Film

We Are Cosmic Code - An Interview with Kaitlyn Kaerhart

Telepathic Transference of Numbers Between Two People, 1908. ‘The Naturalisation of the Supernatural’.

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Molly Hankins January 30, 2025

The title of numerologist, musician, and mystic Kaitlyn Kaerhart’s best-selling book You Are Cosmic Code is quite literal in its meaning - through understanding the mathematical equations of our individual life paths we can tap into universal intelligence. She’s proven with her own life’s work that the data contained in each of our own life’s equations opens up an endless well of creative inspiration and naturally leads to easier, more effective decision-making. 

“I think we are coming into a world now where science is merging with the spiritual, where the left brain and right brain are going to come together and people are going to be able to comprehend on a different level that there isn’t a difference between these two things. They can co-exist and they do co-exist, and when you think about it, music is really just patterns and frequencies - it’s math! Music is math, numerology is math.” 

The intersection between spirituality and music is what she’s always been about, and you can hear it in the way she speaks. There’s a cadence to her voice, particularly when she’s reading personal or universal cosmic code, that sounds like a subtle energy beatbox. As a musician for most of her adult life, she’s been a solo artist under the name Kaerhart, played guitar in several bands and written songs for other artists. Numerology was something she always studied for fun, but when a bad break-up left her homeless and sleeping in a friend’s recording studio, she started doing readings to make a living. Within a year she’d built that business online and was being courted by Penguin-Randomhouse U.K. to write You Are Cosmic Code.

Kaerhart’s philosophy of pattern recognition as the gateway to self-knowledge is a pathway to finding out what we as individuals need to thrive. It also helps that she has a photographic memory, which means her proficiency in numerology, astrology, Human Design, Galactic Maya and Destiny Cards entails almost perfect recall. She believes that, “All these different mystical tools I use are different entry points for people to access their purpose.” The well of information contained in these systems, if integrated into our lives, offers knowledge which empowers us in a way that can bring about a complete shift in priorities. 

“Numerology is an incredibly powerful tool that can instantly access who you really are,” she said. “When you realize how much power you actually hold over your life, you no longer accept things that are out of alignment or keeping you down. The more we do this, the more we’re raising consciousness.” Kaerhart also contends that whether we believe in systems like numerology or astrology is irrelevant because if we’re willing to hear the information, it causes us to reflect on whether it feels true or not. That consideration of our underlying motivations and behavioral patterns alone is an empowering invitation to authentic living.

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“Just as musical instruments naturally fall out of tune from being both over-played or from sitting untouched, so do our states of being - mental, physical, emotional and spiritual.”

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Her particular brand of numerology, fully explained in her book, Instagram videos and in the materials on her website, emphasizes the study of personal annual cycle patterns that occur every nine years. We’ll use July 10th as an example to show how the equation works:.

Birth Month (7) + Birth Date (10) + Current Year’s Numerals Added Up (2+0+2+5) = 26

Reduce to total sum of those numbers, 2 +6 = 8 

According to Kaerhart, 8 is a year of achievement related to developing personal and financial power, but she gives deeply specific answers to every possible outcome of this equation. Like any responsible spiritual practitioner, she’ll tell you to “take what resonates and leave the rest” from any of her content but for Kaerhart, numerology is a very clear roadmap for how to live an optimized life. It came to her intuitively in a dream,. She kept hearing the words ‘spiritual numbers,’ decided to find out what that meant and accidentally built a wildly successful online business and became an international best-selling author as a result.

In addition to the personal annual cycles, there are also personal monthly cycles (108 total months in each cyclical, 9 year cycle) and life destiny numbers that speak to macro-themes related to the realization of our personal destinies. Each life destiny number is related to a certain archetype, and Kaerhart is a life path 1, which is the path of leadership. It’s something she always felt deeply uncomfortable with, but ultimately worked through using numerology.

Memory Tricks, 1617. Robert Fludd.

