Podcast Episode: A Full Strawberry Moon On June 29th & Then Tracking A Firecracker Felt Sense

Posted on by under Consciousness

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where the lunar calendar, indigenous ecology, and the occasional ET sighting all share the same cosmic waiting room.

Mara: Ari Joshua Bouse has a post out that moves through a stretch of celestial events — strawberry moons, mercury retrograde, a full buck moon — and what each one asks of us emotionally and spiritually. Let’s start with the moons themselves and what they’re tracking.

A Full Strawberry Moon, A Buck Moon, And The Space Between

Pip: This segment covers a sweep of sky events from late June through late July — and the post isn’t just listing dates. It’s asking what each moon, each season, and each planetary shift is actually inviting us to do.

Mara: The post opens with a grounding claim from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” That framing sets the tone for everything that follows.

Pip: So the celestial events aren’t decoration — they’re a curriculum. The moons and retrograde periods become prompts for inner work rather than just astronomical footnotes.

Mara: Right. The Strawberry Moon on June 29th connects to Algonquin and other North American nations who tracked the wild berry harvest by this moon. Mercury retrograde runs concurrently — June 29th through July 23rd — and the post frames that overlap as an invitation to slow down, reflect, and work with subconscious material rather than resist it.

Pip: Mercury retrograde as a scheduled appointment with your own programming. Honestly, worse things have been on the calendar.

Mara: The New Moon in Cancer on July 14th follows, and Cancer season carries its own specific energy — nourishment, emotional safety, hearth and home. The post notes that Cancer encourages reconnecting with the feeling realm and stepping back from negative self-talk.

Mara: Then the Full Buck Moon arrives July 29th. The post traces its names across cultures — Native American, Native Alaskan, Celtic, Anglo Saxon — each name anchored in what the land was doing that month: antler growth, salmon runs, herb harvests, honey.

Pip: That cross-cultural naming is doing something real. It’s a reminder that people everywhere were paying close attention to the same sky, just through different lenses.

Mara: Leo season closes the arc, running July 22nd through August 22nd. The post calls it a time for “radically confident self-expression through the heart chakra” — but also cautions against chasing praise or applause as substitutes for genuine inner authority.

Pip: The whole sequence builds toward that: not outward performance, but grounded presence. The moons are a map, not a stage.

Pip: Spiritual beings, seasonal moons, and the quiet work of not outsourcing your sense of self to the crowd.

Mara: Next time, more from Classroom Mothership Earth — same sky, new questions.

Please enjoy the original post that inspire the podcast version by clicking on the link below:

A Full Strawberry Moon On June 29th & Then Tracking A Firecracker Felt Sense Of Independence With A Full Buck Moon In Late July

A Full Strawberry Moon On June 29th & Then Tracking A Firecracker Felt Sense Of Independence With A Full Buck Moon In Late July

Posted on by under Consciousness, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Sleeping lion with glowing floral decorations under a crescent moon in an enchanted forest
A magical lion adorned with glowing flowers sleeps peacefully in a mystical forest at night.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Please enjoy the following videos below that capture the sentiment. Perhaps listening to them together in peaceful alignment, will be music to your ears, if you’ll pardon the pun . . .

We Shall Overcome

A Full Strawberry Moon on June 29 reflects lineage connections to the Algonquin and other North American nations who noticed the connection between the wild berry harvest to this Full Moon.

Also, Mercury will be in Retrograde on June 29 – July 23. These energies are in alignment with slowing things down, reflecting on the past, and focusing on the here and now.

Energetically, Mercury in Retrograde is a good time to be mindful of subconscious thoughts, including past programming. These energies can be a healing and highly intuitive time when we work with its energies intensionally.

Moreover, our psychic abilities and dreams can become triggered so that we can tap into deeper insights by working with our subconscious minds in ways where the unseen realms yield useful information to light our way.

A colorful New Moon in Cancer rises in the skies on July 14, 2026. Cancer season continues till July 22nd.

