Francine Prose Explores the Disconnect of Loving Works Written By Monstrous Authors

Via Harper

Francine Prose May 5, 2026 (lithub.com)

Of course I knew that Charles Dickens had what was arguably the most brutal and public marital separation in literary history. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that in 1858 he left his wife Catherine, to whom he had married for two decades and who had borne him ten children. The dissolution occurred partly because the marriage had essentially been arranged and had never been happy, and partly because Dickens—then in his late forties—had fallen obsessively in love with an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan.

When I decided that I would try to write a novel—eventually entitled Five Weeks in the Country—about the visit that Hans Christian Andersen paid to Dickens in 1857 and during which Andersen overstayed his welcome and made the family (and himself) miserable, I knew that the dissolution of the Dickens marriage—or at least the lead-up to the separation—would have to be part of the narrative.

I decided to end the novel before Dickens left Catherine, before he told anyone who would listen that she belonged in a mental hospital, before he forbid their children to see or speak to their mother. (Of the nine surviving Dickens children, only Charles, the oldest, disobeyed his father’s wishes and remained in contact with his mother). And I changed the ordering of events, so that Dickens’s attraction to Ellen Ternan began when Andersen was staying with him, when in fact it started shortly after Andersen left.

For one thing, I’d known about the disturbing facts of the case for so long that they could hardly surprise me into a new reading of the novels.

The events that surrounded the break-up would have overshadowed everything that came before and would have made it impossible to feel any sympathy for Dickens at all. As it happens, most early readers of my novel have found Dickens less sympathetic than I do. I realize that many people are understandably disturbed by the spectacle of a middle-aged man falling for a very young woman, but what had resonated with me (and not, apparently, with others) was the idea that even the most devoted, loving and deeply committed family member may experience a moment when they have seriously burned out on the pressures and demands of family life—especially, I imagined, a family as large as the Dickens household.

At this point, I should also note that I am a huge Dickens fan. Perhaps my love for his work began when, as a child, I saw on TV the early, black-and-white John Mills film of Great Expectations; certainly it began when I read Bleak House for a college survey course. I made a pilgrimage to see the Dickens memorabilia in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, which owns the writer’s “performance” copy  of A Christmas Carol, marked up with prompts for the gestures he planned to make during public readings, as well as the letter opener he commissioned a taxidermist to fashion from the paw of his much adored dead cat, Bob. (Sentimental taxidermy was popular during the Victorian era.) I’ve read all his novels, some once, some several times. I visited his house in London.

Perhaps my passion for Dickens’s novels will help to explain why I was so taken aback—shocked, really—when Kerri Miller, the smart, thoughtful, humorous person who interviewed me for Minnesota Public Radio, asked if knowing about Dickens’s bad behavior, about his loathsome treatment of his hapless wife, has affected my feelings about his work.

I suppose the main reason I was so startled was that I had never actually thought about the question. It simply hadn’t occurred to me. For one thing, I’d known about the disturbing facts of the case for so long that they could hardly surprise me into a new reading of the novels. For another, I am one of those people who believe that my feelings about an author’s misdeeds, crimes, failings are ultimately unrelated to my opinion about, and the pleasure I get from, their work.

Through the writing of much of it, I felt that I was taking a hard and (yes) sympathetic look at the way that we become someone else when we write.

I know that not everyone will agree, but Alice Munro’s books have stayed on my shelves and my respect for her work has remained unchanged despite the deeply disturbing revelations about the blind eye she turned on the fact that her second husband was molesting her daughter. I wrote a brief biography of Caravaggio, who is supposed to have killed someone over a fight about a bet on a tennis game, and I don’t think that I ever fully internalized the fact that my idol was a murderer.

Perhaps one reason that I find it so easy to separate the art from the artist is that I believe that the person and the work are two separate entities. That is, once I’ve written something, I feel that it takes on a life of its own, that is no more “mine” than are my children and grandchildren.

Even when I have written autobiographically—especially when I’ve written autobiographically—I’ve often felt as if I was writing about someone else, someone who lived during the time about which I was writing, someone who did many of the same things I did and shared many of the same feelings. The characters in my novels aren’t me, though the books may contain elements of my personal history, my daily life, my sense of the world. Once I’ve finished them, they’re on their own, sent out into the world to reach the people who want and need to read them, out in the world to do whatever they’re going to do.

In theory, the contradictions should have been greater, the divide between the life and the work should have been stronger and deeper in the case of someone like Dickens, whose fiction was so thoroughly suffused with empathy for humanity, so full of the compassion that he seems to have lacked for his own family.

But that was one of the things I was writing about—one of the aspects that interested and engaged me when I was working on Five Weeks in the Country. Through the writing of much of it, I felt that I was taking a hard and (yes) sympathetic look at the way that we become someone else when we write, someone wiser and deeper and maybe kinder than we are when we do the grocery shopping and cook a meal and call the family in for dinner.

The history of art is full of monsters. Is there more cruelty and criminality among artists than in the general population? I have no idea. And books can indeed have a profoundly and disastrously evil effect on their readers. But by and large, few paintings and novels are in themselves monstrous, and they continue to enlighten, to hearten us and to give us great pleasure, regardless of the moral failings of the flawed humans who created them.

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Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Prose is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.

art monsters Charles Dickens craft fictionalized nonfiction Five Weeks in the Country Francine Prose Harper HarperCollins

Francine Prose

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

CREDIT: ADOLF SCHALLER FOR STScI

Physical World

The revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope and next-gen radio telescopes are probing what’s known as the epoch of reionization. It holds clues to the first stars and galaxies, and perhaps the nature of dark matter.

By Elizabeth Quill 12.19.2024 (knowablemagazine.org)

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For millions of years following the Big Bang, after the universe’s roiling soup of particles had cooled, the cosmos was a dark and boring place. There were no stars to make light. No familiar swirls of galaxies. Certainly no planets. And the entire universe was shrouded in neutral hydrogen gas.

Then, perhaps 100 million years or so in, everything started to change. Over the next billion-odd years, the universe went from a bland, unimpressive landscape to a rich and dynamic one. This profound shift began when the first stars lit up. As they burned, generating heat and forging new matter, their intense light began tearing apart the hydrogen that pervaded the universe. Everywhere electrons were ripped from these atoms, leaving the bulk of hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — in the ionized state it remains in today.

