⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🔎 Reality has a surprising amount of detail: Reality contains many small but critical elements that are initially invisible; to make progress on difficult problems and avoid stagnant thinking, you must continually seek out and perceive aspects you have not noticed before. Read it here.​

🎙This Past Weekend: Comedian Theo Von and podcaster Duncan Trussell covered topics ranging from aliens to addiction recovery in a thoughtful discussion about finding inner peace. They offered perspectives on spiritual concepts like past lives and honoring deceased loved ones while also cracking jokes about imaginary extraterrestrial gods. Watch it here.​

🧠 Adventure in Cognitive Biases: A game to reduce overconfidence and train flexible thinking. Try it here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in China offers visitors a glimpse into a mesmerizing world of towering sandstone pillars, often veiled in delicate mists. This stunning landscape, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, provided the muse for the floating mountains depicted in James Cameron's "Avatar."

✨ Faith vs. Belief

Often, the terms "faith" and "belief" are used interchangeably, but upon closer examination, they serve different roles in our lives.

Belief is the framework of our convictions; it’s the content within our minds, the firm grip of certainties. It seeks to know, holding onto ideas and concepts like a closed fist. On the other hand, faith transcends mere intellectual acknowledgment. It is an existential stance, a disposition towards life, akin to an open hand. Faith beautifully declares, "I don't know, but I trust," whereas belief cautiously states, "I don't trust, so I must know."

What makes life truly enriching is not the security of our beliefs but the vulnerability and courage of our faith. Imagine if every moment, every turn in our lives was predictable. If our stories were already written with every detail known, wouldn't life lose its vibrancy? It's the very uncertainty, the mystery of tomorrow, that infuses life with zest and vitality.

Today, I urge each one of you reading this: embrace that uncertainty. Take that leap of faith, no matter how small. Life, in all its unpredictability, is finite. Recognizing this truth, perhaps it's time we trust a little more and fear a little less.

🐯 Tigers Above & Below

Enjoy these warm-hearted words from Pema Chodron:

"The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently."

"There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life."

"Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness--life's painful aspect--softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose--you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We'd be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together."

🕳The Biggest Pitfall Along the Path

By Eric Brown

One of the main traps you can fall into is waiting for everything to be perfect.

The best workout plan before going to the gym. The ideal nutrition plan before starting a diet. Having the next 4 months planned before making a major decision.

The problem is: life doesn’t work this way. The circumstances will never be perfect. You can’t predict the future.

If you wait until you know you’ll be successful to act, the things you end up doing will be trivial.

You can only trust yourself and figure it out along the way. Take the leap and make a BOLD decision. You will rise up to the occasion. You can only give yourself the gift of patience and let yourself make mistakes, grow, and improve.

The opportunity you have here, now, is to move your dreams from “one day…” to Day 1.

Day 1 for the Warrior100 is September 1st.

It is a lot. I know. But difficult is the cost of greatness. It’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone could do it, and it wouldn’t be greatness.

You are busy. You have concerns. You want to be prepared. I understand, and I feel the same.

But greatness rarely calls upon you at a moment of your choosing. Your own greatness is calling upon you now.

A part of you is still listening, still reading, still wondering. A part of you is READY for this. HUNGRY. Your Warrior is waking up. Honor that now.

You don’t need to be perfect. You have our support, the sacred structure of the daily disciplines, and the energy of the container we have created. We will all make mistakes, we will overcome obstacles, and we will do it together.

The time for your decision is approaching. Doors are CLOSING August 25th.

​Join here.​

🤓 Learn This Word

Noroke: A Japanese word that means to brag about or sing the praises of the person you love

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​How to Defeat the Procrastodragon Once and For All​

Articles like the one you’re reading now typically start with a confession by the author. Probably by necessity, because you, the reader, rightfully want to know if this internet-guy knows what the hell he’s talking about.

Does he truly understand my suffering and struggles? My unique strategies of self-deception? Does he know my biology and bad habits? The events that have made me who I am? And has he resolved these issues within himself in such a way he can shine a light on my own and help me fix them?

Deep down, you want to know if this is another one of those articles that make you temporarily feel good, but is rather quickly forgotten. Or worse, an article that offers tremendous insight, only to be used as additional ammunition to judge yourself into an even deeper procrastination paralysis.

I believe these reservations are valid, so I’d like to share you a little bit of my story. I hope to show you this article is none of the above, and that by fixing the core existential issue at the heart of procrastination, you can no longer see it as an option.

Honestly, it is possible to overcome procrastination. The key is to aim so far away from self-defeating behavior that you can no longer seriously consider it an option.

I am sure you can picture some individuals who do exactly this.

However, I wasn’t always like this. I had to learn it, the hard way.

Ever since I can remember, from the first moment I got my hands on a Gameboy, I loved to immerse myself in virtual worlds. I can still feel the excitement when hearing the sound of the 56k modem dialing into the web. In time, it became more than mere immersion. I would use games and the internet to escape, to drown my sorrows with distractions.

I let myself be bullied at school, and didn’t have many friends. I was sufficiently different from my parents and siblings, who I struggled to talk with. Instead, all I did was play video games for hours on end. I would lock myself up in my room and spend days writing posts on discussion forums. I discovered a world I was competent in, a place where I could lose the dread of my embodied existence and enter a virtual world that seemingly held more meaning.

The pattern was set. Whenever there was something I didn’t want to face in the real world, so to speak, I would instead do something more fun but in the virtual one. Problem solved.

​[Continue Reading]​

🎬 Endnote

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Mike Slavin