⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌱 How Life Really Works: In a candid exploration of life's fragility, Philip Ball offers a poignant narrative, juxtaposing his personal battle with cancer against the intricate marvels of biological processes and the gene regulation that underpins our very existence. Shattering the DNA-as-blueprint myth, Ball delves into the awe-inspiring complexity of life that emerges not from a fixed script but from a dynamic symphony of cellular collaboration and negotiation. Read it here.

👁 Baba Yaga, Shamanism, and Emergence: Delve into the intertwining paths of mythopoetic cognition and the Slavic archetype of Baba Yaga, where Euvie Ivanova reveals the uncanny relationship between shamanistic narratives and the emergent patterns of nature and existence. This thought-provoking piece connects the primordial threads of our ancestors' shamanic practices to the modern concepts of complex systems, illustrating how life perpetually reinvents itself beyond the sum of its parts. Read it here.

🧠 Century of The Self: This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

St. Elmo's Fire is a weather phenomenon involving a bright blue or violet glow, appearing like fire in some circumstances, emanating from the mastheads of ships or the wings of airplanes, and even from objects on the ground like steeples or chimneys. This luminescence is caused by a strong electric field in the atmosphere, typically during thunderstorms. See it here.

📏 You Are Immeasurable

The tendency to compare is a common one.

We examine our ability in a particular arena and see how we measure up against the competition.

We then do that across a variety of domains.

How do my looks measure up? How does my athleticism measure up? How does my health measure up? How does my weight measure up? How does my bank account measure up? How does my intelligence measure up?

I could go on and on but you get the point.

We often run these calculations unconsciously.

And it adds up to a negative number because we fixate on the ways we don't measure up.

Rather than the progress we've made and the capacity we've built, we see the ways we're still deficient. The ways others are ahead.

But this isn't even about viewing your measurements more positively.

It's about realizing that, in your totality, you are immeasurable.

That's because you can't measure something that is completely unique.

In your totality, you are a category of one.

A category of one, by definition, cannot be compared.

So don't be fooled into measuring a bundle of thin slices of your being, assigning value to those dimensions, and adding them up into your worth.

Your worth is incalculable.

You are immeasurable.

You are unique.

🙏 Grief is Praise

Enjoy these pointed words on loss from Martín Prechtel:

“Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who hare loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love.

A nonfake grieving is how we praise the dead, by praising that which has left us feeling cold and left behind. By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve.

To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Anemoia: Nostalgia for a time that you have never lived

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go With Books! An Homage To The Magic of Scratches and Scribbles on Dried Leaves

I grew up in a little village in the north of the Netherlands, a picturesque Dutch fishermen’s place carrying around 10,000 inhabitants. My grandfather worked on a boat. He went out every day to try and catch some of those slippery sea-animals. My mother, she lived next to the harbor of Medemblik. In her world, memories of salty air, stormy nights, and the sound of the whacking ropes against masts still linger.

I grew up a little more inland, closer to farmland than farmsea. I always liked to play outside, climb trees, and build huts. And thus I was lucky we could call the house on the corner our home, as it had the biggest garden in the street. Our garden had nice patch of grass, some bushes and trees, and always a few cats dozing off, letting their cute little cat-dreams carried off by sunbeams.

I remember one thing in particular. I was around six or seven years old at the time. Not old enough to watch the grown up’s television programs, I was often told to go to bed early. Unable to sleep, I lay there, listening to the organic orchestra of birds, carefree, too young to fully grasp the mortal nature of existence.

The language of the birds put a spell on me. The warm summer breeze was carrying the laughter of playing children. Time slowed down to a halt, seconds stretched into hours, even days. It was if the world was holding its breath. I could not fathom I would ever grow old. It was as if gravity was momentarily suspended. I felt empty, fully there, letting the world flow into every corner of my being.

I don’t think I will ever forget that feeling. Something in me expects I will forget everything but that feeling, that moment, when I die.

Wouldn’t that be nice, that a little slice of (my) awareness is single-pointedly focused on that sliver of time, floating in space-time towards eternity?

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 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