Film

The Is The Life

Kolo Rock Paintings, Tanzania.

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Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of fiction and non-fiction narrative prose, as well as a poet and educator. Her work moves seamlessly between the macro and micro of life, balancing the grandest, celestial ideas of existence with a beauty in the mundanity of daily life. In this essay, written for ‘Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion’, and published by the Center for Religious Humanism at Seattle Pacific University in 2002, she considers the totality of human experience, in search of the simple question, what makes a good life?

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Annie Dillard January 21, 2025

Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, bird-watching. Beyond those things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.

Another contemporary consensus might be: You wear the best shoes you can afford, you seek to know Rome's best restaurants and their staffs, drive the best car, and vacation on Tenerife. And what a cook you are!

Or you take the next tribe's pigs in thrilling raids; you grill yams; you trade for televisions and hunt white-plumed birds. Everyone you know agrees: this is the life. Perhaps you burn captives. You set fire to a drunk. Yours is the human struggle, or the elite one, to achieve... whatever your own culture tells you: to publish the paper that proves the point; to progress in the firm and gain high title and salary, stock options, benefits; to get the loan to store the beans till their price rises; to elude capture, to feed your children or educate them to a feather edge; or to count coup or perfect your calligraphy; to eat the king's deer or catch the poacher; to spear the seal, intimidate the enemy, and be a big man or beloved woman and die respected for the pigs or the title or the shoes. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, necklaces, degree, murex shells, or ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. spear points, hoe, plant; they kill aurochs or one another; they prepare sacrifices as we here and now work on our projects. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? No one could love your children more; would you love them less? Would you change your project? To what? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.

However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, and yourself and your passions, weigh equally in the balance with those of any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow rivers, or painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted from disease then or now. Our lives and our deaths count equally, or we must abandon one-man-one-vote, dismantle democracy, and assign six billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to six billion, a ranking whose number decreases, like gravity, with the square of the distance between us and them.

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“People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines.”

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What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising.

Then you would know your own death better but perhaps not dread it less. Try to bring people up the wall, carry children to see it to what end? Fewer golf courses? What is wrong with golf? Nothing at all. Equality of wealth? Sure; how?

The woman watching sheep over there, the man who carries embers in a pierced clay ball, the engineer, the girl who spins wool into yarn as she climbs, the smelter, the babies learning to recognize speech in their own languages, the man whipping a slave's flayed back, the man digging roots, the woman digging roots, the child digging roots what would you tell them? And the future people what are they doing? What excitements sweep peoples here and there from time to time? Into the muddy river they go, into the trenches, into the caves, into the mines, into the granary, into the sea in boats. Most humans who were ever alive lived inside one single culture that never changed for hundreds of thousands of years; archaeologists scratch their heads at so conservative and static a culture.

Over here, the rains fail; they are starving. There, the caribou fail; they are starving. Corrupt leaders take the wealth. Not only there but here. Rust and smut spoil the rye. When pigs and cattle starve or freeze, people die soon after. Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.

People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.

Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

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Annie Dillard (b.1945) is an American writer of narrative prose, in both fiction and non-fiction, and a poet. In 1975 she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Orson Welles

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Four of Coins (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Power, the Four of Disks
Number: 4
Astrology: Sun in Capricorn
Qabalah: Chesed of He

Chris Gabriel January 18, 2025

Here we see the beginning of structure, and how proper structure creates the seat of power on the Earth. Here the work of the suit becomes sturdy and stable.

In Rider, we see a King guarding four golden coins. He wears a crown and is dressed in red. His feet lay upon two coins, he holds one at his chest, and rests another upon his crown.

In Thoth, we have a birds eye view of a castle with four towers, in each of which sit the symbols of the four elements. The castle is the indigo of Capricorn, the ground around it is the bright orange of the Sun.

In Marseille, there are four coins around a central heraldic shield bearing a flower and sometimes a Phoenix. Two flowers grow between the four coins.

The Four of Disks is home, a place of stability to rest after we have accumulated our resources. The sturdiness of our home is the source of our power. In the Ace of Disks we saw the importance of building upon a rock, here we see the importance of building with good stone and strong wood.

