A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.
The Devil is numbered fifteen and shows a figure, usually male and satyr-like, half-man and half-animal. Sometimes, male and female forms are shown chained or trapped at his feet. The Thoth deck (shown here) has the Devil as a goat, appearing against a background of the male sex organs. His third eye represents the Eye of God and the staff across his chest is topped with the Winged Disk symbol and double-headed snakes.
The Devil card is often misunderstood and feared. However, before Christianity became a leading religion, there were several pantheons which contained fertility gods and they were often depicted as animals – the Horned God of the Wicca for example, servant and consort of the Goddess. The Devil does not therefore necessarily represent an evil being.
The Devil is the personification of the animal, instinctual and even bestial parts of us. Pre-occupation with matters connected to the Devil can lead to degradation and sheer ugliness, but by identifying and accepting the darkness within we learn to discover that it is simply the dark side of our light.
Tim Ferriss Susan Cain on Transforming Pain, Building Your Emotional Resilience, Exploring Sufi Wisdom, Tapping into Bittersweet Songs, and Seeking the Shards of Light | Brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 770M+ users (http://linkedin.com/tim), Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement (http://athleticgreens.com/tim), and Pique premium tea crystals (https://www.piquelife.com/tim). Susan Cain (@susancain) is the author of Quiet Journal: Discover Your Secret Strengths and Unleash Your Inner Power, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking, the latter of which spent eight years on the New York Times Best Sellers list and has been translated into 40 languages. Susan’s first record-smashing TED Talk has been viewed more than 40 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks (and if you like that one, you should check out her most recent TED Talk with violinist Min Kym). LinkedIn named her the top sixth influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda Gates. Susan partners with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink to curate the Next Big Idea Club. They donate all of their proceeds to children’s literacy programs. Her new book is Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Show notes: https://tim.blog/2022/03/30/susan-cai… Please enjoy! SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/1dSzTkW LINK TO ALL SHOW TRANSCRIPTS: https://tim.blog/2018/09/20/all-trans… About Tim Ferriss: Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 500 million downloads and been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three years running. Connect with Tim Ferriss: Sign up for “5-Bullet Friday” (Tim’s free weekly email newsletter): https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-yt/ Visit the Tim Ferriss PODCAST: https://tim.blog/podcast/ Visit the Tim Ferriss BLOG: https://tim.blog/ Follow Tim Ferriss on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/tferriss/ Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss/ Like Tim Ferriss on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His books include Kali’s Child, Esalen, Authors of the Impossible, The Serpent’s Gift, Mutants and Mystics, The Supernatural (with Whitley Strieber), and Secret Body. He is coauthor, with Elizabeth Krohn, of Changed in a Flash: One Woman’s Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All. His most recent book is The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge. His website is https://jeffreyjkripal.com/ Professor Kripal organized the Archives of the Impossible symposium at Ric University. See https://impossiblearchives.rice.edu/ Here he points out that spiritual epiphanies can occur to individuals with strong scientific backgrounds and materialistic beliefs, such as Nobel laureate Kary Mullis or professional skeptic Michael Shermer. Sometimes, but not always, such events lead to profound shifts in belief. Synchronistic events can shape major cultural shifts, such has occurred with the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement. He points out that, often, such epiphanies defy all attempts at rational explanation. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on March 24, 2022)
Psychologist. Certified Trauma & Relationship Specialist. Consultant. Helping others build a solid sense of Self with a side of badassery.
Mar 13 (Medium.com)
Unlearning these is what leads to our empowerment
dganin/pexels
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 61% of adults report having had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) and 16% reported scores of four or more. If you’re interested in taking the ACE test, you can go here.
Childhood trauma comes in many forms, which commonly include: our emotional, social, or psychological needs going unmet, our physical needs (food, shelter, water, safety, warmth) going unmet, divorce/physical abandonment, physical/emotional/psychological/sexual abuse, witnessing violence, alcoholism/drug addiction, sexual addictions/other addictions, poverty, or a lack of consistent rules and boundaries. This list isn’t exhaustive, and other forms of childhood maltreatment are less common but are still documented, such as war, natural disaster, or gang violence.
Elevated ACE scores of four, or higher, exponentially increase risks of emotional, psychological, and physical disorders and diseases including reduced emotional empathy; low emotional intelligence; personality or mood disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); and major depression or bipolar disorder. Additionally, it is reported that there are positive correlations with physical diseases and higher ACE scores, including asthma, high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
With facts like these, it makes it even more critical for us to examine how our childhood may have affected our adult lives. While it’s hard enough reaching a place of acceptance that adult intimate relationship abuse (narcissistic abuse) isn’t love, it begs us to look even closer at how our adverse childhood experiences may have set the stage for us getting tangled up in toxic adult relationships.
