Brian Longo

Manifestation 4 #manifesting #manifestation #visualization #lawofattraction #loa Shadows at the End of History: Occultism and Cult Movements in the 1990s The 1990s occupy a strange place in the history of Western esotericism. On one hand, the decade is often remembered as an age of technological optimism — the dawn of the internet, the end of the Cold War, the sense that history itself had reached some kind of settled plateau. On the other hand, it was a period of intense spiritual searching, millennial anxiety, and fascination with the unseen. As the calendar counted down toward the year 2000, occult and New Age subcultures flourished alongside a handful of new religious movements that would end in tragedy. This piece surveys both threads: the popular occult currents that shaped 1990s culture, and the cults whose activity during the decade left a lasting mark on how the public understands the line between fringe religion and danger. The Occult Goes Mainstre...

Manifestation 3 #manifesting #manifestation #visualization #lawofattraction #loa The Occult Undercurrent: Popular Esoteric Movements and Cult Phenomena of the 1980s The 1980s occupy a peculiar position in the modern history of the occult and new religious movements. It was a decade that opened in the long shadow of the 1970s' spiritual experimentation and closed in the grip of a moral panic so thorough that it reshaped law enforcement training, daytime television, and the popular imagination for a generation. Between these two poles, a genuine and diverse landscape of occult practice, New Age spirituality, and high-control religious groups flourished, intersected, and, in several notorious cases, collapsed into violence or scandal. This article surveys the major occult currents of the decade alongside the cults and new religious movements that dominated headlines, with attention to the cultural anxieties that bound the two phenomena together in the public ...

Neruda On The Park - Cleyvis Natera #fiction #books #novel #dominican #nyc Neruda on the Park by Cleyvis Natera Published: May 2022, Ballantine Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) Genre: Literary fiction, multigenerational family drama Overview The novel is a multigenerational story set primarily in New York, with flashbacks to the Dominican Republic, centered on a fictional neighborhood called Nothar Park that is predominantly Dominican. At the heart of the story is the Guerrero family, who must confront the pressures of gentrification when an aging building in the neighborhood is slated for demolition to make way for luxury condominiums. The Story Eusebia Guerrero, her husband Vladimir, and their adult daughter Luz have called the neighborhood home for two decades, and the coming demolition threatens the community they've built there. Eusebia responds by secretly plotting a campaign of sabotage to try to halt the const...

Hannaford Granulated White Sugar #sweets #sugar #food The History of Granulated White Sugar: From Ancient Cane to Modern Crystal Few substances have shaped the course of human history, economics, and culture as profoundly as sugar. What sits today in an unassuming bag on a supermarket shelf — pure white, finely granulated, and inexpensive — was once among the most coveted and heavily guarded commodities on Earth. The story of granulated white sugar spans nearly ten thousand years, crossing continents, empires, and revolutions, and its refinement into the crystalline form we recognize today represents centuries of agricultural experimentation, chemical innovation, and, darkly, one of history's most brutal labor systems. Origins in the South Pacific The story of sugar begins with the domestication of sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), a tall perennial grass believed to have originated in New Guinea as early as 8000 BCE. Early Pacific Islanders chewed the ra...

Manifestation 2 #manifesting #manifestation #visualization #lawofattraction #loa Manifestation in the Occult: Will, Symbol, and the Architecture of Desire Long before the word "manifestation" was absorbed into the vocabulary of self-help seminars and social media affirmations, it carried a far older and more technical meaning within occult and esoteric traditions. In ceremonial magic, Hermeticism, Thelema, and various strands of Western esotericism, manifestation refers to the deliberate act of bringing an idea, entity, or desired condition from the plane of thought into the plane of physical reality. It is not merely positive thinking; it is a structured metaphysical operation, resting on a set of assumptions about consciousness, correspondence, and causation that predate modern psychology by centuries. This article traces the occult conception of manifestation from its philosophical roots through its ritual technologies, its major theorists, and the...

Manifestation #manifesting #manifestation #visualization #lawofattraction #loa The Law of Attraction: Origins, Claims, and the Science Behind the Belief Few ideas in modern popular spirituality have achieved the cultural reach of the Law of Attraction — the proposition that human thought, particularly sustained emotional focus, exerts a causal influence on external events. Framed by proponents as an immutable universal principle akin to gravity, the Law of Attraction holds that "like attracts like": that persistent thoughts of abundance draw abundance, that fear draws misfortune, and that the texture of one's inner life inevitably becomes the texture of one's outer circumstances. This article examines the doctrine's intellectual lineage, its core claims, the psychological and physical mechanisms proponents invoke to justify it, and the scientific scrutiny — much of it skeptical — that the concept has attracted since its mass popularization...

Shapeshifting: Transformation, Identity, and the Fluid Self Across Myth, Culture, and Science Shapeshifting — the capacity of a being to alter its physical form, appearance, or nature — is one of the oldest and most universally distributed ideas in human thought. From the metamorphosing gods of ancient Greece and Egypt to the werewolves of medieval Europe, from the skin-walkers of Navajo tradition to the quantum indeterminacy of subatomic particles, the concept of shapeshifting permeates mythology, religion, folklore, biology, psychology, and speculative science. It speaks to something fundamental in the human imagination: the terror and fascination of a reality that refuses to stay fixed. To study shapeshifting is to study the nature of identity itself. What makes a thing what it is? If a man becomes a wolf, is the wolf still the man? If a god takes mortal form, does divinity persist beneath the flesh? These questions are not merely mythological curiosities. They echo through...