⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ Unraveling The Dream: This documentary investigates the neuroscience of consciousness, illustrating how psychedelics and meditation can dismantle the ego's "controlled hallucination" to provide a glimpse into the interconnected nature of reality. Watch it here.

✨ Recovering a Forgotten Sense: On the imaginal, its loss, and the possibility of return. Read it here.

🎈 How To Reconnect With Your Inner Child: The experiences you had as a child influence your emotional life as an adult. Recognising these dynamics can be healing. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“What's happening at the end of that street? Pictured here are not auroras but light pillars, a phenomenon typically much closer. In most places on Earth, a lucky viewer can see a Sun pillar, a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually, these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground and are sometimes known as a crystal fog. These small ice crystals may then reflect not the Sun but ground lights. The featured image captured not only numerous light pillars but also the iconic constellation of Orion, and was taken in Mohe, the northernmost city in China.”

🌎 An Intro Guide For Earthlings

Welcome to our weird wide world.
It can get pretty crazy around here.
It’s been that way for a while. Maybe the whole time.
You’ll run into lots of people who speak confidently.
That doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
Best to witness their conduct, their day-to-day behaviors.
Then decide whether to heed their words.
There can often be great chasms in speech and action.
Certain folks love their high-horsing and grandstanding.
But that doesn’t mean you’re beneath them.
They just like to feel like you are.
You don’t have to play their game.
You can opt out.
There are a lot of things in culture that seem to demand your participation.
But you can unsubscribe.
You can build your life à la carte.
You don’t need to mirror the images in pop culture.
Speaking of pop culture, there’s something we invented you should know about.
The screen.
We love it around here.
People spend their days interacting with pocket screens, desk screens, and lap screens.
Jumbo screens are even bolted to our walls.
We learn about the “world” this way.
Algorithms will tell you this place is filled with terrible people.
There are some for sure.
But so many kind souls exist outside the blinding light of attention-seeking screen games.
The world portrayed on the flashy-light-boxes is not the whole story.
Always remember that.
These devices are often used by competing and hidden forces.
They seek to capture your attention and wield it for their own means.
Don’t let anyone tell you what you need to care about.
Let your care be a natural eruption from your inner depths.
Let it be the product of cultivation. Soil tilled over time with roots clawing into the earth.
Grounded.
There’s a breed of care that is like fast fashion.
That rapidly refreshes with news cycles and viral memes.
This form of care is mostly social signaling.
Very little effective action.
It’s about being seen as a certain type of person.
Rather than being it, independent of who sees.
It’s not all humdrum though.
There are lots of ways to experience joy in this world.
You’ll no doubt find that out.
The wonders abound.
This planet is teeming with life.
The natural sights will make you dizzy with awe.
With an archive of human art sprawling millennia.
But I’d be remiss not to point out the cruelty and suffering.
I don’t know why the world is like this.
There are different theories.
We live in a fallen world pervaded by evil.
Or we’re evolving out of a brutal state of nature.
Or we’re a bored god playing hide-and-seek with oneself.
The why can be endlessly debated but the what cannot.
The suffering is real.
But by embracing our natural inclinations for care.
We can become unique healing balms for particular pockets of pain.
I encourage you to tune into the greater forces of benevolence and compassion.
Even if only imagined.
Because the consequences of the actions they inspire are very real.
There’s so much more I wish I could say.
But time is short.
I’m sorry if this message got to you decades too late.
It’s good that you’re here.
Thank you for being here.

🗝️ The Key To The Riddle

Consider these words from Rachel Carson:

🤓 Learn This Word

Kairosclerosis: A moment in which you realize that you're happy but simultaneously destroy that happiness by overthinking it

🕸️ From Around The Web

An extremely non-comprehensive list of how to increase your surface area for luck and magic (and instantly sprinkle fairy dust on your life)

“I’m trying to consciously uncouple from Instagram/Meta (boring, I know, been done before, so overplayed, yada yada, but I fear it is finally my time to go gentle into that good night), so I stumbled onto the 2016 trend just yesterday for my aloted five minutes of scroll.

Soooo glad so many people enjoyed where they were ten years ago, and I love that you’re nostalgic for that time. But personally? There’s not enough money in the ever-expanding universe to bribe me into being 26 again.

‘Twas a wretched and cursed time, and sifting through my camera roll evidence of that year I felt my former despair roll over me like a fog. Finally, FINALLY, when I got to the very tippy tail of 2016, the camera roll slowly gets less depressing; things started to look up, and in 2017 an amazing series of twists and turns and synchronicities put me on a trajectory to start my own business, make dear friends, meet my husband, etc.

I remember exactly what the catalyst for the shift — I went on a roadtrip to Big Sur and saw a sign on the road that said, “Holy Granola” with an arrow pointing up a steep mountain.”

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