⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🕹️Why Everything is Becoming A Game: All the better to control you. Read it here.

☀️A New Kind of Computer, Designed For Deep Focus and Wellbeing: Refusing to accept a future where our devices are exhausting, addictive, and distracting. Learn more.

📚An Emersonian Guide to Taking Control of Your Life: The great American thinker never pretended that true independence of mind was easy, but he made a thrilling case for its rewards. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The sky appears to whisper to the earth in this week’s image. At first blush, you might assume this picture is too magnificent to be real. It must be fake and with the proliferation of AI image generation, it wouldn’t be too hard to do. This, however, is a genuine photograph taken by Jayme Brown.

 🎯 Reclaim Your Attention

​There is endless drama and spectacle available to consume us all. Seductive algorithms generate daily tidal waves of distraction that drown us in trivialities and falsehoods. The internet can be a powerful tool for accessing knowledge but it can just as easily serve as a black hole for your attention.​

We have to remember what really matters. The dizzying buzz of social media and 24-hour news cycle can keep us constantly preoccupied while the real lights in our lives burn out. Turn to the hearth of your world: the intimate surroundings and the warmth of the people you cherish as they are the real engines of significance in your life.

Break the spell of the screen and make eye contact with quality time, laughter, and precious memories. Our time here is short. Tomorrow is not promised so say "I love you" with enthusiasm. Allow yourself to spark a conversation, to ask an intriguing question, and to lean in for the answer.

The drama never ends so make space by the fire for that which truly nourishes you. Reclaim your attention and use it to water seeds of meaning. You will be better for it and the world will be made better because of it.

👹 Boldness Cures Fear

Consider this thought-provoking quote from Carl Jung:

“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Pareidolia: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Deconstructing Dawkins: Richard Dawkins and the Fallacies of Mechanistic Science

By Steve Taylor

Richard Dawkins is the high priest of popular science, this country’s unofficial scientist laureate. His theories have helped to form the generally accepted scientific “rational” worldview of our culture, which most of our institutions, our media, and our respected intellectuals accept as “reality.” The main tenets of this worldview can perhaps be summarized as follows:

– Life came into being by accident, through the interactions of certain chemicals. Once it had come into existence, it evolved from simple to more complex forms through randomly occurring genetic mutations acted on by natural selection.

– Living beings consist of “selfish genes” whose mission is to replicate themselves. Human beings are merely vehicles for the propagation of our genetic material. The desire for genetic replication is the main motivation of everything we do.

– All of our instincts, emotions and behavioral traits are related to certain genes. These characteristics exist in us because they had survival value for our prehistoric ancestors. As a result the genes they are related to were “selected”. For example, it was genetically beneficial for men to be polygamous, since this meant that their genetic material could be replicated more frequently, so men have a natural tendency to be unfaithful. According to some advocates of evolutionary psychology, rape may also have a genetic basis; it can be seen as a desperate attempt to replicate their genes by men who cannot attract willing sexual partners.

– Since living beings are nothing more than their physical or chemical components, there can be no such thing as a “soul” or “life-force.” What we experience as “consciousness” is produced by the workings of the billions of neurons in our brains.

– As a result there can’t be any life after death. Our consciousness dies with our brains, and nothing survives our bodies.

– Paranormal, “mystical” or “spiritual” phenomena cannot be genuine because they contravene the fundamental laws of nature. For example, there is no known energy field which could link one mind to another and make telepathy possible and no known force which could account for the ability to move objects by mental effort.

[Continue Reading]