This pivotal period — when all that hydrogen went from one form to another — is known as the epoch of reionization. It began with our cosmic dawn and ushered in the modern era with all its marvelous textures and features. It serves as the backdrop for when the universe grew up.

“It’s the last major shift that happens to our universe,” says theoretical astrophysicist Julian Muñoz of the University of Texas at Austin. Everything changed over that billion years or so and nothing much has changed in the billions of years since.

While there are models that describe how this great transition might have happened, giant gaps in our picture remain. When did the first stars form and when did light, escaping their host galaxies, kick off reionization? What kinds of galaxies were most responsible and what was the role of black holes? How did reionization proceed across time and space? And what clues might it hold to other cosmic mysteries, like the nature of dark matter?

“We don’t understand how the universe came to be what it is today,” Muñoz says.

Some answers are now within reach, thanks to new tools that allow scientists to look back deep into the universe’s first billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, is peering at the galaxies that existed only hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang and is already turning up surprises. At the same time, next-generation radio telescopes are focusing not on the galaxies but on the neutral hydrogen that once pervaded all of space. That hydrogen provides clues to how the epoch of reionization unfolded, and other characteristics of the cosmos.

“The tools that we can bring to bear now on studying this epoch of cosmic history are unlike anything we’ve had before,” says astrophysicist Rob Simcoe of MIT.

Light galore

Our current understanding of the early universe’s development goes something like this: After the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmos expanded and the primordial soup of subatomic particles cooled. Within the first second, protons and neutrons formed. Within the first few minutes, they joined up into atomic nuclei. About 380,000 years in, those nuclei began capturing electrons to form the first atoms. This milestone, in which the ionized soup became neutral atoms, is known as recombination (a misnomer, since nuclei and electrons had never combined before).

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Until they were captured into atoms, the unfettered electrons scattered light like a dense fog in a car’s headlights. But with electrons reined in, photons could shoot out through the cosmos. Today, those particles of light arrive to us in the form of a faint glow known as the cosmic microwave background.

Then the universe entered what are known as the dark ages. With hydrogen and some helium gas pervading the cosmos, there was nothing much around to make light. Yet blobs of dark matter were busy pulling in the surrounding gas, some of it condensing enough to set off nuclear fusion. A hundred million years or more after the Big Bang, the first stars lit up in our cosmic dawn. As these early stars burned, their ionizing ultraviolet light began escaping from their galaxies. This created bubbles of ionized hydrogen that grew until they merged, eventually filling the cosmos.

JWST is poised to answer many questions about early galaxies and how their light drove the process of reionization. For now, though, the telescope is turning up more questions than answers. There were many more galaxies in early times than scientists had thought — and these galaxies were producing far more than enough of the type of light needed to reionize the universe.

Early images released by the telescope were overflowing with galaxies that dated to less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. Then, in late 2022, came confirmation of the earliest galaxy yet; it existed just 350 million years after the Big Bang. That record was then busted when UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Brant Robertson and colleagues announced a galaxy that dated to just 290 million years after the Big Bang.

Many of these galaxies are brighter and more massive than expected: In 2023, six galaxies dating to within 700 million years of the Big Bang made headlines for how mature they already appeared. Despite the early epoch, their stellar masses rival that of today’s Milky Way, which has 60 billion solar masses worth of stars.

Standard theory can’t explain so much star formation so early, so these galaxies were dubbed the “universe breakers.”

“It’s just absolutely wild,” says astrophysicist Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado Boulder, a coauthor on the paper. “It implies an early universe that is either more chaotic and bursty than we thought, or a universe in which things can evolve more quickly.”

The discoveries may force a reexamination of galaxy evolution. And they raise big questions about reionization.

Even the faintest early galaxies that JWST has spotted are producing loads of reionizing light, four times as much as expected, astrophysicist Hakim Atek of the Institut Astrophysique de Paris and colleagues have found. Despite their dimness, there are enough of these galaxies to reionize the universe mostly on their own.

And JWST is also turning up hints that supermassive black holes formed much earlier in cosmic history than thought; the high-energy emissions they generate as they feed on surrounding matter would also have contributed to reionization.

With all that light, the universe should have been reionized sooner than we know it was, Muñoz and colleagues suggest in a 2024 paper titled “Reionization after JWST: a photon budget crisis?”

It’s not really a crisis, Muñoz says. Existing research has established that reionization ended 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. But the seeming overabundance of reionizing light is a clear sign that something is missing in our picture of the early universe. “We don’t know all the pieces of the puzzle,” he says.

Seeking clues in hydrogen

Other efforts hope to track reionization by using next-generation radio telescopes to see how much neutral hydrogen existed across time in the early universe.

Scientists have probed this hydrogen in other ways. The scattering of the light of the cosmic microwave background, for example, offers clues to the total amount of reionization since that light was emitted, roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Quasars, the bright beacons of radiation produced by massive, feeding black holes, offer another probe. Neutral hydrogen absorbs specific wavelengths of light from quasars on its path to an observer, providing a sign of the hydrogen’s presence. But as you approach earlier epochs, there are fewer quasars.

In this simulation of the epoch of reionization, regions of ionized hydrogen gas (blue and translucent) expand over time, overtaking regions of neutral hydrogen (dark and opaque).

CREDIT: M. ALVAREZ, R. KAEHLER AND T. ABEL

So scientists now aim to detect a radio signal from the neutral hydrogen itself, before it was ionized, back through cosmic dawn and even into the dark ages. This signal, known as the 21 cm line, has been detected since the 1950s and is used widely in astronomy, but it hasn’t been definitively spotted from the early universe.

The radio signal arises because of a quantum transition in neutral hydrogen’s electron. The transition, which emits a bit of electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of 21 centimeters, doesn’t happen often. But when neutral hydrogen is abundant, it’s possible to spot.

And the signal can do more than track neutral hydrogen’s whereabouts. It also serves as a sort of thermometer. Scientists can use it to better understand the cosmic temperature, including clues to when energy is injected into the intergalactic medium in the form of light or heat.

Such blasts of energy could come from the first stars and feeding black holes. Or the energy could hint at something more exotic: interactions between dark matter and itself, or unknown interactions between dark matter and more familiar matter. Such interactions, Muñoz notes, could heat up or cool down the intergalactic medium. The 21cm line offers a way to probe the processes at play, including any spurred by unexpected physics. “It can give you information you won’t otherwise get,” he says.

One telescope looking for this fingerprint is known as the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, or HERA. If JWST is known for its complexity and cost, HERA is more off-the-shelf. It’s “made of PVC pipe and wire mesh and telephone poles,” says astrophysicist Josh Dillon of the University of California, Berkeley.

HERA consists of 350 radio antennas spread across 5 percent of a square kilometer in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. While the telescope itself is low-tech, its observations require the most advanced signal processing and data analysis available. That’s because the inherently faint signal has to be spotted amid booming radio noise from our galaxy and others.

Dillon compares spotting the 21 cm signal to listening for the treble at a concert when the bass is 100,000 times stronger. “That is why it hasn’t been done yet,” he says.

HERA seeks a statistical measure of the spatial fluctuations in the 21 cm signal. Those fluctuations arise from variations in the distribution of neutral hydrogen across the sky and so offer a sense of how the gas, as well as the stars and galaxies, were arranged. Other teams instead aim to make a bulk measurement that captures an average signal across the sky. Since the techniques differ, one could help verify the other.

Dark matter has already been invoked to explain one claimed detection. In 2018, researchers with the Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature, or EDGES, reported a detection of the averaged 21 cm signal that corresponds to when the light from the first stars started interacting with the surrounding hydrogen.

The signal is stronger than expected, suggesting colder than predicted hydrogen gas, which has fueled a lot of skepticism around the claim. Some researchers have pointed to interactions between the hydrogen gas and dark matter as a possible explanation, but such an explanation would require unexpected physics.

“There are a lot of fanciful theories,” says observational cosmologist Sarah Bosman of Heidelberg University in Germany. “It has to be fanciful,” she notes, because no ordinary physics would give the strength that EDGES saw.

Bosman admits to being one of the few people enthusiastic about the claim, which she says has motivated researchers working on other experiments that might confirm or refute it. “It’s given the field a really good boost,” she says.

HERA and other telescopes are forerunners of the Square Kilometer Array, which will attempt to map the 21 cm signal across the entire sky. This array will connect radio antennas in South Africa and Australia into the largest radio telescope ever built. Though still under construction, the telescope connected two of its stations to take its first data in 2024.

Better tools, deeper knowledge

No one really knows what to expect from the 21 cm signal, Bosman notes. It could demand only minor tweaks to the existing picture of cosmic evolution, or it might uncover new physics that rewrite our understanding entirely. It’s just too soon to tell.

But Dillon says that the 21 cm line could one day offer “the biggest possible dataset.” The ultimate aim is to probe the time frame from roughly 100 million years after the Big Bang to a billion years after. That time frame represents less than 10 percent of the total life of the universe, but because of the continued expansion of the universe, the time frame covers roughly half the volume of the visible universe.

Future instruments will help reach all the way back. There are various proposals for new radio telescopes in space and even on the Moon, where they would be free from Earth-based interference. The most ancient 21 cm signal would arrive to us at wavelengths that are reflected off Earth’s ionosphere, notes Anastasia Fialkov, a cosmologist and astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England. Telescopes in space, or on the Moon, could get around that problem.

Any 21 cm clues would be studied alongside JWST’s observations of early galaxies, as well as observations from its successor, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and future ground-based observatories like the European Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in Chile.

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Studies of quasars also have plenty more to say, notes Simcoe of MIT, who wrote with colleagues about quasars in the early universe in the 2023 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Quasars are particularly useful, Simcoe says, for identifying “the last regions of the universe that are still holding on to their neutral hydrogen gas.” It’s within these pockets that the youngest stars and galaxies — or the material that birthed them — must reside.

These early stars could be producing trace elements different from what we see produced by today’s stars. If light from quasars reveals those trace elements in an ancient cloud of gas, it’s a clue that we’re reaching an ancient population — perhaps the first stars.

“It will mean we have finally gotten there,” Simcoe says. “And that’s really what the quest is: To find out, when did complexity emerge in the universe? When did the universe really start to look the way it does today?”

No one knows when we’ll know, but Simcoe thinks the present tools, or perhaps the next ones on deck, are capable: “We’re knocking at the door.”

Elizabeth Quill is a science writer and editor based near Washington, DC. She’s fascinated by how complexity — in our cosmos, societies and ourselves — emerges out of almost nothing.

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

May 5, 2026 (emergencemagazine.org)

Author and Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee cautions against stumbling into a future where artificial intelligence only further distances us from what we can feel with our senses and our soul.

Recently I was invited to be part of a gathering bringing together philosophers, ethicists, contemplative teachers, and Indigenous leaders with AI evaluation experts, to help steer AI models towards wisdom, compassion, and human flourishing. I was grateful for the invitation, although I kindly declined, as it made me consider whether artificial intelligence and spiritual life can really intersect, or if their primary orientations are too divergent.

Today a growing number of people are using AI for spiritual guidance, and there are even AI spiritual guru avatars, providing personalized on-demand meditations, counsel, and self-initiation or spiritual blessings. The question we need to ask is, do AI and spiritual growth really have common ground, or is this another illusion distracting us from inner life and real change?

AI works by learning patterns from vast amounts of data, largely sourced from the internet, to make predictions or generate content. It belongs to the mental/informational plane of consciousness and comes from an accumulation of past thoughts/ideas/images/patterns, to which it can give us access. It can organize these thoughts, rearrange them, and appear to give us insight, but it always comes from the past.

Spiritual life, however, is about going beyond the mind and its constant stream of thoughts, either into a state of pure awareness, the now, or into the divine love that can be experienced through the heart. It returns us from the ego’s illusory sense of a separate self to the unity of true nature. The spiritual path can even take us beyond, into the primal emptiness that underlies creation, the Absence experienced through an empty mind, or love’s infinite ocean in which our individual self and all thoughts dissolve.

Spiritual life offers us the direct experience of stillness, emptiness, love, rather than the constant chatter of the mind and its distractions. And through this inner experience we become open to change, real change that comes from within, from a higher dimension, rather than the accumulated information of the mind and the conditioned patterns of the ego. Real change only comes from within, and from a spiritual perspective this means from the Divine, the Self, soul, or atman—the eternal dimension of our being. Meditation, stilling the mind, watching the breath, or focus on the heart give us access to this inner dimension. In contrast, AI belongs to the past, to an accumulation of past thoughts, images, and ideas, and as such is a distraction from real change and the inner work required.

