⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🎬 Quit Your Job: This article advocates for the value of stepping away from structured, predictable work to embrace risk, pursue personal visions, and engage in exploratory, meaningful activities that could lead to significant, unconventional achievements. Read it here.

🤐 Keep Your Goals To Yourself: After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone, but Derek Sivers says it's better to keep goals secret. Watch it here.

📖 The “life-changing” book that has helped 45k+ people imagine a better story for work & life: The Pathless Path written by Paul Millerd is now available for free in digital format. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“What is that unusual red halo surrounding this aurora? It is a Stable Auroral Red (SAR) arc. SAR arcs are rare and have only been acknowledged and studied since 1954.” Photo by Tristian McDonald. Learn more here.

 🧪 Digital Connection Experiment

Thanks to those who submitted the form to participate in the Digital Connection Experiment. I’ll be reaching out with more details in the next 14 days. You will receive a direct email from me. Looking forward to seeing how it all unfolds!

👁 The Society of Self

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

This quote from Walt Whitman is a classic way of describing the vastness of self.

The self is not singular. It's made of many aspects and depending on the context, certain qualities will have more prominence in our external expression and interior experience.

In a therapeutic setting, people navigate these various elements of self using parts work and internal family systems.

I had a realization a couple of weeks back that I'd like to spell out for you today...

Imagine the self as a large room with many individuals interacting.

These rooms can vary dramatically. For some people, their rooms are tidy, everything is well ordered and everyone falls in line like a military assembly.

In other cases, you have a chaotic, free-flowing party environment.

In some instances, it's like a warzone with emotional bombs going off constantly.

If each of these rooms represents a micro-culture or society of self, what sets the tone?

What dictates the rule for engagement between parts?

The answer is the internal caretaker or ideal parent figure.

This part, well developed, is mature, loving, strong, and sage-like in its navigation through messy conflicts.

In lieu of this part being well cultivated, you can see the emergence of an authoritarian tyrant who monopolizes strength, discards warmth, and rules through fear.

You might also find a floaty, hippy parental figure that prioritizes warmth, demonizes strength, and denies the responsibility to preside.

You might also find the complete absence of this figure. This is the scenario in which most of the bombs go off.

I used to consider the internal caretaker/ideal parent figure just another part among many.

But now I see it can serve as a metapart in some ways. It sets the tone, shapes the culture, and creates the boundaries in which other parts interact.

Just like a mother attending to two of her children in a scuffle.

Her approach to the conflict will transform how the children interact in the future.

Her approach can intensify future conflict, promote the repetition of the pattern, or create a learning moment that reduces future conflict.

So focusing on the cultivation of the internal caretaker is a powerful enterprise that can have sweeping and long-lasting effects on our experience of life.

Done well, it affords us a wellspring of deep love as well as reasonable guardrails to guide our behavior in a generative direction.

The cultivation of this part takes patient loving awareness and the wisdom to be aware of cliffs in the distance to steer towards safety.

So ask yourself: In the way I relate to myself, do I need more warmth? More strength? Both?

If it's warmth, try practicing Metta Loving Kindness Meditation as a place to begin.

If it's strength, work on giving yourself structure and sticking to it (start small at first).

Just be mindful that in adding what you're missing you do not subtract what you already have.

Don't swing from warmth to strength or vice versa.

Bring your warmth with you to strength. Bring your strength with you to warmth.

And one final prompt to stimulate the emergence of this metapart:

With the knowledge that you will sometimes fail, try to embody the nurturing love and encouragement that a superwise future civilization would possess. Relate to yourself like you were parenting a child in that world.

The "how" to this prompt is vague and imprecise. It's fog we all need to walk through. And perhaps, if we do this today, it might support the becoming of that civilization in the deep future.

But that's another conversation...

⌛️ Never Wish For Less Time

Enjoy these insightful words shared on stage by John Mayer:

“I wait for most things to be over. I wait for this to be over to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

I’ve realized, everything you love and hate leaves at the same speed: Done. Done. Done. The thing you hate that you have to do tomorrow will be over before you know it, and the thing you're looking forward to tomorrow will be over before you know it.

So I have a new rule in my life, and the rule is: Never wish for less time. Waiting for things to be over is just wishing for less time. Waiting for this to be over to get to the next thing—that's just wishing for less time. So wherever you go, just make a home right there and do that thing…

Wherever you are, go, 'this is where it's all at right now.' I’ve been having the time of my life because I figured that out…”

H/T Billy Oppenheimer

🤓 Learn This Word

Dendrophile: one who finds poetry in the forest's heart, who feels a deep connection with the woods, a lover of trees.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

The Genius of William James: The Clairvoyant American Psychologist

In all my years of writing and lecturing about psychology, there is a phenomenon I’ve grown accustomed to: Whenever I come up with a “new” idea or theory, I eventually find that there is one psychologist who has addressed the topic before me: William James.

Although he is well recognised as one of the founding fathers of psychology, the range and the timeless relevance of William James’ writings and theories never cease to amaze me.

One of the first books I wrote was about the perception of time.

In Making Time, I put forward an “information processing” theory of time, suggesting that the more information our minds process (that is, the more perceptions, sensations, thoughts and so on) the slower time seems to pass. I argued that time seems to go slowly for children because the world is so new to them, and so they are processing much more perceptual information. I suggested that one of the reasons why time seems to speed up as we get older is because the world becomes gradually more familiar to us, and so we process fewer new impressions. I thought I had come up with something new but soon found that William James had put forward a similar theory.

In The Principles of Psychology, he described how children’s slowed sense of time was due to the fact that, “in youth, we have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day… but as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

Another area that has always interested me is the psychology of warfare.

My interest in this topic stemmed from my reading of anthropological and archaeological texts that suggested that warfare only became endemic in fairly recent times (that is, about 6,000 years ago) and that in prehistoric times, group conflict was surprisingly uncommon. This led me to believe that warfare was primarily a psychological phenomenon, rather than one rooted in human biology or evolution. And again, I quickly found that William James had already reached a similar conclusion. In his seminal essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), James suggested that warfare was so prevalent because of its positive psychological effects, both on the individual and on society as a whole.

On a social level, war brings a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat. It binds people together, encouraging them to behave unselfishly for the common good. While on an individual level, warfare makes people feel alive, more alert and awake, giving them meaning and purpose beyond the monotony of everyday life. As James puts it, “Life seems cast upon a higher plane of power.” By the term “moral equivalent of war,” James meant that human societies need to find an equivalent activity that brings the same collective and individual benefits of war — without causing death and devastation.

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin