In 1908 a slim book appeared in Chicago, published anonymously under the pen name "Three Initiates" and titled The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece. Religious scholarship now generally attributes it to William Walker Atkinson, a prolific pioneer of the New Thought movement who published under several pseudonyms. The book claims to transmit ancient teaching traceable to Hermes Trismegistus. Scholars are sceptical of that lineage, and the word Kybalion itself appears in no surviving Hermetic text. It was almost certainly invented by Atkinson.

A ginkgo tree stands on a university campus. A neurologist who has spent his life mapping the electrical whispers of infant brains begins, very quietly, to wonder if that tree has whispers of its own. He sets up sensors. He runs visualizations. He does not become the tree's friend exactly, but he becomes something rarer in a Western scientist. He becomes curious without contempt.

There is a moment most people know well but few have ever named. It arrives somewhere between 2pm and 4pm, or after a long stretch of screen time, or simply at the end of a week where the mind has been working harder than the body. A heaviness settles over the top of the head. Thinking becomes slower, less precise. The inner world feels like it has been pressed down from above. Most of us reach for coffee, a walk, or simply push through. But according to Dr. Robert Gilbert, a researcher in sacred geometry and subtle body anatomy who spent time training at the Clairvision School of Australia, that familiar sensation of fatigue has a precise energetic cause and an equally precise remedy. He calls it the Pulling Up Practice, and it takes less than a minute to do.

Astral projection has fascinated mystics, yogis, and spiritual explorers for thousands of years, and in recent times a growing number of teachers on YouTube have begun sharing their personal methods for inducing the experience consciously. One of the clearer voices in that space is Abbey Harries, who has projected hundreds of times through meditation and has put together a refreshingly grounded walkthrough of her process. What sets her approach apart is the emphasis on breathwork that charges the light body and the willingness to demystify some of the scarier folklore around the practice. This article distils her method and goes a step further by offering a structured tutorial on the spinal breathing technique she uses to prepare the body for separation.

The first piece in this series looked at the ethical concerns traditional spiritual frameworks raise about eating sprouts. The Jain position, the Law of One perspective, the stavara jivas teaching, all of these treat the seed and its sprouting as a continuous arc of plant consciousness that we interrupt when we eat. The question that lingers after reading those traditions is whether the model they assume is actually correct. Are sprouts really beings with souls already attached, or is something more interesting happening?

Ask yourself a brutally honest question. Do you actually enjoy the things you have to do in order to lucid dream? Not the dreams themselves, those are obviously wonderful. The actual practice. The journal. The reality checks. The constant nudging of your awareness throughout the day. If you stripped away the imagined payoff and just looked at the daily activity, would you still want to do it?