Éliphas Lévi Zahed, born Alphonse Louis Constant (February 8, 1810 = May 31, 1875), was a French esotericist, poet, and writer. Initially pursuing an ecclesiastical career in the Catholic Church, he abandoned the priesthood in his mid-twenties and became a ceremonial magician. At the age of 40, he began professing knowledge of the occult. Wikipedia
New Thinkin • Mar 25, 2025 John J. Prendergast, PhD is a spiritual teacher, author, retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a retired Marriage and Family Therapist. He Is the author of Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality (2025), The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence (2019), and In Touch: How to Tune in to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself (2015). He is also the senior editor of and contributor to two volumes of original essays entitled, The Sacred Mirror (2003) and Listening from the Heart of Silence (2007). Here John explores the depths of embodied spirituality, examining the journeys of waking up, waking down, and waking in. John shares profound insights on authenticity, truth, and true nature, while also addressing the more challenging aspects of our conditioning—terror, shame, and doubt—which often arise as obstacles on the path of healing and transformation. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:11:18 Your deepest ground and confronting annihilation 00:22:52 Spanda: the pulsation of life and awareness 00:33:45 Truth and authenticity in the spiritual journey 00:39:19 Opening to awareness and healing trauma 00:43:45 The role of therapeutic relationships 00:48:07 Identifying core limiting beliefs 00:57:42 Self-honesty and vulnerability in spiritual growth 01:03:43 Grief and the lost connection to true nature 01:13:14 Overcoming doubt and the markers of essential qualities of being New Thinking Allowed Guest Host Leanne Whitney, PhD, is a depth psychologist and transformational coach based in Los Angeles, CA. She is the author of Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali and currently serves as Executive Director of Center for Transformation and Integration. Her website is https://leannewhitney.com/ To learn about Leanne Whitney’s Transformational Coaching Certification Course with an emphasis in Somatic Integration Therapy, please visit: https://transformationandintegration…. Producer: Elena McNally Editor: John Hartmann (Recorded on February 21, 2025)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • Mar 26, 2025 Eric Wargo, PhD, is author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocognition, and the Unconscious. He is an anthropologist and science writer. Here he examines notable instances in which disastrous events have been forecast through dreams, works of creative art, and premonitions. One notable example is a novel by Morgan Robertson that appears to have described in considerable detail, twelve years in advance of the event, the sinking of the Titanic. A sensitivity to dream interpretation methods helps one to observe the psychological dynamics of precognition. 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 March 11, 2019)
“He eventually muttered, ‘You’re right, everyone’s always been right. I can’t believe I got to this point’ and kept bawling his eyes out. Then he said something that I’m still thinking about: ‘I traded my life for a lie; I don’t even know who I am anymore.'”
If you also haven’t heard that name since way back when (well, 2020), let me refresh you. It’s a conspiracy theory alleging that President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against the “deep state,” or “a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” that controls the world.
It’s called QAnon because an anonymous poster known as “Q” began spewing nonsense about the deep state and “the Storm,” aka the day of reckoning that will one day come for the pedophilic, omnipotent cabal, on the imageboard website 4chan in 2017.
Although it’s somewhat faded out of mainstream conversation, QAnon is still very much alive. One of the most infamous January 6 Capitol rioters was known as “QAnon Shaman.”
There’s an entire subreddit devoted to people whose lives have been affected by a loved one falling into QAnon, both trying to support those individuals and help them bring their loved ones back to reality. It’s aptly called r/QAnonCasualties, and today, I wanted to share several stories from people who actually managed to get out:
1. “My uncle, who is my dad’s brother-in-law, was raised in a very Christian conservative environment but was generally very cool, calm, and collected, and a great role model for what an uncle/husband/father should be. But when Trump came around in 2016, it’s like that whole positive demeanor he had flipped on a dime. I genuinely don’t know what exactly sparked the change, but over time, he just started spouting crazier and crazier things. Anti-vax, JFK and JFK Jr. resurrection, Pizzagate, election fraud, the deep state, Democrats sacrificing children in satanic rituals, you name it. And he also believed literally anything Trump said on TV and would defend it like his life depended on it.”
“…Fast forward to about a week ago, I got a message from him on Facebook. My crazy, Trump-loving, conspiracy-theorizing Q-Uncle, who’s estranged from his whole family, sent me a random message at 8 p.m. He said he was looking through some old scrapbooks and family photo albums and found old pictures of me as a baby that he thought I might want to have, and asked if he could come over to give them to me. I agreed because I hadn’t seen him in several years, and against my better judgment, I wanted to have a conversation with him about his behavior.”
“So he shows up late at night with a small box of photos and comes inside. I set the box down, open it, and start looking at all the photos. It’s a bunch of pictures from around the time of my birth, and what caught my eye was how happy his family and mine looked and how full of life he looked. Looking at him standing in my kitchen now, he looked so different. Before his divorce, he was very well-kept. Clean cut and in very good shape. Looking at him now, he’s gotten visibly skinnier, lost muscle mass and looks dirty and disheveled. I said thank you for the photos, and he said something to the tune of ‘You’re welcome, my lib ex-wife probably has the rest, but she’s too convinced I’m crazy. I just wish she wasn’t blind, she’ll see the truth soon enough…'”
“…And I basically lost it but didn’t lash out. I started ranting about his behavior, explaining how it’s torn the family apart, especially his family. His own children either hate him or don’t know what’s wrong with him, and the woman he was married to for 30 years wants nothing to do with him anymore. How the rest of the family is embarrassed by him, and he threw it all away for Donald fucking Trump. Who, unlike us, does not know who he is and does not care if he lives or dies. All of this didn’t really seem to phase him, which I was half expecting.”
“…Throughout that little rant, his expression slowly changed from a smug look of annoyance to a fearful look of regret. His eyes widened slowly, and after I mentioned the man in front of me being different than the man in the photos, his eyes started darting back and forth between the photos on the table and me. And by the time I got done speaking, he was breathing very shallow and fast, hyperventilating. And then his eyes were just darting all over the room, almost like he was replaying his life, and he was covering his mouth and eyes and mumbling stuff like ‘fuck,’ ‘oh my god,’ and ‘no no no.'”
“I genuinely wasn’t expecting this reaction and asked if he was okay, and he just started shaking his head and covering his eyes with his hands. After doing this for about a minute, I could hear him start to groan like he was in pain, and then he let out this raw, guttural scream. I swear it shook my house; I’ve never heard anything like it. He was hitting himself on the forehead with the base of his hand and then collapsed to the floor. He took his hands off his eyes and his face was bright red, and he had tears streaming down his face. It was the most emotion and clarity I’ve seen from him in years. He tried to talk but he was still choking up on his words and his voice kept cracking. He eventually muttered, ‘You’re right, everyone’s always been so goddamn right. I can’t believe I got to this point’ and kept bawling his eyes out…”
“…Then he said something that I’m still thinking about: ‘I traded my life for a lie; I don’t even know who I am anymore.’ And he kept crying on the floor. This man was completely broken and realized the consequences of his behavior far too late, and all he could do was cry. So I let him. It went on for about 15 minutes. Eventually, he looked up at me, and I helped him stand up. And I ended up just giving him a big hug. Despite all the pain he’s caused for the family, I still loved him deep down, and I know everyone else does, too. After he pulled away from the hug, all he said was ‘thank you… I don’t know if I’m past the point of fixing things, but I’m going to try,’ and then he turned around and walked out my door.”
2. “So, I was having a convo with my FIL, and he was pissed and feeling himself after the Trump victory. He was saying all sorts of crazy Q tangent-type stuff, and I calmly said, ‘None of that happened.’ He screamed, ‘I saw it!’ I asked where he gets his news from, and he said it was from all the sources. I said no, you don’t, you never saw that on CNN or a trusted news source. He later admitted, when he calmed down, that he saw it on YouTube or X, which I said wasn’t news.”
