It’s Kali Uchis describing falling in love like melting like ice cream. It’s St. Teresa’s ecstasy. It’s why 18th-century German poet Ludwig Uhland said that waking up buried in his lover’s arms is like dying from love’s bliss because he “saw Heaven in her eyes.” Heaven is commonly used to describe this feeling because falling in love is like dying: Both death and falling in love are about losing a grip on reality, leaving this world and entering the ethereal. Like death, we describe a soul in love as being escorted away by angels to a better place. It’s why Cupid has wings—so he can take us from over here to over there.

Yet, when you try to articulate the deepest of your desires, you can’t find a name for it. It’s like that marvellous ache you feel when you see the Milky Way spilled across the sky—it draws you in and makes you long for more of it. This longing has the shape of the infinite. I know a love song is good when I don’t know if they’re singing about a lover or God.

Love, in its purest form, feels like mysticism, like being absorbed into something that wants you to be part of it as much as you want to join it. Some might call it a longing for happiness, but it is so much deeper. Here’s what I mean by mysticism: it’s something that grows your wonder instead of trying to solve it. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

It’s like watching fire—something that constantly moves without going anywhere. It’s “alive” in its own way. Like how God speaks through a bush that burns but is not consumed, something ineffable about music—the way it decorates time like art decorates space—speaks to us.

While readings like those that might come from an aura photographer had previously been done by assigning meanings to specific colors, a point system has emerged from teenagers on TikTok, where real-life interactions are gamified into gaining or losing “aura points.” There are celebrity compilations of “the worst aura moments of all time” and people posting concerns about losing aura because their boyfriend wants space. Taking care of your skin and taping your mouth while you sleep will gain you aura points. Same goes for developing an aesthetic, sitting in nature, making eye contact with women, using wired headphones, doing pull-ups, not speaking, and finding other friends with aura. While the aura math online is inconsistent and subjective (people usually debate the points in the comments), the general rule is you gain hundreds or thousands of points by doing something impressive, intriguing, charismatic, or authentic.

While learning how to auramaxx by preparing for conversations as an introvert and eating breakfast and working out in the morning may help some young men navigate life, and the mostly amusing aura point system may seem harmless, Derek Beres, author and co-host of Conspirituality, a podcast dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis, points out that auramaxxing content online is rife with misogyny. This comes as little surprise seeing as, according to Beres, wellness content online often has right-wing overlap, and looksmaxxing has roots within incel message boards. Aside from the obvious potential for harm toward women, Beres says that the pursuit of auramaxxing can also inevitably lead to guilt and shame for young men.

Tulpa is a concept originally from Tibetan Buddhism and found in later traditions of mysticism and the paranormal of a materialized being or thought-form

The Theosophist Annie Besant, in the 1905 book Thought-Forms, divides them into three classes: forms in the shape of the person who creates them, forms that resemble objects or people and may become ensouled by nature spirits or by the dead, and forms that represent inherent qualities from the astral or mental planes, such as emotions.

The Slender Man has been described by some people as a tulpa-effect, and attributed to multiple people's thought processes.

When you observe a human life from a far enough distance, all the trials and tribulations just become rounding errors.

Dostoyevsky said that to love someone means to see them as God intended, so why on earth shouldn’t you also be a ‘someone’? This makes me think that sometimes you have to try to look at yourself through the eyes of God: how tiny and lacking, yet how precious and important; how flawed and powerless, yet unique and loved.

There’s something very calming about believing that nobody cares about what you do, that you could just be whatever you want to be. It grants you a kind of unlimited confidence, like flooring the gas pedal on your free will. It’s liberating to think that you’re not special — not because you aren’t valuable, but because you aren’t as offensively powerful as you might think. Humility, or the simple act of focusing less on yourself without reducing your sense of self-worth, can be the ultimate source of peace.

I want to see, in hindsight, that misfortunes haven’t hardened my heart — I want to look back and see a survivor. I want to see that heartaches have not smothered my passion and that sadness was not able to keep me down for long.

You may be existentially “trapped” in the present, but your perspective doesn’t have to be. With enough distance from your own timeline, every mistake blurs into a minor miscalculation, and every letdown diminishes to insignificance. Even a bad memory, with enough time, will appear trivial — it might transform you but its colors will fade into a wistful sepia.

The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.

Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.

the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.

Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.

I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.

Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe expresses itself, so why would I hate that? It’s the sense that, while I might fuck up, my basic worth is beyond question—I have no essential damage, I am not polluted, I am fine.

The dominant paradigm, as far as I can tell, is that you’re basically either unwell or you’re okay, and our job is triage. You’re fucked up and depressed, so you do some therapy, and/or take an SSRI, and then you don’t kill yourself.

