⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧘‍♂️ A Week at the Buzzy Meditation Retreat That Promises Bliss on Demand: A new company's efforts to mainstream ancient meditation techniques for achieving states of intense joy has ignited discussions about the intersection of spirituality, science, and commerce. Read it here.

👁️ We Are ONE Consciousness: Cognitive Psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that our sensory systems are evolved to navigate survival rather than to perceive objective reality. He makes the case for consciousness as a more fundamental aspect of existence than SpaceTime. Watch it here.

☀️ The Omnipresence of Goodness: Uncle Pappy reminds you not to let the goodness fade into the background. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This marvelous photo was taken by Mexican filmmaker and photographer Chema Balbuena during his recent excursion to the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia.

 📝 Notes From The Road

Some of my scattered notes you might find meaningful:

Seeking a grand purpose can sometimes block you from experiencing the small purpose in front of you already inviting you to act. An accumulation of small purposes leads to grand purpose. Sometimes people wait to find grand purpose but never do because they never sowed the seeds of small purpose that allow it to bloom.

The recognition of innocence is the antidote to dehumanization. Remember your enemy was born a baby.

Misfortune that cultivates character becomes good fortune.

People tend to blindspot their brilliance. We’re so close to our gifts that they can be difficult to see. This causes people to discount their value as they focus too much on their shortcomings.

Today is tomorrow's nostalgia. Can you find fondness for this moment before it has passed?

📞 Your Calling is Calling

Ponder these words from author James Hollis:

“Most of the people whom we admire in history did not have easy lives; rather, we admire them for what they embodied through their lives.

They won their way through, through the difficulties, to bring those values, those witnesses, into this world and thereby enriched all of us. Vocation, for example, is one of those summonses of the soul. We all do jobs to earn our living, but what is our vocation, our vocatus, our “calling”?

Our calling often requires commitment, discipline, courage, consistency, and persistence. It’s not about comfort, fitting in, being normal at all…I’ve learned I’m better off serving that which wishes to be served.

Your vocation is really not about a job, per se. It’s about what is truly worthy of your commitment, your service. The calling itself is a mystery that comes from someplace deep within the soul. Inspiration—the word inspirare translates as “the breath within”—means to have the breath of the gods moving through us.

While our sense of self makes many of our choices for us, the Self is always seeking its expression through us. When it is violated, as it so often is, it pathologizes and creates symptoms…I am what is wanting expression through me, not what happened to me…Separating your journey from your history is difficult but essential to a free and fuller life.

What does the psyche want?” This question is the beginning of healing the vast split each of us carries within. Then we realize that the ego is obliged to relinquish its privileged position as the regal potentate to be the servant of an even higher power.

That’s why this work is not narcissistic. It’s about finding something worthier of our service than our inherited stories or those adaptive patterns that bind us to a disabling past.

One must always ask the questions: Is what I am doing in accord with my vocation? Does it serve the calling of my soul? Or is it in service to the ego under one of its many occupations by my stories or the world’s stories imposed upon me?

Jung said once that there was virtually no one, even of all those who came to see him, who didn’t know at some level what they needed to do with their life.

Being defeated by ever larger things is probably the single best way to keep our appointment with destiny. To have taken our journey through this dark, bitter, luminous, wondrous universe, to risk being who we really are, is finally why we are here.

Rather than inflating the ego, this journey repositions defeat into proper proportion and, most importantly, serves the wonder of our being here in the first place.

What have the gods asked of me, what does life ask of me, and how best can I respond to it? When we do that, and keep doing that, we are fully alive, whatever our age, whatever our condition.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Sawubona: A Zulu greeting that means “I see you, you are important to me and I value you”

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Beginner’s Mind: Relinquishing Expectation as a Path of Liberation

By Leo Babauta

I wonder if Sylvia Plath realized, when she penned the above quote, that she was expressing an idea which has been practiced as a way of liberation by Buddhists and Taoists since before the time of Christ.

When one is able to relinquish expectation—to see events as an immutable ebb and flow that is to be experienced and accepted rather than judged against one’s hopes—one finds that the world surrenders. One is no longer a slave to the inevitable vicissitudes of time; one is able to fully experience the present moment as complete and to float, bobber-like, atop the waves of changing fortune.

Or something. In the duration of this post, Leo Babauta further examines this idea of releasing expectation and considers the profound implications such a shift in orientation might have for an individual. Expectation-free living may well be a kind of existential keystone—the crucial shift in perspective that can enable a perpetual quiet contentment and an ability to appreciate the opportunity to live out the details of one’s existence.

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