As always, new beginnings are in the air. And specifically, the new waves coming into the shores bring back feeling safe in family matters of the hearth, and other related activities like cooking and gardening.

Crabs are known to weather their emotional fluctuations. Might as well be mindful of co-creating a sense of belonging in the world.

Cancer the Crab is a time when we are encouraged to focus on nourishment, self-care, and our emotional health that breathes in a softer tone that supports reconnecting with ourselves and our hearts. Crabs reflect emotional sensitivity and tapping into the feeling realm.

Remember there is God in forgiveness, and it can be good to get out of our heads; especially when getting seduced into negative self talk narratives.

Or perhaps merely an atheistic appreciation the mysterious forces of Nature are enough to be shelter from the storm.

Looking ahead, a Full Buck Moon will happen on July 29. This Moon gets its name from the Native American observation that male deer antlers began growing in late spring and reach peak growth in July. Many Native Alaskans called this moon the Salmon Moon for its timing with salmon runs.

Whereas in Celtic culture, this moon has been known as the Wyrt (Wort), Mead or Herb Moon because most herbs can withstand harvesting by July. And in Anglo Saxon lineage, this moon was known as the Hay Moon. Bees buzzing out and about reinforce that honey is the elixir of life.

It is important for all humans to remember our shared history. This includes our lineage connections to our indigenous ancestral roots that are part of our planetary history before Colonization. This has impacted everyone and continues to do so.

Of course knowing our spiritual roots connects to that truth as well. Because we all have stardust in our DNA, not to mention oral traditions passed down about our cosmic connections to the Sky People.

Speaking of cosmic connections, a growing body of people are talking about Disclosure these days:

Late July’s full moon cycle amplifies a strong need for emotional freedom that can heighten emotional complexities.

Whether you’re an ET, human or otherwise; the resonate point is that harmonizing with groups can be challenging for everyone till you get into the right vibe, if you’ll pardon the multidimensional pun.

Moreover, Aquarian energies that also constitute July’s full moon cycle can intensify in those of us with strong rebellious streaks, our need to assert ourselves, and can make getting along in groups feel more challenging.

But then again, that’s just part of the human condition.

Speaking of the human condition, fear, anger and jealousy aren’t particularly healthy emotional cravings. And yet, all emotions are fleeting and transient, so we might as well see them as they are; no more or no less.

Besides, the power of community shows that people can be good mirrors for each other to reflect on what triggers us, and can shed light on better understanding of our humanity.

Finally, the tides of Leo season roll in from July 22-August 22. Tis the season to broadcast radically confident self-expression through the heart chakra, and a friendly reminder to nurture our inner child. Leo’s energies encourage movement out of the shadows, and stepping into the light with courage and passion.

Of course dominating the spotlight and always stealing the show can be blinding; as is self-stimulation as a form of meddling into the affairs of others. Besides, it can come across as an arrogant form of defensive pride.

Truly, the 3D realm we live in still carries a strong identification as an outer directed culture. Might as well see this reality as a friendly reminder that we stand in a deeper and higher personal authority when we stop chasing after happiness in the form of “praise, likes, or applause.”

May all Beings awaken to God Consciousness, Cosmic Consciousness, Unity Consciousness, Diversity within Unity, Inner Peace and the Universal Pillars of Love and Truth,

Ari

Podcast Episode: Letting Go Of Getting Stuck In Life By Being Present With Our Stuckness

Posted on by under Consciousness, Podcast, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Woman practicing Tai Chi barefoot on stone path with yin-yang symbol in garden

Check out this newly created experimental AI Podcast feature that aligns with my writing, compliments of WordPress.

Full Disclosure: Truly, I do take pride in my writing, and have yet to use AI for the written word. However, I have been having fun with playing around with AI for illustrations.

This version of 1 of my more recent writings stars 2 AI created characters named Pip and Mara.

Please enjoy the podcast & transcript below:

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where getting unstuck, staying present, and surrendering to the universe are all on the syllabus, and somehow the homework is actually worth doing.

Mara: Today we’re covering work from Ari Joshua Bouse — one extended meditation on what it means to stop fighting your own stuckness and find your way back to the present moment. Let’s start with the heart of it: surrender as a path through.

Letting Go: Presence, Surrender, and Getting Unstuck

Mara: The central question here is deceptively simple — why do we get stuck, and what does it actually mean to let go? Not as a motivational slogan, but as a lived, embodied practice.

Pip: The post opens with a Rhonda Byrne line that stops you cold: “You can’t feel good when you’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”

Mara: That’s the trap in one sentence. The secondary suffering — the judgment layered on top of the original feeling — is often what keeps people frozen far longer than the feeling itself would.

Pip: And the post gets specific about what that looks like in practice. The reflection on getting stuck on other people’s stuckness, and taking it personally, is one of the more honest things you’ll read about how entanglement actually works.

Mara: The post frames it plainly: “experience teaches that it is freeing to stay centered, and observe those entanglements soften and relax.” Letting go of victim consciousness is described as a process — peeling away layers of an onion, not a single decision.

Pip: Which is where Tai Chi enters — not as a detour, but as a structural argument. Ancient meditative movement practices, the post says, integrate the brain’s hemispheres and re-pattern the neurological system toward emotional regulation. The body is part of the solution.

Mara: The post profiles Professor Cheng Man Ching, who brought Tai Chi to the West against the explicit orders of his masters. He once said he was approximately seventy percent Confucius and thirty percent Lao Tzu, and that learning how to be human takes a very long time.

Pip: Seventy-thirty is a surprisingly precise self-assessment for someone also teaching surrender.

Mara: The post also weaves in bibliotherapy — a medium using reading, film, podcasts, and other materials to support therapeutic change, especially between sessions. It traces back to an independent study in college exploring how clients get unstuck outside the therapy room.

Pip: That thread runs all the way to Pema Chodron, whose work the post closes with — a veteran Buddhist teacher the post credits as a leading force in bringing these principles to Western audiences.

Mara: The throughline is consistent: whether it’s Tai Chi, bibliotherapy, or sitting meditation, the practice is always about carrying the insight off the cushion and into ordinary life.

Pip: Stuckness, it turns out, is less a destination than a habit — and habits, given enough momentum, can be re-patterned.

Mara: Surrender as a technology for change — that’s the real thread running through all of this.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else the mothership has on the curriculum. There’s always more to unpack.

Please enjoy the original post that inspired this podcast at the link below:

Letting Go Of Getting Stuck In Life By Being Present With Our Stuckness Through The Power Of A Sweet Surrender

Take care of yourselves everyone,

Ari

Podcast Episode: A Crazy Business Idea For Co-creating A Beautiful New World

Posted on by under Consciousness, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Child standing in a futuristic classroom looking at Earth through large space station windows
A student gazes out at Earth from a high-tech space classroom

Check out this newly created experimental AI Podcast feature that aligns with my writing, compliments of WordPress.

Full Disclosure: Truly, I do take pride in my writing, and have yet to use AI for the written word. However, I have been having fun with playing around with AI for illustrations.

This podcast version of 1 of my more recent writings stars 2 AI created characters named Pip and Mara.

Please enjoy the podcast & transcript below:

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where the daily writing prompt is “come up with a crazy business idea” and the answer turns out to be: civilization, but better.

Mara: Ari Joshua Bouse takes that prompt seriously, and today we’re following the thread — from a vision of shared consciousness and cooperative economics to what it actually looks like to clear space, inside and out.

Pip: Let’s start with the business idea itself.

—

A Crazy Business Idea For Co-creating A Beautiful New World

Mara: The post opens with a genuine question: what does an economy look like when the underlying operating system shifts — when interconnection is the default, not the exception?

Pip: And the answer isn’t a product or a pitch deck. It’s a paradigm. The post lays out what falls away when people genuinely feel their connection to each other.

Mara: The list is specific: “the institutionalized isms, trashing the park, wars, violence, gang banging, organized crime, the so called legitimate maximum-economic profit capitalist conditioning, economic strangulations, and the need to control each other fades away, and is released into a black hole in the Universe.”

Pip: That’s a sentence doing a lot of heavy lifting — and the point underneath it is real. The argument is that these patterns aren’t permanent features of human nature; they’re symptoms of a particular kind of disconnection.

Mara: Right, and the post is careful to say it doesn’t get killed or die — it transforms. The balloon metaphor follows: letting go of a thought form so it floats away, rather than fighting it.

Pip: There’s a friend in the piece who’s been sober from the news for over a year and reports genuine levity — less charge around politics, less reactive energy. That’s offered as a small proof of concept.

Mara: The post connects that to The Celestine Prophecy — James Redfield’s intention, quoted directly, was to inspire readers to “reclaim their power from dominant authorities and dysfunctional relationships: not via political or legal action but through a personalized spirituality that portrays life as a meaningful journey toward self-actualization.”

Pip: So the crazy business idea is essentially: skip the legal filing, go straight to the consciousness upgrade.

Mara: The post also gets concrete about physical space — imagining trash compressed in a way that literally opens up room, turning what looked like a landfill into ground for new growth. It’s the same logic applied materially.

Pip: And the T’ai Chi section earns its place. Professor Cheng’s instruction to “be like a ghost” — to create spaciousness — maps directly onto the economic argument: lead, follow, listen, don’t force.

Mara: The upshot is that cooperative competition, in this frame, isn’t naive. It’s more like push hands than a zero-sum match — sensitive to the other’s energy, not trying to overpower it.

Pip: Which makes the closing meditation clip feel less like an appendix and more like the actual deliverable.

Mara: That thread — from inner clearing to outer structure — is what the whole piece is building toward.

—

Pip: Clear the space, transform the pattern, don’t fight the balloon — it’s a coherent through-line once you follow it.

Mara: More from Classroom Mothership Earth next time.

Please enjoy the original post that inspired this new podcast version at the link below:

A Crazy Business Idea For Co-creating A Beautiful New World

Take care of yourselves everyone,

Ari

Podcast Episode: A New Moon in Gemini, Solstices, Full Strawberry Moon & Mercury in Retrograde

Posted on by under Consciousness, Podcast, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Full moon rising over fields and a country path with a farmhouse nearby
A glowing full moon rises over a peaceful countryside at dusk

Check out this newly created experimental AI Podcast feature that aligns with my writing, compliments of WordPress.

Full Disclosure: Truly, I do take pride in my writing, and have yet to use AI for the written word. However, I have been having fun with playing around with AI for illustrations.

This podcast version of 1 of my more recent writings stars 2 AI created characters named Pip and Mara.

Please enjoy the podcast & transcript below:

Pip: Gemini season, a solstice, a strawberry moon, Mercury going sideways — June is apparently doing a lot.

Mara: This episode covers one post from Ari Joshua Bouse, mapping the celestial events of late June and what they invite us to pay attention to — new moons, seasonal turning points, a full moon with Indigenous roots, and a retrograde worth taking seriously.

Pip: Let’s start with the sky.

A New Moon in Gemini Through Mercury Retrograde

Mara: June opens with a New Moon in Gemini on the fifteenth, and the question this post is really asking is: what does the sky this month want from us, and how do we work with it rather than against it?

Pip: The post frames the Gemini New Moon as a prompt to balance thinking and feeling — and it puts it plainly: “Harmonizing with our heads and hearts helps support effective communication.”

Mara: That’s the throughline for the whole month. The New Moon opens a window for setting intentions, connecting socially, and letting communication projects move more freely. The post specifically names storytelling and sharing topical truths as things that can come to life with greater ease right now.

Pip: Then June 21 arrives carrying two things at once — the Summer Solstice and Father’s Day, a pairing that won’t repeat until 2037.