No better expression of this truth can be found than in the Three Little Pigs! The Wolf, who has easily blown in houses of straw and shrubs and eaten the first two pigs, finds himself at the third Pig’s house made of brick:

So the Wolf came, as he did to the other little Pigs, and said, "Little Pig, little Pig, let me come in."

"No, no, by the hair of my chinny chin chin."

"Then I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in."

Well, he huffed and he puffed, and he huffed and he puffed, and he puffed and he huffed; but he could not get the house down.

The Four of Disks is the house made of bricks, the strong house that cannot be shaken by the world outside. This is our daily life, our daily bread, the things that keep our life going strong.

When we pull this card we are being shown our strength, and being reminded that we may need to fall back on our home, or even reinforce it against coming difficulty, if we have neglected it.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Ageless Wisdom From Tarot Key 13

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Molly Hankins January 16, 2025

The Malkuth is the realm of physicality in Kabbalistic traditions, and as we make our way through it, we live with the inevitability of death. Malkuth is pictured down at the very bottom of the Tree of Life, the world of form being the farthest away we can get from what Kabbalists describe as ‘the one mind of The Creator’. Going in and out of form is the catalyst of spiritual progress that physical life offers us. Without death, as Builders of the Adytum founder Paul Foster Case tell us, life in Malkuth would be akin to a defective record player with the needle remaining forever in the same groove. “Endless repetition would replace progress.” 

Tarot Key 13, the Death card, carries the ageless wisdom that death is the essential mechanism driving the evolution and understanding of our true selves within the world of form. Until our souls realize we are one with all of life we need death to advance the plot of our personal spiritual growth. Key 13 is associated with the sign of Scorpio, representing reproductive energy, as well as the Hebrew letter Nun. As a verb, Nun means to grow or sprout while as a noun it means both fish and movement, each of the layers of meaning signifying the life energy released by death.

The Death card most commonly includes a skeleton riding a white horse or scythe next to a white rose, both representing the movement generated by purified desire. In the tarot, red roses symbolize base desire as a driving force of our personal journeys through the material world, but white represents desire purified by direct experience. The scene in Key 13 takes place at sunrise, with death as the bearer of a new day releasing a burst of growth-promoting energy. Once we know this, not just intellectually but as a fully embodied truth learnt  through many incarnations, we become what Builders of the Adytum refer to as “a new order of human being.”

When we advance to this new order, we loosen our attachment to the temporal nature of life and no longer have the same need for death to catalyze the evolution of our consciousness. Many occult traditions carry the promise of conscious evolution as a means of achieving immortality, but the great spoiler is that overcoming death paradoxically comes from embracing it. By getting to know our physical bodies as temporary vehicles for our consciousness, we come to understand that our true immortal nature is actually the cause of physical death, removing us from the unconscious cycle of endless repetition. “Death is proof of eternal life,” wrote Reverend Ann Davies of Builders of the Adytum. We must learn to consciously embody the rhythm of the death and rebirth cycle in order to transcend it.

With this embodied knowing, we become conscious enough to choose growth-promoting thoughts and actions, instead of relying on death and entropy to advance the plot of our spiritual evolution. There are countless records of occultists from modern Kabbalists to ancient members of the Tat Brotherhood in Egypt who treat death asa force akin to gravity, an inherent and essential feature of life that, with sufficient knowledge and creative efforts, can be overcome. Once we fully accept that life is continuous change and dedicate ourselves to facilitating our ongoing transformation, we can step into the role of being a conscious agent of change. This, according to Kabbalistic philosophy, is the most practical means of overcoming death. 

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“The greatest expression of life’s benevolence and The Creator’s love for us is the fact that we are being taught by an ongoing cycle of movement, change, life and death, whether we want it or not.”

