⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌘 Don't Let Your Darkness Consume You: Overcoming resentment with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche: Watch it here.​

⏳ The Time Trap of Productivity: On the true source of burnout and the problem with micromanaging our days. Read it here.​

✅ Law of 100: An App to build new habits by choosing, tracking, and sharing your progress towards doing something 100 times. Try it here.​

👩‍🔬 The New Science of Self Actualization: Enjoy this book breakdown of Transcend by Scott Barry Kaufman. Read it here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

"Another beauty “trick” used by the Japanese garden designers was to create the landscape so that it would be impossible for the visitor to see all the elements at a glance. Instead, the visitor uncovers the garden step by step, while strolling through the alleys.

Called miegakure, this “hide and reveal” technique hides important landscape features behind hills, trees or buildings, so that by following the path the visitor will be delighted to continuously discover new attractions.

Miegakure can be enjoyed in the garden of Kodaiji, Kyoto: from this point you will admire the bridge architecture, but you will be completely unaware that a very beautiful pond is hidden behind the hill…" Source.​

✨Magic: An Endangered Species

To some magic is considered an endangered species.

A vestige of a time before we smartened up to the cold hard facts of life.

There’s an unfortunate smug categorization that magic is child’s play.

Invoking ideas of unicorns and potions.

Too smart to find the sacred hiding in plain sight.

So caught up in disproving the impossible that they could not muster astonishment in the face of the possible.

That we exist at all. That these words are reaching you. That you just exhaled.

THAT is magic.

Magic isn’t an endangered species.

It is the ground we stand on.

It is the soil from which all life blooms.

We are enveloped in it.

And our ability to see it is a skill of attention.

It is a process of undressing our arrogance, of loosening our grip on our fixed ideas of what this world is.

Our knowledge is only a tiny island, a speck in the vast ocean of the incomprehensible unknown.

And when we learn to embrace the grandeur of this mystery, the tectonic plates of our being shift to cause an eruption of wonder, cascading into the cracks and crevices of a previously deadened world.

No, magic isn’t an endangered species.

But those who know it, feel it, and breathe it…

Those who can taste it on the edge of this moment.

Are becoming increasingly rare.

This highlights the exquisite burden and gift of being bastions of bedazzlement.

You see, magic exists abundantly all around us like gas waiting to ignite.

We are the spark.

Is this day worth setting ablaze?

💡Light of Consciousness

Enjoy these words from Mystic Bernadette Roberts

"One possible way of envisioning the human passage is the following. We think of ourselves as originally emerging from the unknown, from darkness, nothingness or non-existence into the light of consciousness. But as consciousness develops we discover the increasing ability to see in the dark, see into the nothingness or mystery within ourselves and eventually realize that this darkness and nothingness is the divine from which we emerged and with which we are one. Thus we discover that our original darkness IS true light. Midway in this passage, divine light (darkness or unknowing) and the light of consciousness are in balance, with neither outshining the other. But as we move beyond this mid-point, divine light begins to outshine the light of consciousness until, in the end, the light of consciousness goes out and only divine light remains. From this vantage point we look back on the passage and see that although consciousness was the veil that dimmed the light, this dimming was necessary in order to make the human dimension possible. But if consciousness makes human existence possible, it is also not separate from the divine, nor does it completely hide it; on the contrary, consciousness or self is man’s faculty or medium for experiencing the divine — so long as it remains, that is [this is key]. Our passage through consciousness is the gradual return to the divine; we leave the divine unknowingly and in darkness, but we return knowingly and in light."

“To be forgiven is not enough; we must put an end to the very need to be forgiven.”

“Spiritual life is like a moving sidewalk. Whether you go with it or spend your whole life running against it, you're still going to be taken along.”

🤓 Learn This Word

gnossienne: a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​10 Healing and Empowering Spiritual Practices Learned on a Pilgrimage Through Spain​

In the Beginning…

Early human life was difficult. Treacherous. We didn’t have germ theory, didn’t understand proper sanitation, and couldn’t combat the darkness when night fell.

For thousands of years, this state of existence continued in the dark, until the invention of fire. Once we controlled fire, we could cook, coordinate, and converse after dark. Our control of fire led to the creation of candles, and humans could now control when their surroundings were dark.

The problem of the dark plagued humanity for ages. However, much like the dark and shadows when a beam of light falls on them, the problem of darkness disappeared with the invention of flame and candles.

Oftentimes it is not the problem that gets in your way, but the lack of the appropriate tool to address the problem.

Read that again. The problem is not the real problem, the problem is that you do not have the right tools to address the problem.

​[Continue Reading]​

📚 Stairway To Wisdom

The next issue of our premium newsletter Stairway To Wisdom is coming out on Friday. We've extended the World Book Day 45% off discount for the annual plan for the next 24 hours. Claim now to access 70+ book breakdowns.

🎬 Endnote

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