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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 155 (Sep 10, 2023) — Nervous System, Burning Questions, Seeing Clearly, & 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
Reading List for the Rest of the Year
Here’s what I plan to read over the next few months. I’m focused on the self, free will, and spirituality—in other words, I’m focused on the 🔒subject-object relationship which I’ve come to see as the interconnecting thread between science and spirituality.
✅ Finished reading (summaries coming):
- Waking Up (Harris) — Book Summary
- Know Yourself (Ibn Arabi & Balyani) — Book Summary
- The Science of the 1st Person (Harding) — Book Summary
- Being Aware of Being Aware (Spira) — Summary this week
- The Heart of Prayer (Spira) — Summary this week
- Integral Spirituality (Wilber)
- Integral Psychology (Wilber)
- Things That Bother Me (Strawson)
- First Person Action Research (Marshall)
- The Limits of Thought (Bohm & Krishnamurti)
- The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann)
📖 Now reading:
- I Am That (Nisargadatta Maharaj) — Live tweeting highlights
- The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth (Harding)
- The Subject of Experience (Strawson)
- The Evolving Self (Kegan)
- In Over Our Heads (Kegan)
- A Guide to the Subject-Object Interview (Kegan)
- Postautonomous Ego Development (Cook-Greuter)
📚 To read (not in order & will not get to them all):
- Determined (Sapolsky)
- Behave (Sapolsky)
- An Immanent Metaphysics (Landry)
- The Case Against Reality (Hoffman)
- Brief Peeks Beyond (Kastrup)
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman)
- The Spontaneous Self (Breer)
- The Mind Club (Wegner)
- The Illusion of Conscious Will (Wegner)
- Losing Ourselves (Garfield)
- Freedom from the Known (Krishnamurti)
- Krishnamurti to Himself (Krishnamurti)
- The Experience of No-Self (Roberts)
- The Christian Contemplative Journey (Roberts)
- The Book (Watts)
- The Wisdom of Insecurity (Watts)
- Cloud-Hidden (Watts)
- Small Arcs of Larger Circles (Bateson)
- Combining (Bateson)
🌎 Lighter Living
Last call for Nervous System Mastery
This is the last call for Jonny Miller’s latest cohort of his Nervous System Mastery course. I participated in the 2nd cohort and also made a guest appearance on Jonny’s Curious Humans podcast.
Jonny was nice enough to offer Sloww readers $200 off lifetime access with code SLOWW with this affiliate link (I rarely do affiliate sharing, but I think Jonny’s created something unique and needed today). If you go through the enrollment application, just mention “Sloww” in the application process.
Bonus: The infographic below shares some of the key breathing practices I learned. Sloww Premium members can get an overview of the course here: 🔒Behind the Scenes: What I Learned from the Nervous System Mastery Course by Jonny Miller
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Deeper Purpose
What’s the most burning question for you right now?
My existential crisis started with a question along the lines of, “Am I really here to kill myself with more work just to sell people more stuff they don’t need?”
It may seem simple, but that question has led to 8 years of deepening questions—curiously inquiring and pulling on the interconnected threads of wherever they lead and whatever unfolds. When I say “I’m living an ever-deeper inquiry into the self,” here’s what I mean based on my own lived experience:
There are a few big shifts here. In a general sense, you could consider them body, mind, and spirit:
Body: From 0 → 1, there’s the initial shift from an external-focus in life to an internal-focus. You realize you aren’t your physical stuff or external labels because there’s no happiness or fulfillment found in them. It sparks the start of the inner journey of discovering who you are.
Mind: 1 & 2 are “knowing thyself” psychologically and living based on what you learn about yourself (e.g. MBTI, Enneagram, DiSC, StrengthsFinder, Ikigai, etc). While it feels “self-directed” and “authentic,” you are still executing your socialization and still think you are your mind. In other words, you are “subject to” your psychology.
Spirit: 3 & 4 are “knowing thy Self” spiritually. At 3, things get really interesting. You realize you are not your mind because you can now see your mind “as object.” You also realize you had nothing to do with creating and shaping your mind, so what does it even mean to call it “your” mind? I thought I had questioned everything during my existential crisis (at stage 0 → 1), but I realized I never questioned my questioning. You could say you become “meta-minded.” This is when the deeper level of self-questioning and self-reflection begin. At 4, sages and seers tell us that subject and object merge in abiding nondual awareness where duality dissolves including the sense of separate self.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Better Mind
Seeing Clearly with the “Headless Way”
🆕 The Observer & The Observed: “The Science of the 1st Person” by Douglas Harding (Book Summary)
🔒 How to See Clearly with the Headless Way Experiments (+ Visuals & Videos)
I’m currently reading a bunch of Douglas Harding’s books on the headless way. Ever since reading “On Having No Head” (Book Summary), I haven’t stopped realizing I am, in fact, headless. Harding’s practical approach is universal because its simple experiments and exercises help people “see” experientially beyond words and mind.
Try it: I actually just tried the headless way at the dentist this week! It was essentially meditation during a dental cleaning. I consciously watched the hygienist’s hands and tools disappear into the void of my no-face. It’s the first time I’ve tried this, and I’d say this awareness is the most fun you can have at the dentist.
On a separate note: I keep saying the meta-crisis is a me-crisis. It was a pleasant surprise to see that Douglas Harding said the same thing in his own unique way (for reference below, SCIENCE-1 = 1st Person; SCIENCE-3 = 3rd person):
- “Though free from any such intention, is it the business of SCIENCE-1 to save the world from the consequences of SCIENCE-3. The current headaches—war, racial conflict, economic greed, the generation gap, crime and violence, mental illness, drug addiction, with all the other symptoms of mankind’s basic anxiety—come from thinking one has a head to ache, that one is what one isn’t, a thing or 3rd person. And everyone who is cured of this insane delusion automatically helps to cure others, and so does far more towards the world’s amelioration than the world could begin to suspect.” — Douglas Harding
As a bonus: Douglas Harding outlined the stages on the headless way path in various places: this short video, this more detailed overview, and this screenshot here:
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Beyond Mind
What’s the difference between religion and spirituality?
🆕 25+ Deep Quotes on the Differences between Religion & Spirituality
🆕 A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion: “Waking Up” by Sam Harris (Book Summary)
Spirituality is about questioning and investigating the nature of reality through your own direct, first person, lived experience. Wouldn’t more people be interested in spirituality if they knew that?
“Spirituality is to be awake; to drop your illusions; to never be at the mercy of any event, thing, or person; to have discovered the treasure inside of you. Religion is meant to lead you to this.” — Anthony de Mello
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Realization (Sloww Stage 4)
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
