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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 109 (Jun 26, 2022) — Be As You Are, Yin & Yang, Self-Enquiry, & More
Happy Sunday!
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week.
To respect your time and attention, every newsletter can be read in under 5 minutes. If you enjoy it, please take 5 seconds to forward the email version to some friends and family. 🙏
🌀 Sloww Stuff
🆕 Book Summary: “Be As You Are” by Ramana Maharshi
This book is deeeep and covers: awakening analogies, judgment & suffering, solitude & silence, mind & ego, surrender & Self-realization, love & peace, fate & free will, reality & liberation, and so much more.
🔒 Premium Post: How to Practice Self-Enquiry (+ Infographic)
This new Premium post of “Be As You Are” includes bonus book summary content and an actionable guide of Ramana Maharshi’s self-enquiry process: what it is, how to do it, beginner & advanced tips, how to know if you’ve Self-realized, spiritual watch-outs, and more.
🧠 Modern Knowledge
RIP Rebel Wisdom
70 mins | YouTube
If you haven’t heard, Rebel Wisdom is coming to its natural conclusion in November—but don’t worry, there’s new content from John Vervaeke, Ken Wilber, and Daniel Schmachtenberger coming before then. Rebel Wisdom co-founders David Fuller and Alexander Beiner are following their creative daemons in different directions—shifting to less “rebellion” and more “wisdom,” less “critiquing” and more “synthesis.”
“My own personal hero’s journey is going from legacy media out into the badlands of the alternative, finding these amazing ideas and amazing figures, and then completing that narrative by going back to the legacy and shifting that. For both of us, it’s how do we shift the culture? How do we create an environment where people who would never think of doing personal growth work will do personal growth work? If it’s not a cultural movement, then it’s not sufficient.” — David Fuller
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
Yin & Yang
3 mins | YouTube
This is a short video of Alan Watts describing yin and yang. For a longer explanation, check out this video of Watts describing the I Ching (Book of Changes).
Bonus: Here’s a visual meditation on the sacred geometry of the yin-yang symbol.
“That’s the whole trick that we’ve played on ourselves—we don’t know that nothing is something. Lao Tzu put it this way, ‘The usefulness of a vessel is not so much in the clay surround but in the empty space in which something can be carried.'” — Alan Watts
Pair with:
- 10 Life-Transforming Themes & 25 Top Quotes from “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu (Book Summary)
- 35+ Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More
🤯 Mind Expanding
“You” are different in every mind…
Twitter
💭 Deep Thought
Who are you?
Spiritual perspective (from “Spiritual Warfare” by Jed McKenna):
“We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity—but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our ‘biography,’ our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are? Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?” — Sogyal Rinpoche
Scientific perspective (from “Whole Brain Living” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor):
“Pre-stroke, I had known who I was because there had been a group of cells in my left brain that manufactured my identity as Jill Bolte Taylor. These cells that made up my left-brain ego-center knew who I was, where I lived, and tons of other details like what my favorite color was. These ego-center cells had worked day in and day out to keep me abreast of all the tidbits, details, memories, and likes and dislikes that had made up my identity. I, Jill Bolte Taylor, existed because the cells in my left-brain ego-center told me I existed. When those cells of my left-brain ego-center shut down, and I shifted into the oblivion of my right brain, I had no idea who I was and I could not recall anything about my pre-stroke life. It was not as though I was missing a memory that I simply could not put my finger on; it was more like that memory (and I myself) had never existed at all. I know it’s a bit disconcerting to think that who we are is completely manufactured by a small group of cells in our left brain, and that we can lose ourselves at any moment, but that is exactly how fragile our ego identities are.” — Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
💬 Wise Words
In my world, nothing ever goes wrong.
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
What does that mean?
That’s an eyes-open statement. It’s not his world that’s different, it’s him; his undistorted, unfiltered perspective. He has removed the artificial barrier of ego from the perceiver-perception-perceived union and so the three become one and perfection is the certain result.
— Jed McKenna
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Have an alive week!
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
