Everything exists within everything else.
This is the kind of statement that can be so densely packed with laborious truth or so hollowed out with defective logic that we tend to simply circumvent its gritty perplexity whenever we confront it.
Biologists may understand this idea through looking at how organisms are identical to, or symbiotic with, or aligned alongside their environment. Astrophysicists may interpret this point by looking at the chemical signatures and structures of differing stars. Psychologists can do the same while assessing individual behaviors against the collective.
Anthropologists, geologists, botanists — they all encounter this universal trope which…
Every now and again, we unwillingly stumble into the realization that something, if not everything, is out of our control.
And as dreadful as this realization may typically feel, it’s usually accompanied by a resonating sense of peace — whether that peace is sourced from a blissful resignation of circumstance or from a wholesome surrendering of effort.
It’s at this existential intersection, one that we don’t get to frequent all too often, that we interact with one of the truest and most potent of universal laws — that everything is always changing, moving, never static and never still.
In the…
Our ultimate underlying reality —it’s a tall order of a concept for us to digest, whether we want to consider this a spiritual force (intelligent design flowing through everything) or a scientific one (sub-sub-atomic currents of energy).
The question over whatever it is that fills empty space is one that bridges both science and spirituality together, carrying our curiosity more than perhaps any other question has been able to thus far.
What is nothingness? What exists all around us, if anything? What happens when we arrive at pure emptiness?
In other words, what do we find in the proverbial Void?
…
Comfort, I propose, is toxic.
We seem to become so enthralled in our daily pursuit of solace that we unwittingly form something of a dangerous relationship with comfort, indirectly pursuing it was though it were the lifeblood of our existence.
Because most of us have the ability to move through our reality in a way that affords us a considerable amount of influence over our circumstances, both immediate and distant, we pursue our insatiable appetites into a relative kind of oblivion, either doom-scrolling away our free time or getting lost in the myriad of countless distractions that float about us…
A general law of nature that permeates all living and non-living matter alike is the incessant pursuit of equilibrium — the harmonious dissipation of energy that moves towards a comfortably static state of rest; like ripples reverberating outward into a silent and unperturbed state of being.
Only the journey towards a static state of calm may be the last thing that we should be after; after all, it sort of runs contrary to the dynamic river that is our reality.
It’s a fine line to navigate atop.
Within our own sphere of sentimental existence, we hear about the importance of…
“I’m convinced that reality is a tinker toy set that we can learn to take apart and put together in completely different ways” — Terence McKenna
McKenna had often pushed the idea that we, as the sentient human beings we are, remain perpetually engaged in a certain conquest of dimensionality.
If we were to loosen the increasingly materialistic grip we hold on how we perceptually comprehend our immediate reality, as well as how we perceive our place in this world, we can see his theorized conquest at play.
To surpass the countless distractions and shift towards the less tangible realms…
“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It’s safe to say that we, as the curious human species we are, remain far from having figured ourselves out.
While we’ve tapped into certain elemental truths that swirl about us, we’re still relatively naïve when it comes to mapping the human condition, as well as our placement within this relatively unknowable reality that we find ourselves in — two interdependent dynamos of our curiosity.
But, like the well-intended beings we are, we try.
We may get confused along the way…
“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
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
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…