String

Quintessence Quest ✨🧵 A short video of art pieces favourited by friends from other social media platforms, paired with ‘In the Crystal Cathedral’, a composition from the album, Cosmic Lark, by Lyrella (Stringall-Lowe). Feedback is important for creatives, and those contributing to the beauty of the world. So, I am grateful. 🩵 I love the transcendent nature of creation so this is purely human art & music. ©2025 String Productions/SunnCreative #cosmicdrop @tony_lowe @sunncreative @ESPProgProject

Different dimensions... still orbiting the same center ☯️

The James Webb Space Telescope has done it again—revealing a breathtaking structure now dubbed the “Cosmic Vine”: a string of 20 galaxies stretching across a staggering 13 million light-years! What makes this discovery so shocking? This colossal formation dates back nearly 11 billion years, forming just 3 billion years after the Big Bang—a time when galaxies were thought to still be forming in isolated clumps. Instead, JWST captured a massive, organized structure linking galaxies together much earlier than expected. This discovery challenges traditional theories about how and when galaxies clustered together in the early universe. It hints that the cosmic web—the vast, invisible scaffolding of the universe—was already weaving galaxies into chains and networks far earlier than we thought. 📚 Scientists are now rethinking the models of galactic evolution and exploring how such a structure could arise so quickly in cosmic history. The “Cosmic Vine” might just be the key to understanding how galaxies interacted, merged, and shaped the universe we see today. 🔭 Thanks to JWST’s infrared vision, we’re seeing the universe not just as it is—but as it was, long before Earth even existed. 📸 Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / JWST

World leaders may be hell bent in destroying the planet. But a simple thing like leaving Dandelions to flower can make a big difference to your local wildlife. We can only do what we can do to help our wildlife. Plus, living in a wildlife habitat is so good for mental health.

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” — J. R. R. Tolkien

Maidin Mhaith Ó Dhún Na nGall 🇮🇪 Today Saturday March 21st, The Spring Equinox Beam of Sunlight is still visible at the Ancient Monument. Fortress Of The Sun 🌞

Newton spent more time writing about alchemy and theology than about physics or mathematics.

“Find What Speaks To Your Energy And Live It.” ~ A.D. Posey, Muskogee (Creek) Nation. 1873-1908

Copy + paste ! Plenty for today's #FoxOfTheDay , shared by @aliball.bsky.social

A mature Giant Sequoia can use 2000 liters of water every day during the summer. That's why snowy winters are fundamental: with adequate water they can live over 3,000 years [📹 Michael Block]

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, "I must do this." I can't tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon's rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water. -- Jim Harrison

“Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.” - McKellen reciting Vonnegut

Legendary Japanese filmmaker AKIRA KUROSAWA with some great advice for writers everywhere.

The golden rectangle is not an artistic convention - it is a discovery. Randall traces the logic carefully. Take the width of a human face and use it as the short side of a rectangle, with the height of the head as the long side, and the result is a golden rectangle - the same proportion that artists and architects across centuries independently arrived at as the ideal frame for composition. That convergence is not a matter of taste or cultural fashion. The golden rectangle frames the human face perfectly because the human face was built to those proportions. The self-similar nature of the golden rectangle is where Randall finds the deeper significance. Remove a square from a golden rectangle and what remains is another golden rectangle - smaller, but identical in proportion. That recursive quality, infinitely repeating at every scale, is the same fractal geometry Randall traces through plasma structures, ancient sacred sites, and the architecture of the cosmos itself. The human face is not simply aesthetically proportioned. It is geometrically encoded with the same ratio that governs the spiral of a galaxy and the growth pattern of a nautilus shell. Deviation from that proportion, Randall notes, is immediately perceptible - which suggests the golden ratio is not a standard we impose on beauty, but one we recognize because it is already written into what we are.

I tend to retreat to my creative cave when world events become overwhelming. Currently, I am fed up with cruelty towards all living beings and witnessing the lack of empathy of those orchestrating world events. My only respite is to, as the Diné would say, ‘walk in beauty’ - to treasure the unfolding spring, life, and to be gentle towards others. Feed birds, stroke cats, grow and water plants, hold trees - and keep love at the forefront of my heart. I attempt to capture the beauty of nature in photography and art; when gazing into the sun, what is recorded is often a surprise. #walkinbeauty ✨ In the end John Lennon said it best. “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait” - Revolution - The Beatles Yes, you can count me out. #countmeout #cosmicdrop

As all who were with me know, I fell seriously ill in Egypt in February with a horrible lung infection that still lingers. I'm glad I was able to fulfill all my commitments, despite the health challenges, but this trip really brought me face-to-face with my own mortality! Thank you for being there with me, and for your love and understanding. I'll never forget.

@Graham__Hancock Your gifts to humanity of investigation and questioning the scientific status quo are unparalleled. Rest, rejuvenate and heal soon! ✨

🚨The greatest secret about human consciousness was hidden in Tibetan monasteries for 1,000 years. In 2020, a dead monk's perfectly preserved body forced science to pay attention. What researchers found changes everything: The human body begins decomposing within four minutes of clinical death. Cells rupture. Bacteria that spent your entire life contained by your immune system start consuming you from the inside. The process is so reliable, so chemically inevitable, that forensic scientists use it to calculate time of death down to the hour. Biology doesn't negotiate with death. It just begins the dismantling. Except in a monastery in Tibet, where a dead monk's body sat for weeks — skin intact, limbs flexible, no odor, no decay — while the temperature in the room held no special condition and no preservation technique had been applied. The phenomenon is called thukdam. And it has been documented not once, not as legend, but repeatedly across centuries of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Senior meditators — monks who spent decades training the mind in ways Western science doesn't have vocabulary for — die, and then don't fully die. Their bodies remain in a state that clinical instruments cannot classify. Not alive by any measurable standard. Not decomposing the way dead tissue should. Suspended in something that our entire biological framework insists cannot exist. For a thousand years, Tibetan monks treated thukdam as evidence of something they already knew: that consciousness is not produced by the brain. The brain, in their model, is a receiver. A tuning instrument. And an advanced enough meditator could, at the moment of death, consciously withdraw from the body in a way that slows or suspends the biological dissolution process — because the dissolution itself is downstream of something subtler than chemistry. Western medicine, for most of modern history, filed this under "folklore." Then researchers from the University of California San Diego, the Mind & Life Institute, and several collaborating institutions started collecting data. They studied brain activity in meditators during and immediately following clinical death. They documented thukdam cases with controlled observation — temperature logs, clinical assessments, photographic evidence over time. What they found didn't fit any existing model. EEG readings in long-term meditators at the moment of death showed gamma wave activity — the highest frequency brain state, associated with peak conscious integration — persisting and in some cases spiking during the dying process. In normal deaths, brain activity collapses. In these cases, it surged. As if something was turning up, not down. Gamma waves in living meditators are already extraordinary. Matthieu Ricard, a French molecular biologist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk produced gamma oscillations during meditation that were so far outside normal human range that the neuroscientists at Richard Davidson's lab at Wisconsin thought their equipment was malfunctioning. They recalibrated. The readings held. His brain during compassion meditation looked nothing like any brain they had measured before. The degree of neural synchrony — different regions of the brain firing in coordinated patterns simultaneously — was categorically different from baseline human function. What decades of meditation appear to do, structurally, is rewire the relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, between the default mode network and the regions associated with present-moment awareness. The DMN — the brain's narrative autopilot, the system that generates the internal monologue, the mental time travel, the self-referential loop most people experience as "thinking" — quiets in advanced meditators in ways that are measurably, structurally permanent. Their baseline brain state is closer to what most humans only briefly touch in peak experiences or flow states. But thukdam pushes past all of that into territory neuroscience doesn't have a map for. The leading scientific hypothesis attempts to explain it through metabolic slowdown — the idea that extreme meditative states could reduce cellular activity so profoundly that decomposition is delayed the way hibernation delays it in animals. A compelling theory. Except hibernating animals are alive, with measurable heartbeats, measurable respiration, measurable core temperature maintenance. Thukdam monks have none of that. The metabolic slowdown hypothesis requires the biology to be doing something. The biology appears to be doing nothing. And yet the result — preserved tissue, no decay cascade — looks like the result of something actively working. The 2020 documentation intensified the debate because it forced a specific confrontation: either our model of what biological death triggers is incomplete, or our model of what consciousness is and where it resides is incomplete. One of those two things is wrong. Both cannot simultaneously be right in their current form. Consciousness remains the hardest problem in science. Not hard in the way fusion energy is hard, where we understand the physics and struggle with engineering. Hard in a more fundamental way — we don't actually know what it is, where it comes from, or why subjective experience exists at all. Why does it feel like something to be you? Why does information processing in neurons produce the experience of seeing red, or feeling grief, or recognizing a face? No one has answered this. Materialism — the assumption that consciousness is simply what brains do, the way digestion is what stomachs do — is the default scientific position, but it has never been proven. It has been assumed because the alternative felt unscientific. Thukdam is the alternative refusing to stay quiet. What Tibetan contemplative science spent a millennium mapping — the stages of dying, the dissolution of consciousness through progressively subtle levels, the possibility of remaining in "clear light awareness" after the gross body ceases — reads like mythology until you sit with the fact that the monks who practiced this most seriously produced brain states modern neuroscience is still struggling to explain in living subjects, let alone dead ones. The monastery was always a laboratory. It just ran different experiments with different instruments over a longer timeframe. Science is only now building the tools to read the data it left behind.

Kubrick explains the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

How should you handle an important decision? First: don’t rush. Don’t chase an answer. Instead, consciously imagine two or three real possibilities. Picture each one as if it were already unfolding. Feel the consequences. Let the paths stand before you like living options. Then stop. Don’t grind the problem in your head. Don’t stay up all night analyzing. Simply let the possibilities rest quietly in your soul. Steiner emphasized that thinking does not end when you stop thinking. Beneath the surface, a deeper activity continues; sorting, weighing, reshaping, connecting. And then you wake up… different. The question looks new. Details you ignored suddenly matter. One path feels inwardly right; another feels strangely hollow. Not because of impulse; but because something in you has ripened. This is a training of the will. A discipline of the soul. Modern culture worships speed, but spiritual clarity often requires the opposite: the courage to wait. Most bad decisions are not caused by lack of intelligence. They are caused by impatience. Sometimes the difference between wisdom and foolishness is simply the discipline to sleep on a question.