⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧠 Re-Enchanting The Brain: Iain McGilchrist shares how we can re-enchant our view of the world by re-engaging a ‘right hemispheric’ perspective of life, love, and faith. Listen here.

🙏 Atheist AI Model Debates Believer AI Model: Does the existence of suffering and evil disprove the existence of God? And what about the origins of the universe itself? Watch it here.

👁️ The Art of Noticing: A universe of life beneath our feet. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Here, you see an optical phenomenon known as a subsun over Grossglockner in the Alps. A subsun is a bright spot that appears below the sun, typically spotted when looking at a scene with ice crystals, such as a snowy landscape or icy clouds. The ice crystals act like mirrors, reflecting the sunlight and creating the appearance of a sun below the horizon, hence the term "subsun."The image is stunning but the video will make you feel awe for this planet we call home. Watch it here.

 🐰 We’ve Gone Down 200 Rabbit Holes

As this is the 200th edition of Down The Rabbit Hole, I thought it fitting to reflect on what I wrote in edition #001 when I was introducing the newsletter:

“Down The Rabbit Hole is your weekly injection of wisdom, wonder, and well being sent straight to your inbox. Each email explores ancient and emerging tools, techniques, and teachers to help you live a more meaningful, adventurous, and ecstatic existence.

The name is, of course, a hat tip to Alice’s tumble into the surreal world of Wonderland as well as Neo’s decision to “follow the white rabbit” so he could inevitably break free from the matrix. Empowering you to see the unceasing mystery and hidden beauty in this world, these emails will help you transcend the ordinary, navigate your struggles with greater ease, and find a deep appreciation for the gift that is this life.

Side effects may include: inspiration, astonishment, ecstasy, flow states, creative flourishing, and deep gratitude.”

These were meaningful and hopeful aspirations. Perhaps I’ve lived up to some of it. Now that so much time has passed I can reflect on how this newsletter has impacted my life:

It serves as a regular drum beat for me to reconnect with the important things. Not just having the knowledge of what’s important but to actively appreciate the gifts in my life, witnessing them with the eyes of wonder. This newsletter is a forcing function for a certain type of media diet. There is plenty of digital slop to consume and I can’t escape it all but there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t find more “nutritional” media to digest. To provide you with links, quotes, and passages I need to enjoy at least a few servings of soul food. 

After 200 editions, I don’t expect these newsletters to be utterly life-changing. I do hope it serves as a warm campfire you can return to every week to remember the good stuff in life. A brief respite from the cold winds of cultural polarization and terminal cynicism.

I appreciate you for being a reader. Thanks for being along for the ride. ❤️

🌤️ Joyfully Uncertain

Enjoy this thought-provoking passage from writer Sophia Strand:

“The only thing I am certain of right now is that I am constituted by a generous uncertainty. An uncertainty that gestates miracles I could never have expected or authored. I am certain that I am not the most reliable narrator. I have found that the space I hold for being wrong acts like a freshly mulched garden. Relationships sprout there, in the connective tissue between opposing ideas, that would never have grown in the relationally sterile bounds of a well-defended belief.

We are entering an age of increasingly unpredictable climatological change. We are entering an age when we must remember that the most important ideas may not belong to human beings, but to bacteria and insects and entire geographies.

  “Try to love the questions themselves,” the poet Ranier Maria Rilke advised. “The point is to live everything. Live the question now.” How can we develop an empathy for other belief systems? A muscularity for changing our minds? The more generously, joyfully uncertain we become, the more we will create ecosystems rather than malnourished houseplants. Questions, unlike answers, are relational. They involve another person, another landscape, another being. Like mycorrhizal systems below ground, they stitch plant to tree to dirt to bacteria. They create resilient community. Let us learn to live interrogatively. Let us, like electrons, live between energy levels, between particle and wave, self and ecosystem.”

Read the full piece here.

🤓 Learn This Word

Oubaitori: A Japanese word referring to the idea that we all grow, bloom and flower at our own pace. There will never be another one like you. Embrace the beauty of your journey and the blessings of your unique gifts without comparing it to others: they are incomparable.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Carl Jung and the Artistic Impulse: Madness in the Creative Spirit

By Andy Dilks

A brief look at some historical examples of artistic geniuses and it is tempting to believe that there is something approaching madness in the creative spirit.

The artistic impulse permeates throughout history: from the “primitive” cave art of the Upper Palaeolithic through to the introduction of perspective and foreshortening during the Renaissance, rules which would later be subverted beyond recognition by the artists of modernity, who sought to express new ways of seeing and ushered in an era of visual experimentation. Either as creators or consumers, art remains ever-present in the modern world, both a vehicle for expressing our innermost thoughts and desires and a medium through which we can escape into new realities and emotions.

What is it that leads us to create art? Is there a psychological drive at work, a subconscious force which simmers away beneath the surface before emerging in an explosion of creativity? Is there an innermost essence to this process, something which embodies our propensity to express ourselves through art?

A brief look at some historical examples of artistic geniuses and it is tempting to believe that there is something approaching madness in the creative spirit; that art is intrinsically bound with insanity, great works of art functioning as a cathartic mechanism – something which both purges and purifies the spirit –  without which the artist would be confined to the asylum. The fascination of the link between mental illness and creativity emerged in the late 19^th century and remains with us to this day, where heightened creativity can be seen to correlate with states of mind such as hypomania – a state of mind today most commonly associated with bipolar disorder –  where inspiration emerges from the fluctuations between euphoria and depression.

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