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⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ Carl Jung Colorized: In this remastered interview, conducted by John Freeman for the BBC program “Face to Face”, Carl Gustav Jung talks about his life, studies, and his work with Freud. He also shares his thoughts on death, religion, and where humanity is headed. Watch it here.

🦸‍♂️ The Hero’s Journey Is A Jammed Door: The repetition of this narrative pattern in storytelling reflects a cultural stuckness, where individuals fail to achieve true adulthood due to a lack of meaningful psychological growth. The author suggests that our society needs new myths to support different life stages and transitions. Read it here.

💀 Escaping Death: Sam Harris speaks with Sebastian Junger about danger and death. They discuss Sebastian's career as a journalist in war zones, the connection between danger and meaning, his experience of nearly dying from a burst aneurysm in his abdomen, his lingering trauma, the concept of "awe," psychedelics, near-death experiences, atheism, psychic phenomena, consciousness and the brain, and other topics. Listen here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The shocking passing of her father drove Gabriela Reyes Fuchs to view his ashes under a high-powered microscope. “It was like a telescope pointed upwards at the night sky. Instead of mere human ashes, she saw multi-colored nebula that resembled images taken by the Hubble telescope.” Read more here.

🌎 The Social Fabric

Many people say they want to "make the world a better place."

This is a beautiful desire.

But so often people pursue this future in a way that's disconnected from their now.

They have a grand, almost utopian, vision of how the world could be.

People will start businesses, write books, and build movements to bring about the change they wish to see.

All the while being disconnected from how they could live from their vision.

People focus on fixing society in an abstract sense while completely neglecting the social fabric around them.

If you want to make the world a better place, it's okay to have a vision of a possible future.

But don't let its beauty blind you from all the ways you could begin seeding that world in the lives of those around you today.

Notice the people who flow in and out of your experience. Who could use some extra kindness? Who needs a call or text? What's something you could do that would be so extraordinarily helpful that it could even restore someone's faith in humanity?

Strands of the future we wish to inhabit can be woven today if we properly attend to the social fabric around us.

 🍃 Misfortune Into Poetry

Enjoy this wisdom from Jorge Luis Borges:

“A poet should think of all things as being given him, even misfortune. Misfortune, defeat, humiliation, failure, those are our tools. You don't suppose that when you are happy you can produce anything. Happiness is its own aim. But we are given mistakes, we are given nightmares, almost nightly, and our task is to make them into poetry. And were I truly a poet I would feel that every moment of my life is poetic, every moment of my life is a kind of clay I have to model, I have to shape, to lick into poetry. So that I don't think I should apologize for my mistakes. Those mistakes were given me by that very complex chain of causes and effects, or rather, unending effects and causes we may not begin by the cause in order that I might turn them into poetry.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Intelleto: “Intelligence, not of the merely rational kind, but visionary intelligence, a deep seeing of the underlying pattern beneath appearances. Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surfaces from the Self, revealing his original nature.”

As defined by Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Transcending Human Madness and the Over-Developed Ego

By Steve Taylor

To an impartial observer—say, an alien zoologist from another planet—there must be very compelling evidence that human beings suffer from a serious mental disorder and are perhaps even insane.

The last few thousand years have been an endless catalogue of insane behavior. Recorded history consists of endless wars, and the story of the brutal oppression of the great mass of human beings by a tiny privileged minority. The terrible oppression of women which runs through history—and which still exists in many parts of the world—is another sign of this insanity, as is the hostile, repressive attitude to sex and the body which most cultures have shared.

In addition to this insane collective behavior, an alien zoologist might see signs of mental disorder in the way that many of us behave as individuals. He or she would be puzzled by the fact that human beings seem to find it so difficult to be happy. Why do so many people suffer from different kinds of psychological malaise—for example: depression, drug abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation—or else spend so much time oppressed by anxieties, worries and feelings of guilt or regret, and negative emotions like jealousy and bitterness? And why do so many people seem to have an insatiable lust to possess things? Why are we prepared to go to such lengths to obtain material goods that we don’t actually need and which bring no real benefits to us? In the same way, many people have a very strong craving for status and success; they dream of being famous pop or TV stars and try to gain respect from others by wearing particular clothes, possessing status symbols or going to certain places or behaving in a certain way. ‘Why aren’t human beings content just to be as they are?’ the observer might ask himself. ‘Why are they so driven to gain wealth and status instead of accepting their situation and living in the present moment?’

[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin