18 Approaching - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel March 14, 2026
Approaching is the origin of a pure and bountiful harvest, but after eight months it’s unfortunate…
Chris Gabriel March 14, 2026
Judgement
Approaching is the origin of a pure and bountiful harvest, but after eight months it’s unfortunate.
Lines
1
Approaching together in purity.
2
Approaching together: joint approach.
3
Approaching, but gaining nothing. He worries.
4
Approaching and achieving.
5
Approaching with knowledge makes a prince do great work.
6
Approaching with offerings.
Qabalah
Imperfectly the Path of Vau: Chesed to Chokmah. The Hierophant.
In this hexagram we are given the image of the shoreline, a Lake approaching the Earth. The ideogram gives us the image of supplicants: a crown is met with three kneeling people making requests. This is the role of both a petitioner at the court of a King, and the prayers in which we make our pleas to God. As the tide slowly and humbly meets the earth, so the supplicant petitions the King.
The Judgment tells us it is good to make requests and attempt to make changes in the world, but when no ground is gained, it’s best to move on, lest it becomes begging.
1 A unified group advocating for a cause may be able to sway the powers that be with greater effect than a lone individual.
2 Forming coalitions can allow advocates for multiple causes to gain greater influence.
3 Often pleas are met with no results. This is something to contemplate. One should not go on tilting at windmills, but find the most effective method to achieve one’s goals.
4 The petition is accepted, the low meets the high on even ground now.
5 People with power must attract wise and knowledgeable people. Wise people must approach people with power. It is through interaction that great works can be achieved, for both sides are weaker without the other.
6 Lobbyists know well that the key to making changes can be bringing gifts to those in power.
In each line we see a form of petition and its potential for effect. While the text refers primarily to worldly powers, the corresponding Tarot card, the Hierophant or Pope, gives us the perfect symbol: a worldly power representative of a divine power - unifying supplication as legal and divine. This has of course been the case for much of history: the God-Kings of Egypt, China, and the Americas.
A great deal of ritual magic consists of petitioning spiritual powers. As these lines show, there is little difference between making pleas to a king or a deity; one should make the approach with a group, one should have offerings, and most importantly one must have the knowledge to make use of such an interaction.
While many people may never make pleas to a king or petition a deity, nearly everyone will interview for a job, ask for a raise, or try to gain money from another. This is the mundane function of the hexagram. Therefore, let us grow in wisdom so we can approach those who can change our lives, and not make fools of ourselves.
The Mountain and The Fool
Molly Hankins March 13, 2026
On the very first card of the Tarot Major Arcana we find The Fool…
Molly Hankins March 12, 2026
On the very first card of the Tarot Major Arcana we find The Fool. Attributed to the number 0 and the Hebrew letter Aleph (א), he is pictured with a mountain range behind them. Ready to step into the valley of experience, The Fool looks up blissfully, certain of their safety as they’re about to drop off a cliff. And so it is as we leave Source consciousness and step into the valley of separate individuation. Our souls long to know what we’re getting into, but once we take that step into physical incarnation we are stepping off a metaphorical cliff into the great unknown.
At this early stage in the journey, The Fool is still knowingly connected to superconsciousness or source-consciousness, which we forget as we get further into our incarnations. It is exactly this connection that allows The Fool to remain so calm. The number zero represents superconsciousness and harkens to the zero point where consciousness begins; our collective point of origin also known as The Cosmic Egg. Occult author and founder of ‘Builders of the Adytum Mystery School’ Paul Foster Case attributed Aleph to this card because it is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s also known as the father, or the ox as it’s expressed in pictograph, a symbol of the motive, life-giving force from which all things derive.
The Fool is accompanied by a small dog: an evolved, domesticated descendent of a wild animal symbolizing how our consciousness evolves. As Case wrote, “The little white dog is a descendent of wolves and jackals. Thus he is a human adaptation, whereby something given in a wild and dangerous state by the modified processes of nature has been changed into a friend, helper and companion of man. He also indicates the truth that all subhuman forms of the Life-power are elevated and improved by the advance of human consciousness.” The dog embodies the same evolution our souls experience while in human form as well - from lower, animalistic tendencies of dominance and submission towards a wider range of conscious expression of creative capacity.
According to Case, the iced-covered mountains in the background of the card refer to the cold, still nature of the Absolute, the Source from which consciousness originates. The human brain and matter itself have been described as ‘warm, wet and noisy,’ most notably by physicist Max Tegmark, the exact opposite expression of cold stillness illustrated by the mountain range. The archetype of The Fool symbolizes the state of Life-power prior to self-expression in the valley of experience. The image of the mountain appears in many of the Tarot Major Arcana cards, including The Emperor, The Lovers, Strength, Temperance, The Star, The Moon and Judgement. The Hermit waits on top of the mountain holding a light for other seekers to make their way back to Source.
“All of us embody the archetype of The Fool as we leave the safety of unexpressed potential and venture into the warm, wet and noisy world of form.”
The image of the mountain is making its way through the pop-culture social media sphere this month, following the release of the new Gorillaz album, The Mountain. Easily the band’s most overtly spiritual record, it was inspired by two trips to India taken by co-founders Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett after their fathers passed away within ten days of one another.
The Mountain album cover illustrates what feels like a perfect completion of the cycle of incarnations, the antithesis to The Fool’s depiction. The album art finds the Gorillaz characters all together at the very top of the mountain facing the sun. It feels like consciousness itself split into all these different characters, found each other in the valley of experience, had a great adventure playing and creating in the world of form, and then returned back up the mountain. Scientist and author Itzhak Bentov described the realm of the Creator as ‘the fertile void;’ cold and still at rest but alive with potential for expression. It’s akin to what Paul Foster Case described as the icy peaks of the mountains from which The Fool descends.
The album’s cover art feels like the last stop before these different expressions of consciousness are absorbed back into the fertile void. Three of the band members seem to be looking back down to the valley, but Murdoc (the fictional founder of the band) is looking towards Aleph, expressed as sunlight. Even on his phone, he’s still clearly caught up in the experience of form. The Fool is also looking up, confident in his undertaking even though it might seem quite foolish to come into a realm of duality where inevitably everything and everyone we love in this realm we’ll eventually lose.
According to Bentov, life is the ultimate game of hide-and-seek. Not only do all the different expressions of consciousness ultimately find each other on the proverbial mountain, Bentov also believed that mystical experiences are actually the Creator peaking into the world of form to tell our souls, “Boo! I’m you.” All of us embody the archetype of The Fool as we leave the safety of unexpressed potential and venture into the warm, wet and noisy world of form. Much of The Mountain‘s lyrical content deals with the challenge of saying goodbye to those we love when souls leave their physical bodies. But as the album cover and generally uplifting musical choices in the songs promise, we all ultimately find each other in the end, and again and again throughout the valley of human experience.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
Notes On Writing (1959)
C. S. Lewis March 10, 2026
It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt…
Script from “The Proper Art of Writing”, Paul Franck. 1655.
Ask a hundred writers on their advice for writing and you’ll get a hundred different answers. Myriad schedules, techniques, tactics, and maxims that one writer will swear by are meaningless to another, yet so often are decreed as truth. In 1959, the author of the Narnia series C.S. Lewis received a letter from a young schoolgirl in America, asking for his advice on writing. Lewis answered every letter he ever received, and famously spent hours each day on his correspondences which have since been compiled in multiple volumes. His reply, here, was short and to the point. Lewis acknowledges the difficulty and fallibility of writing advice on a general scale, so instead gives a framework with which to think about process of putting pen to paper, and for him it must be pen to paper as per advice number 7.
C.S. Lewis March 10, 2026
It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.
Turn off the Radio.
Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about. . . .)
Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.
When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.
Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.
C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) was a British author, literary scholar and theologian. Most know as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia
18 Sin (Decaying) - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel March 7, 2026
Decaying is the origin of prosperity…
Chris Gabriel March 7, 2026
Judgement
Decaying is the origin of prosperity. Before the first three days and after the first three days.
Lines
1
Atone for the sins of the father. This is the son's task.
2
Atone for the sins of the mother. They can’t be purified.
3
Atone for the sins of the father, some regret, but not too much.
4
The father’s many sins bring shame.
5
Atone for the sins of the father and be praised.
6
Though he doesn’t work for the King, he is noble.
Qabalah
Netzach to Hod: The Path of Pe. The Tower.
Netzach spoils the thoughts of Hod
Here we see natural growth rotting under a heavy weight. The ideogram shows us three insects in a bowl, this is the name of a magical poison, Gu. It was prepared by putting snakes, scorpions and centipedes together in a container and letting them fightPoisons mixwith poisons, the “winner” would then be consumed by worms, who would contain the perfected poison. This would then be used in black magic.
In this strange ritual we see the nature of the generational sin depicted in the hexagram, poison progressing in danger from creature to creature.
Judgment: Exodus 20:5 clarifies this perfectly
“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
Sin is not localized, it spreads through the generations.
1 Here we see Christ, the Son, who being a man atones for the sins of all men. As Christianity would have all men be Christ-like, the task of any Christian is to atone for their inherited sin. We need not look at it through the lens of religion, Sin in this case is something like “generational trauma” or a family curse. The troubles of past generations are inherited by new ones, and they must be rooted out.
2 The Sins of the Mother are of a different nature, they are closer to nature itself. The sinful, devouring father is a near universally accepted archetype. We are all as familiar with Saturn eating his children, as with Darth Vader. The devouring mother is an altogether ignored archetype, projected onto “wicked step-mothers”. This contributes further to the severity of the mother’s sins, and the profound difficulty of dealing with them.
3 Atoning for sins can bring shame and regret. When undergoing psychoanalysis, one may have a temporary period in which uncovered traumas become acutely activated, but this will pass.
4 Sometimes, the sins of the father are too great to repress and they follow the children everywhere. Consider the children of infamous killers and criminals who may have to change their name to relieve themselves of inherited shame.
5 On the other hand, a terrible parent can produce a brilliant child who restores the pride of a family.
6 Atoning for sins, dealing with traumas, making good. These are profoundly noble pursuits which most are too frightened and weak to accomplish. Doing this elevates one, spiritually and materially.
When we consider the nature of Sin, the hexagram and ideogram give excellent context: the image of decaying, something held down by a heavy weight, under which it rots. Liber AL affirms this in chapter I:41 “The word of Sin is Restriction.” This is not the concept of Sin as a restriction, but rather restriction as the nature of Sin. William Blake expresses this intensely: “Sooner murder and infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
It is when we repress and restrict natural energies that Sin occurs. Wilhelm Reich spent his career describing this; repressed desires and complexes which form not only psychological diseases, but manifest physically as muscular rigidity and disease.
St. John Chrysostom described a similar understanding to the hexagram, the diseased and decaying character of Sin:
“This man is a slave to sin. For tell me not of this, that he is not eaten of worms, nor lies in a coffin, nor has closed his eyes, nor is bound in graveclothes. Nay, for these things he undergoes more grievously than the dead, no worms devouring him, but the passions of his soul tearing him to pieces more fiercely than wild beasts… this man is gathering unto himself diseases without number, while his eyes are open… before his body, his soul is corrupted and destroyed, and undergoes greater rottenness.”
