Something Rang at the End of My Meditation

Have you ever heard a bell at the end of your meditation?

It happened to me today. I was meditating on this sound and I was confused because I can’t remember adding a chime sound when making it.

For context, I made my own meditation sound using BandLab and another app that generates white noise. I was very intentional about it. I didn’t want to just mix sounds randomly, I wanted to understand it. The layers, the purpose, how it affects the mind, all of that. I’m very sure there’s no bell chime in it. I’ve added the sound below if you’re interested:

I was meditating the way I usually do, cross-legged, back straight but not stiff, hands wherever they feel comfortable. Sometimes on my knees, sometimes palms up, sometimes down, sometimes I put them together. Sometimes I do that thing where your index finger and thumb touch, but honestly I don’t overthink it. I think the real rule when meditating is to just be comfortable.

Halfway through the meditation, I started seeing colors with my eyes closed. I saw a small purple blob that is kind of expanding. Then replaced by these gray waves, then blue, then green. At some point it was like green and yellow mixed together, and it kind of looked like leaves or flowers. Then I saw something that looked like a white rose… or like a rose shape, with a faint green glow around it. I feel like I’m succumbing to something just like I’m about to sleep but I’m awake.

And then as the sound I know was ending, that’s when I heard the bell. Just one clear chime. Once the 15 min meditation sound ended I opened my eyes.

I looked it up. Turns out, it’s more common than I expected. Some people call it a “zen signal,” but it’s basically an auditory hallucination. As your brain transitions from deep relaxation back to active awareness, it can occasionally misinterpret internal neural signals as a sharp external sound like a bell or chime. This is generally considered harmless. It’s actually seen as a sign that you’ve reached a very deep level of focus, specifically what’s known as the hypnagogic state. It is the brief window where you are not quite awake anymore but you haven’t fully drifted off into a dream state yet. Your mind is still somewhat concious while your body is entering deep relaxation.

So I’m going to take that bell chime as a milestone in my meditation journey. Its like my brain dinged me like a microwave lol. A proof that my meditation is working to change my brain chemistry. After that meditation, I feel refreshed, which seems to be a good sign.

We’re Living in Cognitive Collapse

I remember when I was sitting in history class 15 years ago, reading about wars and people starting wars, or killing innocent people, or getting others killed for what? For honor? ego? legacy? For something they probably wouldn’t even live long enough to see? I judged them. I thought it was stupid. Why would anyone choose violence or step into something that could destroy so many lives instead of just staying home and protecting their peace, their family, and their life? There must be better things to do than violence. Like I don’t know… maybe start a bakery, learn pottery, get really into gardening, painting, reading books? Literally anything feels better than war.

To me, it all felt like something that belonged in the past. I believed that now, in modern times, we knew better. I thought back then, people made choices based on misunderstanding because they lacked enough information or had limited communication. Wars, in my mind, were the result of confusion, misinterpretation, and not fully understanding each other.

And I thought at that time that things were different. That with better technology, faster communication, and more access to information, it should be easier for people to understand each other. Easier to explain, to clarify, and to avoid conflict before it turns into something worse.

But now I’m seeing something else. With the rise of social media and AI, information became faster and more chaotic. The world didn’t just change, it accelerated, and humans didn’t evolve at the same pace as the tools we created. What AI and technology in general did is make everything faster, cheaper, and more scalable. That also means that bad intentions scale faster too. Before, a malicious person could lie to 10 people but now they can lie to 10 million with better grammar, fake images, fake videos, and confidence.

I used to think misinformation was just about wrong facts, but now I see it’s also about too much information, too many voices, too many versions of the “truth” competing at once. It looked like we are living in a world where everyone is talking at the same time and you’re just supposed to know what to believe. Instead of making life simpler, it just adds more pressure, because we’re constantly asked to process more than our minds were ever built to hold. When everything feels urgent, your brain stops slowing down enough to actually question anything. The real battle is clarity vs confusion and right now, confusion is winning because people are overwhelmed.

I think the real issue is not that technology is bad, but that it has amplified bad intentions, and humans are feeling overwhelmed. Because now, it’s not just about whether something is true or false anymore. It’s about having the mental space to even figure that out.

And it’s not only fake news. There are also new kinds of scams that move through the same system of speed and trust. Love scams, investment scams, fake job offers, phishing links, impersonation accounts, and messages that look like they come from banks, friends, or even government agencies. The forms keep changing, but the pattern is the same: urgency, emotion, and pressure to act without thinking.