3. “I used to be a conspiracy theorist who held many beliefs that I now realize are spread by QAnon believers. Eventually, I had to get the COVID-19 vaccine for work, and nothing happened. This led to me starting to question my other beliefs, and I realized I had been tricked. I didn’t die of any horrible side effects like people were saying. I met a classmate who was trans, and he was really cool. That made me see that the narrative I was fed was untrue since he clearly wasn’t a horrible person like the right-wing media portrays. I also got involved with TikTok (mostly for the funny videos lol), but that led to me seeing a lot of diverse people and beliefs I hadn’t heard of before.”
“I was a teenager when this happened, so I understand how I fell for the ploy so easily. I was socially isolated during COVID-19 and became wrapped up in the wrong crowd. Since then, a few years have passed, and I’ve continued to learn about politics and the dangers of conspiracy theories and extremist ideas; I’ve become much better at forming my own ideas rather than just listening to whatever I hear online…”
“…What I struggle to understand is how my dad, who is much older and in many ways wiser than me, fell for it, too. Not only that, but he is falling deeper and deeper into this group, and all of my efforts to talk to him have failed. This change happened over a period of time when I was living with my mom. All of a sudden, he started talking about Trump and how great his policies were. He ended up voting for Trump that year, but I would say his level of enthusiasm was still in the normal range at the time. He just wanted more jobs in America and for the middle class to prosper. 2020 was when things really started to go downhill, starting with all the COVID theories that were floating around. He fully believed them, and so did I.”
4. “Part of the QAnon story my dad believed was that the USD had to be removed and replaced by a new currency because the dollar is the currency of the deep state. Some hours or days ago, I can’t remember, Trump said that he would preserve the USD at all costs, and if BRICS tried to develop a currency to battle the USD, he would establish a 100% tariff on BRICS members (something along those lines). My father was heavily disappointed, so I exploited the doubt momentum my father was stuck in, and I told him, ‘Remember what I told you days ago? This is what I mean, Trump is not the hero they portrayed.'”
5. “They ended up in rehab and started to think more like a normal human after that.”
6. “My whole life has always been just me and my mom. My father died before I was born, so it was just us girls up against the world. Mom clawed her way up from food stamps and Section 8 to a six-figure research-based job. I am so proud of her. She did seem oddly against me getting ‘optional’ vaccines like HPV and meningitis, but whatever. I didn’t think much of it.”
“…She has no real answers to any of these questions and I thought this was the end of it. She had a theory, we talked about it rationally, nothing in her theory made any sense, and now we could move on with our lives. I am not exaggerating when I say I thought she was going to disown me when I got my COVID vaccine. This woman is a research scientist, y’all! What is happening!? She descended deeper and deeper into anti-vaxx conspiracy theories and fringe religious practices and… I honestly still don’t understand the Bill Gates thing. I didn’t even know this person anymore. This person who witnessed my first breath. The first heartbeat I ever knew. Ugh, I’m getting teary just thinking about this now.”
“I got pregnant shortly after my second Moderna shot. I didn’t tell her for six whole months. It was hard, and the whole world felt dark. I didn’t tell her any of this. Just that I was pregnant, my due date was SOON, and that if she wanted to see the baby, she would need to be FULLY vaccinated. Two shots, plus the efficacy time. There was protest and #Q-logic, but I just could not care at all. We didn’t talk again, not a real talk based in reality, until she called to tell me the fire department had to come to the CVS since she was hyperventilating in the pharmacy area waiting for her shot. They still gave her the shot. She was one round in and half the way to seeing my baby be born. I felt this odd twinge of an emotion I wasn’t sure I would ever see again. Pride…”
“…I was so proud of her for facing her fears for my kid. She didn’t do this for me, her kid, but somehow, my kid was worth it. I’ll take it! She got her second shot on a delayed schedule. Ok, fine, whatever. This delay made it so that she wasn’t going to be considered fully vaccinated until after my due date, but I held firm, even though that meant that I was realistically facing being in the delivery room alone. This was such a scary time of my life, and I had no one to hug me. In the end, my kid decided to come late. Very late. So late that my mom could be in the hospital with me.”
“…I feel SO LUCKY because I know this could have been so so so so so so so much worse. I have a reasonable approximation of my mom back with just one really dark year that I try to never think about. I credit her recovery primarily to my son and, more specifically, that I got pregnant so quickly after COVID-19 vaccines came out. She didn’t have time to really steep in the Q-ness because the ultimatum came relatively quickly.
7. “My two successes were with people who were not 100% full Q yet. They were at the point where they thought Alex Jones was a gift from God. So, pretty far in. I got them out with challenging conversations and consistency. Sometimes, I would be more empathetic and not try to act like they were crazy for their beliefs and just try to gently ask, ‘Oh, I get how you see that; have you ever thought about (thing) though?’ Other times, I was more direct and would try to make them feel dumb/embarrassed. Consistency was a huge part.”
“…I definitely don’t have the magic solution, even if you put in the 500 hours of prep/research you would need. I’ve been successful twice but failed three other times so far. Being with someone daily gives you a huge advantage in being able to frame information they are getting every day in a different, more sane way. Most people don’t really have a thought on any topic until their chosen demagogue tells them how to feel later online. If you can start to change how they think about something before they get programmed, it can help a lot.”
8. And finally, from r/skeptic: “I am an ex-QAnon and conspiracy nut, and one strange phrase helped me get out. I left the conspiracy world five years ago after heavy involvement for 10 years. I got out of QAnon around the end of Trump’s [first] presidency. One very strange phrase was common among the believers, and it gave me a lot of internal conflict at the time: ‘Even if Q turns out to be fake, I still value my time in QAnon because it taught me to pay attention and how to think.'”
“This sort of speech was very common among adherents and really bothered me bc it was so self-insulating and protective. Basically, claiming that even if I find out I’ve been a rube believing in batshit conspiracy, I still can’t allow myself to think of myself as wrong, so I’ll spin it as learning to be a ‘critical thinker’ rather than realizing I was conned and I’m ignorant. As for me? I got out and realized I was wrong.”
I’m sending this to family and friends to tell you that I will be singing in a concert with the choir I’ve been singing with for some 23 years now. This concert is Saturday night MARCH 29 at 8 PM EDT (5 PM PDT). It will be Live-streamed and of course my job is to SELL tickets which you can buy at this link – https://cvchorus.org/ Since my job is selling tickets, this is a pretty wide distribution.
We are singing a Gloria Mass written by Puccini, the opera composer. The music is glorious and we will sing with an orchestra. We only get to sing with an orchestra about every three years. Some of you know I started singing opera some 50 years ago in Alaska. So I love this dramatic music. This however may be my last concert with his group. Not sure I have the chops for this director anymore. And singing the Credo this time made me think about the words – words that I have been singing since I was a choir boy. And I’m thinking maybe I need to express myself musically in a different way.
Finally for those of you with limited financial resources, the concert will be posted on our YouTube page after the concert is over. But If you can afford it, buy a LiveSteam. We need to pay for this orchestra.
I know classical music isn’t for everyone. For those who are local, the concert is at Glenn Memorial on the Emory campus. And there will be a nice reception afterwards. Live Streams won’t get the good food.
Hope to see some of you and since this is going to some family and friends far away, I’ll probably have some sort of party for my 75th birthday this July. I had a guest room built which I’ll probably rent out to a student in the Fall but until then, I have an extra room if anyone wants to come to Atlanta in July.
I hope to see you Saturday evening either in person or livestream.