We must cleanse our souls of Sin, whether the restriction of the mind and body through repression, or the restriction of the Soul through evil. When we cleanse ourselves of these, we do good to our fathers,m and even greater for our children, who can be born without needing to bear the shame we ourselves may have been born into.
Disturbed Images
Lamia Priestley March 5, 2026
A roll of belly fat melts into a makeup-caked face; a bag of chips morphs into a family portrait; a butt cheek transforms into a policeman’s bicep…
Lamia Priestley March 5, 2026
A roll of belly fat melts into a makeup-caked face; a bag of chips morphs into a family portrait; a butt cheek transforms into a policeman’s bicep. Gross and sickly, loud and pink, Frank Manzano’s collection of video works, Current Value (2023), uses AI imagery to depict the grotesque in everyday scenes of American suburban life—fistfights, plastic surgery, arrests.
Still from Holistic Consumption Challenge (Current Value), Frank Manzano. (2023).
Rapid cuts between faces result in pile ups of interchangeable characters. An endless treadmill of trash, plastic consumer products, and open mouths, the videos’ choppiness creates what the Chicago-based artist describes as “the human parade”—a crazed illustration of people as stuff. Manzano describes his work as an exploration of “consumerism, massification, the loss of the self.” These themes are felt not just in the works’ subject matter but in the evidence of the mass market AI tools Manzano uses to make many of his images.
Manzano has a fondness for corpulent characters, big butts, cellulite, stretched thighs and teethy smiles. Outside of his focus on flesh, the videos themselves exert a materiality in their reference to the aesthetics of consumer visual culture and their artefacts. There’s the digital lines of security footage, the jacked up saturation of reality TV, the studio lighting of an 80s sitcom, the low res crunchy feel of camcorder home videos. The images look either consumer-grade (camcorder) or like something used to capture consumers (CCTV). But amongst the visual styles referenced in Manzano’s work, one can distinguish something entirely new, the artefacts of AI images.
To create this pastiche, Manzano uses a combination of his own photos, sourced images and ones he generates with AI image tools like Wombo. On a visual level, the artefacts of AI images—the airbrushed smooth skin, confused edges between fingers, gibberish logos and half-baked eyes—contribute to a feeling of the uncanny in these illustrations of the American underbelly. More than just a formal contribution though, these artefacts place the images into a context. Viewers who, over the past few years, have developed a familiarity with AI generated images online, will recognise them here and have some understanding of the process by which they are created—using a dataset of preexisting images. It’s clear that although Current Value’s images have the trademarks of documentary or recorded reality, many of them aren’t real.
“There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence.”
The disturbing nature of Manzano’s videos is due, not to this irreality, but rather to the images’ self-aware embrace of their artificial generation. The AI artefacts are significant because of what they mean in the context of Manzano’s unaspiring video world. Not only are his subjects debased but so too are the images—a perfect marriage of subject and form.
Origins of Fetishization (Current Value), Frank Manzano. 2023.
The philosopher Hannes Bajohr offers a useful framework for understanding this earthbound quality of AI images in his article Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI (2022). Bajohr advocates for interpreting AI arts on their own terms, looking at how they’re made—their “technical substrate”—to develop their aesthetic critiques. Bajohr draws a parallel between artificial neural networks and the ancient aesthetic principle of mimesis—the attempt to imitate or reproduce reality in the creation of art. He outlines two opposing concepts of imitation as it relates to AI images. The first he attributes to the philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s explanation. It describes imitation as construction, which sees “the approximation of an existing state through the inference of the rules that bring it about.” The second concept of imitation, which better describes AI image making, is “imitatio naturae” (imitation of nature). A classical idea that was repopularised in the Renaissance, “imitatio naturae” sees imitation as a mere repetition of the real without the “procedural insight” of imitation as construction. In the case of AI image making, “nature” would be the dataset, and so that from which all representations are derived.
This first approach to imitation, that of construction, implies the possibility of depicting something new. Bajohr emphasises that with the knowledge of a thing’s creation—of its building blocks—moving beyond that thing is possible while in “imitatio naturae”, the representation derives directly from the thing itself. Nature, and so the dataset, is the absolute resource. An artificial neural network can’t truly imagine anything beyond its own dataset, never something outside of that which has already been represented.
There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence. Image generators are so far unable to replicate the mysterious process by which a great artist goes about transforming an ordinary landscape into an image that might produce ineffable revelations in its viewers. The artist—studying how light falls, the relationships of colours, the phenomenon of perspective—might inexplicably assemble a few strokes of paint to reveal something much greater than valleys, woods, hills and streams, much greater than nature.
Manzano’s images are trapped. His subjects lead unambitious lives, marginalised by a cycle of consumerism, greed, lust, violence, and vanity; they're governed by their instincts, unable to escape themselves. So too, AI images exist only in immanence. Image generators simulate master artists’ styles from the past, merely recycling them, destined to make unambitious copies.
Current Value’s images are provocations. They’re affective, disturbing representations of the gutters of material culture because they themselves belong there, unable to dream themselves out.
Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.
Between Nihilism and Salvation
Noah Gabriel Martin March 3, 2026
The chef has requested you not to read that while you eat his food…
Marc Chagall, Sisyphus. 1975.
Noah Gabriel Martin March 3, 2026
“The chef has requested you not to read that while you eat his food,” the waiter said, pointing to my copy of Kafka’s The Trial. I must have given him a confused look, because he smiled and said; “so that you don’t lose your appetite.”
It was embarrassing, but pretty much every social interaction embarrassed me at that age, and it thrilled me too. It was the first time any one out in the city had ever noticed, and seemed to approve of, what I read. I wanted desperately to break the silence in the empty diner, to talk with him further, but I was too shy. I ate my lasagna in silence, paid the bill, and left.
Kafka. Pessoa. Dostoyevsky. Beckett. I wallowed in the literature of despair, bleakness, and nihilism, clinging to the jejune certainty that life is pain like a squalid but tolerable shelter from the storm.
Pessimism saved me from the need to loathe myself, because if there was a fault with being itself, maybe I wasn’t to blame for my unhappiness, maybe it wasn’t that there was something wrong with me.
I took comfort in the belief that it’s okay to not be okay. I reassured myself with philosophical arguments that I was right to find existence a joyless wasteland; that I was right not to believe that things could get better. That pessimism protected me from the people who tried to convince me that their cult or fitness fads or baseline belief in the improvability of the human condition could help.
Growing up on the West Coast in the ‘90s, everybody had something to believe in—EST or Eckhart Tolle or Osho or the Paleo diet or the power of positive thinking. Shifting with the seasons, friends and family clung to one saviour after another, each time with renewed hope that they’d finally found a remedy for their ennui or their gastrointestinal disorder or their money problems.
These days, the circles I move in are more down-to-earth. The people around me aren’t seeking the meaning of life or immortality—they’re just concerned with finding a fulfilling job or making their relationships work. And yet, even these very practical and mundane problems easily acquire a significance that leaps out ahead of itself.
“The job will not save you,” Freamon says to McNulty in an episode of The Wire. Too often we forget this advice. We let the quest for meaningful work, work that contributes to society and brings us creative fulfilment, take on a significance that’s greater than it can bear. We allow ourselves to believe that not only will work bring some limited, contingent meaning into our lives, but that it will bring us an escape from the groundlessness of living.
This is what Simone de Beauvoir called “seriousness” - over-identification with our jobs, or our role as a parent, or our ceramic farmhouse kitchen sink, in which we allow ourselves to forget that, as important as children or jobs are to us, they have no meaning apart from what we invest in them. We can, and often would, be better off if we invested meaning in other things as well.
“The little things can be transformative. Even if they don’t alter the essential character of existence, they can change the way existence feels…”
That’s not to say that your work doesn’t matter, that your family doesn’t matter - they really do (your trendy kitchen sink, however, doesn’t matter). It’s just that we put too much weight on the things we’ve already committed to to save us from the need to constantly create and recreate meaning and purpose. You allow yourself to believe that it’s just an absolute fact that your children matter, not that you’ve chosen to shape your life around that particular source of meaning.
It’s easy for us to carry on trying to find fulfillment in work or relationships or interior decorating because fulfillment is elusive - it’s always a promotion or a new coat of paint away, and that lets us believe that we haven’t reached it yet because we’re falling short. But that’s not it. We haven’t reached it yet because it’s not there to be found. Meaning-making is an infinite task.
I used to be proud that my pessimism sheltered me from the hope so often preyed upon by religious-leaders, middle-managers and marketers; the hope that the solution to the problem of how to live well, an ultimate solution, is somewhere to be found. But this limited me: by being dead-set on avoiding this error, I rushed head-long into its opposite - the belief that just because there is no solution to having problems at all, there are no solutions to this problem or that problem, or that they’re not worth solving.
Despite what the romantics say, love cannot conquer death. But it’s still pretty great. And even though it brings pain, with each hurt we can learn to do it better and make it more enduring. Dancing cannot save us from the fundamental groundlessness of all meaning, but it can make it feel good to have a body and be alive. The little things can be transformative. Even if they don’t alter the essential character of existence, they can change the way existence feels; make it exciting and full of possibilities and significance.
The temptation to give up trying to make things better because ultimately we’re going to die, and ultimately all life will be extinguished at the heat death of the universe, and ultimately nothing really matters, is just as much an error as the temptation to believe we can find ultimate answers. You don’t need to solve these problems in order for that poem you’re writing, or that long lazy Saturday afternoon, or that campaign you’re working on, to be worthwhile.
In fact, to seek salvation and to give in to nihilism are both responses to the same error: the error of only being satisfied by final answers. In either case, it’s a refusal to be content with the kinds of meaning and joy that can be discovered and created in this life, a life that is not only impermanent, but lacks anything beyond itself to give it purpose.
It is exactly because everything that makes life worth living remains incomplete that we can let go of the need for seriousness. Because there’s no final answer, we can let ourselves play.
Albert Camus says, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy”, because being’s inescapable absurdity gives us the chance to fill it with experimentation and inventiveness and feeling; in short, to live!
Dr. Noah Gabriel Martin lectures in philosophy at the University of Winchester and runs the College of Modern Anxiety, a social enterprise that promotes lifelong learning for liberation. He recently began to study dance, which has taught him a lot about being an absolute beginner.
17 Following - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel February 28, 2026
Following is the origin of pure bountiful harvests…
Chris Gabriel February 28, 2026
Judgement
Following is the origin of pure bountiful harvests.
Lines
1
A changing of the guard. Going through the door and making a deal.
2
Cling to the little boy, lose the old man.
3
Cling to the old man, lose the little boy. Followers find what they seek.
4
A growing following. With faith in the Way that’s bright, what could go wrong?
5
Faith in the Great.
6
Grasp it, hold on to it. The King makes sacrifices at the Western Mountain.
Qabalah
Chesed to Gevurah: The Path of Teth. Lust or Strength. The Path between Mercy and Severity.
This hexagram shows the happiness found in submitting to strength, thunder moving the lake. The ideogram contains a flag, walking, and a soldier: an image of following. While the picture of thunder in a lake is difficult to conjure, you may know it by another name, Will o’ the Wisp - a strange moving light seen near swamps and bodies of water. Naturally, people follow them. What they are led to is a matter of debate, are they drawn to buried treasures, to baptism, or to their doom?
1 When powers change, one must discern where to go next and align oneself accordingly. Where is power moving, and how can one follow it?
2 When something new comes into power, it will destroy the old. This is the revolutionary destruction of the Ancien régime and Italian Futurism’s desire to destroy history.
3 When something old returns to power, the new is destroyed. This is the Reactionary restoration of Monarchies and the Fascist desire to return to a Golden Age. As for the followers finding what they seek, we can take this quite directly, Lacan says it best: You are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one!
4 Whichever flavor power takes, it will amass a following. So long as followers have faith in it, it continues to grow.
5 Following is submitting, it is putting one’s faith in a human leader who represents a great ideal, and accordingly appears great themselves.
6 When the leader and their followers achieve their aim, they take hold of power and do not let go. They establish new rituals and all follow.
The key element to consider in this dynamic is that of pleasure and joy, the Lake in the hexagram. It’s easy to see the strength and power of Thunder and make it the primary image but the reality is that submission and obedience are pleasurable, especially in mass. This is the great insight of Wilhelm Reich, who recognized that frustrated, impotent individuals find libidinal release through mass movements. By joining a collective movement, one’s own inadequacies and problems are lost.
A good way to consider the Will o’ the Wisp is in relation to the word “Fascination”, which shares a root with Fascism: Fascinus, the magical phallus god of the Romans. His beautiful phallus would enchant and bewitch those who saw it, and would dispel the envious evil eye. In many ways, political movements come down to exactly this, the masses enchanted by a fascinating charismatic leader. They follow their fascination wherever it will move them. As Peggy March sang: I love him, and where he goes I’ll follow.
Following is not necessarily political: Mohammed, Christ, and Buddha did not isolate themselves, they went about amassing a following. The great victory they offered their followers, however, was in the next life, not in this one.
Let us then be careful of who we follow, and the followings we ourselves may attract.
On the Mechanics of Creation
Molly Hankins February 26, 2026
When scientist and author Itzhak Bentov passed away in 1979 he was in the midst of finishing up a self-illustrated comic strip, which he called the ‘Co[s]mic S[t]rip…
Molly Hankins February 26, 2026
When scientist and author Itzhak Bentov passed away in 1979 he was in the midst of finishing up a self-illustrated comic strip, which he called the ‘Co[s]mic S[t]rip’. Eventually published by his widow Mirtala, the comic became a book called A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness that describes in elegantly simple detail Bentov’s theory on the origin and mechanics of creation, received intuitively during meditation. The theory is best summed up by his predecessor of over 600 years, a 13th century German mystic named Meister Eckhart quoted in the prologue of the book: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me.”
Bentov rarely used the word God, preferring terms like ‘the Creator,’ ‘Universal Mind’ or ‘the Absolute.’ Residing in ‘the fertile void’, this Universal Mind exists in a field of pure potential - it is the original source of consciousness at rest until it decides it wants to create. Anything created from that source is thus inherently made of the same informational code as the Absolute itself. He wrote, “We have to keep in mind that Creation is a big hologram. In other words, every little unit cell in the big structure, whether it is a universe, a cosmos or a super-cosmos or a super-duper-cosmos, contains the information about the whole big structure. The smaller the unit cell, the fuzzier the information; nevertheless, it is there.”
While a grain of sand may have far less consciousness and capacity for creation than an enlightened master, both contain the same divine source code. The ‘fuzziness’found in that bit of sand is best understood as very simple code relative to the more sophisticated program running a human who’s achieved enlightenment. Bentov didn’t live long enough to be exposed to simulation theory, but much of what describes fits in with the idea of the universe as a computer program or video game, designed to generate new experiences. The Absolute is the master-programmer, akin to an acorn seed containing the genetic pattern of a whole oak tree, only instead of a single tree, it contains the blueprint for all there is.
When the Creator becomes active and wants experience, creation begins. Rather than a singular big bang, Bentov subscribes to the idea of a ‘continuous bang’ universe, where the first of many white holes emit a jet of radiation to form a toroidal field around the Creator and matter then forms as it comes from the white hole, first as light. A Biblical interpretation names sound as the prime emanation, because the Creator had to first vibrate the sound of what was to be created before it would manifest. As the book of Genesis says, “Let there be light.” In a continuous bang universe, a white hole and black hole sit back to back in the center of the torus surrounding the Creator, eternally birthing and destroying all there is.
“What is vibrating from the void will manifest and what is not vibrating will not, but it shall still contain the seed for all that could be.”
The idea of vibration as the prime emanation is referred to by Bentov as ‘wiggly consciousness,’ and he contends that everything in existence is made up of a combination of vibration and the fertile void, just like the Creator. When he wrote, “The table, the flowers, the scent of the flowers, and our bodies are all made of rapidly vibrating consciousness,” he’s articulating the same concept as Donald Hoffman’s case against local realism. Hoffman, an author and evolutionary biologist, believes that what we experience as local reality is just a sort of user interface generated by our brains in order to make sense of the sea of wiggly particles we’re immersed in. “Fortunately, our senses disregard all these facts and assemble lovely faces, houses and flowers from hunks of void for us to enjoy. But we know that our senses are deceiving us. The gruesome facts still remain. We are hunks of vibrating, wiggly void!”
What is vibrating from the void will manifest and what is not vibrating will not, but it shall still contain the seed for all that could be. Bentov also points out that the fertile void of pure consciousness is not a private void, but one that connects all there is. “Everybody and everything is made up of this vibrating void, whether you like it or not. Your thinking processes spread out and affect all Creation; there is no privacy, and at this point, it is too late to complain,” he wrote.
The phenomenon of quantum entanglement occurs when two or more particles, such as a pair of photons, become entangled, they remain connected and influence each others’ states even when separated by large distances. According to the book, this process is a mirror of how the Universal Mind creates its experience of ‘other’ by first polarizing into what we understand to be opposites. To activate the creation of all there is, these two poles move away from each other, to opposite ends of the toroidal field surrounding the Creator that looks like a cosmic egg. “Once separated, they want to come together again, because opposite polarities attract each other,” Bentov wrote. “Then the positive end extends with a thunderous sound, the first sound of Creation, it reaches the negative end, whose protospace then begins to flow along the sides of the ovoid, like a wave, outlining the area where space-time and matter will eventually be.”
Bentov also offers an answer for the inevitable question of the meaning of life itself: The point, he tells us, is that the Creator inevitably wants to go beyond the unmanifest rest of the void, craving experience and self-knowledge, but there’s no one and nothing to play with in the unmanifested void! And so vibration begins, followed by polarity, ultimately leading to the creation of all there is. According to this model, we are all fractals of the Universal Mind playing a game of hide-and-seek from our true God-selves. We are so deeply immersed in the world of form that we’ve forgotten our true selves, and what many people call mystical experiences are what Bentov describes as the Absolute saying, “Boo! I’m you!”
He goes even further than this, claiming that the Creator seeks to create more creators who are evolved enough to be responsible for creating their own universes. Achieving enlightenment puts a soul in the running to be promoted from a piece of Creation to Creator-status. Bentov ends the book with a quote from Shankara, an Indian sage who lived in around 800 A.D., to sum up his thesis: “On the vast canvas of the Self, the picture of the manifold worlds, is painted by the Self itself. And the Supreme Self, seeing but itself, enjoys great delight.”
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
The Symbolic Task and The White-Haired Man
Derek Simpson February 24, 2026
“I’m going to give you an act of psychomagic. It won’t address your consciousness but your unconscious…
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1973.
Derek Simpson February 24, 2026
“I’m going to give you an act of psychomagic. It won’t address your consciousness but your unconscious.”
A white-haired man offers this gentle proposal to a white-haired woman seeking remedy for her depression. He instructs her to fill a bottle with tap water. “In order to get out of the condition you’re in, and in order to be the master you are because that’s what you are, you’re going to have to start giving…”
They take a one-block-walk to the Jardin des Plantes, he matches her reluctant pace. In due time, the man pauses their stride, planting his feet along the side of the cement walkway. “Look at this.” He points up at an ancient, wondrous tree poised from within the Earth, frozen in a timeless stretch. “It’s at least 300 years old.” The woman approaches this perfect giant to address it directly. “At first I’m afraid with your big roots, I’m afraid that you… that you…” her arms writhe over an invisible body, miming the hold that the unknown has on her “that you hold me too tightly. I’m afraid. But when I look up it’s fine. I see how beautiful you are.”
The man hands her the bottle, encouraging her to feed her new ally some water and to look up while she does. Sunlight pushes through these woven branches to reach her as the connectedness she previously could not feel is once again present and intuitively understood —she’s been reminded. This man, now beaming, urges her to repeat this ritual with her majestic new friend for the next 20 days explaining that the tree and her are now one, that they share a life.
Our white-haired man is Alejandro Jodorowsky, the creator of psychomagic: a technique for therapy that filters select practices of folk healing through Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind. Put simply, a psychomagic act is a symbolic task to be performed faithfully; your own personal shamanic assignment.
The one sacred rule for a psychomagic act is as follows: if it is prescribed it must be completed. You can, of course, give it a healthy dose of contemplative time before taking action —some clients have even waited years to perform their act. Considering the uncomfortable nature of some of these prescriptions, which regularly include instructions like “act out your own birth with a maternal and paternal participant” or “paint a self portrait with your own blood”, it’s understandable that a client might exhaust any and all other options first. But inevitably we find that in order to heal ourselves, in Jodorowsky’s own words, “we have to do something we’ve never done before - and the harder the better.”
“Jodorowsky respects the intellect but he also understands that in our attempts to heal ourselves, our intellect may only bring us so far.”
Jodorowsky is a noted disruptor, and commonly referenced among lovers of the counter-culture for his groundbreaking contributions to the world of film.. He has long been testing common assumptions on what heights we can and should aspire to in our art-making. Where David Lynch famously traded his paintbrush for a camera and saw clear potential for the motion picture to become the moving painting, Jodorowsky saw an even greater potential for the medium: to heal the ancestral wounds of humanity. It’s clear, in retrospect, that his earliest works for the screen, Fando Y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain, all hold the seeds of psychomagic. Each of these films attempts to aggravate the viewer’s unconscious mind. He hopes to inspire permanent release from mass mental imprisonment. With his more recent autobiographical pictures, The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry, the intention is streamlined. These two films are Jodorowsky’s attempts to heal his own ancestral wounds; they are two distinct acts of psychomagic, self-prescribed.
One moment from 2013’s The Dance of Reality shows Jodorowsky as a boy. He stands atop a cliff ready to jump. The young protagonist is suffering constant abuse by the hands of his own father and is regularly ostracized by those his own age. In the moment he begins to lean forward, our white-haired man emerges from behind to pull him back onto the cliff. In this scene, our director plays his own intuition. He realigns his young self by speaking a series of soft truths, ending in a whisper—“Something is dreaming us. Embrace the Illusion. Live.”
In order to fully embrace the illusion, we must surrender all intellectual reasoning: this is the central tenet of psychomagic. Jodorowsky respects the intellect but he also understands that in our attempts to heal ourselves, our intellect may only bring us so far. Our baggage will become alchemized instead through poetic action. Is that not, after all, what we are all looking for?
If we truly want to heal ourselves, then why is this powerful idea yet to be widely acknowledged? We could cast psychomagic aside out of discomfort or we could say that its wide-eyed discoverer is ahead of his time, but maybe there’s a middle way, a more empowering option. We could instead make ourselves vulnerable, admitting that we don’t actually know what we need in order to heal our deepest pains. Once we’ve come to accept that, we could maybe even muster the courage to open ourselves up to something new, to do something we’ve never done before.
When the white-haired woman was first explaining her depressive predicament to Jodorowsky, she also expressed her doubts. At one point she boils it down to a simple restraint “I don’t understand.” Jodorowsky responds with grace “So let your unconscious understand. I’m not holding a philosophical speech, I’m to perform an act of psychomagic to speak to the unconscious. Psychoanalysis uses words. Psychomagic uses acts. We’re going to perform a psychomagic act.”
Psychomagic: A Healing Art. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Satori Films, 2019.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy. Inner Traditions, 2010.
Dragó, Fernando Sánchez. “Alejandro Jodorowsky: Psychomagic (English subtitles) (Full Interview)” Youtube, Uploaded by Maganopigadus, 27 Jul. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_mTFg7u6VA.
The Dance of Reality. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Le Soleil Films, Caméra One, 2013.
16 Excitement - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel February 21, 2026
Excitement makes princes move armies…
Chris Gabriel February 21, 2026
Judgment
Excitement makes princes move armies.
Lines
1
The sound of excitement.
2
Always hard as a rock.
3
Wide eyed excitement blinds, regrets come too late.
4
The cause for excitement is great. Gather friends like a hairpin gathers hair.
5
Always sick, never dying.
6
Dark excitement comes and spills out.
Qabalah
Binah to Gevurah: The Path of Cheth. The Chariot.
The energy of Gevurah excites the stable Binah.
This hexagram depicts excitement as lightning striking the earth, the calm excited by the storm. The ideogram is a “giving elephant”, the animal’s great thunderous crashes and trumpeting. In man, this is enthusiasm and arousal: the forces that get us up and moving.
The Judgment shows the general idea of the hexagram - excitement is that which emboldens leaders and rallies forces.
1 We can read this literally As the hexagram directly relates to music, this is Wagnerian opera emboldening the aristocracy and the war drum that keeps troops marching.
2 An innuendo for an excited man or animal. The muscles tense as energy readies itself to be unleashed.
3 One can think of the bad decisions made while sexually aroused, or enraged. It is when we are operating on our base natural drives that we make the worst decisions. Our passions override our reason.
4 With a good cause it’s very easy to excite people, exciting language and aesthetics energize.
5 While our drives can often kill us, they can also keep us going far past our reasonable time. Think of an elderly person kept alive by anger and bitterness. Similarly, bats maintain an unusually high body temperature, which allows them to go unharmed by the countless viruses they can be infected with while still able to infect others..
6 When enough excitement builds up, it is bound to release itself and explode. Yeats describes it perfectly in the Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is the case of the hexagram - arousal and passion build up, moving from a part of the body, to the individual, and then the crowd. As Nietzsche puts it:
“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
While excitement inevitably spreads, the key is to control it. To not be overtaken with it, but to use it. While many have recognized the likeness between a rock star and a dictator, one whose words and songs move crowds to outrageous action, music can be a good “release valve” for this sort of collective Dionysian madness, a controlled mass insanity.
This controlling of the energies is precisely the subject of the Tarot card given to this hexagram’s path of Cheth, the Chariot. Cheth itself is the fence or barriers, literally a tool for containing excitement. The Charioteer also controls and directs the energy of his beasts to further himself.
Let us then develop our excitement consciously, move ourselves toward aims we truly desire, and not be moved by the energies swirling around us.
Thank You, Francis! (1923)
Francis Picabia February 17, 2026
One must become acquainted with everybody except oneself…
Optophone I, Francis Picabia. c.1922.
Francis Picabia had an insatiable appetite for art. A true ‘artist’s artist’, he shapeshifted throughout the 20th century, joining and abandoning different movements with reckless abandon. Picabia became a leader of Cubism, a pioneer in Abstraction, a foundational figure in Pop Art, a figure head of Dada, and a primary Surrealist - his paintings could not be contained and his background of wealth meant that he did not need concern himself with money, only creation. In this essay, written when he was already an established figure, he lays out his philosophy of restlessness: an artist must not be concerned with anything other than exploration.
Francis Picabia February 17, 2026
One must become acquainted with everybody except oneself; one must not know which sex one belongs to; I do not care whether I am male or female, I do not admire men more than I do women. Having no virtue, I am assured of not suffering from them. Many people seek the road which can lead them to their ideal: I have no ideal; the person who parades his ideal is only an arriviste. Undoubtedly, I am also an arriviste, but my lack of scruples is an invention for myself, a subjectivity. Objectively it would consist of awarding myself the légion d’honneur, of wishing to become a minister or of plotting to get into the Institute! Well, for me, all that is shit!
What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself a new man every moment, then forget him, forget everything. We should be equipped with a special eraser, gradually effacing our works and the memory of them. Our brain should be nothing but a blackboard, or white, or better, a mirror in which we would see ourselves for a moment, only to turn our back on it two minutes later. My ambition is to be a man sterile for others; the man who set himself up as a school disgusts me, he gives his gonorrhea to artists for nothing and sells it as clearly as possible to amateurs. Actually, writers, painters, and other idiots have passed on the word to fight against the ‘monsters’, monsters who, naturally, do not exist, who are pure inventions, of man.
Artists are afraid; they whisper in each other’s ears about a boogey man which might well prevent them from playing their dirty little tricks! No age, I believe, has been more imbecilic than ours. These gentlemen would have us believe that nothing is happening anymore; the train reversing its engines, it seems, is very pretty to look at, cows are no longer enough! The travelers to this backward Decanville are named: Matisse, Morandi, Braque, Picasso, Léger, de Segonzac, etc., etc. … What is funniest of all is that they accept, as stationmaster, Louis Vauxcelles, whose great black napkin contains only a foetus!
Since the war, a ponderous and half-witted sentiment of morality rules the entire world. The moralists never discern the moral facts of appearances, the Church for them is a morality like the morality of drinking water, or of not daring to wash one’s ass in front of a parrot! All that is arbitrary; people with morals are badly informed, and those who are informed know that the others will not inform themselves.
There is no such thing as a moral problem; morality like modesty is one of the greatest stupidities. The asshole of morality should take the form of a chamber-pot, that’s all the objectivity I ask of it.
This contagious disease called morality has succeeded in contaminating all of the so-called artistic milieux; writers and painters become serious people, and soon we shall have a minister of painting and literature; I don’t doubt that there will be still more frightful assininities. The poets no longer know what to say, so some are becoming Catholics, others believers; these men manufacture their little scribblings as Félix Potin does his cold chicken preserves; people say that Dada is the end of romanticism, that I am a clown, and they cry long live classicism which will save the pure souls and their ambitions, the simple souls so dear to those afflicted by dreams of grandeur!
However, I do not abandon the hope that nothing is finished yet, I am here, and so are several friends who have a love of life, a life we do not know and which interests us for that very reason.
Francis Picabia (1879 – 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist. He is considered one of the most significant and kaleidoscopic artists of his generation.
15 Modesty - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel February 14, 2026
Modesty is prosperity. The Sage achieves his ends…
Chris Gabriel February 14, 2026
Judgment
Modesty is prosperity. The Sage achieves his ends.
Lines
1
The Sage is modestly modest, he can cross the river.
2
The sound of modesty.
3
The toils of the modest Sage have an end.
4
Humble modesty.
5
Not rich, he calls on his neighbors, and they raise an army.
6
The sound of modesty directs the army to the city.
Qabalah
Malkuth to Netzach: The Path of Qoph. The Moon.
In this hexagram, we see the high making itself low. The image is that of a mountain buried under the earth. This is the colossal pyramids covered by the sands of time, a beautiful statue covered in dirt. It is also the nature of wisdom, for the ideogram shows us modesty as rationed words - someone who does not make a show of themselves, but hides their immense power.
1 A wise person is not so modest as to do nothing, they simply move when the time is right.
2 The wise sage, while not making a show of himself, emits a powerful aura. Spiritual energy can palpably arise from an individual, be it with a simple gesture, or a word of advice.
3 While a wise person will work hard, they do not work for the sake of working: they have clear goals and do nothing that does not further them.
4 Often, an ascetic makes a show of their own modesty. Many are proud of their apparent virtues, while true wisdom is humble even in their virtue.
5 A wise person is capable of rousing the many to achieve their own goals, without the promise of payment.
6 It is good to be led by a wise general. This line can also go back to the image of the buried pyramid, radar waves penetrating the ground and discovering the contours of what lay beneath.
When we do not choose or engage in modesty, we will be forcibly made humble. This is the irony of pride: no matter how high one makes oneself, we will fall. Shelley shows us best in his poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
As Hamlet puts it, “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay”. This truth is why the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Emperors of China would depict themselves humbly as children and orphans on their tombs and documents. By humbling oneself, one assures a greater longevity.
Though the next hexagram, excitement, shows the squeaky wheel getting oil, the quiet, humble wheel is the least likely to get thrown away.
As the hexagram is given to Qoph, the letter of the Moon card in Tarot, we can see the act of veiling, hiding, and occulting at play. Dreams speak in a veiled way, just like spies communicate in an occulted fashion. Even when they are not understood, a symbol can influence a great deal unconsciously, and when understood, its power is enormous.
Therefore, let us humble ourselves, be modest, and let our work and power speak for itself.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in 5D
Molly Hankins February 12, 2026
Linguistic relativity, as described by anthropology Professor Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf in the early part of the 20th century, is a worldview shaped by the structure of language.
Punctuation Personified: or, Pointing Made Easy, John Harris. 1824.
Molly Hankins February 12, 2026
Linguistic relativity, as described by anthropology Professor Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf in the early part of the 20th century, is a worldview shaped by the structure of language. Known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the theory claims that different languages equate to different interpretations of reality, creating different cognitive patterns. As global consciousness continues its rapid evolution to what many spiritual teachers call the 5th dimension, our use of language can aid that progression, as well stall it.
Author, scientist and magician Peter J. Carroll believes that 5th dimensional consciousness includes access to what’s known as the causal plane, and that 3D life is just the world of effects. When we’re precise with words, we refine our ability to access the causal dimension and create effects in our day-to-day lives, which is easier said than done depending on what languages you speak. English, the language best known for facilitating international commerce, can be especially tricky when it comes to describing higher dimensional concepts. In her book, Waking Up In 5D, author and teacher Maureen St. Germain describes how she found herself moving away from polarized language as her consciousness expanded.
“To discover your own habits, all you have to do is notice the way you speak of your experiences and how that colors your current situation. When you discover your own ‘source code,’ you can change it,” she writes. “Language is a strong and significant key to creating more mastery at every level. Let your language be open-ended, without preference or prejudice, so you can speak the language of the 5th dimension.” Our source code sends the programming instructions for 3D effects to the causal plane, and if the language we use is empowering, then those instructions are far more likely to be carried out with precision. An entire chapter of Waking Up In 5D is devoted to extracting polarizing and disempowering language from our 3D lives so that we can stabilize our ability to affect causality.
She recommends watching our verbs and adverbs first to see where they may have, what she calls, a “polarizing charge.” For example, a verb like the word ‘trying’ combined with an adverb like ‘hopefully’ completely undermines any possibility of acting on the causal plane. If we’re ‘hopefully trying’ or ‘trying hopefully,’ we’re not owning our ability to cause any effect. Instead of saying ‘I can’t’, saying ‘I won’t’ or ‘I don’t want to’ empowers us as active participants in reality creation. Even adjectives like ‘weird’ or ‘strange’ are polarizing, whereas we could just as easily call something ‘interesting’ and neutralize any charge.
“Playfulness is the right energy to come with, because play is creativity without attachment to outcome, and thus play is non-polarizing.”
Sapir describes the same concept in a different way: “It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group.” So for those who only speak and understand English, a language with many words for describing products and value but only one word for love, we must become especially creative with how we use it. Adjectives like ‘detached’ or ‘unconditional’ describe higher dimensional ways of loving that take the word love, as both a noun and verb, beyond polarity.
To consciously shift our use of language is to actively participate in our own evolution. “This is a time to find nonpolarizing, nonpejorative words to describe new and different choices and experiences. The most profound shift will occur in the way you operate, the way you think, and you will discover that you do not need to ‘work.’ Rather, you need to be playful,” St. Germain writes. “The original purpose of the third dimension was to explore the vast variety that polarity can provide. Just imagine the amazing variety we have explored around the extremes of polarity. This cycle has ended and we are winding up the way we did things in the third dimension. Things have changed, the rules have changed, and it’s not the same game.”
Of course we can choose to remain in the same old game of the 3D world, allowing life to happen to us and staying passive in the process. But when we choose to become active agents of our evolution and edit our “source code” to remove polarized and limiting language and emphasize neutrality, we’re stepping into the new game. And playfulness is the right energy to come with, because play is creativity without attachment to outcome, and thus play is non-polarizing.
Author Cormac McCarthy described it best in his novel Blood Meridian, with language serving as the thread of order weaving through our reality: “The man who believes the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by that very decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
From Cynicism to Sincerity (Part II)
Noah Gabriel Martin February 10, 2026
I dropped the slacker voice when I left Canada, but I get sucked right back into it when I’m home for a visit…
To read part one of Noah Gabriel Martin’s ‘From Cynicism to Sincerity’, click here.
Noah Gabriel Martin February 10, 2026
I dropped the slacker voice when I left Canada, but I get sucked right back into it when I’m home for a visit. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it always happens with certain people: people who I don’t feel all that comfortable with; people who I don’t know how to communicate with. Mostly, I fall back into the voice when talking to men.
In general, falling intonation in English denotes a statement, and so there’s nothing especially gendered about its use to mark the termination of a phrase. But linguists have noted that men emphasise it.
If exaggerated downward inflection is more associated with men’s speech now, when it has come to signal ironic detachment, maybe that’s because it serves a useful purpose in helping men avoid vulnerability. Specifically, the vulnerability that comes with sincerity, or putting your heart on the line - a vulnerability that can be perilous for men.
I noticed the slacker voice only after it had gone, during episodes of what How I Met Your Mother coined ‘revertigo,’ a reversion to old character traits when associating with places or figures from it. In England, my voice had become higher and lost that drop in pitch. When I was reverting I was painfully aware that I was doing it, yet totally unable to pull myself out of it.
This old voice felt strained. My new voice felt more natural, more like my own—not just because speech came more easily, but because it allowed me to express more of myself. Without the constraint of that exaggerated ‘final lowering’ I could have so much more fun with the dynamics of a sentence. Like any armour, the blankness of my old voice weighed me down and inhibited my movement.
I first started to wonder about the etiology and teleology of the voice during a hiking trip last Summer. The revertigo reached its peak when for 6 straight (very straight) days I shared the company of the most closed-off group of guys I’ve encountered in a decade. I didn’t know them well, and they made no effort to strike up a conversation. Meanwhile each of my ouvertures fell to the forest floor with a monosyllabic splat.
I didn’t mind. I was there to hike. I was happy to remain silent, and after making an effort for the first day, that’s pretty much what I did. Maybe they preferred it that way, but I didn’t think so - I got the impression they just didn’t know how to do anything else. Meanwhile, any time I did open my mouth, everything came out as a low mutter, flatter than a pancake.
That’s when I started to suspect a connection between the voice’s performed apathy, the terror of vulnerability, and being a man.
Men’s terror of vulnerability is a consequence of being terrorised. In her book on how patriarchy damages men, bell hooks describes the controlling, demeaning and violent treatment boys are subjected to by their fathers, mothers, and peers.
This terrorism targets, above all else, vulnerability, whether that’s the vulnerability of expressing emotion, or of displaying affection - it targets anything that makes a boy vulnerable to being hurt.
“In trying to make a man invulnerable, patriarchal terror instead does something quite different - it produces a terror of vulnerability.”
The cruel elegance of patriarchal terrorism against boys is that the target and the weapon are the same - hurt. The point is to make a boy into a man that can’t be hurt, and so anything that might hurt a boy is both a legitimate and an effective target for terrorism.
That’s why the most familiar advice given to boys getting bullied is to not let them see you cry; as long as the punishment doesn’t hurt you anymore, you’re no longer an effective target. But this also reveals that the advice is complicit with the bullying. It is not strategic, even if it may look like it; it doesn’t propose a way to defeat the bully. It’s merely an instruction for what’s expected of the victim, an instruction on how to surrender. It’s not just that you’re no longer an effective target, it’s also that you’re no longer a legitimate target: the terrorism has successfully transformed you into a man not vulnerable to patriarchal violence anymore, and, more than likely, a man capable of going on to perpetrate that violence himself.
Because vulnerability is itself the target, any kind of vulnerability is just as likely to make a boy victim to it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something a man really should remain vulnerable to, or something worth growing out of. Displaying emotions indicates vulnerability, just as showing that you care does, or even revealing too much about how you make up your mind.
As Terrence Real writes in How Can I Get Through To You? “Our sons learn the code early and well; don’t cry, don’t be vulnerable, don’t show weakness—ultimately, don’t show that you care.”
I learned as a boy that if I let you know what I’m enthusiastic about, you can mock me for it because it’s stupid and uncool, and that if I show you affection, you can punish me for it by rejecting me and proving to me that I’m unworthy of reciprocating it. In trying to make a man invulnerable, patriarchal terror instead does something quite different - it produces a terror of vulnerability. It does this just because it can’t make a man invulnerable, and because a man will always remain vulnerable, the terror of vulnerability has plenty of fuel.
The terrorisation of vulnerability in boys is sufficient to explain adult male behaviour that avoids all vulnerability. It explains the masculine reserve that refuses to share its enthusiasms and pain, to show affection, or to ask for it.
That terrorization would explain why my fellow hikers were so withdrawn.
This also explains the Simpsons’ snark, and it would explain why the voice of my generation was a voice that must never take anything seriously, and must always maintain ironic distance from whatever it says. It was a voice terrified of believing in something, and what might happen if someone said what it believed in was stupid.
I miss The Simpsons. I miss the period of my life when everything was a joke and the point of saying anything wasn’t that it was true or that it mattered, but just that it was clever. But I love the voice I have now. I don’t mean the way it sounds, I love what it can do. I love the way it rises and falls; its expressive range; how its sincerity can, like open hands, lift up the things worth saying; and the way it can whisper ‘I love you’ with all the openness to a beloved and a world outside of what I can use my words to control that those words need to really be true.
Dr. Noah Gabriel Martin lectures in philosophy at the University of Winchester and runs the College of Modern Anxiety, a social enterprise that promotes lifelong learning for liberation. He recently began to study dance, which has taught him a lot about being an absolute beginner.
14 Having Enough (Great Wealth) - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel February 7, 2026
Having enough is the origin of prosperity…
Chris Gabriel February 7, 2026
Judgment
Having enough is the origin of prosperity.
Lines
1
Going unharmed.
2
A big wagon carries a load with far to go.
3
The Prince makes sacrifices to the Son of Heaven
4
Without a sound. Without fault.
5
His faith reaches out.
6
Heaven has blessed you.
Qabalah
Tiphereth on the Middle Pillar. The exalted Sun. The 6 of Cups and 6 of Disks, and the Prince of Cups and Prince of Disks.
High in the sky sits the radiant midday Sun. As it rises through the morning, it is satisfied at its zenith, and begins to set, having had enough for the day. While we saw the rising of the sun and of man in our previous hexagram, here we have the apex.
1 At the height of our strength, we will go unharmed. It is a cruel irony, but often it is the weakest who are harmed the most while those with power go unscathed.
2 When we have many things, as those in power tend to, the act of moving becomes a problem. It is easy for someone with nothing to start over somewhere else. This is also the journey of the Sun; we can think of Helios on his chariot who, having reached the height, now starts his journey into the night.
3 In his book The Accursed Share, writer Georges Bataille describes the titular concept as the excess energy in an organism which must be sacrificed:
“The living organism ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in it's growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”
This is especially apt for the hexagram, as he is describing our relation to the “Solar Economy” itself.
“Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander. Hence the real excess does not begin until the growth of the individual or group has reached its limits.”
4 Wealth and power do best when they do not flaunt themselves and make noise. It was the superfluous spending of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that led the people to revolution, and the monarchy to the guillotine.
5 “He” in this case is the Sun, and as Bataille says “Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy - wealth - without any return.”
The sun reaches out to us.
6 As we have seen, it is the blessing of the Sun and the Heavens above that create our own power and wealth.
This hexagram is given to Tiphereth, the Solar center of the Tree of Life, the highest self and source of our higher nature. Though Hexagram 30 shows the direct nature of the Sun, we see here what the Sun does in relation to humanity.
Let us then know when we’ve accumulated enough wealth and power and give away our accursed share in magnanimity.
Watching the ‘Apocalypse’ On the Set of Apocalypse Now (1977)
Maureen Orth February 5, 2026
It was the middle of the day in the steamy Philippine jungle and the sun was merciless…
Much has been written, spoken, filmed, and discussed about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic ‘Apocalypse Now’. ‘Hearts of Darkness’, the documentary made by Francis’s wife Eleanor Coppola and released in 1991, has become the definitive account of the legendary production, but Orth’s account, originally published in Newsweek two years before the film was even released, was the first to lift the veil. A work of masterful fever-dream journalism that captures the depravity, absurdity, and insanity of the production, and revealing how the act of reporting becomes inseparable from the madness it describes.