AI may be described as “faster than the human brain,” but this comes from a limited understanding of our human potential and our ability to access the higher mind. The higher mind is the consciousness of the Self, which functions on the plane of unity and is therefore much quicker than the rational mind, which functions on the plane of duality (the separation of subject and object). Referred to as bodhichitta, or “awakened mind” in Buddhism, the higher mind recognizes the inherent unity and interconnections in all things and is not limited by the constrictions of past and future. Essentially it functions outside of time.AI reflects a civilization that is increasingly disconnected from its inner life, without the roots that are needed to nourish or sustain us.

In Sufism this awakened mind is described as the consciousness of the heart, which is the locus of our divine nature. The heart both sees and knows the truth inherent in all things, the unity of being to which we belong, and the patterns of transformation which are part of our true nature. Through the consciousness of the heart we are able to access our divine Self, and live from this center of our being, guided from within.

The question then is, how much is AI a distraction in our world today? We live in a time of deep uncertainty, cultural and ecological crisis. What may be most needed is not more technology, but more love, care, and responsibility—for one another and for the Earth. These qualities are central to spiritual life, yet they sit uneasily alongside technologies that require vast amounts of energy and water and expanding data centers. And while the hype around AI says that it will bring transformational change, reshaping our world, it does not introduce a new quality of consciousness, which is what is vitally needed at this time. In this sense it is a distraction from the need for real change, the change that will help bring our civilization back into balance with the natural world that sustains us. It promises a technological future, while anyone who has seen through the cracks in our present civilization knows that technology cannot save us, but rather is at the root of much of the polycrisis that confronts us.

AI reflects a civilization that is increasingly disconnected from its inner life, without the roots that are needed to nourish or sustain us. There are few signs that AI is leading us back to what is simple, essential, and deeply human. To state it simply: AI has neither heart nor soul—qualities that belong to the essence of our human nature, and give true meaning and purpose to life.

For thousands of years we walked in two worlds: the outer physical world of the senses and the inner world, experienced in dreams and visions. In the land where I live, Coyote is the primary creator god for the Coast Miwok people, as well as a trickster god. O-let’-te, Coyote-man, formed the Earth and made people out of feathers or twigs. Seen and unseen were woven together in such stories and myths, with symbols and sacred images forming a bridge between the two, linking the soul and the senses. Through these symbols the numinous inner world flowed into the outer, giving daily life a depth of meaning as we lived as part of the great tapestry of the sacred. And then centuries ago in the West we began the story of separation, until science convinced us that only the physical, tangible world was real, and the inner worlds faded from our collective consciousness. Without our noticing, the outer world became more and more barren, without sacred meaning. It lost its numinosity, and instead became a resource to be exploited, a commodity to sustain our civilization.

Is this how we are to stumble into the future? First, we lost connection to the soul and world soul, the anima mundi, the spiritual intelligence within nature. And now our screens seem more important than our senses, information encoded in ones and zeros rather than through touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell. As a result, for example, many relationships have lost the primary quality of touch and have instead become distorted by the algorithms of social media, creating an imitation of intimacy that results in alienation rather than the simple human bonding we need, the lived companionship that really nourishes us.

Yet we appear so entranced by this technology, addicted to its constant stream of images and endless information, that we do not seem to care what is happening, what world we are creating. Is this the “brave new world” that we want to leave to our children and grandchildren? Is its environment of growing distortion and deceit really our collective destiny?

There is another story waiting to be born, one that comes from the depths of the soul and the world soul, that speaks of oneness and an interconnectedness that belongs to the natural world, rather than computers. This is a story that is part of our DNA, the unity of being to which we all belong. A story in the way trees speak to each other through fungal networks, how birds migrate along ancient patterns. It is visible in a murmuration of starlings, the spiral of a sunflower and a galaxy. It is present in the music of creation if we are able to be silent and listen. But it needs our attention if we are to hear this story and weave it back into our human experience, to recognize the real nature of the ground under our feet.

We need to return our awareness to the living Earth, what I have called “a deep ecology of consciousness,” so that we can create a sustainable future seven generations or more. AI by its very nature can only recreate past patterns and thus encourages us to overidentify with a way of thinking that has become globally self-destructive. AI may enable us to gather information, but it cannot help us to make the changes that are so desperately needed. In fact, it may seduce us into avoiding looking deeper, while the vast sums of money and attention being poured into its development could be much better spent on the social and environmental polycrisis that confronts us. If we can stop distancing ourselves from what we can see and touch, feel with our senses and soul, we may recognize the living oneness which is our heritage, and help birth its story back into our everyday life.

Rather than focusing on our screens there is a vital need to turn from the mind to the heart, from the ego to the soul or Self. And through this inner change we can learn to be of service in the outer world. This is a real quality of our divine nature, the compassion and selfless service of bodhichitta, also known as the servanthood of the Sufi; and a contribution we each can make if we take the radical step back to what is natural and true, to what resonates with our senses and our soul. As Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully said, “Real change will only happen when we fall in love with the planet.” No machine can do that for us. That work remains deeply, quietly human.

 May 4, 2026

By  Jed Diamond (menalive.com)

                Margaret J. Wheatley is one of my heroes. She began caring about the world’s peoples in 1966 as a Peace Corps volunteer in postwar Korea. Since then, as a consultant, senior-level advisor, teacher, and healer, she has helped millions to better understand ourselves and our world. In her book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, she says,

                “My aspiration is for you to see clearly so that you may act wisely. If we don’t know where we are, if we don’t know what to prepare for, then any path we choose will keep us wandering in the wilderness, increasingly desperate, increasingly lost.”

                I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Wheatley and wrote an article, “Warrior’s of the Human Spirit: Finding Your Path of Contribution in a World Out of Balance.” I said in the article:

                “At a time when many people are afraid of the truth, she tells it like it is. At a time when many people want to run away and hide, she invites us to step into our true warrior spirit in the tradition of Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa.”

                In my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, I quoted Trungpa:

            “Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Here the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the Tibetan pawo which literally means ‘one who is brave.’ Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness. Warriorship is not being afraid of who you are.”

                I received my own awakening to the warrior spirit in 1993 at a Men’s Leaders’ Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, sponsored by Wingspan Magazine. As part of the conference offerings, we were invited to participate in a traditional Native American sweat lodge ceremony. In the 4^th round when things got so hot in the lodge that many people had to get out, I was transported into a vision where I saw the sinking of the Ship of Civilization and the launching of Lifeboats For Humanity.  

            Most of those on the Ship of Civilization wouldn’t believe the ship could sink, denied the truth, and went under. A few people, who believed the truth of their senses rather than the propaganda of the ship captain, escaped in lifeboats, banded together, and created a new, more sustainable, world.

            Over the last thirty years this vision has guided my life. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

• “Civilization” is a misnomer. Its proper name is the “Dominator culture.”

            As long as we believe the myth that “civilization” is the best humans can aspire to achieve, we are doomed to go down with the ship. In The Chalice & the Blade: Our History Our Future first published in 1987, internationally acclaimed scholar and futurist, Riane Eisler first introduced us to our long, ancient heritage as a Partnership Culture and our more recent Dominator Culture, which has come to be called “Civilization.” In her book, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, written with peace activist Douglas P. Fry, they offer real guidance for creating a world based on partnership.

• There is a better world, beyond civilization.

            When I was given the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, I got a clear sense of the two worlds that are competing for our attention: A world where hierarchy and dominance rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Takers) and a world where equality and connection rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Leavers). In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, Quinn asks,

                “What does saving the world mean? Saving the world can only mean one thing: saving the world as a human habitat. Accomplishing this will mean (must mean) saving the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible. We can only save the world as a human habitat if we stop our catastrophic onslaught on the community of life, for we depend on that community for our very lives.”

The Pattern of Collapse of Complex Civilizations

                In her book, Who Do We Choose to Be?, Margaret Wheatley says,

                “The only thing evident from the study of history is that we humans fail to learn from history. Yet those who do study the history of civilizations have illuminated the pattern of the rise and fall of complex human societies. The pattern of collapse is remarkably consistent.”

                In her book, The Watchman’s Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, world-renowned futurist Rebecca D. Costa shares what scholars have learned over the years about the signs of impending collapse:

                “The first sign is gridlock,” says Costa. “Gridlock occurs when civilizations become unable to comprehend or resolve large, complex problems, despite acknowledging beforehand that these issues may lead to their demise.”

                She goes on to say,

                “Then, as conditions grow more desperate, the second sign is the substitution of beliefs for knowledge.”

                Costa says these conditions are present in all complex societies that expand to the level we call empires. Drawing on the work of historians such as Dr. Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, she says,

                “Tainter believes that war, crop failures, disease, and political unrest appear to have caused the fall of the Roman Empire, but in truth ‘diminishing returns on investments in social complexity’ was the root cause. As systems for commerce, governance, and defense grew more complex, the ‘energy’ needed to manage them simply exceeded the capabilities of the Roman people.”

                Margaret Wheatley draws on the work of Joseph Tainter, Sir John Glubb, and others who have studies the collapse of empires and notes that whether it is the Roman, Arab, Ottoman, Spanish, or British Empires, they all fall after approximately ten generations or 250 years. It is clear to many that as we celebrate the 250 years from 1776 to 2026, the United States is no exception.

                Wheatley says,

                “This is the Age of Threat, when everything we encounter intensifies fear and anger. In survival mode, we flee from one another, abandon values that held us together, withdraw from ideas and practices that encouraged inclusion and created trust in leaders. And most harmfully, we stop believing in one another.”

                It is time we stopped blaming ourselves and others for our predicament. No political party or administration can save us and none is ultimately to blame.

                “We are walking the well-trodden path of collapse documented in the history of all complex civilizations,” says Wheatley, “so we must find a new path of contribution.”

The Future of Our Country, the World, and Ourselves

                 Many of us who have been working to make the world a better place have broken our minds, hearts, and souls trying to fix what is unfixable. With wisdom (and age — I turned eighty-two this year) some of us have concluded that there are some things that humans have done in our woundedness and ignorance that cannot be fixed.  

                Many of the changes that we have brought about, including the destabilization of the climate, are not reversible. We will have to live with the consequences. But that does not mean there is nothing we can do. Here’s what Meg Wheatley says to those who are ready to hear the truth and feel called to do something constructive:

                “The perfect storm is here, created by the coalescence of climate and human-created catastrophes, insatiable greed, fear-based self-protection, escalating aggression and conflict, indifference for the well-being of others, and continuing uncertainty. As leaders dedicated to serving the causes and people we treasure, confronted by this unrelenting tsunami, what are we to do? My answer to this is also stated with full confidence: We need to restore sanity by awakening the human spirit. We can onlyachieve this if we undertake the most challenging and meaningful work of our leader lives: creating Islands of Sanity.”

                This is what I’ve been doing since 1993 when I had the experience in the sweat lodge where was given both the vision of collapse as well as the potential future of the “life-boats for humanity.” One of my other heroes is a woman named Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She wrote the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves. She also offered this heart-felt call to action:

                “Mis estimados queridos, My Esteemed Ones: Do not lose heart. It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

               “You are right in your assessments. The luster and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking.

               “Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is – we were made for these times…”

                Margaret Wheatley says that,

                “An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people’s commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires sane leaders with unshakable faith in people’s innate generosity, creativity, and kindness.”

                In June I will be sharing some new opportunities for our MenAlive community. I wrote about them in a recent article, “Becoming Rebels in Our Own Time.” I hope you will join us. Come visit me at MenAlive and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. 

Best Wishes,

Jed Diamond

Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive

By Trent Ralston

Published: May 5, 2026 (TheOnion.com)

I used to struggle with my finances. Every month I’d stress out about how I was going to make rent, pay the bills, and still have something to set aside for my future. I must have read every article and watched every webinar looking for advice on how to get ahead, but the most important thing I learned didn’t come from any expert. It was a lesson I had to teach myself—that the key to financial success lies in taking advantage of others. 

 Trust me, screwing people over is the best thing that ever happened to my bank account.

Many of us fall into the habit of treating those around us—friends, family, coworkers—with respect. Unfortunately, this all-too-common practice can be devastating to our financial wellness. The good news is that our prospects improve dramatically as soon as we learn to see other people as nothing but tools for our personal gain. It really is that simple. In my case, the moment I started following a basic plan of always manipulating everyone around me, I was on the road to prosperity.

Everyone knows it’s important to establish trust in a business relationship. What fewer people recognize is that you need to abuse the hell out of that trust. I used to own a pizzeria with a friend of mine, and when we were starting out, money was tight. I almost certainly would have given up if I hadn’t discovered two quick and easy ways to boost my income: I withheld wages from my employees by not paying their overtime, and I skimmed cash off the top anytime my co-owner wasn’t around. I did this for a couple years, and by the time anyone caught on, I had already diversified into exploiting other people I knew.

