Film

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.

The King and Prince of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  King of Cups, Prince of Cups
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Water or Scorpio
Qabalah: Yod of He or Vau of He

Chris Gabriel March 1, 2025

The King of Cups is the ruler of the suit. He sits imperiously on a throne, cup in hand. He is the powerful sea, and the paradoxical strength of water. As chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching says: 

Nothing in all beneath heaven is so soft and weak as water.
And yet, for conquering the hard and strong, nothing succeeds like water.
And nothing can change it:
weak overcoming strong,
soft overcoming hard.

This is the way of the King of Cups.

In Rider, we find a fair faced King wearing an ornate crown with golden filigree, a greenish gold cape with red scallops, and a blue robe. A fish pendant hangs around his neck and his shoes are scaly. One hand holds the Cup and the other, a scepter. Behind him the sea churns, a ship sails, and a fish swims.

In Thoth, we have the equivalent Prince. He is nude but for his helmet, which bears an Eagle. He stares into his cup which holds a serpent. In his hand is a downward lotus. His fluid chariot is drawn by a great eagle. Waves splash behind him.

In Marseille, we have the simplest image. An old grey bearded king with a large crown under which the flaps of his hat rise up. He is dressed as the other kings, but his cup is the largest.

We can interpret, in this card, the classic 1950’s image of the father, home from a long day of work and having a drink, and all of the negative connotations that may come with this.

In the phrase “Drink like a fish”, you will see the ill dignified form of the King. The solution is the serpent in the cup: St. John’s Chalice.

St. John is given a cup of poison wine. He blesses it, a serpent rises out, and he drinks it just fine. This is the highest form of the Scorpionic Water: a medicinal poison. Harmful substance distilled into a curative form. The King of Cups understands well the maxim of Paracelsus: dosis sola facit venenum. The dose makes the poison.

While the King of Wands will act on aggression and make war with the world, the King of Cups will, like water, slowly erode the foundations of his enemies. He must beware, however, lest his waters dissolve himself. This is shown perfectly in the Fisher King of Arthurian legend who, wounded again and again by the bleeding, poisonous Lance of Longinus (the Lance that wounded Christ on the Cross) and by his own poisoning, poisons his land to become a waste. The only cure is in the Holy Grail.

When pulling this card we may be met with an older, wiser man who has mastered his emotions, and is filled with love. Alternatively, they may be troubled, with a heavy heart. We may also be called on to use our love and power. Emotion is extremely powerful, be sure it sweetens and heals rather than spoil and poison those around us.

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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

Karmic Escape Velocity

George Sturdy and Solomon Young, 1869.

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Molly Hankins February 27, 2025

The Law of One is based on a series of channeled conversations between physics professor Don Elkins and Ra, the Egyptian sun god. It posits that forgiveness is the path required to exit the wheel of karma. Forgiveness of self and others corrects the imbalance of ‘energetic momentum’ between giver and receiver, described as karma in The Law of One. The momentum is said to take on a circular pattern of repetition that can only be disrupted by complete forgiveness. 

Ra is a 2.6 billion year old, sixth-dimensional social-memory complex. They chose a physicist as the preferred channel for The Law of One’s teaching because of Elkin’s advanced understanding of certain physics-based concepts, namely inertia. In physics, inertia is a property that allows matter to exist in a single state unless changed by an external force. Humans caught in the cycle of karma, unable to understand the true purpose of forgiveness, risk never being able to achieve the escape velocity necessary to get out.

Ra, and many other higher dimensional beings who’ve taken an interest in human life, acts as that external force by giving us the information necessary to overcome karmic inertia. From our limited perspective, we can’t understand the utility of forgiveness, particularly radical forgiveness for acts of violence and destruction that are deemed unforgivable. Without being able to understand why it’s useful to forgive, and how forgiveness of self is inherent in true forgiveness of another, we’re unmotivated to do so. 

Rather than repeating the lessons created by imbalance, forgiveness allows us to integrate sustainable balance in how we give and receive energy. We benefit from understanding how the physical and emotional experience of balanced energy exchange feels and the gain intellectual experience of the lesson learned. Not only does conscious forgiveness prevent us from making the same mistakes and repeating lessons, it releases us from negativity by allowing us to see others as part of ourselves.

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“Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel.”

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As suggested by the name, the premise of The Law of One is that we are all one.  Specifically that all of life is part of the original thought of The Creator, and as we all contain the initial  creative spark from one thought, we are all reflections of The Creator. By recognizing ourselves in the reflection of another, we can more easily forgive. Forgiveness is not about condoning a transgression or trying to make it right, it’s about releasing any negative emotions to free ourselves. 

Once forgiven, the transgression no longer has power over us, even if the pain caused by it still remains. This frees us to begin healing, and the Bible refers to that healed state of being as “a peace that passes all understanding” (Phillippians 4:7). Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel. While the inevitability of human drama will pull us back on,we can always forgive and hit karmic escape velocity once more. 

A passage from The Law of One uses the metaphor of a poker game to describe the role of forgiveness as a tool to ‘win’ the game of life: “I am Ra. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin — and we stress begin — to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes.

“You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: ‘All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.’ This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love.”

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

Rick Beato

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.”

Wheel of Fortune (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Wheel of Fortune
Number: X
Astrology: Jupiter
Qabalah: Kaph, the Palm

Chris Gabriel February 22, 2025

In the Wheel of Fortune, we find one of the greatest mysteries in the deck. It is the endless flux of our lives and the universe encapsulated in a single image. Understanding this card will allow us to grasp the cosmology of tarot and divination.

In Rider, we find a wheel in the middle of a blue sky. The Cross is its center, and around it are the symbols of Salt, Sulphur, Mercury, and Aquarius. On the rim is the Tetragrammaton and TARO, serving duall

purpose as an anagram of ROTA, or Wheel. Atop the Wheel we have a Sphinx bearing a sword. A snake falls down its left side, and Hermanubis flies up from below. At the corners are the four Cherubs, winged and reading in their clouds.

In Thoth, there are vibrant purples and golds - the colors of the divine. In the center is a ten spoked wheel. Riding the wheel are the Sphinx who sits above, Apophis or Typhon falling down, and a monkey climbing up. The background is a violet spiral marred by the lightning bolts, which descend from the stars above.

In Marseille, we are shown a more material wheel sat upon a base. It has six spokes. Along the wheel are three monkeys: the one atop is crowned, winged and bearing a sword, to the left one falls and the other rises on the right.

What is the Wheel of Fortune? What is the meaning of this trinity?

Let us look to Jupiter, the God of this card. Jupiter, like the other Gods of the ancient pantheon, is very human. As the king of the Gods he rewards those who please him and punishes those who upset him, and his whims are very fickle. This is the nature of life and luck, where our conditions change extremely easily and with no warning. We find ourselves on top of the world, and then we are plummeted down again, and must fight our way back up. This is an eternal struggle.

This card argues there is a logic to this cycle of change. It can be put concisely into a magic word: IAO.

Isis
Apophis
Osiris

In these three characters, we are given the narrative cycle for life. Isis and Osiris are married, Apophis/Seth kills Osiris and chops him up, then Isis restores and mummifies him.

Isis is the mother and healer, Apophis the son and destroyer, and Osiris, the father and the destroyed. 

This is the essential magickal trinity of life, death, and rebirth, and the alchemical trinity of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. 

I see this pattern very clearly in children’s games: Rock, Paper, Scissor and Kiss, Marry, Kill.

Isis: Salt: Rock: Kiss
Apophis: Sulphur: Scissor: Kill
Osiris: Mercury: Paper: Marry

The trinity is even mirrored in language with the Ablaut Reduplication. Consider: Tic-Tac-Toe, hip-hop, splish splash. If we reverse these, Toe-Tac-Tic, hop-hip, splash splish, we end up with a very awkward phrase, we naturally speak in the IAO pattern.

This may seem silly, but it is through this exact pattern that we can grasp our ever changing conditions in life.

The Wheel of Fortune itself is still used extensively in games: from game shows, various wheel based auctions to, of course, roulette. In all of these, we see a very immediate form of luck and changing fortunes.

When we pull this card, we are seeing a coming change to our situation.  Luck and fate will come into play. Whether or not this will bring us higher or drop us farther can only be indicated by the other cards. For example, if a card like “Failure” precedes Fortune things may be ready to improve. 

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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

A Start

Knot, 1947. Anni Albers.

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Anni Albers was one of the key figures of 20th Century Art. Joining Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School as an untrained, but deeply passionate, novice, she came to create a new language of textiles, a radical theory of color, and an understanding of pattern and form that would change the course of art history. Her career extended long beyond the Bauhaus, blurring the lines between craft and fine art, teaching at Black Mountain College and becoming the first textile artist to have a solo show at the MOMA. In this essay, written in 1947 but not published until Gropius’ death in 1969, she succinctly captures the feeling of a radical place that offered new promises and the development that this philosophy encouraged in all of its practitioners.

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Anni Albers, February 20, 2025

I came to the Bauhaus at its “period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. But far from being awesome, the baggy white dresses and saggy white suits had rather a familiar homemade touch. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances. 

Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no hopelessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own land of confusion. But there seemed to be a gathering of efforts for some dim and distant purpose, a purpose I could not yet see and which, I feared might remain perhaps forever hidden from me. 

Then Gropius spoke. It was a welcome to us, the new students. He spoke, I believe, of the ideas that brought the Bauhaus into being and of the work ahead. I do not recall anything of the actual phrasing or even of the thoughts expressed. What is still present in my mind is the experience of a gradual condensation, during that hour he spoke, of our hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective. It was an experience that meant purpose and direction from there on. 

This was about twenty-six years ago. 

Last year some young friends of mine told me of the opening speech Gropius gave at Harvard at the beginning of the new term. What made it significant to them was the experience of realizing sense and meaning in a confused world, now as then—the same experience of finding one’s bearing.

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Anni Albers (1899 –1994) was a German born, Jewish artist, writer, teacher, and printmaker. Alongside her husband Josef Albers, she helped redefine color theory in the 20th century, and was the leading voice textile art, ushering in craft practices into fine art.

Richard Prince

Film

Wagnerian Painting

Portrait of Téoder de Wyzewa, Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1989.

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Téodor de Wyzewa was Polish born theorist, writer, and critic who in the last decades of the 19th century became amongst the most celebrated minds in Paris, contributing a philosophical grounding to the Symbolist movement. This essay, first published in 1885 of which a section is reproduced here, anticipates the development of abstract art and espouses a number of formalist theories upon which many 20th century movements would be built. Key amongst them is the idea that art is the route to access 'the higher reality of a disinterested life'.

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Téodor de Wyzewa, February 18, 2025

The world we live in, which we declare real, is purely a creation of our soul. The mind cannot go outside itself; and the things it believes to be outside it are only its ideas. To see, to hear, is to create appearances within oneself, thus to create Life. But the baneful habit of creating the same things has made us lose the joyful awareness of our own creative power; we thought real the dreams we gave birth to, and also this inner self, limited by objects and subject to them, that we had conceived. 

Consequently, we have been the slaves of the world, and the sight of this world, where we engaged our interests, has since ceased to give us pleasure. And the Life which we had created - created in order to give us the joy of creating - has lost its original character. It is necessary therefore to recreate it; one must build, over and above this world of defiled, habitual appearances, the holy world of a better life: better, because we can make it intentionally, and know that we make it. This is the very business of Art.

But from where will the artist take the elements of this higher life? He can find them nowhere unless in our normal life, in what we call Reality. This is to say that the artist, and those to whom he wants to communicate the life that he creates, cannot, as a result of what their minds normally do, erect a living work of art in their souls, unless it presents itself to them under the very conditions in which they have always perceived life.

And so, this explains the necessity of realism in art; not a realism which transcribes the vain appearances that we think real, with no other end, but an artistic realism, which tears these appearances from the false reality of interest where we perceive them, in order to transport them into the higher reality of a disinterested life. We see around us trees, animals, men, and we assume they are living; but, seen in this way, they are only vain shadows which drape the shifting decor of our vision. They will only live when the artist, in whose special soul they have a more intense reality, inspires them with this higher life - recreates them before us.

As minds become more refined, Art requires increasingly more diverse methods than those operative in reality to suggest the same life. Thus, a polychrome statue resembles the models it has reproduced too much in its material.  

And so again, a drama, when read, will appear more alive to delicate souls than the same drama played in a theatre by living actors. In order to preserve the feelings of art, we have an ever more urgent need that the impressions of life should be given us, in the life of art, by means other than those of real life.

Painting responds to this need. The means it employs to suggest sensations to us artistically differ entirely from the means employed by reality. For the colours and lines in a. painting are not reproductions of the quite different lines and colours which are in reality; they are only conventional signs which have become equivalent to what they signify as the result of an association between the images. But they are just as different, finally, from real colours and lines as a word differs from a thought, or a musical note from the emotion it suggests.

A few outstanding masters, their eyes endowed with an almost pathological sensitivity, accustomed artists to seeing objects surrounded by the air that bathed them. From that moment, the vocabulary of painting became modified; new signs were introduced which created new sensations.

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“Marrying them in such a way as to produce in us, by their free play, a complete impression comparable to that of a symphony.”

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Painting, Literature and Music each suggest just one mode of life. But life exists in the intimate union of these three modes. Soon, their art must have appeared to painters, as it did to writers, to be insufficient to create the whole life which they conceived. Therefore, long ago they wanted to expand the possibilities of their art, to employ it to reconstitute diverse forms of life. For example, writers noticed that words, over and above their precise conceptual meaning, had assumed special resonances for the ear, and that syllables had become musical tones, as had the rhythms of the sentence. Then, they attempted a new art: poetry. They employed words no longer for their conceptual value, but as sonorous syllables evoking emotion in the soul by means of their harmonious alliance.

The same need to translate the life of the emotions with the means of their art very quickly drove painters to go beyond the limits of reproducing their sensations in a wholly realistic way.

And a new kind of painting was attempted by them, one which a happy agreement of circumstances made possible. This is to say that colours and lines themselves, like words, had also, through familiarity, assumed for souls an emotional value independent of the objects they represented. We had always seen a certain facial expression, a certain colour or certain contours accompany the objects which inspired us with such-and-such an emotion. And behold, these colours, these contours and these expressions, are linked with these emotions in our soul; they have become not just signs of our visual sensations, but signs of our emotions also; they have become, by the accident of this connection, emotional signs, like the syllables of poetry or musical notes. And so, certain painters were able to leave behind the original purpose of Art, which was to suggest the precise sensations of sight. They employed colours and lines for purely symphonic compositional ends, with no regard for the direct depiction of a visual object. And nowadays, colours and lines - the means of painting - can be used in two quite different kinds of painting: the one sensuous and descriptive which recreates exactly how objects look; the other emotional and musical, neglectful of treating the objects these colours and lines represent, using them only as signs of emotion, marrying them in such a way as to produce in us, by their free play, a complete impression comparable to that of a symphony.

Therefore, emotional painting, as well as descriptive painting, has a legitimate right to exist, and possesses the value of an art which is equally precious. Its first master was the poetic Leonardo da Vinci. He gave us the emotion of lascivious terror through the mystery of perverse and supernatural expressions. Later, Peter Paul Rubens created the most intense symphonies of colour. Whereas with Rembrandt, we find a supernatural play of chiaroscuro which creates an emotion which is at once more troubled and more restrained. Afterwards, Watteau translated elegant melancholy: he devoted the delightful grace of his drawings to light-hearted and sweet poems which seem to recall certain andante movements in Mozart's quartets. And in turn, Delacroix was the lyricist of violent passions, a little vulgar in their romanticism.

All these masters have proved that painting could equally well be descriptive of real sensations, or suggestive of real emotions. Only, they have intuited that these two possibilities demanded two quite different kinds of art, and that they had to choose one or the other, following their natural inclinations. Today, the necessity of making a choice is even more vital.

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Téodor de Wyzewa (1862-1914) was a Polish writer, critic, and translator who emigrated to France in 1869. He was a leading exponent of the Symbolist movement.

Four of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Luxury, the Four of Cups
Number: 4
Astrology: Moon in Cancer
Qabalah: Chesed of He

Chris Gabriel February 15, 2025

The Four of Cups is comfort, familial love, and emotion. We are given three very different interpretations of this same force in each deck.

In Rider, we see a youth no longer satisfied by material pleasure. He sits like an ascetic beneath a tree, rejecting the phantom hand that holds out a cup for him. He is like the Buddha, denouncing the world for the sake of what’s higher.

In Thoth, we see four golden cups and elaborate pipe-like roots leading to the Lotus, which is pouring down water into the cups. The clouds in the sky are the silvery gray of the Moon, and the wavey Sea is the light blue of Cancer.

In Marseille, we have four cups and a pillar-like flower. Qabalistically, the card is the Mercy of the Queen. This is the love and kindness of the mother.

