⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🍄 Let’s Talk About Bad Trips - Separating Difficult from Traumatic: Bad trips are a polarizing concept in psychedelics. Acknowledging that they exist - and knowing how to work with them - can be a source of healing. Read it here.​

🎙Capture your life's moments: Audio Diary is an AI-powered diary that listens to you and intelligently chronicles your most precious moments. Try it here.​

💗 100 Couples Share Their Secrets to a Successful Relationship: “Love is not just an emotion; it is a skill. It has to be worked on; sharpened regularly.” Read it here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

Doesn't this whimsical animal feel like it was pulled out of the pages of a children's book? It's a photograph by Tim Flach. This is what he had to say about this cartoonish creature: "This for me, is the Salvador Dali of the bird world. When it comes to the length of the Peruvian Inca tern’s moustache, longer is healthier. A longer moustache indicates a stronger immune system and therefore a more attractive proposition for courtship." Source.​

⏭ New Eras and Next Chapters

Be mindful not to confuse the people in your life with your imagining of them.

You've had your experiences with them. Shared memories. Some colored with joy and laughter. Others grayed out in grief and despair.

Spend a lot of time with someone and you can really start to feel that you know them.

And you do. It's a beautiful thing.

But you never know all of someone. There is always more to learn and more to uncover.

Everyone is a mystery at some level.

It is a gift to let them be that mystery to us.

Rather than imprisoning them in the story we've created based on our past experiences...

Let them grow beyond your conception of them. Let them surprise you.

Let them unfurl into new eras and next chapters.

Don't confine them to their past.

If you can do this for others, you can do it for yourself.

And that opens the door to great freedom.

As Alan Watts colorfully said, "You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago."

😣 On Pain

Sink into this passage from the one and only Khalil Gibran:

"And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.

And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. "

🤓 Learn This Word

Athazagoraphobia: The fear of forgetting, being forgotten or ignored, or being replaced

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​The Noble Truths of Manhood I Learned From My Father​

I write this in appreciation and honor for my father. And with the hope that men who may not have had the same type of unreasonable father-fortune that I had, may benefit to some degree from reading whats shared here.

When I was a kid, my Dad was a sort of god to me. As I grew up and individuated, there was a time I took his gifts for granted and focused largely on his faults. Growing up further and appreciating the whole picture in an integrated way…and having more life experience to see how unusual my childhood with him actually was… I feel overwhelmingly grateful for who he was and what he shared with me. Moreover, I feel indebted to share what I can of what I received with others.

My dad was of an old breed of men that I might have thought only an embellished legend if I hadn’t experienced it firsthand. To get some sense of this…

One time we were working on a semi engine and it was time to put it back in the truck. We were waiting on the tractor to return to the shop so we could lift it in, but we were losing daylight. So he wrapped chains around the engine and lifted it back into the truck by hand. Because it needed done. After we finished the job, he repeated a phrase he said continuously throughout my childhood: “see the job, do the job, stay out of the misery”.

Another time he was standing in a parking lot smoking a cigarette when gunshots were fired in one of the stores. Everyone ducked or ran the other way. My dad ran straight towards the sound of the gunshots. After breaking the door down he found that the man wielding the gun had just shot himself in the head. The woman (his ex wife) he had attacked first was badly bleeding but not dead. My dad bandaged her and held the blood in while the ambulance arrived. She lived. He talked to her during that time about her ex husband finally being out of pain and that she could forgive him. He visited with her afterwards and helped her process the emotions further. When he told me about running towards the gunshots, he assumed the shooter was still alive but said he knew he could keep his body moving through enough bullets to take the shooter out and prevent anyone else from getting hurt. He did this for strangers.

Yet another, a friend called in duress as her son who was a police officer but was also mentally unstable had been aggressive towards her more intensely each night and said he would kill her that night. The police station didn’t believe her and wouldn’t intervene. My dad said we would protect her. He waited in the front yard while I (age 16) waited inside armed. The son pulled up in a police car, got out and charged my dad. They went to the ground, my dad put him in a choke hold, and took his gun and threw it. He held him there for many minutes till other police came. Not because he liked fighting, but because she needed protection and there were no other options.

Once during a business meeting, some of his staff interrupted to say they couldn’t remove the tree limb that was threatening the house without a boom truck. He took his suit jacket off, went outside, threw a rope over the limb, climbed it by hand, pulled the chainsaw up, cut the limb, then went back into his meeting.

Just to add cool factor to the list…we were driving on the highway pulling a trailer…he was driving with his knee while rolling a joint when an axle broke and we lost a wheel. He grabbed the wheel with one hand and navigated the car to the side of the road, put it in park, then kept rolling the joint he had maintained in the other hand, before going to check on the wheel.

From acts of this more physically heroic type, to developing intentional communities, designing maybe the first viable city/state at sea project, accurately predicting when the Berlin wall would come down, advancing educational theory, and so on, my dad did impossible things regularly. At the base of that capacity was a commitment to integrity, deeper than most people know is a possibility.

This was taught explicitly through words, and implicitly through actions.

Most of the wisdom was about life and being a human, but some was as a father to a son about being a man, which I am specifically sharing here. (See the note at the bottom for clarification about this.)

Following is a small sampling of some of the teachings he embedded in every learning experience:

​[Continue Reading]​

🎬 Endnote

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