⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🙏 Notes on gratitude and surrender: Michale Ashcroft reflects that he is not the architect of his own blessings, and that's good. Read it here.

🚐 Who’s Driving The Dreambus? This radical and challenging documentary ventures into the heart of the mystery of identity, flipping the idea of spiritual endeavour on its head, revealing a message so profound and yet so simple that it might just end the search. Watch it here.

🧠 The Electrostatic Brain: How a Web of Neurons Generates the World-Simulation that is You. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Photographer Boris Mrdja snapped this photo of the night sky in Apuseni National Park, Transylvania. It’s 8 single exposure photographs stitched together into a panorama.

🌬️ Remember The Breath

You're likely reading this email on your phone, if not, a tablet or laptop. Using these magical devices, there are millions of digital places you could be right now.

I'm grateful that somehow through all of the noise, you managed to find your way here. And you could click away at any second so our time here could really be quite brief.

But for just a moment, while I have it, I'd like to point your attention to your breath. It might be a hectic day, it's certainly been a hectic year, and we all can benefit from small reminders to turn our senses inward, let the chaos of daily life momentarily fade into the background, and focus on our breath.

If you would just take a slow, deep breath in filling your lungs until you naturally feel ready to exhale. If it feels right, allow yourself to sigh while you exhale to help release some tension.

Let's do that again. Deep breath. Full lungs. Exhale. Sigh.

One more time. Go ahead. You know the motions.

There. If you followed along, I hope you enjoyed taking that brief pause with me. As you go about your day, especially as you feel yourself getting stressed, remember the breath and the peace that waits within it.

👁️ Child Eyes

Enjoy this reminder from Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

And this quote from psychologist Abraham Maslow:

“I have described the integrated person as having a healthy childlikeness. The most mature human beings are also childlike. That is not as contradictory as it sounds. The most mature people are the ones who can have the most fun. They are able to "regress" at will ; they can become childish and play with children and be close to them. It is no accident, I think, that children generally tend to like them and get along with them. Involuntary regression is of course a very dangerous thing; but voluntary regression seems to be characteristic of very healthy”

🤓 Learn This Word

Autophile: A person that loves solitude, being alone

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

The Medical Gaze: Why Depression Should Not Be Reduced To Chemical Imbalance

By Jonathan Toniolo

I’ve been battling depression off and on since adolescence.

A few months prior to getting clinically diagnosed, my mental state was especially catatonic.

Some days, concentrating on anything other than food and sleep required a will so great, even the resolve of Sisyphus seemed trivial in comparison.

I tried some non-psychiatric recommendations — talk-therapy, more exercise, dietary changes, herbal remedies — though I couldn’t sense immediate results and, given my lack of will, quickly abandoned them.

My parents had learned about SSRIs after seeing a few of those absolutely scintillating antidepressant commercials — you know, the ones where they casually narrate a number of potential side effects over someone’s glossy smile — and, in a desperate and loving attempt to heal their sick child, finally convinced me to consult a psychiatrist.

When I met with the doctor, we¹ ended up talking about symptoms of depression for the majority of our session (he had been suffering from depression for many years as well). We briefly discussed a few common causes, such as loss, failure, rejection, isolation, and genetic influences, among others.

Although, rather predictably, the conversation eventually segued into a treatment plan based entirely on the physiology of depression; one that suggested my brain chemistry was simply out of balance and that Zoloft was my golden ticket to get it back to “normal.”

The logic seemed to be: “[Insert irrelevant cause] disrupted your normal production levels of serotonin and dopamine, so take this pill to readjust those levels, and you will be healed. ”

In a way, this was reassuring. It relieved some of the burden of responsibility for feeling so miserable — “It’s just my shitty chemistry! There’s nothing I can really do about that…”

I also trusted the doctor knew best and was acting in good faith — especially considering he had also suffered from depression.

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