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Happy Labor Day: The Rabbit Has Taken the Podium!
Happy Labor Day!
This year, I am celebrating the holiday with a particularly delightful fruit of my labor-
The paperback edition is officially available on Amazon:
What’s Up with Rabbit Holes? An Insider’s Guide to Investigating What We Believe, Why We Believe It, and What We Might Be Missing
And yes, I am very happy, especially since it arrived just in time for Labor Day! And in time for my TTN podcast, The Power of Beliefs: Do We Own Them? Or Do They Own Us? on Wednesday, September 9th at 3:30 PM ET.
What’s Up with Rabbit Holes? An Insider’s Guide to Investigating What We Believe, Why We Believe It, and What We Might Be Missing
For the past several months, I have been thinking, writing, researching, reconsidering, rearranging, deleting, restoring, questioning, laughing, crying—and occasionally following the Curator of the Living Library of Wonder down yet another rabbit hole. The Curator is an adorable bespectacled rabbit, and you can read about him here, in a previous blog post. And while you're there, check out today's blog post as well, with more about the fruits of my labor.
Celebrating the fruits of all this labor on Labor Day is especially fitting because fruits also became an important word in the book itself.
For the past ten years, I have been on a quest to make sense of the reality we are bombarded with every day. So while finally writing the book, one of the questions I increasingly found myself asking was not simply, "Is this belief true?" But also: What are the fruits of believing it? What does this belief produce in me? Does it make me more curious or more certain—in the rigid or dogmatic sense? Does accepting this perspective make me more capable of managing complexity and diversity—or more determined to divide the world into people who “get it” and people who don’t?
Then another question arose: Am I willing to investigate my own beliefs—or am I quietly convinced that I know everything there is to know about the topic at hand? That question changed the direction of the book. Because I originally thought I was writing about other people’s rabbit holes. However, somewhere along the way, the investigation turned around: the investigator was being investigated; there was no way I could avoid looking at my own beliefs too.
Many of you know me enough to know that I have spent much of my life exploring spirituality, metaphysics, consciousness, healing, extraordinary human potential, and more than a few unconventional and yes, woo-woo ideas. Writing this book has not changed my belief, hope, or excitement that extraordinary things are possible. What has changed is my understanding of the responsibility that comes with believing them and especially with sharing them.
I am learning to distinguish more carefully among:
what I believe,
what I know,
what I suspect,
what I hope is true,
and what the evidence gives me the right to claim.
And perhaps even more importantly:
What does my belief give me the right to transmit?
Because beliefs have fruits beyond ourselves and our personal worldviews. We share them, and we teach them. We recommend people, products, treatments, explanations, philosophies, political narratives, spiritual teachings, and ways of interpreting reality. When I realized how easily we can all be misled, influenced, or simply mistaken, and how easily our convictions and sincerity can outrun the evidence, I vowed to become more careful.
And the good news is that I am not less curious! In fact, I can’t wait to dive into more rabbit holes with my toolkit complete with a kaleidoscope, compass, the Twelve+ Codes for Be~coming—and one mildly suspicious, but highly curious rabbit wearing spectacles.
And apparently, according to the primary image above, the Curator has decided it is time to address the public, standing atop a podium created from his favorite books—Curiosity, Kindness, Better Questions, and Brighter Tomorrow—not to tell us what to believe, or to distrust our own experience, and certainly not to tell us we should stop following interesting rabbit holes. He will always take questions, as he simply reminds us:
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