I would like to replace it with the following paradigm. There is a spectrum of background mental states, from “suicidal/dissociated/freaked out” to “abiding peace, happiness, and energy.” Nearly everyone can get pretty far up that spectrum. Nearly everyone can experience profound healing and become thoroughly Okay. It is your birthright.

A psychotechnology is anything that can alter your relationship with self, from mainstream talk therapy, to all kinds of meditation, to well-applied hallucinogens, to newfangled forms of therapy like IFS, etcetera.

There is no one “path,” although some traditions have clusters of practices that will make most sense taken together, just like each kind of cuisine contains an internal coherence of flavor and texture.

Find ways to bring more and more of yourself into loving awareness. Every detail of your being. The ones you like, and the ones you don’t. Especially the ones you don’t, especially the parts that most repulse you. You know, loving awareness—even if you haven’t heard the phrase before, you know what it is. Those moments of spacious, calm, thorough, tranquil connection with whatever portion of existence you’re currently exposed to, where nothing is being challenged or conceptualized, but rather is just allowed to appear, in radiant suchness, without resistance or fear. That variety of existential condition.

What it is like-Greater feelings of immersion in the world, sense of the sublime beauty of existence-Greater affection for other people, directly connected to less worrying about what they think of me-Less worrying about what type of shithead I am for not getting things done, more getting things done-Less guilt, more skillful action to repair things done wrong in the past-Easier time reaching deep meditative states, due to massive decrease in inner conflict-Everything more pleasantWhat it is not like-Mania—I am sleeping and eating and acting more or less normally, it’s just smoother and better-Lobotomization on a mood level, I am still aware of suffering in the world, and still feel sadness, it just seems less ‘personal,’ less like a threat-Lobotomization on a tactical level, being less critical of self doesn’t mean I can’t figure out what is in my self-interest-Self-absorption, I am more concerned than ever before with the well-being of others, both immediate and distant-Passivity, I feel more assertive than ever, just in different ways

A good chunk of the pain in your life, and a bunch of your maladaptive behavior, comes from conflict with the shadow, and your instinctual response—to engage more fiercely in this conflict—is exactly the opposite of what you need. If you want to move on with your life, you need to connect with and integrate your shadow or you will live in impotent inner struggle.

Stop trying to trick yourself. Understand that the maladaptive things you do satisfy your dark desires. “Having,” goes the book’s central saying, “is evidence of wanting.” Just understand why you have engineered your own despair, and admire the engineering. And then, as if by magic, you will change.If this seems confusing or unlikely or silly, that is fine. If this seems objectionable, that is also fine3. It’s just a narrative framework.

First, EK asks you to look at a situation in your life that happens, over and over again, that you don’t like.

Once your personal drama is in your mind, EK asks you to recall the sensations associated with this situation, and then try to enjoy and appreciate them.

If you have a big chunk of non-integrated shadow, what you have is a brittle self-conception. There are lots of parts of yourself that you’re constantly avoiding, and all sorts of things that happen to you that aren't supposed to. This requires vigilance. You’ve got to filter, erase, elide, and generally Photoshop your consciousness on an ongoing basis to make everything acceptable to your judgment.That filtration might have some effects on experience generally. Maybe if your mind is enforcing a heavy-handed narrative frame, some of the aesthetic properties of life go unnoticed. And maybe the complexities of other human beings are harder to perceive behind the wall of concepts you’re placing in front of them. If you could take that filter off, perhaps the world would look different, and your existence would feel smoother, more intuitive, less fragmented.

notionally, I was very self-aware. However, in truth I’d never really looked into the things I was really ashamed of—I’d just spent time mining the sort of foibles I could use as fuel for entertaining self-deprecation. In this way, I’d unintentionally been creating a semi-accurate ‘understanding of self’ that was, partially, a coping mechanism.

Like, it was so cool that I’d arranged a way to both slake my lust for affirmation and never be seen by anyone, thus remaining in safety. So ingenious how I’d permanently arranged the role of misunderstood artist for myself. It was fantastic how I could thus remain forever unknowable, unredeemable, distant, separate, but still special, praised, remarkable.

I don’t know that it’s literally true that my mind is composed of little characters with different agendas. But I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of adopting this as a lens. Instead of identifying with my unpleasant thoughts/feelings (this is me and I hate it, I suck) or fighting them (this isn’t me and I reject it), I now try to understand them as emanations of parts of me, which I then engage with in a spirit of open-hearted curiosity.

I remembered being criticized for my poor hygiene, and, moreover, how almost every time attention was brought to my physical form, it meant that something bad was about to happen. And then I did the most cliched therapy thing of all: I gave that dirty little kid a hug and told him that it was okay. In practice, this felt like releasing tension. A healthy inner space was created between me and the dirty kid in my mind. That person wasn’t identical to me, I was not my history. Simultaneously, though, I didn’t need to reject that person, either.

