Ed Ruscha

Film

Against Fluency

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Arcadia Molinas August 12, 2025

Reading is a vice. It is a pleasurable, emotional and intellectual vice. But what distinguishes it from most vices, and relieves it from any association to immoral behaviour, is that it is somatic too, and has the potential to move you. A book can instantly transport you to cities, countries and worlds you’ve never set foot on. A book can take you to new climates, suggest the taste of new foods, introduce you to cultures and confront you with entirely different ways of being. It is a way to move and to travel without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.

Books in translation offer these readerly delights perhaps more readily than their native counterparts. Despite this, the work of translation is vastly overlooked and broadly underappreciated. In book reviews, the critique of the translation itself rarely takes up more than a throwaway line which comments on either the ‘sharpness’ or ‘clumsiness’ of the work. It is uncommon, too, to see the translator’s name on the cover of a book. A good translation, it seems, is meant to feel invisible. But is travelling meant to feel invisible – identical, seamless, homogenous? Or is travelling meant to provoke, cause discomfort, scream its presence in your face? The latter seems to me to be the more somatic, erotic, up in your body experience and thus, more conducive to the moral component of the vice of reading.

French translator Norman Shapiro describes the work of translation as “the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” This view is shared by many: a good translation should show no evidence of the translator, and by consequence, no evidence that there was once another language involved in the first place at all. Fluency, naturalness, is what matters – any presence of the other must be smoothed out. For philosopher Friedreich Schlerimacher however, the matter is something else entirely. For him, “there are only two [methods of translation]. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” He goes on to argue for the virtues of the former, for a translation that is visible, that moves the reader’s body and is seen and felt. It’s a matter of ethics for the philosopher – why and how do we translate? These are not minor questions when considering the stakes of erasing the presence of the other. The repercussions of such actions could reflect and accentuate larger cultural attitudes to difference and diversity as a whole.

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Lawrence Venuti coins Schlerimacher’s two movements, from reader to author and author to reader, as ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in his book The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization is “leaving the author in peace and moving the reader towards him”, which means reflecting the cultural idiosyncrasies of the original language onto the translated/target one. It means making the translation visible. Domestication is the opposite, it irons out any awkwardness and imperfections caused by linguistic and cultural difference, “leaving the reader in peace and moving the author towards him”. It means making the translation invisible, and is the way translation is so often thought about today. Venuti says the aim of this type of translation is to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self- conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.”

The direction of movement in these two strategies makes all the difference. Foreignization makes you move and travel towards the author, while domestication leaves you alone and doesn’t disturb you. There is, Venuti says, a cost of being undisturbed. He writes of the “partly inevitable” violence of translation when thinking about the process of ironing out differences. When foreign cultures are understood through the lens of a language inscribed with its own codes, and which consequently carry their own embedded ways of regarding other cultures, there is a risk of homogenisation of diversity. “Foreignizing translation in English”, Venuti argues, “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations.” The potential for this type of reading and of translating is by no means insignificant.

To embrace discomfort then, an uncomfortable practice of reading, is a moral endeavour. To read foreignizing works of translation is to expand one’s subjectivity and suspend one’s unified, blinkered understanding of culture and linguistics. Reading itself is a somatic practice, but to read a work in translation that purposefully alienates, is to travel even further, it’s to go abroad and stroll through foreign lands, feel the climate, chew the food. It’s well acknowledged that the higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view. And to get the bigger picture is as possible to do as sitting on your favourite chair, opening a book and welcoming alienation.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Film

Page and Princess of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Page/Princess of Disks
Number: 4
Astrology: Earth of Earth
Qabalah: He of He

Chris Gabriel August 9, 2025

The Page of Disks is the lowest court card, the earthiest part of the earth. It is the seed, small in size but immense in potential. In each depiction, the young figure holds a disk which they look upon carefully.