Maureen Orth February 5, 2026
In the tropics one must before everything keep calm. – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It was the middle of the day in the steamy Philippine jungle and the sun was merciless. Director Francis Ford Coppola, dressed in rumpled white Mao pajamas, was slowly making his way upriver in a motor launch. “Right here is where we hang the dead body,” he said to his production designer, Dean Tavoularis. “I want skulls – a pile, no, a wall of skulls.” “Can we light this for night?” he asked his director of photography, Vittorio Storaro. Storaro sighed and stroked his beard. “Fires should be burning behind the curtain,” Coppola said to Tavoularis, pointing to a striking red silk curtain that meandered 300 yards along the riverbank. When the boat docked, a set decorator complained, “Where are we going to get 200 skulls?” Tavoularis shrugged. After what he and everyone else had been through, 200 skulls were just so many coconuts.
For over a year, one of Hollywood’s most successful directors (“Godfather I and II”) had been shooting “Apocalypse Now,” a film about the “untouchable” subject of the Vietnam war. It had started in March 1976 as a $12 million movie that would take four months to shoot. Things quickly escalated. By the time the crew finally left the Philippines a fortnight ago, they had become battle-scarred, if well paid, veterans. “Apocalypse Now” had consumed more than 230 shooting days and a million feet of film and will end up costing about $25 million. (A little more than $7 million came from the sale of distribution rights in foreign countries; United Artists says it has put up $7.5 million and advanced the rest to Coppola, who has put up all his own assets as guarantees on the loans.)
Life on the set – four different locations in the Philippines – also escalated quickly to apocalyptic dimensions. The young crew, composed largely of Americans, Filipinos, and Italians, weathered a typhoon, survived dysentery and sweated through day after day of relentless heat – alleviated by periodic R&R trips to Hong Kong. Stuntmen amused themselves by diving from fourth-story windows into the motel pool below. The prop man, Doug Madison, became adept at fabricating top secret CIA documents, thought nothing of driving 400 miles to fetch a special Army knife, and made a connection with a supplier of real corpses – before he was vetoed. At one point, Coppola asked Tavoularis to produce 1,000 blackbirds, which prompted the designer to consider making cardboard beaks for pigeons and dyeing them black. The film company retained a full-time snake man, who appeared every morning on the set with a sack full of pythons. The Italians brought in pasta and mozzarella from Italy in film cans. Did Coppola want a tribe of primitive mountain people living on the set in their own functioning village? He got it.
Replay Of A National Nightmare
At night, General Coppola reviewed video cassettes of the film in his house in Hidden Valley, a volcanic crater, arriving there in a helicopter that he often piloted himself. By the time he finished shooting, he had lost 60 pounds, and the making of “Apocalypse Now” had come to resemble nothing so much as its subject – Vietnam.
For years, Hollywood has ignored Vietnam on the theory that nobody wants to see America’s worst national nightmare replayed. Now, a number of movies are being made about the war, but none so far-reaching as “Apocalypse.” The original script was written in 1967 by John Milius, an unregenerate hawk, but Coppola has reportedly long since abandoned all but the story line to move closer to the script’s original source, Joseph Conrad’s classic study of moral jungle rot in Africa, “Heart of Darkness.” Coppola’s idea has been to make the film on two levels – both as an entertaining war movie full of action, adventure and spectacular special effects, and as a mythical, highly stylized allegory of the American experience in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 – all of it set to the rock music of The Doors and filled with psychedelic sound and light.
Martin Sheen plays Army Capt. B. L. Willard, hired by the CIA and sent upriver on a Navy patrol boat crewed by Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Larry Fishburne and Albert Hall. His mission is to kill Coppola’s “Mr. Kurtz,” one Col. Walter E. Kurtz – an officer gone insane – who lives in a temple resembling Angkor Wat across the border in Cambodia, is worshipped by the Montagnards and is played by Marlon Brando.
One of Kurtz’s entourage is a spaced out hippie photographer who’s had about 200 acid trips too many, a role Denis Hopper evolved for himself. Robert Duvall plays another kind of mad colonel who carelessly risks the lives of his men in order to land in a village that has perfect waves for surfing. As Sheen and his crew head upriver, they encounter a wild rock concert during which 300 horny soldiers storm a stage to get at a delegation of Playboy bunnies; a French plantation family determined to hold out at all costs; exploding bridges, and one peaceful group of Vietnamese whom they murder in panic. One helicopter battle sequence, choreographed to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” took seven and a half weeks to shoot and will appear on the screen for only six minutes.
A Film On Two Levels
“I am doing this film half intuitively,” says Coppola, sitting inside his houseboat, where he wrote out the script each day on index cards. “I am spinning a web. The movie has two levels – the level of the life on the boat and the mission and then what happens to Kurtz’s mind when the film becomes a surreal. His mind is blown by the extent of the horror of the war. You have to invent. All I do is see more or less what the truth was and put it in the movie. Of course, the movie has to live in reality and practicality. I’m spending $100,000 a day. Imagine the degree of control I have to have.”
That control wasn’t always easy – to say the least. The first phase of “Apocalypse” ended when the typhoon struck, destroying sets that had taken months to build and stranding the crew in various isolated locations. (One group found itself stuck in a house with a Playboy Playmate, who shut herself up in a room, declaring, “I can do without sex for nine months.”) Even before the typhoon, Coppola fired one of his leading actors, Harvey Keitel, who hated the jungle and couldn’t stand bugs. On the first day of shooting, Keitel and the other actors had been unintentionally left by the camera crew in the middle of the river. “Hello,” announced Keitel fruitlessly into his walkie-talkie. “Hello, this is Harvey Keitel.” Silence. “This is Harvey Keitel.” Silence. Then: “You wouldn’t do this to Marlon Brando. You wouldn’t do this to Marlon Brando.”
“It was hell for a while at the beginning of the movie,” says Gary Fettis, a crew member. “Mostly because Francis was getting ripped off by the Filipinos. Artistically, Francis didn’t know what he was going for and he was a pretty hard guy to be around. The crew didn’t know he didn’t know. But when you’d see him typing away in his houseboat in the mornings, you suspected as much. It created a sense of chaos.”
When Brando showed up last fall with an entourage of seven (his fee for five weeks’ work was $1 million), Coppola still hadn’t written the ending to the movie. He finally shut down production for a few days to talk about Conrad with an old pal from film-school days at UCLA, Dennis Jakob, a fanatical lover of Nietzsche’s philosophy who became the movie’s intellectual catalyst. He also spent hours discussing the war in Vietnam with Brando, and tapes of those conversations figure in the film.
“He piled up garbage. He spread blood and skulls all around. He got old bones from a restaurant in Manila. Rats arrived on the set and people began to complain of the stench of festering flesh.”
A 285-Pound Star
“I tried to write the end in which Kurtz goes mad, over 100 times,” says Coppola, “but I didn’t know what Marlon would look like or how much he would weigh. I went to bed every night at 4 a. m. and told my wife, if she was there, ‘I can’t write it, I can’t write it’.” In fact, Brando showed up weighing 285 pounds, so Coppola decided to make Kurtz 6 feet 5 inches and do most of his body shots using a 6 foot 5 inch double, a coloful ex-boatswain’s mate in Vietnam named Pete Cooper who ran the boats for the crew and served as military adviser to Coppola. Brando shaved off all his hair for the role and requested 5-inch lifts on his shoes to get the feel of the part. On the first day he wore the lifts, he twisted his ankle and retreated at once to his trailer.
Members of the crew refused to ride in a bus with Dennis Hopper, who wore the same set of clothes for the two months he was there. Last March, Keitel’s replacement, Sheen, a 36 year old physical-fitness buff, suffered a heart attack during a 6-mile jog in the 100 degree heat. Sheen, who recovered six weeks later, thinks his attack was precipitated by his own death fears triggered by working on “Apocalypse Now.” “The film really scared the hell out of me,” he says. “I discovered through my sickness that I was acting out my mother’s death. She also died thousands of miles away from home of a heart attack.”
Coppola was forced to rely on the Philippine military for personnel had equipment, since the U.S. Department of Defense refused to cooperate with the project in any way. (Coppola sent angry cables to Washington, D. C., claiming that Defense was harassing him.) On the first day of the big helicopter scene last summer, according to some reports, a Filipino officer pocketed the $15,000 out of which he was supposed to pay his pilots, and the next day the pilots refused to work. Almost every day thereafter, they made new demands for money on the film company – which had come to be regarded in the local countryside as a cross between an invading army and Santa Claus.
Pagsanjan, the sleepy river town north of Manila where the “Apocalypse” crew had its headquarters, had been accustomed to an average wage of less than $2 a day. But for nine months, the movie company pumped in $100,000 a week there. As a result, the robbing of local coconut plantations stopped, rents for homes shot up astronomically, and every night the high-school principal, Ricardo Fabella, went from bar to bar in his jeep urging the Filipino film workers not to waste their windfall wages on liquor and women. “Our people have lost their sense of values,” he said. “Everything I’ve taught them they’ve forgotten.”
At one lavish party Coppola threw to thank the residents of Pagsanjan for their cooperation, he heard himself praised by the governor of Laguna Province as the best ambassador the U.S. ever sent. The next speech was from the local prosecutor who, before he picked up the microphone to sing with the band, mentioned two lawsuits against “Apocalypse” – one for the mutilation of birds (both suits were later dropped). He turned over the mike to Coppola, who serenaded the crowd with “‘A’ You’re Adorable.” “It’s either here or Beverly Hills,” Coppola called to his wife. “Let’s stay here.”
Everything But Real Bullets
Because of the film’s vast arsenal of explosives and weapons, the set was heavily guarded at all times. Coppola was driven by a member of President Ferdinand Marcos’s personal staff. For one scene involving 2,000 South Vietnamese troops and villagers, the film-makers recruited several hundred South Vietnamese refugees. The Philippine Government supplied eighteen helicopters, which were outfitted with new rotor blades and converted into gunships for the Philippine Air Force at the film company’s expense. Dick White, an ex-Vietnam helicopter flying ace and daredevil, supervised the air sequences. “This movie has everything but real bullets,” he says. “With my helicopters, the boats and the high morale of the well-trained extras we had, there were three or four countries in the world we could have taken easily.”
But the longest running real battle on the set was over what the film was really about. “What Francis is trying to say,” says Brando’s stand-in, Pete Cooper, “is that the military people were not second-class citizens and idiots. They were good hometown boys, but the war changed them. The whole military image is going to be changed after this.” “I hate to say it,” says special effects chief Joe Lombardi, “but this whole movie is special effects. You got three stars but the action’s gonna keep the audience on the edge of their seats. It’s a war movie.” “This movie’s about how wrong it was for Americans to go against their nature,” says Dean Tavoularis.
Still, everyone was loyal to the general. One of Coppola’s skills as a director was that he was able to make everyone give his all.” Francis wanted to get me and Dick White drunk and listen to war stories,” says Cooper. “I didn’t want to. For the first four months of this film I was screaming in my sleep – reliving it all. But in the military you’re taught to follow orders. Francis is a brain drainer. You sit with him for ten minutes and he absorbs everything in your body.”
It’s hard to say who gave the most, but nearly everyone agrees that a great catharsis came at Kurtz’s compound – a hot and humid pit a half mile long. The temple inside the pit was destroyed by the typhoon, and was reconstructed with 300-pound blocks placed mostly by hand. To express Kurtz’s “horror,” Tavoularis, who describes his life as “a shambles” after working two years on the film, let his feelings of depression and alienation run wild. He piled up garbage. He spread blood and skulls all around. He got old bones from a restaurant in Manila. Rats arrived on the set and people began to complain of the stench of festering flesh.
“Francis and I reached the same point through different channels,” says Tavoularis. “We both did it by going through a certain madness. He was feverishly rewriting the whole end of the film, talking to Marlon and Dennis Hopper. I was living the house of death I was making. It became such a low level in my life that somehow putting blood on staircases and rolling heads down steps seemed natural to me.” The experience went on for weeks. “There were times,” remembers Delia Javier, a Filipion crew member, “when I feared the consequences for my psyche. Then one night everything fused together. It was what Christians call a miracle.”
Part of the credit for the miracle goes to 250 fierce and primitive Filipino mountain tribesmen, the Ifugaos, still head-hunters during World War II, who were brought from the north to live on the set at Kurtz’s compound. “People said the Ifugaos were very calming in the craziness,” says Eva Gardos, a former Harlem schoolteacher, who was sent to the mountains of the northern Philippines to find “some primitive people” at Coppola’s request. In order to lure the Ifugaos south, Gardos promised them a weekly supply of betel nuts and, in case any of them got sick, live animals for sacrifice.
Four Blows Of The Knife
Brando invited the Ifugaos to his big welcoming party, complete with ice Oscars lighted from inside, spectacular fireworks and a magician. They loved the fireworks. Coppola incorporated Ifugao ceremonies and dances into the film; they were also taught to use guns and to sing – phonetically – ‘The Doors’ “Light My Fire” to the accompaniment of their own instruments. Although they generally were shy, one teenage Ifugao girl got friendly enough with make-up man Fred Blau to ask if she could borrow his tape of John Denver’s “Greatest hits.”
In honor of Coppola, the Ifugaos re-enacted their sacred sacrifice of a water buffalo and Coppola has used this on film as one of his story’s most important symbols. “First the Ifugaos talked to the water buffalo for two days and told it not to be afraid of death,” reports one extra. “Then they killed four pigs and sacrificed a chicken. The meat was passed around and eaten, sometimes raw. Then the elders took long knives and gave the buffalo four blows at the back of the neck. During this time the water buffalo didn’t utter a sound, but he had a big tear in his eye – he really did. Wham, the fourth blow killed him. In the film, Sheen kills Brando the same way.”
Is America ready for “Apocalypse Now”? Just to make sure, United Artists is paying a half million dollars on two political miracle workers – Jimmy Carter’s media consultant Gerald Rafshoon and pollster Pat Caddell – to help Coppola’s staff devise a marketing strategy for the three-hour-plus film. The film is scheduled, if all goes well, to open in Decemmber. It will be shown on a reserved-seat basis at increased admission prices. Caddell’s poll ranges from measuring the impact of Vietnam to finding out how many people know the meaning of the word “apocalypse.”
Maureen Orth (b.1943) is an American journalist and writer. Orth began as one of the first women writers at Newsweek and is currently a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair,
On the Termite
André Castor February 3, 2026
Termite mounds - those brown piles of rigid dirt that protrude from the landscape and hide acreage below them - are as ancient as the land they rise from…
Shrine in a termite mound, Kolwezi, Congo, c.1930.
André Castor February 3, 2026
Termite mounds - those brown piles of rigid dirt that protrude from the landscape and hide acreage below them - are as ancient as the land they rise from. In parts of Africa, South America, and Australia, these earthen towers are not just temporary homes, they are enduring monuments, passed down through the generations of termite colonies. Some mounds are known to be over 34,000 years old, but most at least number in the hundreds of years, surviving across centuries and millennia, continually inhabited and rebuilt by successive colonies.
When we think of buildings and cities, we often imagine them as symbols of human ambition, crafted to last for centuries or successive lifetimes. Yet, the termite mound offers a humbling contrast. Here, time itself does not belong to the individuals who build it, but to the community that comes together—over and over again—to tend to it, to repair it, and to keep it alive. It is not a static monument to human achievement, but a living, breathing testament to the persistence of purpose across generations.
The question then arises: What does it mean to build something that outlasts us? What can we learn from these oft-derided insects about living within the cycles of time, about the relationship between the individual and the collective, and about the ways in which our actions are woven into the fabric of a larger, continuous story?
Built by colonies of termites to serve as both nests and climate-controlled environments, these mounds are constructed from earth, saliva, feces, and other organic matter, which is collected by the termites from their surroundings. The architecture is remarkably complex, with a series of tunnels and ventilation shafts that regulate airflow and temperature, providing the colony with a safe, stable environment carefully controlled to maintain optimal conditions of temperature and humidity in the face of extreme weather conditions outside. The mounds can rise up to 30 feet in height and span much large areas below the surface, offering refuge and safety from predator.
Termites help improve soil health, promote water infiltration and enhance nutrient cycling through the aeration process of their building. Their mounds act as natural reservoirs, absorbing and slowly releasing moisture to sustain surrounding vegetation during dry periods. Some species of termites even cultivate fungi within their mounds, creating a symbiotic relationship that helps decompose plant matter, contributing to nutrient recycling in the ecosystem. In these ways, termite mounds are not just homes for termites, but vital structures that play an important role in maintaining the ecological balance of their environment. In the process of thousands of years, these insects build not just for themselves, and their future generations, but the world around them.
“Decay is not the end of things, it is a necessary part of renewal.”
Termite mounds are a reminder that individual lives are but fleeting moments in the vast expanse of time. What these creatures leave behind, in lives that usually last no more a few years for workers and perhaps a few decades for the Queen, is not just the work of a single generation, but the shared contributions of thousands of generations. Each mound is built, maintained, and inhabited by countless termites over thousands of years, but it is always the same mound, never fully finished, always in the process of becoming. The generations may come and go, but the mound itself endures. They are constantly being rebuilt, repaired, and adjusted. They are living structures, continuously in flux, responding to the demands of the environment, to the needs of the colony, and to the rhythms of life itself. Nothing about the mound is static. It is a cycle of construction and deconstruction, creation and decay, over and over again.This challenges the human tendency to view our lives as distinct and separate from one another, as if each of us is isolated in time. How often do we build lives as though they must stand alone, seeking personal recognition, fame, or success? The termite mound offers us a different way of being: a life that belongs to something greater, a purpose that extends beyond the self. The mound’s continuity suggests that the most meaningful actions are not those that bring fleeting personal glory, but those that contribute to a larger, ongoing process—one that connects generations, that transcends time.
For humans, the idea of impermanence is often uncomfortable. We are taught to chase stability, to fight decay, to preserve what we have for as long as possible. But there is a wisdom that we often overlook: decay is not the end of things, it is a necessary part of renewal. The cycles of life, growth, and decay are not to be feared, but understood as fundamental to the very essence of existence.
What if we understood our lives not as isolated projects but as part of an ongoing story—one in which we participate, but do not control? What if our actions, like the termites’ construction of their mounds, were not aimed at permanence or recognition, but at fostering a deeper, intergenerational connection to something larger than ourselves? The mound teaches us that the highest form of meaning may lie not in building for today, but in building for tomorrow, and for the communities that will follow us.
André Castor is a conservationist and researcher who writes about the natural world.
13 Coming Together - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel January 31, 2026
Together in the wild. Cross the great river…
Chris Gabriel January 31, 2026
Judgment
Together in the wild. Cross the great river.
Lines
1
Together at the gate.
2
Together at home.
3
Hiding weapons in high grass. Climbing the high hill. He doesn’t rise for three years.
4
Climbing the wall, but unable to attack.
5
Together we cry, together we laugh. Great leaders meet.
6
Together in the country.
Qabalah
Tiphereth to Kether: The Path of Gimel. The High Priestess.
Here the connection is made from below to above, the Solar Tiphereth seeks to rise to the Heavenly Kether.
In this hexagram we see the rising sun, coming together with the sky. It is pure heat rising. This hexagram is the perfect opposite of hexagram 6 - water under heaven - in which rain splits away from the sky. When fire is below heaven, it moves up. As such, the lines of the hexagram show a progressive coming together of people from within to without.
Judgment: A group of people together in the wild crossing a great river conjures thoughts of the teamwork it takes to “build bridges”, both literally and metaphorically. We can also see the other side of this; crossing the Rubicon and marching on Rome. A group of people cross the river to make everyone join their circle.
1 The group is at the gate, the first impasse. They remain on the boundary. This, again, can be understood in two ways: either as a force seeking to expand into territory out beyond the gate, or they may be the idiomic “barbarians at the gate” seeking to get in.
2 A group at home, amid family. This is a very small community, built on a base natural sympathy. It has no need to spread out. This is the natural human state, totemic and clannish. Getting people to come together was a great labour of history; the combining of disparate families and clans to form cities, states, and empires, against their own selfishness is extraordinarily difficult.
3 When outmatched, it’s best to hide one's strength and wait it out from a good vantage point. It’s useless to fight impossible odds.
4 One climbs the wall to fight the city, but they lack the force to achieve their goals.
5 After much commotion and turmoil, victory comes and peace is made.
6 People have gathered together. From the gate, to the homes, to the whole city, and now the country, but it has not yet reached past itself, the group has not satisfied its expanding desire for empire.
“The Sun never sets on the British Empire.” The rising sun of the hexagram shines its light first on very little, and then on more and more. This is the human desire to gather people together, to have dominion and expand our control. The familial clan shown in line 2 come to control the country in line 6, so we consider the actions necessary for one family to gather its allies and take control of a country. Or how an individual man, like Caesar, can create an empire. This is not solely through violent conquest, as Abraham Lincoln proves in his famous line “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
Just as the Sun rises and falls, so too do Empires, families, and groups. As Hawthorn says “Families are always rising and falling in America.”. While all powers are destined to fall, the time indicated by this hexagram is that of their rising.
Shadow Work in Ancient Egyptian Magic
Molly Hankins January 29, 2026
In Biblical terms, the Egyptian concept of ‘shew’ is expressed as a revealing of what’s hidden, whereas ancient Egypt’s great mystery schools are thought to have treated shew as the shadow-self that needs the light of consciousness shone upon it in order to be integrated…
Molly Hankins January 29, 2026
In Biblical terms, the Egyptian concept of ‘shew’ is expressed as a revealing of what’s hidden, whereas ancient Egypt’s great mystery schools are thought to have treated shew as the shadow-self that needs the light of consciousness shone upon it in order to be integrated. Author, vocal coach, and archangelic channeler Stewart Pearce explained the nature of shew in his book Angels and the Keys to Paradise. He writes that to name individual aspects of our shew is to, “identify that aspect of self that dwells far from the light, and therefore is the part that most desires reintegration with the light, with the collective soul.” This yearning to merge the seen and unseen worlds is natural. If we are all sparks of consciousness from the original Creator, we are not designed to ignore what we create. Pearce contends that integration of all our creations is essential to our development both spiritually and magically.
