handprint set against the atomic flash of Penguin orange and reaching out to the reader in mutated welcome.
Actually, the 1955 hardback first edition of The Chrysalids does use a foot with a bonus toe and it just doesn’t work. Footprints speak of journey, handprints speak of creation. We find traces of our own Old People in cave complexes and ancient river beds. Their footprints are accidentally preserved, some plodding hunter treading in the right combination of mud, whereas their handprints are deliberate marks full of agency and hope, stretching out to us across a million tribulations.
The Chrysalids of the title are David and a group of his friends. Their unseen mutation is less a blasphemy and more the inevitable future of the human race.
And this is what they share with our prehistoric artists.
Thomas Sharp is a British poet and creative director. He has created work for the British Library, Sir Simon Russell Beale, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Cubitts, Politico. Historic Royal Palaces, London Fire Brigade, Design Museum, English National Ballet, Henry Moore Foundation and the Francis Crick Institute. He self-publishes and his colophon is his own handprint plus an extra finger. You can see his commercial work here, his artistic work here and receive regular thoughts on language, consciousness, magick and romance from here.
This article was borrowed from David Pearson’s Book Cover Review. To see more like it, head here.
21 Biting - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel March 28, 2026
Biting is prosperity. Gain by correction…
Chris Gabriel March 28, 2026
Judgement
Biting is prosperity. Gain by correction.
Lines
1
Chained feet. One’s toes are cut off.
2
Biting flesh, cutting off the nose.
3
Biting cured meat and finding poison.
4
Biting dried meat and finding a gold arrow.
5
Biting dried meat and finding yellow gold.
6
Chained neck. One’s ear is cut off.
Qabalah
Gevurah to Tiphereth: The Path of Lamed. Adjustment. Gevurah corrects Tiphereth
In this hexagram we see the image of a mouth, with the solid lines on the top and bottom as the lips, the broken lines as the teeth, and the solid line in between as a thing being bitten. It is thunder below the sun, a solar flare or a sudden lightning strike. The ideogram provides an image of biting, with one character relating to “biting questions” or “biting words”, and the other directly to eating.
Judgment: Biting, here, is correction itself. Just as the Qabalistic path is Lamed, the shepherd’s crook, we can think of the nipping shepherd dog keeping the sheep on the proper path. In the human realm, this relates to crime and punishment: the pursuit of Justice.
1 At the lowest line, we see the feet in chains, and the toes cut off. This is a historical punishment meant to cripple a warrior. This occurs in Judges 1:6, But Adonibezek fled; and they pursued after him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and his great toes.
This is also the ritual punishment of Kings described by Robert Graves, “the sacred king was ritually lamed in a way that obliged him to swagger or lurch on high heels”
2 This is the idiom of “cutting your nose to spite your face”, a punishment that hurts the one inflicting it. Traditionally, the cutting of noses, known as rhinotomy, was a punishment for adulterers. The most famous example of nose cutting was inflicted on Byzantine emperor Justinian II “Rhinotmetos”, who was deposed and mutilated, but made himself a golden nose, overthrew his enemies, and became emperor again.
3 The preparation of a cured meat has been accomplished, but within it there is poison. This is punishing an old crime. In a case like this one should “let sleeping dogs lie”, not try to punish too severely, for the feelings this arises are toxic. This is revenge rather than justice.
4 Finding a golden arrow in dried meat, this is an investigation, piercing through to the heart of the matter, chewing on a case.
5 The golden truth is found in the midst of this dried meat. The case has been chewed on and the facts of the matter have made a judgment clear.
6 Mirroring the first line, here we see the head enchained, and the ears cut off. This is a criminal who is deaf to counsel and blind to justice. Punishment will have no effect on someone like this.
As this hexagram relates to the Tarot card Justice, we see that that the law is dealt by the Sword she holds. Across cultures and times, many punishments took the form of mutilations; the offending body part would be cut off, such as the hands of a thief. In the lines, we have many forms of punishments with varied results as well as forms of judging crime.
While we may not be judges or criminals, we must develop good judgment and know when to correct behaviours in ourselves and those who wrong us. We must not go too far, or be too lenient, but keep to the straight and narrow path of justice.
Film
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