⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🙏 Gratitude: Experience poet David Whyte through composer Mark Guiliana’s lens in this sonic and visual collaboration on gratitude. Watch it here.

👁️ The Psychedelic Turn in Spirituality: Plato and the psychedelic church. Read it here.

🪐 A Dent in the Universe: When there’s no script left to follow, imagination becomes the tool that prevents freedom from collapsing into emptiness. Read it here.

🧘 AM/FM: A simple & free meditation timer, tracker, and journal with 4 channels of ambient music and guided meditation streaming live 24/7. Try it here

🎇 Image of The Week

Off the remote coast of Western Australia, surfers recently captured footage of a wave so strange and violent that many people initially assumed it had to be fake. The wave forms when powerful swells collide over a shallow reef, forcing the ocean to surge upward in an explosive, almost architectural shape that looks more like something erupting than breaking. It was first spotted years ago and only after a long search was it finally filmed properly, revealing a natural phenomenon that feels barely believable even to experienced surfers. What struck me most is that after years of curating this newsletter, I still encounter moments like this where nature seems to exceed its own rules. It is a reminder of how astonishingly alive and dynamic the surface of this planet really is, and how much is still unfolding out there beyond the edges of our everyday awareness. The picture doesn’t do it justice. Read more and watch the video here.

🎯 Reclaim Your Attention 

​There is endless drama and spectacle available to consume us all. Seductive algorithms generate daily tidal waves of distraction that drown us in trivialities and falsehoods. The internet can be a powerful tool for accessing knowledge but it can just as easily serve as a black hole for your attention.​

We have to remember what really matters. The dizzying buzz of social media and 24-hour news cycle can keep us constantly preoccupied while the real lights in our lives burn out. Turn to the hearth of your world: the intimate surroundings and the warmth of the people you cherish as they are the real engines of significance in your life.

Break the spell of the screen and make eye contact with quality time, laughter, and precious memories. Our time here is short. Tomorrow is not promised so say "I love you" with enthusiasm. Allow yourself to spark a conversation, to ask an intriguing question, and to lean in for the answer.

The drama never ends so make space by the fire for that which truly nourishes you. Reclaim your attention and use it to water seeds of meaning. You will be better for it and the world will be made better because of it.

🔥 A force of nature

Feel the fire in these words from George Bernard Shaw

🤓 Learn This Word

Vagary: An unpredictable instance, a wandering journey, a whimsical, wild, or unusual idea, desire, or action

🕸️ From Around The Web

A massive new dream database reveals clues about consciousness during sleep

“An international collaboration of scientists has created the largest-ever public database of brain activity recordings and accompanying dream reports. In a first analysis of this resource, the researchers confirmed that dreaming is not exclusive to the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, finding that when conscious experiences occur in deeper sleep, the brain exhibits patterns of activity that more closely resemble wakefulness. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

For millennia, dreams have been a source of fascination, but their systematic study is a modern endeavor with significant scientific applications. Investigating subjective experiences during sleep can inform research into consciousness itself, aid in understanding memory consolidation, and provide insights into sleep disorders like sleepwalking. Despite this importance, progress has been hampered by a persistent challenge: dream studies are resource-intensive, often resulting in small sample sizes that are difficult to compare across different laboratories.

To address this limitation, a consortium of 53 researchers from 37 institutions across 13 countries came together to build the Dream EEG and Mentation database, known as DREAM. Coordinated by Monash University in Australia and supported by organizations including the Bial Foundation, the project aimed to centralize and standardize decades of dream research.”

[Continue Reading]