⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

💗 Experiencing MDMA Without Substances: Practitioners of the Jhanas claim they can induce extremely blissful mental states that rival life’s peak experiences, available at any time with enough concentration. Read more here.

🌱 Don’t Let Your Art Die: Smuggling your weirdness through the cult of the sensible: Watch it here.

🤩 How To Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on wonder and the proper aim of education: Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This beautiful photo from Ukranian photographer Mikhail Kalinin was captured during such frigid cold that a bird’s song could be seen.

 🔮 Wonder Dosing The Ordinary

I spend an unreasonable amount of time exploring the contours of wonder and why we seem to lose it as we age.

There are clear and practical reasons for its seeming evaporation.

When you're a child, you're exposed to so many firsts, but eventually, you exhaust those firsts and the world that formerly felt extraordinary due to its sheer novelty, becomes ordinary and mundane.

Secondarily, as we grow, we have to become more narrow in the way we navigate life. We must shoulder the responsibility that comes with fending for ourselves, earning a living, and “adulting” as it were. That means we must let go of the more open-ended exploration that is often synonymous with childhood.

But these factors shouldn’t convince us that wonder’s erasure is necessary. To me, its loss is not a sign of individual maturation but more an indication of broader cultural dysfunction.

We should be able to revive or even retain our sense of wonder into our dying days. It can imbue us with a flexibility, openness, and enthusiasm that could serve as a salve in this hyperpolarized world. But an epidemic of cynicism and arrogance is violently trying to stomp it out.

Cynicism is safe. It says “Everything sucks and if I don't have something precious to care about, to nurture, and to make more beautiful I can just sit on my hands and let everything continue to suck.” You don’t have to get in the arena. You just languish.

While arrogance pretends to possess complete knowledge. Because we’ve seen something many times before we erroneously conclude we have an accurate representation of it. We assume the currently held map is as rich and textured as the territory.

Why stop to wonder at the tree? At the sky? At your place in it all?

But even those with the most fine-grained expertise on a given subject matter have gargantuan gaps in their understanding.

We are immersed in a great mystery. We live on a small island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of unknowns and unknowables.

Arrogance protects us from the fear that emerges when we realize the world cannot fit neatly into the cognitive boxes that we've inherited or self-constructed.

But it also can be exhilarating to recognize just how much detail and richness is flowing through our experience this very second.

Even if you are inside of a room you've been in a thousand times over a thousand days, there are details in that room you have yet to notice.

But what good is it to see the texture of the ceiling? The paint chip on the baseboard? The crease in the poster? The pattern of light reflected through the double-pane glass windows?

Any one of these minuscule details can open up a rich chain of inquiry. What are the mechanisms behind them? Who installed them and what are their stories? What value is unconsciously absorbed through their presence?

This can stoke fascination and gratitude.

But it can also bring forth the recognition that you are a conscious agent capable of flashlighting your attention into the underlit pockets of reality.

That you can temporarily pull yourself up and out of the blur of time. That you can massage free the surface of perception, hardened by repetition and routine, and submerge yourself in the living freshness of the moment you inhabit.

Our lives are worthy of reverence, yet the force of habituation can lull us into sleep, obscuring its grandeur.

So my invitation to you today is to find a tiny thread of wonder in the ordinary and pull on it. See what kind of magic unravels into your life.

🕊 Turning Loss Into Beauty

Enjoy these potent words from soul-stirring author Martín Prechtel:

“If we can let ourselves "have" our deepest emotions about the prospect of losing what we love most, or our deepest feelings about having lost what we do love, then those deepest feelings of love, no longer having a place to go, must now get to the real work of life by filling the place she, he, they, or the country lost have left empty, with our creations of beautiful music, singing, eloquence, housing, plant growing, beautiful food, clothing, jewelry, acrobatics, dancing, stonework, ironwork, woodwork, communal gift giving, weaving, knitting, spinning, braiding, and so on in every kind of very good and well-done creations for the world to have. Motivated by our grief in this way, our creations only express our emotions, but because our well-made creations from our grief must bring "beauty" to those who hear or wear them, anyone seeing, hearing, or feeling what we have caused to manifest would be inspired and filled with life. This is turning loss into beauty in its most elemental sense.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Syzygy: This word refers to a state of balance or union between opposing forces or elements. It is often used to describe the integration of different aspects of the self, such as the conscious and unconscious, the masculine and feminine, or the rational and irrational.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

The Noble Truths of Manhood I Learned From My Father

I write this in appreciation and honor for my father. And with the hope that men who may not have had the same type of unreasonable father-fortune that I had, may benefit to some degree from reading whats shared here.

When I was a kid, my Dad was a sort of god to me. As I grew up and individuated, there was a time I took his gifts for granted and focused largely on his faults. Growing up further and appreciating the whole picture in an integrated way…and having more life experience to see how unusual my childhood with him actually was… I feel overwhelmingly grateful for who he was and what he shared with me. Moreover, I feel indebted to share what I can of what I received with others.

My dad was of an old breed of men that I might have thought only an embellished legend if I hadn’t experienced it firsthand. To get some sense of this…

One time we were working on a semi engine and it was time to put it back in the truck. We were waiting on the tractor to return to the shop so we could lift it in, but we were losing daylight. So he wrapped chains around the engine and lifted it back into the truck by hand. Because it needed done. After we finished the job, he repeated a phrase he said continuously throughout my childhood: “see the job, do the job, stay out of the misery”.

Another time he was standing in a parking lot smoking a cigarette when gunshots were fired in one of the stores. Everyone ducked or ran the other way. My dad ran straight towards the sound of the gunshots. After breaking the door down he found that the man wielding the gun had just shot himself in the head. The woman (his ex wife) he had attacked first was badly bleeding but not dead. My dad bandaged her and held the blood in while the ambulance arrived. She lived. He talked to her during that time about her ex husband finally being out of pain and that she could forgive him. He visited with her afterwards and helped her process the emotions further. When he told me about running towards the gunshots, he assumed the shooter was still alive but said he knew he could keep his body moving through enough bullets to take the shooter out and prevent anyone else from getting hurt. He did this for strangers.

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🎬 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