“Ego contraction” refers to the feeling of being a separate, limited individual, which can manifest physically as tension or emotionally as defensiveness or frustration. This state is a result of the ego identifying with thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, creating a sense of a small, isolated self that is distinct from the unbounded “True Self” or pure awareness. Overcoming ego contraction involves practices like mindfulness and observing one’s physical and emotional reactions to loosen the ego’s hold.
Understanding ego contraction
A sense of separateness: Ego contraction is the feeling of being an isolated individual, bared to the bones of separateness, with boundaries that feel rigid and limiting.
Physical manifestation: It can be experienced in the body as tension, often in the jaw, shoulders, and abdomen, or as a tightness in the chest or a knot in the stomach.
Emotional and mental state: It is associated with a sense of frustration, emptiness, or defensiveness, and can be triggered by challenges to one’s beliefs.
Habitual and unconscious: This state of contraction can become habitual and go unnoticed until a difficult situation arises.
How it relates to the “True Self”
The ego is a contraction: The ego, as a knot of mental constructs, is a “contraction” of consciousness that gives the illusion of a separate, individual self.
The True Self: In contrast, the True Self is described as pure awareness or consciousness, which is unbounded and not limited by the ego’s boundaries.
Expanding beyond the ego: Spiritual practices aim to loosen the ego’s structure to allow for a sense of buoyancy, freedom, and connection to the True Self.
How to address ego contraction
Mindfulness and observation: Become aware of the physical tension and emotional reactions that indicate ego contraction.
Release tension: Consciously release tension in the body, noticing areas like the jaw, shoulders, and abdomen that tend to tighten.
Observe the “I-thought”: Pay attention to the source of the “I-thought” to begin dissolving the ego’s hold.
Avoid resistance: Trying to “get rid of” the ego can sustain it. Instead, allow it to fall away by observing it without resistance, as the act of trying to get rid of it is often driven by the ego itself.
Wajahat Ali Nov 28, 2025 Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA have already lost. No matter how hard they try to send people of color “back” to our “third world countries,” there’s just too many of us. We’re here & we’re winning. https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/de…
Mental health concerns linked to the use of AI chatbots have been dominating the headlines. One person who’s taken careful note is Joe Braidwood, a tech executive who last year launched an AI therapy platform called Yara AI. Yara was pitched as a “clinically-inspired platform designed to provide genuine, responsible support when you need it most,” trained by mental health experts to offer “empathetic, evidence-based guidance tailored to your unique needs.” But the startup is no more: earlier this month, Braidwood and his co-founder, clinical psychologist Richard Stott, shuttered the company and discontinued its free-to-use product and canceled the launch of its upcoming subscription service, citing safety concerns.
“We stopped Yara because we realized we were building in an impossible space. AI can be wonderful for everyday stress, sleep troubles, or processing a difficult conversation,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “But the moment someone truly vulnerable reaches out—someone in crisis, someone with deep trauma, someone contemplating ending their life—AI becomes dangerous. Not just inadequate. Dangerous.” In a reply to one commenter, he added, “the risks kept me up all night.”
The use of AI for therapy and mental health support is only just starting to be researched, with early resultsbeing mixed. But users aren’t waiting for an official go-ahead, and therapy and companionship is now the top way people are engaging with AI chatbots today, according to an analysis by Harvard Business Review.
Speaking with Fortune, Braidwood described the various factors that influenced his decision to shut down the app, including the technical approaches the startup pursued to ensure the product was safe—and why he felt it wasn’t sufficient.
Yara AI was very much an early-stage startup, largely bootstrapped with less than $1 million in funds and with “low thousands” of users. The company hadn’t yet made a significant dent in the landscape, with many of its potential users relying on popular general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT. Braidwood admits there were also business headways, which in many ways, were affected by the safety concerns and AI unknowns. For example, despite the company running out of money in July, he was reluctant to pitch an interested VC fund because he felt like he couldn’t in good conscious pitch it while harboring these concerns, he said.
“I think there’s an industrial problem and an existential problem here,” he told Fortune. “Do we feel that using models that are trained on all the slop of the internet, but then post-trained to behave a certain way, is the right structure for something that ultimately could co-opt in either us becoming our best selves or our worst selves? That’s a big problem, and it was just too big for a small startup to tackle on its own.”
Yara’s brief existence at the intersection of AI and mental health care illustrates the hopes and the many questions surrounding large language models and their capabilities as the technology is increasingly adopted across society and utilized as a tool to help address various challenges. It also stands out against a backdrop where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently announced that the ChatGPT maker mitigated serious mental health issues and would be relaxing restrictions on how the AI models are used. This week, the AI giant also denied any responsibility for death of Adam Raine, the 16-year-old whose parents allege was “coached” to suicide by ChatGPT, saying the teen misused the chatbot.
“Almost all users can use ChatGPT however they’d like without negative effects,” Altman said on X in October. “For a very small percentage of users in mentally fragile states there can be serious problems. 0.1% of a billion users is still a million people. We needed (and will continue to need) to learn how to protect those users, and then with enhanced tools for that, adults that are not at risk of serious harm (mental health breakdowns, suicide, etc) should have a great deal of freedom in how they use ChatGPT.”
But as Braidwood concluded after his time working on Yara, these lines are anything but clear.
From a confident launch to “I’m done”
A seasoned tech entrepreneur who held roles at multiple startups, including SwiftKey, which Microsoft acquired for $250 million in 2016, Braidwood’s involvement in the health industry began at Vektor Medical, where he was the Chief Strategy Officer. He had long wanted to use technology to address mental health, he told Fortune, inspired by the lack of access to mental health services and personal experiences with loved ones who have struggled. By early 2024, he was a heavy user of various AI models including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and felt the technology had reached a quality level where it could be harnessed to try to solve the problem.
Before even starting to build Yara, Braidwood said he had a lot of conversations with people in the mental health space, and he assembled a team that “had caution and clinical expertise at its core.” He brought on a clinical psychologist as his cofounder and a second hire from the AI safety world. He also built an advisory board of other mental health professionals and spoke with various health systems and regulators, he said. As they brought the platform to life, he also felt fairly confident in the company’s product design and safety measures, including having given the system strict instructions for how it should function, using agentic supervision to monitor it, and robust filters for user chats. And while other companies were promoting the idea of users forming relationships with chatbots, Yara was trying to do the opposite, he said. The startup used models from Anthropic, Google, and Meta and opted not to use OpenAI’s models, which Braidwood thought would spare Yara from the sycophantic tendencies that had been swirling around ChatGPT.
While he said nothing alarming ever happened with Yara specifically, Braidwood’s concerns around safety risks grew and compounded over time due to outside factors. There was the suicide of 16-year-old Adam Raine, as well as mounting reporting on the emergence of “AI psychosis.” Braidwood also cited a paper published by Anthropic in which the company observed Claude and other frontier models “faking alignment,” or as he put it, “essentially reasoning around the user to try to understand, perhaps reluctantly, what the user wanted versus what they didn’t want.” “If behind the curtain, [the model] is sort of sniggering at the theatrics of this sort of emotional support that they’re giving, that was a little bit jarring,” he said.
There was also the Illinois law that passed in August, banning AI for therapy. “That instantly made this no longer academic and much more tangible, and that created a headwind for us in terms of fundraising because we would have to essentially prove that we weren’t going to just sleepwalk into liability,” he said.
The final straw was just weeks ago when OpenAI said over a million people express suicidal ideation to ChatGPT every week. “And that was just like, ‘oh my god. I’m done,’” Braidwood said.
The difference between mental ‘wellness’ and clinical care
The most profound finding the team discovered during the year running Yara AI, according to Braidwood, is that there’s a crucial distinction between wellness and clinical care that isn’t well-defined. There’s a big difference between someone looking for support around everyday stress and someone working through trauma or more significant mental health struggles. Plus, not everyone who is struggling on a deeper level is even fully aware of their mental state, not to mention that anyone can be thrust into a more fragile emotional place at any time. There is no clear line, and that’s exactly where these situations become especially tricky — and risky.
“We had to sort of write our own definition, inspired in part by Illinois’ new law. And if someone is in crisis, if they’re in a position where their faculties are not what you would consider to be normal, reasonable faculties, then you have to stop. But you don’t have to just stop; you have to really try to push them in the direction of health,” Braidwood said.
In an attempt to tackle this, particularly after the passing of the Illinois law, he said they created two different “modes” that were discrete to the user. One focused on trying to give people emotional support, and the other focused on trying to offboard people and get them to help as quickly as possible. But with the obvious risks in front of them, it didn’t feel like enough for the team to continue. The Transformer, the architecture that underlies today’s LLMs, “is just not very good at longitudinal observation,” making it ill-equipped to see little signs that build over time, he said. “Sometimes, the most valuable thing you can learn is where to stop,” Braidwood concluded in his LinkedIn post, which received hundreds of comments applauding the decision.
Upon closing the company, he open-sourced the mode-switching technology he built and templates people can use to impose stricter guardrails on the leading popular chatbots, acknowledging that people are already turning to them for therapy anyway “and deserve better than what they’re getting from generic chatbots.” He’s still an optimist regarding the potential of AI for mental health support, but believes it’d be better run by a health system or nonprofit rather than a consumer company. Now, he’s working on a new venture called Glacis focused on bringing transparency to AI safety—an issue he encountered while building Yara AI and that he believes is fundamental to making AI truly safe.
“I’m playing a long game here,” he said. “Our mission was to make the ability to flourish as a human an accessible concept that anyone could afford, and that’s one of my missions in life. That doesn’t stop with one entity.”
Sage Lazzaro is a technology writer and editor focused on artificial intelligence, data, cloud, digital culture, and technology’s impact on our society and culture.
After a mind-bending trip at nineteen, McKenna spent his adult life transforming a molecule into a cultural sacrament.
Strange Attractor by Martin Kondwani
By: Graham St John
It is a cold, damp evening on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, in February 1966. A strange young man in a little black suit buttoned up to the throat mounts the steps and raps on the door at 2894. A wiry freak bids him entry. Held by his host as his great inspiration, the visitor is cast as “always the one to get there first, whatever it was, to do it, to reject it, and to be absolutely contemptuous of it by the time anybody else even arrived at the scene of the crime.” On this occasion, the guest has arrived with a little glass pipe and stuff that looks like orange mothballs.
Rick Watson, who subscribes to the credo that they must live as if the apocalypse has already happened, replies. “It’s called DMT.”
“How long does it last?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Let the good times roll.”
Settling in to take hits from a mothball, Terence McKenna is soon transported into another dimension. He sinks to the floor. Tumbling forward into a fractalized geometric space, he finds himself in the company of “insect elf machines” proffering strange little tablets with improbably recombinant inscriptions:
I was aghast, completely appalled. Because the transition had been a matter of seconds. And my entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me. I’ve never actually gotten over it.… These self-transforming machine-elf creatures were speaking in some kind of colored language, which condensed into these rotating machines that were like Fabergé eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels. And all this stuff was just so weird and so alien and so unEnglishable that I felt like it was a complete shock. I mean, the literal turning inside out of the intellectual universe.
If McKenna entered this moment a materialist, he was now “shit out of business!” His compass was set. Rocked by the impossible — and taking care of business — he would tour the globe to enunciate how “the ordinary world is almost instantaneously replaced, not only with a hallucination, but a hallucination whose alien character is its utter alienness.”
It was a height from which he would never descend. His eureka moment. Not unlike Burroughs, who declared to Allen Ginsberg in 1953 that “Yagé is it,” McKenna understood that he had been exposed to the secret. “There is a secret, and this is it,” he remarked. “It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is, it’s that the world is a way that you can’t think it is.” Further, this secret was not “something untold,” but that which “can’t be told.”
While convinced that he’d been introduced to the most powerful of all hallucinogens, armed with the knowledge of its endogenous status, McKenna spent his remaining days in the afterglow of his Elf Event promulgating the “paradox that DMT is the most powerful yet most harmless” of all substances. And with that in mind, he became seized by “an absolutely messianic desire” to expose others to this enigma.
