“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
~ Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer who is known for her confessional style of writing. Her work often explores themes of mental illness, female identity, and the struggles of women. Plath’s poems are known for their technical brilliance, fierce honesty, and striking imagery. Her most famous poems include “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”. (Wikipedia.org)
Back in my advertising days there was a campaign I got well and truly stuck on. I’d been at it the better part of a week, index cards spread across my desk, crumpled legal-pad pages on the floor, the deadline coming at me like weather. Nothing worked. The harder I pushed, the worse it got.
So one night I gave up, went home, slept, and somewhere around five the next morning I woke with the whole thing assembled in my head, clean and obvious, as though somebody had quietly solved it while I wasn’t looking.
I’d love to tell you I was brilliant. The truth is I just got out of the way. These days, a lot of my writing works out that way, too.
If you’ve ever done creative work of any kind, or really any kind of work at all, you know that feeling. The click. The penny dropping. The thing the Germans and the psychologists both call the “aha.” And until recently we didn’t have much idea what was actually happening in the brain at that moment.
Now we’re starting to.
Last year a team at Duke ran people through a clever little puzzle while watching their brains in a scanner. They used what are called Mooney images, those high-contrast black-and-white blotches that look like nothing at all until, suddenly, you see the hidden object, a face, a dog, a guitar, and then you can never un-see it. That instant of recognition is a tiny, pure aha.
And what the scientists found is that in that instant the brain literally reorganizes how it represents the image. The pattern of activity in the visual regions doesn’t just take in more of the same information; it rearranges into a whole new configuration. They call it representational change.
At that same moment, the hippocampus and the amygdala also light up, the brain’s memory and emotion centers, which is part of why a real insight feels so good and tends to stick. In fact, the solutions that arrived in a flash were remembered about twice as well as the ones people ground out step by step.
And here’s the part that’s really amazing: newer research has looked at how we have these aha moments while we’re following a story or making sense of unfolding events, and found that just before the insight lands, the brain reaches back and reinstates older memories, the patterns of earlier, causally related things we’d already taken in.
The insight isn’t new material flooding in from outside. It’s the mind suddenly connecting pieces it was already holding, reaching into its own past and rearranging what was there into a shape that finally makes sense.
The breakthrough you’re waiting for usually isn’t out there somewhere. It’s already inside your head, in pieces, waiting for you to stop griping long enough to let them rearrange.
Now, if you’ve spent any time around the world I came up in, this is going to sound familiar, because people have been pointing at this truth for the better part of a century, just without the scanners. I teach Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and one of its most powerful tools is something we call reframing.
You take an experience that’s locked into a single meaning, a failure, a rejection, a humiliation, and you deliberately visualize or use a story to put it inside a different frame, and the feeling attached to it shifts, sometimes in an instant.
For years the skeptics waved that off as a parlor trick. But look again at what the Duke team found: an insight is, at the level of neurons, a reframe. It’s the same information held in a new configuration.
Reframing works because it’s doing on purpose the very thing your brain does on its own in a flash of insight.
Go back further and you find the same intuition everywhere. Earl Nightingale built a whole career on a single sentence: “we become what we think about.” Claude Bristol wrote a little book in 1948 called The Magic of Believing, and Dale Carnegie was teaching ordinary people to change their lives by changing the frame around their worries long before that.
Some of that old positive-thinking literature curdled into magical nonsense, the notion that you can simply wish a parking space or a fortune into existence, and I’ve got no patience for that. But underneath the hype was a real observation that the science now confirms: the frame you hold something in determines what you’re able to see, and shifting that frame can genuinely rearrange your inner world.
Those guys had the truth. They just didn’t have the fMRI.
So what do we do with all this, practically? A few things, and not one of them costs a dime.
First, when you’re truly stuck, stop pushing. The aha tends to arrive after you step back, not during the white-knuckle grind, because the brain needs a little slack to do its rearranging. Sleep on it. Take a walk. Get in the shower. (There’s a reason for that cliché.)
Second, feed the machine. Insight reaches back into what you already know, so the wider and richer your store of raw material, the more pieces it has to connect. Read outside your lane. Stay curious about things that aren’t useful to you yet.
Third, when something knocks you flat, before you accept the first frame your mind hands you, try another one on. Ask what else this could mean. Ask what it might be here to teach you. You’re not lying to yourself when you do that. You’re doing deliberately what your brain was built to do anyway.
There’s something quietly hopeful in all of this, I think. We tend to assume our answers have to come from somewhere else, an expert, a guru, a better set of circumstances down the road.
But the science keeps pointing back inward. You’re already carrying around almost everything you need. The work isn’t acquiring more of it. It’s getting quiet enough, and brave enough about your frames, to let what’s already in there fall into place.
“Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.”
~ Rumi
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, commonly known as Rumi, was a Sufi mystic, poet, and founder of the Islamic brotherhood known as the Mevlevi Order. His family hailed from Balkh. Rumi is an influential figure in Sufism, and his thought and works loom large both in Persian literature and mystic poetry in general. Wikipedia
There is a cosmic web that invisibly links us to our fellow practitioners. We perceive it only when awake and remain ignorant of it whilst asleep. Their presence is not incidental to ours; our efforts — or lack of efforts — mutually reinforce each other….
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Vincenzo recently asked me how to help grow the Italian community. Although this type of question has come up throughout all communities from the beginning of this school, for whatever reason, it struck me differently this time.
There is a cosmic web that invisibly links us to our fellow practitioners. We perceive it only when awake and remain ignorant of it whilst asleep. Their presence is not incidental to ours; our efforts — or lack of efforts — mutually reinforce each other. Although it works mysteriously, it is also quite grounded: if I witness someone else making extra effort, or sacrificing something I know to be dear to them, those efforts put more pressure on me to work seriously. And on the other hand, if I witness someone making excuses and giving justifications, I am tempted to do the same.
Ouspensky described this web in the following way: “A man can rise to the next step of the staircase only by putting another man in his place… this is a general principle… Putting people in one’s place is school-work, that is, the joint efforts of all the people belonging to the school. All school-work is organized with this purpose in view… to put new people in the place occupied by the people who are there at present and in this way to help them rise to other steps.”
In a comment during our Enneagram and Three Poisons sessions, Eva spoke of experiencing a special state in which “there was no sense of ‘I’ to judge things as good or bad…” It is exactly this illusory sense of ‘I’ that values one’s own development so much more than the development of others. Imagine not having a particular interest in ‘my own development’ over the development of anyone else; of being as interested in the progress of others as in one’s own.
Certainly, such selflessness is the best foundation for external consideration, and the more we are able to experience it, the more our communities will grow — both through our being more helpful to others, and through the thick cosmic web we form.
ABOUT THE SCHOOL Our projects are undertaken with the understanding that a school must give back. It must harness the talent and resources of its members to form an expression that can outlast them.Learn more about the School of the Old New Method
WATCH AN INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOP Learn more about the Old New Method – Watch recordings of our online gatherings that introduce the knowledge and practical methods we use.Available through purchase. View Workshops ABOUT THE FOUNDER I had no structural foundation at my disposal, no institution, no location, no following—only the conviction that these truths were pertinent to contemporary seekers… Drawing inspiration from the agricultural metaphor embedded in ancient wisdom, I arranged the central concepts into twelve monthly labors, creating a yearly cycle of symbolic cultivation tasks… Soon, a hundred people committed to practicing this cyclical teaching on a regular basis. This was the beginning of my school.” Read the full autobiographical note by Asaf Braverman ABOUT THE TEACHING Nature develops us only up to a certain point and then leaves us unfinished, just as it creates wheat but not bread, milk but not butter, grapes but not wine…Learn more about our teaching
Ralston College Jul 21, 2026 The Ralston College Podcast Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation. In this opening lecture from Ralston College’s symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, Dr Iain McGilchrist traces a line of questions concerning the nature of intelligence, embodiment, wisdom, and the soul in an age increasingly defined by mechanistic thinking and the rise of large language models. Drawing on neuroscience, literature, theology, music, and myth, he explores what it means to understand beyond the constraints of reductionist accounts that view the human being as a computational information processor. In this wide-ranging and dynamic talk, he invites us to consider, as deeply as we can, the essence of our humanity. Recorded at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, this event brought together leading thinkers including Jonathan Pageau and Stephen Wolfram for a day-long engagement with some of the most pressing questions facing technological advancement, the meaning crisis, and ultimately, civilization itself. At 23:34, listen to this music, which was appreciated during the live event by Dr McGilchrist: • J.S. Bach: Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Chris… If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops Isaiah Berlin Plato David Bohm Ludwig Wittgenstein Gabriel Marcel Homer William Shakespeare: Othello William Ernest Henley: Invictus Nelson Mandela William Wordsworth: Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey Thomas Tallis Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Tomás Luis de Victoria William Byrd Emil Cioran Johann Sebastian Bach Eugene Gendlin George Gaylord Simpson Galileo Galilei Peter Medawar Niels Bohr Joseph Pieper V. S. Ramachandran D. H. Lawrence Laozi: Tao Te Ching George Steiner Martin Heidegger Hannah Arendt John Milton: Paradise Lost Saint Paul: Epistle to the Ephesians Onondaga Nation Yuval Noah Harari Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning – Chapters — 00:00 – Introduction 08:56 – Lecture Begins: What is AI? 13:10 – Propositional Knowledge vs Experiential Knowledge 16:16 – Body vs Soul 19:44 – The Soul 28:07 – The Limitations of Scientific Cognition 32:38 – Wisdom 35:12 – Non-Doing and Surrender 45:00 – Lucifer and 49:49 – Transhumanism 53:23 – Closing Remarks
Me: What did David Bohm say about the the endarkenment?
Google AI Overview
In his 1980 lecture and writings on “Knowledge as Endarkenment,” the physicist and philosopher David Bohm argued that accumulated human knowledge is frequently an active form of “misenarking” or self-deception. Instead of bringing clarity, our rigid collective thoughts and memory-driven assumptions lock us into cycles of fragmentation, conflict, and psychological blindness. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The Core Idea of Endarkenment
Active Misinformation: Bohm proposed that our pool of collective knowledge is thoroughly infected with unexamined assumptions, biases, and a false sense of separation between the observer and the observed. [1, 2]
The Trap of the Ego: When people make mistakes driven by these fractured frameworks, they do not question the underlying thought process; instead, they blame others or double down on the error, which compounds human suffering. [, 2]
Accumulated Memory vs. Living Insight: Real understanding requires breaking free from habitual mental patterns. True perception cannot happen when the mind merely reacts mechanically from dead memory and old information. [1]
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 24, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing 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 1988. It will remain public for only one week. Martin Rossman, MD, is founder and director of the Center for Collaborative Medicine in Mill Valley, California. He is Clinical Associate at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco and a scientific advisor to the Institute for the Advancement of Health in New York City. He is the author of Healing Yourself. Dr. Rossman emphasizes the importance of the patient taking an active role in the healing process, rather than being passive recipient of scientific medicine. He demonstrates how you can use mental imagery to relax your body and guides you in a meditation to contact your own “inner advisor.” Jeffrey was a subject in this demonstration and had a remarkable, life-changing experience.
Free Spiritual Growth Events – Online Jul 9, 2026 Watch the official trailer for ILLUSION, the groundbreaking new documentary from filmmaker Melissa Tittl. Reserve your free access to watch the full film: ???? https://spiritualgrowthevents.com/ill… ILLUSION explores one of humanity’s oldest questions: What is reality? Bringing together leading scientists, astrophysicists, physicians, consciousness researchers, philosophers, and ancient wisdom experts, the film examines how perception, belief, sacred geometry, frequency, neuroscience, and consciousness may shape the world we experience. Rather than offering a single conclusion, ILLUSION invites you to explore multiple perspectives on the architecture of reality—and perhaps reconsider what you thought you knew. Featuring: • Gregg Braden • Professor Avi Loeb • Dr. Stuart Hameroff • Matias De Stefano • Dr. Sue Morter • Jean-Pierre Luminet • Jason Padgett • Maria Wheatley • Veda Austin • Christopher French, PhD • and many more. Directed by Melissa Tittl, creator of acclaimed films exploring consciousness, ancient civilizations, and human potential. Watch the full documentary free during the online viewing event. Register here: ???? https://spiritualgrowthevents.com/ill… Topics explored: Consciousness • Perception • Reality • Sacred Geometry • Ancient Civilizations • Frequency • Cymatics • Neuroscience • Philosophy • Quantum Physics • Human Potential • Ancient Wisdom • Documentary • Science
Google AI Overview
Illusion (2026) is a 122-minute documentary directed and written by Melissa Tittl, produced by Hathor Studios. It explores consciousness, frequency, sacred geometry, and ancient wisdom through interviews with researchers and pioneers like Veda Austin and Gregg Braden. Reviewers and participants call it a thought-provoking, visually expansive look at reality. Instagram·Gregg Braden +6
Core Themes & Content
Consciousness and Reality: Questions fixed perceptions of the physical world by blending modern science with esoteric ideas. Instagram·gregg.braden +1
Sacred Geometry and Sound: Explores physical patterns in nature, such as hexagonal water structures and the correlation between sound frequencies and ancient architecture.
Open Inquiry: Rather than enforcing a specific viewpoint, the film invites viewers to reexamine assumptions handed down by mainstream paradigms. Instagram·gregg.braden +1
Reception and Access
Audience Response: Early viewer feedback and reviews from figures like investigator Tyler Engle praise the project as impressive and mind-bending.
Viewing Options: The documentary premiered digitally, with limited free global streaming windows offered directly via Hathor Studios alongside tiered digital ownership options. Newswire.com +1
Review:“Melissa Tittl’s ILLUSION doesn’t just question reality. It re-enchants it, offering a luminous, rigorously poetic invitation to recognize that the cosmos, consciousness, and sacred geometry are not separate mysteries but one resonant, living language. Watching it feels less like viewing a film and more like remembering a truth you always knew.”- OMTimes Magazine
Review:“I didn’t expect the movie to be that awesome. It was so well put, and the story made so much sense. What I really take from that is how, from so many different perspectives, everything matches with the same story, which is how consciousness is actually a song. It’s music.”- Matias De Stefano
Review:“I think it’s an important film because it is opening the door to a very deep question regarding us, our relationship to the world around us. Perhaps most importantly, our relationship to the world within us, to ourselves.”- Gregg Braden
Review:“So much better than I expected, honestly, in the best possible way. I did not know anything about this. I knew my part in it, but after watching the movie, I’m just blown away by how much was able to be connected in one film. I was talking to the production team and everything, and they said they had like 10 hours of footage, and making that compressed into two hours and flow like that was really incredible. I do this for a living, and that was honestly really impressive.”- Tyler Engle
Review:“I absolutely loved the film. For me, a couple of things that really stuck out was it put language to things that I have always felt and a lot of the things that the mystics, the sages, ancient ones talk about. I really appreciated some of the science and how it went so much deeper into things.”- Carissa Johnsen
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 19, 2026 Edi Bilimoria, DPhil, FIMechE, CEng, is a Consultant Engineer and has been Project Manager and Head of Design for major projects such as the Channel Tunnel. He is a Trustee of the Scientific and Medical Network, Adviser to the Galileo Commission of the Network, a Trustee and a Council Member of the Francis Bacon Society, and was the Education Manager for the Theosophical Society in Australia. He is author of Mirages in Western Science Resolved by Occult Science, The Snake and the Rope: Problems in Western Science Resolved by Occult Science, his four volume work, Unfolding Consciousness: Exploring the Living Universe and Intelligent Powers in Nature and Humans, and Consciousness Came First: Revealing Evidence for Universal Intelligence and Mind Beyond the Brain. His website is edibilimoria.com. Edi illuminates ancient wisdom and eternal truths from Theosophy suggesting that consciousness is foundational to matter and not separate from it and that even the smallest particle of matter has spirit. By reassessing historical ideologies that have led to detrimental societal effects, we can think with our heart and feel with the brain to value our mental and spiritual well-being over mere physical existence. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:32 Worldview of matter foundational to mind 00:07:44 Science raised to metaphysics 00:20:06 Creative and intuitive inspiration 00:39:00 Theosophy: wisdom as possessed by the gods 00:45:35 Uniting with our source 00:54:48 AI and consciousness 01:03:16 Self-awareness and reflection 01:09:21 Primacy of the heart and overuse of intellect 01:22:52 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. She offers intuitive coaching to help individuals access their inner guidance for clarity, healing, and meaningful decision-making. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on May 1, 2026)
“Perpetual inspiration is as necessary to the life of goodness, holiness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to animal life.”
–William Law
(Image from Amazon.com)
[H]ow significant it is that in the Indo-European languages . . . the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis-gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel--for to doubt is to be double-minded. . . . Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division–a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.
“When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, ‘Four years.’ They said, ‘How can that be?’ He answered, ‘I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.'”
“For my part, I think the chief reason which prompted the invisible God to become visible in the flesh and to hold converse with men was to lead carnal men, who are only able to love carnally, to the healthful love of his flesh, and afterwards, little by little, to spiritual love.” –St. Bernard
“Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s palace; and look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial joys; having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride fo a monarch, in her husband’s chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you.
“You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
“Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you can never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made; till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all; you never enjoy the world.
“Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there, than in your own house; till you remember how lately you were made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it; and more rejoice in the palace of your glory than if it had been made today morning.
“Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it that you had rather suffer the flames of hell than willingly be guilty of their error.” –Thomas Traherne
“Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual. In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours.” –Eckhart
“Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.” –William Law
Love is a mode of knowledge.
[M]an’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God.
“The sect of lovers is distinct from all others; Lovers have a religion and a faith all their own.” –Jalal-uddin Rumi
“Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinction between what hinders and what helps itself.” –St. Augustine
“Our kingdom go” is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of “Thy kingdom come.”
“The rout and destruction of the passions, while a good, is not the ultimate good; the discovery of Wisdom is the surpassing good. When this is found, all the people will sing.” –Philo
It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground. This new-found life is “more abundant” than the other, and of a different and higher kind. Its possession is liberation into the eternal, and liberation is beatitude [happiness].
