⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🤯 Awestruck: As researchers discover the benefits of this little-understood, larger-than-life emotion, Johns Hopkins scientists figured out how to measure it. Read more here.

👁 Real Life: A reminder of where it is and what it’s made of. Read more here.

🚪Opening Invisible Doors: A quick video of a dog and how it relates to humans and healing. Watch it here.

🌱 Apotheosis Is Back: Applications are open for the one-of-a-kind transformational event integrating plant medicine with myriad other philosophical and spiritual practices. Learn more.

🎇 Image of The Week

“How can a flame stay lit under a waterfall, even when it's half-frozen in the winter? That's a question many have been asking about the mysterious 'eternal flame' in western New York for years.

Eternal Flame Falls is in Shale Creek Preserve at Chestnut Ridge Park in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park. In a small cave at the bottom of a 35-foot waterfall, there's an 8-inch flame that defies all scientific explanation. Despite water all around it, the flame stays lit 'almost' year-round.

Many believe the flame was lit thousands of years ago by Native Americans but how it stays lit is anyone's guess.” Read more here.

🥸 Venn Diagram Vision

There's an affliction I've dubbed "Venn Diagram Vision" that causes a person to live in a chronic state of compare and contrast.

Everything they experience is referenced against an image in their mind about how things should be.

This is certainly is a useful capacity to cultivate but is certainly not an appropriate way of life.

Here's why:

When we take the experience we're having and overlay a multi-dimensional set of mental measuring sticks, we push ourselves one step (or more) away from life.

The disposition towards the moment becomes not embracing what is, but focusing on what isn't.

The most torturous thing about it is that this endless sizing up of things will not end even if we managed to arrive at a reality that perfectly matches up with our vision.

By that point, we will have created a new vision and we will use that to compare our once dream, now life, against.

Never quite arriving.

Pursuits of personal growth and spiritual advancement can cultivate tendencies that make us hyperaware of all the ways they can be better.

This is done with good intentions. How can we grow if you aren't aware of the ways we need to grow?

And finding ourselves making progress can be a pretty sweet high.

But this mental pattern run amok can terrorize us to the point we live in a state where all we see are the fixes that need to be made.

This can disconnect us from the beauty and richness of being alive.

The moment begins to feel intolerable in the presence of all the flaws.

This isn't growth. It's erosion.

We try to source our motivation from the brief highs we get from small steps of progress rather than a pervading nourishment that can be accessed in the here & now.

This can lead to burnout, breakdowns, and bouts of depression.

If we're growing a garden, we have to water our plants and pull the weeds.

Sometimes we are so fixated on the horizon that the garden of our lives begins to wither away.

So if you're stuck in hyperawareness of ways you can be better, you must practice the opposite:

Wanting what's right in front of you.

Take off the goggles of Venn diagram vision and embrace what is.

Love the world as it is. Love yourself as you are.

This is one of the most significant things you can do.

🔮 Freefall Into Future

Enjoy these classic quotes from the bliss-following Joseph Campbell:

“We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Nutro: A Russian word that refers to something that governs your inner being; your core

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

50 Aphorisms from Alain de Botton That Reveal Harsh Truths About Human Nature

Some of the greatest philosophy books ever created were formed from nothing but a numbered list of succinctly written insights — maxims or aphorisms: pithy observations containing a general truth about life.

Such classics include Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, and most of Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s masterpieces.

Alain de Botton is a modern-day curator, translator, and torch carrier of ancient and neglected ideas, and is bringing the aphorism back to life. Following in the footsteps of philosophers such as Aristotle, who founded “The Lyceum,” and Plato, who began “The Academy,” De Botton has created The School of Life, a multi-continental classroom devoted to developing emotional intelligence through the guidance of philosophy.

Alain is most famous for his best-selling philosophy books on such diverse topics as The News, Status Anxiety, Architecture, Work, Art, and Love. But many now recognize him from Twitter, which he uses primarily to drop aphoristic wisdom-bombs to his 640K followers.

Below you will find 50 Alain de Botton quotes taken from his Twitter and books alike. As you read you’ll see that living a happy life, according to Alain, is less about chasing pleasure and more about mitigating despair and replacing it with hope and consolation.

​[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