⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🛑 Stop Being Who You Aren't: And find your "people" along the way.  Read it here. 

🤔 Natural misunderstandings of adult stage theory: Adult developmental stage theory describes certain qualitative shifts in ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that occur in some adults. These enable unusual capabilities: the systematic and meta-systematic modes. Those have played essential roles in human progress historically, and seem likely to be critical for our future.  Read it here. 

🫁 State Breathwork App: Improve your mental and physical well-being through breathwork. Born in science, the state breathing app gives you the skills to take control of your state in any situation - in record time.  Try it here. 

🎇 Image of The Week

A usual day for Flynn Prall and his friends is picking a piece of bushland they've never been to, walking the trails, and then scanning the grounds and branches in the hope of finding some insects ready for their close-up photo shoot. This is how he captured this image above of the very psychedelic-looking banksia peacock spider.

🪤 Is Your "Potential" A Trap?

Certain circles will encourage you to pursue your potential but I'm beginning to think this whole enterprise is a trap.

This isn't to say you should resign yourself to laziness or disengage from your cares and concerns.

I'm pointing out how we relate to our futures. Our potential can never truly be reached as long as there is a tomorrow in which you can conceive of a better you than today.

Trying to live up to some imaginary version of yourself that always eludes your embodiment is a recipe for dissatisfaction and distraction.

It's a mistake to try to chase down that "better" you rather than letting it naturally bloom out of your attunement with yourself and the world around you.

Rather than keeping score on how you're improving, find contentment in who you are, nurture what you find to be meaningful, and be good to those around you.

This will bring you fulfillment.

💀 Why Skulls?

I love this sentiment from independent artist Kai Straw:

"You may have noticed all of the artwork for my singles are various depictions of skulls. Or on social media you've seen me ask my followers to comment with a skull to show support. That may be confusing, like - how is this guy so positive but using such a negative symbol so often? Here's an explanation, because I want you to be a part of this. Before I quit drinking (sober for ~8 years) my brother gave me a bottle of skullhead vodka. The bottle is shaped like a skull. For some reason I never opened it, and after I quit drinking, I kept the bottle out. It's in my living room right now, actually. I like keeping it out because it reminds me that I made a choice to own my life, and every day when I see that skull bottle I'm reminded that I'm making that same choice. Someone may ask - doesn't that bottle of vodka remind you of the bad choices you made, the person you were, and so on? It doesn't. It reminds me I've had the strength to become the person I am. I think taking ownership of something many could view as negative and pulling from it joy and growth is the key to sustained happiness. I always look to see the strength that can bloom from tragedy. My life has required that. Recently, I lost my job, and I'm going to make that mean opportunity instead of despair. That's, essentially, the story of the skull. In my world, it means strength, love, and resilience. You can view the way I use that symbol as a metaphor for how I approach life. It represents ones ability to let sunshine radiate from everything. It means, I am the architect of myself - regardless of circumstance."

🌿 Apotheosis Update

Spaces have been filling up since we announced the upcoming Apotheosis retreat. Want to spend 7 days and 6 nights immersed in a uniquely transformative psychedelic retreat deep in the Mayan Jungle of Mexico? A few spots still remain.  Learn more here. 

🤓 Learn This Word

Intervulnerability: “Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan uses the term intervulnerability to describe the need for this mutually held space. When asked about this idea in an interview, she replied, When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.”

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

 The Power of Language: How It Shapes Our Perception of Reality and Separates Us from the World 

"Reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass recently, I was struck by the power of language to shape the way we think, and therefore to shape our perception of reality itself.

Apparently, seventy percent of the words in the English language are nouns, whereas in Potawatomi, the native language of the tribe from which its author - Robin Wall Kimmerer - comes, 70% of the words are verbs.

To get an indication of what this means, she gives an example: whereas we refer to a ‘bay of water’, Potawatomi speakers would instead refer to the process of ‘baying’. In other words, life, in this particular moment and location, is expressing itself in the formation of a bay.

Although the two ways of speaking refer to the same thing then, the emphasis is very different. Whereas the English language denotes a static, identifiable, separated phenomenon, the Potawatomi emphasis on process evokes an unfolding, where the subject of the sentence does not need to be mentioned because it is life itself, simply in a particular instantiation.

We see here clearly how languages shapes the way we think, since the two different ways of expressing the same thing entail two completely different worldviews! Potawatomi, like all Native American languages, arises within an animist culture and worldview, which is to say a worldview where everything, from rocks to stars to spirits, is alive, interconnected, and interacting. Modern English, on the other hand, is a product of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality and objectivity (as well as individual sovereignty, ‘progress’ etc, all of which have important connotations for how we then experience the world, as well shall see), and denotes a world exterior and other to me, composed largely of inanimate - ie dead - matter."

 [Continue Reading] 

🎬 Endnote

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