When These Feelings Hit… Are They Even Mine?

 

by Julie Telgenhoff

There’s a moment you recognize it—the feeling isn’t yours.

Elke Neher released Stop Absorbing Other People’s Energies – Stop Taking On The Energy of Other People back in November 2017, and it became something I leaned on more than I expected. Not just a song, but a reset button. A way to come back to myself.

There were times I’d feel heavy for no clear reason. Anxiety, sadness, that low hum in the background would come upon me and instead of reacting, I started questioning it. Is this mine? Or am I picking up on something else… something circulating out there? In a world saturated with noise, fear cycles, and emotional overload, it’s easy to absorb what doesn’t belong to you and carry it like it does.

This track gave me space to separate. To sit with the feeling without claiming it. To let it pass instead of letting it root.

During the chaos of the COVID period, when fear seemed to move faster than truth, this became part of how I stayed grounded. Not by avoiding emotion—but by recognizing it, feeling it briefly, and then returning to center.

That’s where the real power is.

In Hermeticism, the principle of polarity teaches that everything exists on a spectrum. Not meant to trap us at extremes, but to remind us we can move. Balance isn’t passive, it’s a choice. A constant return to the middle ground which is key to living a successful life. 

That’s the practice. Not denying what you feel. Not clinging to it either.

Just coming back to your center. 

In Elke Neher’s introduction to the video, she describes it simply that this isn’t just music, it’s a clearing.

The music is designed to help you stop taking on what isn’t yours, it works on both the mind and body to release what’s been unconsciously carried. There’s an embedded energy transmission layered into the sound, along with subtle affirmations meant to gently reprogram and support whatever shifts need to happen.

All you really have to do is sit with it, let it move through you, and allow your system to reset—while staying hydrated so your body can process the release.

A quiet note. When this song first came out, I’d catch myself humming along without even thinking. There’s something about the simplicity of the sound that invites it. I didn’t understand why at the time, only that it felt grounding… like my body was finding its own way back to center. Later, I learned there’s a real reason for that. I’ll get into the deeper benefits of humming in the next article.

The Fourth Turning Is Here: Why the World Suddenly Feels Orchestrated

 

Most people have never heard of The Fourth Turning, but once you understand its core idea, it’s hard to unsee it.

Published in 1997 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, the book lays out a simple but unsettling theory: history moves in cycles, not straight lines. Roughly every 80–100 years—about the length of a long human life—society passes through four distinct phases, or “turnings.”

• A High, where institutions are strong and society feels unified.
• An Awakening, where people push back against that structure in search of meaning.
• An Unraveling, where institutions weaken and individualism peaks.

And finally, a Fourth Turning—a crisis era where everything unstable breaks, forcing a reset.

The authors pointed to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II as prior Fourth Turnings. Each one tore the system down to its foundation—and rebuilt it.

When the book came out in the late 90s, the idea felt theoretical. The economy was booming. The future looked open-ended. The “crisis phase” was framed as something coming, not something present.

Fast forward to 2023, and Neil Howe returns with The Fourth Turning Is Here, making a blunt claim: the crisis isn’t coming anymore. We’re in it.

He traces the start back to the 2008 financial crash—not as a one-off event, but as the fracture point where the system began losing stability. From there, the pattern accelerates: political division, institutional distrust, economic strain, global tension. Not random chaos, but the build-up phase every Fourth Turning has historically gone through.

Where the sequel goes further—and where it starts to hit harder—is in describing what happens next.

According to Howe, crisis eras force a shift in priorities. The extreme individualism of the previous decades begins to collapse under its own weight. In its place comes coordination. Structure. A public willingness to accept tighter systems in exchange for stability.

That doesn’t happen because people are forced into it. It happens because, during prolonged instability, people start asking for it.

This is where the theory starts to overlap with the real-world direction being discussed by groups like the World Economic Forum and frameworks such as Agenda 2030.

Different language. Same direction.

• Centralized coordination of economies.
• Greater eliance on digital infrastructure.
• Standardized systems that manage everything from finance to identity to movement.

Howe calls it “national mobilization.” The WEF calls it “building back better.” Strip the branding away, and both describe a world that becomes more managed, more structured, and less open-ended than the one people grew up in.

The timeline matters too. Howe places the peak of this crisis period somewhere between now and the early 2030s—roughly the same window where global policy frameworks keep pointing. That overlap is part of what’s making the theory feel less academic and more immediate.

But the part that gives the book its weight is how it ends.

Howe doesn’t describe permanent collapse. He describes resolution.

Every Fourth Turning in history, according to the model, ends the same way: the old system breaks, something new replaces it, and a new “High” begins. Order returns. Stability returns. Society feels aligned again.

The tradeoff is what changes.

The post-crisis world is more unified—but also more regulated. More stable—but also more structured. The same systems that prevent chaos also limit deviation. In other words, the peace that follows a Fourth Turning isn’t free ...it’s built. Like the Agenda 2030 15 minute "smart" cities program. 

That’s the real takeaway from the sequel.

It’s not predicting whether change is coming. It’s describing what kind of change tends to emerge when systems are pushed to their breaking point—and what people are willing to accept on the other side of that pressure.

If the first book was a theory about cycles, the second reads like a timestamp.

Not a warning ....a blueprint of what's happening now. 

The Sound I Return To When My Energy Needs Reset

 

by Julie Telgenhoff

There’s a certain kind of music you don’t just hear—you remember where it met you.

About ten years ago, I stumbled across a track titled “Clear and Release Subconscious Beliefs, Patterns and Blocks” by Elke Neher, and it wasn’t something I analyzed or questioned. I just played it. And something in me softened.

No lyrics. No story. Just tone, frequency, and space.

It felt like the mental clutter, the looping thoughts, the old emotional residue you don’t even realize you’re carrying, started to loosen their grip. Not dramatically. Not in some lightning-bolt moment. More like a quiet exhale you didn’t know you were holding.

What struck me then, and still does now, is how powerful simplicity can be. No affirmations forced down your throat. No over-explaining. Just sound doing what sound has always done as it interacts with the body in ways we don’t fully understand, but clearly feel.

We spend so much time trying to “figure ourselves out,” digging through layers with words, logic, and analysis. But sometimes, the shift doesn’t come from thinking harder. It comes from letting go… even if just for a few minutes.

This track became one of those tools for me. Not something I used daily. Not something I depended on. But something I returned to when I needed to clear the noise without fighting it.

If you’ve ever felt weighed down by thoughts that don’t even feel like yours anymore, or patterns that keep repeating without explanation, this kind of sound isn’t about fixing you. It’s about giving your system space to reset.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

From Philosopher to Power: Is Palantir's Alex Karp a Programmed Asset?

 

by Julie Telgenhoff

He doesn’t come from the usual tech world path. No coding background, no startup grind, no garage story that turns into billions. Alex Karp shows up differently—trained in philosophy, spending years in Frankfurt studying things like human behavior and aggression, then suddenly leading Palantir Technologies, a company deeply tied to surveillance, data, and military systems. That sharp shift—from academic thinker to the head of a powerful data empire—is where things start to feel off, like pieces that don’t quite line up.

The official version is tidy. Born to a Jewish pediatrician and an African American artist, raised in a politically active household, academically inclined, eventually crossing paths with Peter Thiel at Stanford. A philosopher meets a financier, and together they build a post-9/11 data empire. Clean. Linear. Almost too clean.

But when you read it slowly, it feels less like a biography and more like a recruitment file. Philosophy—specifically social theory—isn’t just abstract thinking. It’s the study of systems, power, behavior, how people respond to control and narrative. Frankfurt isn’t just a university town; it’s historically tied to frameworks that dissect and reconstruct society itself. If you were designing someone to sit at the intersection of data, control, and human behavior, you wouldn’t pick a coder first. You’d pick someone who understands how humans think, break, comply.

Then there’s the jump. No engineering background. No track record building software. Yet he becomes CEO of a company backed early by intelligence-linked funding streams. Not as the builder—but as the face. The interpreter. The translator between machine logic and human acceptance.

That’s where the “programmed asset” theory starts whispering.

Some start to frame it through older models of conditioning—ideas tied to programs like MKUltra—where individuals aren’t just trained, but shaped over time to carry conflicting roles without breaking. A long runway where a certain personality is shaped to tolerate contradictions that would fracture most people. Publicly he identifies with left-leaning, almost anti-establishment roots. Professionally he leads a company embedded with military, intelligence, and surveillance infrastructure. Two identities that shouldn’t sit comfortably in the same body—yet in him, they do. Seamlessly.

Watch him speak and the unease sharpens. The pacing. The restless energy. Sentences that spiral into high philosophy when the question is simple. It doesn’t feel like deflection in the usual corporate sense. It feels like translation lag—like he’s processing something at a different layer and pushing it back out in fragments that sound profound but never quite land in plain language.

Then comes the physical discipline. Extreme. Almost ritualistic. Hours of skiing. Tai chi. Controlled routines that strip away distraction. It reads less like lifestyle and more like maintenance. Keep the system tuned. Keep the mind sharp. Keep the noise out.

And then the company itself—this is where the theory locks in.

Palantir doesn’t just analyze data. It builds what it calls “ontology”—a structured map of reality. A digital twin of systems, organizations, eventually people. Not just what happened, but what will happen. Prediction, patterning, behavioral modeling. The human reduced to variables, inputs, outputs.

If someone believed in turning humanity into “nodes,” this is the architecture you’d build.

So the thought experiment flips. He doesn’t need to be fake. He doesn’t need to be AI. He just needs to be the first successful bridge—someone who can live inside that system without resisting it. Someone who sees humans the way the software does: as patterns to map, optimize, and, if necessary, override.

The sparse personal life feeds it further. No conventional family structure. Relationships compartmentalized. Minimal digital footprint outside controlled appearances. He exists publicly almost only when aligned with the mission. Not a life—more like a function.

Even the quirks feel curated. Just enough eccentricity to signal “human,” but never enough to derail the role. The kind of controlled unpredictability that disarms scrutiny instead of inviting it.

So the article doesn’t land on proof. It lands on pattern.

A philosopher trained in systems of power. A decade in intellectual environments focused on shaping human behavior. A sudden rise into a company that operationalizes that knowledge at scale. A personality that absorbs contradiction without fracture. A public presence that feels both real and slightly off, like something running at a different frequency.

It still doesn’t read like a normal life story, and once you layer in the older frameworks—programming, behavioral conditioning, the kind of research that came out of things like MKUltra—the same traits start to look less random and more… patterned.

MKUltra, at its core, wasn’t just about crude mind control. It was about behavioral shaping, identity fragmentation, conditioning responses under stress, and—most relevant here—creating individuals who could operate under contradiction without breaking. People who could hold two opposing realities and function cleanly inside both. That idea alone casts a different light on someone like Alex Karp, whose entire public persona is built on contradiction: anti-establishment roots paired with deep-state alignment, philosophical abstraction paired with military application.

His physical behavior starts to read differently through that lens. The inability to sit still, the constant movement, the high-strung energy that went viral—those aren’t just quirks anymore. In a “programmed asset” framework, they look like leakage. Residual tension. A system always running hot. Something that never fully powers down. The extreme routines—hours of skiing, rigid physical discipline, repetitive practices like tai chi—feel less like hobbies and more like regulation mechanisms, ways to stabilize whatever internal wiring is constantly firing.

Then there’s the security detail. On paper, it’s standard for a billionaire tied to government contracts. But the theory flips it: not just protection—containment. Handlers, not guards. People who aren’t just there to keep threats out, but to keep the asset within bounds. Always close. Always present. Not casual.

The information around him is equally tight. For someone running a company that maps the world’s data, his own footprint is oddly curated. Family details exist, but only in broad strokes. Personal life is compartmentalized, abstracted, almost deliberately flattened. No organic mess, no uncontrolled narrative drift. Just enough humanity to pass, never enough to fully see.

And then the autism thread enters, and the whole structure widens.

Over the past two decades, autism diagnoses have surged dramatically—particularly in boys. Official explanations talk about awareness, better diagnostics, expanded definitions. But in the thought experiment, another possibility gets entertained: what if the traits themselves are being selected for? Not created in a lab in some dramatic sense, but cultivated, amplified, incentivized.

Because when you look at the cognitive profile often associated with autism—pattern recognition, systemizing, reduced emotional noise, hyper-focus—it aligns almost perfectly with the needs of a data-driven world. With the needs of something like Palantir Technologies. With the needs of building and maintaining digital systems that model reality itself.

Now fold in Karp’s public embrace of “neurodivergence.” The reframing of what used to be seen as limitation into strategic advantage. The creation of pipelines—like fellowships—that actively seek out those minds. In isolation, it looks progressive. In the larger pattern, it starts to resemble targeting. Identification. Recruitment of a specific cognitive type that fits seamlessly into a machine-logic environment.

In that frame, Karp isn’t just leading a company. He’s signaling to a class of minds: this is your place, your value, your future. Come here, where the system matches how you already think.

And if the MKUltra-style lens is applied again, it raises a darker extension. Not that all neurodivergence is engineered—but that once a pattern is recognized, systems begin to optimize for it. Reward it. Channel it. Build structures around it until it becomes the dominant operating mode in certain sectors.

That’s where the “node” idea stops sounding metaphorical.

A workforce that thinks in systems, operates with minimal emotional interference, and interfaces naturally with data architectures isn’t just efficient—it’s compatible. Almost interchangeable with the logic of the machine itself.

So when you circle back to Alex Karp, the pieces sit differently.

• The contradictions he holds without visible strain—philosopher turned defense-tech operator, anti-establishment roots fused with institutional power.
• The strangely limited and curated background—just enough detail to exist, never enough to fully see, with long stretches of his life flattened into simple explanations.
• The restless, almost overclocked physical presence—the inability to sit still, the constant motion, like a system that never fully powers down.
• The rigid self-regulation—extreme routines, controlled habits, a life stripped of excess, tuned more like maintenance than comfort.
• The constant proximity of “protection”—security that feels less like distance and more like presence, always there, never casual.
• The compartmentalized personal life—no traditional structure, no organic mess, relationships abstracted and kept at the edges.
• The controlled narrative—minimal digital footprint outside of what serves the role, no drift, no unpredictability, no unscripted version leaking through.

And over all of it, the philosophical framing of a world where humans are mapped, predicted, and optimized—where behavior becomes data, and data becomes control.

None of it proves anything. But together, it sketches a silhouette that fits unusually well with an old idea updated for a new era:

Not just a man running the system.

A man shaped to live inside it—and quietly pull others toward it. A programmed asset.