A simple way to start recognizing scams is to notice the emotional pattern first, not just the content. If something is rushing you, if it’s making you feel fear, excitement, urgency, or attachment too quickly, that’s usually the first warning sign. Real opportunities and real people rarely demand instant decisions.

So what do we do with all of this?

I don’t think the answer is to “go back” or to erase AI or technology. That doesn’t really feel possible anyway because technology doesn’t reverse, it can only evolve and honestly, it wouldn’t fix the deeper issue. Instead, I think it’s about rebuilding something inside all this noise.

For fake news, don’t use social media as your source of news. Rely instead on established news organizations, official statements, and sources that have accountability rather than virality. If something feels emotionally intense or shocking, assume it needs verification. And remember, if something spreads fast, it doesn’t automatically mean it’s true.

Most importantly, slow down your own mind instead of reacting instantly. Learn what to ignore, what to verify, and what to trust slowly. So much misinformation right now are suceeding not because people are careless, but because they are tired. They’re scrolling too fast, trusting too quickly, and not pausing long enough to question anything. That’s why it’s important to slow down, think, and refuse to be easily manipulated.

I used to think the world was becoming clearer as it advanced. But now it feels like clarity is something you have to actively protect and consciously choose. Hopefully, that’s the shift we’re all going through right now, not just learning more, but learning how to think slowly again in a world that never stops speeding up. Manifesting a calmer, clearer life for all of us ✨

Am I Unlucky In Love Or is The Universe Just Protecting Me

There’s this weird moment after you ask the universe for a sign… when you realize it’s already been answering you the whole time—you just didn’t like the answer.

I say that prayer—the one that goes, “If it’s not good for me, take it away.” It feels right to ask for signs so I don’t end up wasting time on something that isn’t meant for me. I say it as if I mean it without condition. As if I am prepared for the removal. In practice, I am not always prepared. I ask for clarity, and then I hesitate when it arrives. I recognize it, and then I argue with it privately, as though the argument might change what I have already understood.

Sometimes I want to disprove the sign. I want to test it. I want to behave as though persistence might force a different outcome. And if I’m being honest, there’s also this stubborn part of me that wants to prove the sign wrong. So I stay a little longer than I should. I explain away what I have seen. I tell myself that consistency is a form of love, or patience, or maturity. Like I want to be the exception to what I’m being shown. But somehow, every time I do that… it circles back and proves itself right in the end.

The signs aren’t even subtle. It’s like I start turning into a version of myself I don’t like. I feel more anxious. I start noticing patterns I can’t unsee, little inconsistencies, emotional distance, things that don’t match what I was promised at the beginning. And sometimes, it’s not just emotional. Sometimes something happens in real life that makes you pause and go… wait.

I remember this one situation where someone I was with got into an accident. It just happened like one of those real-life things that forces everything to slow down. Time continued and with time, other things became visible.

The earlier patterns did not resolve themselves; they accumulated. Small omissions became larger inconsistencies. What I had once dismissed became impossible to ignore. Little lies stopped feeling small. The lack of empathy, the impulsiveness, the way consequences always seemed to follow but never really change anything started stacking up. There was a moment that I understood that what I was watching was not an exception to a pattern, but the pattern itself. I remember saying: oh. This is why things in their life keep going this way.

It is at this point that people often reach for the word karma. But karma is not always instant. It’s more like life slowly becoming a mirror of your behavior. And for some people, that mirror gets heavier over time. It is a life that continues to produce the same outcomes because it continues to produce the same choices. I don’t think the universe is actively punishing someone as revenge. This is who you are and eventually, life reflects that back at you.

There’s also this internal part, which I think is worse. The guilt that doesn’t really leave. The restlessness. The inability to build something stable. The repetition of the same cycles with different people, different excuses. That kind of “karma” just lingers. It stays in the background of everything.

Sometimes bad things just happen. Not everything is karma. Not everything carries a deeper meaning, and life does not always visibly punish those who do wrong, which feels unfair but also… real.

What I’ve started to realize, though, is that staying too long in something that keeps showing you it’s wrong doesn’t make you loyal. It just makes you involved in it. You start carrying something that was never meant to be yours in the first place. Its like you’re sharing the weight of someone else’s actions instead of letting them face it on their own. In the end, that’s another form of karma I’ve experienced, not what happens to them, but what happens to you when you ignore what you already know.

And so the question returns whether I am unlucky in love, or whether what I have been calling luck has been something else entirely.

Protection is not always recognizable as protection while it is happening. It does not always feel like relief. More often, it resembles interruption. It resembles disappointment and loss. Sometimes it feels like things falling apart at the exact moment you were trying to hold them together.

The universe doesn’t always remove people in dramatic ways. Sometimes it just keeps showing you the truth repeatedly until staying becomes the harder option.

What’s Real After Everything Else Isn’t

Astrology isn’t real. Manifestation, tarot readings, MBTI, maybe none of it is real in a literal sense, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work in people’s minds. Sometimes belief itself is powerful enough to change how we see the world, how we act, even what we notice. The mind is strong enough to create meaning where there is none, or maybe to reveal meaning that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It’s like a placebo effect for reality. Nothing physically changes but instead we do.

That pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

Your name is part of it. Watching the scene in the movie Project Hail Mary where Rocky said the name of his girlfriend made me think that our names are just a sound that someone gave us. You didn’t choose it, but you got used to it until it started feeling permanent and like it belonged to you. And now, when someone says it, you respond automatically even if it’s just repetition and a shared agreement. Its something that tells us who we are.

Money works the same way. It’s paper, or numbers on a screen, yet it controls almost every decision we make. Where we live, what we eat, how we move through the world. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, people used what they called “Mickey Mouse money.” It became nearly worthless later because the system behind it collapsed and people no longer trusted it as a stable way to trade value. Even though it was real paper money, it lost its value when people lost trust. This shows that money only works when people collectively agree it is important and believe they can use it to buy things. That’s what gives money power. Not the material itself, but the collective belief.

There’s a moment in The Little Prince where a man claims to own a star because no one owned it before him. He sits and counts his stars, writes the number down, locks it in a drawer. The Little Prince finds this completely absurd. And once you see it, you start noticing the same thing everywhere. When you step back, it almost feels surreal — like watching adults seriously argue over something a child would question immediately.

We do the same thing with land. The ground existed long before any person did and yet someone can own it, so that others have to pay simply to stand there, to build there, to live there. If you really think about it, the ground doesn’t know it belongs to anyone. It’s just there. We’re the ones who decided to divide it until it started feeling like the natural order of things. And then we drew lines on maps and called them countries. Invisible borders we treat like walls. You’re born on one side and suddenly that shapes your language, your passport, and your opportunities.

From there, it becomes easier to see how we extend the same logic to people.

People reduce entire groups into inherited labels or group identities, as if those labels could contain the full complexity of a person’s life, thoughts, or humanity. People can’t define others by stories written about people before them or by assumptions tied to others who merely share a similar appearance.

Yet, once a label exists, it starts shaping how people are seen. Who people assume belongs or is important. Who gets noticed or overlooked. People begin to sort each other without noticing. Into useful and not useful. Into valuable and replaceable. It doesn’t always look like open hostility. Sometimes it just looks like indifference. But indifference can also be a way of erasing someone without realizing it.

And when that way of seeing grows larger, it doesn’t stay small. It scales. People take that habit of reducing others into categories and expand it into something much more serious, where they stop seeing entire groups as individuals and start seeing them as a single idea, a side, a problem, or a threat. Into something that makes it easier to distance from their humanity. The mind protects itself by simplifying what it cannot fully hold but that simplification comes at a cost. The moment someone is no longer seen as fully human or as someone with a life as detailed and real as your own, the weight of what happens to them begins to feel lighter than it should.

No one is born inherently above anyone else. No one is born below. Those ideas only appear after systems are built—systems of power, economics, survival, fear. And once those systems exist, people start using them to organize the world, even if they quietly distort what a human being actually is.

If you trace that further, you start to wonder what is actually real underneath all of this.

If you strip away the systems, the money, borders, labels, status, you don’t actually find nothing. You find consciousness, memory, emotion, experience—the small, unmeasurable things that don’t exist in systems but exist in life. Those things don’t come from systems. They come from being alive.

Maybe a lot of what we treat as “real” is actually just shared agreement. But the way we treat each other inside those agreements is real in a much deeper way, because it has consequences. It shapes how people feel about themselves and how they move through the world. It leaves marks. That’s why it matters.

Because even if names are invented, money is invented, borders are invented, people are not. And what we do to each other inside these inventions becomes lived experience. It becomes memory, pain or care or distance or connection.

Maybe nothing is real in the way we think it is.

But people are real. Our connections, our feelings, our memories and experiences are real.

And maybe the only thing we’re truly responsible for is not letting the systems we invented make us treat the real parts like they don’t matter.

Humanizing Myself

I have spent years trying to convince myself and everyone else that I was human enough.

Not in a science-fiction sense as if I’m a robot or an alien or another specie. I wasn’t questioning whether I had a soul. It is more like standing in a room full of people who all seemed to understand it. They cried at the right moments without overthinking it, laughed easily and wore their feelings like a second skin. There I was on the other side wondering why I felt like I was just watching it all behind a glass.

What makes a person human, exactly? I used to think about this like it was a riddle I could solve if I thought hard enough. I’d go so deep into my own head that I’d forget my name. I’d lose the thread of where I ended and my thoughts began. I still do this sometimes and it is not going away.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard

What I was experiencing is called emotional suppression. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who suppress their emotions don’t experience them less intensely. They just carry the weight of them alone and their bodies and minds pay the price. Higher stress levels. Difficulty connecting with others. A kind of loneliness that’s hard to explain because everything on the outside looks fine.

That was me. Everything was fine. My face said so.

The first time I realized I felt things more intensely than most people around me, my instinct wasn’t to lean into it but to hide it. To perform neutrality. To master the poker face. If I didn’t show it, no one could use it against me. No one could look at me like I was too much. I became very good at it.

What I didn’t realize was that I was becoming a stranger to myself.

For years I wore it like an armor, and I thought I was protecting myself. On the outside, happy and sad and furious all looked the same, a kind of calm, unbothered neutrality that people probably read as composed. On the inside, I was a weather system. Thunder with no sound. I was exploding constantly and no one around me had any idea, because my face was always neutral.

I wouldn’t say I woke up one day and decided to change. It didn’t happened in a heartbeat. It was gradual. I started learning. Slowly, then all at once. I tried to get to know more about myself. What it means to be someone who feels deeply in a world that often rewards people who perform with less emotion. I started paying attention to what was actually happening inside me.

And then, just last year, something shifted. I cried. It was the kind where you don’t care what your face is doing. I laughed so hard at something stupid that my stomach hurt. I told someone I was angry, and I meant it, and I didn’t immediately soften it into something easier for them to hear just to make them feel comfortable. I felt things and I let my face show it.

I made myself feel safe. That’s the thing no one tells you. Sometimes the person who has to give you permission to feel is you. I would have loved for someone to have done that for me when I was younger. I would have loved for someone to sit across from me and say: all of it is okay. The big feelings, the loud feelings, the ones that don’t make sense. You are not too much or broken. You just feel things, and that is one of the most human things there is.

But no one did, and so I’m telling it to myself now. It may be late but not too late.

There is something quietly revolutionary about letting yourself feel. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you present. It makes you real and free.

Lying To The Point Of No Redemption

At a young age I was pushed so hard to admit the truth that lying started to feel pointless. The truth was obvious anyway and I have never regretted saying the truth ever since. Sometimes the truth is the only thing that makes the weight in your chest a little lighter. 

I hold a deep reverence for an oath where once I swear to god, I’m bound to tell the truth. Some people probably feel the same way. When someone asks me to swear, it almost feels like they already know the answer and are just waiting for me to confirm it so I just say it.

Lying is complicated. People notice patterns. If your story doesn’t match the last thing you said, that’s when things start falling apart. I don’t really understand why people lie about small things. The kind of lies that aren’t protecting anyone or sparing anyone pain. But I guess I’m not them. Maybe for them it’s embarrassing to tell the truth or maybe it feels easier to lie. I am good at noticing when someone else is lying. Sometimes I just pretend I didn’t notice but if its something that matters, I have to understand why they felt they couldn’t just say it.

There is one kind of lying that I think is harmless and kind of fun. When you go somewhere and a stranger you know you’re not going to meet again asks for your name or your life, you can just give them a different version. You can just tell them a different name, or say that you’re married, act dumb, say self-sabotaging or weird things or claim you failed school or say that you work at a morgue or as a ghost writer or a barista or a fortune teller, any job you feel like at any moment or any life that feels interesting. It’s fun cosplaying as a different person for minutes. It’s its own kind of performance and then you leave, and they’ll never know who you actually were. Identity is not really as fixed as we think.

The Urge To Sabotage

It’s strange how we sometimes sabotage the very things we say we want. Oh how quickly our excitement turns into avoidance. You make a vision board. You start a challenge. And then a few days later you abandon it, like the version of you who cared about it was a completely different person.

We live in a world that constantly rewards short-term gratification, the quick dopamine hit or immediate comfort. Committing to something long-term suddenly feels heavy. Especially when there are a thousand other options right in front of you. You could do this, or that, or maybe something even better will come tomorrow. So instead of choosing, we just hover. And the more options we have, the harder it becomes to commit to anything at all. Sometimes all we need to do is just pick one thing because staying undecided slowly erodes our ability to move forward at all.

