⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🔮 Have You Noticed The New World: Step into a new realm where dreams, digital spaces, and consciousness blend, offering a playground for creativity and purpose if you navigate it mindfully. Read it here.

🛳 You Are a Wonder, You Are a Nobody, You Are an Ever-Drifting Ship: Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are. Read it here.

🦋 A Guide To Self Transformation: On overcoming the urge to repeat painful patterns. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This is a case where the image of the week is a single frame of a video. The video is just too spectacular not to share. It captures Volcan de Fuego in Guatemala erupting while simultaneously being struck by lightning.

“Volcanic lightning is an electrical discharge that occurs within a volcanic plume during an eruption. It's different from the lightning you see in a regular thunderstorm, and is caused by collisions between ash particles or fragments within the plume, creating static electricity.”

Watch it here.

 🌻 Tend To Your Garden

You have the tremendous capacity to make the world more beautiful...

First by noticing the beauty that already exists and elevating it for others to experience.

Next by giving your attention to the world like you are watering a garden.

Your perception can nourish. Your presence can be like sunshine.

You can watch people blossom into their fullness just as if they were blooming spring flowers by genuinely caring for them and seeing the best in them.

This world can often veer minds towards fixating on getting ahead and gaining clout.

This arises fundamentally from insecurity, a lack of belief in our right to exist, almost as if our personhood need to be earned by accomplishment.

This disposition can often leave someone feeling alienated and isolated because they are neglecting the garden around them as they pursue elevated status.

More meaning is to be found as dutiful stewards of our panoramic patch of social fabric than in the endless pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

We can begin to feel truly alive when we care for life and feel a reverence for the way life emerges, in all its varied forms, to greet and meet us.

As we tend to the world around us we get to experience the reality of our embedded nature. This invites a shift in identity.

We are no longer a little "I" chirping along inside our heads.

We are an inseparable embodiment of a beyond ancient process, interacting with others who are simultaneously of the same substance and exquisitely distinct.

You are growing and being grown.

You are the gardener and the gardened.

You have always been an inextricable aspect of this great web of life.

The feeling of isolation is formed from a miscalculation of what you truly are...

To quote Alan Watts:

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”

Similar sentiments were held by a man who helped humanity learn a great deal about this universe:

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -Albert Einstein

He wrote these words in an attempt to console a Rabbi's daughter after her younger sister's untimely passing.

 📰 Good Bad News

Enjoy this reminder from Trev Cimenski:

“For those of you saying, I wonder where I'll end up.

I've got bad news.

You're never going to get there. Going to arrive. This is it. This is it. Always.

Where do you think I'll end up? Dead. That's where I'm going. That's where it's going. And yet, we can't stop dreaming about it. The outcome, the big picture, the what will I do with my life when all we can do is pass through it.

It's not a destination, it's a, it's a momentum. Moment to moment. And if we're lucky, maybe we can string up those moments to wear like a pearl necklace and at the end watch heaven dance and light off of them.

For those of you saying, I wonder where I'll end up, I've got good news. Right now is forever. You're already there.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Hanami: The Japanese traditional custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers; flowers in this case almost always refer to those of the cherry or, less frequently, plum trees.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Alternative Human Nature: Why Kindness and Cooperation are More Natural Than Selfishness

By Steve Taylor

For a long time, there has been a general assumption in our culture that “human nature” is essentially bad. Human beings — so it has been assumed — are strongly disposed to traits like selfishness, domination, and warfare. We have powerful natural impulses to compete with one another for resources, and to try to accumulate power and possessions. If we are kind, it’s usually because we have ulterior motives. If we are good, it’s only because we have managed to control and transcend our natural selfishness and brutality.

This view of human nature has been justified by biological theories like the “selfish gene” (as popularised by the UK science writer Richard Dawkins) and the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology describes how present-day human traits developed in prehistoric times, during what is termed the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). The EEA is usually seen as a period of intense competition, when life was a kind of Roman gladiatorial battle in which only the traits that gave people a survival advantage were selected, and all others fell by the wayside.

For example, evolutionary psychologists have suggested that men have a strong urge to gain wealth and power because, in prehistoric times, this enhanced their chances of survival and increased their reproductive possibilities (1). Others have suggested that human beings have such a strong impulse to fight wars because prehistoric tribes of genetically similar people were in constant competition for resources with other groups (2). Similarly, racism has been seen as an adaptation that developed because altruism towards another group would have decreased a group’s own chances of survival. It was beneficial to deprive other groups of resources and power in order to increase our own access to them. In the words of Pascal Boyer, for example, racism is “a consequence of highly efficient economic strategies”, enabling us to “keep members of other groups in a lower-status position, with distinctly worse benefits” (3).

All of this may seem logical. But in fact the assumption these views are based on — that prehistoric life was a competitive struggle for survival — is completely false.

[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