“We live in a universe whose age we can’t compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.” — Bill Bryson

Twisting the Baseline

In my continued attempts to peel away at the layers of superfluous distraction that cloud our perspectives towards the way reality really works around us, I’ve found it fitting to overlay one particular phenomenon of the physical world — that of the vortex — upon our own human nature as a means to further discern some realizations about who and…

“An experience of higher-dimensionality is achieved by integration of experiences of different centres and levels of consciousness. Hence the indescribability of certain experiences of meditation on the plane of three-dimensional consciousness and within a system of logic which reduces the possibilities of expression by imposing further limits upon the process of thinking.”

— Fritjof Capra

I’ve happened to stumble into somewhat of an interesting phenomenon while sliding down the rabbit hole that is Wim Hof —specifically relating to his particularly trendy breathing technique.

The exercise, which has been coasting Reddit boards and surfing podcasts for a long while now, has…

We rush for the stars as we crawl toward our graves.
— Al McGuire

Deeper Pastures

It’s looking like more and more of a practical inevitability that humankind will leave the dusty, threatening surface of our increasingly hostile planet and head down under, below the surface of what we’ve called home for as long as we can remember.

The cornucopia of threats —from rising thermostats and rising nuclear ambitions to thinning atmospheres and thinning diplomatic patience —seem to coagulate into a firm realization that our safest place to be, to no one’s surprise, is underground.

And this isn’t to be construed in…

“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
― Terence McKenna

A Hyperthesis

There’s a little known secret that’s reserved for the quiet minds who pursue some measure of personal enlightenment, one that is stumbled into somewhat unexpectedly by those who are committed in the search for the kind of lasting fulfillment that true self-actualization brings about.

While terms like enlightenment or self-actualization themselves are operative and interchangeable (say, with…

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan

In October of 2017, humanity initiated a project called ‘Sonar Calling GJ 273b’, sending music and other information through deep space towards a red dwarf star — Luyten’s star — located about a dozen light-years away.

Named after Willem Luyten, the star is one quarter of the mass of the Sun and has roughly a third of its radius. More importantly, the star hosts two exoplanets with some rather promising characteristics for containing life.

One of the two planets, a ‘super earth’, is almost…

We’re all nuclei. We’re all at the center of our own little universes, all being orbited and all orbiting, all moving atomically, pulsating with the rhythms of the world around us.

While we’re no different from each other, we’re immensely unique.

And while we’re no different from nature, we’re really one and the same.

In fact, we’re weaved into our surrounding reality in such an intricately intimate way that we can’t even seem to comprehend all of the interrelated elements and mediums and quarks of this symbiotic existence.

Many religions and ideologies have coined innumerable terms to describe this all-encompassing…

“But the man who knows the relation between the forces of Nature and actions, sees how some forces of Nature work upon other forces of Nature, and becomes not their slave”

— Fritjof Capra

Just Hydrogen Dioxide

There’s nothing quite like huddling under a dense pine canopy next to a frozen lake during a spell of precipitation whereby nature doesn’t know whether to rain or to snow, so it does both.

Steam, because it’s still early in the winter, emanates from the forest floor and permeates through the surrounding canopies, coalescing into mists and wisps which irresistibly join the busy clouds overhead.

Rain…

From Metaphysics to Betaphysics

Philosophers have often equated the study of our physical reality with the study of our very existence. It had been as common in Ancient Greece, when Aristotle lectured on matter and our fundamental essence, as it had been in Europe not more than two centuries ago when electromagnetism had been discovered and its findings passionately applied to our human nature.

Today, things are becoming a bit more zoomed-in, leaving the correspondence of natural law to human nature in the hands of those with specialized equipment — microscopes, telescopes, hadron colliders. …