A New José Stevens Article

What Makes You Happy?

Begin by asking yourself what makes you happy and just see what comes up for you. A great variety of answers usually crop up. My dog makes me happy. Sunny clear days make me happy. Rain makes me happy. … Well, this list could go on and on as you can probably see. If all these things make me happy, I should be happy all the time or at least a good part of the time, right? Unfortunately, this is not so. … How can a thing, event, situation or experience cause something to happen that is really an experience within you, an aspect of your awareness?

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A New José Stevens Article

Is there any hope for humanity?

Like so many words there is much controversy over the term Moloch, referenced in the Old Testament several times and often referring to a Canaanite god who is believed to have demanded child sacrifice. The term is now being used to refer to AI, artificial intelligence, and its proliferation without proper caution or controls. This came about because like so many technologies various corporations were in a race to develop AI and to be the first to make it viable and capable of turning enormous profits. Therefore, there was the incentive to deliver to the world AI that was filled with bugs, unfinished in many respects, and had not been assessed for potential risks involved. Other corporations with equally unfinished AI quickly dumped their products onto the world stage not wanting to miss out on the profits. At this time this is the way of almost all technologies. The monster is out of its cage.

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A New José Stevens Article

The Importance of Shamanic Wisdom Regarding Hallucinogenic Plants

The previous article focused on the problems that can occur when someone combines pharmaceutical medicines and chemical compounds from the laboratory with natural entheogenic plants that have not been altered in any significant way. Here we will continue the discussion about the great interest by the general public in indigenous plant medicines and the need for greater understanding of the knowledge that indigenous cultures have compiled over many centuries, even thousands of years.

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A New José Stevens Article

The Explosion of Interest in Medicine Plants: What we need to know

Most of you are probably acquainted with the great interest in a variety of medicine plants or entheogens being researched for treatment with veterans and others suffering from PTSD and a variety of other disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety, and various addictions. When interest in some of these plants and chemical compounds like MDMA and LSD in the nineteen sixties and seventies arose showing much promise as healing compounds, great fear among conservative government officials and other traditionalists rendered most of these them illegal and they were made schedule one drugs, a felony if someone had possession or consumed them. Researchers were no longer allowed to study them and they were off limits in every way for quite a few years.

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A New José Stevens Article

5 Year Cycle

Many of you have shown interest in the Trends talk reference to a special five-year cycle of change that begins in 2023 or, in other words, this year. Not being an astrologer, I cannot speak in those terms about the next five years so I will use my own way of describing the cycle which can best be characterized as change, change, and more change. As we pointed out in the Trends talk, 2023 is a year dedicated to cleaning up all the of the emotional and energetic detritus that has been brought to the surface by the big challenges we have faced in recent times…

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Rewilding: Discovering Our True Wildness

“Be someone who transitions well. Accept it. Integrate it. Look for the opportunity in it. It is not other than you, rather it is also you.”             

~ From last month’s article.

 
Recently I was returning from a two-week vacation in Thailand with my wife Lena. While the trip itself was worth it the return trip was grueling….

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A New José Stevens Article

Managing Turbulent Transitions

As many of you know this is a time of turbulent transitions, including those that are personal, societal, global, climatic, experiential, internal, external, physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental. In other words, just about every way possible.

Some of us don’t handle transitions well, finding them frightening, exhausting, trying, and challenging. Some of us find them exciting, energizing, interesting, or even fascinating.

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A New José Stevens Article

Can we live without CRISIS?

Since one of the main themes of these times is crisis I thought it would be useful to dive into the topic just to crack it open a bit for greater understanding. Perhaps we need not run from every crisis but can find ways to experience it without resistance.
 
The simple definition of a crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger. When crisis occurs, people think of many words to describe it: Catastrophe, a dire situation, disaster, emergency, cataclysm, calamity, huge mess, extreme hardship or adversity, chaos, anarchy, jam, crunch, difficulty, and so on. All these descriptions add some flavor to the overall definition of crisis.  

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A New José Stevens Article

The Mystic Path and the Shamanic Path: Are they the same?

Believe it or not there is much controversy in academic circles about the differences and similarities of the mystic path and the shamanic path. While there is no right answer, here we will look at these similarities and differences. We do not know how old each of them are, but evidence suggests that the shamanic path is older because of its relationship to human survival. Shamans have been around for anywhere from forty to seventy-five thousand years and of course with each new discovery the time frame gets earlier. Shamans have always specialized in the gathering, storing, and execution of power in order to better heal the sick, discover the location of herds for hunting, predict and alter weather patterns, talk to plants to discover their properties and medicines, and communicate with allies to improve the tribes’ chances of survival.

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A New José Stevens Article

Key Aspects of Transformation

In this brief article we are going to examine some of the most fundamental aspects of beingness and how almost nobody understands how these aspects are the keys to happiness. This brief article could be a book or it could be a short article like this one. To begin I am going to make some rather outrageous proposals that I will not attempt to prove here. All I will say is that much wiser people than myself have made these proposals throughout history knowing that they almost completely failed in their mission to educate the human race on these matters.

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