That’s all it takes to achieve economic well-being: It’s not about sticking to a household budget or paying down credit card debt. It’s about fucking people over, again and again.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of ways to do this. Did you know you can borrow money from somebody and just never pay it back? The benefits of this approach are seemingly endless. Back when I was married, I used to take out loans from my father-in-law all the time, and I never dreamed of repaying him. I mean, what was he going to do about it? Sue his own daughter’s family? After a while he started asking to see receipts to prove I was spending the money on his grandchildren, like I’d promised, but by then I’d already enriched myself to the tune of $15,000. It’s all about taking opportunities where you find them.

That’s not to say it’s always easy. I don’t come from a privileged family where there are rich, elderly relatives suffering from dementia and just begging for someone to forge their power of attorney and siphon off their life savings. But I have been able to maintain a decent lifestyle through modest, reliable strategies like refusing to pay child support. That’s an extra $450 in my pocket each month, which isn’t too bad. Sure, I can no longer enter the state of Ohio, where there’s an outstanding warrant for my arrest, but who cares? I wouldn’t want to go there anyway. That’s where my ex-wife lives.

I know some of you out there are thinking this all sounds too good to be true. You ask: How can this be? How can taking advantage of everyone you meet possibly be the secret to long-term financial security? I’ll answer your question with a question: How the fuck do you think billionaires do it? 

Alex O’Connor Jul 21, 2024 Within Reason Podcast EpisodesGet all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC – subscribe for 40% off unlimited access. For early, ad-free access to videos, support the channel at https://www.alexoconnor.com To donate to my PayPal (thank you): http://www.paypal.me/cosmicskeptic

• VIDEO NOTES

Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. His courses are available for study here: https://www.bartehrman.com/alex

• TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Substack 0:07 Who Was Judas Iscariot? 04:32 Why Did Judas Betray Jesus? 12:01 Is Judas in Hell? 19:05 The Historical Judas 21:28 What is the Gospel of Judas? 23:09 Explaining Gnosticism 29:38 How Gnosticism Describes the Material Realm 37:05 The Gnostic Role of Jesus 42:32 The Beginning of Judas’s Gospel 48:38 Jesus’s Teachings to Judas 54:16 Why This Gospel is So Confusing 59:15 Judas Being Called the 13th Spirit 1:02:45 Jesus Appearing as a Child 1:04:50 The Person Who Carries Jesus Around 1:06:57 How This Gospel Explains Adam & Eve 1:11:24 Destiny of the Cosmos 1:14:33 Evidence That Judas Was Saved 1:18:42 Judas’s Motivation to Betray Jesus 1:21:34 How Ancient is This Text? 1:24:10 Where Was it First Rediscovered? 1:33:50 How Old is the Coptic Version? 1:38:33 Bart’s Reaction to the Gospel of Judas 1:48:26 Publishing the Gospel of Judas

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My Website: https://www.alexoconnor.com

CircleofAtonement Nov 24, 2023 *To learn more about A Course in Miracles, please visit circleofa.org/start.* Have you ever wanted a quick but comprehensive overview of the teachings of A Course in Miracles? Have you wanted someone to just sit down and tell you what this path is all about? In this video, Course teachers Robert and Emily Perry do just that. With over sixty years of Course study between them, Robert and Emily will take you through the whole sweep of the Course’s thought system. In less than one hour, you’ll learn what the Course says through 15 of its essential teachings, from our pristine beginning in God to our eventual return: Introduction: (0:00) God: (2:05) Creation: (5:50) The Son of God: (9:27) The separation: (13:17) The world: (16:55) The Holy Spirit: (20:13) Jesus: (22:52) The ego: (26:18) Sin, guilt, fear: (29:26) Perception: (32:57) Forgiveness: (36:15) Relationships: (40:14) Your function as a miracle worker: (43:32) Vision: (47:05) The final step: (50:09) Conclusion: (53:51) We all search for answers to life’s biggest questions, and finding these answers can unlock our lives like nothing else can. A Course in Miracles offers new answers to the biggest questions of our existence, ones you will not hear in church, in school, or in spirituality. It has new and brilliant perspectives on each of the items listed above, which can give you a new lens through which to look at yourself and your world. This video is meant to be used for anyone who want to learn more about A Course in Miracles, for those who want to share the Course with others, also for study group leaders who want to help members understand the Course’s big picture. For more, please visit circleofa.org/start. We are here to help you with both the theory and application of what A Course In Miracles (ACIM) offers. Since 1993, the Circle’s purpose has been to bring to students and the world the profound and unparalleled wisdom of A Course in Miracles. We are the publisher of the Complete and Annotated Edition of the Course (what we call the “CE”). Our work grows out of our commitment to be as faithful as possible to what A Course in Miracles says, our years of dedication to walking this path ourselves, and our desire to see the Course’s purpose realized in the lives of students and in the world.

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https://acimce.app/ -Whether you are new to ACIM or you’ve been a student for many years, our online community offers a rich collection of resources and loving friends to support you on your journey. All are welcome to connect with like-minded companions dedicated to understanding and applying Course teachings in daily life. Choose the membership level that meets your needs and deepen your practice with exclusive content and guided support: https://community.circleofa.org/

The Thorne Universe May 8, 2026 https://go.hotmart.com/M105247953K A fascinating introduction to the hidden mysteries of the universe—perfect for curious minds ready to explore space. ???? https://go.hotmart.com/Q105507386H Dive deeper into the most mind-blowing discoveries of the cosmos—this is where the real secrets begin. What if reality is not physical at all… but deeply connected in ways the human mind was never meant to understand? Quantum entanglement is one of the most terrifying and mysterious discoveries in modern physics. Two particles separated by billions of kilometers can instantly affect each other with no visible connection, no signal, and no known mechanism. According to everything we thought we knew about space, time, and causality… this should be impossible. Even Albert Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” But what if Einstein was wrong? In this video, we dive deep into the frightening theory of quantum entanglement and why many physicists now believe the universe may not be locally real. We’ll explore the shocking experiments that proved entanglement is real, the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries that changed physics forever, and the terrifying possibility that space itself may be an illusion. How can particles communicate instantly faster than light? Does observation actually create reality? Are we living inside a hidden quantum network beyond human perception? And what happens if consciousness itself is connected to entanglement? Scientists have spent decades trying to explain this phenomenon, yet every new experiment seems to make reality even stranger. Quantum mechanics predicts behaviors so bizarre that even the founders of modern physics struggled to accept them. From Bell’s Theorem to the collapse of the wave function, the deeper we investigate, the more unstable our understanding of existence becomes. Some physicists now suggest that information, not matter, could be the true foundation of the universe. Others believe entanglement may connect every particle that has ever interacted since the beginning of time. If true, then separation may be nothing more than an illusion created by our brains. This isn’t science fiction. These are real experiments performed in laboratories around the world. In this documentary-style exploration, we uncover: • The terrifying truth behind quantum entanglement • Why Einstein hated the idea • The experiments that broke classical physics • Bell’s Inequality and non-local reality • How particles stay connected across impossible distances • Whether faster-than-light communication is possible • The connection between consciousness and quantum theory • Why some scientists think reality is fundamentally holographic • The frightening implications for free will, time, and existence itself The universe may be far stranger than we ever imagined… and quantum entanglement could be the clue that unravels everything we believe is real. Watch until the end, because the final theory changes the meaning of reality forever. If you enjoy videos about quantum physics, black holes, cosmology, space mysteries, consciousness, simulation theory, and the terrifying side of science, subscribe and turn on notifications for more deep-space documentaries and mind-bending scientific discoveries.

• Google AI Overview

Bell’s theorem proves that the universe is not “local” (i.e., quantum particles can influence each other instantaneously across distance). It rules out “local hidden variables”—meaning entangled particles do not carry secret instructions about their measurement outcomes, contradicting Einstein’s view. Experiments consistently show that quantum mechanics predicts, and experiments confirm, stronger correlations than possible in a local, realistic world. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Core Concepts:

• Entanglement: Two particles are linked; measuring one instantly tells you the state of the other, regardless of distance.
• Local Hidden Variable Theory (Einstein’s view): The belief that particles are like two separated gloves where you know the left (or right) immediately because they were pre-determined, not because they communicate.
• Bell’s Inequality: A mathematical formula devised by John Bell to test these theories. If “local realism” is true, results must fall below a certain number.
• Violation of Inequality: Quantum experiments produce higher numbers than the inequality allows, proving the local theory is wrong. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Simplified Analogy:
Imagine two people in different cities, Alice and Bob, each holding one particle of an entangled pair. They measure them in different ways (say, 0° or 45° angle). [1, 2, 3]

• If particles have “hidden variables,” they act like pre-set machines.
• Bell showed that if you run many trials with different angles, there is a maximum correlation they can share.
• Experiments show that particles act more synchronized than this, as if they “know”

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 10, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing Adrian Woolfson is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Genyro, a synthetic genome design and construction company based in San Diego, CA. He is the author of Life Without Genes, and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics. Additionally, he has authored over 160 scientific papers, book chapters, reviews, and patents. His newest book is On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Intelligence. Adrian explores the emerging field of synthetic biology, including the design and creation of entirely new life forms using artificial intelligence. He explains how genomes function as both instruction manuals and component libraries, and how decoding their “grammar” could allow humanity to engineer organisms for medicine, sustainability, and beyond. Woolfson also addresses profound ethical questions, ecological risks, and the long-term future of life as a programmable medium. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:20 Synthetic life creation 00:12:40 Genome grammar regulation 00:19:00 AI timelines ethics 00:25:20 Ecology risks firewalls 00:31:40 Governance human editing 00:38:00 Philosophy human nature 00:44:20 Biological possibility mapping 00:50:40 Genome building technology 00:54:50 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 Thursday, April 23, 2026)