In Rider, the Page is a young man wearing a simple green tunic with tan undergarments. He dons a red turban, gently upholds his disk with both hands, and looks upon it happily. Little wildflowers grow at his feet.

In Thoth, the Princess wears a diaphanous gown and a great fur. She is crowned by a goat’s skull. Her disk is a flower whose center is a Tajitu, a Yin and Yang symbol. She holds a scepter, with its crystal base towards the ground. She smiles, looking down at her pregnancy and blossoming disk.

In Marseille, the Valet is a stern young man. He grips his belt with one hand, and carefully inspects the disk he holds in the other. His feet are pointed in each direction upon barren soil. A few scrubs grow in the waste, but his duty is to bring the earth to life.

The role of this card is to restore life to the barren Earth. Each year, we see plant life die in the winter and begin to blossom again in the spring: this is the place of the Page, themselves the fertile earth.

This fertility extends beyond the flora and to the animal in Thoth. The Princess of Disks is in fact the only card in the deck which features a pregnant woman. In my experience, this card has directly indicated a real pregnancy multiple times. Beyond the physical, this is the natural mind of man, untouched and fertile, ready for inspiration.

It can help to understand this card alongside a concept from the Tao Te Ching: Pu 樸

The characters in this name are Tree and Forest, and is commonly known as “Uncarved Wood”; the wood still in the forest. This is akin to a slab of marble still held in a quarry, not yet sculpted. In the west we have similar concepts, like “Carte Blanche”, a blank paper with which we can dictate freely. 

The Page is a person given a blank check, a blank piece of paper, a block of wood, or a slab of marble. It is what they do with this tabula rasa that matters. In this way, the Princess as a future mother and her unborn child are perfect symbols of infinite potential.

When pulling this card, we are to be given something that we must work upon. One may have to build from the ground up or start a grassroots project. We may become increasingly receptive to inspiration, or, indeed, become literally pregnant.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Film

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Un Autre Monde, J. J. Grandville. 1844.

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A masterpiece of philosophical fiction, Le Guin’s story has reverberated across generations since it was first published in 1973. At once readable as an allegory for Christ’s sacrifice and as a questioning of the very premise of utilitarianism, ‘Omelas’ is above all else a vivid parable of the modern age. In a world where happiness relies on the abject misery of a single person, we can see clearly the inequality and be disgusted by the injustice - Le Guin creates this world and asks us to look deeper into our own, where the same moral issues are happening everyday yet so few of us choose to walk away from our ‘Omelas’.

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Ursula Le Guin August 7, 2025

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights, over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green’ Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however – that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc. – they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains,. washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas – at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer; this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.

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“They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do.”

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Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men, wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, ”Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope…” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits haunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. ”I will be good,” it says. ”Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, ”eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

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Ursula K. Le Guin ( 1929 – 2018) was an American author, best known for her science fiction works The Hainish Cycle and The Earthsea Cycle. Over the course of her life, she wrote more than twenty novels and more than a hundred shrot stories, as well as seminal works of literary criticism.

Film

Dr. Joe Dispenza

Film

Enfolded in Living Reality Pt. 1

Plate from Oculus Artificialis, Johann Zahn. 1685.

Tuukka Toivonen August 5, 2025

“…reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a  devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and  imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life […].”    

 -Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things (2021) 

Our modern understanding of reality is a curious thing. We have all been told, at one point or another, to “get  real” or to “live in the real world”, lest we veer too far from the parameters of a typical, ordained life course. We are called to engage in regular “reality-checks”, in order to recognize that not all of the ideas and trajectories we choose can succeed in realistic conditions.  Exhortations and assumptions of this kind are what our familiar social universe is composed of, and how it gets maintained. And then we have the physicists, from Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking to Michio Kaku and Carlo Rovelli, who approach reality and the ways it is constituted as the ultimate question for science. Their mind-bending quantum theories suggest that reality is only produced when particles that simultaneously exist in multiple locations become observed, taking specific properties and therefore becoming real. The infinite possibilities that exist as a wave function suddenly collapse into matter made of tangible particles — although even particles themselves have been shown to become fuzzy under close analysis.¹ Some physicists and philosophers even postulate that we exist inside a simulation, or that reality constantly keeps splitting into parallel worlds, creating infinite copies of us without our awareness. We  are, it seems, still far from having reality all figured out.  

Being perched between these two extremes — treating reality rather casually and narrowly within familiar social contexts while acknowledging the discoveries of physicists that fundamentally challenge our assumptions of what is real — makes exploring the topic of reality difficult. Theories of how reality is socially constructed, always contested and ever-changing, were useful within sociology in an earlier era, but now seem complicit in flattening our existence by reducing it — indeed confining it — to language, symbols and institutions.² The conceptual world of quantum physics, despite a considerable number of thinkers who have explored how it might intersect in ways that affect day-to-day lives, starting with Carl Jung’s ideas on synchronicity, often feels disconnected from human experience.) Perhaps, then, there is a terrain between those two poles that, regardless of our relative inattention to it, might be just the right starting point for questioning human reality in the 21st century. What is it,  exactly, that we have been missing due to our polarized take on reality? 

This gap is perhaps the space of a rarely-articulated living reality, a subtle experiential dimension right there before our eyes (and other sense organs), but that we normally overlook and under-value. Artists such as Yuko Kurihara, whose paintings transform the wonderfully uneven, vibrant surfaces of pumpkins, bananas and oranges into an absorbing universe of their own,³ remind us of the hidden layers of reality and the potential we have to perceive them quite readily, given time and the right quality of mind. Contrary to our belief that the words we employ correspond to an actual reality in the moment that we gesture toward it, what seems to occur  instead is that the words themselves come to form their own — superficial and simplified,  relationally diminished — world. Perceptual reality, meanwhile, slips away from view in all its unspoken richness, receding to the background as mere potential. We are far too quick to “collapse” the infinite possibilities, depths and textures of reality into an  impoverished stand-in. This is, of course, partly unavoidable for it would surely be impossible to navigate daily life if we stopped to perceive every single thing anew each time. Yet it is troubling all the same how unaware we are of our casual reductive habits and how easily they can obscure the living nature of reality and our awareness of it, relegating us to live a substitute for a real human existence.  

It seems to me that contemporary technological society has not merely inherited our perceptual poverty but appears to be hell-bent on further reducing our reality to fixed categories, prescriptions, images and algorithms. The powerful cognitive technologies we are in a rush to develop and disseminate build directly on our already-impoverished version of reality. It is logical to assume that they will only entrench this thinnest of realities, locking us more firmly within its confines, or specific regimes of power, as foreseen in Yuval Noah Harari’s⁴ ominous reading of the situation. Many of these technologies will impose progressively stricter and stricter limits on what we can experience and how, drawing our attention to those slivers of presumed reality, based on arbitrary choices, that we think can be easily measured and quantified. Health comes to be appraised and understood through wearables and apps, while the ever-evolving creative process becomes reduced to mere “content”. Unique human voices — our most intimate of expressive instruments — become synthesized into digital production tools deprived of subtlety and immeasurably  precious and intrinsically interwoven ecosystems come to be regarded as worthless if they fail to bend to the needs of scalable business and investment. Whatever still survives within this arid, flattened universe of controlled reality could be easily starved to death as the forces of reductionism accelerate at the expense of the kind of expanded, life-giving, delicate awareness I described above. 

We have, thankfully, not yet arrived at a full culmination of these developments. There is still time to counter the forces that overwhelm us with artificial stimuli and that try to lock us into realities that are narrower and narrower in character. It is still possible, I like to believe, to cultivate and maintain a kind of supple, open awareness and quality of mind that allows us to remain in touch with living, pulsating reality. The second part of this essay will delve further into this profoundly important challenge, which ultimately asks us to choose between two radically different understandings of reality: one as a fragmented patchwork of representations, the other as complex, continuous, alive and whole.

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Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors. 

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¹ Cossins, D. (ed.) (2025) How to think about reality. New Scientist, London.

² Berger, P.L., Luckmann, T., 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, New York, Anchor Books.

³ Some of Kurihara’s works can be viewed on her Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/kuri_nihonga/ 

⁴ Harari, Y.N., 2024. Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Fern Press, London. 

Film

Justice/Adjustment (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Justice or Adjustment
Number: XI or VIII
Astrology: Libra
Qabalah: Lamed, the Crook or Staff

Chris Gabriel August 2, 2025

Justice holds a sword and scale. Traditionally, the sword is in her right hand, while the left holds the balance. She is seated and crowned. This is the Roman goddess Justitia and the Egyptian goddess Maat.

In Rider, Justice is young, blonde, and androgynous. Their robes are red with golden trim, and

they wear a simple gold crown. They sit on a stone chair between two columns. Their right hand

holds the sword aloft, level to their neck, while the scales are hung down. They look ahead

stoically.

In Thoth, we have a very different image. Here Justice is “Adjustment”

, and the figure is the

Egyptian goddess Maat - consort to Thoth, divinity of balance. She stands, holding her sword to

the ground with both hands. She herself forms the scale, which holds the symbols for Air and

Libra. Her body is green with streaks of blue.

In Marseille, the Queen is blonde, she looks upon her sealed cup and holds a wavy dagger, ready to defend what is hers.

In each depiction we are given a very different form of Justice: the worldly institutions and human judgments of Marseille, the praeter-human divine Justice of Rider, and the embodied balance of Maat in Thoth.

Justice, as a concept, has not been with man from the beginning. It was invented by Plato and Aristotle in the first century and, as Nietzsche points out, has little basis in nature. The idea of equality is political and utopian; it is an ideal rather than an achievable state. Marseille shows this clearly. Rider believes in a divine law, and a fair administration of it. With Maat, we get a very different view.

The Egyptians did not strive for justice, but for maintaining balance and equilibrium. Maat is the goddess not only over the moral affairs of mankind, but the very cosmos too. She wages an endless battle against Chaos. The ordered nature of the celestial cycles, the seasons, and the flooding of the Nile, were all thanks to her. She was depicted as an Ostrich, and her feathers were the symbol of balance. The hearts of men would be set on a scale and measured against one of her feathers in the afterlife.

Often, the legal system is disappointing and imbalanced, and few people feel that justice is consistently served. Religious thinkers generally believe that God will administer justice in the end. With Maat, and adjustment, one can embody balance, and in doing so help to bring the world into homeostasis.

The Hebrew letter Lamed, the Crook, is given to this card. The crook of a shepherd helps to direct sheep, or catch them when they stray from the path. This is an ideal image of Justice, sitting beyond punishment or morality. There is a balanced path forward which mankind must follow. To stray is to fall into chaos.

When pulling this card, we may be met with the consequences of our actions, good or bad. This can be a “reality check” if one has been feeling too high, or a boost, if one has been feeling too low. This can also be pleasant social interaction.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Film

Inside Reality Center's Harmonic Resolution Mission

The Splash of a Drop, Professor A. M. Worthington.1895.

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Molly Hankins July 31, 2025

The paradox at the heart of Reality Center in Los Angeles, which offers a comprehensive nervous system reset via “digital psychedelics,” is that the experience allows us to drop reality entirely for a little while before optimizing performance upon return. Both reality itself and our performance within  it feel like they’ve elevated following a session, akin to playing a freshly tuned musical instrument. While the term digital psychedelics is technically correct to describe how light and sound are used to mimic an altered state, it hardly captures the full essence. Walking into their neon-lit facility inside an old brick building that once housed Santa Monica’s municipal offices in the early 20th century, it’s unclear whether you’re arriving at a law office or an underground rave. 

Past the reception room, where your shoes are removed and your Reality Management Technician greets you, lies a large, dark, high-ceiling room with a massive projection screen in front of four sound-wave table beds. Inside one of the smaller rooms surrounding the main hall, filled with more sound-wave beds and post-experience integration areas, is where your voice is sampled to create custom binaural beats in real time. Reality Center’s proprietary software, InTune, does  just that, as well as map your voice to generate data for 12 different emotional biomarkers represented onscreen by different colors. This is not first generation technology, it’s something neuroscientist Don Estes has been working on for over 40 years that has now been simplified and brought to life with Reality Center’s Millennial co-founders.

He describes a successful session as resulting in, “…a state of mind that occurs when the survival mechanism is turned off and the mind can experience feelings of peace and well-being, connectedness, faith, trust  and communion with the higher self.” In Don’s essay, he describes the intended benefits of the digital psychedelic experience, which he calls a harmonic resolution. “All human suffering”, he writes, “stems from the difference between who a person says they are and who they really are. This difference creates a tension that functions like a black hole, drawing in resonant people, places, events, circumstances, and situations in an attempt to resolve the tension. This is the theme of the current universal age. The whole of the universe cannot be united until every individual part has integrated its own self.” Integration of self is effortless when our nervous system is entrained using vibration, and this is the basis for a theory he developed called sensory resonance. It posits that there are both resonant and dissonant effects on our autonomic nervous system created by the choices we make. 

Enter the Raj brothers, Tarun and Pranab, who were already engaged with sensory resonance practices, making binaural beats together since they were kids. In his role as a Reality Center co-founder, Tarun brought his software-developer brother Pranab into the project to build the InTune software. It’s used both in-session and on your own after the session, which Tarun calls a “digital supplement” using personalized binaurals to re-establish nervous system entrainment after the experience. Vocal samples are recorded after you’ve been put into a meditative state and while  talking about what brings you joy, so the custom binaural generated contains your highest vibrational states of being. A graph with the 12 emotional biomarkers are displayed on a projection screen before you, so as you speak in real time you can see data about what’s going on emotionally in your own subconscious mind. After that it’s time to get on a sound-wave table and have a full body experience of resting in your own frequency. 

Tarun explained, “We’re making sure people that have no experience can achieve these states, which haven’t been available, especially in a personalized way. We’re really focused on making something fine tuned to your specific needs, which is why it’s called InTune. Our voice is a great biometric, it carries with it what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.” The harmonic data is compared to the words being used, and clusters of information are tracked, which is what becomes the 12 emotional biomarkers. “On a very basic level we have different algorithms that find the fundamental frequency of the tones of your voice. You can say the same word 100 times and it might have a different tone depending on when you said it, how you’re feeling that day, how much sleep you got or what you’re goal state is,” he added about the customization. “We’re looking for the most harmonic parts of your statements, where that tonality is most aligned, that gives us a metric we can use to create instant, personalized biofeedback.”

There’s a delightful balance between science and esoteric philosophy in Reality Center’s approach to sessions, which are intended to empower clients’ psyches so they can make the changes needed to adjust reality to their preferences. Tarun described how our souls  form on Earth with no instruction manual, thrown into the gameplay of the human experience. It can take many lifetimes to acquire learn the knowledge needed to get the best out of being here. “But we’re in a time in which we need dramatic shifts to happen quickly, so this is a tool to create agency for transformation,” he said. As kids, he and Pranab had turntables and were pushing Schumann Resonance standing wave binaural beats through their subwoofers to align themselves, calling themselves “neuro-DJs.” Tarun was clearly the right person to meet Don and put the founding team together, alongside combat veteran and commercial media director Jonathan Chia.

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“After we forgive or let go, what do we actually want to wake up and do everyday now that those things aren’t holding us back?”

