🌀🐇 #164 radical healing, possibility of peace, happy or memorable?

Plus The Tyranny of Self Love

November 15, 2023

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📸 Do You Want a Happy Life or a Memorable Life? Nat Eliason delves into the inherent conflict between seeking personal happiness and creating a life rich in memorable experiences, suggesting that a life focused solely on happiness may lack distinct, memorable moments. Read it here.

👁 Seeing That Frees By Rob Burbea: In this review, the book is praised as a profound guide to understanding consciousness, noted for its detailed, original approach and practical examples aimed at fostering personal growth and alleviating pain. Dan Shipper emphasizes the book's rare quality in the meditation and Buddhism genre, blending depth and wisdom with a pragmatic, non-dogmatic style. Read it here.

❤️‍🩹 Hidden Arts of Radical Healing: In a time of growing tension and inter-cultural conflict, Elder Les Spencer recounts stories, principles and findings from an era of inter-cultural peace healing in Australia. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This spectacular image of 4 rainbows was taken by Nigel Danson, a photographer based out of the UK. Check out his 5 guiding principles:

  1. Always photograph the things I love.  Never shoot for commercial gain alone.

  2. Shoot more sunrises than sunsets - even in the summer

  3. Don't spend too much time editing my photos. Get outdoors as much as possible

  4. Revisit locations. This is how I always get the best images.

  5. Visit and photograph 3 new locations (maybe a county or country) every year

🪩 The Illusion of Shiny Exteriors

In our relentless pursuit of success, it's all too easy to be lured by the glittering facade of external rewards: wealth, fame, and prestige. Yet, in chasing these shiny exteriors, we often overlook the intrinsic values that genuinely enrich our lives. This oversight, as seductive as it may be, can lead to a profound sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness.

Consider the allure of a high-paying job. On the surface, it promises financial security and societal status. However, if this job doesn't resonate with our passions or values, the daily grind can become a soul-sapping journey. The paycheck, while substantial, is a meager consolation for hours filled with monotony and drudgery. This is the crux of the matter – when our days are spent in pursuits that hold no personal meaning, even the heftiest of salaries can feel hollow.

The path to a truly fulfilling life lies in the pursuit of intrinsic values. It's about engaging in activities that are rewarding in themselves, without the need for external validation. This approach doesn't just enrich our present; it ensures that our future selves are aligned with pursuits that bring genuine joy and satisfaction.

While money and fame are byproducts of some life paths, they should not be the compass guiding our journey. Instead, we should focus on what genuinely moves us, drives our passion, and brings us joy. By doing so, we not only enrich our own lives but also set an example for a more fulfilling way of living. Let's choose substance over superficiality, depth over appearance, and meaning over mere accumulation. Let’s choose craft over status and art over praise.

✌️ Possibility of Peace

Enjoy these words on peace from Martín Prechtel:

“How relaxing it would be if there really just was a bunch of bad guys who you had only to depose to make the world all fixed up. But that's too simple and the source of even more loss, because in the instance of trying to cure it all by force you plant the next round of the sickness of revenge. So what do you do?

Get courageous.

Become a person. Make beauty out of grief. Become real people who might have untenable rotten ideas, but who in the end grow into solid old people who are generous and unconniving, people who know things and don't just see everything as a business opportunity. Be courageous, make your hate into an art of love beyond your wants, and stop sending undigested grief in the form of sorrow frozen into hate into the arms of the future. Hand over the world with some modicum of the possibility for peace.”

The beginning rings similar to this quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

🤓 Learn This Word

Crepuscular: of, resembling, or relating to twilight. Commonly used to describe crepuscular rays which are shafts of light that are seen just after the sun has set and which extend over the western sky radiating from the position of the sun below the horizon

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

François de La Rochefoucauld’s Short Essay on the Tyranny of Self-Love

Best-selling of philosophy author Alain de Botton provides the following biography of François de La Rochefoucauld:

“The Duc de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris in 1613, and despite his many initial advantages (wealth, connections, looks, and a very beautiful and ancient name), he had a thoroughly difficult and often miserable life. He fell in love with a couple of duchesses who didn’t treat him well; he ended up in prison after some bungled but honorable political maneuvering. He was forced into exile from his beloved Paris on four occasions. He never advanced as far as he wanted at court. He got shot in the eye during a rebellion and almost went blind. He lost most of his money, and his enemies published what they falsely purported to be his memoirs, full of insults against people whom he liked and depended on, who then turned against him and refused to believe in his innocence.”

[…]

“[He] wrote a very slim book, barely 60 pages long that can deservedly be counted as one of the true masterpieces of philosophy. The book is a compendium of acerbic melancholy observations about the human condition.”

That book is called Maxims, and it includes 641 in total. There are many repeating themes explored in La Rochefoucauld’s observations such as betrayal, flirtation, desire, and selfishness. But the trait which seems to fascinate La Rochefoucauld the most is that of self-love.

The Maxims are littered with aphorisms on self-love such as “In jealousy there is more self-love than love.” Or, “Fewer men are made cruel by natural ferocity than by self-love.” But at the end of the Penguin Classics version of the book, under the section “Maxims Withdrawn by the Author,” we can find a piece on self-love which is far closer to an essay than an aphorism.

As you read the following dissection of self-love try, try reconnect it to your own life. La Rochefoucauld described his book a “portrait of the human heart.” It is designed to illuminate the dark recesses of your shadow side with the torch of embarrassment and push you into a wiser way of being. Note how the use of “self-love” is often interchangeable with the Buddha’s use of “ego.”

La Rochefoucauld’s portrait of self-love in full:

🎬 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