“Thinking and feeling negative shadow complexes sabotages our creative energy within the dynamics of the universe. Carl Jung suggested that, ‘One doesn’t become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but rather by drawing the light into the darkness, and creating a light filled consciousness.’ As we identify, purify and redistribute the energy of our shadow from within, more space is created within our cells for light to reside,” Pearce explained. From the perspective of Egypt’s mystery schools, physical changes occur as light is shown in the darkness of our psyches. The idea of ‘light’ here is not a metaphor because light is considered intelligent, and bringing this higher intelligence into our beings by consciously calling in the light gives us access to both expanded awareness and magical abilities.
The magic Pearce refers too is defined by the famous occultist Aleister Crowley as, “The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” Developing this capacity means shedding light on any shame or regret blocking the light of higher intelligence, and therefore blocking our ability to act as co-creators of our reality. Pearce believes that what Egypt’s mystery schools were pointing to with their emphasis on integrating the shew is that our shadow can be a portal to the Creator and to working with what he calls ‘Source Energy.’ Consciously shining light on our shew disrupts the ‘karmic holding patterns’ living in our tissues and keeping us in the karmic wheel of repeated reincarnation in order for our consciousness to evolve. Shew work allows us to choose our own path to conscious evolution, rather than relying on the karmic algorithm to furnish experiences for us that force us to evolve.
“If we bring enough of our shew out of darkness we can begin working directly with collective consciousness to affect change on a global scale.”
This shew integration process, which Pearce also calls “dissolving our darkness,’ has certain thresholds to cross as our consciousness evolves. With each milestone, we can begin using our will to create effects at a global and even galactic scale. When we reach enlightenment, we gain the ability to co-create directly with Source Energy. Over the course of many lifetimes, if we bring enough of our shew out of darkness we can begin working directly with collective consciousness to affect change on a global scale. Pearce, who channels the archangelic collective that provides much of the information in his writing, believes we must dissolve 85% of our darkness in order for our will to begin expressing at the level of global consciousness. Symptoms of having crossed this threshold include drastic upticks in synchronicity and seeing ideas we thought were unique to us expressing within the global collective.
Once 90% of our shew is integrated, we can work at the galactic level. This essentially means that we become pawns on the chessboard of life with a sufficiently developed consciousness to be worthy of being played by higher dimensional entities, known in ancient Egyptian mythology as gods. In previous articles on the nature of personal alchemy, we explored how alchemizing our negative emotions prepares our being for magical practice and the ability to “hold” more high dimensional intelligence within our physical vessels. Our ability to co-create and perform magic with greater impact comes from working with increasingly powerful higher dimensional intelligence. From this point, we gain intelligence by virtue of our expanding access and integrate even more of our shew, so we’re heading towards the 95% threshold of enlightenment.
When we’ve cleared enough shew to be able to embody our own higher consciousness and share consciousness with intelligent beings far greater than ourselves, our vessels are prepared to hold the light of Source Energy. This is where we cross the threshold of enlightenment, and as Richard Rudd of the Gene Keys says, the process of getting there can be blissful and playful. Of course there is suffering along the way, but we help each other find bliss and play anyway. Only the presence of undissolved shew can cast darkness enough to block the light, and only when we are able to face those parts of ourselves by consciously seeking out and integrating them, can we begin integrating with Source and experiencing higher consciousness on Earth.
As author and channeler Tom Kenyon put it in his book The Hathor Material, “The goal is not to merely ascend to another octave. The goal is to live our lives as fully and as richly as possible, constantly surrendering to the greater power of love and awareness. Our advice would be not to concern yourself with timetables and phenomena. They will take care of themselves. Besides, they are of such cosmic proportion as to be immune to your thoughts and interventions. It would be far more beneficial to change those things you can, and what you can affect is the amount of love you bring to the world." That change starts with loving the parts of ourselves, of our shew, that we’re afraid or ashamed of.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
From Cynicism to Sincerity
Noah Gabriel Martin January 27, 2026
The key feature of what I’ll call the 90s West Coast slacker accent is that the tone dips at the end of a phrase, like an inverse question…
Sloth, James Esnor. 1904.
Noah Gabriel Martin January 27, 2026
The key feature of what I’ll call the 90s West Coast slacker accent is that the tone dips at the end of a phrase, like an inverse question. It doesn’t indicate conviction, however. Instead, the slacker tone is all about ironic detachment; it allows the speaker to say something while signalling that they don’t care about saying it, each claim a candy wrapper thoughtlessly dropped to the floor as they keep on walking.
The purpose of the slacker tone is to distance the speaker from what they’re saying, to show that they can’t be found in their words, that the things they say can’t be used to identify them, who they are, or how they feel. The arc of the pitch descends just as each sentence concludes, like a slash crossing it out as it tumbles off their tongue.
That’s not to say that what they’ve said isn’t true, or even that they don’t believe what they’re saying, just that what they’ve said doesn’t matter to them, and the fact that they’ve said it shouldn’t be taken to mean that that’s how they feel. In short, the slacker tone is a disclaimer that alienates sincerity.
Why say things if they don’t care about them? It’s a puzzle, but the greater mystery is why a whole generation might adopt a tone of voice contrived to undercut each expression, signaling that the things we say are of no importance and shouldn’t be taken seriously. What would motivate us to systematically undermine the power of our own speech?
The slacker tone of voice has frequently been conflated with sarcasm. In fact, the quintessential example of slacker voice is from a 1996 episode of the Simpsons - one punk says “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” to another, who responds “I don't even know anymore.” He doesn’t know, because he hasn’t decided to be sarcastic; to reject as false and even worthy of ridicule the position he’s aping. The slacker voice is more ambiguous than sarcasm, it doesn’t reject the thing being said, thereby actually taking an affirmative position contrary to it; it refuses to take any position at all. If sarcasm announces, with ridicule, that you don’t agree with the semantic content of what you’re saying, a slacker tone makes it impossible to tell what you believe in, or if you believe in anything at all.
The Simpsons’ calling attention to this voice is a distraction from the fact that this snark was the entire style of The Simpsons; the undecided, un-pin-downable position which disowns everything and affirms nothing was characteristic of its era, and The Simpson epitomised it. It treated the mainstream with irreverence, without actually taking up a position against it. It dismissed all seriousness as equally ridiculous, refusing to look at whether some positions might be more worthwhile than others.
The Marxist cultural critic Frederic Jameson, called this style of speech ‘pastiche’, and it was marked by a refusal to sign onto any political project and fight for it. He identified it with a postmodern rejection of commitment to the truth and value of any political cause. Jameson described the kind of parody that isn’t motivated by belief in something, exactly the kind of parody we see in The Simpsons, as ‘parody without a vocation’ or ‘parody with no target’ and nothing to defend. “It is a neutral practice of such mimicry”, he said, “without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.”
Growing up as a precociously jaded teenager on the Westcoast, the freewheeling, mainstream, equal opportunity cynicism of The Simpsons was exciting. Maybe we didn’t need a programme; maybe it was enough to satirically lay waste to the corrupt pieties of earlier generations. I didn’t think the onus was on us to replace it with a platform of our own. In fact any positive ambition seemed arrogant; indulgence in the hubristic naivety of thinking you’ve got all the answers. The important thing didn’t seem to be to change things, the important thing was not to fall for the bullshit.
“The fear of being a dupe makes us stupid, because it gets in the way of our sensitivity to differences between more and less dangerous errors.”
What I didn’t understand then was how well this callow nihilism plays into the hands of the status quo. Established power is victorious by default, and the fight against it is an uphill battle. All that’s necessary for those in power to maintain their privilege is for nothing to change, they have inertia on their side. Cynicism, scepticism, and nihilism, even if it takes swipes at the status quo, always ultimately reinforces it.
To have a chance, the side of change needs to offer something. It’s not enough to destroy. To become real, the will to change must create.
That’s why, far from bringing down the system, the snarkiness of the 90s could only engender nastier and nastier iterations, from Family Guy to the Pepe and Soyjak memes on 4chan and 8kun image boards. Because it eschewed sincerity as “cringey” from the start, this caustic sense of humour could never give rise to hope. However, it could curdle into a politics that used jokes to conceal a very real lust for the free expression of cruelty and hatred.
90s slacker indifference also served a deeper political and social need: ego defense. Its linguistic detachment is there to protect the speaker. But to protect against what? What could pose so general a threat that any sincerity, no matter how righteous, would leave one open to it.
The American Pragmatist philosopher William James criticised undue skepticism as the ‘fear of being a dupe’.
The problem, according to James, with the ‘fear of being a dupe’, or what most philosophers would call ‘epistemological responsibility’, is that trying to make sure we never fall into error gets in the way of a tremendous amount of learning, discovery, and even of finding truth. Many of the most urgent and momentous questions we face in life - whether and who to marry, what career to pursue - cannot be decided one way or the other, so we frequently find ourselves in a position of having to take leaps of faith, or to put it more ecumenically, to form beliefs and make choices on insufficient grounds. To do that, we’ve got to let go of the fear of error, lest we remain paralysed by it.
The fear of error, in James’ interpretation, is a kind of phobia. It might be understood as a sort of psychosocial autoimmune disorder, and like any autoimmune disorders, it’s a dysfunction in our self-defenses that not only directly harms us, but makes it hard for us to protect ourselves when we have to. Fear of error produces a kind of autonomic stupidity that destroys the body and mind’s ability to distinguish between what’s harmless and real threats.
The fear of being a dupe makes us stupid, because it gets in the way of our sensitivity to differences between more and less dangerous errors. Not all errors are equally dangerous; an unjustified belief in the stability of nuclear détente is more dangerous than an unjustified belief in the benefit of community, but if we’re overly concerned with avoiding any error at all, it makes it a lot harder to appreciate the difference.
The detachment of the slacker tone is a similar kind of disordered autoimmune response, motivated by an even more fundamental paranoia than James’ ‘fear of being a dupe’ - an abject terror of vulnerability. For the paranoid, the problem with being a dupe isn’t really the error, it’s that one has failed to defend oneself, allowed oneself to be taken advantage of, made oneself vulnerable. Besides being a dupe, there are many other ways of being vulnerable, and we have learned to avoid them all.
The terror of vulnerability, like the fear of being a dupe, is paranoid; it’s got nothing whatever to do with any particular threat. It mistakes defensiveness itself for the point, forgetting that defense should be defense of or against something. As Robert Frost writes:
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,”
If we’ve always got our defenses up, there’s no way for us to peek over the parapets to tell if there’s actually something out there to defend against.
It’s this terror of vulnerability that lay beneath the Simpsons’ snark, and 90s slacker culture in general. On the face of it, this kind of detachment might look cool, but when we look under the hood we can see the shaking, timid reality that it’s covering up.
What culture needs instead is the courage to be sincere, to stand up for something, to risk the vulnerability it takes to say clearly, with care and feeling: “this is what I believe in.”
Dr. Noah Gabriel Martin lectures in philosophy at the University of Winchester and runs the College of Modern Anxiety, a social enterprise that promotes lifelong learning for liberation. He recently began to study dance, which has taught him a lot about being an absolute beginner.