― Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte, later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his first abdication in 1814, with a brief restoration during the Hundred Days in 1815. Wikipedia
Born August 15, 1769, Ajaccio, France
Died May 5, 1821 (age 51 years), Longwood House, Longwood, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha
July 28, 2025 (deepakchopra.medium.com)
By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP
People like to live out storylines, a habit that goes back thousands of years. Everyone has an individual story, one of eight billion as things stand today. But collective stories are more powerful, universal, and long-lasting. If you had been born in any age of recorded history, the dominant story would have been either religious or physical-materialistic.
At the present time, the physical/materialistic story is so dominant, thanks to modern science and technology, that a crucial fact gets lost: All stories are mind-made. We are their source, but when enough people are convinced that a story is absolutely true, we forget this fact. Instead of holding on to our status as creators, we lapse into the subsidiary role of being a character in the story.
One major tradition, however, was free of stories, namely the Vedic tradition in India. Although Hinduism was the offspring of the original Vedic teachings, Vedic knowledge itself is not religious teaching. They teach instead about consciousness. No story is attached, because consciousness is timeless. It has no historic events, turning points, breakthroughs, disasters, triumphs, or loss of self-confidence. Consciousness simply is, like existence itself.
When this truth is lost, the mind fills in the space with stories. A story is whatever you live by that isn’t fully conscious. Of course, the world’s religions and spiritual traditions contain inspiring thoughts, some of them deeply imbued with pure consciousness. By the same token, physical/materialist eras are filled with impressive discoveries that bring subtle levels of Nature to light. But only consciousness knows consciousness. Every other source of knowledge is subsidiary at best, unreliable at worst.
Looking at ourselves now, most people would be shocked to discover that identifying with the physical world is a mistake. Correcting the mistake has enormous implications — it would be like waking up from a dream. If we stop accepting the basic tenet of physicalism — that everything in existence is explainable by exploring the matter and energy that compose the universe — a huge shift is possible. Despite the obvious triumphs of science and technology, we have to abandon the scientific worldview to explain the following mysteries:
It is amazingly hard to prove that the physical world isn’t an illusion. I will number the steps so that each one can be examined and challenged on its own.
1. Nothing is real unless we experience it directly or know about it through rational investigation. If there is anything real outside our ability to experience it, it might as well not exist, because the human brain provides our only interface with reality.
2. Even though science divides objective facts “out there” from subjective activity “in here,” this is only a matter of convenience. Everything comes down to experience. A dream at night is an experience, and so is the sight of billions of galaxies.
3. Until we know what experience is made of, we don’t know how reality is constructed.
4. All the qualities we attribute to the physical world — such as the redness of a rose, its voluptuous fragrance, and its velvety texture — are produced in our consciousness.
5. Without human perception, light isn’t bright, a summer day isn’t hot, and a rose isn’t red. Photons, for example, are invisible when they strike your retina. Sugar is tasteless when it strikes the tongue. A rose has no fragrance when it strikes the nose. These qualities (technically known as qualia) are produced by the mechanism of perception.
6. Thanks to physicalism, we say that perception occurs in the brain, but it doesn’t. There are no pictures inside the brain, no light, no color, no sound. The brain is no more the origin of perception than a radio is the origin of the music being played through it.
7. All we can say reliably is that experience occurs in awareness, is known in awareness, and is made out of awareness. Awareness is the creator and recipient of experience, forming a feedback loop that never escapes the field of awareness.
8. The primacy of awareness can be shown by the fact that even atoms and subatomic particles have no intrinsic qualities. They display their properties according to what the human mind looks for, asks about, identifies, and experiments with. When we think we are reducing matter and energy to their fundamental nature, what we are doing is subdividing our experience into finer slices, nothing more.
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9. The mental activity of using our perceptions to define what is real and then interpreting these perceptions creates reality insofar as human beings know it. We tell ourselves a story built from our experiences, and even when we point to laws of nature and mathematical formulas to bolster our story, they, too are experiences.
10. The claim that data, measurements, rational logic, and verifiable experiments have a privileged position is mistaken. Awareness is a single, uniform field, accessed through experience. A scientific fact has the same basis, neither higher nor lower, as our experience of thinking, sensing, intuiting, creating, understanding, knowing, and perceiving.
11. Humans are only one species of consciousness. We have no access, except by inference, to the consciousness of other creatures, which belong to other species of consciousness.
12. A critical factor in our species of consciousness is language. Using words, we label our experiences, and in that way, two things happen: First, the universe is transformed from a unified, unending process into bits and pieces of isolated “stuff,” each bit being assigned a word or label. Second, we build our story of reality by means of labels, even though they are our own, arbitrary creation.
13. The artifacts we employ to keep our story going have the drawback of misleading us about what is real. The whole scheme of Mind-Body-Space-Time-Particles-Forces-Fields are names we invented for shapes, forms, and activities that occur in our awareness. In reality, awareness cannot be trapped inside these categories. It is formless, timeless, boundless, and without a specific location.
14. Since we have grown accustomed to believing in our own story and tagging everything in nature with a fixed name, we’ve lost sight of what exists beyond this tapestry of Maya: formless awareness, which gives rise to the possibility of form, shape, and everything imaginable. We would appear to be trapped, therefore, in our limited perceptual mechanisms.
15. Yet even this inescapable trap is of our own devising. The fact that human awareness has created a story and then bought into it, forgetting that we are its creators, cannot destroy one true thing: We are aware of being aware.
16. The fact that we are aware can never be eradicated, but we can put it to new uses that would abolish the old uses.
17. The most important of these new uses is to wake up from the illusion.
18. Experience is infinitely malleable, infinitely creative. Seeing that this is true, we wake up from a host of limiting beliefs, prejudices, and false assumptions.
19. Awareness is transcendent, existing in an inconceivable domain beyond space, time, matter, and energy. Yet this domain is the source of everything. When we wake up to this fact, we no longer give privileged positions to things that don’t deserve them. Ripe for demotion are death, fear, materialism, the brain-as-mind, and other outworn aspects of a story based entirely on Maya.
20. If our source is unbounded awareness, we should participate in everyday life on the basis of this one true thing, the only truth that deserves a capital T. To be grounded in formless being is to know reality — this is both awakening and freedom.
As you see when you go deeply into it, this argument for consciousness is irrefutable, as much as physicalists deny it. They grow angry in the face of serious challenges to the assumption that the physical world “out there” defines reality.
But behind the concerted force of science, received opinion, ad hominem attacks, and sheer ignorance, there is still the unquenchable need to know what is real. Only by accessing reality will we humans know who we are and why we are here. The next time you see a single red rose, take a closer look. It contains a mystery powerful enough to topple the universe.
DEEPAK CHOPRA, MD, FACP, FRCP, is a Consciousness Explorer and a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is the co-founder of DeepakChopra.ai, his AI twin and well-being advisor. He also co-founded Cyberhuman, a transformative suite of personalized health and well-being solutions. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is also an Honorary Fellow in Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. He is the author of over 95 books, translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers.
For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution. His mission is to create a more balanced, peaceful, joyful, and healthier world. Through his teachings, he guides individuals to embrace their inherent strength, wisdom, and potential for personal and societal transformation.
In his latest book, “Digital Dharma” (Harmony/Rodale), Chopra navigates the balance between technology and expanded awareness, explaining that while AI cannot duplicate human intelligence, it can vastly enhance personal and spiritual growth. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of their top 100 most influential people.” www.deepakchopra.com.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Sep 7, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy Jürgen Kremer is author of the textbook Psychology in Diversity, Diversity in Psychology – An Integrative Psychology for the 21st Century. He is coauthor of Ethnoautobiography. He has been an executive editor for ReVision: Journal of Consciousness and Transformation since 1994. He teaches psychology at Santa Rosa Jr. College in California. In this 2021 rebooted video, he distinguishes between “shamanic practitioners” such as himself and authentic shamans who work within very specific cultural traditions and are acknowledged as such by their community. As a psychologist, he incorporates drumming, chanting, and other trance and animistic practices, from various cultures, into his work and personal life. He points out that we all have shamanistic cultures in our ancestry if we go back far enough. This recognition can help us achieve greater balance in life. 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 February 12, 2021)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Sep 8, 2026 New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast James Tunney, LLM, is an Irish Barrister who has lectured on legal matters throughout the world. He is a poet, a visual artist, and author of The Mystery of the Trapped Light: Mystical Thoughts in the Dark Age of Scientism plus The Mystical Accord: Sutras to Suit Our Times, Lines for Spiritual Evolution. His website is http://www.jamestunney.com. In this 2020 rebooted video, he discusses the history of Western and Eastern traditions concerning the right and left hand spiritual paths, particularly tantra as practiced by the Aghori sect. He relates this to the left and right divisions in politics, as well as the cultural distinction between conservative/classical and romantic. The discussion also encompasses unarmed, martial arts combat. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 13, 2020)
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more.
Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature — that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light.
To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough.
