⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📝 The One-Touch Guide to Doing a Weekly Review: How Tiago Forte goes from chaos to clarity in 30 minutes. Read it here.

🧯The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: A long form conversation between 3 minds I admire. Watch it here.

🎧 Immersive Sound Journeys To Help Alleviate Anxiety: Olo’s natural soundscapes create moments of relaxation and rejuvenation. Try the app.

🎇 Image of The Week

What you see pictured above is known as a “red sprite.” They are a type of natural phenomenon that occur in the upper atmosphere. They are a form of transient luminous event which are short-lived electrical phenomena that occur above thunderstorms. Sprites are characterized by their red color and jellyfish-like appearance, often with tendrils extending both upward and downward. They are typically triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thunderstorm and the ground. This photo was taken by photographer Paul M Smith in northern Oklahoma.

💥 Something Rather Than Nothing

The quote above excerpted from a poem by William Blake rhymes with the passage I’ll share below from the late John O’Donohue. This passage mirrored my own recurring but vague notions about the enormity of detail in this world, here expressed with such precision and lucidity, it was as if those thoughts had found their voice:

“One of my favorite sentences in the Western philosophical tradition is from Leibniz; it was subsequently used by Schelling and Heidegger: "The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing." I think this is a great sentence, because it alerts one immediately to the mystery of the presence of things, which we so often tend to forget. In post-modern culture, we live increasingly in a virtual world and seem to have lost visceral and vital contact with the actual world.

Another way of looking at this statement is: the real mystery is that there is so much. Everywhere the human eye looks, everywhere the human mind turns, there is a huge panorama of diversity; the difference that lives in everything and between everything, the fact that no two stones, no two fields, no two faces or no two biographies are the same. The range and intensity of this difference is quite staggering. This is not an abstract thing. People who live in small farms in country areas could spend hours telling you about all the differences they experience between two places in the same field. Patrick Kavanagh spoke of the "undying difference in the corner of a field."

Part of the way we can rediscover magic in the “mundane” is by leaning past our conditioned ways of viewing everyday objects and widen the aperture of our attention such that the details that are always there but unseen finally get noticed.

Around you right now are hundreds, thousands of tiny details slipping past your awareness. This useful and functional. We need to be able to attend to what matters. But sometimes what matters is what we haven’t been attending to. It’s a worthwhile skill to explore the novel territory living beneath the conceptual map of our everyday life.

 📞 Everything Is Waiting For You

Enjoy this poem from the warm-hearted pen of David Whyte:

“Your great mistake is to act the drama
 as if you were alone. As if life
 were a progressive and cunning crime
 with no witness to the tiny hidden
 transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
 the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
 even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
 the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
 out your solo voice. You must note
 the way the soap dish enables you,
 or the window latch grants you freedom.
 Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
 The stairs are your mentor of things
 to come, the doors have always been there
 to frighten you and invite you,
 and the tiny speaker in the phone
 is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
 conversation. The kettle is singing
 even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
 have left their arrogant aloofness and
 seen the good in you at last. All the birds
 and creatures of the world are unutterably
 themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Acedia: Lack of concern over your spiritual life or "mental sloth"

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

50 Alan Watts Quotes to Give You a Glimpse of Enlightenment

Below you will find a curated list of the best 50 Alan Watts quotes of all time. This will forever hold a special place in our hearts here at HighExistence, and this collection was made with love.

We’ve written about the man and his teachings many times before. He had an overwhelming influence on youth culture over the decades.

Capable of bridging the gap between Eastern and Western cultures better than few before him, Alan Watts could distill lifetimes of wisdom into approachable, digestible lectures.

He could venture deep into the caverns of consciousness and emerge with emeralds of wisdom. With stunning clarity and lucidity, his lectures and over 25 books will forever alter the lives of those who rest their eyes on them.

With that, we dug deep into the archive to find some the best 50 Alan Watts quotes: the most enlightening lines the Internet has to offer on everything from life, mind, and meaning to Zen and society.

Savor these.

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

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

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That's it. It will take 5 seconds and will help us spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin