🌀🐇 #156 3 years old, ego doesn't die, scientist on prayer

Plus The Key To Meditation

September 20, 2023

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

⚰️ The Ego Doesn't Die: Why Western spirituality is so confused, and what to do about it. Read it here.

🏛 Theo Von Explores The Meaning Crisis: On the “This Past Weekend” Postcast John Vervaeke explores how we can cultivate wisdom, virtue, and connection through ancient philosophies and modern psychology. Theo and John discuss topics like the loss of shared values, polarization, social media impacts, stoicism, love, psychedelics, and more. Watch it here.

🙏 A Scientist on Prayer: This video features Andrew Huberman's intimate revelations on how meditation and prayer shape his understanding of self and purpose. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Pictured above is a real rabbit! A fitting image for this edition celebrating Down The Rabbit Hole 3-year anniversary. “The average Flemish Giant weighs about 15 pounds (6.8 kilograms), though the breed can get even larger. Some of these rabbits can even reach up to 10 kilograms (22 pounds). The longest Flemish Giant rabbit ever recorded was four feet three inches long!”

🎂 3 Years Old

As I pen down this week's issue, I'm filled with a sense of astonishment. It's been three years since the inception of this newsletter. That's 156 weekly rendezvous where we've delved into the magic that cloaks our everyday life.

This journey, for me, isn't merely a ritual. It's a devotional act. The insights, material, and wonders I share don't cater to popular appeal. Instead, they are an echo of a deeper knowing within me, that our sense of wonder can and should remain intact as we age.

I understand in the whirlwind of adult responsibilities, it's all too easy to drift from the childlike wonder that once embraced us. Yet, I remain steadfast in my conviction: our world is drenched in enchantment. That magic, often cloaked in the ordinary, beckons us, and recognizing it is an art each one of us can master. We need not forsake our wonder-tinted lenses as we tread the path of time.

Being guardians of this wonder allows us to embrace a more humble worldview. It supports us to recognize that while we've assembled incredible fields of knowledge enabling groundbreaking technologies and healing methodologies, they all stand on the great mystery of existence. A mystery we're all a part of.

As we mark this three-year milestone, whether you've been with me from the start or joined somewhere along the way, your presence means the world. Your attention gives purpose to this weekly dispatch.

To help me celebrate, I’d love to hear your thoughts:

🎈🥳 What does this newsletter mean to you? How has it intertwined with your own journey?

I’ll read every reply. I will cherish your words and use them to fuel me as I continue this weekly adventure.

❤️‍🔥 The Devotional Act

Famed music producer Rick Rubin on how an artist’s creation is a devotional act:

“That's what people think. It's like, just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value. Like, as an artist, if you like it, that's all of the value. That's the success comes when you say “I like this enough for other people to see it.” Not “Other people like it so it's successful.” That doesn't mean anything because other people liking it is out of your control.

All that's in your control is making the thing to the best of your ability. It's all an offering to God. And if you're making an offering to God, you're not thinking about, Oh, what's the budget? Or, I hope, I hope this segment of the audience is gonna like it.

We don't think like that. It's a higher vibration. We're making the best we can make to the best of our ability out of love and devotion. That's what it is. And there is no “I'm changing it for someone else” because it can't be better than this devotional act that we're doing.”

Watch him say it here.

🤓 Learn This Word

Woodvivos: The wistful warmth gained from touching and communicating with trees.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

The Key to Meditation is Noble Failure

Meditation, like many other things, is really about failing. Over and over again.

In his book The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, Stephen Cope describes something that he calls The Noble Failure. It’s a moment one experiences when meditation practice shows you just how out-of-control your mind really is:

“Our first experiment with a meditation technique of this kind inevitably brings us face-to-face with an alarming discovery: we cannot do the technique at all! We cannot let awareness rest in the breath for even a few seconds together without it slipping off and thinking about dinner tonight, or that irritating snoring sound coming from our neighbor. We’ve given awareness a very simple object – the breath. And such a simple directive: Stay!! Stay, Lassie, stay. Stay on the breath. But Lassie just keeps romping off to play in the woods.

I sometimes call this discovery ‘the Noble Failure.’ It is certainly a failure – because we discover that the mind will simply not rest on the object. But it is also noble, because it gives us (perhaps for the first time) a vantage point from which to observe the nature of ordinary mind.”

One realizes that the mind isn’t really something you direct most of the time; you’re not usually guiding it in a specific, productive direction. Rather, thoughts, emotions, and other mental experiences arise and pass away, seemingly out of our control. We can’t help but think stuff. During meditation we attempt to stop thinking, we attempt to stop our mind’s chatter, and realize we can’t. We don’t have a choice. Even when we want it to sit still for just a couple minutes, the mind rambles on.

Fortunately, we’re in the position of being able to train our own mind through contemplative disciplines such as meditation.

We can train the mind through trying over and over to control it and repeatedly failing.

🎬 Endnote

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin