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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 128 (Jan 8, 2023) — Ultralearning, Human Development, Who am I?, & More
Sloww Sunday shares creations from Sloww along with curations of fascinating finds to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
🌎 Lighter Living
The Only 3 Books I Plan on Rereading (So Far)
A question on Twitter prompted me to think about books that are worth rereading. Of all the books I’ve read, I could only think of two (along with a research paper):
1. Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis) — This book is packed with so much smart stuff that it deserves a reread.
2. Ego Development Theory by Susanne Cook-Greuter (EDT Summary | Full Research Paper) — I highly recommend reading (and rereading) the full paper. If you’re a Premium member, you can also see 🔒my EDT self-assessment and 🔒how my journey maps to the EDT stages.
3. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (Book Summary) — In the future, I plan to read multiple translations side-by-side and create my own version of my favorite passages stitched together.
Explore more: How do I design a lighter life (Sloww Stage 1)?
🧭 Deeper Purpose
🆕 Book Summary: Ultralearning by Scott Young
Sometimes finding purpose can come as a byproduct of other learning projects we pursue in our lives. This book was a quick and easy read. Summaries of many more learning books will be published in the coming weeks!
“Learning, at its core, is a broadening of horizons, of seeing things that were previously invisible and of recognizing capabilities within yourself that you didn’t know existed … Ultralearning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.” — Scott Young
Get the eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
Explore more: How do I find higher purpose (Sloww Stage 2)?
🧠 Mental Wealth
🆕 Human Development 101: What are Horizontal & Vertical Development?
This new public post will introduce you to the concepts of horizontal and vertical development—how they differ, how they interconnect, and more. “Human development” (or psychological development) has completely transformed how I view myself, others, and humanity as a whole—it’s one of the 10 most life-changing ideas that I’ve ever discovered. This post also outlines 3 metaphors for human development—including a new one I’m proposing called the “library ladder.”
Get Mini Mind: 365 Daily Emails of Bite-Size Brain Food
Explore more: How do I master the mind (Sloww Stage 3)?
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
The Most Fascinating Question: ‘Who am I?’
Alan Watts’ birthday was this week (Jan 6th). It led me to discover a new quote from him:
“If we are honest with ourselves, the most fascinating problem in the world is ‘who am I?'” — Alan Watts
So, who am I?
- “The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: ‘Who am I?’ Or rather: ‘What is ‘I’?’ What is this thing I call ‘I’? What is this thing I call self? You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this? You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know who you are? My, you are still asleep.” — Anthony de Mello
- “Before you ask any other question, first ask the most fundamental question of your life: ‘Who am I?’ … What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought – or the emotion or sense perception – happens.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “Ramana Maharshi used to ask, ‘Who am I?’ We see now that this is a very deep question. Ask it ceaselessly, constantly. Ask it and you will notice that you are the answer. There is no intellectual answer—you are the answer. Be the answer, and everything will change.” — Michael Singer
- “If the enquiry ‘Who am I?’ were a mere mental questioning, it would not be of much value. The very purpose of self-enquiry is to focus the entire mind at its source. It is not a case of one ‘I’ searching for another ‘I’ … If the root ‘I’-thought is pulled out, all others are at the same time uprooted. Therefore seek the root ‘I’, question yourself ‘Who am I?’. Find out its source, and then all these other ideas will vanish and the pure Self will remain … The thought ‘Who am I?’, destroying all other thoughts, will itself finally be destroyed like the stick used for stirring the funeral pyre.” — Ramana Maharshi
- “The question ‘Who am I?’ is not an invitation to analyse the mind and to come to conclusions about its nature, nor is it a mantric formula, it is simply a tool which facilitates redirecting attention from the objects of thought and perception to the thinker and perceiver of them. The solution to the question ‘Who am I?’ is not to be found in or by the mind since the only real answer is the experience of the absence of mind. The belief that the mind can, by its own activities, reach the Self is the root of most of the misconceptions about the practice of self-enquiry.” — David Godman
Self-enquiry: If you’re ready to meet life face-to-face and ask this deep question, check out Ramana Maharshi’s approach called ‘self-enquiry’ (public post | 🔒Premium how-to guide)
Explore more: How do I embody wisdom (Sloww Stage 4)?
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
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