Three voices on esoteric — read top-to-bottom; each entry takes the previous as a starting point.
wardruna — wardruna — 2020
An official music video by Norwegian Nordic-folk group Wardruna for "Lyfjaberg," rooted in the Eddic poem Fjölsvinnsmál. The song depicts a ritual ascent of the mythic Healing-Mountain where pilgrims shed possessions, time and fear before being cured by ancient runic chants.
Fall of Civilizations — Fall of Civilizations — 2020
An in-depth audio-documentary chapter on the Sumerians: their origins in the marshlands of Mesopotamia, the rise of cities like Uruk and Ur, the invention of writing and mathematics, the reigns of Sargon and Ur-Nammu, and the slow ecological and political collapse that ended the world's first civilization..
The Life Guide — The Life Guide — 2023
A three-and-a-half-hour explainer covering the entire arc of Greek mythology in chronological order — from primordial Chaos through the Olympian gods, the age of heroes, the Trojan War and the Odyssey. Sourced from Edith Hamilton, Stephen Fry, Robert Graves and Apollodorus.
From the Journal
Fourteen years of zazen, permission to teach from his roshi, and a public step back from any Buddhist identity. The arc from that step to the books, courses, and conversations that followed is one of the cleanest case studies in how a non-institutional contemplative voice forms. Continue reading →
More from the Journal
In 1975, three Trappist monks at Spencer, Massachusetts assembled a 20-minute lay practice from a 14th-century English text. The book, the course, and the heirs that followed are the visible side of a fifty-year recovery.
More from the Journal
More than thirty million copies of The Power of Now have moved through readers' hands. The instruction inside is one specific contemplative move, repeated under many names, and it is neither manifestation nor Buddhist mindfulness.
Click a voice. The red threads show which entries in the catalogue cite, quote, or echo that teacher.
From the Lexicon
all entries →Concept
The principal pantheon of deities of ancient Sumerian religion (c. 3rd millennium BCE) — literally *the offspring of An*, the sky god. In mainstream assyriology, the Anunnaki are the great gods of the Sumerian and Akkadian texts: Anu, Enlil, Enki, Inanna, Ninhursag and the rest. In the modern reception of the term — beginning with Zecharia Sitchin's 1976 *The 12th Planet* and continuing through Mauro Biglino, Paul Wallis, Michael Tellinger and others — the same texts are read as a literal historical record of a flesh-and-blood astronaut civilisation from a body called Nibiru. The two readings sit on the same primary sources and disagree about almost everything else.
Figure
American teacher and author (born Bernard Perona, 1941), best known for *The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life* (Volumes I and II, 1999–2000) and the Mer-Ka-Ba meditation he reconstructed from Egyptian and Atlantean sources. After a transformative 1971 encounter with two angels, Drunvalo spent decades teaching the Flower of Life workshop in person; in 2011 he founded the School of Remembering and consolidated his life work into the four-day *Awakening the Illuminated Heart* (ATIH) workshop, now taught worldwide by some 200 certified teachers. Lives in Sedona, Arizona.
Text
[Michael Singer](lexicon:michael-singer)'s 2007 trade book — twenty-five short chapters on disidentification from internal narration and the recognition of [awareness](lexicon:awareness) as the [witness](lexicon:witness) that does the noticing. The book sold over four million copies and became one of the most-cited contemporary American works in the [non-dual](lexicon:non-duality) practical literature outside Tolle. Singer compresses contemplative material drawn from his decades at the Temple of the Universe into a self-help register that disguises its actual lineage; the prose reads as plain American but the recognitions it tracks are those of [Advaita Vedānta](lexicon:advaita-vedanta) and of [Theravāda](lexicon:theravada) *vipassanā*.
Curated paths
all collections →Starter trail
A first walk through the index — beginnings of presence, the dissolution of the seeker, and the recognition that nothing was ever missing.
453 entries · ⌘
Reading path
Direct-path teachings on awareness as the only reality. Rupert Spira, Ramana, and the contemporary voices clarifying the same view.
178 entries · ⌘
Voices
The teachers who shaped the contemporary conversation — Tolle on presence, Watts on alignment, Spira on awareness, Sadhguru on inner engineering.
165 entries · ⌘
Where it meets the lab
Consciousness studies, biology of belief, and the work of researchers tracking the edges of the mind-body boundary.
487 entries · ⌘
Most recent
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▶ YouTube
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◉ Podcast
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Eckhart Tolle
◉ Podcast
A Beginner's Guide to Dark Retreat with Andrew Holecek
Andrew Holecek
▶ YouTube
Outer Space, Inner Space and the Mystery of Form
Eckhart Tolle
▶ YouTube
Why Most Unhappiness Comes from the Story 'Me and My Life'
Eckhart Tolle