⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌄 The World Is Incomprehensibly Beautiful: A video love letter to nature. Watch it here.

👁️ The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the deepest meaning of beauty, and the highest form of faith. Read it here.

🤔 Everything We Don’t Know: Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we’ve made as a species, there is still a lot to learn about earth, life, and the human condition. Watch it here.

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🎇 Image of The Week

This is a screenshot from a video shot by volcano chaser Marco Di Marco on February 8th In Iceland during the last eruption of the Svartsengi volcanic system. Watch the full video here.

 ✨ Convenience Has Eroded Serendipity

In the rush toward convenience, something sacred has been forgotten. Our days, once woven with the quiet beauty of simple moments—sharing a meal, asking a neighbor for help, meeting someone by chance—have been traded for the hollow efficiency of apps and algorithms. Where once we found the richness of human connection, we now find ourselves isolated, surrounded by screens that promise everything but deliver so little of what truly matters.

The world moves faster, but in this speed, we have lost the serendipity of living. The deep, unplanned encounters that once shaped our days have been erased by systems designed to keep us comfortable, yet distant from the untamed, messy beauty of life. In our search for ease, we’ve traded away the mystery that brings meaning to our lives, and in doing so, we have let go of the preciousness that can never be automated, never be bought.

There is a quiet grief in the spaces we no longer occupy—the communal warmth of real friendship, the soft edges of reliance on one another. These things can never be reduced to convenience, for they exist in the slow unfolding of time, in the unexpected moments that call us back to what is real and lasting.

Can we remember what it is to live deeply? To move with intention through a world that seeks to erase the very essence of what makes us human? There is beauty still waiting to be found, in the spaces we reclaim, in the sacred territory where the heart, not the algorithm, is our guide.

🌱 Apotheosis Plant Medicine Retreat

Apotheosis: Rebirth is a 2-month initiation designed for personal transformation, combining a robust curriculum and a 7-day plant medicine retreat in the lush jungles of Mexico (Nov 3-9).

Participants are guided through deep healing, spiritual practices, and sacred ceremonies such as Ayahuasca and Bufo Alvarius. The experience offers a profound reconnection to purpose, wisdom, and the living cosmos, aiming to empower individuals as heart-led leaders and community stewards.

Limited spaces remain. Mention Down The Rabbit Hole in your application and claim 10% off. Apply here.

🔨 Sacrificing Enchantment For Utility

Heed these words from Omar Najjarine:

“An argument I had with my cousin who had warned me that I wasn't being smart by spending all my free time reading and writing instead of planning my next career move. He kept warning me that I can't keep living paycheck to paycheck, I have to plan to make more and keep up with costs and inflation. I can't just finish my work and run back to my books, I had to mind my financial growth.

And this seemingly innocent, prudential advice, you know, memorized the world over by parents and self-satisfied realists. It's not in principle incorrect, but it's what starts us down the path to spiritual and psychological sickness. Once you reorient your heart and mind to utility, it's almost impossible to return to your original enchantment.

You create a shell around your true self out of a fear of poverty, and you live in that shell for so long until you forget who you were. So most people go around with incredible blockages of identity. One of the saddest moments was noticing it in my father and it wasn't until he semi-retired that I was able to have soul-searching conversations with him because before he could never draw on his inner resources like that.

The reason most people lead lives of quiet desperation as Thoreau says is because they've sacrificed their aspirations and imagination on the altar of practicality. But it's like food or sex the moment you've satisfied the practical you crave meaning which is the more important thing for your soul. But again, if you serve the practical long enough, you lose the vocabulary the interior tools to reconstruct genuine meaning. I assure you the epidemic of anxiety and loneliness is not because more people decided to start painting instead of getting a side hustle.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Homeliness: the quality of being simple or ordinary, but pleasant, in a way that makes you think of home

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Beyond the Brain: How a Spiritual Perspective Can Help Us Understand Consciousness

By Steve Taylor

“Francis Crick was one of the most eminent scientists of the twentieth century. In 1953, along with James Watson, he helped to ‘break’ the genetic code (by discovering the structure of the DNA molecule). Later in his scientific career, Crick decided to turn his attention to what seemed to him to be the biggest remaining problem in science: consciousness. He decided he was going to solve the riddle of how our brain produces our ‘inner life’ of thoughts and sensations.

Crick fully expected the riddle to be solved within a few years, with the help of the latest brain-scanning and imaging technology. The issue seemed straightforward: human beings experience consciousness, and consciousness is produced by the brain. After all, isn’t it clear that when the brain is damaged, consciousness is impaired? And isn’t it clear that when the brain stops functioning — at the point of death — consciousness stops too? As Crick put it graphically, ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ His task was therefore clear: to investigate exactly how these nerve cells and molecules gave rise to our conscious experience.

Unfortunately, consciousness proved to be much harder to ‘crack’ than the genetic code. Working together with a young researcher called Cristof Koch, Crick devoted the last two decades of his life to the riddle of consciousness but made frustratingly little progress. He made a number of suggestions — for example, that consciousness was related to the brain’s visual cortex, to short term memory or ‘some form of serial attentional mechanism’ — but none of these were confirmed by evidence.

Interestingly, although Crick never gave up his faith in a materialistic explanation of consciousness, his co-researcher did. Cristof Koch eventually came to doubt the basic assumption of their work: that consciousness can be explained in terms of brain activity. He began to investigate alternative ways of explaining consciousness, and adopted a panpsychist perspective, based on the idea that consciousness is an intrinsic property of the universe.

In this article, I will examine why Crick made – and many other scientists have made — so little progress in attempting to explain consciousness in terms of brain activity. And we will see how, from a spiritual perspective, consciousness begins to seem much less problematic.”

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