Mara: The post draws a real contrast there. In the Northern Hemisphere, the solstice carries what it calls Grandfather Sun-Yang energy — outward, expansive, growth-oriented. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the opposite: the longest night, Grandmother Moon-Yin energy, a turning inward.

Pip: The planet literally experiencing opposite seasons at the same moment — that’s the kind of thing that makes the phrase “duality of living on this planet” feel less like a bumper sticker.

Mara: The Full Strawberry Moon follows on June 29. The post traces that name to the Algonquin and other North American nations who connected the wild berry harvest to this moon, and notes that other cultures named it for whatever mattered most to people on the land at midsummer.

Pip: History embedded in a calendar. That’s not nothing.

Mara: June 21 also opens Cancer season, running through July 22. The post frames Cancer as a softer emotional register — nourishment, self-care, reconnecting with feeling. Then Mercury stations retrograde on June 29, lasting through July 23, and the post treats that as a genuine invitation: slow down, reflect, and pay attention to subconscious patterns.

Pip: So the month ends with two overlapping energies asking for the same thing — quiet and inward attention.

Mara: And the psychic and dream life, the post says, can surface real insight during that window if you’re working with it intentionally rather than just waiting for it to pass.

Pip: Which points straight toward how we actually tend our inner lives day to day.

Mara: A month of thresholds — new beginnings, a solstice, ancestral moons, a retrograde. The invitation seems to be: meet each one with some awareness.

Pip: More sky ahead. We’ll see what it asks for next time.

Please enjoy the original post that inspired this new podcast version at the link below:

A New Moon in Gemini, Summer Solstice, Full Strawberry Moon & Mercury in Retrograde at the End of June

Podcast Episode: Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave

Posted on by under Consciousness, Podcast, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Empty classroom with wooden desks and chairs arranged in a circle under natural sunlight.
An empty classroom with wooden desks arranged in a circular formation bathed in sunlight.

Check out this newly created experimental AI Podcast feature that aligns with my writing, compliments of WordPress.

Full Disclosure: Truly, I do take pride in my writing, and have yet to use AI for the written word. However, I have been having fun with playing around with AI for illustrations.

This podcast version of 1 of my more recent writings stars 2 AI created characters named Pip and Mara.

Please enjoy the podcast & transcript below:

Pip: There’s a site called Classroom Mothership Earth, which is either a philosophy blog or the most ambitious field trip ever conceived — possibly both.

Mara: Ari Joshua Bouse writes here about education, consciousness, and the ideas that stay with you long after the bell rings. Today we’re following him back into a high school classroom and into Plato’s cave. Let’s start with what that cave actually meant.

Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave

Pip: The post opens with a prompt — describe something you learned in high school — and the answer isn’t a formula or a date. It’s a philosophy class that apparently rewired the writer’s entire sense of reality.

Mara: The Humanities course had a teacher who, as the post puts it, “embodied his humanity” — theatrical, philosophical, running the room like a group rather than a lecture. The layout shifted between rows, clusters, and horseshoe configurations to keep energy moving through the space.

Pip: So the room itself was part of the pedagogy. The furniture arrangement wasn’t aesthetic — it was functional, designed to open something up in the students.

Mara: And what got opened up, specifically, was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The post describes it this way: “the metaphor of humanity being asleep and trapped in own own darkness lit a fire in my neurons and energy field.”

Pip: That’s a sentence doing a lot of heavy lifting across several centuries of philosophy.

Mara: What it means in practice is that the allegory didn’t stay abstract. It landed as a personal reckoning — the post connects it directly to protective instincts, survival dynamics, and what it calls “death and rebirth” taking root in the psyche. This wasn’t intellectual exercise; it was identity-level disruption.

Mara: The class also covered Plato’s Republic against Pericles’ Democracy, the teacher’s own Theory of Good, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. The curriculum was genuinely wide.

