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- 🌀🐇 #116 enlightenment, escape overthinking, first human photograph
🌀🐇 #116 enlightenment, escape overthinking, first human photograph
Plus AI Sages
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🌅 Enlightenment: A personal note on a confusing subject from Sasha Chapin. Read it here.
☮️ Alan Watts: How to escape overthinking and find peace. Watch it here.
🤖 The AI Sages: Join us on a journey up the mountain of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, guided by seven AI sages who are truly wise beyond their bits and bytes. Learn more here.
🎇 Image of The Week
Taken in 1838, Louis Daguerre’s photograph of a Paris street scene shows a man standing along the Boulevard du Temple getting his shoes shined. It is widely believed to be the earliest extant photograph of human figures.
🔮 Be Your Own Genie
Imagine this: one day, you will lose someone you love. Grief will consume you and you will long for just one more hour with that person. But what if, in that moment of longing, a genie appeared and offered you that exact wish? Can you imagine the joy and gratitude you would feel in those precious 60 minutes?
Now, consider the fact that you have the power to be your own genie. The hard truth is that we will all eventually lose everything and everyone we love. While we may not know when that day will come, we cannot avoid the inevitability of loss that comes with the preciousness of life.
But if we confront this truth head on, it grants us a gift. By accepting that loss will one day come, we can more deeply embrace all that we still have today. Instead of taking things for granted, we are filled with gratitude and appreciation for what we have.
So today, I encourage you to contemplate the nature of loss and discover the hidden ecstasy that comes from recognizing all of the blessings that still remain within your grasp. Today, you have the power to grant the wishes you know you will one day want to make. Take the time to appreciate all that you have, and cherish every moment you have with the people you love.
🔍 Big Things Won't Fully Find Us
Savor this beautiful reminder from the heart of Brianna Wiest:
"You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it's really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It's learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It's learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it's okay to slow down. That you don't always have to prove yourself. That you don't need to fight forever, or constantly want more. That it's okay for things to be just as they are. Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won't fully find us."
🤓 Learn This Word
Mechanomorphism: a conception of something (as the universe or a living creature) as operating mechanically or to be fully accounted for according to the laws of physical science
⏳ From The Archives
A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.
I find myself returning again and again to the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, a Bohemian-Austrian poet who passed away in 1926.
There is something in Rilke’s words that strikes me as the highest quality to which a writer or artist can aspire. It’s a clarity and a purity that communicates something more than the sum meaning of the words.
There’s a heartbeat in his language. A sense that Rilke is whispering a secret in your ear. You can feel him. And you can feel that this was a man who was deeply in touch with his truth, with the rhythms as he felt them.
Today, I don’t want to write anything too cerebral or involved. Today, I just want to share with you two passages that are among my most adored of anything I’ve read. Today, I just want to share two slivers of Rilke and meditate on their significance.
On Romantic Relationships
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
100 Book Summaries To Accelerate Your Personal Growth
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