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Serving as our own agents of change rather than relying on the algorithm of life and death to drive spiritual progress has benefits beyond simply feeling more relaxed about the human condition. Embodying immortal consciousness as a way of life changes our relationship with dying. This can take many forms of expression, removing the fear and stress of death, or even slowing the aging of our physical bodies to the point of being able to choose when and how we die. The occult definition of immortality is not that of living forever in a single physical body, it’s learning to keep the beat of eternal change in our lives by making transformation-promoting choices so we no longer have a spiritual need for entropy and death.

Whether or not we subscribe to the possibility of conscious immortality and seek it as a goal of our experience, we all get to reap the harvest of wisdom from our choices. In her lecture on Tarot Key 13, Rev. Ann Davies tells us that the greatest expression of life’s benevolence and The Creator’s love for us is the fact that we are being taught by an ongoing cycle of movement, change, life and death, whether we want it or not. The numbers 1 and 3 represent love and unity and they are the basis of the algorithm of life itself, always pushing us towards acceptance of the nature of how things are as a basis for right action. This is the acceptance that nothing we experience in form, no matter how painful it may be, is meant to harm our souls.

“One who arrives at this state can say with St. Paul, ‘I die daily.’ Every morning becomes a resurrection to the awakened soul. All the old motives, petty ambitions, all the foolish opinions and prejudices gradually die out,” Paul Foster Case wrote in Learning Tarot Essentials. “Thus, little by little, there comes an adjustment of all one’s personal conceptions of life and its values.” Consider this essay an invitation to keep making adjustments to our perspectives that promote transformation, so we can become conscious curators of change in our own lives, and be curious about what the life experience algorithm brings us in response.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

RZA

Yoga and Human Evolution

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Sri Aurobindo was an philosopher, yogi, maharishi, and poet who developed the concept of Internal Yoga. Here, in this piece from 1909, he lays out some of the foundations of this practice: human progress, according to Hindu philosophy, is a cycle of spiritual evolution where the material world emerges from the spiritual, and mankind advances from animal impulses to self-realization in God. This evolution is not just intellectual, but a holistic purification of body, emotions, and intellect, culminating in unity with the Divine, which is the ultimate goal of humanity's development. For Aurobindo, the path to this unity is through Internal Yoga, a practice that unifies the body, mind, and soul in perfect harmony.

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Sri Aurobindo January 14, 2025

The whole burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilised man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning, the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world. From kārana to sūksma, from sūksma to sthūla ¯ , and back again, that is the formula. Once manifested in matter the world proceeds by laws which do not change, from age to age, by a regular succession, until it is all withdrawn back again into the source from which it came. The material goes back into the psychical and the psychical is involved in its cause or seed. It is again put out when the period of expansion recurs and runs its course on similar lines but with different details till the period of contraction is due. Hinduism regards the world as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognise the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijñāna-vijrmbhitāni, developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures and the progress of mankind. Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward. 

The animal is distinguished from man by its enslavement to the body and the vital impulses. Aśanāyā mrtyuh, Hunger who is Death, evolved the material world from of old, and it is the physical hunger and desire and the vital sensations and primary emotions connected with the prāna that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in the savage man who approximates to the condition of the beast. Out of this animal state, according to European Science, man rises working out the tiger and the ape by intellectual and moral development in the social condition. If the beast has to be worked out, it is obvious that the body and the prāna must be conquered, and as that conquest is more or less complete, the man is more or less evolved. The progress of mankind has been placed by many predominatingly in the development of the human intellect, and intellectual development is no doubt essential to self-conquest. The animal and the savage are bound by the body because the ideas of the animal or the ideas of the savage are mostly limited to those sensations and associations which are connected with the body. The development of intellect enables a man to find the deeper self within and partially replace what our philosophy calls the dehātmaka-buddhi, the sum of ideas and sensations which make us think of the body as ourself, by another set of ideas which reach beyond the body, and, existing for their own delight and substituting intellectual and moral satisfaction as the chief objects of life, master, if they cannot entirely silence, the clamour of the lower sensual desires. That animal ignorance which is engrossed with the cares and the pleasures of the body and the vital impulses, emotions and sensations is tamasic, the result of the predominance of the third principle of nature which leads to ignorance and inertia. That is the state of the animal and the lower forms of humanity which are called in the Purana the first or tamasic creation. This animal ignorance the development of the intellect tends to dispel and it assumes therefore an all-important place in human evolution. 

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“The highest term of evolution is the spirit in which knowledge, love and action, the threefold dharma of humanity, find their fulfilment and end.”

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But it is not only through the intellect that man rises. If the clarified intellect is not supported by purified emotions, the intellect tends to be dominated once more by the body and to put itself at its service and the lordship of the body over the whole man becomes more dangerous than in the natural state because the innocence of the natural state is lost. The power of knowledge is placed at the disposal of the senses, sattva serves tamas, the god in us becomes the slave of the brute. The disservice which scientific Materialism is unintentionally doing the world is to encourage a return to this condition; the suddenly awakened masses of men, unaccustomed to deal intellectually with ideas, able to grasp the broad attractive innovations of free thought but unable to appreciate its delicate reservations, verge towards that reeling back into the beast, that relapse into barbarism which was the condition of the Roman Empire at a high stage of material civilisation and intellectual culture and which a distinguished British statesman declared the other day to be the condition to which all Europe approached. The development of the emotions is therefore the first condition of a sound human evolution. Unless the feelings tend away from the body and the love of others takes increasingly the place of the brute love of self, there can be no progress upward. The organisation of human society tends to develop the altruistic element in man which makes for life and battles with and conquers aśanāyā mrtyuh. It is therefore not the struggle for life, or at least not the struggle for our own life, but the struggle for the life of others which is the most important term in evolution, — for our children, for our family, for our class, for our community, for our race and nation, for humanity. An ever-enlarging self takes the place of the old narrow self which is confined to our individual mind and body, and it is this moral growth which society helps and organises. 

So far there is little essential difference between our own ideas of human progress and those of the West except in this vital point that the West believes this evolution to be a development of matter and the satisfaction of the reason, the reflective and observing intellect, to be the highest term of our progress. Here it is that our religion parts company with Science. It declares the evolution to be a conquest of matter by the recovery of the deeper emotional and intellectual self which was involved in the body and overclouded by the desires of the prāna. In the language of the Upanishads the manah.kos.a and the buddhikos.a are more than the prānakosa and annakosa and it is to them that man rises in his evolution. Religion farther seeks a higher term for our evolution than the purified emotions or the clarified activity of the observing and reflecting intellect. The highest term of evolution is the spirit in which knowledge, love and action, the threefold dharma of humanity, find their fulfilment and end. This is the atman ¯ in the anandakos ¯ .a, and it is by communion and identity of this individual self with the universal self which is God that man will become entirely pure, entirely strong, entirely wise and entirely blissful, and the evolution will be fulfilled. The conquest of the body and the vital self by the purification of the emotions and the clarification of the intellect was the principal work of the past. The purification has been done by morality and religion, the clarification by science and philosophy, art, literature and social and political life being the chief media in which these uplifting forces have worked. The conquest of the emotions and the intellect by the spirit is the work of the future. Yoga is the means by which that conquest becomes possible. 

In Yoga the whole past progress of humanity, a progress which it holds on a very uncertain lease, is rapidly summed up, confirmed and made an inalienable possession. The body is conquered, not imperfectly as by the ordinary civilised man, but entirely. The vital part is purified and made the instrument of the higher emotional and intellectual self in its relations with the outer world. The ideas which go outward are replaced by the ideas which move within, the baser qualities are worked out of the system and replaced by those which are higher, the lower emotions are crowded out by the nobler. Finally all ideas and emotions are stilled and by the perfect awakening of the intuitive reason which places mind in communion with spirit the whole man is ultimately placed at the service of the Infinite. All false self merges into the true Self. Man acquires likeness, union or identification with God. This is mukti, the state in which humanity thoroughly realises the freedom and immortality which are its eternal goal.

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Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, educator and was one the most influential leaders of the Indian Independence Movement before become a spiritual teacher, introducing the world to his ideas on human progress and spiritual evolution.

