The Old Soul Within

The Perils of Heroic Individualism

Heroic individualism is an ongoing game of one-upmanship against both self and others, where measurable achievement is the main arbiter of success; self-worth and productivity often get prioritized over people; and short-term thinking reins. Regardless of how far you make it, with heroic individualism the goalpost is always ten yards down the field. Try as you might, you never quite arrive. Heroic individualism says that you will never have enough, be enough, or do enough. It is an endless gauntlet of more, more, more. While heroic individualism may lead to decent short-term performance, long-term, it is a recipe for disaster. This is because fulfillment, health, and excellence depend on things that are inherently inefficient and unproductive, at least based on heroic individualism’s acute timescales and financial metrics.

From 2017 to 2021, I interviewed hundreds of people and reviewed thousands of scientific papers. In defining heroic individualism, I came up with the following signs and symptoms:

• Low-level anxiety and a sensation of always being rushed or in a hurry — if not physically, then mentally.

• A sense that your life is swirling frenetic energy, as if you’re being pushed and pulled from one thing to the next.

• A recurring intuition that something isn’t quite right, but unsure what that something is, let alone what to do about it.

• Not always wanting to be on, but struggling to turn it off, and not feeling good when you do.

• Feeling too busy, but also restless when you have open time and space.

• Easily distractible and unable to focus; struggling to sit in silence without reaching for your phone.

• Wanting to find some inner calm and peace but not knowing how.

• Lonely or empty inside.

• Successful by conventional standards, yet feeling like you’re never enough.

In chapter one of Groundedness, I wrote about a concept in ancient eastern psychology known as the hungry ghost. The hungry ghost has an endless stomach. He keeps on eating, stuffing himself sick, but he never feels full. He lives a bloated and miserable life. Back then, it was considered a severe disorder. Yet the modern world that so many of us inhabit today depends on the creation of hungry ghosts.

While in the book I focused mainly on how heroic individualism affects individuals and organizations, I now see many examples of how it is affecting society as a whole. Our culture is increasingly becoming one big hungry ghost, the consequences of which are damning.

People are perhaps less grounded than ever, increasingly alienated from each other and from themselves. We are plagued by rampant busyness and hustle, so obsessed with acute productivity that we neglect to nurture intimate relationships. We are constantly being pinged, buzzed, and pulled this way and that by our digital devices — disrupting periods of full engagement in work and leisure.

Connection over the internet, while valuable, is not the same as belonging to your local community. More and more of our downtime is filled not by thinking, mind-wandering, or reading but by chasing dopamine, scrolling feeds filled with click-bait headlines; junk marketing; and the performative perfect lives of people whose actual lives tend not to be so perfect.

Most of what we consume we have no idea where it came from or how it was made. And, for many people, we are equally disconnected from what we produce or any tangible benefit of it. The work of anthropologist David Graeber found that over 40 percent of all jobs in the developed economy are what he termed “bullshit,” meaning they provide no value to anyone, including the person doing them.

One result of heroic individualism on a mass scale is collective loneliness, a variety that is both broad and deep. Hannah Arendt called it “uprootedness” and “superfluousness,” a lack of connection to one’s neighbors, to one’s work, and to one’s own ability to think. Arendt’s loneliness occurs when someone is constantly a degree or two removed from the experience of their inner and outer lives; when someone is so frequently told what to think (and spends so much of their time distracted) that they lose the ability to think for themselves.

Arendt posits that this type of loneliness leads to tribalism, and worse, totalitarianism. She writes that these movements allow people to “escape from disintegration and disorientation,” and that “the isolation of atomized individuals provides the mass basis for totalitarian rule.”

Alienation, loneliness, and uprootedness are fundamental problems of our times. The interests of many of the largest forces shaping society today — politicians, social media companies, rote consumerism, and perhaps even some large religious organizations (certainly not all, as in the book I highlight many benefits of spirituality and religion; but some, yes) — are to make us feel lonely. If we feel lonely, if we are not connected with what is deep within us and actually here in front of us, then we’ll try to fill our emptiness with stuff and flee to alternative worlds and tribes.

We know from decades upon decades of research that the kind of loneliness which Arendt describes makes people anxious, depressed, and burnt out. The three pillars of well-being are autonomy, mastery, and belonging; modern psychology speak for the ability to think your own thoughts, do your own actions, and live in connection with others. It is undeniable that our world right now is increasingly void of all three, at least in their authentic manifestations.

A significant consequence of this void, I suspect, is people filling the gap with superficial sources of meaning in their lives, most notably connecting one’s identity to a tribe that pits itself against others. Perhaps the starkest example is polarization in the United States and Trumpism, which is most certainly not about any coherent policy platform but rather about people feeling connected to something — anything — in their lives. Sadly, it is a false connection, one that is not good for anyone but the leaders of such movements, almost always grifters and charlatans, who prey upon the fears of their followers.

“Individualism exists through disconnection, and the cost of disconnection is disconnection,” writes the therapist Terrence Real, in his book Us. “Virtually everyone in the West feels superior to someone and inferior to someone else,” he goes on. “Virtually everyone in the West sees the group they belong to as superior to some other group and inferior to another. None of this sees the air of daylight, while in reality, the pain of disconnection sweeps the western world for all to see. We have never been a lonelier people.”

The economist Kenneth Bouding once said that there are two kinds of ethics: the economic and the heroic. The economic ethic says there are benefits and costs to everything and they should be weighed against each other. The heroic ethic says push ahead as fast as you can, costs be damned. In the words of another economist, Herman Daly, the heroic ethic is all about “hang the cost! Full speed ahead! Death or victory right now! Forward into Growth. If we create too many problems in the present, the future will learn how to deal with it.”

In the past few decades we have devoutly followed the heroic ethic. Though in The Practice of Groundedness I wrote at length about the individual detriments of being addicted to growth and consumption — such as anxiety, burnout, and insecurity — I didn’t mention the societal ones, which, at present, are impossible to ignore.

The same oil that fuels our heroic ethic also fuels nation-states with values antithetical to ours, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. This has put us in a real bind: either we support regimes that abuse basic human rights and freedoms (and in the case of Russia, start all-out wars) or we suffer massive inflation at the pump, which spills over into so many other facets of our heroic lives.

Our reliance on cheap and dirty energy is also fueling climate change, making many parts of the globe barely habitable for human life. In mid-July of this year, more than 100 million Americans experienced temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Around the same time, the United Kingdom hit record temperatures of 105 degrees Fahrenheit, causing some airports to shut down due to melting runways.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with economic growth. Many, myself included, would argue it is a good thing — especially given so much of the world’s population still lives in abject poverty. However, it seems safe to say that our current approach, what Bouding called the “heroic ethic,” isn’t working. Like the hungry ghost of ancient Eastern parables, if you keep stuffing yourself with no concern over what you are consuming or whether or not it satiates you, eventually you’ll end up bloated, miserable, and sick — which seems to be the direction in which the global economy and earth on which it is situated are heading.

If you revisit the symptom list for heroic individualism above, you’ll find that just about all of them apply to America and other Western societies at large. We live in never-enough cultures that implicitly and explicitly push people to search for love and meaning in all the wrong places. The result is loneliness, disconnection, and rote consumption, which give rise to toxic sociopolitical movements and wreak havoc on the planet.

When I wrote the manuscript for Groundedness over two years ago, I was unfamiliar with the work of Arendt. I hadn’t heard about the “heroic” economic ethic. COVID was only just beginning. Democratic backslide in the west was still in its infancy. Inflation was not nearing nine percent. There was not war in Europe. I am afraid the book is more relevant now than it was then, not only individually and but perhaps even more, societally.

What, then, would a more grounded society look like?

• One that accepted the reality of environmental (and other) constraints and thoughtfully evaluated tradeoffs, making deliberate decisions and adapting, ideally by incentivizing new technologies that make growth more sustainable.

• One that supported presence and productive activity by encouraging and making participation in craft, sport, and the arts financially feasible for all. Also, one that genuinely prioritized and supported the health and safety of people working in the age-old crafts upon which we all depend, such as medicine, teaching, and construction.

• One that played the long game, evaluating so-called “success” and “failure” on time horizons that reach beyond a single quarter, using metrics that extend beyond the financial, and understanding that what looks “efficient” and “optimal” today may be destructive in the future.

• One that realized its vulnerabilities and addressed them instead of kicking the can down the road — again and again and again — and in turn dealing with acute crisis after acute crisis after acute crisis. For many places, this would require an authentic reckoning with a history of enslavement, racism, and discrimination.

• One that encouraged and supported deep community and belonging instead of everyone going at it alone — sometimes out of necessity to make ends meet, other times because the ethos is so strongly pointed toward keeping up with the Joneses.

There are no easy solutions to what ails us. It’s hard enough to make change as an individual, it is even harder to do it at scale.

And yet, we’ve got to start somewhere. “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outwards from there,” writes Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.”

People often think about this common dichotomy that pits bottom-up individual actions against top-down societal change. I think it’s largely false. All the big and thorny problems we face demand both. Practicing groundedness starts as an inside game, cultivating the skills and habits of acceptance, seeing clearly, playing the long game, concentration, taking productive action, cultivating respect, building community, and working on genuine vulnerability and strength. And then it spreads out from there — to your family, to your colleagues, to your neighbors, and ideally, beyond. We need good and grounded leaders now more than ever. In our families. In our schools. In our hospitals. In our boardrooms. In our state capitols.

I am under no delusion that a more grounded ethos will spread quickly, and I am by no means certain it will happen at all. But all we can do is keep showing up and trying. If nothing else, taking wise action gives us hope and energizes us to keep going.

by Brad Stulberg at medium.com on September 18, 2022, adapted from his latest book The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success that Feeds — Not Crushes — Your Soul

The Transition to Post-Capitalism is Inevitable

In Margaret Atwood’s powerful essay on the reality of climate change — and its implications for the future of oil-dependent industrial civilization — she tells two vastly distinct stories of our future.

The first is a tale of dystopia — a future so bleak, it would make Hollywood moguls looking for the next science fiction blockbuster of action-packed (post)apocalypse salivate with anticipation. Here, Atwood tells a story of human failure: of short-sighted choices based on fatal addiction to business-as-usual, and an egoistic hubris rooted in centuries of globalization.

In this scenario, we largely ignore the overwhelming evidence of climate change, and the result is that industrial civilization enters a period of protracted collapse, fueled by accelerating war, famine, and natural disasters.

The second is a vision of utopia — a collectivist dream-world in which everybody works together, harnessing the best of human ingenuity across society, economics, politics and technology, to peacefully restructure the fundamentals of human existence. Here, Atwood tells a story of human success: of far-sighted decisions based on confronting the follies of business-as-usual, and by embracing our unity as a species.

In this scenario, we act on the overwhelming evidence of climate change, and the result is that industrial civilization enters a period of carefully calibrated transition to a techno-utopian post-capitalist, post-materialist infrastructure, avoiding the worst of today’s scientific warnings.

Of course, both these scenarios are extremes, but there is a purpose to such extremes. Atwood uses the power of story to help us awaken to the starkness — and gravity — of the choice we now face: a choice, effectively, between hell and heaven on earth.

And Atwood is spot on when she notes that this is not just about climate change.

The meteoric accumulation of scientific data over the last few decades has increasingly brought home the fact that the climate crisis is a symptom of a deeper, civilizational problem. It is not just that we are completely and utterly dependent on fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas, to do literally anything and everything in our societies — from transport and food, to art and culture.

It is the wider context of that structural dependency: the extent to which cheap fossil fuels enabled the exponential economic growth trajectory that took-off since the Industrial Revolution; the symbiotic relationship between economic growth and the evolution of the banking system, which has been able to flood the world with credit on the back of seemingly endless supplies of cheap oil; the relentless expansion of Anglo-European capitalism through empire and slavery; the transformation and militarization of global capitalism under US dominance, accompanied by ownership and control of much of the world’s land, food, water, mineral and energy resources by a tiny minority of the world’s population; and the subjugation of planetary resources to the endless growth-imperative of that minority, as it seeks, entirely rationally within this structure, to maximize its profits.

The corresponding ecocide that has resulted — with species extinctions now at record levels, and the degradation and destruction of critical eco-systems escalating at unprecedented scales — is not factored into the narrow calculations of quarterly returns by these powerful interlocking corporate and banking conglomerates.
Climate change is merely one symptom of a wider Crisis of Civilization.

There is a new scientific model being developed with support from a UK government task-force at Anglia Ruskin University. The model shows that on a business-as-usual trajectory, industrial civilization as we know it would likely collapse within 25 years due to global food crises, induced by the impacts of climate change in the world’s major food basket regions.

The model shows, however, that this outcome is by no means inevitable — in fact, its creators pointed out that such a business-as-usual trajectory would be unrealistic, as already policy changes have been pursued in response to the 2008 food and oil shocks. Though inadequate, this means that as crises accelerate, they will simultaneously open up opportunities for change.

The question, of course, is whether by then it will be too late.

A widely-reported paper in Science Advances published in June concluded using extremely conservative assumptions that an “exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity” has occurred “over the last few centuries.” The scale of this loss indicates “that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” Although it is still possible to avoid a loss of critical ecosystem services essential for human survival, through “intensified conservation efforts,” the window of opportunity to do so is “rapidly closing.”

There is much corroborating evidence for these findings. Another study in May found that if global warming continues at current rates, one in six species on the planet will be at risk of extinction:

Extinction risks from climate change are expected not only to increase but to accelerate for every degree rise in global temperatures. The signal of climate change–induced extinctions will become increasingly apparent if we do not act now to limit future climate change.

The risk of civilizational collapse — and outright extinction — is perhaps the clearest signal that there is something deeply wrong with the global system in its current form. So wrong, that it is right now on a path to self-annihilation.

War, famine, and social break-down are happening today in the context of escalating, interconnected climate, food and energy crises. The conflicts in the Middle East that are now pre-occupying Western governments were sparked by a cocktail of climate-induced drought, entrenched inequalities, depletion of cheap oil, and political repression.

The spiraling terrorist violence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and beyond — purportedly in the name of religion — is being aggravated by concrete material realities: water scarcity, energy scarcity, and food scarcity.

The real issue is not a clash of civilizations, but a Crisis of Civilization in its current form, which of course should really beg the question: which war are we fighting, and in whose interests?

The world is locked into a clash of civilizations, each side pointing the finger of blame at the other: the Western world’s ‘war on terror’ to crush Muslim barbarians, and the Muslim world’s ‘jihad’ to repel Western empire. Ironically, neither side could exist without the other.

As economic hardships accelerate while the global system continues to unravel, this reactionary violence against the Other is becoming evermore normalized. Communities, searching for somewhere to pin their anxieties, root themselves in simplistic, artificial categories of identity — political identity, religious identity, ethnic identity, national identity.

These identities serve as anchors amidst a maelstrom of intensifying global uncertainty, as well as convenient vindicators of blame against those who stand Outside one’s chosen identity.

But while both sides are consumed with mutual hatred, they are missing the point: the real issue is not a clash of civilizations, but a Crisis of Civilization in its current form.

According to another groundbreaking paper in Science, published earlier this year to little media fanfare, while we are busy fighting each other to death, overconsuming planetary resources and annihilating the very ecosystems we need to sustain long-term human survival, we are in fact contributing to the permanent destabilization of the Earth System (ES).

The new study develops a framework to understand ‘Planetary Boundaries’ (PB) within which can be discerned a “safe operating space” permitting modern societies to evolve.

The study is authored by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Sweden, Australia, Denmark, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, Kenya, India, the US and the UK. Noting that the 11,700 year long epoch known as the ‘Holocene’ is the only state of the Earth System that definitely supports “contemporary human societies,” the scientists conclude:

There is increasing evidence that human activities are affecting ES functioning to a degree that threatens the resilience of the ES — its ability to persist in a Holocene-like state in the face of increasing human pressures and shocks. The PB framework is based on critical processes that regulate ES functioning… [and] identifies levels of anthropogenic perturbations below which the risk of destabilization of the ES is likely to remain low — a ‘safe operating space’ for global societal development… Transgression of the PBs thus creates substantial risk of destabilizing the Holocene state of the ES in which modern societies have evolved.

While much attention has been paid to the new science of impending doom, there has been less focus on the new science of civilizational transition.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from these warning signs is what they tell us about the need not simply for ‘change’, but for fundamental systemic transformation.

The science of impending doom does not prove the inevitability of human extinction, but it does prove the inevitability of something else: the extinction of industrial civilization in its current form.

The endless growth model of contemporary global capitalism is not just unsustainable — it is on track to destabilize the  Earth System in a way that could make the planet uninhabitable for society as we know it.

It is not humanity, then, that is doomed — it is industrial capitalism.

The choice before us, then, is whether or not we are willing to give-up fossil-fueled endless material growth.

As much as governments and corporations would like us to remain deluded in the conviction that this choice lies not in our hands, but theirs, the truth is that both are becoming increasingly obsolete as global crises accelerate.

The oil empire is crumbling. The US shale industry is collapsing under ballooning debt and diminishing profitability. Canadian oil and gas firms are “bleeding money” as they experience the biggest drop in profit in a decade. The UK’s oil industry is “close to collapse” according to Robin Allen, head of the Association of UK Independent Oil and Gas Exploration Companies.

The governments that remain beholden to the fossil fuel lobby will die along with these firms.

As they crumble, in their place new post-capitalist, post-materialist ideas, structures, and practices are fast emerging. One powerful compendium of information on the rise of the new paradigm is a new book by Dr. Samuel Alexander, an environment lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, and a co-director of the Simplicity Institute.

“The main issue, however, is not whether we will have enough oil, but whether we can afford to produce and burn the oil we have,” Alexander writes in Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015).

Just as expensive oil suffocates industrial economies that are dependent on cheap energy inputs to function, cheap oil merely propagates and further entrenches the existing order of global capitalism that is in the process of growing itself to death.

The death of the age of oil is, therefore, symptomatic of the end of the capitalism itself.
“We cannot merely tinker with the systems and cultures of global capitalism and hope that things will magically improve,” adds Alexander in Prosperous Descent (2015).

Those systems and cultures are not the symptoms but the causes of our overlapping social, economic, and ecological crises, so ultimately those systems and cultures must be replaced with fundamentally different forms of human interaction and organization, driven and animated by different values, hopes, and myths.

Un-civilizing ourselves from our destructive civilization and building something new is the great, undefined, creative challenge we face incoming decades — which is a challenge both of opposition and renewal.

Alexander shows that conventional growth economics in the developed world has become “socially counter-productive, ecologically unsustainable, and uneconomic.” Not only that, but mounting evidence in the form of price volatility, stagnating energy supplies, and the failure to address the instabilities of the global financial system suggest that the world is facing an imminent end to growth, symptomatic of the breaching of planetary boundaries. In this context, there is a need for what some scholars call “degrowth” — defined as “an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions.”

An equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions

Degrowth doesn’t mean the end of prosperity, but the end of a particularly parasitical form of economics that is widening inequalities even as it ravages the environment. If we don’t choose this path voluntarily, as a species, Alexander warns, it is likely to be imposed on us in a much more unsavory fashion by the unsustainability of business-as-usual.

But inasmuch as Alexander rejects a resigned, fatalistic capitulation to inevitable dystopia, he also warns against blind faith in salvation via techno-utopian ingenuity.

Instead, he coins the idea of “voluntary simplicity” — a way of life in which “people choose to restrain or reduce their material consumption, while at the same time seeking a higher quality of life.”

Revolution

Dr. Alexander shows that voluntary simplicity is the only pathway that avoids civilizational collapse. It does so because it entails the fundamental systemic transformation of civilization — the transition to a way of being which does not eschew technology, but uses the best of human technology to re-wire civilization from the ground up.

At the core of this radical re-wiring is a transformation of the human relationship with nature: moving away from top-down modes of political and economic organization, to participatory models of grassroots self-governance, localized sustainable agriculture, and equity in access to economic production.

This transformation in turn will require and entail a new “aesthetics of existence.” Drawing on the ethical writings of Michael Foucault, Alexander notes that “the self” as we know it today is woven largely from the structures of power in which we find ourselves. As inhabitants of consumer societies, we have internalized mass consumerism, its egoistic values and its reductionist worldview, “often in subtle, even insidious, ways.”

The self is not just shaped by society, but also acts on and changes itself through self-fashioning

Yet Foucault also showed that “the self” is not just shaped by society, but also acts on and changes itself through “self-fashioning.” What type of person, then, should one create?

Given that over-consumption is driving many of the world’s most pressing problems, it may be that ethical activity today requires that we critically reflect on our own subjectivities in order to refuse who we are — so far as we are uncritical consumers. This Great Refusal would open up space to create new, post-consumerist forms of subjectivity, which is surely part of the revolution in consciousness needed in order to produce a society based on a ‘simpler way.’

The post-capitalist, post-materialist societies of the future, thus, represent the emergence of not just a new form of civilization entirely — but a new form of human being, and a new way of looking at, and being in, the world.

This new “self” will be premised on envisioning the inherent unity of the human species, the interdependence of humankind with nature, and a form of self-actualization based on safeguarding, exploring and nurturing that relationship, rather than exploiting it.

Our task today is to accelerate the process of transition to post-capitalism by creating and implementing it here and now, in the bowels of a dying system. We may well fail in doing so — but the point is precisely to broaden the horizons of the present so that we become cognizant of possibilities that lead beyond it, to plant seeds that might blossom in years and decades to come as governments fall and economies rupture.

We need to work together to craft new visions, values and worldviews; to develop new ideals, ethics and structures; to innovate new politics, economics and cultures of resistance and renewal.

Most of all, we need to evolve new stories of what it means to be human. As Atwood shows, we need stories that speak to the human condition, which beckon to a utopian future beyond the constraints of the dystopian present, which can help us reflect on the challenges of today with a view to collectively dream-weave a more meaningful tomorrow.

Whatever choices we make, one thing is certain. Well before the end of this century, our fossil fuel-centric industries will be little more than outmoded relics of an old, defunct civilization.

by NAFEEZ AHMED at medium.com on July 28, 2015

Rediscovering the Magic

The awakening of magic was part of the story of creation, when human consciousness first appeared. The natural magic of the Earth allowed us to experience the wonder and mystery of creation, how all of creation embodies a divine purpose. It can be seen, for example, in the cave paintings in southern France whose animals have a shamanic dimension. Tragically, this early magic began to be misused for the purpose of power, and this started the split between the worlds, the world of light and the physical world of creation, which is imaged in myth as the Fall, a loss of innocence. I sense a calling to return to this primal relationship, awakening this magic that is still present, although mostly hidden, within creation. The magical relationship between the worlds is a part of our heritage which we have mostly forgotten, although we still speak of a “magical moment” when the numinous energy of the inner comes into our outer world.

Could it be that back in the very beginning, before the division, before all the power plays, before even the misuse of magic that damaged so much, the relationship with the Divine was simple companionship, friendship, and love? That we walked together, feet touching the ground, hearts singing the songs of creation? This was the time of naming, when “God taught Adam all the names, all of them,” and the world came alive through this pure magic. It was the time when rivers and trees sang their true nature, and everything was alive with divine presence. Maybe this is what is called the Garden of Eden, but then it was just the way things were.

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, November 2021, at workingwithoneness.org

The Eternal Oneness of Being

Within this celestial, fractal reality there is the illusion of separation – the duality that arises in the mind. We are born into the world as one and we have no idea of ‘me’, the separate self, for some time until it is gradually instilled upon us by the environment and our developing mind. Thoughts, memories, and sensations are assigned to a “person” and a pattern of identification emerges. We hear our name over and over, your toy truck and my toy truck. The hamster wheel starts turning. The brain starts seeking to strengthen this machine – to feed it, to compete, to seek and understand, to avoid failure, etc. And over time, we’ve bought into this illusion until it has become a virtually ubiquitous feature of our culture, and one that has been wreaking havoc throughout human history in varying forms and degrees.

To suggest we are all one might seem like a sappy, hippie cliche, but it is the bedrock of non-duality, most major spiritual traditions, and (more recently) the scientific world. And yet, everyone thinks it’s me. I am me and you are you, two separate, heterogeneous worlds that occasionally interact; this identification and attachment to the body-mind complex is heavily entrenched and continuous for most.

Making matters worse, many aspects of our society actively encourage this false identification for a whole slew of financial, political, and social reasons. You’ve got to get ahead. You can’t say that. You need to be better looking. You are not enough. Because it seems to be separate from the rest of existence, the ‘me’ – by its very nature – is anxious, inadequate, and afraid at its core. This makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation, a fact that has not escaped those who hold power. This fear is perpetuated and maneuvered carefully to keep the status quo intact. However, this manipulation can work both ways.

The practice of meditation involves a gradual dissolving of this illusion. The ‘me’ ceases to be personal and returns to its true state – universal. There is no longer me and you, there’s just I, playing itself out in the house of a thousand mirrors. And this is not just some etheric-sounding claptrap, it is borne out by quantum physics, thermodynamics, as well as basic neuroscience involving the nature of the default mode network (DMN) in the brain.

‘Self and other’ is a major aspect of neural activity going on in the brain regions of the DMN, and meditation (as well as psilocybin and other psychedelics) have repeatedly shown in studies to reduce this activity – permanently, in the case of meditation.

Thoughts and feelings of love and connection with “the rest of the world” increase, thoughts and feelings of loneliness or depression decrease. The separate self, which was formed in the mind, gradually dissolves. This also necessarily extends to other mental concepts that involve the ‘me’, such as spacetime and free will. Who is there to choose? What is it that is supposedly enduring through space and time? Is “mine” actually different than “yours”, or is it a single, infinite substrate apparently having separate experiences for the fun of it? The answer to these questions can be realized through the practice of editation and self-inquiry. So, what is meditation? By providing a few different definitions across the spiritual spectrum, the effort here is to demonstrate that this is not anything new or even confined to one particular religion or culture. The messengers change, the message is and was the same.

"There is only one meditation – the rigorous refusal to harbor thoughts.”
– Nisargadatta

"Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.”
– Lao Tzu

"You can only stop the flow of thoughts by refusing to have any interest in it.”
– Ramana Maharshi

"Be still and know that I am god.”
– Psalm 46:10

All of these quotes boil down to the same process, becoming a witness to our thinking instead of an active participant.  In so doing, the identification and attachment with the ‘me’ is diminished and eventually broken. The The Lao Tzu instructions are perfectly fitting – just remain in the center, watching. Then forget that you are there. The first part, remaining in the center watching, is “your” doing – the practice of meditation that Ramana and Nisargadatta describe above.

The second part, the forgetting you are there, happens on its own as a result of the practice. The enlightenment. The doer dissipates, the subject-object duality collapses. This process necessarily creates an agony, a crucifixion essentially. The ego (another term for the separate self or ‘me’) has quite a lot of inertia and cunning to it, and will fight bitterly to survive. There is a friction put in motion as the self writhes and agonizes and starves, alternating with the ascending bliss of “enlightenment”, “god”, “brahman” – whatsoever term feels encouraging enough to get you to just sit down in the damn chair and be quiet for awhile. But by and by, with this gradual discontinuation of feeding the self, spaces begin to emerge in what was assumed to be a solid, continuous entity.

The ‘me’, along with all of its dramas and triumphs and tragedies, are seen as a movie projected on a screen. A great non-seriousness and peace arises, the universal witness enjoying a particular slice of cosmic cinema for a little while. To reiterate, while non-duality and meditation may seem radical or nonsensical in some ways, it is really just a different attempt at bringing the main tenets of religion and spirituality into a coherent and even scientific practice. The talent of the messenger lies in their ability to communicate or point towards that which cannot be said. And as humanity continues to barrel closer and progress through its own ruination and rebirth – which is really just a larger scale version of what the individual goes through in meditation – the knowledge and practice of this process becomes more and more vital. Today we find ourselves at the early stages of a monumental paradigm shift. We have exhausted the illusion of separation to its very limits and cannot go any further into this darkness.

The road back from the edge and returning to the light is an arduous one, but it is the inevitable path that is laid out before us. Meditation represents the journey back home – the relative dissolving .into the absolute, love overcoming the power of fear.

"...they suggest to ordinary people that you can bypass the fire and enter into the light. But you cannot bypass the fire. And there is no way into the light except through surrender – of self, ecstasy, love. It is as difficult now as it ever was, and the requirements are what they’ve always been.”
– Adi Da For

from “Everyone Thinks It's Me” by Jeffrey Nirenberg on September 6, 2022, at jeffnirenberg.com

I’ll Meet You at the Setting Sun

I’ll meet you at the setting sun
Beyond these drifting years
Between the shadow and the pale
Beneath the sting of tears
Behind the veil of solitude
Across the seas of Time
I’ll meet you at the setting sun
Where you are ever mine

by Sacha Stone, October 7, 2021

Gnomes, Elves, Faeries, Leprechauns, Trolls and Ogres

Far from being only fanciful folklore characters, gnomes, elves, faeries and leprechauns are living among us and diligently stewarding Nature. These souls’ small forms, which cannot be seen with 3D vision - very young children often see them, though - were designed in antiquity by members of highly advanced civilizations living then on Jupiter. That is where not only the devas’ bodies, but most species in Earth’s animal and plant kingdoms were co-created in consonance with the desires of God, Gaia and Sol.

You can rightly think of Sol, God and Gaia as the trinity that used Creator’s energy to put into motion their ideas that manifested the magnificent planet now called Earth. Sol provides the light that enables life in your world, and solar flares are his power surges that are adding impetus to Earth’s ascension course, releasing her humankind from the bondage of mass mind control, and strengthening all life forms that absorb the light.

Incrementally various groups of “wee folk” - we use that term respectfully and lovingly - were introduced during an era when humans, animals and plants communicated telepathically and all knew they were inseparable parts of the Oneness of All. After amassed negativity destroyed all life on the planet, those souls were the last to return.

Some theories about devas have them in the same category as air, fire, water and earth, probably because they continuously interact with the four elementals to serve the needs of Earth and its residents. But these intelligent, kind and sensitive wise souls are distinctly different. They have families, live in communities, enjoy group events and move around as their services are needed. Their lifespans can be half a century or longer, and while their evolutionary status qualifies them to incarnate as humans, they don’t wish to do so.

