⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🎯 How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You): Uncover a unique framework to rethink and align your career choices with your authentic self amidst society's outdated conventions. Read it here.

🔗 You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships: The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explains the limits on how many connections humans can keep up, and the trade-offs involved when you invest in a new relationship. Read it here.

🍄 The Science of Psilocybin and Its Use To Relieve Suffering: Leading psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths discloses the ways that psychedelic drugs can be used to create spiritually meaningful, personally transformative experiences for all patients, especially the terminally ill. Roland recently passed away so I share this video to honor his memory. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Located on the Curonian Spit in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, the Dancing Forest is a pine forest renowned for its peculiarly twisted trees. Unlike a typical forest where trees grow straight up towards the sky, the trees in the Dancing Forest have contorted trunks that spiral into loops, rings, and other unusual shapes, resembling dancers in motion. The exact cause of this unique deformation remains a subject of debate. While some believe it's the result of certain geological factors, others speculate it might be due to the activity of caterpillars affecting the pine seedlings. Regardless of its origins, the Dancing Forest remains one of Russia's most intriguing natural mysteries and is a popular tourist attraction.

 🌳 Find Freshness Through Relabeling

"It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't."

This quote from G.K. Chesterton reveals how we can become blind to the majesty of the world around us. Once labeled, we don't revisit these things and examine them for their uniqueness. If we recognize it, it's placed neatly in its mental box without a second thought.

Friend and author of many iconic HighExistence articles, Jordan Bates, used to call trees "Bark-clad Earthclaws." This is an excellent example of relabeling to promote freshness of perspective so something's uniqueness can shine through our rigid frames of reference.

Try It: Find an everyday object and relabel it in a unique way. Realize how the label and the thing are very different. Ponder how the thing exists beyond our abstract categorizations.

❤️‍🔥 Path of Humble Apprenticeship

Savor these words from poet David Whyte:

“But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

“We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find our selves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.

The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship, not only in following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and beautiful abasement but strangely, through its fierce introduction to all its many astonishing and different forms, where we are asked continually and against our will, to give in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Gezelligheid: A dutch word that means coziness, fun, the general togetherness that gives people a warm feeling.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Carl Jung On Why We Must Learn To Accept Ourselves Before We Can Help Others

Carl Jung exhibited the sort of serene wisdom that is usually reserved for the reclusive-hermit-sage. Yet, he arrived at his personal “wholeness” not through the traditional route of Christian grace or Buddhist meditation, but through scientific and psychological means. Delving into his own troubled mind and reflecting on the neuroses of his patients, he arrived at an unsettling insight.

We must learn to accept our own darkness if we want to overcome our own neurosis.

Without this self-acceptance, our attempts to help others will be futile, both on an individual and global level.

Alan Watts said that Jung intimately embraced his own dark side and:

Whenever we refuse to accept our feelings and thoughts, however disturbing they might be, we experience psychological dissonance. Dissonance happens when our behavior does not match our self-image, or the image we think others might have of us. When we project our shadow onto others, we refuse ownership of ourselves, distancing ourselves from ourselves, losing ourselves in the process. This, according to Jung, is how neurosis finds a way to take over the psyche.

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin