⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🫶 You Don’t Feel Lonely Because You Have No Friends: You feel lonely because you only hear about their lives—instead of living them together. Read more here.

🪑 Doing Nothing Has Never Been More Important: How the under-appreciated art of idleness can transform the world. Read it here.

👁️ How To Think About The Sublime: An exquisite mix of fear and awe, pleasure and pain, the sublime stretches the imagination and reveals the limits of reason. Read it here.

🚪 The 5 Forces Erasing Wonder From Your World: You can now read the transcript of episode 1 of my new podcast titled Where Wonder Went. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Water drop refraction of backyard winter forest trees.” This image was captured by user FallOut99 on DeviantArt. In a world now overrun with AI imagery, you can be sure this image is authentic as it was captured way back in January of 2014.

🔥 Reigniting The Flame of Wonder

Enjoy this excerpt from the first episode of Where Wonder Went:

“The world of wonder is the world that we're born into, and the sense of wonder that we experience as children has magical quality to it. The things that we encounter—there's this great sense of firstness to everything and we possess a deep inquisitiveness toward the world around us.

As time progresses and we grow up, that experience begins to wither away. And for a lot of people it evaporates entirely, or at least that's how they feel from inside, from the interiority of their experience. The sense of wonder has—it feels like it has completely left them. And so I want to sort of do some archaeology or cartography. I want to make maps and I want to excavate the fossils of wonder and bring them back into our lives.

So this isn't solely about asking the question “where did wonder go?” but to use what we discover as tinder for reigniting the flame of wonder in our lives so that we might engage with ordinary living in a way that carries more reverence and appreciation and freshness and aliveness.”

🎶 Can’t Hear The Music

Consider these words from Anthony de Mello:

🤓 Learn This Word

Angertainment: A type of programming, especially talk shows and talk radio, which is characterized by anger or which provokes anger in its audience.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Unlearning Default Awayness: How to recognize and relax unseen Awayness.

I've been meditating for almost ten years. I've dabbled in many methods and frameworks: Seeing that Frees, Aro gTér, Sam Harris, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, The Mind Illuminated. Time and again, the spacious, open, inclusive, “non-doing” practices resonated most deeply. I finally took the hint and adopted Opening Awareness as my base practice.

The basic instruction is deceptively simple: “Remain uninvolved in whatever arises.” Involvement manifests as three “muscular contractions” of the mind: emphasizing, de-emphasizing, and setting aside. In their compulsive forms, these map to clinging (attachment), pushing away (aversion), and ignoring (ignorance). Discovering what the instruction means in the midst of specific sensations and concrete situations becomes integral to the practice, ultimately revealing what it means to rest in the totality of experience.

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