Always they have had a symbiotic and synergistic relationship with the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms, and several decades ago they took on the mission of sending forth light rays to inspire humankind to once again live harmoniously with all of Nature. As vibrations keep rising, you will start seeing their auras on the ground, in bushes and trees or fluttering in the air, and eventually you and these loving little people will become friends.

Trolls and ogres also are more than characters in tales. These souls, whose bodies typically are larger than the devas but also are invisible to 3D vision, are inclined to cause inconvenience or even hardship to other life forms. As the planet’s ascension journey continues, they will absorb the light or leave and find a third density world to call home.

excerpted from Matthew Ward at https://www.matthewbooks.com/september-1-2022

Astral Projection

In astral projection (sometimes called astral travel) the conscious mind leaves the physical body and moves into the astral body.  The individual ceases to consciously experience things in the physical body and experiences them, instead, in the astral body - that is out of the physical body and in the fourth dimension. These experiences, therefore, are sometimes referred to as out-of-body experiences, or heightened states of consciousness.

During astral travel the individual is aware of things encountered on the astral plane and retains a coherent recall of those encounters in various degrees of detail and vividness/vagueness depending, to some extent, upon his personal state of spiritual evolution and training.

In astral projection the individual's astral body remains attached to his physical body by a long, thin, silver cord. Sometimes this cord, or astral umbilicus, can be seen during the out-of-body experience. It is reported that if this cord is severed permanently, the physical body dies.

Sometimes the astral body is described as one of our resurrection bodies. The mental body might be described as another.

Astral projection, out-of-body-experiences and lucid dreams complexly overlap each other in their essential characteristics. They may well represent different paradigms for conceptualising very similar, or even identical, experiences. In each case, the person is asleep, the person is conscious, and the person has the ability to compare his present heightened state of awareness with his "normal" waking state of awareness.

Understanding the nature of conscious experiences which occur during sleep, and learning how to manage and respond to them, is important for spiritual growth. Such understanding and learning is also necessary for engaging in active spiritual work during sleep.

Conscious sleep phenomena have discrete sensory, emotional and mental content which exist in direct subjective awareness while the physical body is "fast asleep" on the bed or in the chair.

It is worth repeating that the vehicle which leaves the physical body during astral projection is the astral body. The astral body is neither the soul nor the spirit.

From our point of view in physical plane waking consciousness, the human being can be thought of as having a tripartite constitution: it has three bits to its makeup. The three bits are the "incarnation module", the soul and the spirit. The incarnation module is itself made up of three components: the physical body, the astral body and the mental body.

Establishment western religiosities are in error in positing a bipartite constitution for the human being.

The physical body has seven levels of organisation within it, of which solid, liquid and gas are the three densest. The other four levels, not yet formally investigated, recognised or taught by western orthodox science, are sometimes referred to as the etheric levels.

The physical body is our vehicle of transport on the physical plane (sometimes called the third dimension); the astral body is our vehicle of transport on the astral plane (sometimes called the fourth dimension), and the mental body is our vehicle of transport on the mental plane (sometimes called the fifth dimension).

Within the incarnation module, the astral body and the mental body (together) are sometimes referred to as the personality. From our point of view in physical plane waking consciousness, it is the incarnation module which comes into being at conception or birth, and which later leaves the physical plane at "death".

The soul is quite different from the human physical, astral and mental bodies. The soul is an individuated expression of the spirit which provides animation for the incarnation module. The incarnation module is a temporary vehicle used by the soul to express itself in the world of matter.

Our spirit is our divine spark, our core star. It is the highest level of our being; it is that part of us which partakes of the divine nature; that part of us which is perfect and infinite; that part of us which has always been, is now, and will always be, one with the being of God.

Spiritual practice, among other things, seeks to align the energies of the incarnation module with those of the soul and the spirit so that the energies of light, love and abundance can be anchored on Earth.

Meditation is a spiritual exercise which seeks to align the physical brain with the soul.

from https://alcuinbramerton.blogspot.com/2005/12/astral-projection-soul-and-spirit.html

Be a Senescent Cell Killing Machine

Most of us have accepted that weakness comes with old age. But does it have to? Thanks to a new study published in Nature Medicine, we now have a convincing culprit for age-related physical dysfunction: the accumulation of “zombie” senescent cells. We might be able to fight off senescent cells and their inflammatory secretions with interventions including senolytic drugs, exercise and intermittent fasting.

There’s no question that humans are living longer than they used to. But are they living healthier for longer? Based on a 2010 study from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 45% of people over the age of 85 today are frail, often suffering physical dysfunction and decreased mobility that may lead to hospitalization, placement in a nursing home and mortality. But what causes this frailty and physical dysfunction, in the absence diagnosable disease? One culprit is cellular senescence.

Many of the cells in our body are fated to become senescent at some time or another. Radiation exposure, chemotherapy and metabolic stress including high fat intake have been shown to promote senescent cell accumulation.

Senescent cells look very different from healthy cells. They express different genes, they are prohibited from reproducing or dividing naturally, and they pump out inflammatory “SOS” signals in an attempt to recruit other healthy cells to come to their rescue, usually in vain. These signals include proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, proteases (enzymes that break down proteins) and other factors that together make up what is called the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). The inflammation created by senescent cells can lead to tissue dysfunction and even turn healthy cells senescent, like a zombie virus that spreads and eventually causes the zombie apocalypse of late-life frailty. This spreading of cellular senescence may even happen at a distance, with senescent cells in one tissue, like fat, spreading senescence-causing inflammatory signals to cells in another tissue, like muscle.

“Senescence can be induced by such stresses as DNA damage, telomere shortening, oncogenic mutations, metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction, and inflammation. Senescent cell burden increases in multiple tissues with aging, at sites of pathology in multiple chronic diseases, and after radiation or chemotherapy.” — Xu et al., 2018

Zombie cells sound ominous, even if they are a defense mechanism that our bodies use to neutralize damaged cells that could become cancerous — at least they can’t divide. But what if we could selectively remove senescent cells from the body, or reverse the senescent state?

“We all know that we have a growing aging population, and we are seeing aged individuals suffer with a lot of diseases, most of which are age-related,” says Ming Xu, an assistant professor at the UConn Health Center on Aging and first author on the Nature Medicine study on the impacts of senolytics. “The biggest motivation for my research group is to find a way to improve the quality of late life for these individuals and delay the onset of age-related diseases.”

It’s feasible based on current evidence, Xu says, to delay many diseases of aging by targeting fundamental aging processes like cellular senescence. Xu’s lab is exploring the promise of senolytic drugs, or agents that can eliminate senescence cells. The idea of using senolytics to target and potentially reverse the symptoms of aging, such as physical and cognitive dysfunction, is a relatively new one.

Several years ago, Mayo Clinic researchers developed a seemingly anti-aging mouse model by genetically targeting p16-positive cells. The cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p16 is a tumor suppressor protein that increases in tissues with age and that is associated with cellular senescence. You can think of it as a policeman that can permanently revoke a cell’s “license to divide.” It is triggered by severe stress or damage that a cell is unable to repair.

The Mayo Clinic researchers found that they could effectively kill off all of the p16-positive senescent cells in their genetically modified mice by administering a single drug. When the researchers treated these mice to clear out their senescent cells, they found that the mice lived healthier for longer, on average. Even late-life drug treatment helped slow the progression of already established age-related disorders. This indicates that cellular senescence can cause age-related phenotypes and that removal of senescent cells can prevent or delay tissue dysfunction and extend healthspan.

Targeting senescent cells has also been found to prevent age-related bone loss in mice.

“These results indicated to us that senescent cells might play a role in aging, and that they could be a therapeutic target,” Xu said.

“Physical function declines in old age, portending disability, increased health expenditures, and mortality. Cellular senescence, leading to tissue dysfunction, may contribute to these consequences of aging, but whether senescence can directly drive age-related pathology and be therapeutically targeted is still unclear.” — Xu et al., 2018

Several years ago, Xu had a thought that he couldn’t shake. If senescent cells were at least partially responsible for the physical and cognitive dysfunction typically observed in aged animals, young mice should experience accelerated aging if injected with already senescent cells. Xu and colleagues eventually tested this idea by transplanting senescent preadipocytes (stem cells from adipose or fat tissue) extracted from transgenic mice into young, healthy mice. The researchers made these fat tissue cells senescent by exposing them to high levels of radiation or a chemotherapy drug after extracting the cells from their transgenic mice.

Xu and his colleagues were surprised to see that when they transplanted these senescent cells into young mice, they observed an onset of physical dysfunction including weakness and frailty. It was as if the young mice were aging before their eyes.

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, that researchers have transplanted senescent cells into young, healthy mice and observed an age-related phenotype as a result,” Xu said. “I actually developed the idea for this experiment several years ago. We’ve observed for some time now that removing senescent cells from aged animals has beneficial effects. I thought, maybe we can do the opposite. By transferring senescent cells into healthy, young animals, we could confirm the causal effects of senescent cells on aging and physical dysfunction, if the young animals ended up looking more like aged animals.”

Xu’s lab specializes in investigating physical function, so they focused on this aspect of aging and senescent cell accumulation in mice. While the exact mechanisms whereby senescent cells lead to physical dysfunction are still unclear, Xu suspects that inflammation plays a big role.

“Transplanting senescent cells into young mice increases their senescent cell burden,” Xu said. “In other words, the transplanted cells induce other cells in the host to become senescent. All of these senescent cells together contribute to the physical dysfunction we see.”

“Previously healthy young adult mice transplanted with [one million] senescent cells had significantly lower maximal walking speed, hanging endurance, and grip strength by 1 month after transplantation compared to mice transplanted with control cells. […] Reduced walking speed began as early as 2 weeks following a single implantation of senescent cells and persisted for up to 6 months, yet the transplanted cells survived in vivo for only approximately 40 days, consistent with the possibility that senescent cells might induce senescence in normal host cells.” — Xu et al., 2018

Xu and his colleagues were able to measure how many of the host organism cells in young mice became senescent following transplantation by looking for genetic markers present only in the transgenic mice that they extracted the cells from. Being able to differentiate the senescent cells they found in their young mice by the cells’ origin, they had proof that the transplanted senescent cells created many more senescent cells in the host mice.

While inflammation may be the primary mechanism whereby transplanted senescent cells cause more host cells to become senescent, this turns out to be a difficult idea to prove. Inflammation and levels of cytokines are difficult to measure and compare between individual animals because of their innate variability. It’s best to compare levels of cytokines and inflammation across different time points but within the same individuals, for example before and after events or exposures known to promote cellular senescence.

The transplantation experiments prompted Xu and colleagues to further explore how targeted clearance of senescent cells could improve the healthspan and physical function of aged mice. But instead of targeting inflammation like many other researchers have tried to do with drugs such as rapamycin, Xu and colleagues are looking to kill the source of these Zombie-spreading signals.

Our immune systems normally keep an eye out for mis-folded proteins, damaged and senescent cells, to clear them from our bodies before they wreak havoc. So why couldn’t Xu’s young mice simply rid their bodies of the transplanted senescent cells? Their immune systems should technically have been able to clear these “zombie” cells as soon as they were introduced.

But if the senescent cell burden becomes too great, these “zombie” cells and their inflammatory secretions can compromise a mouse’s (or a human’s) immune system, leaving it prone to an over-accumulation of senescent cells. Aged mice with weakened immune systems are less able to defend themselves against cellular senescence than healthy young mice.

Once they had shown a causal relationship between cellular senescence and aging-related physical dysfunction, Xu and colleagues set their sights on killing of the “zombie” cells responsible for all of this carnage. They hoped that by doing so, they’d be able to improve the physical function and overall health of both young mice treated with senescent cells, and aged mice.

“In my lab, we’ve found that senescent cells have antiapoptotic pathways that help them survive even though they are very proinflammatory and live in inflammatory environments,” Xu said.

Apoptosis is a natural process of programmed cell death that senescent cells, and cancer cells, sneakily surpass. Xu and colleagues used two drugs, dasatinib and quercetin, that in combination have been shown to effectively and selectively eliminate senescent cells. These drugs trigger apoptosis (programmed cell death) in slow-to-die “zombie” cells. Known generally as senolytics, they disable the senescence-associated antiapoptotic pathways that protect senescent cells from inflammatory environments that would normally trigger apoptosis in healthy cells.