“In my old bands even though I was just a guitar player who wrote the songs, I was constantly in these positions where I was thrust into the spotlight. And when I found out I was a life path 1 I was like, what if I tried to embrace that? What if I tried embracing being the leader archetype even though it’s so uncomfortable for me and I don’t want to be seen?” she recalled. “And when I finally stepped into that role of leader instead of trying to hide, that’s when I got my book deal and my socials started to grow. I was embracing the traits and qualities of the path I’m meant to walk, and numerology helped me. It’s an incredible tool to learn to love and accept ourselves.”

Digesting her materials feels like an attunement. Just as musical instruments naturally fall out of tune from being both over-played or from sitting untouched, so do our states of being - mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. Working with numerology, and especially Kaerhart’s particular practice of incorporating multiple information systems, feels like being tuned to harmonize our state of being. “A lot of people who come to me feel really lost, and I was too - I felt like everything was failing and I didn’t know what path I was supposed to take. Following my cosmic code helped me try on being a leader, and I just tried being in that energy and flowing with my annual and monthly cycles. As soon as I did it everything manifested.”

Kaerhart still writes music and happily described how much lighter it feels to be creative now that the pressure is off from having to be commercially successful enough to make a living at it. She was even offered a record deal recently, contingent upon “knocking off the numerology” on her Instagram. Most of her old friends from the music business have been baffled by the shift in her focus, and she hears the same feedback from peers in the spiritual community who don’t understand why she’s still making music. 

“Music and numerology are both incredible tools for healing. With music it’s instant, you put on a song and your vibration instantly changes. Even if you’re depressed, when you put on your favorite song, the healing is instant,” she said. “Music transcends language and culture, but so do numbers. Numerology requires us to take a moment to understand it, to do the math. But in terms of results, they’re exactly the same.” 

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You can find Kaitlyn Kaerhart at Kaerhart.com and @Kaerhart.

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

Ky Dickens

Film

Disharmony as Intelligence

Color Analysis From A Mummy Cloth, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. 1902.

Tuukka Toivonen January 28, 2025

Iwakan is one of my favorite Japanese phrases. It consists of three Chinese characters, 違 (i, meaning difference, deviation), 和 (wa, meaning harmony, peace) and 感 (kan,  meaning feeling, sense), that together form a single word that loosely translates as a ‘sense of disharmony’. In daily interactions, I use the term casually  when something feels off or out of place, yielding a mild yet noticeable dissonance rather  than a jarring sense of wrongness. A friend recently pointed out that having an iwakan does not necessarily suggest a negative situation or grave problem as such, only that  something—a sentence, a bit of furniture, a stylistic choice—might need to be rearranged  or reconsidered. 

What strikes me as remarkable about this single word—beyond how it incorporates the  beautiful wa character (considered quintessentially Japanese) in its midst—is its gentle emphasis not explicitly on disharmony or dissonance per se, but our sensing of it.. Along with foregrounding the utterer’s subjective experience, iwakan for  me serves as an eloquent reminder of the embodied nature of human knowing. It is the final kan character that signals this definitive quality, in a gesture so subtle that it becomes all too easy to overlook its potency. Here, dissonance becomes something felt intuitively in the body as opposed to a rational or purely intellectual observation of a discrepancy or  incongruence.  

Many  other Japanese emotional and relational expressions end with  kan or ki (気), the Chinese character of Daoist origin that (in Daoist usage) refers  to the fundamental universal energy that permeates all life and the entire cosmos. 

Think of the curious feeling you get, having just left home, that ‘something’s not  quite right’, prompting you to realize a moment later that the keys are still on the kitchen  table or that the air-conditioning is still humming. Or imagine spotting a dirty piece of  plastic waste in the middle of your most cherished beach and the  sensations this sight arouses in your body (while suspending any explicit thoughts about what should or should not be done in response). Next, recall how your abdominal area or your shoulders feel after a challenging conversation or an outright verbal conflict. What sensations can you detect or remember? What is the ‘shape’ and contour of your unease in each case? If you are anything like me, your experience of disharmony in situations like  these may range from a strange tickle or tingle to slight disgust and heaviness.  

