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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 169 (Jan 7, 2024) — How to Read, Need to Win, Presence of God, & 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
How to Read a Book
If you plan on reading more books this year, why not first learn how to effectively and efficiently do so with the classic How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren (Book Summary). The 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics is the most practical and actionable guide out there and includes bonuses on how to skim, how to mark a book intelligently, and how to take notes at the different levels of reading.
3 Key Ideas:
- Syntopical Reading: This is the most active, effortful, complex, and systematic kind of reading. It’s reading authors/books widely separated in space and time as if they were members of the same universe of discourse, and it gives you the ability to construct an analysis of a subject that may not be in any of the individual books.
- Dialectical Detachment/Objectivity: When you are reading, you should look at all sides and take no sides. Dialectical detachment/objectivity should be maintained throughout all reading. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author’s views on an issue with an actual quotation from their text.
- Coming to Terms: Reading across many books and authors is largely an exercise in translation. If an author uses a word in one meaning and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them but they have not come to terms. It’s up to the reader to establish terms and bring the authors to them (not the other way around).
“We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.” — Mortimer Adler
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
New Year, New Challenges
The beginning of a new year is a great time to start a new lifestyle challenge or experiment. Here are 25+ intentional ideas to get started.
Challenges completed:
- ✅ No-Buy Year — This was a no-buy year specifically for clothing purchases (which I just kept going after the year ended).
Challenges in progress:
- 👣 Wise Walk (6/365 days)
- 🔒 No-Alcohol Year (252/365 days)
- 🔒 No-Caffeine Year (60/365 days)
- 🔒 No-Social Year (70/365 days) — I deleted all social media apps from my phone (will still use them here and there when on my computer), but this challenge is intended to cut down both social media time and phone screen time dramatically.
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
The Need to Win
Here’s a powerful passage from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton:
“When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets—
He is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting—
And the need to win
Drains him of power.”
Anthony de Mello shares this same passage in Awareness (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary) and follows it by saying:
- “Isn’t that an image of what most people are? When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. Now there’s human living for you. That’s what life is all about. That can only come from awareness. And in awareness you will understand that honor doesn’t mean a thing. It’s a social convention, that’s all. That’s why the mystics and the prophets didn’t bother one bit about it. Honor or disgrace meant nothing to them. They were living in another world, in the world of the awakened.” — Anthony de Mello
Pair with: The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey (Book Summary + 🔒Premium Summary)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Favorite Thoughts on Free will
Bernardo Kastrup may have my favorite thoughts on free will so far. He comes at the subject from a scientific perspective, but it matches the spiritual perspective of those like Rupert Spira. I just listened to this new video where Kastrup clarifies some of his thinking on free will (🔒summarized in the Sloww Society community). More here:
- 25 Deep Quotes on Free Will from Bernardo Kastrup
- 🔒Bernardo Kastrup Synthesis: Everything about Free Will (+ Infographic)
“What nature decides to do is both what it desperately wants to do and what it must do. What nature does is a result of what nature is. Nature wills what it wills because it is what it is, and it can’t will otherwise without being something that it is not. But, of course, it is what it is, so it wills what it does. There is no external environment beyond nature to impose choices on nature. What nature chooses to do comes out of itself, therefore it comes out of its being. It’s a result of what it is. So, nature wills what it must will given what it is. But, it does make choices. It couldn’t make different choices because it isn’t different. Nature is what it is and not something else. It does make choices, but its choices are a direct consequence of what it is. So, from that perspective, what nature wills is what it must, and what nature must is exactly what it wills. So, there is no distinction at the level of nature between free will and determinism.” — Bernardo Kastrup
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
What is Christian Nonduality?
For Jesus’ birthday, I read some short books by Marshall Davis that were great:
- The Practice of the Presence of God In Modern English by Brother Lawrence and Marshall Davis (Book Summary)
- Experiencing God Directly: The Way of Christian Nonduality by Marshall Davis (Book Summary)
“There are two basic approaches to Divine Truth. One is self-inquiry, relentlessly pursuing the question, ‘Who am I?’ until the answer is experienced directly and immediately. When we see who we truly are, we see who God truly is. The other way is to ask ‘Who is God?’ When we know God, then we know ourselves. The first approach is most commonly used in Eastern spiritual traditions. The second approach is found in Western traditions. An equivalent question asked by Christians is ‘Who is Christ?’ There are two ways of understanding Christ: Christology from below (beginning with Jesus’ human nature) and Christology from above (starting with his divine nature). When it comes to spiritual inquiry, East starts ‘from below.’ asking ‘Who am I?’ West starts ‘from above,’ asking ‘Who is God?'” — Marshall Davis
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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