Art from The Fate of Fausto by Oliver Jeffers — a modern fable about the existential triumph of enoughness, inspired by Vonnegut
The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”
In the preface, Berry considers how nature calibrates expectation — even in the creative act itself, where inspiration is not a reach for more but a letting be of what is, a surrender to reality, which is miracle enough:
On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams… In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations — other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.
In how it thrives on the freedom from expectation, in how it demands a total surrender and breaks the moment it is demanded of, creativity has a lot in common with love. It may be that nature invented love to teach us the art of enoughness — to learn how to open the heart to another without condition or expectation, to be fully welcomed in another heart in order to learn the hardest axiom of being: that we are, and always were, enough.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days
Love’s salutary alchemy of enoughness comes alive in the second part of Berry’s eight-part sabbath poem of 1994:
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shapes of clouds?Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shapes of flesh, ever-changing
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of the body for body,
unending light. You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.
Couple with John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — a lovely vintage illustrated fable about the meaning and measure of enough — then revisit this soulful animated adaptation of Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and his prose meditation on the nature of the universe lensed through a sunflower.
Nietzsche c. 1875
~ Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who started his career as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, at age 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. Wikipedia
Born October 15, 1844, Röcken, Lützen, Germany
Died August 25, 1900 (age 55 years), Weimar, Germany
Area Dullard Now Has Name For Lifelong Condition
Published: September 8, 2026 (TheOnion.com)
CARY, NC—Describing the experience as “a revelation,” 38-year-old Derrick Henard told reporters Wednesday that everything had finally clicked for him after he was given a diagnosis of stupid. “I remember googling the word ‘stupid’ for the first time, reading the definition, and thinking, ‘Holy shit—this is me,’ ” said Henard, recalling that while he had initially been skeptical when his girlfriend suggested he might be stupid, it increasingly began to make sense as he did more research into the condition. “Then I went to the doctor and did a bunch of tests, and they told me, ‘Yep, you’re stupid.’ At that moment, it was like all the pieces of the pie suddenly came together. Even better was learning I’m not alone. Being stupid is actually really common in the U.S.” Henard went on to explain that being stupid was probably the reason he had never done well in school.
Published: May 18, 2020 (TheOnion.com)
THE HEAVENS—Reflecting on how far He had come since His early days on the live music circuit, The Lord God Almighty spoke to reporters Monday, recalling his start as a backup dancer before He made it big as a deity. “It’s kind of crazy to think about it now, but back then, I was basically just a glorified extra in Odin’s traveling revue,” said the Supreme Being and Creator Of All Things, noting that in those days He considered it a success if even one or two worshippers came up to Him after a show. “People think I was just destined to be the King of Kings and Ruler Of The Cosmos, but the truth is I got a lot of lucky breaks along the way. I’m not saying it was an accident that I found success—I worked my ass off doing five shows a night for years, but I was fortunate to have friends like Frannie, Beth, Zeus, and all the other dancers who taught me everything I know.” God added that He probably would never even have made it as a diety if the producers’ original choice for the part hadn’t mysteriously broken her leg right before callbacks.
“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare.”
By Joe Wilkins
Published Sep 8, 2026 (Futurism.com)
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The companies ushering in food delivery robots aren’t buying themselves much goodwill in the Windy City.
In the short amount of time they’ve been on Chicago streets, the bots have sent residents to the hospital and smashed through bus stops, prompting local officials to set up an exclusion zone prohibiting the companies from operating in a certain section of the city.
Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.
A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.
Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.
“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dct3eKipij0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.
“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.
“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”
In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”
“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”
More on robots: As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them
Add Futurism as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting.
I’m a tech and labor correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
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 Pam Rodolph, H.W., M. speaks on… “Letter to a Woman with Learning Disabilities, About Translation®“ When discussing Prosperos teachings, it’s important to direct your explanations to your audience’s abilities and expectations, without losing the points you’re making. Pam gives a wonderful example, actually suitable for everyone, with a letter that encourages her student to try to “think like God.” Find out how! Pam is a longtime Prosperos student and Mentor, and you will enjoy hearing her insights. For further information, click here: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/sunday-talk-23-06-2024-mjscy-k7eb8 SUNDAY MEETING — September 13, 2026 11:00 am Pacific / Noon Mountain / 1:00 pm Central / 2:00 pm Eastern PLEASE CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW TO JOIN THE MEETING Join Sunday Meeting By contribution. Please click here to contribute: Contribute! Call In Information: +16699006833,,85882863391# US (San Jose) +13462487799,,85882863391# US (Houston) Dial by your location +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 301 715 8592 US +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 929 205 6099 US (New York) +1 253 215 8782 US Meeting ID: 858 8286 3391 Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abtcyLDACK |
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