⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧱 Rebuilding Society on Meaning: This video proposes that modern society fails to provide spaces for shared meaning and togetherness, which leads to breakdowns in community, politics, science, and more. Joe Edelman offers new methods of articulating and designing for sources of meaning as a path to rebuild society around what gives life richness and purpose. Watch it here.

🪤Avoiding the Traps of Psychedelic Self-Absorption: This episode of the psychedelic medicine podcast covers the cheapening and overuse of the idea of “trauma” in popular discourse and why approaches focusing on excavating supposed repressed traumatic memories from childhood should be approached with a degree of skepticism. Listen here.

🕊 A Murmuration of Humanity: Incredible choreographed artistry from Sadeck Berrabah that shares a simple but poignant message. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand are a natural wonder that has been attracting visitors for over 130 years. The caves are home to thousands of magical glowworms that create a serene ambiance as visitors glide silently through the starry wonderland of the Glowworm Grotto. The caves are made up of two levels, the upper level is dry and decorated with stunning, delicate cave formations, and the lower level consisting of stream passages, glowworms, and the Cathedral, the tallest part of the cave.

🙏 A Simple Prayer

Here’s a simple prayer that I wrote to help keep me centered and attuned as I start each day:

I pray for clarity of mind so that I may appropriately attend to the things that matter and effectively water the garden of my life.

I pray for warm-heartedness and compassion for myself, those around me, and the shifting circumstances I find myself in.

I pray for wisdom in the crucial moments that call for swift action.

I pray for the eyes of wonder to gaze upon this magnificent planet. Each day refreshed, reborn, renewed.

I pray for the awareness that life is a sacred gift so that I may embrace the good fortune of every next breath.

I pray for the inheritance of love raining on down me from my ancestors.

I pray for the opportunity to love this world in new ways.

I pray for the courage to speak the words etched into my heart.

🪟 Four Windows of Knowing

Enjoy this excerpt of “the four windows of knowing” as described by Bill Plotkin in his book The Journey of Soul Initiation:

NORTH: HEART-CENTERED THINKING

“This is not the logical, analytical, deductive mode of thinking endemic to the contemporary Western world; rather, it is thinking that is independent, critical, creative, moral, and compassionate. It is "critical" in the sense that it reflectively questions assumptions, discerns hidden values, and considers the larger social and ecological context. Entirely distinct from the rote memorization and parroting commonly stressed in mainstream Western schools and society, heart-centered thinking overflows with an animated curiosity that leads to a constantly adjusting and in-depth knowledge of human culture and the wider environment. The Self is a compassionate systems thinker, understanding the patterns and dynamics that connect the interdependent members of the more-than-human community. The Self intuitively comprehends how our actions ripple across space and time to other places and future generations.

SOUTH: FULL-BODIED FEELING

This includes our emotions but also several other kinds of feelings: premonitions and hunches ("gut feelings" or "the feeling in my bones") about particular social gatherings, city neighborhoods, or natural habitats; interpersonal vibes; sexual passion; our general sense of corporeal well-being, malaise, or disease; and our bodily feelings - our awareness of our internal organs (interoception) and the positioning of our limbs (proprioception and kinesthesia, or "muscle sense"). To have heartfelt and gratifying relationships with our fellow humans and with the other creatures and places of our world, we must proceed, first and foremost, by way of full-bodied feeling. True communion is impossible without feeling. Although the other beings indigenous to our world do not speak a human language, we can nevertheless come to know them through feeling, through a kind of nonphysical touching. By way of feeling, we can instinctively translate what's being "said" by the nonhuman flora and fauna (and stones, rivers, and forests). When it comes to communion with others of our own kind, we must remember that we're at least as much feeling-infused as we are linguistically inclined. What on Earth would our relationships be like if we couldn’t sense social vibes, read the emotional field, or discern the bodily states of our friends and family? Certainly our sexuality is founded on our capacity to feel, in all senses of the word. To be fully human we must fully feel.

EAST: FULL-PRESENCE SENSING

I mean the way we can learn to reside in the five senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The sharp and nuanced sensing we’re capable of with a well-developed Self contrasts with the diminished perception typical of people in egocentric cultures. In the mainstream Western world, for example, the senses are often dulled by disinterest, disuse, and stultifying cultural activities that take place indoors and in denatured outdoor environments with a woeful constriction in the diversity of things that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted. Too few contemporary people are intoxicated by the songs of birds and bowled over by their colored plumage. Can we feel the delicacy of a cool breeze jostling the hair on our sunbaked arms? Do we linger with the perfume of peonies? Keen sensing is a talent, one that must be cultivated and practiced in order to be maintained and honed. The Self is a connoisseur of full-presence sensing, a devotee of the rainbow spectrum, a maven of music (including the songs of creatures, wind, and waters), an epicure of food and drink, an aficionado of texture and textiles, and quite frankly, a fanatic of floral fragrances.

WEST: DEEP IMAGINATION

By "deep," I'm signifying the images, symbols, dreams, visions, and revelations that we do not command or control but that arise unbidden and possess the immediate ring of truth. In egocentric cultures, the imagination has been contrasted with and pitted against truth and reality: "It was just my imagination." "Leave the dull, everyday world behind, and escape to the land of imagination." But in fact the deep imagination is an indispensable faculty for discovering the truth about everyday life, no less essential than sensing, thinking, and feeling. Our deep imagination not only shows us what might be but also illuminates what already is. Without deep imagination, we would have only the most superficial experience of another person, a relationship, a song or painting, a bird or flower, a meal, or the design of a book or a business. Our deep imagination also reveals things we may never have detected with only our senses or emotions or by deduction. The nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekule discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie of a snake seizing its own tail. A psychotherapist, by way of an image that suddenly appears to her inner eye, might grasp - accurately - her client's long-standing conundrum. The deep imagination is also our primary resource for recognizing the emerging future, for "seeing" the visionary possibilities of what we can create right now - individually and collectively - and consequently for creating a better world. Deep imagination is the essential resource for all genuine human creativity. The Muse or Dreamer waits within everyone to be reclaimed as an indispensable resource for liberating ourselves from the flatlands and wastelands of the mainstream and for designing and building new, life-enhancing societies.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Ultracrepidarian: noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside their area of expertise

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

18 Rare Aldous Huxley Quotes to Upgrade Your Grey Matter

Aldous Huxley was one of the most iconic and prophetic thinkers of the 20st century.

Huxley is best-known for his novel Brave New World, in which he predicted the appearance of dictatorships which used soft forms of coercion such as drugs and entertainment to pacify the populace.

Later in life, Huxley became interested in psychedelic/entheogenic substances and mystical experiences, famously writing The Doors of Perception about his experiences with mescaline.

Beyond becoming one of the preeminent intellectuals of his time, Huxley also had a prodigious talent for writing.

His words contain a seemingly effortless eloquence. He’s one of those writers whose presence you can really feel in the sentences. You can almost picture Huxley, cross-legged and sipping a cup of tea, regaling you with his profound ideas over a lovely luncheon.

Keep that image in mind while you savor these quotes—these dusty treasures plucked from the consciousness of one of the most renowned geniuses ever to exist on this planet.

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin