⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁 A Few Stray Points about Nonduality: Michael Taft is interviewed by Jake Orthwein about the various kinds of nonduality, the difference between monoism and nondualism, and fundamental confusions about nondual practice.  Listen here. 

🪦 I love my wife. My wife is dead: This letter was written by Richard Feynman to his wife 16 months after she passed.  Read it here. 

🎆 It Was A Beautiful Piece of Art In The Sky: What Caused This Strange Glowing Spiral Over Alaska? There's a Simple Answer.  See it here. 

🎇 Image of The Week

Another wonder of nature. This is a photo of a tree and perhaps an owl if you squint hard enough. How easy it would be to miss just wandering through the woods. Image captured by Alice McKay.

🚪 Finding The Magic Door

I've been thinking a lot about Craig Chalquist's "Journey of Re-Enchantment." I've written about it before. It's a narrative structure distinct from the Campbellian Hero's Journey, which you've probably heard of before. It involves following breadcrumbs back to the world of wonder we left behind in childhood as we "grew up" and became skilled economic agents. Society molds us into particular kinds of box-checkers, and this forms a rigidity of mind that walls us off from that world of wonder. To find our way back, we must go through the "magic door."

Part of the trouble is that the adult world attempts to convince you that this world doesn't exist and that it was your youthful delusion that made you believe it ever was. They claim the door isn't real, and that's enough to keep you from ever looking. The wonder-erasers will parrot propaganda that this magic door leads to a world of unicorns and fairy dust. But that's not where it leads. It leads you back to where you are right now, just with eyes a bit more wide open.

You see, as we age and grow into adulthood, we come to understand things we didn't know as children. This is good, natural, and an important part of the maturation process. But it's not all "I once was blind and now I see." In the process of opening our eyes in some ways, we closed them in others. Walking through the magic door allows us to open our eyes again and rediscover the magic in the mundane.

The clouds, the trees, the ants, the wind, the moon, the shadows, the sun-drenched coin you passed on the road—all are whispering to you in the foreign tongue of wonder. You used to be fluent before you knew these things had names. We confuse knowing the name with knowing them. We don't know them. We can never fully know them. But we can drop the pretense that we do.

Then, we might find the doorknob that opens the magic door. I promise you, your inner child left it unlocked.

🌳 Sometimes

Enjoy these sentiments from David Whyte:

"Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest,

breathing

like the ones

in the old stories,

who could cross

a shimmering bed

of leaves

without a sound,

you come

to a place

whose only task

is to trouble you

with tiny

but frightening

requests,

conceived out

of nowhere

but in this place

beginning

to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what

you are doing right now,

and

to stop what you

are becoming

while you do it,

questions

that can make

or unmake

a life,

questions

that have patiently

waited for you,

questions

that have no right

to go away."

🤓 Learn This Word

McGuffin: an object in a work of fiction that serves merely to motivate the plot

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

 50 Aphorisms from Alain de Botton That Reveal Harsh Truths About Human Nature 

Some of the greatest philosophy books ever created were formed from nothing but a numbered list of succinctly written insights — maxims or aphorisms: pithy observations containing a general truth about life.

Such classics include Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, and most of Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s masterpieces.

Alain de Botton is a modern-day curator, translator, and torch carrier of ancient and neglected ideas, and is bringing the aphorism back to life. Following in the footsteps of philosophers such as Aristotle, who founded “The Lyceum,” and Plato, who began “The Academy,” De Botton has created The School of Life, a multi-continental classroom devoted to developing emotional intelligence through the guidance of philosophy.

Alain is most famous for his best-selling philosophy books on such diverse topics as The News, Status Anxiety, Architecture, Work, Art, and Love. But many now recognize him from Twitter, which he uses primarily to drop aphoristic wisdom-bombs to his 640K followers.

Below you will find 50 Alain de Botton quotes taken from his Twitter and books alike. As you read you’ll see that living a happy life, according to Alain, is less about chasing pleasure and more about mitigating despair and replacing it with hope and consolation.

 [Continue Reading] 

🎬 Endnote

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