Drawing on years of clinical experience, the authors take readers on a remarkable journey of self-discovery. The “sub personalities” that live with the self are explained, allowing readers to pursue their individual destinies.
Colin Wilson helped usher in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with his landmark work, The Outsider, published in 1956. The Outsider was an intelligent, meticulous, and unprecedented study of nonconformity in all facets of life. Wilson, finally, became a prolific and unparalleled historian of the occult, providing a generation of readers with a responsible and scholarly entry point to a world of mysteries. Now, acclaimed historian Gary Lachman, a friend of Wilson and a scholar of his work, provides an extraordinary and delightful biography that delves into the life, thought, and evolution of one of the greatest intellectual rebels and underrated visionaries of the twentieth century.
Dr. James Cooke explores the profound mystery at the core of human experience: consciousness. Integrating the latest scientific advancements with deep meditative insights and the potential of psychedelic therapy, Cooke challenges long-held views about the self and consciousness. From a transformational personal experience to rigorous scientific analysis, he argues that our individual sense of self is an illusion—a survival mechanism—while proposing that consciousness is a universal feature of all life.
Three Damselflies, with blue eyes, on a wild plant. Damselflies are flying insects of the suborder Zygoptera in the order Odonata. They are similar to dragonflies but are usually smaller and have slimmer bodies. Most species fold the wings along the body when at rest, unlike dragonflies which hold the wings flat and away from the body
Credit: Getty Images, Alberto Ghizzi Panizza, Science Photo Library
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In Edinburgh, I exited the city offices, turned left at the statue of Scottish economist Adam Smith, and walked two minutes along the Royal Mile to the Museum of Childhood.
But for all its soft exhibition pieces, the museum, by highlighting vast improvements in the living conditions of young people over the centuries, conveys a hard and relevant narrative—about the growing power of children.
Founded in 1955 by a city councilor and toy collector, the world’s first museum dedicated to childhood’s history has four fascinating floors of dolls (like Queen Anne from 1740), toys (like the 1920s voice-activated Radio Rex), and stuffed animals (a Steiff teddy bear that accompanied Jewish children on the Kindertransport train out of Nazi Germany). Once seen as little adults who did not live long (medieval art did not even depict childhood until the 12th century), Earth’s 2.3 billion children now represent a rising global superpower. In the 21st century, capitalism, extended schooling, legal protections, social supports, and technology have empowered more children to shape their own lives—and threaten the supremacy of adults.
“The grown-ups have failed us,” declared famously the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who organized global school boycotts on Fridays. “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change—and it has to start today.”
People older than Thunberg rarely discuss children’s growing power—and their fear of it—but it is an animating force in our societies and politics.
In response to grown-up hypocrisy, don’t be surprised if children demand even more power—including democratic rights that they are denied.
Restrictionist immigration policies, often framed as an issue of culture or economy, actually focus on demonizing and detaining children. During the Trump and Biden presidencies, the United States had an official policy of separating children from parents at the border. “We need to take away children,” said the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Officially, the idea was to discourage families from immigrating to the U.S. But one motive of the policy was the conspiratorial fear among adult Republicans that today’s immigrant children might become tomorrow’s powerful young electorate of Democratic voters.
Nationalists around the world also have seized neutral government agencies and expert institutions that they see as hostile to traditional values. But in weaponizing such institutions, nationalists often target children.
Politically, the idea of reducing the power of children, in part by reducing their numbers, has adherents on the economic right (children are “taxeaters”) and the ecological left (more children=more carbon emissions). But, ironically, efforts to decrease youth power by shrinking the child population can be self-defeating. Because, when children become scarce, they often become more important—and powerful.
Societies with fewer kids have smaller talent pools from which to develop adults who can support their older populations as workers, consumers, and taxpayers. Which means each kid must be more successful and productive than the last. That’s why smart countries with low birth-rates, notably in Asia, invest so much in the education and support of their children.
Such generational solidarity makes all the sense in the world. But today’s politicians—who thrive on fear and division—try to make us afraid for our children, and of our children.
Some of these policies are good-faith efforts to protect children—from distractions and screen addiction, from online bullying, from loneliness and mental health problems. But such policies also can violate basic democratic principles. The governments banning phones for schoolchildren are organizations of adults selected by adults, and they rarely include children in determining such policies.
I’m already seeing a bitter backlash against device control by schools from the children I coach and parent. The complaints are specific. Why can’t I retrieve my homework from my phone, especially when my teacher is interrupting lessons to answer texts? Why are the school administrators, who won’t provide the classes I need, confiscating the phone I use to access online community college courses? How dare the adult world, which won’t stop routine mass shootings at schools, separate me from the phone I need in an emergency?
So, in response to grown-up hypocrisy, don’t be surprised if children demand even more power—including democratic rights that they are denied.
Indeed, that is already happening. Worldwide, young people are forming their own councils and parliaments, some with formal power, to make more decisions for themselves. Young people have successfully pressed to lower the voting age to 16 or 17 in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Malta, Nicaragua, and in local jurisdictions from Germany to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In fact, one reason I visited Scotland was to study its advances in youth democracy. Beginning with the 2014 referendum on independence for Scotland, children here have been able to register to vote at age 14, and to cast ballots at 16.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • Dec 12, 2024 Steve Taylor, PhD, is the author of Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time. He is the author of 15 other books including The Adventure, The Leap and Spiritual Science, He is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and a past chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. Steve also writes the popular ‘Out of the Darkness’ blog for Psychology Today. His work has been described by Eckhart Tolle as “an important contribution to the shift in consciousness that is happening on our planet.” His website is https://www.stevenmtaylor.com/ Here he examines time from the perspective of altered states of consciousness that result in a sense of time expansion, time contraction, or even time cessation. While such states can be triggered by emergencies, they are also relatively common among athletes. He also looks at the radical implications of near-death experiences and research on precognition. 00:00 Introduction 02:55 The Time Expansion Experience (TEE) 13:20 Challenging the definition of time 20:25 The near-death experience 25:20 Einstein’s block universe 28:26 Are we trapped in time? 31:10 Consciousness outside of time 35:58 Multiple dimensions of time 38:37 Consciousness more fundamental than time 43:24 Conclusion 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. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 24, 2024)
A novel approach to making seawater evaporate faster has been hailed as a significant breakthrough in desalination technology that will benefit billions of people worldwide.
Up to 36% of the world’s eight billion people currently suffer from severe freshwater shortages for at least four months of the year, and this could potentially increase to 75% by 2050.
Seawater desalination is one of the most effective strategies to alleviate the impending scarcity, but existing processes consume massive amounts of energy, leaving a large carbon footprint.
Other problems plague the production of fresh water from the sea, including the necessity to de-scale membranes used in the reverse-osmosis desalination process with chemicals that are toxic to sea life. Furthermore, once the water is produced, the briny by-product is so overly rich in salt that it has the effect of an ecological contaminant.
Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA) have already demonstrated the potential of solar-powered evaporation as an energy-efficient, sustainable alternative to current desalination methods, but they are still limited by a lower evaporation rate for seawater compared to pure water due to the negative effect of salt ions on water evaporation.
UniSA materials science researcher Professor Haolan Xu has now collaborated with researchers from China on a project to develop a simple yet effective strategy to reverse this limitation.
By introducing inexpensive and common clay minerals like zeolite and bentonite into a floating photothermal hydrogel evaporator, the team achieved seawater evaporation rates that were 18.8% higher than pure water. This is a significant breakthrough since previous studies all found seawater evaporation rates were around 8% lower than pure water.
The researchers say the hydrogel evaporator maintained its performance even after months of immersion in seawater.
“The key to this breakthrough lies in the ion exchange process at the air-water interface,” Xu says.
“The minerals selectively enrich magnesium and calcium ions from seawater to the evaporation surfaces, which boosts the evaporation rate of seawater. This ion exchange process occurs spontaneously during solar evaporation, making it highly convenient and cost-effective.”
Considering the global desalination market numbers around 21,000 operational plants worldwide, even small declines in desalination performance can result in the loss of tens of millions of tons of clean water.
“This new strategy, which could be easily integrated into existing evaporation-based desalination systems, will provide additional access to massive amounts of clean water, benefitting billions of people worldwide,” Xu says.
Fossil fuels are what power most of the world’s desalination plants, and experimental machines trying to de-carbonize the industry have used solar power, and mechanical energy from the movement of waves.
As I search out research on happiness what I see confirmed again and again is how deeply unhappy Americans are. So what to do? Here is a paper I wrote eight years ago. I think it is more relevant and important today than it was then. Try what it suggests and see what effect it has on your own happiness.
Credit: Alessandro Biascioli / Getty
We know that happy people are healthier, that happiness spreads, and that happy people make healthier choices that produce a healthier, happier society. We know this because it is quantifiable and testable. The data also show why a choice that is compassionate and life-affirming is so powerfully transformative.
Part of the reward of becoming an agent of compassionate, life-affirming change, whether or not you get public acknowledgment, is the knowledge you are doing measurable good. There is nothing theoretical about your gift as an agent of change. It may usually be anonymous, but the contribution is quite real.
Research shows that the spread of happiness can be objectively measured and quantified. This work also begins to explain exactly what one needs to do to cause happiness to spread and what the social outcomes are of doing so. The steps that have to be taken are completely…based in individual choice.
There actually is a database of international research on happiness: the World Happiness Report. Published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), it is edited by Professor John F. Helliwell […]
I doubt the evangelical MAGAt community as they worked to Christianize public education in the United States anticipated that their parody, the Satanic movement would use the same path they are creating against them. But they are.
Credit: Stock photo
The Satanic Temple is increasing its work in schools across the country, trying to combat a rise in religious teachings.
The group, launched in 2013 to battle the “intrusion of Christian values on American politics,” recently began a religious release program in an Ohio school district and plans to expand to a district in Tennessee soon.
It does not seek to convert students toward Satan but wants to be a bulwark against increased religious education.
“A lot of people obviously hear the word Satan, and they tend to lose their minds wherever we go. There tends to be quite a community backlash,” said June Everett, campaign director for the After School Satan Club and Hellion Academy of Independent Learning (HAIL) for The Satanic Temple.
“I’m actually a little surprised that things have gone viral in Ohio, because we actually had three after school clubs in Ohio. It seems to be our most popular state, so I was thinking maybe launching the HAIL program in Marysville, that everybody would sort of be over us. […]
A reward poster with surveillance photos of a man suspected in the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson who was killed outside the the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan seen on Dec. 4, 2024. (Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
WHEN THE IDENTITY of the person who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a mystery, Americans grafted their own ideas about the gunman onto the little information available. Now that a person of interest in the case has been arrested, that imagined character is bumping up against the identity and writings of a named suspect, who appears to have left an extensive trail of book reviews, including for an anti-technology manifesto written by the Unabomber and treatises on managing back pain.
Along with a three-page, handwritten manifesto reportedly in the possession of Luigi Mangione upon his arrest, those online traces may offer insight into the motives of a man accused of a killing that touched a nerve for Americans exhausted with profit-hungry health care companies.
Much of the online chatter has centered on the book written by Ted Kaczynski, the man known as the Unabomber, who conducted a nearly 20-year campaign of mail bombings designed to reverse society’s accelerating technological revolution.
“You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
“You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” an account bearing the name and likeness of Mangione wrote on Goodreads in a review of Kaczynski’s 1995 essay “Industrial Society and Its Future.” “Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.”
The book’s anarchist-inflected take on modern society mocked leftists and has recently found a second life on TikTok among people who reject the traditional left-right divide. In 2021, The Baffler described Kaczynski as an “unlikely unifying figure, embraced on TikTok by both jaded environmentalists and right-leaning doomer nihilists.”
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have also cited Kaczynski. “He might not be wrong,” Musk said, of Kaczynski’s insistence that tech had been bad for society.
Other books drawing Mangione’s interest included a mish-mash of self-help bestsellers, pop psychology analyses, and self-optimization volumes such as Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek.”
One of Mangione’s favorite books, judging by his glowing review, was a diagnosis called “What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies” by blogger Tim Urban. The author said in his description of the book that it eschews “the usual left-center-right horizontal political axis” in favor of “a vertical axis that explores how we think, as individuals and as groups.”
“I believe this book will go down in history as one of the most important philosophical texts of the early 21st century,” Mangione wrote.
Urban took to Twitter Monday afternoon with a comment apparently directed at Mangione’s appreciation for his writing: “Very much not the point of the book.”
While Kaczynski’s book provides an obvious possible influence for political violence, other books in Mangione’s reading history also stood out given his alleged target.
They included at least three tomes about managing pain: “Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance,” “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery,” and “Back Mechanic.”
A Twitter account bearing Mangione’s name featured an X-ray of a back with a surgically implanted medical device.
Details were beginning to leak out Monday about a manifesto that Mangione allegedly had on his person when he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
“These parasites had it coming,” one line in the document said, according to a police official who spoke to CNN. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said the NYPD did not yet have possession of the full, three-page document but that it appeared to betray “some ill will towards corporate America.”Share
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Here’s something that might blow your mind: the most powerful tool for managing pain isn’t in your medicine cabinet — it’s in your head. And before you dismiss this as some new-age wishful thinking, let me tell you about a breakthrough study that’s changing everything we thought we knew about pain management.
Scientists at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine have just confirmed what ancient wisdom traditions have been telling us for millennia: mindfulness meditation isn’t just effective at reducing pain — it actually works better than placebo treatments, and it does so by activating entirely different pathways in the brain.
This is a game-changer for the millions of Americans living with chronic pain. Think about it: no prescriptions, no side effects, no costs — just the untapped power of your own mind.
Let me break down what makes this discovery so revolutionary. We all know about the placebo effect — that fascinating phenomenon where people feel better simply because they believe they’re getting treatment. But here’s where things get interesting: mindfulness meditation isn’t just another placebo. It’s doing something completely different in your brain.
Dr. Fadel Zeidan, who led this groundbreaking research at UC San Diego’s Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, puts it this way: mindfulness meditation helps you separate pain from your sense of self. Instead of getting caught up in judging and fighting against pain, you learn to experience it differently. The result? Less suffering, without a single pill.
The research team put this to the test with 115 participants, comparing four different approaches: guided mindfulness meditation, a placebo cream (basically petroleum jelly that participants thought would help), fake meditation (just deep breathing), and listening to an audiobook. They applied painful (but safe) heat to participants’ legs and scanned their brains throughout the process.
The results were remarkable. Not only did mindfulness meditation significantly reduce both pain intensity and unpleasantness compared to all other interventions, but it was the only treatment that actually reduced activity in the neural pain signal — a specific pattern of brain activity we know is associated with pain.
This matters tremendously, especially given our current opioid crisis. Millions of people are trapped in cycles of medication dependency, dealing with diminishing returns and often devastating side effects. Mindfulness offers a way out — a practice that’s available to anyone, anywhere, without the risks associated with pharmaceuticals.
What’s particularly fascinating is that mindfulness works whether you “believe” in it or not. Unlike placebos, which rely on your expectations, mindfulness is a direct, intentional practice that puts you back in control of your pain experience. It helps reduce the connection between brain areas involved in self-awareness and emotional regulation, essentially helping you experience pain without letting it dominate your consciousness.
Dr. Zeidan and his team are now looking at how to integrate these findings into clinical settings to help those who need it most. While this particular study focused on healthy participants, the implications for people living with chronic pain are enormous.
Want to give it a try? The beauty of mindfulness meditation is its simplicity. You don’t need special equipment or years of practice — participants in this study saw significant pain relief after just a few guided sessions. All you need is a quiet place, a comfortable position, and your breath.
In our world of quick fixes and instant solutions, mindfulness offers something more profound: a way to transform your relationship with pain and, ultimately, with yourself. It’s not about avoiding pain — it’s about changing how your brain processes it.
This research represents more than just a scientific breakthrough — it’s a reminder of our innate capacity for healing and resilience. In a time when we’re increasingly dependent on external solutions for our well-being, mindfulness shows us that sometimes the most powerful medicine isn’t medicine at all — it’s the extraordinary potential of our own minds.
The most revolutionary aspect of all this? It’s completely accessible. No prescriptions needed. No insurance required. Just you, your breath, and the willingness to explore a different way of being with pain. In a healthcare system that often feels out of our control, that’s not just empowering — it’s revolutionary.
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