This card was traditionally called Justice, but in more modern decks is now named Adjustment. This change reflects one of the deeper aspects of meaning that the card covers – the requirement for constant assessment and balancing which opens us to spiritual expansion.Life is a flowing river of energy – and when it is blocked for any length of time it behaves exactly as water does..it stagnates. When we fail to consistently assess our position and attitudes in relation to life – in general, and on a personal level – we too begin to stagnate.So on a day ruled by Adjustment, we need to take stock of ourselves. Have a look at habitual or routine behaviour, and decide whether it is appropriate to your current state of mind, and position. Sometimes a thing becomes outdated, and loses its value as we change and alter. If you find anything like this decide to let go of it, to clear the way for new more appropriate actions.Think about the ways in which you approach life – do you feel you’re getting the most out of it, and putting as much as you can into it? If not, think about why. For some of the fortunate people among us, happiness and contentment come as a result of simply deciding that these things are in our lives now, and then living each day reminding ourselves of that fact. So consider if you are one of those fortunate people who can simply choose to be happy, fulfilled and contented… and then do it.If you are one of those people who cannot, at this time, decide to be happy, because of surrounding circumstance, try for today, to find something to be happy about – a little ray of sunshine cutting through the darkness. It will make a difference to the imbalance you might be experiencing – and go some way toward adjusting your situation.
Affirmation: “I move towards balance and harmony.”
In Front of Your Nose features Orwell’s final writings, including extracts from his manuscript notebook, as well as details of his remarriage and adoption of a son, notes on the writing and publication of Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Graham Greene, an examination of politics and literature in Gulliver’s Travels, and the hidden meanings of “nonsense poetry.”
Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell’s work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective “Orwellian”—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Room 101”, “Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “doublethink”, and “thoughtcrime”. In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
Ghost of Abraham Lincoln, appearing to show Abraham Lincoln as a white figure standing over Mary Todd Lincoln
The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln is a photograph taken by the American photographer William Mumler in 1872. It appears to depict a faint white figure, interpreted as the ghost of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, standing over his seated widow, Mary Todd Lincoln.[1] The photograph is assumed to be a hoax, although it is still unclear how exactly it was created.[2]
The photograph is currently the property of the Ian Rolland Center for Lincoln Research. It’s part of the Friends of the Lincoln at Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana.[3]
Background
Mumler began taking spirit photographs in 1862. He invited the renowned photographer J. W. Black to examine the process he used, but Black was unable to tell how “ghosts” appeared in Mumler’s photographs.[4] Throughout the 1860s, Mumler’s career took hold, and many spiritualists came to him for photographs. One of the reasons for a surge in demand was the American Civil War, which caused more than 600,000 deaths.[5] He was repeatedly accused of fraud and was brought to trial in May 1869.[6] The prosecution brought a list of possible methods Mumler could have used to fake the photographs, but none of them could be proven without a reasonable doubt. He was acquitted of the charges, and his career in photography continued.[7][8]
In February 1872, Mary Lincoln was still mourning the loss of her husband, Abraham Lincoln, after his assassination nearly seven years earlier.[9] In her later years, Lincoln was institutionalized after a trial in 1875, though was later released into the custody of her sister Elizabeth.[10]
Legacy
Mary Lincoln in 1861
The photograph is one of the most famous hoaxes of the 19th century. While the method Mumler used may have been double exposure, it has not been proven.[11] The process is made more complicated by the fact that Abraham’s arms appear to be on Mary’s shoulders.[12] In 2022, photographic process historian Mark Osterman demonstrated a possible technique using two negatives, printed simultaneously with sleight of hand.[8]
The Astrology Podcast • Mar 25, 2025 Discussing what happened in the past when the planets Saturn and Neptune form conjunctions every 36 years, and how these alignments often coincide with important turning points in history, with astrologers Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best. We spend the first three quarters of the episode going through the seven most recent Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history in detail, starting with the 1989 conjunction and then going backwards in 36 years increments to 1952/3, 1917, 1882, 1846, 1809, 1773. In the last part of the episode we highlight recurring themes that have come up across multiple conjunctions, and extending our study all the way back to the year 500 BCE. By looking at conjunctions from the past we hope to get a better idea of what the current Saturn-Neptune conjunction means, which is forming in the sky now in 2025 and 2026. This is episode 483 of The Astrology Podcast:
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
.jpg)
