⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🤯 How A Neuroscientist Came To Embrace The Reality of Acausal Synchronicities: The article details the journey from materialism to accepting the concept of acausal synchronicities, a term coined by Carl Jung to describe meaningful coincidences not linked by cause and effect. The author suggests that acknowledging these synchronicities, rather than dismissing them, can lead to a deeper understanding of reality and the meaning of existence. ​Read it here.​

🧘‍♀️ A Guided Meditation On Exploring the Heaven Worlds: This meditation is designed to heighten awareness and appreciation of sensory experiences, both external and internal. The session guides participants through various imagined "Heaven Worlds", each representing different forms of joy and well-being, such as the joy of companionship, artistic creation, physical warmth, intellectual insight, and more. The goal of the meditation is to exercise and expand the participants' ability to self-generate positive emotional states. ​Listen here.​

🍄 Ceremonybox: A beautifully designed kit for psychedelic rituals from Portier Supplies, an organization that aims to create psychedelic tools that match the magnificence of the psychedelic state. ​See it here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

After spending the first years of her life locked in a cage, a chimpanzee named Vanilla is struck with awe as she sees the sky for the first time. Highly encourage you to watch the video of this moment ​here.​

🗝 The Project Within You

Here are two related but different ideas that I offer to you today as food for thought.

The first is from Michael Curzi:

"To heal society, my inclination is: There is an unambiguously pro-social project within you. It is an idiosyncratic personal inclination. It may be humble or grand. The task is to obtain the strength to improve your circumstances & character in order to let that project out."

The second is from Allison Wilens:

"The real life hack is to get people to pay you for a version of your natural tendencies which brings them into greater balance and elevates them to formal and sustainable acts of service. The professionalization process being its own act of refinement of your personality."

I offer this to plant a seed of possibility in your mind. What would this rough sketch project look like for you? What are your natural tendencies that already bring value to others?

🔗 Intergenerational Project

Slowly digest these words from philosopher Bayo Akomolafe:

"Your life’s work is an intergenerational project. That is because 'we' are produced by the manifold, by the collective, so that to squeeze the significance of one’s life into the container of its biological duration is to lose sight of the ways death is generative, prolific, and even useful for continuity. It is to centre the human in the very middle of a cosmic saga, all the while forgetting that the human is already ecstatically mediated by, and dependent upon, and threaded through with, the nonhuman.

To think of our lives as ours is to relinquish our accountability to our ancestors, who often need 'healing' and continue to produce effects.

Our bodies are long bodies, wide bodies, spread out, queering space and time; your failure, your confusion, might very well be the nourished soil that coaxes out new possibilities from the earth; our work is long, unusual and always yet to be fully disclosed. The anorexic confines of traditional activisms cannot understand this or appreciate why many now feel invited to lean on the fences of conventional, intelligible action – even if it means being branded mad.

Your life's work is an intergenerational project, an ancestral conspiracy, a continuous meeting of bodies, a queering of temporality. Your life is not yours to resolve, yours to complete, or yours to contain. It is necessarily the life of the many. Be thankful for the threadbare places of your life, for it gives the many who are yet to come something to stitch theirs with."

🤓 Learn This Word

Metapay: A term coined by Abraham Maslow to describe the forms of compensation that go beyond salary like the ability to be creative and autonomous in one's work.

(Hat tip to Kyle Kowalski of ​Sloww ​for pointing me to this one).

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​Do Things Differently To How You Have Done Them Before: A Maxim for Freedom​

We all know the quote 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results'. [Probably originating, in fact, from an AA meeting, not Einstein, as often attributed].

The reason this quote is so memorable is not just because of its truth but because of its universality.

It’s what we all do, all the time. Because we’re mad, yes. Quite mad. All of us. (As made clear in the less famous but equally true Carl Jung quote: “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?”). We are mad because to be human is to be mad.

And part of what it means to be mad, and part of the human condition therefore, is to repeatedly make the same mistakes, over and over and over again.

Now, on one level, having recognised this madness, it is good to accept it. You are a human. Therefore you are mad. You are, to an extent, doomed to this. Because the universe, of which you are a part, is mad. Simply because of the fact that logic is nothing but a language, rationality is nothing but a net or map. There is no external explicatory overlay to the universe, because there is nothing beyond the universe. It just is, for no reason other than its own being.

BUT!

This does not mean that you must accept all of the conditions and limitations of your madness. One can, demonstrably, be less mad than another. One can make more sense of the inexplicable than another. There is benefit to improving the map, even if that’s all it is.

And the primary way in which we can reduce our madness, in which we can interrupt this utterly infuriating process of bumping against the same blank walls of our terra cognita, like a computer character glitching between the same rooms of a house, over and over and over again, is very simple:

​[Continue Reading]​

🎬 Endnote

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