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

The Sun (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Sun
Number: XIX
Astrology: Sun
Qabalah: Resh

Chris Gabriel January 11, 2025

In many ways, The Sun is the central axis of the tarot, just as it is the center of our solar system. It is through this card that we relate to the stars and planets that make up both the deck and our universe.

In Rider, we see a naked child riding upon a white horse and bearing a red flag. In the background, a wall is covered in sunflowers and the Sun looks down upon him.

In Thoth, we find two butterfly winged cherubs rejoicing in front of a green hill, encircled by a wall. A central flowery sun shines, and around the border we see the full Zodiac.

In Marseille, we are given two young brothers, standing before a wall. One guides the other, who is struggling. The Sun looks straight ahead at us.

In each card, we are presented with the great masculine force of consciousness and new life. The Sun is the father of life, and the babes depicted are expressions of all new life. The “cycle of life” is the cycle of the Sun, and it emanates from and into the wheel of creatures that make up the Zodiac. The Zodiac is the cyclical track which our Sun follows month by month.

The Egyptians believed the Sun died each night and was reborn again each morning, and that this cycle occurred not only daily, but yearly, with the Sunborn in the Spring, and dieing in the Winter. They represented the morning sun with a baby, Harpocrates, or the child Horus. 

With this card we see the joy of the newborn Sun, and his future power as the midday Sun.

As we follow the cycle of the sun, our lives are a mirror to its own, rising from our beds each day and then laying down each night.   Being born, living, and then fading and dying. Nearly all religions begin as Sun cults. Whether we view this cycle as a blessing, or a curse depends on us. 

Is life a Sisyphean task? We roll the solar stone up and down day by day, month by month, year by year until we die. Or is this a playground in which we can dance and move freely? Are we the child stumbling and struggling, or the child helping his brother?

The Sun represents our consciousness, in opposition to the Unconsciousness of the Moon. It illuminates what is dark and hidden, it is said Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and this is certainly true in our lives and minds.

The path of the Sun is certain, its rising and falling is unending. And as the bible tells us in Luke 12:3 “Whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”

When we pull this card, we will be brought into the light. Our time within the cycle will be illuminated, and nothing will hide in the darkness. This is a joy if you have done well, and a curse if you’ve been up to no good. Therefore let us rejoice in the light of consciousness, express ourselves and be seen clearly!

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

The Most Teachable Space

Rooms by the Sea, 1951. Edward Hopper.

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Suzanne Stabile January 9, 2025

My husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile and I have had the privilege of knowing Fr. Richard Rohr as a friend and spiritual mentor for most of the last three decades. Joseph was a Roman Catholic priest until he was forty, which seemed to put his life experience more in line with Richard’s than with mine. As a result, I always felt a little insecure when I found myself included in a discussion about something that I had never heard of.  

Father Rohr began to teach us about the  importance of liminal space in 2004. Their unique experiences as seminarians from the age of fourteen gave them both deep understanding of classical languages. Joe was able to immediately decipher the meaning of the word liminality by understanding the Latin word for “limina” which is, “threshold.”  

That afternoon, I learned that liminality refers to a special psychic and spiritual place where “all transformation happens.” It is when we are betwixt and between, neither where we’re going nor where we’ve been. 

More importantly, however, it is the place where we are not in control. The reality is, Father Rohr told us, is that nothing new happens as long as we are inside of our self-constructed comfort zones. And nothing much good or all that creative comes to us from business as usual.

As our conversations about liminality continued over the years,  Father Rohr shared that he thought liminal space was the most teachable space. In fact, he added, it might just be the only teachable space. If that doesn’t get your attention, I think it should. We have so much to learn both as individuals and as a global community, and if the only way we can learn it is on a threshold, then that is where I want to be.

Liminality is characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy. And when we experience it, our sense of identity dissolves, bringing about feelings of disorientation. We are living in a period of transition, during which our usual limits around thought, self-understanding, and behavior are not as reliable as they used to be. Liminal spaces are uncomfortable. We haven’t been taught how to hold mystery. We aren’t good at waiting. And we seem to struggle mightily with allowing the world to happen, instead of trying to control it.  

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“We are always moving toward somewhere and something. We just can’t seem to accept that we aren’t in charge of where or when.”

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I find it helpful to know that when we find ourselves on the threshold, we often respond initially in one of three ways. There are those who need security by temperament. They tend  to run back to the old “room” that is already constructed. They circle the wagons, pull in and protect and defend the doctrines and policies that suit them. Their orientation to time is the past, meaning they are tethered to past experiences and find their comfort in what has already happened. 

Then there are those who are risk-takers by temperament. Rather than stay on the threshold they will run ahead to a room of their own making and liking. Often leaving everything behind. Their orientation to time is the future and they are often over-anxious to get there. It seems that none of us want to stay on the threshold without answers. 

Finally, there are those who are oriented to the present moment and when they find themselves in liminality, they distract themselves by focusing on what is right in front of them. They are often wondering how they can be helpful in restoring comfort to all involved.  

I would suggest that we all spend some time considering the likelihood that when nothing is happening, something is happening. We are always moving toward somewhere and something. We just can’t seem to accept that we aren’t in charge of where or when. 

This journey we share opens the way for something new and I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to move toward something unfamiliar, I want to do it with some ancient wisdom as my companion. For me, that wisdom is found in the Enneagram. It’s trendy right now, so I suspect you’ve heard of it. The Enneagram I’m referring to, however, and the one I have based my life’s work on is thousands of years old and it continues to enlighten my understanding any time I am anxiously but courageously standing on the threshold. In this series of articles, we will explore the wisdom that can be found in The Enneagram, and learn together how to embrace the teaching space of liminality with courage, compassion, and creativity.

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Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.

David Eagleman

Film

On the Termite

Shrine in a termite mound, Kolwezi, Congo, c.1930.

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André Castor January 7, 2025

Termite mounds - those brown piles of rigid dirt that protrude from the landscape and hide acreage below them - are as ancient as the land they rise from. In parts of Africa, South America, and Australia, these earthen towers are not just temporary homes, they are enduring monuments, passed down through the generations of termite colonies. Some mounds are known to be over 34,000 years old, but most at least number in the hundreds of years, surviving across centuries and millennia, continually inhabited and rebuilt by successive colonies. 

When we think of buildings and cities, we often imagine them as symbols of human ambition, crafted to last for centuries or successive lifetimes. Yet, the termite mound offers a humbling contrast. Here, time itself does not belong to the individuals who build it, but to the community that comes together—over and over again—to tend to it, to repair it, and to keep it alive. It is not a static monument to human achievement, but a living, breathing testament to the persistence of purpose across generations.

The question then arises: What does it mean to build something that outlasts us? What can we learn from these oft-derided insects about living within the cycles of time, about the relationship between the individual and the collective, and about the ways in which our actions are woven into the fabric of a larger, continuous story?

Built by colonies of termites to serve as both nests and climate-controlled environments, these mounds are constructed from earth, saliva, feces, and other organic matter, which is collected by the termites from their surroundings. The architecture is remarkably complex, with a series of tunnels and ventilation shafts that regulate airflow and temperature, providing the colony with a safe, stable environment carefully controlled to maintain optimal conditions of temperature and humidity in the face of extreme weather conditions outside. The mounds can rise up to 30 feet in height and span much large areas below the surface, offering refuge and safety from predator.

Termites help improve soil health, promote water infiltration and enhance nutrient cycling through the aeration process of their building. Their mounds act as natural reservoirs, absorbing and slowly releasing moisture to sustain surrounding vegetation during dry periods. Some species of termites even cultivate fungi within their mounds, creating a symbiotic relationship that helps decompose plant matter, contributing to nutrient recycling in the ecosystem. In these ways, termite mounds are not just homes for termites, but vital structures that play an important role in maintaining the ecological balance of their environment. In the process of thousands of years, these insects build not just for themselves, and their future generations, but the world around them.

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“Decay is not the end of things, it is a necessary part of renewal.”

