My rumbles on Mixcloud were down to a flatline this year. I didn’t have much time to assemble, analyze and mix songs. Although one of the ways I unplugged from all of the presidential election mishegas was to wear Bluetooth headphones (this pair is the best — and really affordable) just about everywhere and sleuth out new music and revisit the classics over on Spotify.

You can listen to the fruits of my departure on the new four-hour playlist I compiled last week.

If you’ve ever wondered how Tame Impala, Ella Fitzgerald, Kidnap Kid, Glenn Gould, Joni Mitchell, Frank Ocean and Shura might all find their way into the same dream field, well, then, this collection is for you.

Also, I’d like to thank artist-photographer Caleb Charland for allowing me to feature his eerie photograph, Candle with Gold Frame for the playlist’s cover. Please go explore his work, he has a unique eye aimed on nature, tech and the metaphysics in between.

Play in good health!

The above photograph, titled eXtreme Deep Field is considered the most zoomed-in photograph ever created by humankind.

Essentially, you are looking billions of years backwards in time because what this photograph displays is a myriad of galaxies, some as old as 13.2 billion years; galaxies that were created shortly after the universe came into existence.

Michael Zhang notes:

What scientists and physicists never broach, when discussing the notion of ‘singularity’ (the Big Bang and all it connotes) is of course what came before the Big Bang.

So what I like to do is contemplate the Big Bang and then hold alongside the theory of singularity the question of origin.

And then something peculiar happens. My mind stretches out to the endlessness of space, eliminating any sense of location, which, then, shortly thereafter does away with the concept of time.

If I do not have markers, locations, to designate any movement from A to B then, well, I don’t have any ‘time’. Because I’m not located in a particular place, neither are any of the galaxies, they might as well all be inside my head, which is the wild and poetic concept that the mystic Rudolph Steiner offered as a teaching.

Steiner suggested that human beings are a direct reflection of the cosmos and that our consciousness is imbued with the entirety of the universe.

In The Sun Mystery lectures he wrote: “Throughout a human lifetime, what happens in the head remains an image of the entire cosmos. The very fact that we have a head means that each of us carries an image of the entire cosmos around with us…”

If you want to amplify your mind being blown a wee bit more you can see the giant, hi-res version here.

So when I meditate on the amazing eXtreme Deep Field photograph that’s what I contemplate. How about you?