Hi,
I'm Stefan. I'm 22.

For many years, I had dreamed of visiting this incredible place. Even though autumn isn't the best time to visit Mont Saint-Michel Abbey, I decided to finally make it happen on my birthday!

So today, I'm sharing the most fascinating facts about this place, along with some of my slightly acrobatic photos taken there! 🤣

The Most Mind-Blowing Facts About Mont Saint-Michel

1. It stands on a living granite island that rises and breathes

Mont Saint-Michel is not just a rock but a massive granite monolith that is over 500 million years old.

Under the influence of tides and geological movements, it slowly rises — by just a few millimeters per century.

Vipassana.

The most perfect tool for self-knowledge and inner growth for a modern person, out of all I have come across. Every other practice and tool is either white noise, preparation, or a gentle supplement. Vipassana is not the chest — it is the key that opens the chest of eternal knowledge about life. Or rather, even knowledge about eternal life.

It is also very important to learn Vipassana — or any other practice — from the right teacher. One of my main rules: don't even try to listen to what a teacher or master is saying until you have figured out what inner state they are speaking from. What state they live in, and whether it resonates with you. Whether they themselves are the inwardly desirable fruit of their own philosophy and teaching. If a master doesn't have the state you need, they will never lead you to it, however beautiful and logical the nonsense they tell you.

Masters differ. What matters is understanding whom you yourself serve — light or darkness — and then finding the right person for that request. And yes, hiding behind bright knowledge, a great many teachers, masters and monks actually serve darkness: I mean that their personality has been swallowed by base motives and ambitions. That isn't so hard to see either, if you look closely enough, paying attention to details and indirect signs and trying to see the true motives, often not even fully conscious. Or rather, to feel them, switching off excessive logical reasoning.

Yes, practice isn't the most natural thing, I'm in. But how natural is the life we live now?

Practice is a wedge that helps correct the distortions technocracy has inflicted on us. But there's a nuance. True naturalness is nature. By practising away from nature, we deprive ourselves of most of the effect and of the precious time of our lives.

The MAIN practice and book of life, the window to the source of infinite knowledge, is……

I love this life.

It is so intricately made, and precisely because of that, the love I feel for it — and the happiness I live through it — at moments simply floods my consciousness and moves me to love and forgive everyone.

For me, one of the main signs that I'm heading the wrong way is when these regular surges of love and happiness towards everything that exists disappear from my life.

It can mean different things: my body has become polluted, somewhere I acted against my conscience, I made decisions out of line with my higher mission, life around me has become mostly unnatural to my original genetic and evolutionary needs, and much more.

In my view, such states of pure love are the most important indicator of harmony and inner purity in almost everything that makes up a human being.

Their long absence always makes me reconsider everything happening in my life and make serious corrections — in any area of life that could, one way or another, create inner disharmony and keep me from reaching this wonderful oneness with the universe.

June 9

Beauty. What an enormous burden it is.

As far as I know, our brain judges the beauty of the person in front of us based on deep genetic information about what the signs of a healthy body look like. Facial features, build, the colour and quality of the skin literally tell it that this person is the best and safest fit for continuing the family line.

And of course, beyond general standards of health and fertility, the brain can also tell, from a complex set of the subtlest signals, how well a particular person's genetics suit creating new life together. Especially if the brain itself is more or less healthy and harmonious :)

So the sense of beauty doesn't come out of nowhere. It has a clear cause and effect, again shaped to raise our chances of survival as individuals.

But here's the catch. Physical health doesn't always mean mental health, just as mental health is still far from guaranteeing high morals, virtues, love for people and the world, or the wish to build a strong, whole family. And that is unique.

So why did I say that outer beauty is an enormous burden?

I have probably been thinking about beauty my whole conscious life. For about as long, I have been watching girls, women and grandmothers, as well as men of all ages. So many incredibly beautiful girls — and absolutely empty, callous, shallow, uninteresting, undeveloped inside.

It's astonishing when you touch someone's inner world and suddenly understand the metaphor our ancestors tried to pass on in Russian fairy tales about mermaids. Good young men see them as indescribable beauties, but in fact they are terrible underwater monsters that drag them under and drink their blood.

