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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 170 (Jan 14, 2024) — Less Spending, More Wisdom, God Games, & 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 this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📘🌀 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
Are you moving toward wisdom?
The image above is just one representation of increasing wisdom.
Another is DIKW (Wikipedia) which has countless visual interpretations online (this is just one of them):
And, another is Bloom’s taxonomy (Wikipedia). Fun Fact: The original version of Bloom’s taxonomy from the 1950s included ‘synthesis’ as the second-highest level. When it was redesigned in the early 2000s, it made synthesis the highest level but changed the name to ‘create’. Either way, it’s clear that synthesizing is one of the highest-order thinking skills one can have:
“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” — T.S. Eliot
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Do you know where all your money goes?
Several years ago, I manually tracked how we spent every dollar and compared it to the prior year. It was eye-opening and helped us cut our spending 30% year-over-year! The simple act of being more conscious of tracking spending keeps intentionality top of mind and makes you question every purchase. This year, I’m going to pick up the tracking again to see if we’ve kept up the good habits.
Highlights here: Average American Spending vs Sloww’s Household Expenses (& How we Cut our Spending 30% in a Year!)
- “The new roadmap for money says that there is something called ‘enough.’ Enough is this vibrant, vital place—an awareness about the flow of money and stuff in your life, in light of your true happiness and your sense of purpose and values. Your ‘enough point’ (having enough) is having everything you want and need to have a life you love full self-expression with nothing in excess. It’s not minimalism. It’s not less is more (because sometimes more is more), but it’s that sweet spot, the Goldilocks point. Enough for me is one of the absolute fulcrums between the old roadmap for money and the new roadmap for money … Once people start to pay attention to the flow of money and stuff in their lives in this way, their consumption drops by about 20-25% naturally because that’s the amount of unconsciousness that you have in your spending. So, when you become conscious, that falls away and many people say they don’t even know what they used to spend their money on.” — Vicki Robin
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
What is your flywheel?
What is the thing you do that makes you can’t help but do another thing that then makes you can’t help but do another thing—almost like all the things are just happening by themselves? You may have found your flywheel!
Jim Collins describes the “flywheel effect” like this:
- “A flywheel is an underlying, compelling logic of momentum … there’s an inevitability built in. If you do A, you almost can’t help but do B. And if you do B, you almost can’t help but do C. And if you do C, you almost can’t help but do D. And around and around. And it’s driven around because there’s an underlying connection. There’s a logical sequence that builds dynamic momentum, because A drives B drives C drives D and around back to the top of the loop. Then, if you can kind of stand back and then say, ‘We need to engage in the very hard thinking of figuring out exactly how our flywheel turns. What is our flywheel?’ In a way that truly has that inexorable driving momentum within it.”
Here’s how Jim Collins describes his personal flywheel:
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Are you questioning your programming?
You can use any term you like for ‘programming’: socialization, conditioning, enculturation, etc. According to Ego Development Theory, ~80% of Western humans haven’t yet questioned their socialization. From everything I’ve explored, Anthony de Mello is one of the best teachers for getting you to question your programming. Here are some highlights from a new Anthony de Mello quotes page:
- “Would any of you in your right mind sit down and knowingly, and willingly, and deliberately upset yourselves? It’s as if this is something beyond our control. So, stop blaming yourself. This has been stamped into you, you’ve been programmed into this, you’ve been conditioned this way. This is what you got to understand … If you would understand it, you’d be free.” — Anthony de Mello
- “Who is responsible for the programming? Not you. It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and so-called needs; your values, your tastes, your attitudes.” — Anthony de Mello
- “One must take responsibility wisely … It’s no maturity to blame yourself when you’re not to blame. You’re not doing it deliberately. This comes from your programming. You’re not blaming your programming, you’re understanding it … When you bump into reality, there’s a pain caused within you. That pain is not caused by reality, but something that’s happening inside of you. You’re not producing that deliberately. Who would deliberately want to cause pain to themselves? Now you have to understand what that something is. Why is it with some people this process doesn’t go on or they’ve released themselves from it, whereas with others it does? This is responsibility—to understand. And, as a result of understanding, to be freed from it.” — Anthony de Mello
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Is God playing a game of hide-and-seek?
I recently updated this post with some of the all-time best Alan Watts quotes and came across these:
- “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.”
- “Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.“
- “There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself.”
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