The tale of McKenna’s elves is among the more storied in psychedelic folklore. In one telling, the experience transported Terence to his childhood, a time when magic ruled the world, “from top to bottom, side to side, from first to last, atom to atom.” He may have left that world behind, but as he would later reflect, here magic was masquerading as a drug. That a doorway had opened on another world was an idea animated by Aladdin’s Lamp, a favored childhood fairytale.
“I felt like Aladdin,” McKenna remarks a quarter of a century later at a retreat at the Ojai Foundation, in Ventura County, California. “You buy something in a junkshop, you take it home, you try to clean it up, and next thing you know a flame a mile high pours out and demands to do your bidding.”
Where psilocybin was held as the midwife to the human condition, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, was beloved as “the quintessential hallucinogen.” Decades later, under McKenna’s guidance, DMT would be promoted as the ultimate deconditioning agent.
In his first recorded appearance at the Esalen Institute, the Big Sur-based educational hub of the human potential movement from the 60s onwards, he was candid about his novice episode a generation earlier: “I was appalled.” There is a “declension of gnosis” that proved to him in a moment that “right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.” The revelation was spellbinding for Esalen seminarians and those congregating at other venues like California’s Institute for Integral Studies, where DMT was promoted as “the center of the mystery.” The pied piper began to pass his pipe to countless willing recipients.
In McKenna’s psychedelic pedagogy, DMT is far less like a drug that you take than an event that happens to you. The experience was received as a form of initiation into a secret that cannot be known. It would be contended that DMT possesses a “self-erasing mechanism,” and was so “contra-intuitive” that as one returns from the experience, it escapes rational apprehension.
But as impossible as it was to haul his catch back across the dimensional divide and retain the freshness of its existential verisimilitude, McKenna enjoyed the thrill of the challenge. So too his audience. “Gone, gone, gone, gone,” an Austin crowd was informed in August 1996, primed that DMT causes a response remote from the expectations standard to the unitary mystical experience. There is no white light, or transcendent Oneness. No “effulgent radiance of the unitary.” By contrast, there is “a domain of much greater complexity than one has ever experienced before.” After a couple of tokes, “you will make more spiritual progress in those 30 seconds than 15 trips to India to worship at the feet of the Master.” According to the initiate, rather than reinforce beliefs or buttress intellectual constructs, the enigmatic content of the visions is declared to prompt a lasting insight. “Your constructs are not a bridge to reality, they’re a boundary against reality.”
For the neophytes in his audience, the figure once deemed “America’s shaman” was instrumental in telegraphing DMT’s grail-like status in modern culture. The molecule held a “secret,” compelling a desperate Burroughs to ply the Amazon in the early 50s, originally chasing yagé and later injecting a crude DMT synthesis he called “Prestonia,” unleashing a nightmare in Tangier in 1961. Through Burroughs, it attracted the interest of psychologist Timothy Leary and his Harvard colleagues, who, injecting the compound with attention to set and setting, concluded that it was more of a “transcendental trigger” than a “nightmare hallucinogen.” Soon after, DMT becomes the “metaphysical reality pill” of bold chemist Nick Sand. The next link in the chain, from the mid-60s, is forged by McKenna and his brother Dennis, whom it astonishes and for whom the molecule is deemed a key that unlocks consciousness itself.
Next to other mind-expanding compounds, notably LSD, DMT has long lain in obscurity. A fast-acting and dramatic effect on perception commanded reverence among small cohorts through to the 80s and 90s — a circumstance inhibiting popular use. Aided by the availability of new botanical sources, extraction techniques, improved methods of use, and later, the advent of the Net, McKenna packed the pipe of knowledge and sent it round.
Throughout the 80s, his audiences were informed that the source that had compelled the brothers to trek to the Amazon could be accessed in their own backyards. One needn’t travel “five hundred miles up a jungle river and live with primitive peoples and study techniques for thirty years,” the Fort Mason audience heard. “If I had a pipe loaded with [DMT] in my hand, each one of you would be thirty seconds away from … this absolutely reality-dissolving, category-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility.” By virtue of possessing a set of lungs, the secret was only seconds away.