In some cases, disharmony grows into a persistent, nagging signal that is simply  impossible to ignore. Think back to the moment you first faced ‘adult’ pressures — when you began to get serious about your education, find a proper job or plan for career  success. Alongside any immediate feelings of anxiety or frustration, did this generate any  disharmonies or recurring kinds of bodily discomfort in you? In my case, the unease I felt in relation to future expectations surged around the age of 17 and 18, producing a lingering, growing discomfort that eventually led to a major life transformation. 

The inner resistance I experienced in that now distant moment in my small hometown in Finland did not spring purely from my  naïveté or lack of familiarity with the ‘real world’. No— it was rather that the transitions I  was being asked to undertake felt devoid of meaning and resonance. The foremost paths into further study and work that I was being offered appeared  alienating and uninteresting at the time. Internally, I met this situation with a screaming  ‘why?’ along with the desire to find an escape hatch. 

This sense of disharmony may not have resolved had it not been for a surprising turn of events that led me to discover an alternative route forward. On one  sunny winter morning, seemingly out of the blue, an American youth musical group visited my high school in Kotka. That encounter inspired me to put all other  plans—and uncomfortable expectations—properly on hold. Upon graduation, I duly flew to Denver to join a year-long tour that would first take me to the United States and then  onwards to new lives in Japan and the United Kingdom. For the first time, I found a vigorous sense of aliveness, belonging and meaning in a totally new  context. 

It was iwakan that encouraged me to commit to this transition, coupled with  the strong positive sentiments I felt towards the musical program. To me, this served as a powerful demonstration of the surprising influence that a subtle, embodied sensation can wield when we stay (or are forced to stay) with it. Building on these reflections alongside other experiences, I have come to see disharmony as a vital kind of  intelligence, a  holistic one that we all too often ignore at our peril. We may not have the words to latch onto and express it, or perhaps  our society does not (yet) view it as a perfectly legitimate way of knowing,  learning or making decisions. Change, however, may be on its way even in cultures that, unlike Japan, do not incorporate nuanced references to felt sensations in daily spoken language. 

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“All this should help us see why the humblest inner twitch or sensation—whether dissonant  or harmonious—has the potential to be an important bridge between our day-to-day  experience and the civilizational priority of protecting the Earth.”

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Drawing inspiration from contemplative traditions, dance, and structured  experiments and surveys, a growing body of multidisciplinary academic research  approaches the felt dimension of intelligence through the concepts of embodiment and embodied cognition. Although still a new field of empirical inquiry, this research is already coalescing on understandings that profoundly challenge conventional definitions of  intelligence as well as the reductive views of  intelligence as algorithmic or computational. It proposes, simply, that intelligence  emerges not in the brain alone but through the ongoing interaction of our minds, bodies and environments. The bodily sensations we feel as we go about our daily lives—whether  relating to the temperature of the air, the motion of our legs as we walk, or the discomfort  we sense before an important presentation—are integral to the way we exist and navigate  the world, rather than something peripheral or subordinate to the explicit, conscious thought we bring to focused tasks and problem-solving.  

One way to interpret this trend is to view it as the gradual and long-overdue incorporation  of our animality, aliveness, and wholeness into mainstream thought. It is a liberating shift,  in at least three respects: first, it encourages us to stop suppressing or discounting aspects  of ourselves we internally feel compelled to follow but culturally devalue. This may result in enhanced feelings of personal integrity, wholeness and connectedness. Second, the realization that we are fundamentally embodied beings—living organisms with  bodies—helps us understand that the essence of our intelligence cannot be replicated or appropriate technologically, for it relies on direct lived experience. Third, embracing our embodied, animal selves brings us radically closer to the more-than-human world, highlighting and activating a foundational commonality, a shared way of being that the various artificial (conceptual and material) divides we have enacted between us and the  rest of the living world have not—and can never—eliminate.  

In the ecological philosopher David Abram’s words, this subtle transformation means we  no longer “look upon nature from a cool, detached position ostensibly outside of that  nature”, instead we (once again) become nature.¹ As such, our lives can more fully embrace the processes uncovered by embodiment scholars where intelligence fundamentally arises through the interaction of mind, body and ecology rather than from the individual brain or algorithmic machines.  

All this should help us see why the humblest inner twitch or sensation—whether dissonant  or harmonious—has the potential to be an important bridge between our day-to-day  experience and the civilizational priority of protecting the Earth. As the German  philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs insightfully observes, “[e]ven an ecological redefinition of our relationship to the earthly environment will only succeed if our  corporeality and aliveness—as connectedness or conviviality with our natural environment —is at its center. Only if we inhabit our bodies will we also be able to maintain the earth in  habitable form”². Should we fail to recover and revalue our embodied natures, we will put ourselves at risk of becoming diminished and disempowered by artificial intelligence  technologies, allowing the opportunity to reconnect with our planet tragically slip beyond our grasp. 

So it turns out that iwakan—in a marked contrast with the subtlety of the phrase—has quite a few major lessons to teach us, both individually and societally. By observing  not only the disharmonies of our world but also  paying keen attention to our embodied sensations, we begin to relearn how to live fully in  our bodies. If we do so in a way that welcomes every kind of sensation as constitutive  of our intelligence, we will learn to once again live intelligently in the more-than-human  world. This is not an easy task—the learning journey I have personally experienced  has been long and remains far from complete, replete with myriad mysteries that may  never be resolved—but with practice, the basic ability to listen to our senses and inner  interoceptive, somatic signals eventually becomes effortless. Thus, striking a beautifully  harmonious and satisfying chord, we discover that by participating in our own existence  wholly, we will also find it radically easier to participate—experientally and and  regeneratively—in the larger sphere of life that our existence is rooted in.

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Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors. 

Tuukka would like to thank Elina Osborne and Chiharu Suzuki for the suggestions they kindly  offered in the process of this article’s germination at Amigo House.

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¹  Abram, D. 2010. Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. New York (N.Y.): Vintage books.
²  Fuchs, T. 2021. In defence of the human being: Foundational questions of an embodied 2 anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

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.”

Knight of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Knight of Wands
Number: 1 
Astrology: Sagittarius or Leo
Qabalah: Yod of Yod 

Chris Gabriel January 25, 2025

The Knight of Wands is the embodiment of fire, the true bearer of the Wand. In each depiction, we are shown figures of pure externalized energy racing toward their highest aims..

In Rider, we see a rearing brown horse whose rider is dressed in tattered yellow robes. This robe itself is fire, and bears the mark of its elemental creature, the Salamander. The knight wears silver armor, and his helmet is topped with a fiery plume. His wand is verdant. He is riding through a desert landscape with pyramids in the distance.

In Thoth, we find a black horse with a mane and tail of fire. His rider is adorned in black armor with a beard of fire and a helmet topped with a hawk. His wand is aflame. His cloak joins the great fire that fills the card.

In Marseille, we have a far more calm scene, a cloaked horse and his rider both gaze down from their height upon an unseen sight below. Here we see the dominance of the rider over the horse, while the others aggressively ride, this knight reigns in that strength.

The Knight of Wands is the highest and fieriest card in the suit of Wands. In Thoth and Rider, this is shown as aggression, and as extreme and volatile movement, while the Knight in Marseille seeks to control this fire. It is a difficult task, as fire is the element most difficult to contain: water can be dredged, dammed and bottled, air can be blocked by a wall and blown out your mouth, earth can be shaped with ease, but fire burns or dies. 

Both Knights in Thoth and Marseille are white knuckled as they grip the reins of the horse. They are “riding the tiger” of aggression, and cannot simply turn away. The Knight in Marseille has broken his horse thoroughly, controlling his primal drives. 

This is a struggle for many, especially children whose immense emotions cannot be fully expressed by language and freedom, and so they throw tantrums and grow angry. The Knight of Wands can be an unstoppable person firing on all cylinders, which can be exciting or terrifying. This can also be the force you will embody.

As Sagittarius, we can think of arrows and bullets, an extremely useful tool of aggression when pointed in the right direction. The Knight of Wands working in the wrong direction is horrible, but in the right direction it is an astounding force.

Therefore let us have the discipline to aim our wills at the right target, and then move ahead full speed.

When we pull this card, we can expect a great deal of energy either in ourselves or in a fiery person. If you use this energy well and move in the right direction, the results will be swift and certain.

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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

Al Pacino

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.

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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.”