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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 150 (Jul 16, 2023) — Accepting & Appreciating, Edge of You, Finding Your Guru, & More
Sloww Sunday shares my latest and greatest creations and curations 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.
📚 Lifelong Learning
Making sense of the Blind Men & The Elephant
The parable of the blind men and the elephant seems to keep coming up. If you aren’t familiar with it, start here. Here are 3 ways to interpret it:
1. It’s about disciplinary perspectives:
- “The lesson is that simply having six different experts from six different disciplines examine an object will likely yield at least six different understandings of the object … We can compare these men to disciplinary experts who are trying to understand a complex phenomenon (i.e., the elephant). They naturally concentrate on that part of the phenomenon that their disciplinary training has taught them to focus on: One disciplinary expert concentrates on the trunk, another focuses on the tusks, and others study the ears, body, legs, or tail. Their disciplinary training has equipped them to approach the problem with a specialized toolkit of assumptions, epistemology, concepts, theories, and methods. The disciplines are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing: probing deeply into those parts of the problem (and only those parts) that they are uniquely designed to study and producing narrow, specialized understandings of it. Instead of dismissing conflicting insights as ‘mere opinion’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ it is best to view their work as partial or incomplete.” — Allen Repko, Rick Szostak, & Michelle Phillips Buchberger
2. It’s about being interdisciplinary:
- “What is lacking, of course, is any attempt to integrate these conflicting insights, insofar as this is possible, into one composite description or image of the object so as to provide a more comprehensive understanding of it. This understanding is not ‘owned’ by one discipline or insight. We extend this analogy to include a seventh blind person representing the interdisciplinarian who queries the other six about the object. That person then integrates the information provided by the six disciplinarians in an attempt to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the elephant … It is left to the interdisciplinarian to look at the ‘big picture’ and research the whole elephant. We do this, not by duplicating the narrow and specialized work of the disciplinary specialists, but by critically examining their multiple and conflicting insights, integrating them, and producing a more comprehensive understanding which will lead to a workable solution. This, in a nutshell, describes interdisciplinary process.” — Allen Repko, Rick Szostak, & Michelle Phillips Buchberger
3. It’s about what it’s possible to communicate:
- “My question is not what did the blind guys find out about the elephant, but rather, what were they doing before they came across the elephant? Were they arguing about stage theory? Were they drinking in a pub? Were they doing improvisational dance? It matters to the way they perceived and described the various elephant anatomical bits … What metaphors were they sharing? What is it possible to communicate? … The question is not how did they describe the elephant, but who are they to each other? … The communication is not what is said, it’s what it was possible to say.” — Nora Bateson
Explore more: 25+ posts on Lifelong Learning (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Accepting & Appreciating People for Who they Are
At some point, I started saving quotes on accepting and appreciating the beauty in who people already are. Before I knew it, I had compiled enough for a post. Quotes feature: Carl Rogers, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass, Carl Sagan, and more talking about sunsets, trees, lettuce, roses, deer, and much more.
New Post: 10 Thoughtful Quotes on Accepting & Appreciating People for Who they Are
- “Let’s take the bees and the flowers. In a world of no bees there’s no flowers; in a world of no flowers—no bees. Because bees and flowers are aspects of the same organism, or organization. They go together, so I invent the word ‘goeswith’ to indicate organic relationships. And we as human beings, obviously, we ‘gowith’ an enormous cosmos of geological, botanical, and zoological events. And we are entirely dependent on them, and we cannot treat them as really and truly separate species. The bees are as much a part of us as they are a part of the flowers, because we need vegetables—and we can’t have those without bees or other insects. So what we’ve got is a universe that all hangs together, and where each so-called part of it implies all the other parts … There is really and truly no way of separating out independent things. And this is difficult for people to understand because of our method of motion. A plant is understandable as something growing out of the earth because it’s rooted. But human beings wander about on legs. And we don’t seem so stuck to things as plants do. And therefore we have delusions of separation.” — Alan Watts
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Deeper Purpose
Revisiting the Birth Lottery & Free Will
It’s becoming clear that a growing number of humans get the lottery of birth: Buffett, Popova, Housel, Harris, Spinoza, Russell, Eagleman, Schmachtenberger, Cook-Greuter, Spira, Harari, Dobelli, Strawson, Cashmore, and many more. Two new posts share all the highlights:
New Post: 50+ Birth Lottery Quotes to Question Who You Are
New Post: 10 Deep Quotes on Free Will from Yuval Noah Harari
- “When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that you choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint and born into a world of circumstances about which we have no choice in our most formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment means that the citizens of our society possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not free-will choices of the citizens; these are the hands of cards we’re dealt. Because we did not choose the factors that affected the formation and structure of our brain, the concepts of free will and personal responsibility begin to sprout with question marks.” — David Eagleman
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Where’s the edge of you?
Nora Bateson went viral a couple years ago when she posted:
If you’ve been following me for a bit, you’re probably well aware that I’m a fan of developmental stage theories—in particular Susanne Cook-Greuter’s ego development theory and Robert Kegan’s subject-object relationship. So, when I hear someone say it’s BS, I want to fully understand their perspective. As usual, I went as deep as possible to get the most holistic view of Bateson’s thoughts.
New Post: Is Developmental Stage Theory BS? (Nora Bateson Synthesis)
Here’s a quick highlight of where Bateson is coming from. This was her response when someone asked her, “What can I do? I’m a being that feels some sense of agency and responsibility for what’s happening in the world.”
- “The best thing that we can do is, first of all, start to explore that notion of your own self as complex. And then, pretty soon, you come to this question of, ‘Where is the edge of me?’ And, in that question, there is an opening. Where is the edge of me? Do I end at the edge of my skin? Am I the edge of my bank account or my tax ID number? Am I the edge of my family? Am I the edge of my community? My nation? Am I the edge of the biosphere? Where’s the edge of me? In that question and that exploration there’s a very active shift, and the possibilities of what you can do. Otherwise, you end up in a nasty little paradox around: if I do something good for me, it’s going to be bad for you. If I do something good for my nation, it’s going to be bad for your nation. If I do something good for my family, it might not be good for a family over there. Recognition of that interdependence that we are all in is a shift, and there’s just another order of questions and possibilities that come out of that shift. I’m interested in the unprecedented possibilities that come out of that recognition.” — Nora Bateson
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Beyond Mind
Who is your guru?
Many people talk about finding their guru—the teacher who instantly resonates with you. For me, it’s never been someone who is just spirituality, or just philosophy, or just science—it’s the interdisciplinary synthesizers. So far, my favorites seem to be David Bohm & Douglas Harding.
David Bohm: I’ve read Thought as a System (Book Summary), but I also want to read Wholeness and the Implicate Order and watch all his conversations with Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Douglas Harding: I’ve read On Having No Head (Book Summary), and now I’m reading The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. I’ve also watched a bunch of his videos on YouTube which I highly recommend checking out.
Who is your guru?
- “What I’m up to, at its briefest, is to wake up to the mystery of myself.” — Douglas Harding
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Realization (Sloww Stage 4)
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
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