Xu and his colleagues found that the senolytic cocktail of dasatinib plus quercetin alleviated physical dysfunction and increased late-life survival in aged mice. The drugs also alleviated and even prevented physical dysfunction in young mice who received senescent cell transplants. Similar effects have been observed in previous studies, Xu said, but only in animal models. Xu and colleagues went a step further by testing their senolytic drug cocktail in human tissue for the first time. They took fat tissue samples from human patients and treated them with dasatinib plus quercetin in vitro.

“We observed naturally occurring human senescent cells being cleared in these tissue samples by our senolytic drug cocktail,” Xu said. “We also observed a reduction in the inflammatory cytokines in these tissues, while key adipokines were not affected. This demonstrates that these senolytic drugs can decrease inflammation without a global killing effect.”

Adipokines are also cytokines, or cell signaling proteins secreted by adipose tissue, but many of these are actually anti-inflammatory and important for a range of tissue functions. For example, the adipokine called adiponectin is a key regulator of insulin sensitivity and tissue inflammation. Higher levels of adiponectin are associated with greater insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. You wouldn’t want senolytic drugs to inhibit adiponectin at the same time as they are having an effect on inflammatory cytokines.

Thankfully, Xu and colleagues found that the senolytic cocktail of dasatinib plus quercetin not only selectively reduced inflammatory cytokine levels in human tissue, but also appeared to improve human adipose tissue function more broadly as measured by gene expression.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time that these senolytics have been shown to kill senescent cells in any human tissues,” Xu said. “We think this is an important step toward a clinical trial for these drugs.”

Could some of the improved tissue function Xu and colleagues observed have been from reversing cellular senescence as opposed to eliminating senescent cells entirely? The answer to this question is still unclear, Xu said. It’s possible, although the current data points to dasatinib plus quercetin promoting apoptosis in treated tissues.

While Xu and colleagues are focusing their efforts on identifying drugs that can selectively eliminate senescent cells, other researchers are exploring whether healthy lifestyles can help people hone their bodies into senescent cell killing machines. For example, results from a study published in Diabetes in 2016 suggest that exercise can prevent diet-induced cellular senescence and metabolic dysfunction in adipose tissue in mice. The researchers fed mice a “fast food” high fat diet (40% of energy from milk fat) and added high fructose corn syrup to their drinking water (think, soda!). The researchers found that exercise reduced the number of p16-positive senescent cells in transgenic mice fed a fast food diet.

“The harmful effects of the [fast food diet] were associated with dramatic increases in several markers of senescence, including p16, EGFP, senescence-associated β-galactosidase, and the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), specifically in visceral adipose tissue. We show that exercise prevents both the accumulation of senescent cells and the expression of the SASP, while nullifying the damaging effects of the [fast food diet] on parameters of health.” — Schafer et al., 2016

Intermittent fasting is also a promising intervention for the targeting of senescent cells. “Zombie” cells don’t respond well to being starved of sugar(sugar = brains!!) for long periods of time. Intermittent fasting has been shown in animal models to promote autophagy, or cellular “self-eating” that helps clear out damaged cellular components including mis-folded proteins.

Intermittent fasting may also help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress processes associated with cellular senescence. For example, oxidative stress shortens telomeres, the protective DNA caps at the ends of your chromosomes, which can lead to a cell becoming senescent. Intermittent fasting has been shown to reduce markers of oxidative stress and inflammation (for example, in this study of humans with asthma), making it a promising intervention to at least alleviate senescent cell burden in aging individuals.

Xu hopes in the future to discover a reliable, non-invasive biomarker that researchers may be able to use to measure cellular senescence burden in humans across time. Xu and his colleagues identified senescent cells in their study mice via three different invasive markers: p-16 expression, DNA damage in the telomere region and senescence-associated β-galactosidase activity. All of these markers require tissue sampling.

One promising non-invasive biomarker for cellular senescence is activin A, a protein and growth factor that plays a role in cell proliferation. In a previous research study published in eLIFE, Xu found that activin A increases with age in mice. He also found that senescent fat progenitor cells secrete activin A, and that clearing p-16 positive senescent cells from mice is accompanied by reduced serum levels of activin A. These characteristics make activin A a potentially good blood biomarker for senescent cell burden in vivo.

“The experiments revealed that senescent fat cell progenitors release a protein called activin A, which impedes the normal function of stem cells and fat tissue,” Xu said. “Additionally, older mice had higher levels of activin A in both their blood and fat tissue than young mice.”

There are two different ways to go after senescent cells. One is to selectively kill them off. Another is to block the toxic, inflammatory signals that they spew out. Xu and colleagues are working on senolytic drugs that selectively clear senescent cells from the body by targeting anti-apoptotic pathways or p53 signaling. Other drugs exist that inhibit the inflammatory secretions of senescent cells, known as SASP-inhibitors. Rapamycin and metformin, drugs that are already used in humans, and kinase inhibitors are examples of such drugs. Xu and colleagues show in their recent study that these drugs can have some positive effects on physical function in aged mice.

However, SASP-inhibitors also have problematic side effects that are made worse by the fact that these drugs have to be taken on a regular basis. One of the promising aspects of senolytic drugs that eliminate the senescent cells, Xu says, is that these drugs could work while being administered only intermittently. With these drugs you’d only have to kill off your senescent cells every so often, rather than regularly take drugs that simply inhibit the toxins and inflammatory cell signaling pathways that these cells produce.

“One unique aspect of this study is that we treated mice with senolytic drugs at very late-life stage, or at an equivalent of 80 years old in human years. But even at this late stage, we still saw profound benefits,” Xu said. “We extended the lifespan and healthspan of these mice. It indicates that to slow down aging, it might not be necessary to start treatment in middle-age years — late-life treatment might still result in healthspan and lifespan benefits. But we need human clinical trials to tell us whether these senolytic aging interventions can work in humans.”

TAKEAWAY: EXERCISE AND FASTING COUNTER SENESCENCE

by Paige Jarreau, PhD, published in LifeApps.io on July 25, 2018