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Treating veterans is a core function of Reality Center, which they’re able to do free of charge thanks to grant funding. After losing countless friends during and after his military service to drugs and suicide, Jonathan had a psychedelic experience that left him certain of life after death and solidified his mission to bring this experience to his fellow servicemen and women. Once the nervous system reset takes place, he explained, the experience of expanded consciousness and integration begins. “If you feel like you have to protect yourself all the time, you never really sleep that well and if you don’t sleep well you never get reset. We reset, expand then use the experience to elevate your life. We try to move people as fast as possible to the human performance side of it. After we forgive or let go, what do we actually want to wake up and do everyday now that those things aren’t holding us back?” There are countless reports from clients who have experienced that level of emotional release from a session. 

All Reality Center clients have access to their session technician beyong their appointment to provide integration support, providing ongoing access to a community who’ve shared the experience that positively influences the state of neuroplasticity clients find themselves in. Technicians are extremely open-hearted and minded when it comes to helping clients integrate every aspect of their experience. “We don’t approach this from just a new age wellness perspective,” Pranab explained, “There’s a lot of science that goes into this, but also a lot of comfort. This is not a sterile, clinical building. We’re not trying to be anyone’s guru - we’re peers.” 

Witnessing the peer-to-peer healing dynamic in action between Jonathan and 73-year-old client, veteran and original Source Family member Zarathustra Aquarian, opened up another dimension of Reality Center - the multigenerational collaboration powering the project. Born the same year as Don, Zarathustra lived through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and watched the cultural tides turn from the imprisonment of Timothy Leary in 1970 to the decriminalization of psilocybin in American cities 50 years later. They both lived through the technological revolution of computers and smartphones becoming ubiquitous, and even though Don developed the tech decades ago, he needed Millennial design and marketing to bring harmonic resolution therapy to its full iteration. Zarathustra is a computer scientist by training and he came to Reality Center looking for the deep relaxation and connection to his higher self that he gets from a sensory deprivation floatation tank. 

“After working with John, I realized that sensory deprivation is a special case of my theory of sensory resonance, wherein all of the senses are given nothing instead of being synchronized together in a coherent experience as we do at the Reality Center,” said Don. “ Both, all or nothing seem to distract the normal mind from the clutches of the reticular activating system's survival mode that blocks access to those higher states of mind and assists in achieving altered  or non-ordinary states of mind.” In many ways the experience of being put into harmonic resolution via light, sound and vibration stimulus is exactly the opposite of floating in a dark saltwater tank, yet both can yield psychedelic experiences. Don and his co-founders believe our consciousness can more readily separate from the physical body and experience a psychedelic-level of awareness with an entrained nervous system, which is why connecting with dead loved ones is so common. 

In an expanded state of consciousness the veil between dimensions, including that of life and death, become thin. “The difference between your current state and ideal state is where suffering lies,” Tarun reminds us, and having an experience of consciousness beyond death is sometimes the only bridge needed to close the gap between one’s current and one’s ideal state.

We wrapped up at Reality Center with a final, albeit obvious, question: does anything strange ever happen? Stories began pouring out from Tarun and Pranab about equipment turning on when the power was out, glitches coinciding with moments of personal revelation, seeing beings in the room through closed eyes, and an endless list of synchronicities and coincidences. For instance, back-to-back clients with no exposure to each other will use the same word to describe their state of being. Apparently this usually happens in threes, like three consecutive clients who don’t know each other all being from the same town. It’s a rather flirtatious pattern of reality Terence McKenna might characterize as the universe nodding in approval. 

Tarun thinks a synchronicity is just a vibrational correlation, which is precisely the type of data being generated by InTune and the nature of nervous system entrainment facilitated in the session. With all that vibrational correlation percolating in Reality Center’s Morphic field, of course they’re resonant with ongoing instances of correlation. Check out RealityMgmt.com and get InTune here.

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

Bob Pittman

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”