⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

❓23 Questions To Reflect on 2023: It’s already 2024 but there’s still time to reflect on the year that has just concluded. Use this list of questions to gain perspective and gather insights from 2023 so you can set the stage for a wonderful year ahead. Read them here.

🤫 Wisdom From Mr. Rogers: Listen to Fred Rogers discuss on the gift of silence and his concern for our society’s craving for constant noise. Watch it here.

🧘Yoga Nidra Guided Meditation: This is the 30-minute Yoga Nidra exercise Andrew Huberman has done 1-7X’s per week since 2017. Listen here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Depicted above are prehistoric hand paintings at the Cave of Hands in Argentina, thought to be over 10,000 years old. A new study suggests that the prehistoric cave dwellers may been ‘high’ on oxygen deprivation. Learn more.

 🧪 Digital Connection Experiment

In today's digital era, the landscape of social media often feels overwhelmed by the clamor of voices more inclined towards outrage than constructive dialogue. This phenomenon isn't accidental; social media platforms are designed to reward inflammatory and polarizing content, as these generate more engagement. As a result, individuals often become exaggerated versions of themselves, cartoonish caricatures driven by the pursuit of likes and shares rather than authenticity.

In this turbulent storm of digital noise, the essence of true connection is lost. That's why I'm proposing a tiny experiment for a few willing individuals to use digital technology to foster connections that are deeper, more intentional, and developed gradually – a stark contrast to the superficial "connections" dominating today's social networks.

This experiment is free. I’m inviting 8-10 readers to participate over a 6-month period. I will also be participating.

This is a low time commitment endeavor. Once per month, you will receive a form to complete. This form will have various questions. Some lighthearted and others that dig a bit deeper. Shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes maximum to fill out. Once all the responses are in, they will be aggregated and shared with everyone in the group (and only the group).

Let’s see if we can use digital tools to cultivate connected space that is radically different from the “connection” we experience on social media. I imagine this will begin to feel closer to a collective of pen pals than a constant feed into your daily life.

Complete this form if you’d like to be considered for the group.

❤️‍🔥 Wander With Human Heart

Enjoy Carl Jung’s guidance on how to actually learn about the human psyche:

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.”

👁 Resolve Negative Emotions

Most meditations help you create space between yourself and negative feelings. The Self Salutation is a free newsletter series that goes a step beyond that to help you surface and resolve negative feelings. This makes it natural to maintain a state of mindfulness. If you subscribe by clicking the button below, you help support Down The Rabbit Hole and keep these weekly newsletters free for all who want to receive them.

🤓 Learn This Word

Dadirri: Inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness out of respect.

⏳ 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.

In a lecture delivered to Swiss clergymen, Carl Jung shared some of his deepest insights on this topic.

Alan Watts believes this was the greatest thing Carl Jung ever wrote:

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🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin