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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 162 (Nov 19, 2023) — Heroic Potential, Inter-Being, Best Books, & 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 & Deeper Development
10 Best Books of the Year
Here are my favorite books of the year in no particular order (out of 30+):
- Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, & Mark McDaniel (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary)
- Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning by Jack Mezirow (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis)
- Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain by David Eagleman (Book Summary)
- Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis)
- The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann (Book Summary coming)
- Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy by Ken Wilber (Book Summary coming)
- The Science of the 1st Person: Its Principles, Practice and Potential by Douglas Harding (Book Summary)
- Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice by Shunryu Suzuki (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary)
- Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis)
- The Perfume of Silence by Francis Lucille (Book Summary coming)
“Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.” — Joseph Campbell
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Areté by Brian Johnson
I hate to say it, but the new release Areté: Activate Your Heroic Potential (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis) wasn’t for me. It’s 1000+ pages long, and even the audiobook is a whopping 20 hours long!
But, here’s a secret: you can get pretty much everything from this 1-hour video published 3 years ago that Brian called an overview of his life’s work (I also previously summarized the video here).
“I looked into a range of Ph.D. programs but couldn’t find one that integrated everything I wanted to study, so I playfully (emphasis on playfully) decided to give myself my own Ph.D. in Optimal Living—integrating ancient wisdom, modern science and practical tools across a range of domains (from nutrition and psychology to business and peak performance) to optimize and actualize.” — Brian Johnson
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Last chance to read this free Premium post!
There’s been a very positive response to this new post so far: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis? I’ll be changing this to a Premium post soon, so read it while it’s public!
Our #1, ultimate challenge, root cause, generator function, most urgent and important problem is: ourselves, or our “selves” (in other words, who we think we are; we are our minds; our present and predominant subject-object relationship).
The solution to the me-crisis: awareness of our “selves” (in other words, more people realizing they are not who they think they are; more people realizing they are aware of their minds; more people questioning, investigating, witnessing, and transcending their socialized minds; more people changing/developing their subject-object relationship).
“Despite all the concrete problems faced by society, the most pressing problems are actually ‘in our heads’ (i.e., in our minds and souls, we are in a crisis of the psyche) … The meta-crisis—the crisis that contains all of the other crises—is something like a crisis of the human mind … There are a large number of crises drawing increasing amounts of public attention, such as the ecological, economic, immigration, geopolitical, and energy crises. But there is also an invisible crisis unfolding within our own minds and cultures that is getting much less attention. This is the meta-crisis, which has to do with how humans understand themselves and the world … It is the psyche—the human dimension—that is in the direst of straits.” — Zak Stein
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
The Ultimate Free Will Guide
If you’re sincerely interested in free will, I’ve somehow compiled quite the rabbit hole on that subject (and interconnected subjects like the birth lottery, moral responsibility, agency attribution, etc) over the last couple years.
This new post is your go-to guide and jumping off point that links to everything I’ve ever published on the topic: The Ultimate Free Will Guide for Open Minds & Sincere Seekers
“Free will scepticism is an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone – and that you’ve therefore only yourself to blame if you fail. It’s a reminder that accidents of birth might affect the trajectories of our lives far more comprehensively than we realise, dictating not only the socioeconomic position into which we’re born, but also our personalities and experiences as a whole: our talents and our weaknesses, our capacity for joy, and our ability to overcome tendencies toward violence, laziness or despair, and the paths we end up travelling. There is a deep sense of human fellowship in this picture of reality – in the idea that, in our utter exposure to forces beyond our control, we might all be in the same boat, clinging on for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck.” — Oliver Burkeman
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
What is interbeing?
These wise words from Thich Nhat Hanh on ‘interbeing’ underscore the interconnectedness and interdependence of all elements of existence (Wikipedia or videos here and here):
- “About thirty years ago I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word ‘togetherness,’ but I finally came up with the word ‘interbeing.’ The verb ‘to be’ can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. ‘To be’ is always to ‘inter-be’ … We do not exist independently. We inter-are. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me … Whatever I am doing, the energy of mindfulness enables me to do it as ‘us,’ through interbeing, not as ‘me.’” — Thich Nhat Hanh
- “To be means to inter-be. A flower has to inter-be with everything else. She has to inter-be with the sunshine, with the cloud, with everything else. She doesn’t have a separate existence. Being means co-being. Existing means co-existing … Interbeing means you cannot be by yourself alone. You have to co-be, inter-be, with everything else … You carry Mother Earth, you carry the sunshine, you carry the rain, everything. This is not a ‘me’, this is a ‘we’. We inter-are. If we remove the element of parents, ancestors, food, education, air, water, there is no ‘us’ left. So, ‘we’ means the whole cosmos.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
Alan Watts coined the similar term ‘gowith’ or ‘goeswith’:
- “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 … 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.” — Alan Watts
- “It should be obvious that the human being ‘goeswith’ the rest of the universe, even though we say in popular speech, ‘I came into this world.’ Now, it is not true that you came into this world, you came out of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree apples, the solar system in which we live—and therefore the galaxy in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live—that system ‘peoples’ … But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature; that all these things ‘gowith’ us.” — Alan Watts
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