This society doesn’t really train us to be committed people anymore. If anything, it trains us to constantly look for the next thing. Social media makes it worse. You feel clear about what you want, and then you scroll for ten minutes and suddenly you want five completely different lives. It’s hard to stay loyal to your own direction when you’re constantly being shown other directions.

The thing about goals is that the beginning is always the most exciting part. Starting something feels electric but after that, consistency is where it gets quiet, repetitive and boring. When there are no immediate consequences for stopping or when no one is watching or holding you accountable, that’s when most people drift away. The uncomfortable truth is that you have to learn how to commit even when nobody is watching.

It’s kind of like being in a relationship. When you’re truly committed to someone, you don’t wake up every day asking yourself whether you should keep showing up. You just do. Because the decision was already made.

There’s a line from Carl Jung that always comes to my mind: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.

We keep asking “Why does this keep happening to me?” but the answer is just somewhere inside us. Our inner world. The stories we carry about who we are. Sometimes we say we want something like success, love, opportunity but internally the story doesn’t match. Maybe a part of us believes we don’t deserve it or that we’re not really going to get it. Maybe we think wanting it is a bad thing because it makes us selfish or greedy.

So when opportunities actually appear, we hesitate. Our ego steps in and tries to protect us from uncomfortable feelings like guilt, fear, or vulnerability. And instead of moving forward, we hold ourselves back.

Then later we call it bad luck. Or fate.

Another strange thing I noticed about desire is that the more desperately we cling to it, the more resistance we create. When we want something so badly, we try to control every step of it, the energy becomes tense and almost repelling.

Sometimes the only way forward is to loosen your grip a little and allow the desire to exist without trying to force it. Enjoy the feeling of wanting something, then let go of the need to control how it arrives.

The Brightest Star In The Sky

There’s this bright red and white star that I keep noticing whenever I look up at the sky.

One time I came home and accidentally glanced up, and there it was again. I don’t know why but looking at it made me feel comforted. It felt like running into someone familiar in a crowded place.

I started tracing the stars around it and realized it might be a constellation. I feel happy because it was the first time I’d ever tried to recognize a constellation myself. After looking it up, I think it might be the Scorpius constellation. The red star in it that I kept noticing is called Antares, a red supergiant that astronomers say is nearing the end of its life and will eventually explode in a supernova. Which is strange to think about because it feels like its been there forever. Though I suppose I’ll go long before it does.

It made me think, maybe people from thousands of years ago also looked up at that same star and just like me,  felt the same kind of comfort.

Last night I went outside because I felt like petting the dog and my cat. I sat on the stairs for a while and when I lifted my head, I immediately spotted it again.

“Oh,” I thought. “There you are.”

It almost feels like the star is looking back at you, like it’s winking. And it’s nice somehow to think that every night there’s just this one star there, waiting for you to notice it again.

Although I can’t actually be sure it’s Antares. Maybe it’s Sirius instead. I only know it as that red-and-white star that flickers like it’s alive. If it really is Antares, it’s strange to think that it’s technically dying.

Maybe that’s also why it made me think about my cats that night.

When my first cat died, there were nights when I’d hear a cat meowing outside the house. Every time I went out to check, there was nothing there.

I always felt guilty.

Cats were more independent, that’s why I chose them over dogs. I thought they would be fine if I traveled for a week and left them with my family. I thought they didn’t need me as much.

But I was wrong.

Whenever I leave, it feels like they also get depressed. A week after I came back from a trip they get sick.

And yesterday I realized something that I hadn’t really thought about before: I’m there for their entire life.

For me, they’re just a part of my life.

But for them, I’m part of all of it.

Maybe that’s also why I miss them when I’m away.

Because they miss me too.

I’m fxking Orpheus

If you don’t know who Orpheus is, he’s that stupid mortal who went to the underworld to get his lover back. He almost did. He really, really almost did. But then he ruined everything because he couldn’t follow one simple rule: don’t look back.

I used to be so mad at him. I questioned whether he really loved Eurydice, his wife. How could someone who crossed death itself not stop himself for a few more steps? How hard is it to just keep walking forward until the light? I was even thinking, if it were me I wouldn’t do that. I’d wait. I’d endure. I thought I would do better but now I’m eating my words.

I can’t believe I was sympathizing with him right now because I’ve looked back too. I hate that I understand him now.

Orpheus didn’t look back because he lacked love, he looked back because he loved too much. Silence can be too cruel. The heart starts to ache when it is desperate to be reassured.

Maybe the gods chose that rule on purpose. Maybe they already knew he would look back. Maybe they knew love, when tested with silence, almost always fails.

Even when the heart knows better, the silence between footsteps can be louder than death itself.