Unlearn Trying To Please People. The fact is, some are going to have an opinion — from parents and caregivers who may have abused you, to an ex who discarded you for whatever they had on the side. And, a hard truth is that their opinion will likely be based on self-preservation and misinformation. Others may base their opinion on half-assed information, or a Herd Mentality.
Will they gossip about you? Maybe.
Will they obscure facts or try to make you look “crazy” to spare themselves? Perhaps.
The fact is, people dismiss what they don’t understand or what they see as threatening to their Ego. If their lives have been arranged in such a way as to shun those with different lived experiences from their own, forget them. You don’ t owe them an explanation or an apology. And, you aren’t obligated to set space aside for them in your life.
The sooner we unlearn thinking we have to appease others, the sooner we begin healing.
Unlearn Believing You Deserved It. No one deserves it. No. One. Not even a parent who lived their life parenting us from a place of torture, captivity, or restraint. When we release ourselves from thinking that we deserved their abuse, it frees us. We are no longer held captive by their agenda. It’s the emotional scars that are carried with us, long after the physical ones have faded. It’s these emotional scars that fool us into believing we somehow “caused” their abuse, or “deserved” their mistreatment.
A hard truth is that inter-generational trauma is repeated and carried from one generation to the next because the older generation taught abuse as “normal” while the younger generation accepted it as something being wrong with them, or that this is just how things are.
Once we take a few steps back and see the crazy-making nonsense for what it is, it gets easier to release ourselves from the misbeliefs that we somehow “deserved” abuse.
We didn’t.
Unlearn Thinking You Can’t Heal. The reason we believe we can’t heal from our pain is because we wound up carrying it with us when it was never our burden to carry. It was our parents’ and caregiver’s burden. Their responsibility.
Our choices are a direct result of the things we were taught in our earliest years. Our attachment style, our beliefs on whether we think people are genuinely good, how we see ourselves, and how we engage in our world, are the messages taught to us by our caregivers.
And, they’re teaching us from how they see the world.
A hard truth is that there is a difference between can’t, and won’t.
Many survivors of abuse wind up living their lives in one of two ways:
They either wind up betraying themselves into believing that their opinions, feelings, and experiences are invalid and as a result, they become vulnerable for more abuse. These are the people who find themselves in one toxic friendship or intimate relationship after another and often question, “Why?” The answer: It’s because they haven’t learned their value or to stop betraying their sense of Self.
On the flipside are those who abandon everyone around them and hold tight to the misbeliefs, misinformation, and misguided agendas they were taught. They often find themselves bored, restless, disillusioned, and going from one relationship or situation to another. Never happy. Never seeing that they’re perpetuating lies that keep them unhappy and disillusioned. The result: They also wind up abandoning their sense of Self and take on the identity of those who spoonfed them lies and abuse.
But, there’s a third option. Some call it The Road Less Traveled. Some call it Fighting the Good Fight. There’s reasons for this; the road less traveled has many bumps, detours, and risks. There’s no roadmap, and many fear getting lost along the way.
And, the good fight will inevitably leave a few emotional bruises if we choose to get in that boxing ring. We can block, duck and run…but that only perpetuates what we were taught earlier. Fighting the Good Fight means taking that risk, facing it head-on, and standing our ground.
So, some won’t choose these routes. But, the thing is, no one really tells us that it’s the Road Less Traveled and the Good Fight that lead to empowerment, to growth, and to healing.
But, they are…
Unlearn Distracting Yourself. A hard truth is we distract ourselves from healing because distractions numb. They perpetuate feeling nothing or feeling a momentary high that pushes our pain to the back of the line. Then, another inevitable crash. And another distraction is turned to. This is how a cycle of self-numbing begins — whether its based on self-medicating, technology/gaming addiction, shopping, workaholism, perfectionism, or idealism— anything that catches our attention long enough to distract us from our pain is what we turn to.
Distractions all have us by the short-fuzzies. We live in a world of distraction. It’s a quick fix for anyone who isn’t wanting to heal, is afraid of the pain of healing, or is ashamed that they will be judged for wanting to heal. Walking away from distractions takes inner strength. We’ll be tempted and will have to resist being pulled back into it. Those who authentically care about us will support us in slowing things down, tossing out the video games for quiet conversation, or the noise and chaos for an introspective hike in nature.
The fact is, pain, anger, anxiety, and negative Self-talk are all there for a reason: to wake us up. And they beg to be healed. Why do you think depression, anxiety, and addictive behaviors are cyclic? Because they show up as manifestations of unhealed pain. Distractions are merely bandaids; not solutions.
And, as with any bandaid, it either needs to be replaced with another bandaid, or it has to be tended to, so it can heal.
I sent the following email to Rick Thomas, President of the Trustees, on April 3, 2022. Today he said he would forward it on to the Dean Search Committee (HughJohn Malanaphy, Anne Bollman, Calvin Harris):
–Mike Zonta, BB editor
Rick, thanks for opening up the Dean search to the broader student body. Not sure I agree with your search committee selection. A little too orthodox for my taste.
Glad also you are open to examining the role of the Dean’s office. Since Thane and Jesus are not available for this position, that’s quite a list of duties. [The Dean Search Committee is “looking for a person, a spiritual leader who can fill the role not only of administrator but of visionary, political cheerleader and spokesperson for our School. Someone we can recognize as elevated in perception, clearly conscious of The Prosperos goals and deeply involved and committed to the task of revealing spiritual truth – one student at a time.”]
That’s why I think a more healthy, and less hierarchical, direction for the school to take would be to have the Executive Council as a whole take on this role (the role of Dean) which up to now has been fulfilled by one person. The Executive Council has been THE decision-making body throughout the history of the school. Even when Thane was dean, all decisions of the Executive Council had to be unanimous.
In effect, this would be getting rid of the title and role of Dean but the duties, including visionary, cheerleader, spokesperson, etc., would be fulfilled by the all three members of the Executive Council, not a single person.
Why should one person be the visionary or the cheerleader or the spokesperson for our school? We all have a stake in the future of our school.
It is as a group we will grow or perish. And being led by a group, even such a small group as the Executive Council, would be a small step in the direction of a more group-centered leadership model for the school as a whole.
Mike Zonta, H.W., M.
P.S. If people really feel that only one person can be a spokesperson for the school, a compromise version of this idea would be to have a rotating dean among the three members of the Executive Council, like some cities have rotating mayors on a yearly basis. As far as being a visionary or a cheerleader, that should be up to all of us.
The Fool is the first card of the Tarot and is generally unnumbered, or numbered zero. The Fool is at the start of our journey and is the initiator. Seen by many as the innocent, he has an eagerness and freshness about him. He is young and carefree, entering the World without preconceptions.
The Fool trusts in life and expects his path to be a happy and rewarding one. There is faith in the gods to see him through and a complete absence of fear.
Sometimes the Fool is seen as too carefree – certainly a good dose of other people’s more negative reality could damage him. However, for as long as the Fool has faith in his own purity and innocence, others will not be able to take advantage.
This is the child within. This is how we were before the many experiences of life forced us to build up so many walls. The Fool does not shade himself from the light – here we are born and from here we walk the path. It’s time to jump off the cliff…
By Ishaan Tharoor Columnist Yesterday (WashingtonPost.com)
A Ukrainian service member stands in front of an Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo plane destroyed by Russian troops in Hostomel, Ukraine, on April 3. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
Five weeks ago, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a fateful speech in reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His government’s decision to, among other things, inject more than $100 billion into the country’s military and deliver lethal support to Kyiv marked a sweeping policy shift away from decades of constitutional pacifism that had kept Germany often on the sidelines of major conflicts.Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
It was, in the words of Scholz and his allies, a “Zeitenwende” — a turning point in history, a watershed moment made all the more pronounced by the German language’s knack for sprawling, declarative nouns.Advertisement
On a visit to Washington last week, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said that Germany “cannot look away or stand apart,” and that this “Zeitenwende cannot be had for free.” After clinging to European visions of perpetual peace, war in the heart of the continent had shaken Germany’s cautious political establishment into action.
For many on both sides of the Atlantic, the battles in Ukraine may even mark something more stark — a “Zeitenbruch,” as coined by former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, which is a rupture in history, the closing of one age and the entry into another marked by even deeper uncertainty and great power rivalry.
This 60-foot Ukrainian flag was unfurled off the side of a hotel located across the street from the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/UbQCwt5jId— NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 10, 2022
In Washington, let alone the capitals of Western Europe, there’s a palpable change in atmosphere. The heroism of Ukraine’s defenders and the reported atrocities carried out by Russian forces have fired the imaginations of the Beltway class, which after years of quagmire and stalemate in the Middle East now has a far more morally clear and potentially winnable conflict to get behind.Advertisement
American flags seldom fly in my left-leaning Washington neighborhood, but a brief Sunday stroll turned up myriad iterations of Ukraine’s blue-yellow bars hanging from fences and doorways. European diplomats in the city speak of an unprecedented solidarity among NATO allies and hail the Biden administration’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine and sweeping sanctions on Russia. The West as a geopolitical entity has rarely been more united as a bloc and more coherent as a political project.
For some U.S. commentators, Ukraine is not just ground zero in a confrontation with the Kremlin, but the battlefield for the future of liberalism. “If [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is successful in undermining Ukrainian independence and democracy, the world will return to an era of aggressive and intolerant nationalism reminiscent of the early twentieth century,” warned political theorist Francis Fukuyama. “The United States will not be immune from this trend, as populists such as [Donald] Trump aspire to replicate Putin’s authoritarian ways.”
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum located in Ukraine the launchpad for an ever-expanding ideological war against illiberal autocracy. “Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China,” she wrote. “But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others.”
For 50 years Washington armed and abetted mortal enemies of Indian democracy.
Now Washington threatens India with “consequences” for refusing to break with Russia—India’s most reliable partner for 60 years—over a war in faraway Europe.
Is this “friendship” or imperial contempt?— Kapil Komireddi (@kapskom) April 2, 2022
Yet, for many outside the West, the moment is less a turning point than a reminder of the past. Critics point to a long tradition of Western double standards on the world stage. The Russian invasion elicited a Western response that was swift and all-encompassing — Ukrainian refugees were welcomed, while governments imposed crippling sanctions on Russia for its violation of international law. Where was such action in other contexts, they argue, including those where the United States and allies were complicit in ruinous wars and occupations?Advertisement
“We have seen every means we were told could not be activated for over 70 years deployed in less than seven days,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said at a security conference in Turkey in March. “Amazing hypocrisy.”
A delivery driver in Baghdad recently told the Associated Press that Iraqi insurgency against U.S. troops was as justified as Ukrainian resistance to Russian forces. “If anything, the resistance to the Americans in Iraq was more justified, given that the Americans traveled thousands of kilometers to come to our country, while the Russians are going after a supposed threat next door to them,” he said.
In the West, the fight over Ukraine is seen with almost Churchillian clarity. Elsewhere — particularly in countries that have reasons to doubt Winston Churchill and Western moralism — suspicion and distrust endures. “You never know when the U.S. will spring a nasty surprise on you and start to look at you negatively, which is something the world’s only Hindu-majority country has to worry about,” right-wing Indian journalist Raghavan Jagannathan told my colleague Gerry Shih. “You have an Abrahamic past. There’s a strong binary of, ‘You’re right or wrong, you’re with us or against us.’ ”Advertisement
Even in Germany, more than a month after Scholz’s speech, it’s not clear how transformative this “Zeitenwende” may be. The war in Ukraine may bog down into a conflict of attrition, raising the stakes the longer it drags out. Scholz may have initiated a sea-change in German defense policy but has so far resisted calls for wholesale bans on imports of Russian natural gas and oil, which fill the Kremlin’s coffers yet also buttress much of the German economy.
“The Zeitenwende speech broke some taboos in German foreign policy, but so far these are only enough to soothe the German conscience,” wrote Berlin-based analyst Oxana Schmies. “Economic opportunism has not yet been overcome either. Strategic thinking has yet to establish itself in the body politic.”
“The problem is that no one knows how long the Zeitenwende will actually last because now comes the hard part,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “If the war starts to ramp down, I worry that there will be a real desire for things to go back to how they were, and that’s just not possible.”
War in Ukraine: What you need to know
The latest: Russian troops appeared to be regrouping and shifting their focus away from Kyiv. That could set the stage for a new phase in the conflict — centered on the country’s east — that military analysts warn could be long and bloody. Also, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Ukrainians to prepare for “difficult fights” ahead in the besieged port city of Mariupol. And on the southern coast, explosions were heard throughout Odessa on Sunday morning.
On the afternoon of October 27, 1992, David Bohm was at Birkbeck College, the University of London, putting the finishing touches on a book that would sum up his lifelong struggle to create an alternative quantum theory. At six-fifteen he telephoned his wife, Saral, to let her know he was about to leave. “You know, it’s tantalizing,” he said. “I feel I’m on the edge of something.”‘ An hour later, just as his taxi pulled up outside his home, Bohm suffered a massive heart attack and died.
This study concerns the role of thought and knowledge. The author rejects the notion that our thinking processes neutrally report on what is out there in an objective world. He explores the manner in which thought actively participates in forming our perceptions, our sense of meaning and our daily actions. He suggests that collective thought and knowledge have become so automated that we are in large part controlled by them, with a subsequent loss of authenticity, freedom and order.
(Goodreads.com)
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