- Down The Rabbit Hole
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- 🌀🐇 #269 too busy, psychology's consciousness problem, creative sanctuary
🌀🐇 #269 too busy, psychology's consciousness problem, creative sanctuary
Plus Are We Still Thinking?
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🧠 Psychology has a consciousness problem: The biases that shape our understanding of the mind. Read it here.
🎶 A Creative Sanctuary in the Scottish Highlands: Meet Lomond Campbell, the multi-disciplinary artist and maverick instrument inventor, as he shares his unique conceptual machines and creative process. Watch it here.
⌛️ Are we too busy to enjoy life? We often use constant busyness as a numbing mechanism that keeps us from noticing what truly matters. Read it here.
🚪 Where Wonder Went: Catch up on my new podcast. Episode 1. Episode 2. Episode 3.
🎇 Image of The Week
“Andrew McCarthy, an Arizona-based astrophotographer who specializes in photographing the sun, captured the unlikely photo on Saturday (Nov. 8) at around 9 a.m. MST (11 am EST). The shot, dubbed "The Fall of Icarus," required an "absolutely preposterous" level of planning and "might be the first photo of its kind in existence," McCarthy wrote in a post on the social platform X. The skydiver in the image was the YouTuber and musician Gabriel C. Brown, who jumped from a small propeller-powered craft at an altitude of around 3,500 feet (1,070 meters), around 8,000 feet (2,440 m) from McCarthy's camera. Brown shared several behind-the-scenes photos of the shoot in an Instagram post, including a video of him and McCarthy celebrating the shot.” Read more here.
🌳 Reverence of Approach
Here’s a snippet the latest episode of Where Wonder Went:
There is a beautiful quote from John O’Donohue—if you have not heard of him, I just love him. He is a special soul. He’s written many great books. I’ve listened to a number of his lectures on Audible. This quote has really stuck with me and feels appropriate for this particular riff I’m on right now. It’s related to our reverence of approach. I’m trying to approach this tree with reverence. I’m not trying to approach with an ossifying, classifying rigidity, trying to form-fit the tree into a preconceived notion. I’m letting the preconceived notion fall away, to the best of my ability, and letting the moment breathe its life into me—allowing it to speak for itself.
“When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”
Our reverence as we approach the world matters. The face of wonder appears to us in proportion to our capacity to approach reverently. It’s hard to experience wonder if our eyes are already glazed and we’ve already decided what is in front of us.
🧘 And The Student Was Enlightened
Ponder this “broken koan” from David Chess:
“One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”
“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”
And the student was enlightened.”
🤓 Learn This Word
Holobiont: A host organism and all of its associated symbiotic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, that live on and inside it. The term emphasizes that the host and its microbes should be studied together as a single functional unit, as they are in constant, complex interaction.
🕸️ From Around The Web
Are We Still Thinking?
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too —
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out —
And take upon’s the mystery of things
— Shakespeare, King Lear
Dialogue as Being
“When someone asks, “Where do you get the news?” how do you answer? What are sources for the news, for new knowledge?
Before modern times, the primary source was person-to-person conversation. Knowledge transferred everywhere people converged: in marketplaces and agoras, churches and bars, courts and association meetings, job sites and hearths. Through dialogue is how all people — peasants, kings, Da Vincis and Aristotles — for most of time, received almost all knowledge. There were a few books available, but there were no newspapers. Gathering new information mostly required organic, two-way process of conversation. Any news was naturally in the category of rumor (you could call “fake news” the obvious default), with the reputation of the speaker considered, and room for doubt, clarification, contradiction, and the other benefits of dialogue given full due. In other words, in pre-modern times one talked to more people, sometimes in a single day, than one would ever read in one’s lifetime.
The primacy of this two-way process eventually ended. Between the invention of the printing press and the radio, we creaked open the heavy door to truly modern technology: media that could support mass, one-way communication. The printing press enabled genuine broad-casting. I think that the great event between the pre-modern and the modern world is not World War 2, or the Industrial Revolution, or the French Revolution, but the set of technologies that divide history into before and after this ability to truly broad-cast. It took only a few hundred years to complete.”
🎬 Endnote
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With Wonder,
Mike Slavin