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Termite mounds are a reminder that individual lives are but fleeting moments in the vast expanse of time. What these creatures leave behind, in lives that usually last no more a few years for workers and perhaps a few decades for the Queen, is not just the work of a single generation, but the shared contributions of thousands of generations. Each mound is built, maintained, and inhabited by countless termites over thousands of years, but it is always the same mound, never fully finished, always in the process of becoming. The generations may come and go, but the mound itself endures. They are constantly being rebuilt, repaired, and adjusted. They are living structures, continuously in flux, responding to the demands of the environment, to the needs of the colony, and to the rhythms of life itself. Nothing about the mound is static. It is a cycle of construction and deconstruction, creation and decay, over and over again.This challenges the human tendency to view our lives as distinct and separate from one another, as if each of us is isolated in time. How often do we build lives as though they must stand alone, seeking personal recognition, fame, or success? The termite mound offers us a different way of being: a life that belongs to something greater, a purpose that extends beyond the self. The mound’s continuity suggests that the most meaningful actions are not those that bring fleeting personal glory, but those that contribute to a larger, ongoing process—one that connects generations, that transcends time.

For humans, the idea of impermanence is often uncomfortable. We are taught to chase stability, to fight decay, to preserve what we have for as long as possible. But there is a wisdom that we often overlook: decay is not the end of things, it is a necessary part of renewal. The cycles of life, growth, and decay are not to be feared, but understood as fundamental to the very essence of existence.

What if we understood our lives not as isolated projects but as part of an ongoing story—one in which we participate, but do not control? What if our actions, like the termites’ construction of their mounds, were not aimed at permanence or recognition, but at fostering a deeper, intergenerational connection to something larger than ourselves? The mound teaches us that the highest form of meaning may lie not in building for today, but in building for tomorrow, and for the communities that will follow us.

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André Castor is a conservationist and researcher who writes about the natural world.

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Ace of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Ace of Cups
Number: 1
Astrology: Water
Qabalah: Kether of He

Chris Gabriel January 4, 2025

The Ace of Cups is the fountainhead, the great source from which all the waters in the suit of cups spring. It is the Holy Grail and the Cauldron: the Heart.

In Rider, we find a golden chalice pouring forth water, held aloft by a divine hand. A dove flies down carrying a communion wafer. The cup is marked mysteriously with an M or W. This is the chalice of communion, the cup that runneth over. 

In Thoth, we find a blue cup with the base of a lotus flower. It is marked with a Vesica Piscis. Water pours forth from the top and bottom of the cup, and all around it are emanations of water, blood, wine, and divine light.

In Marseille, we find an ornate, kingly cup. It is adorned in jewels and ornament. Jodorowsky thought it resembled a cathedral with its 7 spires. The central spire bears 3 interwoven circles, which themselves contain 3 circles. This is the Heart as a temple.

Each of these cards depict, in their own way, the Heart, the Fountain from which all blood flows. In contrast to the Ace of Wands, which is the divine phallus, here we have the divine vulva, and rather than the masturbation genesis of the Egyptians, here we see the birth of the world from the womb of the Great Mother.

The suit of Cups pertains to Water, and thus our emotions and depths. This being the first card in the suit shows us that the Heart is the central source from which all feelings flow. But let us not forget, Water is Divine, and it brings life to the mundane cup. Before the blood of Christ spilled into the Holy Grail, it was just a cup. 

It is the divine beauty of the Blood that makes a Heart worthy and pure. This is shown in Revelation (an image of which appears in Thoth’s Lust card) as the Cup of Abominations that Babalon carries, one filled with the blood of saints, abominable things and her own filth. A heart of darkness. 

The Ace of Cups is our own Heart, whether it pumps pure love and life, or sour acidic hatred is up to us. When we drink from the Grail, will we receive immortality or be cursed by our own impurity?

When we pull the Ace of Cups we can expect an emotional experience, a significant dream, conversation, or vision. Our feelings will be brought forth. As Nietzsche writes: Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain.

We must listen to our Hearts and let them flow freely.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

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