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- 🌀🐇 #143 animism, enchantment, empathy based bedtime stories
🌀🐇 #143 animism, enchantment, empathy based bedtime stories
Plus Inviting The Solstice
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🔮 Artemis AI Bedtime Stories: Where empathy takes center stage, and magical storytelling comes to life. Try it here.
🤯 Wonder and Enchantment: Iain McGilchrist and Patrick Curry explore the concept of enchantment, describing it as a deeply personal, relational experience that ranges from charm to joy. They discuss the role of art, language, and mindfulness in facilitating enchantment, emphasizing the need for openness and humility. Watch it here.
🐾 Animism is Normative Consciousness: For 98% of human history - over 10,000 generations - our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate - imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. Listen here.
🎇 Image of The Week
This shot captures Cai Guo-Qiang's incredible fireworks display "Sky Ladder." He created it for his 100-year-old grandmother as she had always been his biggest supporter. See it in motion here.
☀️ The Solstice
Today is the solstice. Summer for the northern hemisphere and winter for the southern hemisphere.
These demarcations in time can be treated as insignificant. I like to use these lines drawn in the passage of time to recenter and reconnect to what I'm doing and where I'm heading.
I want to encourage you to do the same.
What does this change in the season mean to you? Want do you want to invite into your life? More of something? Less of something else?
See a vision. Feel the feeling.
Now begin building momentum towards this. Take a minuscule action right now.
If you want more creativity, set a timer and write for 5 minutes (or draw or sing).
If you want to feel fitter, do 10 push-ups.
If you want to cultivate your relationships, send a quick gratitude text.
Most people can do part 1 but struggle with part 2. They can generate a vision but grounding it into reality is where they have hang-ups.
This is usually because it's overwhelming to feel the difference between today and the vision.
That's why it's so important to start with something so small it almost feels silly but there's a rule I follow when it comes to changing behaviors:
It's harder to start than it is to increase.
A microscopic habit can grow into its majesty when you water with enough enthusiasm over time. But you have to first plant the seed.
👁 The Artists Is The Seeing Eye
Enjoy these quotes from the acclaimed architect Frank Lloyd Wright:
"The artist himself, of course, is of his time, or he is not an artist. He is the prophet of his time and of his day; he is the seeing-eye of his people. He can see a little further and more clearly than his people see."
"I have never wanted to be finished. I have never wanted to feel that what I have done was the best I could do. I have to be careful of that because that is poison to the creative spirit."
"The greatest harm that man can do in life is to spoil the faith, the trust, and the fresh vision of the child."
🤓 Learn This Word
Tathātā is a Buddhist term variously translated as "thusness" or "suchness," referring to the nature of reality free from conceptual elaborations and the subject–object distinction
⏳ From The Archives
A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.
Best-selling of philosophy author Alain de Botton provides the following biography of François de La Rochefoucauld:
“The Duc de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris in 1613, and despite his many initial advantages (wealth, connections, looks, and a very beautiful and ancient name), he had a thoroughly difficult and often miserable life. He fell in love with a couple of duchesses who didn’t treat him well; he ended up in prison after some bungled but honorable political maneuvering. He was forced into exile from his beloved Paris on four occasions. He never advanced as far as he wanted at court. He got shot in the eye during a rebellion and almost went blind. He lost most of his money, and his enemies published what they falsely purported to be his memoirs, full of insults against people whom he liked and depended on, who then turned against him and refused to believe in his innocence.”
[…]
“[He] wrote a very slim book, barely 60 pages long that can deservedly be counted as one of the true masterpieces of philosophy. The book is a compendium of acerbic melancholy observations about the human condition.”
That book is called Maxims, and it includes 641 in total. There are many repeating themes explored in La Rochefoucauld’s observations such as betrayal, flirtation, desire, and selfishness. But the trait which seems to fascinate La Rochefoucauld the most is that of self-love.
The Maxims are littered with aphorisms on self-love such as “In jealousy there is more self-love than love.” Or, “Fewer men are made cruel by natural ferocity than by self-love.” But at the end of the Penguin Classics version of the book, under the section “Maxims Withdrawn by the Author,” we can find a piece on self-love which is far closer to an essay than an aphorism.
As you read the following dissection of self-love try, try reconnect it to your own life. La Rochefoucauld described his book a “portrait of the human heart.” It is designed to illuminate the dark recesses of your shadow side with the torch of embarrassment and push you into a wiser way of being. Note how the use of “self-love” is often interchangeable with the Buddha’s use of “ego.”
La Rochefoucauld’s portrait of self-love in full:
🎬 Endnote
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