By the way, the essence of this metaphor transfers perfectly to men, who often buy girls' attention with money and other tools, presenting themselves as knights on the outside, then sucking out all the life and turning out to be terrible monsters inside…

Continued in the comments

Pain.

And what I've understood about it.

Pain is an astonishing concept. A spectrum of special sensations, a facet of how we perceive outer or inner reality.

Pain comes in different forms: physical, emotional, mental.

By nature I'm quite a freedom-loving person, and in life I always try to choose the path of ease, acceptance, gratitude and love.

I'm deeply convinced that you can and should spend most of your life in these states. But here's what's interesting.

Over the past year, a very deep understanding of pain has ripened in me.

As you grow up and develop, life brings far more responsibility than before.

And sometimes — I'd even say often — we humans start making mistakes that make us feel painful things: shame, disappointment, sadness, fatigue, losing the meaning of life and much more.

Ever since childhood, as bedtime stories, I listened to my parents tell wise parables from different countries and sages, and all my life I've been drawn to the spiritual side of human existence.

I know a lot of powerful tricks that, in any situation, can greatly or even completely numb the mental pain of a loss or of a mistake made in any area of life.

Of course, such tools keep working only if you live by your conscience.

When your conscience isn't clear, switching off the pain of a loss — in my case, at least — is very hard.

For many years I've watched different people, entrepreneurs in particular, who have managed to build very strong inner beliefs that "everything happens for the best", that "it will all be fine anyway", that "this too shall pass", that "on the scale of the universe this situation means nothing".

And many other amazing and, truly, effective plasters and painkiller shots that, like an ambulance in a crisis, can greatly or almost completely bring the pain down.

But here's the catch…

Read the rest in the comments 🔱

May 9, 2025

The absurdity of what is happening on planet Earth

2024. Humanity, or so it believes, is at the peak of its development in all of its history.

People live so long and so comfortably that it would once have been hard even to imagine.

Countries calmly count their GDP, make new goods, extract resources and try to make the people in their cities happier. Some more, some less.

At the very same moment, between Hawaii and the US floats a garbage patch the size of eight Belaruses: 2,200 km long, 800 km wide and 10 metres deep. It's also called the seventh continent.

In this patch of floating junk, new kinds of viruses regularly emerge, which birds then carry across the planet, along with new kinds of terrible, even repulsive animals whose diet is 90% plastic.

Hundreds of millions of fish and sea creatures are poisoned, and then die or mutate. Algae that produce up to 50% of the oxygen on Earth are dying, and the water is rapidly being contaminated and changing its composition.

And this is only the best-known patch, 1.5 million km² according to official data. There are countless smaller patches like it all over the world.

This year I was on uninhabited islands in Papua New Guinea. A place where there had never been anything man-made.

When we arrived on one of the islands, eight of us spent about an hour clearing a small stretch of beach of plastic, filling whole bags with all kinds of non-biodegradable waste.

What is this? I came to a place called one of the most beautiful dive spots on Earth. And even here the plastic has reached?

And at that moment tears well up. Plastic went into mass production less than 100 years ago! And it was discovered as a chemical compound 169 years ago!

Has humanity really managed to soil a vast ocean in such a short time?

Meanwhile, society is built so that continuing to pollute our home is encouraged, welcomed and pushed on us with the lure of good profit.

Continued in the comments 🍁

September 12, 2024

Generosity.

Generosity expressed in money is only a small part of what makes a person generous.

Do we try to be generous with wisdom, generous with knowledge, generous with purity, generous in understanding people, generous with sincere love for people, generous with happiness, generous with forgiveness?

It often happens that I gather positive, bright energy and then share it generously with people.

Sometimes I take on the role of a lightning rod that, with full understanding, accepts any negativity or dark energy from other people and, passing it through itself, makes it cleaner.

Often this even changes the course of a person's life: they feel the purity, notice that it feels good to be near this clean energy, and start reaching for it on their own. Meanwhile, I sometimes have to wash all kinds of dirty deposits out through myself.

You could call it "Energy-Laundry".

And this, too, is generosity, and charity of its own kind.

Money doesn't exist in nature; it exists only in our heads. It's a simple agreement between people, and an illusory one. The dialogue of generosity happens at the level of energy, one way or another.

I'm generous with my energy and see no point in not sharing it. Why else am I here?

Generosity with money alone can never buy off all the rest.

Especially if the donation comes from the mind.

More importantly, financial help can sometimes spoil a situation and a person's life, unlike investing your energy in their destiny. Investing knowledge, wisdom, vision and opportunities that they must put to use themselves.

Can't give your energy? Unfortunately, then it's often better to give nothing than to give money.

May 2, 2024

A dish is a whole synthesis.

No, it's far from just food on a plate, cooked a certain way.

Every year I'm amazed at how colourful and many-sided a picture dishes start to paint for me.

Like many vegans, I suppose, I'm a big fan of delicious dishes made from plants that are no less tasty than versions with meat, dairy, fish, bread and even eggs.

But here's the question: does our perception of a dish stop at taste alone? The answer is no.

A couple of minutes ago, flying on a plane, I started recalling the tastiest vegan cafés in Bali, knowing I'd be in them in a couple of weeks.

I'm quite hungry and have barely eaten today, though it's already 4 pm.

At some point I caught myself realising I felt no desire or craving for them at all. I immediately asked myself: how so?

I had realised before that 99% of tasty vegan dishes aren't all that healthy, or all that nourishing. They're empty. And often they're even cooked in a way that harms the body.

If we're saying meat needs to be replaced somehow, vegan restaurants don't think about that at all.

Or rather, they've learned to replace meat in terms of taste. But real, quality replacement of micronutrients is almost never on the table.

It's as if it doesn't matter to them at all what you'll be digesting, or whether it will do you any good beyond the table of the restaurant where you're enjoying the meal.

Traditional cuisine works the same way, actually.

A Michelin restaurant never asks itself:

— In what proportion will I fill my guest's stomach with energetically valuable and energetically empty food? 70/30? 50/50? 20/80?

— Do I want my guest to have only something tasty? Or something good for them?

— Is food the meaning of human life?

Then why cook what shortens it and takes time away from life's other delights?

What mostly matters to restaurants is that their ingredients are edible on paper, audited and fresh. And of course they look for the most surprising combination of these substances to amaze their guests and win their love…

Continued in the comments 🐚

February 4, 2024

The road to happiness

Happiness is born in synthesis. Of the body's movement and the thinking process. At the meeting point of the spiritual and the material. In the fusion of masculine and feminine. In the golden width of wisdom and simplicity.

Break all this into parts and you won't get happiness. Society so passionately teaches us to live in our heads.

We exercise separately in the gym, and then think separately, sitting at a school desk or a work desk. We create a new layer of reality that lives only in our heads and has nothing to do with the real world.

Like a game, this layer is full of levels, statuses and labels: what is good and what is bad, what is happiness and what is not.

Only the thought born in movement is real; everything else is an illusion of reflection and of connection with reality.

All because any thought is a recorded image of some aspect of the material world, which we built on the sensations of the body.

Tear the thinking process away from the physics of the body, and you end up in a world of illusion and non-objectivity.

And it is precisely the world of illusions that makes us suffer, being the direct opposite of happy objectivity.

In just the same way, we're driven into a fake spiritual world or psychology, made to spend such precious minutes of our lives unravelling tangles and pointlessly picking at ourselves.

Oh, come on.

99.9% of psychological illnesses and disorders exist only in the absence of movement and fresh air.

Any attempt to solve psychological problems inside yourself is doomed to fail.

It treats the effect, not the cause.

Our body is the subconscious turned inside out. To remove the cause, you need to change something in your way of life and in how you treat your body.

I recognise the value of being born on Earth and treat with equal respect both the spiritual path of enlightenment and the material path of becoming.

I see myself in balance, at the meeting point of these two worlds.

That's how it has been since childhood: I'm both this and that.

I belong here and there.

And in both packs I have a name and a word.

photo by @tebenik

October 19, 2023