Greetings, friends.
šš½ Every other Thursday, āRemember the Futureā lights up your inbox with a free curated list of interesting finds to help you spark curiosity and feeling of connection to the many beautiful qualities of life.
This weekly letter is a revival of the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman orator whom I admired in one of my past lives as a Classics student. Throughout his personal letters, Cicero offered explanations for his belief that each and every human possesses a spark of divinity, a force that animates all of nature. Suspicious of certainties, Cicero was a man directed by probabilities.
Yet, while he abstained from dogmatic assertions about the nature of life, he strongly believed that the Universe was ordered in accordance with a divine plan. According to Cicero, the mind or soul of each individual is a reflection of the divine mind.
Accordingly, Cicero deduced from his divine origin belief that each human must do everything in his power to develop the higher faculties that distinguish him from animals. Thousands of years later, another great philosopher of his time, Friedrich Nietzsche, would say that each person must give meaning to his own life by writing his own language and describing his own objectives.
We create our selves by telling our own story. This is how we come to realize what it means to be alive.
Recognizing the multifaceted nature of truth and the beauty of being alive, is what guides Infinity Road. This is a project designed to be a collection of stories that help guide us toward a higher vantage point, where we can see and feel the collective manifestation of what being alive as a human means for each and all of us.
Have you ever had an experience that made you question the nature of reality? So has approximately 30-40% of the population, and so did Dave Bryce Yaden, a PhD research fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Braden is using psychological research to investigate the nature of spiritual experiences at the University of Pennsylvania where he and a team of researchers are compiling data from people around the world in an undertaking called the āVarieties Corpus.ā Check it out here.
**It turns out humans arenāt the only creatures with intuitions.** šš½
Even with advanced technology it can be difficult to detect many kinds of impending natural disasters. But these accounts about animal behavior before disasters have prompted some researchers to devote serious scientific attention to the theory that animals may have inbuilt systems which alert them to impending natural disasters.
Credit @laurenfleishman
āThe meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: If there is any reaction, both are transformed.ā
-C.G. Jung
Feelings do not come prepackaged in boxes labelled with names such as āloveā. They come in untidy combinations that need to be put into narrative order to make sense. Some sequences come from within us, perhaps dictated by our hormones, certain are influenced by our individual ways of thinking and doing. But many of them come from without, from the narratives we hear and see and read. What is love? Itās all in the story.
Shower Thought
The whole world is a series of miracles. But weāre so used to them we call them ordinary things.