Great spiritual teachers are often described as mirrors that enable people around them to become aware of patterns, believes and other unconscious bits.
I argue that Socrates was precisely this in its purest form to the Athenian people: he was a spiritual teacher guiding them from ignorance to truth and virtue. Socrates’ method was questioning others to mirror their behavior, values, beliefs, and thought process and make them aware of their own unconscious patterns and blind spots has become his trademark. It was famous in Athens at the time and it still is today. His goal was for everyone to reach excellency and to truly know-themselves.

Today breathwork is having its moment, a few more years and it may be up there with Yoga and Meditation.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool to work with trauma, receive insight, induce personal growth and explore one’s consciousness.
Beyond that, it’s also easy to access, more controllable and direct than most psychedelic experiences, and it comes in a million variations. Learn more about how it works and where it comes from.

“I call it therapy for those who don’t want to talk about their problems, I call it meditation for those who can’t want to sit on a cushion for hours, and I call it a drugfree plant medicine.”
-Ben

I shed light on many facets of the controversial term “drugs”. Pharmaceuticals are drugs, so are beer and coffee. Here, I aim to replace stigma and misinformation with knowledge and understanding.
Most people habitually connect “drugs” to things like hedonism, harm, abuse, addiction, and so on. And while this is not entirely wrong, the same is true about food as people are using and abusing it in similar ways.
It is only that we cannot live without food and we need it on a daily basis why we would never deny the necessity to consume food. 
Yet, as food is entirely natural to us humans, so are “drugs”.
If you think this sounds unreasonable or outrageous, please bear with me and let me explain. You may be surprised how much this is true.

If you follow a predetermined path, you won’t be making your own experiences. You won’t make your own mistakes, therefore you won’t learn what really drives you. 
If you start walking in a direction and adjust your course when clues appear like breadcrumbs, you’ll create your own path. 
But most importantly: You’ll learn to listen and trust your own voice.

Most of our problems stem from just that, from following rules.
-Paulo Coelh

Evolution is not always right in the sense that what worked at one time is not necessarily the best solution at a later stage of development. And evolution is not finished.
Instead, those who adapt in the right way and fast enough when conditions change, are those who are able to make it. We can easily see how our primal desires drive us to make questionable assumptions and decisions, eat sweets, seek instant gratification, keep unhealthy habits, believe in populists or opportunists, or be suspicious of strangers/foreigners. Although these drives have been important in the past, now they are hindering us, individually and collectively.

Awe and wonder are not about what we perceive, but how we perceive it. We see the infinite beauty and complexity of things, we see the vastness of life in a grain of sand or find the funniest little detail in the strangest of clouds.
Awe and wonder are some of the most amazing states of mind we can cultivate during the day by reminding us what a mystery this life truly is and how little we really now about it.

I’m a philosophy student who just finished his Master’s in Berlin, Germany. Over the last five years I got sucked more and more into many fascinating topics that did not fit into the usual curriculum.
For some time, I had an insatiable hunger for knowledge and insight from all domains.
I kept researching, reading, and writing on different topics, spanning from Jungian Psychology to Transpersonal Psychology, from Cognitive Science to Spirituality, from Mysticism to Psychedelic Therapy, and from Mythology to Metaphysics.
What I was doing felt so intimately connected to what I considered to be the essence of philosophy and at the same time, it seemed entirely separate from the philosophy I was studying. There was effectively no place for it in the academic world.
This is why I began writing online to share my inspiration and knowledge with the hope to inspire and find community. Over the last 4 years I’ve also been walking the path, practicing Breathwork, meditation and Yoga to not just talk about a spiritual philosophy, but trying to live it as fully as possible.

I do firmly believe that technology can do immense good, but only if we are able to clean out our own garbage first. Both individually and collectively we need to grow up and show up first.
In this article, I present a complementary dimension of development: The conscious use and implementation of what could be called psycho-technologies.
We could also call them tools of the mind and body; after all they are not sperate. They may include practices such as meditation, trauma-work, breathwork, psychedelics, Yoga, Tai-Chi, or therapy.
They can help us heal, build a deeper connection to ourselves, the people around us, and the natural world, they can help us bring more meaning into our lives, and they can help us regulate our thoughts and emotions.

One thing we carry with us wherever we go is our breath.
Similarly as our body it can either be something we unconsciously use or it can become a vessel for transformation, a resource to become more conscious, or to enhance our physical and mental health.

This is why in this article I want to share a few simple ways through which 
(1) you can tap into your nervous system and relax more deeply to fall asleep faster and 
(2) I will present you with a simple thing that if implemented can greatly improve overall sleep quality and recovery.

In my view, the goal of spirituality is to realize that you and the world are both fully divine and that there is no separation beyond the perception of the mind, the five-sense-reality that you are experiencing right now.
Instead of being in conflict and fear of the outer world and other people, we can recognize them as parts of ourselves, different expressions of the same source. This realization eventually enables access to a participatory approach to life and the world around us, finally leading to illumination or awakening.

Mystical experiences may be described as moments of deep connectedness, insight, or transcendence that go far beyond everyday experience and ordinary consciousness.
“The mantra of the mystic is:
I want to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miraculous in the mundane, and the sacred camouflaged in the profane.”

In another installment of this series about the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were taking place for nearly 2000 years just outside of Athens, this article attempts to answer how the “Secret of Eleusis” never got betrayed
I discuss the ineffable nature of the initiation, the difference between direct knowledge and propositional knowledge, especially in the context of psychedelic experiences, and briefly touch on why we might need to recover the Eleusinian experience for our modern world.

Everything can be entirely meaningless, determined, and mechanic or infinitely meaningful, mysterious, and divine.
The humanities and the sciences are two ways to see the world.
The sciences turn everything into an object. But they can’t really find or talk about meaning in the world and that’s ok, because it’s not their task. To examine our thoughts, ideas, culture and meaning we have the humanities. And ultimately we need both, but right now we are desperately missing one side of the equation.

This article will explore what was so special about the initiation at Eleusis and why the secret seems to have never been betrayed.
First, I discuss the general purpose and nature of initiation before going into the nature of the initiatory experience in Eleusis. We have many reports of the ineffable nature of this experience which seem to indicate that none of the ritual components by themselves could be taken to constitute the actual secret.

In the second part of this series about the Eleusinian Mysteries, we will delve into the myth of Demeter and Persephone and its interpretations.
The myth tells the drama of Persephone’s abduction to the underworld by Hades and the sorrowful search of her mother, Demeter.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were one of the most important Greek institutions of antiquity, existing for nearly 2000 years and attracting visitors from all over the Mediterranean. They were a 9-day ceremonial rite, culminating in an initiation into the mysteries of life and death. I discuss the nature and importance of this Greek mystery religion that remains unknown to many.