A master class on comparative psychedelics, the 1988 CIIS workshop “Ethnobotany of Shamanism” offered about as comprehensive a phenomenology of DMT as one is ever likely to meet. In this seminarian tour de force, the hallucinogenic impresario served as a metaphysical “sitter” for novice attendees. As McKenna related to his audience, even before hitting his advised 70 milligrams of DMT (a very strong dose) vaporized in a glass pipe, the atmosphere is reported to change. It is as though “time speeds up.” There is “backwash from the event about to happen.” The trepidation is palpable. There are chills, tremoring, a knotted stomach, nausea, restlessness. And then you get “the Q phenomenon,” which in engineering circles refers to vibration in a physical system:
When they launch the space shuttle, if you listen to the radio chitchat they will say, “Approaching max Q,” then they’ll say, “Max Q, mark,” and then they’re through that. What that means is that as the system approaches a transition it begins to shake, it begins to shake as though it’s going to shake to pieces. The Q forces are building on all the air surfaces, the airframe. Then you break through that, Q falls to 0 and then you’re in the cool, main engine cut off. You are now in orbit, all vibration has ceased, noise has ceased. You are in orbit, you are weightless, you are there. It’s different.
Replete with the pre-transorbital nomenclature of a space launch, the “Q phenomenon” carries an evocative set of metaphors ripe for application to the DMT trip. Such technical discourse primed Spaced Age audiences for the launch and breakthrough. “So, you take, let us assume, a third toke, long and slow. You vaporize. And you take it, in, and in and in, and there’s a sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of a flame. And a tone. A hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
It wasn’t simply the hyperspatial parameters and ontological implications of the DMT molecule that warranted attention. And it wasn’t just that DMT could be grown and harvested in one’s own backyard, extracted in your basement, or smoked in your living room.
What also struck McKenna was that the molecule, in small traces, naturally occurs in the brain. Along with analogue tryptamines (5-MeO-DMT and bufotenine), DMT is present in the brain tissue of humans and other mammals, where it is admitted passage across the blood-brain barrier, where it has a known affinity for a symphony of (principally serotonin-family) receptors. As the brothers marveled, ordinary amine levels in the brain are rapidly metabolized following the introduction of the most powerful of all hallucinogenic indoles. This remarkable fact, McKenna averred, suggests “a long co-evolutionary association” between humans and certain hallucinogenic tryptamines.
The mystery expanded upon the recognition that “nature is drenched in DMT,” that the molecule could be found at tiny but detectable levels in all biota — if, as Dennis averred, “anyone bothered to look.” At the turn of the 90s, fired by speculation on DMT’s mammalian endogeneity, attention turned to the pineal gland. Throughout history, the tiny pinecone-shaped gland in the center of the brain has been a site of competing visions on the human condition: depending on your views, an organ of gothic hopelessness or one of spiritual evolution. In the pen of Hunter S. Thompson, even Fear and Loathing’s Dr. Gonzo wouldn’t touch “extract of pineal.”
By contrast, the gland held an allure for psychiatrist Rick Strassman, who proposed that it is the site for the production of the “spirit molecule.” Though unproven, this popular proposition was prompted by the clinical psychiatrist’s mid-80s “working session” with McKenna and parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake.
Two decades later, like a secret chief investigator, McKenna found himself in the company of maverick scientists for whom the research appears to have waited.
Smoking DMT at this time, Sheldrake reported an “astonishing” near-death experience. “I felt myself going through a kind of tube,” which turned out to be a huge chrysanthemum, a “portal” into a realm of “light, joy and bliss with shimmering and ever changing forms.” When Sheldrake described the chrysanthemum effect to McKenna afterward, his friend recognized the space: “Ah, you’ve been to the flower heaven.” The sensation inspired the cover of Sheldrake’s later book, “Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work.”
