⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📷 Paragraphica: A camera that takes photos using location data. It describes the place you are at and then converts it into an AI-generated "photo". ​See it here.​

🧘 Realization of Completeness: Exploring some subtle misunderstandings in meditation. ​Read it here.​

🔮 Mike's Search For Meaning: A recent podcast appearance where I explore finding the magic in everyday life, following your blissipline & reigniting child-like wonder. ​Listen here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

An absolutely stunning beach shot by ​Will Gard​ in Charlestown, Rhode Island.

⌛️ Seeing From The Other Side of Loss

I believe it's hard to practice "memento mori" until you've experienced significant loss.

Then you can feel its full gravity.

It can lead to the unnerving sense that the other things in your life you hold dear could be ripped from your hands

This is true but need not be a recipe for everlasting dread. No, instead you can find a place to view your life where you deeply appreciate all that you have.

Where simple moments with friends and family become shrouded in the golden light of still-having-them.

Loss can plant the seed of deep gratitude for all the love that remains.

This is a lens on life where you've already attended everyone's funeral and you've been gifted the ability to go back and still be with them.

Some might find that this is a grim thought.

But it's a fact of life.

And until you've stared loss squarely in the face your won't fully realize your capacity to appreciate this one wondrous life you have and all those dancing with you in it.

😵‍💫 Embracing Madness

Chew on these words from none other than Carl Gustav Jung:

"Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life."

🤓 Learn This Word

Octopolis is a high-density habitat of gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) located in Jervis Bay on the south coast of New South Wales. Biologists discovered this unique site in 2009. Characterized by an elliptical bed of shells, primarily scallop shells, with a diameter of 2-3 meters on its longer axis, Octopolis also features a single piece of human detritus, which is believed to be scrap metal. The octopuses construct their dens by burrowing into this shell bed, which proves to be a superior building material compared to the surrounding fine sediment. At its peak, Octopolis has been observed to host up to 14 octopuses simultaneously.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​The Perennial Philosophy: Are Spiritual Traditions Different Expressions of the Same Truths?​

When we look at the world’s spiritual traditions—such as Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sufism, and mystical Christianity and Judaism—it is tempting to believe that underlying each is a ‘common core’ of principles.

This is sometimes expressed in the concept of the ‘perennial philosophy,’ as popularized by the religious scholar Huston Smith and the author Aldous Huxley. Perennialism suggests that the world’s great ‘wisdom traditions’are different articulations of the same fundamental truths.

However, under the influence of post-modern cultural theories, many religious scholars turned away from the idea of perennialism, suggesting that it was naive and ignored significant differences between traditions. There was a shift toward ‘contextualism’ or ‘constructivism’, which saw traditions as independent and suggested that the spiritual experiences of individuals from different traditions were fundamentally different since they were created by the concepts and practices that are distinct to those traditions.

This shift from perennialism to contextualism also took place in my own field of transpersonal psychology. Until about 15 years ago, transpersonal psychology was closely affiliated with spiritual and religious traditions and heavily influenced by the writings of Ken Wilber, who advocated his own nuanced version of the perennial philosophy. But around the turn of the century, there was a movement toward a more pluralist perspective, beginning with Jorge Ferrer’s influential book Revisioning Transpersonal Theory. The book was highly critical of perennialism (and of Wilber). Ferrer didn’t deny that there was some common ground between different traditions, speaking of a “common spiritual dynamism underlying the plurality of religious insights and ultimates.”

However, he believed that the similarities between traditions had been overstated by perennialists. For example, across the world’s spiritual traditions, there are different concepts of some fundamental spiritual principles, which are seen as the essential reality of the world—the Tao, brahman, dharmakaya, the One, the Godhead, and so on. A perennialist would say these are simply different interpretations of the same spiritual force, which is accessible to all human beings in deep states of meditation, or in higher states of consciousness. However, Ferrer suggested that there are ‘a multiplicity of spiritual absolutes’ that shouldn’t be conflated. Other transpersonal psychologists, such as Glenn Hartelius, also turned away perennialism, suggesting not only that the similarities between traditions had been exaggerated, but that any similarities that did exist could be explained in terms of biological and neurological factors.

However, it seems to me that this is a case of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’ I think religious scholars and transpersonal psychologists were right to move away from the naive perennialism of earlier scholars, but that they have moved too far in the other direction. They have become too relativistic and unnecessarily skeptical toward the shared background of spiritual traditions.

​[Continue Reading]​

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