⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌻 Richard Feynman on the Wonder of Life: an ode to the “atoms with consciousness” and “matter with curiosity” that we are. Watch it here.

🐾 An Immense World: The astonishing ways in which animals experience our planet. Read more here.

 🎶 Music For Mushrooms Documentary: Can pairing music with psychedelics bring transformative healing to the world? Learn more here.

💌 Get More Emails Like This: Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

The Pamukkale Thermal Pools are a natural wonder in Turkey, known for their stunning white travertine terraces filled with warm, mineral-rich waters. These thermal pools are formed by calcium deposits from hot springs, creating a unique, snow-like landscape. The waters are said to have therapeutic properties, attracting visitors seeking relaxation and healing. Bathing in these pools provides a unique experience surrounded by beautiful, cascading terraces.

 🌳 A Living Purpose

I feel like there is an important distinction between an organic, embedded purpose vs. a manufactured, bolted-on purpose. Personal growth culture encourages the finding of one's purpose in a way that leads some to latch on to something inauthentic.

Thinking of vague notions of "I want to make an impact" and coaches coaching coaches coaching coaches. Reaching for a convenient idea of what one's purpose might be to feel the relief of having found it plus reap the imagined status gains.

Something like person-purpose fit. You can feel it when a person's purpose is kinda zip-tied to their identity. It feels rickety. Like it's not going to last. A purpose emerging from the broader tapestry of one's life and interfacing intimately with their immediate context...

That feels rock solid. Like it's woven into and coherent with a greater story and exuded/exhibited on scales of both days and years. This kind of purpose feels more resilient and alive.

Less concretely defined in some sense. More capable of morphing with the path and transmuting barriers along the way.

🧠 For Curious Minds

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👁️ Into The Mystery

Chew on this quote from Donella Meadows:

“Transcend Paradigms: There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing.”

Pairs nicely with this sentiment from Richard Feynman:

"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Waldeinsamkeit: A German word that refers to the feeling of solitude in the woods

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

Carl Jung On Why We Must Learn To Accept Ourselves Before We Can Help Others

Carl Jung exhibited the sort of serene wisdom that is usually reserved for the reclusive-hermit-sage. Yet, he arrived at his personal “wholeness” not through the traditional route of Christian grace or Buddhist meditation, but through scientific and psychological means. Delving into his own troubled mind and reflecting on the neuroses of his patients, he arrived at an unsettling insight.

We must learn to accept our own darkness if we want to overcome our own neurosis.

Without this self-acceptance, our attempts to help others will be futile, both on an individual and global level.

Alan Watts said that Jung intimately embraced his own dark side and:

Whenever we refuse to accept our feelings and thoughts, however disturbing they might be, we experience psychological dissonance. Dissonance happens when our behavior does not match our self-image, or the image we think others might have of us. When we project our shadow onto others, we refuse ownership of ourselves, distancing ourselves from ourselves, losing ourselves in the process. This, according to Jung, is how neurosis finds a way to take over the psyche.

In a lecture delivered to Swiss clergymen, Carl Jung shared some of his deepest insights on this topic.

Alan Watts believes this was the greatest thing Carl Jung ever wrote:

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