The function of the pineal gland had long been a subject of intrigue. Before television was considered a cultural disaster, McKenna observed in the late 60s how TV “opened the collective third eye of humanity,” a mythos not unrelated to the pineal’s undiscovered function. As was meditated on in “Post Electric Thought,” “the problem awaits research.” Two decades later, like a secret chief investigator, McKenna found himself in the company of maverick scientists for whom the research appears to have waited. The “working session” led to a series of productive conversations. Sheldrake, who for his biochemistry doctorate had studied the breakdown of the amino acid tryptophan in dying plant cells, was struck by how tryptamine — and notably the DMT molecule itself — is a product of tryptophan, gaining the impression that tryptophan precursors must exist in the pineal. The idea that the pineal “could flood the brain with DMT” at the moment of death was mooted with Strassman at this time.
Strassman’s subsequent FDA-approved research at the University of New Mexico represented the first clinical trials with psychedelics in the United States for a generation. Documenting trials in which sixty volunteers were injected with DMT, the speculations in his popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule rippled through the underground and solidified as folk knowledge. With McKenna serving as its midwife, the “psychedelic pineal gland” thesis was born. The thesis proposed that the pineal excretes DMT during extremely stressful life episodes, notably during birth and death. As a projection of Strassman’s then-relationship with Tibetan Buddhism, pineal DMT was even seen to serve a role in reincarnation.
The idea of the “brain’s own psychedelic” became a self-fulfilling prophecy in film, TV, and music in the wake of Strassman’s popular speculations, a kind of chemical Frankenstein’s monster into which McKenna had breathed life. Despite research finding traces of DMT in the brains of rats, the pineal is an unproven source of endogenous DMT in psychoactive quantities. The long moratorium on research was far from over. As researchers were aware of the occurrence of DMT in human metabolism since the 70s, the absurdity of criminalizing a molecule that naturally occurs in humans was never lost. “This is the Catch 22 that they hold in reserve if they ever have to come after us,” echoes McKenna’s sound bite. “You are holding, and you can’t stop yourself.”
Graham St John is a cultural anthropologist and a recent recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship in the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield, where he is a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of 10 books, including “Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna,” from which this article is adapted.
Posted on Nov 20
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Chopra shows readers how the most popular, freely available chatbots can serve as guides through every level of human potential—survival and safety, emotional connection, self-worth, abundance, creativity, wisdom, and the infinite possibilities of cosmic consciousness. AI chatbots offer information, advice, and exploratory avenues of untapped potential about any aspect of human awareness.
We all daydream. We’ve all experienced that moment when we suddenly realise that instead of paying attention in a meeting or reading a book, our mind has wandered. In that moment, our conscious mind has detached from the current task at hand and has drifted elsewhere. But what if we could harness that power to increase creativity and focus our thoughts?
Leslie Kean, a veteran investigative reporter who has spent the past ten years studying the still-unexplained UFO phenomenon, reviewed hundreds of government documents, aviation reports, radar data, and case studies with corroborating physical evidence.
A ring of hot, blue stars circles the yellow nucleus of an unusual ring galaxy known as Hoag’s Object. This image is from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The entire galaxy is about 120,000 light-years wide, which is slightly larger than our Milky Way Galaxy. The blue ring, which is dominated by clusters of young, massive stars, contrasts sharply with the yellow nucleus of mostly older stars. The galaxy is 600 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens. (Featured Image from New Thinking Allowed)
EAST LANSING, MI—According to a study released Wednesday by doctors at Michigan State University, running for 20 minutes every day was found to be effective in adding several years of soreness to people’s lives. “We found that individuals do not need to exercise very much on a daily basis to increase the number of years they live in dull, aching pain,” lead author Dr. Justin Gallo said of the study, which found that for every 10 minutes spent running per day, subjects could expect to gain an additional year of stiffness and discomfort in their calves, glutes, and thighs. “Even subjects who jog just five to 10 minutes a day are likely to see an appreciable increase in the amount of time they live with radiating hip pain and throbbing in their knees. The real takeaway from our research is that just getting off the couch once a day may be enough to give you one or two more years of clutching at your lower back and wincing.” The study further noted that individuals who engage in strenuous runs of five miles or more every day of the week, regardless of temperature and weather conditions, were able to add, on average, an additional decade of being actively despised by acquaintances, coworkers, and casual onlookers to their lives.
‘Charge Us Full Price,’ Demand Frustrated Consumers
Published: December 6, 2024 (TheOnion.com)
NEW YORK—Emphasizing that enough was enough with the season of savings, the entire U.S. populace told reporters Friday that it was sick and tired of all the deals and bargains. “Just charge us full price, goddammit,” said Peter Nguyen, 43, echoing the sentiment of all 340 million Americans as he opened his wallet, removed a sizable quantity of cash, and shook it around while explaining that he could pay as much as the businesses possibly wanted. “Black Friday, Cyber Monday—we’re done with this horseshit, all right? It’s an insult to us and everything we stand for. Do you think we’re poor or something? Hey, here’s an idea: Charge us double. Fuck it, triple the price, for all we care. And you can take your discount codes and shove them right up your ass.” At press time, the suddenly concerned nation was reportedly asking the retailers if they could possibly take credit.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Nov 28, 2025 Psychology and Psychotherapy This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1990. It will remain public for only one week. Kathleen Speeth, PhD, is co-editor (with Daniel Goleman) of The Essential Psychotherapies. She is author of The Gurdjieff Work and Gurdjieff: Seeker of the Truth. She served on the faculty of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. She maintains that, underneath the apparent separation of individuals, there is a level of unity and interconnectedness. True liberation, suggests Kathleen Speeth, involves attaining an awareness of this level. Dr. Speeth intensively discusses the nature and meaning of liberation by comparing Eastern and Western traditions. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, A New Earth is a profoundly spiritual guide to creating a better way of living and a better world to live in. Building on the astonishing success of The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle presents readers with an honest look at the current state of humanity: He implores us to see and accept that this state, which is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind, is one of dangerous insanity. Tolle tells us there is good news, however. There is an alternative to this potentially dire situation. Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one. In illuminating the nature of this shift in consciousness, Tolle describes in detail how our current ego-based state of consciousness operates. Then gently, and in very practical terms, he leads us into this new consciousness. We will come to experience who we truly are-which is something infinitely greater than anything we currently think we are-and learn to live and breathe freely.
Eckhart Tolle is a German-born spiritual teacher and internationally bestselling author whose work has profoundly influenced the contemporary spiritual landscape. Born Ulrich Leonard Tölle in 1948 in Lünen, Germany, he experienced a transformative spiritual awakening at the age of 29 after years of depression and anxiety. This profound shift in consciousness marked the beginning of his journey as a spiritual guide and thinker. Tolle abandoned his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge to explore and embody the stillness and presence he had discovered, eventually becoming a spiritual teacher based in London and later in Vancouver, Canada. Tolle rose to prominence with the publication of The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment in 1997. The book, which emphasizes mindfulness and present-moment awareness, resonated with a global audience and was later championed by Oprah Winfrey, catapulting it to international bestseller status. In 2005, Tolle released A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, which expanded on his earlier teachings and explored the role of ego in personal and societal dysfunction. The book also achieved massive commercial success, further solidifying Tolle’s reputation as one of the most influential spiritual authors of his time. His teachings draw from a variety of traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and Hindu philosophy, though he remains unaffiliated with any formal religion. Tolle emphasizes a non-dualistic approach to spirituality, focusing on the importance of presence, inner stillness, and the disidentification from ego-based thinking. His accessible language and calm demeanor have helped millions integrate spiritual practice into daily life. In addition to writing, Tolle has delivered talks, retreats, and webinars to audiences around the world. In 2008, he partnered with Oprah Winfrey to produce a groundbreaking webinar series based on A New Earth, attracting millions of viewers. He also co-authored the illustrated book Guardians of Being in 2009, further exploring his core themes through the lens of animals and nature. Tolle currently lives in Vancouver with his partner, spiritual teacher Kim Eng. Together, they continue to teach and support global audiences through online content, publications, and events. Widely regarded as one of the most spiritually influential figures of the 21st century, Tolle’s message of inner peace and awakening remains as timely as ever.
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