#or at least children who are in heavily consumerist societies

[boysnberriespie]

There’s always something off putting about new internet memes and language* becoming serious discourse with real analysis (fine and normal, academics do it all the time) but people with no media literacy read those posts/essays and think that means anybody who says those things is brainwashed sheep. They’ve been analyzed and therefore there is something significantly wrong with them.

Can we not do neutral analysis anymore? Can nothing be interesting for its own sake? Must we be the arbiters of cultural value based on the next new substack essay and how we felt about it?

*not including the misuse appropriation of AAVE which is not what I’m thinking about in this moment, and while a connected discussion, isn’t necessarily the same thing as people coming up with corecore or even something like blorbo

[spirit-science-blog]

“Time not important… only life important.” yep, we’re going there, things are about to get a little bit philosophical now that we’re dealing with the Fifth Element...no..not the Alchemical Quintessence, but close! That crazy 1990s Sci-Fi about a killer planet, the power of love… and… You know, Bruce Willis’s Wacky Taxi Adventures... and all that…

So, major spoiler alert… The fifth element is Love. Well, kind of...it’s this woman called Leeloominaï Lekatariba Lamina-Tchaï Ekbat De Sebat… For short, Leeloo is the fifth element, and in essence: a perfect, supreme being of sorts. In a way, she’s kind of like Avatar Aan, destined to unite with the other classical elements in an ancient Egyptian temple to act as a defense system against this super evil Dark Force called Mr. Shadow - which takes on the form of a cruel planet, whose only goal is to destroy life in a cosmic cycle every 5000 years.

It’s a movie that’s had its fair share of criticism, especially in the gender department… Leeloo is the only real female character, with others appearing randomly throughout as passive objects, sex objects, or with most of their femininity stripped away like Major Iceborg. Aside from the fifth element herself, there’s a real lack of divine feminine in this story, but then again, her nature itself does embody many characteristics of the divine feminine: powerful, unique, and beyond the understanding of nearly everyone that she meets.

Regarding the plot, we have kind of a Raava vs. Vaatu thing happening like from Legend of Korra… and it’s hard not to draw lines to Avatar here considering the whole elemental theme huh? In the intro, we see an archaeologist deciphering ancient words regarding the conjunction of celestial bodies, something we should all do more of you know? Which, by the way, if you haven’t picked up your edition of the 2021 Almanac of the New Age, I might highly recommend it, because it helps you do just that without being randomly surprised by a giant robot-alien! Before they show up though, the archaeologist has to keep yelling to Aziz to wake up, as the kid keeps nodding off… I wonder if this is subtly depicting how humanity keeps falling asleep and thus the light that illuminates sacred knowledge is not currently stable. Yet when the advanced beings come to show the way, the light is blinding… Powerful and concrete.

There’s also a sense here that humans are the custodians of Earth, so we have to protect it from darkness and destruction ourselves, and while these higher beings help when the time is right, they cannot do it for us. While Love is shown as this mythical force that these advanced beings can use to defeat the darkness, it could also be said that Love is neutral energy between Light and Dark, one that is capable of harmonizing both sides, ultimately resetting the cycle, something that is echoed in Zorg’s speech later on.

All this knowledge is of course passed down through a secret brotherhood of priests, acting as keepers through the generations, of which there are many stories of secret societies doing the same in our history, and amazingly in the future where the main story takes place, Priest Cornelius is also an “Expert of Astrophenomenon”. He’s not just an expert on the metaphysical, but also seemingly the scientific study of space, and there’s certainly a sense that he’s got that whole balance thing down to a tee, working to better his understanding of both science and spirit by combining the two fields.  

So when the military fires a bunch of missiles at Mr. Shadow, it’s interesting to see how they treat Cornelius, who tries to explain to them what Mr. Shadow is, to which he is mostly ignored, and they continue trying to brute force the problem. Yet Evil begets more Evil - as Cornelius explains, subtly referencing that the military's weapons, or at least their intentions. Mr. Shadow - symbolic of “our” shadow selves, demonstrates that it will grow in power if you try to destroy it with the same mindset that created it. The only way to truly harmonize the darkness is through love.

Even more impressive is this disconnect between the President of Earth and Earth itself. While, of course, they are trying to protect the earth and all of its life, when we see the world, we have to ask… are those living? Police and robots so heavily control everything, it’s smoggy, you see some crazy representations of people like the guy who tries to rob Korben in his apartment, and I’m not sure I saw a single tree…

Now, Major Dallas, to that end, of course, represents the divine masculine, also fulfilling the warrior archetype. While, of course, he checks all the classic hero tropes of the ex-lone warrior destined to save the world and fall in love with a perfect supreme sacred woman, the way it plays out DOES provides us with a bit of wisdom for ourselves concerning synchronicity. He describes that what he wants is to meet that perfect woman, and she falls from the sky into his cab. Perhaps this is a nod to manifestation in some way, as it’s their love story that’s the key to resolving the movie's conflict. It’s also a reminder for us that when we stumble into synchronicity, we have to be willing to take that leap of faith and follow where it leads us. For Korben, he has an opportunity to give LeeLoo up to the coppers but ends up putting his whole life at risk for her instead, but it’s THIS path that leads to the world being saved. Korben has to ask himself what’s important, following his heart and helping someone in need or earning more points on his taxi license…

Now, Leeloo on the other hand, through her character explores the nature of spirituality, DNA, and the physical capabilities of our souls within a body. A big topic in spirituality today is the science of ascension - we made a whole workshop on that which you can watch for free if you like - and what enlightenment might look like or do to our physical bodies. Leeloo’s DNA is perfect.. But it isn’t inhuman. There’s nothing really out of the ordinary about her DNA, she has the same genetic composition as us, just more of it, more tightly packed, allowing for greater inherent genetic knowledge and potential. Perhaps there’s a message here that the human genome is already whole, we just need to utilize its latent capabilities to find inner harmony, leading to a leveling up of what we are truly capable of.  

So if Korben was like Link and LeeLoo was Princess Zelda, Zorg would be Ganondorf, completing the trinity. Zorg actually drops some pretty interesting wisdom in his discussion with Cornelius. Despite his “evil” role, his whole name is Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, being named after the prophet and saint in many religions, and Emanuel meaning ”God is with us” in Hebrew. Zorg explains that life itself results from chaos and disorder at times. He believes that by creating a little destruction, he is encouraging life to renew itself, so the Priest and he are really in the same business… while it might just sound like he’s been brainwashed by the Shadow, when we look deeper, we do find some hidden spirituality!

His ideology is in alignment with the wisdom of the importance and honorable role of darkness in our reality. Much like the tower or death card in the major arcana or the shells of the Qliphoth in the Kabbalah, agents of darkness often come to give structure, boundaries, and direction for light to move through, as well as clearing stagnant energy to make way for new and evolved paradigms. Much like the cycles and sine waves that move through nature, energy flows through peaks and valleys that balance each other out.

Zorg knows he is a monster and is proud of it. He’s a businessman at heart, powerful from the money of capitalism, and a reflection of society's state of awareness and evolution. As we mentioned, this future society is portrayed as consumerist and still dwelling on issues of pollution and crime, even in spite of great new technologies. Perhaps that’s why the Darkness had to come, to help propel the evolution of consciousness forward and bring about divine love. However, while the love between Korben and Leeloo is highly symbolic, it doesn’t seem to affect basically anyone else, which might call us to ask ourselves… would it have been better for humanity and its pollution to be destroyed? This - at the very least - seems to be the underlying thinking behind Zorgs criminal activity. Ultimately, in the face of darkness, humans must come together to accomplish things and stop evil, something we wouldn’t do otherwise… This is what makes us evolve as a species.

Zorg perfectly encapsulates his philosophy in his quote about glass, saying “this glass is serene and boring, but when destroyed, a lovely ballet ensues full of form and color”. He then knocks it off the table and a bunch of little vacuum cleaner droids come and clean it up. Describing that the “People who created them, technicians, engineers, now have money to feed their children. They are part of the chain of life".

Interestingly though, Zorg is only a monster because life experiences took him there, but he started like any of us. There is a nice lesson from Cornelius about how fickle life is: all of Zorg’s power counts for absolutely nothing when his entire empire comes crashing down because of one little cherry. Cornelius saves Zorg’s life regardless, showing us the virtue of the angels, even towards the demons.

When the team finally makes it to the alien space opera, we get to meet Ruby Rhod and Plavalaguna. Ruby is one of the most unique parts of this movie… Crazy sexual antics aside, he is unapologetically authentic to his true nature, bending gender standards and seemingly embodying masculine and feminine with grace and humor. Perhaps the epitome of the wacky human spirit. And then as for Plavalaguna, she has some very ascended master vibes. The Mondoshawans entrusted her with the safekeeping of the elemental stones, who actually carries them inside her body as a safeguard. From a Spiritual perspective, this seems to describe how we all embody the classical elements within us. She even senses Leeloo's presence behind a wall down the hallway, implying she has some measure of clairvoyance. Interestingly, like the Mondoshawan from earlier, she doesn’t seem overly concerned with her own death, echoing the movie’s sentiment that time is not important, only life. Deeper though, it appears that she knew she was going to die all along, in order for the stones to get out of her…. We’re not even gonna ask how she got the stones inside her in the first place...that’d be one hard pill to swallow, let alone perform an entire opera with these giant rocks in your belly. Mad props to her.

Perhaps the reason superior beings don’t fear death as we do is that they know the bigger picture, they know these lives are transitory, so they don’t mind dying for a cause, as they understand the purpose of this life in the bigger scheme of things. Knowing that the flux and flow between life and death is transient, they’ll be back in the right place and the right time as life requires it. In the same way, in traditional tarot the horse Death is riding, is stepping over a prone king, which symbolizes that not even royalty can stop change. Plava understands her role and accepts her death, after imparting wisdom to Dallas that Leeloo is still fragile and somewhat human, despite her seeming physical evolution.

This idea of Leeloo still being human, however, forms a key part of the ending, as up until this point she has been learning all of human history via an alphabetical database… When she learns of war, she loses hope in humanity after seeing the darker sides of our past. Certainly, we can’t blame her, humans are the only species to cut down a forest to make room for a billboard that says “stop deforestation”, I’d be pretty shocked about our history too. However, Korben’s love shows her that love is an undefinable thing, it’s not a stone like the other elements, but a feeling between people that permeates everything and is worth fighting and caring for.

It’s pretty funny that when it comes down to it, none of the characters actually know how to activate the super-love bomb. Leeloo doesn’t know what will happen, but she continues to follow her divine calling to be on that platform without second-guessing herself, even if she didn’t know at the end how to activate the final “weapon”..she follows her own inner voice and calling and is guided into defeating the darkness, speaking to the importance of following our intuition and own inner guide.

Ultimately love is shown to be something with no boundaries, no clear explanations, but still exists through us, changing our lives in powerful ways. And through thousands of years, it will stay as the most important thing worthy to fight for. It’s no accident that in a time of such modernized technologies and possibilities humanity once again has to turn to nature for help in the form of the elements. It reminds people that technology cannot always provide protection, it is nature that always has been the source of power, as it exists forever. And only things that are eternal, like nature and love, are of true significance. Today, it seems people either love or hate this movie, but whatever way the coin falls, it is undoubtedly a fun experience, and packed to the brim with spiritual wisdom!

So until next time, be mindful of what you do with the gift of life, cause we never know when a sentient evil planet might try and eat us. Toodles!

This video was created by Team Spirit Connect with the team at https://spiritsciencecentral.com/about

[talabib]

How To Find Financial Freedom In Your Forties. 

Once you reach your forties, it’s safe to say you’re not the high-school prom king, nerd, or cheerleader you once were. Your path in life has led to new roles like worker, breadwinner, spouse, parent – or all of the above.  

No matter what your situation, though, you still have something in common with all the other forty-somethings of your generation: money.

Most people hope that middle age will bring them financial security and freedom. However, many find some stumbling blocks between them and prosperity in the second half of their lives. 

This post looks at the lives and fortunes of six distinct characters. Along the way, they reveal the damaging attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about money that are holding you back and show how you can build a secure foundation for your family’s future.

Indulging your every want leads to a lot of debt that you don’t need. 

There are five damaging attitudes you’ll need to let go of if you’re going to achieve long-term prosperity and fulfillment. In this post, you’ll meet a cast of characters who embody these bad attitudes, and you’ll learn just how they turned things around – or how they didn’t. 

The first attitude you’ll need to unlearn is desire.In today’s consumerist society, it’s easy to confuse the things you want with those you need. Surrounded by media images of glamorous celebrity lifestyles, you may find yourself spending excessive amounts on designer clothes, fast cars, or extravagant restaurants. 

Sure, indulging your desires is part of what makes life fun. But unfortunately, doing so can also burden you with debt, which is likely to send your anxiety levels soaring. 

Josephine, a successful entrepreneur and businesswoman, knows all about desire and the stress it can put on a person’s finances. Although she owned a successful communications business – a business that provided her with an annual income of around a million dollars a year – one thing she didn’t have was financial security. Hundreds of thousands of dollars came into her bank account each month, only to leave it just as quickly. All thanks to her decadent lifestyle. Josephine splurged her massive salary on everything from huge mortgages on a string of luxury properties to five-star hotel suites to personal make-up artists.

Unfortunately, Josephine’s desire for a lavish lifestyle was costing her more than just money – it was taking its toll in stress, too. 

From the outside, it looked like Josephine had a perfect life. But in reality, she had to keep working extremely hard to keep the money rolling in each month. Josephine knew if she took her foot off the gas, she would immediately encounter difficulties; she had so heavily leveraged her property investments with debt. This manic, work-hard-play-hard lifestyle had suited Josephine in her twenties and thirties, but now, in her forties, she’s finding that she doesn’t have as much energy. Unfortunately, with all her desires and their accompanying debts, slowing down hasn’t been an option. 

Clearly, Josephine needs to reassess her lifestyle and her desires.

When you don’t focus on the right things, you’re headed towards failure. 

What do you really want out of life? Not just tomorrow, but in five or even twenty years’ time? If you’re a little unsure, then you’re not alone. All too often, we fail to clearly envision exactly what we want our future to look like. Without this grand vision, we have trouble focusing our efforts on long-term goals. Instead, we live day to day, searching for fulfillment in our next vacation or job but rarely finding anything more than fleeting moments of gratification. 

This brings us to the next attitude that’s holding you back from a prosperous future: your focus. 

Meet Jasper, a forty-something man who’s been struggling with focus ever since he left high-school. During his formative years, Jasper didn’t have a problem with focusing on what he wanted. In high school, he was a star athlete; he looked to be headed for great success, and had no problem envisioning a future career in professional sports. 

Unfortunately, through a combination of bad luck and injury, Jasper’s athletic career never took off. He’s been drifting through life ever since. He never replaced his vision of becoming an athlete with any other long-term goal. So at the age of forty, he’s without focus. He bounces from one dead-end job to the next, living for the weekend and drinking too much. He lives with his elderly mother because he can’t afford to pay for an apartment of his own. 

Deep down, Jasper is a decent guy. But because he doesn’t know what he wants from life, he’s ended up with very little in the way of possessions and almost no savings for his retirement.  

However, not everyone who struggles with focus does so because of a lack of it; problems can also arise when a person’s focus is too narrow.  

Meet Jayne, a lawyer and single mother to eight-year-old twin girls. Although she has the potential to earn a very decent income, Jayne only works part-time. Why? Because she’s always made her family the main focus of her life. When she was younger, she believed that getting married and having children would be enough to bring her happiness. 

Unfortunately, when her husband became abusive, and their marriage ended, Jayne was left to shoulder the financial burden of raising two children. However, her current job barely covers the family’s expenses, let alone a retirement plan. Finding herself in this precarious position, Jayne is starting to realize that focusing so much on her family isn’t bringing her the happiness or peace of mind that she’d anticipated.

Money is a limited resource for most, but time is finite for all of us.  

Even if you’re bad with money, you’re probably savvy enough to know that it doesn’t grow on trees. We all understand – in theory, at least – that money is a limited resource. Yet many of us fail to grasp that time is finite too. We act like we have all the time in the world to get what we really want, whether that’s closer relationships with our loved ones or a solid financial plan for our retirement. But time, like money, is something we can’t afford to waste. 

Many forty-somethings have competing demands on their time and finances, from teenage children to aging parents, which means they delay making arrangements for their financial future. Believing they have plenty of time to secure their finances in the years to come, they continue to focus purely on the urgent demands of the here and now. 

Karen and Russ did just that. While Karen was a stay-at-home mom, Russ worked long hours to provide his family with a comfortable lifestyle. Unfortunately, while the couple had a great house and enjoyed overseas vacations, they hadn’t put a plan in place to ensure their lifestyle remained sustainable. They had a big mortgage, for example, but neither of them had any life insurance. 

This meant that if anything were to happen to Russ, or if he were suddenly unable to work, his family might lose their house. Furthermore, with Karen out of the workforce for so long, her retirement income would be worryingly small. Once they crunched the numbers, the couple realized that, even if they downsized and sold their house in the future, it still wouldn’t give them enough money to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

But an unhealthy attitude towards time doesn’t only hurt those with financial troubles. It can also negatively impact even the most financially secure people. 

Brad was a self-made billionaire who owned a global technology company. However, despite his enormous wealth, Brad’s life was far from perfect. Because he’d been so focused on his career, he’d never dedicated the time to finding the right person to settle down and start a family with. 

He also had a distant relationship with his parents and only really communicated with them through his personal assistant. In other words, Brad lacked loving relationships in his life, and no matter how much money he had, he couldn’t buy back the time he had failed to spend on getting closer to other people. 

Your childhood beliefs around money may be hindering your progress as an adult. 

What do you think about when you think about money? Perhaps either that it’s something to be spent and enjoyed, or that it needs to be saved for a rainy day?

Many of our attitudes about money are formed during childhood. They’re handed down to us by our parents. Most of us reach adulthood without ever questioning them. But these attitudes aren’t correct or even helpful just because we’ve clung to them for a long time.

In other words, if you’re serious about building a better financial future, you might need to examine your core beliefs about money.

Remember Jasper, the former athlete? Unfortunately, he doesn’t just lack focus. He also inherited damaging beliefs about money from his father, who spent his life working eighteen-hour days for little pay. From a young age, Jasper’s father drummed into him that working for a living was extremely hard and that money was very difficult to come by. As an adult, then, Jasper felt that the best way to protect himself from the hardships his father had suffered was to eschew ambition and try to work as little as possible. 

Unfortunately, this reluctance to knuckle down and work meant bouncing around from job to job. As a result, he never progressed up any sort of career ladder. Jasper may have avoided his father’s struggles, but he’s got plenty of his own as a result of his damaging beliefs. 

Although it’s better hidden than Jasper’s, Karen – our stay-at-home mom  – also has a damaging belief about money: she’s always felt incapable of making any. Instead, Karen believes she was meant to be a wife and mother, with her husband the family breadwinner. This belief was given to her by her parents,   who never really expected anything more of their daughter. It’s no surprise then that she’s now completely financially dependent on her husband.

And what about lonely Brad? His loneliness also arose from a damaging belief about money that was handed to him by his parents. From a young age, Brad was taught to value money and success above all else. As a child, his parents gave him the impression that their love was conditional on his accomplishments. As an adult, Brad now believes that human relationships aren’t nearly as important as his career. Unfortunately, the result is that he has no one to share his high-pressure lifestyle with – and he’s getting lonely.

The key to changing your financial future is to take action. 

At this point in our journey, it might seem as if your finances can only ever cause you stress and despair. Luckily, this isn’t the case. Anyone can turn their finances around if they take action. The sooner you change, the sooner your future will too. 

You don’t have to do it alone, either. Talking to a trusted financial advisor can help you understand your options and the changes you and your family need to make. 

So what did Ben, a financial advisor, advise our group of assorted forty-somethings, each with their own unique financial challenges? 

First, Ben advised extravagant Josephine to come to grips with her desires, which had loaded her up with debt over the years. Following his advice, Josephine sold most of her luxury properties and used the money to buy her remaining homes outright. It considerably lessened her expenses and reduced her stress levels.

Next, Ben advised Karen not to let damaging beliefs about herself hold her back any longer. Karen launched her own business, which built up her confidence along with her and her husband’s retirement savings. Now Karen is well on her way to a secure and fulfilling future. 

As for our former high school Jock Jasper, Ben advised him to focus on bigger goals, like establishing a real career for himself. With some financial help from his mother, Jasper was able to go back to college and study physical education. 

Sadly, though, Jasper’s beliefs were just too deeply entrenched to overcome. After only a year, he dropped out of college and lost a lot of the money his mother gave him. He is yet to achieve financial security. 

Lastly, Ben correctly pointed out that both Karen’s husband Russ and billionaire Brad needed to unlearn their attitudes towards time. Russ had to act immediately to secure his family’s financial future, so he took out life insurance and protected his family’s income in the event that anything were to happen to him. 

Brad, on the other hand, needed to spend more time with his ailing mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. Encouragingly, in the final months of her life, he rearranged his busy schedule and took the opportunity to rebuild his relationship with her.

The positive changes that this bunch of forty-somethings made prove that, even in middle age, you can still transform your relationship with money for the better.

By the time you get to forty, you’ve probably made some money mistakes in your time. Whether they’ve struggled to build a sustainable career or failed to grow a nest egg, many forty-somethings are grappling with an uncertain financial future. But it’s not too late to take action. By reassessing your priorities, curbing your desires, and reevaluating your beliefs, you can still look forward to financial security later in life. 

Action plan: A trustworthy financial advisor is within reach. If you’re looking for financial freedom, you’ll need to find a financial advisor you can trust. With this in mind, you should always look for an independent financial advisor, one who doesn’t earn a commission on any of the financial products she deals with. Instead, look for an advisor who only makes money from the fees her clients pay her directly. Advice from a qualified professional can be a great help and can cost as little as $200 a month.