⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

💪 How To Do Great Work: Paul Graham argues that to do truly great and original work, you must choose a field you have a natural ability in and are deeply interested in, get to the frontier of knowledge in that field, notice the gaps, and explore the promising ones with curiosity as your guide. He provides advice on how to nurture great ideas, collaborate effectively, maintain high morale, and avoid common pitfalls. Read it here.​

🤯 The Startup Landscape for Expanding Consciousness: The article provides an overview of the startup ecosystem focused on expanding consciousness through various modalities like psychedelics, meditation, breathwork, and virtual reality. Read it here.​

🐲 Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth: In this fascinating discussion, mythologist Joseph Campbell explores the universal hero's journey found across cultures, how modern stories like Star Wars follow this model, and the deeper meaning these myths can bring to our lives today. Campbell argues myths help us understand the mystery of existence and provide spiritual guides to becoming our fullest selves. Watch it here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

I love sharing otherworldly natural phenomena to provoke wonder at the grandeur of our planet. I can't believe after nearly 3 years of writing this newsletter that I am *just* now coming across the image you see above. The blue lava of the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia is a result of high concentrations of sulfur in the volcano. When the volcano erupts, sulfuric gases are also released. When these gases come into contact with the air, they ignite, burning with an intense blue flame. The lava itself isn't blue but appears so when the sulfuric gases burn off at temperatures over 360 degrees Celsius (680 degrees Fahrenheit). This gives the flowing lava an eerie, otherworldly blue glow, particularly visible at night.

👁 Wanting What's Right In Front Of You

The comparative mind will convince you that the "good life" is always just beyond where your feet stand. This highlights the importance of the distinction between "wanting what's right in front of you" vs "hyper-awareness of ways things could be better."

Now surely recognizing the ways you can improve your experience of life is important. Striving to better our conditions is one of the ways we can experience great adventure.

But to only do that and to atrophy your capacity to savor and enjoy the moment as it exists now, will leave you in this predicament Alan Watts so lucidly expressed:

"Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly."

If I find myself preoccupied with all the ways that I can improve my circumstances to the point that I am not embracing the beauty and grandeur of the now, I deliberately shift into a mode where I engage the senses and find contact with all the good fortune flowing towards me and the immensity of blessings that envelop me.

📚 Wisdom Is Not A Quote

Savor these important words from Euvie Ivanova:

"Wisdom is not a quote.

You don't get wisdom from a book, or from listening to gurus.

No matter how eloquent, words are not wisdom. They are a very useful medium of communicating information, but that's not what we're talking about here.

Wisdom does not live in ideas and concepts.

Wisdom lives in the web of Life, in the interconnectedness of everything that exists.

I say "lives" intentionally. Wisdom is not fixed, it is alive.

It may sound paradoxical, but the path to tapping into this interconnectedness of Life is through listening to our own bodies, in developing inner authority, clarifying the channel so the river of Life can flow through us.

You are not just living life.

Life is living you, through you, as you.

Ancient, beautiful, ever-transforming, Life."

🔎 Attention = Most Important

By Eric Brown

"Your attention is the most important resource you have.

More than money, health, or anything else. Your attention is your life. Your life is the sum total of the things that get your attention.

For something that influences the quality of every moment of our lives, it’s remarkable how little we focus on it. Most people don’t even realize that you can develop the quality of your awareness and your attention.

To bring things into focus more clearly, to be more fully present, to notice the subtle and brilliant nuances of the world around you.

Training your attention, your focus, and your concentration is the difference that makes the difference.

The progress you make with your attention positively impact every single moment of your life.

Every single situation, moment, event, conversation, experience is enriched and vitalized by training your attention.

And fortunately, for the last 2,500 years – modern science and the wisdom traditions have provided us with very clear, straightforward, and accessible ways to improve our concentration and refine our attention.

This is one of the 4 disciplines we will be practicing in the Warrior100. If you know that this is important, I encourage you to join us. We will take you from a complete amateur in concentration meditation to a skilled meditator. And the impact of this, as we have just spoken about, are literally life-changing. I hope you’ll join us. We begin September 1st."

🤓 Learn This Word

Sielvartas: A Lithuanian word that's literal translation is “soul tumbling” and is used to describe grief or resentment

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​Ernest Becker’s Unflinching Examination of How the Fear of Death is Secretly Controlling Your Life​

Everyone knows on some level that they’re going to die, but very few people really believe it.

I’m talking about the real, emotional, visceral understanding of the fact that one day, you will cease to exist.

It means that all of your future possibilities will remain unrealized, and everything that you have come to know will come to an end. It also means that the moment of death is the last time in eternity that you will be able to feel something; to experience all there is to experience, to love everyone who’s around to be loved.

This is an agonizing realization, but it also comprises one of the most powerful appeals to really and truly live.

Personally, I know of no greater reason to be happy now, to attack your goals now, to learn more now, to love more now, than the idea that you will one day die.

It’s now clear that we human beings are actually the only creatures on earth who are aware of the fact that we are going to die one day, and the knowledge of this fact comes with enormous psychological consequences. It turns out that the fear of death motivates more of our behavior than we might believe.

​[Continue Reading]​

🎬 Endnote

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Mike Slavin