⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

💪 Commit To Yourself: Build new habits and reach big goals through the power of social accountability and cold hard cash.  Learn more here. 

🕰 Three Theories for Why You Have No Time: Better technology means higher expectations, and higher expectations create more work.  Read it here. 

📆 Daily Routines of Famous Creative People: Can't be sure how accurate this chart is but it is fascinating to see who your schedule lines up with.  See it here. 

🎇 Image of The Week

NASA’s JWST spacecraft has peered deep into yet another nebula to reveal star- and planet-forming processes previously invisible to us. The space telescope’s near-infrared camera captured this beautiful and scientifically intriguing image of star cluster NGC 346, seeing clouds packed with dust and hydrogen — the building blocks of worlds to come.

△ Coming Together

We're flirting with the idea of hosting another  Apotheosis Retreat . To be clear, we're in the very early stages of this consideration.

We hosted 5 retreats in the pre-covid world. It might be time for our next. If you're unaware...

Apotheosis is…

• A spiritual-psychedelic retreat that brings together students of life from all over the world to catalyze breakthroughs and accelerate growth.

• A carefully curated series of peak experiences designed to show you what is truly possible as a human being.

• A one-of-a-kind transformational event integrating plant medicine with myriad other philosophical and spiritual practices.

• A loving, accepting environment that births powerful community, camaraderie, and (re-)connection with self, others, and nature.

Help us decide if we should move forward. If this would be interesting to you & you'd consider attending, reply to this email and let me know.

🌎 Pale Blue Dot

Remind yourself of this classic statement from Carl Sagan:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Fargin: a yiddish word that means to wholeheartedly appreciate the success of others

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

 Should We “Revere” the Universe? — An Exploration of Yūgen 

In Japanese aesthetics, there is a concept called “yūgen” that refers to an awareness of the profound grace and subtlety of the universe — an awareness which evokes feelings that are inexplicably deep and too mysterious for words. Alan Watts once wrote of yūgen, noting that,

“There is no English word for a type of feeling which the Japanese call yūgen, and we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which Japanese people use the word […] ‘To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.’ (Seami) All these are yugen, but what have they in common?”

I find these to be beautiful examples of situations which might provoke this feeling of yūgen, and upon reading them, I feel that I know exactly what yūgen is, despite there being no English translation. Yūgen is an expansive feeling, a mystical awareness, an almost soaring reverence for existence that is summoned forth by a poignant confrontation with the ineffable details of reality.

This feeling is integral to who I am. It is something I have experienced many times, and it is the essence of my most intimate connection to the universe. Sometimes this mystical, reverent feeling arises when I contemplate life from a macro-perspective, imagining the endless, sprawling sea of the cosmos. Often, though, it is the tiny, transient, unexpected details of day-to-day experience — a flittering hummingbird, a diminishing sunset, a precious song or bit of poetry — that awaken an expansive feeling, humbling me and reminding me that I exist in an enigmatic wonderland about which I know virtually nothing.

 [Continue Reading] 

🎬 Endnote

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