Every time I’d have some sort of weird inner tension—which was often—I would try to introspect, talk to different parts of myself, try to bring myself into deeper and deeper harmony, accept whatever discordant bits of consciousness I would normally reject.

One thing about my wife is that she’s a shaman. When she sees other people in distress, she’s uncannily good at figuring out whatever frequency they’re on, and helping them surf it. This is doubly true when people are on psychedelics; she could be a legitimate psychedelic healer if she wanted that life path.So, as I spiraled out near the Lululemon, she comforted me, and asked me, gently, but firmly, “what made you want to do this today?” And I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know, I thought it would be fun. She did not buy this, and, after some more comforting, said, “Did you think that the affirmation would make you happy? Like having a lot of eyeballs on you would make you worthy of love?” I begrudgingly agreed with this line of questioning. And then she said, “what part of you needs that—can you find it for me?”

I felt unusually sure of myself. But there was still, like, stuff. Maybe twice a week I’d still think about some embarrassing moment from my past and grunt in pain. Occasionally I still caught myself frantically speculating about what I could do to ensure that I remained a lovable/interesting/worthy person.

at some point, 90% of my self-image had been repaired, and, at that point, my mind’s basic disposition changed from default self-suspicion to default self-acceptance.

I realized that perhaps the main effect of my self-loathing, in my life, had been to get in the way of how much love I could show other people. Before me, in my consciousness, in what felt like 50-foot-tall neon letters, blinked the question: DO YOU HAVE THE COURAGE TO BE AS LOVING AS YOU CAN POSSIBLY BE

through shadow work, I stopped denying large parts of myself and brought them into loving awareness. Then, I continued that work in finer detail with introspective techniques, bringing more little bits of my mind into loving awareness. Then, I attacked one of my psychological monsters with loving awareness on LSD. Then, I cleaned everything up with loving awareness on MDMA.

Repression isn’t some fanciful concept, it’s a simple consequence of psychological reward and reinforcement. Things you don’t like to think about, you think about less, and slowly they become distanced from your habitual thought patterns, until they almost never enter into your mind. Therefore, you can quite easily end up in a state where you say, “I love myself,” and what you mean is, “I love all the parts of myself that I routinely think about, but I might have some icky feelings about all that stuff that I’m not quite capable of looking at right now.” This is where, I think, a lot of people are stuck.

When we ask for Deep Okayness, we are asking for you to accept everything, wholeheartedly. It is a high bar to clear.

A hundred years ago, when image creation and distribution was more constrained, commerce was arranged by class. You can conceive of it as a vertical model, with high and low culture, and magazines and product catalogs that represent each class segment. Different aspirational images are shown to consumers, and each segment aspires upward to the higher level.

The world we live in is no longer dominated by a single class hierarchy. Today you have art, sport, travel, climbing, camping, photography, football, skate, gamer.

Class still exists, but there’s no longer just one aesthetic per class. Instead, “class” is expressed merely by price points that exist within consumer subcultural categories

In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume. Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web. While Reddit communities for gear were self-organizing consumer subcultures from one direction, companies and ad networks were working toward the same goal from the other direction.

API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post

way: in the cultural production service economy, all culture is made in service of for-profit brands, at every scale and size.

European and American commentators of all political stripes recognize the current cultural moment as one that is stuck in some way. Endless remakes and reboots, endless franchises, cinematic universes, and now metaverses filled with brands who talk to each other; a culture of nostalgia with no real macro narrative

Beyond our workplaces, what else is stepping in to provide a sense of community and belonging?

All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins. This seemingly insurmountable gap is what my workshops were trying to address. But what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it?

Culture is a process, with the end result of shaping human minds.

Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind. All communication now approaches propaganda, and language itself has become somebody else’s agenda. Little

When you bought Bitcoin and Ether, it’s with the knowledge that there was also a culture there to become part of. Now years later, there are many tribes to “buy into,” from Bitcoin Christians to Bitcoin carnivores, from Ethereum permissionless free market maxis to Ethereum self-organizing collective decentralized coop radicals. Even if none of these appeal to you, you still end up becoming what “the space” (crypto’s collective term for itself) calls a “crypto person.” The creation of more and more “crypto people” is driven by the new revenue model cryptocurrencies exhibit. The business logic of these tokens is “number go up,” a feat accomplished by getting as many people to buy the token as possible. In other words, the upside opportunity is achieved with mass distribution of Bitcoin and Ethereum culture—the expansion of what it means to be an ETH holder into new arenas and practices. Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.

Under CPSE models, companies brand products. They point to subcultures to justify the products’ existence, and use data marketing to sort people into starterpack-like demographics. Subcultures become consumerized subcultures, composed of products

Authenticity, I came to understand, was more than a culture of irony and suspicion of everything commercial culture has to offer. It drew on a deep moral source that runs through our culture, a stance of self-definition, a stance of caring deeply about the value of individuality.