A good upbringing with a loving family leads to, at its best, an individual who is secure and can withstand the tumult of the world. Often, however, people lose themselves within the comfort of home, reject the external, and remain in arrested development.

In Rider we see a boy who is becoming unhappy with his comfort. He may be preparing to grow, to expand and transform. When Crowley described his Thoth card, he gave it a subtitle: “The Seeds of Decay”, which lay in the fruits of pleasure.  

This is not to say comfort is always bad; there is a time and a need for it. Childhood may be best spent in comfort, butwhen childhood ends, the comfort must be abandoned and the enchanted circle of the mother broken.

If this fails to occur, one will remain in an illusion, a daydream, an oedipal hologram meant to keep an individual from individuating. This is the struggle of the card's astrological placement: the Moon in Cancer, even though it is in the sign of its rulership, is prone to delusions and extreme sensitivity to the world around it. 

The card is notably featured in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Kid finds it in a destroyed house and then pulls it while having his fortune read:

He took one. He'd not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back. The juggler took the boy's hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up. 

Cuatro de copas, he called out. 

The woman raised her head. She looked like a blindfold mannequin raised awake by a string. 

Cuatro de copas, she said. She moved her shoulders. The wind went among her garments and her hair.

When we pull the Four of Cups we can expect a slow and comfortable energy to be at play, we don’t need to worry. Nothing is falling apart, for now.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

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.

Film

Egyptian Tantra and the Ankh

Sphinx Mystagoga, 1676. Athanasius Kircher.

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Molly Hankins February 13, 2025

In Drunvalo Melchizedek’s Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life book series, he shares channeled material from Thoth, also known as Hermes Trismegistus. The second book outlines the basics of Egyptian tantra practice, explaining that recycling orgasmic energy is the key to eternal life. This is a vast departure from many other tantra traditions, but makes sense - human life begins with an orgasm.

From an energetic standpoint,  most orgasms are akin to discharging a battery into a ground wire - the energy dissipates and is gone from the battery forever. “This is what all the world’s tantric systems I am aware of believe,” he writes, “That orgasm brings one a little closer to death because a person loses his or her life-force energy in the orgasm.”

For the Egyptians, controlling sexual currents was more important than controlling sexual release. According to Thoth / Hermes, the Egyptian tantric system is unique as it recycles sexual currents as a source of infinite life-force energy. Engaging in this practice, according to the sex magic schools of Isis (partnered) and Horus (solo), can create the conditions allowing for eternal youth and life.  

Overlay the Egyptian ankh next to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, and the meeting point of his arms is the energetic starting point at which we’re directing the sexual current in our bodies - the heart chakra. The practice  is that of pushing energy out from our backs.allowing it to loop back around the top of our head, and re-enter the front of the heart chakra to form the ankh shape. 

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“Immortality is not living forever in our current form - it’s learning to work with the energy that  animate our physical bodies, to the point where we don’t age.”

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The goal of Egyptian tantra is to let sexual energy build up the spine, and then move it towards the heart chakra as you’re approaching orgasm. This practice can be used to simply build vital energy or directed towards an intention, and can be performed solo or with a partner. The instructions, as Drunvalo, explains are: .

1. Allow the sexual energy to rise up your spine and collect at the top of the heart chakra.

2. The moment you feel orgasm is imminent, fill your lungs 9/10ths of the way full and hold.

3. At the moment of orgasm, push the energy out the back of the heart chakra at a 90 degree angle relative to your spine, allowing the energy to continue in the round shape like the top of ankh, and recycle it back into your body. 

4. The instant the sexual current energy makes contact with the front of the body, draw in the rest of your breath so your lungs are full, this completes the ankh before exhaling.

To illustrate the power of this practice, Drunvalo uses the example of a standard tuning fork. Once struck, it will vibrate for a certain amount of time upon being struck. A tuning fork with the ankh shape on top, however, will vibrate for a much longer period of time because the energy is being recycled back into itself rather than immediately dissipating. 

Egyptian tantra posits that recycling our life-force energy keeps us vibrant in form for longer. Immortality, Drunvalo believes, is not living forever in our current form - it’s learning to work with the energy that  animate our physical bodies, to the point where we don’t age. The goal of this practice is to evolve to a point where we can live as long as we wish in a healthy, vibrant body then choose when and how to transition. 

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

Adrien Brody

Sound Shapes the Mind: A Binaural Beats Primer

Danny Timur February 11, 2025

We live in a world of noise. We are inundated with honks of traffic, buzzes of phones, and din of conversations that we now spend much of our lives attempting to drown out the sounds of the artificial world, which in turn only pushes us further from nature. We strive for silence, believing that may be the answer, seemingly unaware that nestled within the frequencies we hear are wavelengths that could hold the power to calm our minds, sharpen our focus, or even alter our emotional states. These are known as binaural beats—a type of auditory illusion that can shape the way we think and feel, and their possible benefits are enormous.

Binaural beats are simple. In a pair of headphones, two different frequencies are played, one in each ear. What seems like a straightforward auditory experience opens a door to something far more profound. Your brain doesn’t hear the two tones separately; instead, it creates a third frequency—a "beat" that is the difference between the two sounds. For example, if one ear hears a tone at 300 Hz and the other hears one at 310 Hz, your brain perceives a 10 Hz beat. This influences the very frequencies of your brainwaves, guiding them into specific states as it synchronizes itself in a process called brainwave entrainment. 

Our brains are malleable, and a variety of activities and tools can help us synchronise and rewire them. Meditation, exercise, movement, surges of dopamine from scrolling timelines - all of these are modes of entrainment that alter our consciousness and send us into new states, but they are often scattershot in their efforts. The real power of binaural beats lies in their ability to influence these patterns in a targeted way. Our brainwaves are categorized into distinct frequency bands, each associated with different states of consciousness:

• Delta (0.5–4 Hz): Deep sleep or unconsciousness.

• Theta (4–8 Hz): Light sleep, meditation, and creativity.

• Alpha (8–12 Hz): Relaxation while awake, calm but alert.

• Beta (12–30 Hz): Active thought, alertness, and concentration.

• Gamma (30–100 Hz): Intense focus and cognitive processing.

When we listen to a binaural beat at 4 Hz, we enter the theta state, which is associated with deep relaxation, creativity, and even meditation. At 10 Hz, we move into the alpha state—calm, but alert. For moments when focus is needed, binaural beats in the beta range (12–30 Hz) can help foster concentration and alertness.

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“In the symphony of human experience, music has always informed our emotions. Songs, speech, birdcall - these can change our mood in seconds. Binaural beats are an extension, a distillation, of this eternal idea.”

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Binaural beats act as a gentle guide, steering your mind into a particular wavelength. Like a dancer moving in time with music, your brain follows the rhythm, adapting its own frequencies to match the beat. These shifts are not merely psychological. They are physiological, rooted in the way our brains process and respond to sound. 

We can be precise in our responses, identify harmful or painful emotions and find their sonic mirror, the audio antidote to reclaim balance. The brain waves in a stressed state, for example, are often fast-moving beta waves which make it hard to focus or think clearly. Listening to binaural beats in the alpha or theta ranges will counterbalance this by promoting slower, more relaxed brainwave patterns. In the same way, if we are tired, Binaural beats can be used to enhance cognitive performance by encouraging brainwave activity that promotes alertness and concentration. Our morning coffee can be listened to, instead of drunk, and the energy that we have so long relied on from external sources can be unlocked within ourself.

This form of deep listening, of allowing the subconscious to be guided by the sonic, has the potential to unlock deeper states of consciousness—states where creativity flows freely, where anxiety dissipates, and where we reconnect with the present moment. The theta state, which binaural beats can induce, brings deep meditative experiences, a sense of inner peace, and heightened creativity. For those who struggle with finding time to meditate or who are unable to quiet their minds on their own, binaural beats offer a shortcut—a gentle, guided entry into mindfulness.

In the symphony of human experience, music has always informed our emotions. Songs, speech, birdcall - these can change our mood in seconds. Binaural beats are an extension, a distillation, of this eternal idea and they offer a unique key to unlocking the mind’s potential. Through the simple act of listening, we can influence our brainwaves, shifting our mental state from tension to relaxation, from distraction to focus, or from confusion to creativity.

There is a deep, almost primal connection between sound and the mind. In a world filled with noise, the quiet power of binaural beats reminds us that the gentlest frequencies can have the most profound effects. By simply tuning into the rhythm of sound, we might just find a way to harmonize our minds with the world around us.

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Danny Timur is a musician and DJ based in Hong Kong.

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