Pip: And the post notes that metacognition and superconsciousness weren’t yet common language — but that didn’t stop anyone from having those experiences. The concepts came later; the experiences came first.

Mara: The image that closes the reflection is the teacher drawing a diagram of the Cave on a blackboard, and the writer connecting that chalk sketch to ancient cave art. The visual form of the idea outlasted the lesson itself.

Pip: Turns out the cave has good acoustics for anything that echoes.

Mara: The throughline is that a single classroom encounter with one allegory can reorganize how a person understands consciousness — and keeps doing so long after graduation.

Pip: Shadows on a wall, seating arrangements, a teacher with chalk — small things that turn out to be load-bearing.

Mara: Next time, more from the mothership.

Please enjoy the original post that inspired this new podcast version at the link below:

Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave

Take care of yourselves everyone,

Ari

Podcast Episode: Embodying Paradox, Change & Humor In The Everyday Moments Of Life

Posted on by under Consciousness, Podcast, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Abstract swirling streams of water twisting around glowing blue and teal geometric crystals
Swirling water streams intertwine with glowing geometric crystals in an abstract composition.

Check out this newly created experimental AI Podcast feature that aligns with my writing, compliments of WordPress.

Full Disclosure: Truly, I do take pride in my writing, and have yet to use AI for the written word. However, I have been having fun with playing around with AI for illustrations.

This podcast version of 1 of my more recent writings stars 2 AI created characters named Pip and Mara.

Please enjoy the podcast & transcript below:

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where the curriculum includes falling off your bike, losing on purpose, and calling all of it wisdom.

Mara: That’s actually a fair summary. Ari Joshua Bouse has a new post up exploring resilience, paradox, and how everyday stumbles become the practice itself. Let’s start with what it means to stop fighting the dark and work with it instead.

Embodying Paradox, Change and Humor In Everyday Life

Mara: The central question here is how resilience actually gets built — not by avoiding difficulty, but by changing your relationship to it. The post argues that resilience is cultivated, not inherited, and that the everyday moment is where that cultivation happens.

Pip: And the frame for all of it comes from a Taoist concept the post calls Investing In Loss. The setup is direct: “you might lose a game 99 times out of a hundred. But if you lose 99 times and you are paying mindful attention about your partners moves, you can learn their tricks, and spring the trap to win the 100th game.”

Mara: So the upshot is that losing, done consciously, is actually data. The mindset shift the post is pointing at is the difference between defeat and apprenticeship — same outcome, completely different relationship to it.

Pip: The bike and the swimming pool make the same case more viscerally. Most of us got water up our nose and fell off the handlebars and somehow did not develop lasting trauma from either. We just got back on.

Mara: Right — and the post uses that to ask a genuine question: how do we stay present in everyday life the way we were present when we were learning something genuinely new and a little scary? That’s where Dan Millman enters. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior gets name-checked as a long-running personal touchstone — a book recommended in high school, not fully read until after college, but never forgotten.

Pip: There is something quietly honest about admitting the book sat on the to-do list for years before it landed. Delayed absorption counts.

Mara: The post opens with two epigraphs that frame the whole thing. Eckhart Tolle on bringing in light rather than fighting darkness, and S. Kelley Harrell going further: “bless the darkness, hold the light, because the two aren’t divisible.” That’s the paradox the title is naming — not resolving the tension, but inhabiting it.

Mara: The shadow-boxing image the post offers — awakening to shades of your hidden self in a mirror — suggests the inner work and the outer stumbling are the same practice, just different angles.

Pip: Lose on purpose, get back on the bike, and hold the light and the dark at the same time. Straightforward advice, if you don’t mind the bruises.

Mara: That tension between difficulty and openness seems like the thread worth pulling next time.

Please enjoy the original post that inspired this new podcast version at the link below:

Embodying Paradox, Change & Humor In The Everyday Moments Of Life

May all Beings be free of suffering, and awaken to God Consciousness, Cosmic Consciousness, Unity Consciousness, Diversity Within Unity, Inner Peace and the Universal Pillars of Love And Truth.

Podcast Episode: What’s In It For Me? A New World If You Can Take It.

Posted on by under Consciousness, Podcast, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Glowing interconnected lines forming a complex neural network structure
Complex network of glowing interconnected lines representing neural connections

Check out this newly created experimental AI Podcast feature that aligns with my writing, compliments of WordPress.

Full Disclosure: Truly, I do take pride in my writing, and have yet to use AI for the written word. However, I have been having fun with playing around with AI for illustrations.

This podcast version of 1 of my more recent writings stars 2 AI created characters named Pip and Mara.

Please enjoy the podcast & transcript below:

Pip: Mercury is in retrograde, paradigms are shifting, and somewhere a crocus is bravely breaching the frost — welcome to Classroom Mothership Earth.

Mara: This episode follows Ari Joshua Bouse into questions about consciousness, imagination, and what it actually means to navigate a world in transition. Let’s start with the post that frames all of it — what’s in this for any of us.

What’s In It For Me? A New World If You Can Take It.

Pip: The post opens with a provocation: we are collectively in transition, between paradigms, and the question is how you hold yourself together while the scenery changes around you.

Mara: The grounding line comes from Amit Goswami, who the post cites as arguing that consciousness is “the foundation of existence that causes the wave function to collapse into a single experienced reality.”

Pip: Which is a dense way of saying that what you believe about reality shapes the reality you experience — and that science and spirituality are, as the post puts it, converging in waves.

Mara: The post builds that convergence from several directions. Indigenous oral traditions — the Hopi origin story gets a specific nod — carry accounts of Sky People and humanity’s relationship with Mother Earth that predate modern frameworks by millennia.

Pip: And then there are the credentialed dissenters: Colonel Phillip J. Corso, author of The Day After Roswell, and Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, who wrote Passport to the Cosmos. Both decorated, both professionally established long before they started talking publicly about UFO and ET phenomena.

Mara: The post treats them as contextual witnesses — people whose prior credibility makes their later accounts harder to dismiss. The through-line is that stories about where we come from are not fixed. They shift the way seasons do.

Pip: The Mercury retrograde framing earns its keep here. The post compares it to The Twilight Zone — that liminal, slightly disorienting space where the usual rules feel suspended and perception gets elastic.

Mara: And the practical counsel the post lands on is this: stay playful, stay light-hearted, maintain a healthy detachment. The warning is against fixed thinking and fear-based framing — what the post calls “doomsday scenarios” and “war-mongering mentality.”

Pip: Einstein opens the whole thing — imagination over knowledge — and by the end you understand why. Knowledge consolidates what already exists. Imagination is what gets you through a paradigm shift without calcifying.

Mara: The post closes with a reminder that we may not control what happens, but we do choose our attitudes. Spring is arriving, crocuses are coming up, and the work is staying open to what’s next.

Pip: Consciousness as foundation, imagination as the tool, and a crocus as the unlikely mascot of paradigm change.

Mara: The territory here keeps expanding — next time, more from the edges of what we think we know.

Please enjoy the original post that inspired this podcast version at the link below:

“What’s In It For Me? A New World If You Can Take It.”

Take care of yourselves everyone,

Ari

Happiness As A Way Of Life Does Not Mean That You’re Happy All The Time

Posted on by under Uncategorized
Daily writing prompt
What’s a common misconception people have about happiness?
View all responses
Rural landscape with sun rays breaking through dark clouds over green fields

I remember when I worked with a single parent who said, “I just want my son to be happy.” Regardless of where they are at in their life cycle, that’s what most parents want for their children.

But there is a difference between getting what we want, things not going our way and experiencing happiness as a way of life.

Awareness of the truth that we all suffer and that desire and attachment are the root of suffering is key to unlocking a common misconception about happiness.

Happiness as a way of life recognizes that an open, passive attitude and mindful approach by allowing the present moment to unfold as it will (regardless of what feelings we’re being visited by), is what’s up.

Moreover, it is freeing to be present with softening our sense of craving that often accompanies happiness (like any other state of being)- pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

We often crave moments to happen or not happen . . . Or by wishing them to begin or end in ways opposite of what’s really going on.

Moments are what they are. We are the one’s that project our “stuff” onto them. We’ve all done it.

Truly, these moments are what they are, and will be nothing more than fleeting or transient.

Might as well be curious about these moments as they arrive, and surf them as they happen, like riding a wave with the grace of a swan.

Just as an example, the pursuit of happiness is a setup in our constitution, if you’ll pardon the multidimensional-revolutionary pun.

Pursuit connotes suffering. Like striving, being in pursuit of something is really just another unattainable craving because the pursuit of something (such as an attached mental concept) never really happens.

Or if it does happen that you manifest, reach your goal or get what you want . . . chances are that you missed the magical moments of the process as they unfolded because you were still in hot pursuit of reaching your lofty ideal.

Perhaps you identify with a dystopian view of your lowest self portrait. Comedian George Carlin captured the sentiment in my favorite one-liner by stating, “if my goal is to fail and I succeed, which have I done?”

Happiness is seeing beyond the smoke and mirrors, bells and whistles, and bling in the world of 10,000 things.

Happiness is the radical self-acceptance that an interplay between form and formless are always flowing together. Happiness as a way of life lives in a space that transcends the clinging and grasping to our judgments, justifications and mental concepts.

Like the old saying, it’s the journey not the destination.

Take care of yourselves everyone,

Ari

Remembering Feeling Inspired By An Old College Professor’s Wisdom

Posted on by under Uncategorized
Daily writing prompt
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
View all responses
Elderly professor smoking a pipe sitting at a wooden desk with books and papers

As this writer reflects on this writing prompt, he looks back on the time when his 20ish year old self was hearing prophetic wisdom from one of his favorite teachers during his tenure as a college student.

Mr. Easton was an English professor, a writer and a charismatically eccentric man. And I have come to believe, as he did, that everyone has a writer living within their Being.

Further, during an Advanced Composition class; it was late in the Spring semester, and for many of us, our college careers were winding down. Because Mr. Easton was a very present person, he probably sensed our anxieties about our prospective unknown futures, saw the teachable moment, and deviated from the class lesson plan.

Footnote: Unlike most of the professors at my Alma Mater at that time, Easton did not have his Ph.D. And yet to many of us, he was among the smartest and most engaging teachers on the faculty.

Back To School . . . Near the tail end of one particular class, Easton elaborated on how we should “hang in there, I promise . . . you’ll see that in your 30s, it starts to get better.”

Of course that’s true and it’s not true. There are no guarantees. If we don’t work at our mental health, then our mental health issues just don’t magically go away.

Speaking of Polaroids, another Kodak moment featrured Easton encouraging us to “take lots of pictures” at various family events, “because people get older and you never knew who would still be around at the next gathering.” He emphasized that the gatherings were important experiences, as well as good opportunities to capture moments through pictures, and then tell stories to remember our connections and loved ones.

Since that time, Easton’s wisdom still sounds true. Moreover, I serve it up to my 20 year old self; as well to all of the 20 year old selves out there making the track through life. While it’s cool to be in the moment, it’s important to have a longitudinal view in life.

Keep in mind that there is something to be said for hanging in there. Get up. Stand Up. Find your passion. Nobody else is going to do it for you. But everyone needs a little hurdle help sometimes. We’re hear to lift each other up rather than tear each other down.

Or like the Beastie Boys sentimental anthem, you gotta fight for your right to party!

And you can’t to that in this incarnation unless you are still breathing!

Nowadays, I use meditation to time travel back to my old self by envisioning peaceful, calming thoughts; coupled with a gentle and soft heartfelt approach of self-compassion that includes a forgiving attitude of gratitude and radical acceptance for what is.

Take care of yourselves everyone,

Ari