Community Update May 2026   Assembly 2026 is coming…plus…  ** Classes, Meetings, & Activities – save the dates! ** (see below feature article)  – Tulsa Hosts RHS Class – – Based on a report by Calvin Harris, H.W.,M. – Last month Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of a live, in-person class in Releasing The Hidden SplendourTM, one of The Prosperos Foundation classes. The weekend’s activities began Friday afternoon when Pam Rodolph H.W.,M., met instructor Calvin Harris, H.W.,M. at the airport and took him to his hotel. The Tulsa Hyatt Downtown is lovely and comfortable, and only five minutes from the Oklahoma State University campus, where the class was to be held.      That evening Calvin and Pam met for dinner with Sandy Parks and Sandy’s grandson Ethan. Over dinner they confirmed that all preparations for the Class were in place. Much credit goes to Mara Pennell, H.W.,m., who — aided by Pam and Sandy – had done the lion’s share of work in getting class location and material pulled together. (Unfortunately, a medical emergency prevented Mara from attending, but she was certainly there in spirit.)     On Saturday morning, Calvin headed early for the class venue, through rain that, fortunately, cleared by afternoon. The OSU campus featured beautiful landscaping, and the classroom had lots of windows for pleasant natural light. The hotel’s IT tech quickly had the class audio/visual materials up and running on the School’s network, all controlled by a flip of a switch. This allowed a seamless transition from music, to lecture, to overhead projection of the T-Field and The Three levels of Mind, back to lecture, then to C.G. Jung’s “6,000 Dreams”; these smooth segues provided one ingredient in the success of the class. Although no recording device was provided by OSU, the registrar was able to record the lessons on her phone and relay them to be saved in School files. (Thank you, modern technology!) Calvin Harris, H.W.,M. explains the T-field.       Nine students participated in this class, including four students who were new to The Prosperos, and one who was new to RHS. Calvin reported that it was the first time he had taught such prepared students, so very eager to “unlearn.” Because of their recent life experiences, these students were truly ready to hear this instruction, and some had waited more than a year to attend a live class. They were attentive to the material and took copious notes.       From conversations over dinner on Saturday evening, it was clear that the new students were gaining a greater understanding of their identity as Consciousness; thus, in feeling that they understood their situations better, they would be able to attempt using the technique to align and empower their authentic selves. Veteran students noted that they were getting a greater respect for RHS, and that in coming to grips with the situations they faced, they would practice the technique on a more regular basis. The RHS class in Tulsa, left to right:  Ethan Burningham, Webb City, MO; Clint Lambert, Tulsa, OK; Lana Cay Pennell, Independence, MO; Instructor Calvin Harris,Cathedral City, CA; Karen E. Hall, Independence, MO; Emily Gilbert, Joplin, MO; Shelly Gilbert, Joplin, MO;  Sandra Park, Carthage, MO; Patricia Lambert, Tulsa, OK.      Instructor Harris reported that this class had two goals – to invest in the continuation of The Prosperos School by attracting new students; and to discover what teaching Mentors would need in order to provide classes for attracting these new students. He stated that he was grateful for his Group Dynamics Team — Mara Pennell, H.W.,M., Pam Rodolph H.W.,M., and Sandy Parks — for their willingness to take on the legwork and provide a support system to bring this class into being. Their trust in the “process” of plan, execute, review, adjust, move forward, and repeat, had allowed the team to undergo daunting challenges that were met head-on, and he thanked them from the bottom of his heart. He added that, at the end of the day, he could look back and think, “We gave it absolutely everything we had.” He stressed that the team’s conscious focus and energy for the School’s future, and for children yet unborn, was unwavering. Calvin Harris, H.W.,M., is President of the Mentors Association and a member of the Board of Trustees. Student News… April was Poetry Month in Colorado, and longtime student Sue Beck, H.W.,M. heard there was a poetry contest through a local radio station. She entered a bunch of her favorite poems, and she was notified that ten of her Haiku were chosen to be broadcast on the radio. Sue will be going in to the station to do a taped reading of her haiku. These recorded poems will then be used to fill little slots of time, and to promote “community voices.”  Sue reports that one of the poets whose work was chosen was just eight years old, so the competition was fun. She says, “This is definitely a first, to be read on the radio. I will be sending the ten chosen Haiku to the Vesper Flights, so anyone interested can see what kind of poems were chosen.” Congratulations, Sue! To read Sue’s poems and other writings by Prosperos students, visit the Vesper Flights blog on our website:  https://www.theprosperos.org/vespers. Assembly 2026Sat./Sun., September 12-13 Plan now to join us online, and experience a…**  More information coming soon — check our website!  ** https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/assembly-2025-s6wll Everyday Learning In our everyday experiences we have the greatest opportunity to study metaphysics. Undoubtedly the school of everyday habits presents to us the greatest teacher. Through successfully meeting circumstances, we gain strength and understanding. The vital essence of Truth is, of course, contained in the testing. Where does man have a greater opportunity to test Truth than in the daily routine?                                                                                 – Thane of Hawai’i Coming Events **  Sunday Meetings  **   –  “How to Use a Problem as a Doorway”  – with Heather Williams, H.W.,M. Sunday, May 17, 2026  –  11:00 AM PT We all have problems! The question is, how do we deal with them? You can learn to use a problem as a doorway, and to open the door to FOR-GIVE — to GIVE UP believing in a problem, FOR the opportunity and ability to awaken to theTruth that is our Higher Self. More information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/things-or-love-77l23-mc358-k3gb7   –  “Determined Assumption”  – with Thane of Hawaii Sunday, May 31, 2026  –  11:00 AM PT This third and final lesson in Thane’s “Greater Freedom” series explores the ways in which our unrecognized determinations can subvert the joy and satisfaction of our heart’s desire. More information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/thane-the-law-of-the-vacuum-nwa3h-wbpk5   –  “What Does Technology Have to Do with Our Attention?”  – with Heather Williams, H.W.,M. Sunday, June 14, 2026  –  11:00 AM PT These days we seem to be overwhelmed by technology demanding our attention —  advertising, texts, emails, websites, social media and of course, Artificial Intelligence. Heather share three ways she has learned to take charge of her attention. More information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/things-or-love-77l23-mc358    –  “Freedom from What?”  – with Thane of Hawaii Sunday, July 5, 2026  –  11:00 AM PT From the Archive — Thane explores the philosophical / religious underpinnings of the American revolution and the founders, and identifies challenges he saw happening in 1981 — with insights that resonate in our own time. More information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/thane-the-law-of-the-vacuum-nwa3h-wbpk5  **  Classes  **   –  Releasing the Hidden SplendourTM– with Heather Williams, H.W.,M. Saturday/Sunday, June 20-21, 2026 One of The Prosperos Foundation Classes, “RHS” helps us to become aware of the voice of the ego-separate-self in us — AND — it helps us to become aware of the Essential, True Self in us that is behind the ego. More information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/rhs-202606-rhs –  Lucid Dreaming – with HughJohn Malanaphy, H.W.,M. Saturday, June 27, 2026 Release the power of your dreams! We’ll bring the conscious mind to be aware that we’re dreaming (while we’re in the subconscious mind), and amazing things can happen. More information: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/lucid-dreaming-202212-js2c8-n8hgc –  Translation®– with Pam Rodolph, H.W.,M.S Saturday/Sunday, July 18-19, 2026 Another of our Foundation Classes, Translation® provides a fundamental resource for getting beyond limitation, disorder, and confusion: Straight Thinking in the Abstract. Learn to see through what seems to be to recognize Truth, which is waiting for your discovery. –More information:– https://www.theprosperos.org/events **  Ongoing Events  ** –  DreamGroup– with HughJohn Malanaphy, H.W.,M. Thursday evenings — explore the conscious-unconscious connection  –  Open Discussion– with Clint Lambert Friday evenings — Straight Thinking conversation about current events and more  –  Translation® Saturday Meeting– with Mike Zonta, H.W.,M. Saturdays (for those who have taken Translation® class only) More information about these activities: https://www.theprosperos.org/events

**  How Can We Help You?  ** High Watch Translation® Service The High Watch Translation® Service is supported by our High Watch members. Requests and updates are sent out to experienced Translators as soon as they are received. All information relayed through this link or via our website is kept confidential, unless requested otherwise. You may add additional information, or inform us of any changes or requests for further Translation® in your situation, at any time through the link below. —Translation® is our form of prayer. It is used to get to the Truth of any situation or dilemma, and access the Unpredictable Good.  —Did you know that you can request Translation® from the High Watch Translation® Service for any situation going on in your life, or of which you are aware?             This is the primary purpose of the High Watch –-              To hold the High Watch for you and with you. For more about the HWTS: https://www.theprosperos.org/hwts FOR MORE INFORMATION…We invite you to visit our websites for information about the School, as well as for descriptions of our wide selection of printed, recorded, and online resources (many are free; others are available for purchase). General Information – For our calendar, class descriptions and blog, as well as other articles and information, please visit https://TheProsperos.org.  Audio Center – This site offers free podcasts, talks and lectures, plus a wealth of other recorded material for our students and friends. To see what’s available, please visit https://TheProsperos.com.

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