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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 175 (Feb 18, 2024) — Raise a Genius, Circle of Reading, Self-Regulation Cues, & 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
Who is in your “circle of reading”?
Years after reading it, I continue to be inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary). This book was Tolstoy’s last major work and in progress for 15 years before his death. The introduction written by Peter Sekirin says Tolstoy’s goal was delivering wisdom to the widest number of people. In Tolstoy’s own words:
- “To create a book for the masses … is incomparably more important and fruitful than to compose a novel of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time, and then is forever forgotten. The region of this art of the simplest, most widely accessible feeling is enormous, and it is as yet almost untouched.”
- “I cannot understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on Earth? … All our education should be directed to the accumulation of the cultural heritage of our ancestors, the best thinkers of the world.”
- “I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers … They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue … I would like to create a book … in which I could tell a person about his life, and about the Good Way of Life.”
One of my favorite ideas from the book is what Tolstoy calls a “circle of reading”:
- “The purpose of my book is not to give exact, word-for-word translations of thoughts created by other authors, but to use the great and fruitful intellectual heritage created by different writers to present for a wide reading audience an easily accessible, everyday circle of reading which will arouse their best thoughts and feelings.”
- “I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people … I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my Circle of Reading.”
- “I am busy with the Circle of Reading … I cannot do anything else … I have selected thoughts and grouped them into the following major topics: God, Intellect, Law, Love, Divine Nature of Mankind, Faith, Temptations, Word, Self-Sacrifice, Eternity, Good, Kindness, Unification of People (with God), Prayer, Freedom, Perfection, Work, etc.”
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Four Cues to Self-Regulate
When encountering differences is setting you off, try these four self-regulation cues from Diane Musho Hamilton (bonus: you may notice these pair nicely with the four steps in Tara Brach’s RAIN method recently covered in Sloww Sunday #173):
1. Cognitive: Remind yourself mentally that everything is okay.
2. Embodied: Feel the weight of your body. Feel every place in your body where you can sense gravity.
3. Breathing: Identify with the breath. The breath harmonizes body and mind.
4. Noticing: Notice the mind and the agitation of your thoughts. Just see if you can feel something like space in the mind and in the room. Experience space both on the interior of your experience and the exterior of your experience.
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
How to Raise a Genius
I finally read and thoroughly enjoyed the short book Raise a Genius! by László Polgár (Free PDF | Book Summary). The book covers how László and his wife, Klára, devised an intentional plan to privately educate all their kids as geniuses. As it turned out, they had three daughters who all became chess grandmasters. I’m not personally interested in chess, but I am interested in learning and development so that’s what my summary focuses on. Premium members get bonus access to 🔒20 characteristics of genius education (+ infographic).
“In the end I would like to prove that socialization, development within society, and in that context the genius-izing of a person, depends firstly not on their native biological powers: their way of life is not decided from birth; it must be considered principally as a social product, in practice, a result of nurture. To express it provocatively, I often say, ‘Genius is not born, genius is raised.'” — László Polgár
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Thinking by Writing & Writing by Imitation
It’s no secret that many people write specifically to think better. But, how do you write better? Here’s a lesser known “secret”: copy great writers. I’ll never forget this excerpt from the book Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion by Frank Visser about how Wilber learned to write:
- “During these early years Wilber showed little interest in writing itself; in fact, he disliked it. The compulsory essays he had to write at school held little appeal. Even after he had become a famous author, he rarely looked forward to the actual task of writing. The reason for this is that he sees himself first and foremost as a thinker: ‘Basically I’m just a thinker. And because I had some new ideas, relatively interesting ideas, I felt I should communicate them. And to communicate them I had to write them down. But I didn’t particularly enjoy that part.’ Once he had decided to write books, in order to develop his fluency as a writer he took Alan Watts — then a popular author — as a model: ‘I basically taught myself how to write using Alan Watts’ books. Alan Watts was one of the clearest writers I had read. He is really a great, clear, elegant writer. I took all thirteen or fourteen of his books and copied every one of them, literally sentence by sentence. I still have the notebooks downstairs. I wrote the books out, so that I could know the style of writing. Just getting a sense of being able to write clearly, and study syntax, seeing how you put paragraphs together.’ Over the years Wilber has gone on to develop his own clearly recognizable style, which is both abstract and theoretical as well as being extremely direct and personal, and sometimes even lyrical. Yet it is only recently, after having written eighteen books, that he has the feeling that he has finally mastered the art of writing to some extent.”
On why imitation works, The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul (Book Summary) says:
- “Imitation appears to be behind our success as a species. Developmental psychologists are increasingly convinced that infants’ and children’s facility for imitation is what allows them to absorb so much, so quickly … Imitation is at the root of our social and cultural life; it is, quite literally, what makes us human … Engaging in effective imitation is like being able to think with other people’s brains—like getting a direct download of others’ knowledge and experience. But contrary to its reputation as a lazy cop-out, imitating well is not easy. It rarely entails automatic or mindless duplication. Rather, it requires cracking a sophisticated code—solving what social scientists call the ‘correspondence problem,’ or the challenge of adapting an imitated solution to the particulars of a new situation. Tackling the correspondence problem involves breaking down an observed solution into its constituent parts, and then reassembling those parts in a different way; it demands a willingness to look past superficial features to the deeper reason why the original solution succeeded, and an ability to apply that underlying principle in a novel setting. It’s paradoxical but true: imitating well demands a considerable degree of creativity.”
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
The separate self is like the clown who takes the bow
Spiritual teacher Jean Klein came up with an impactful way to think about the separate self (outlined in this short post). Here’s how Francis Lucille and Rupert Spira describe it:
- The Idea: The separate self is like a clown that comes on the stage after a performance to claim all the applause. The ballerina’s performance finishes, the curtain comes down, the clown comes on and bows, and everybody claps. The clown feels, ‘I did it all’, but in fact, the clown didn’t dance.
- The Meaning: In retrospect, we look back at a succession of thoughts and imagine that there is a ‘chooser’ in the system between each thought. But, it’s not actually there. The notion of a chooser is simply itself a thought which appears retrospectively. The thought says, ‘I was there in between each thought choosing it’. It’s the clown that takes the bow—it wasn’t actually present, but it claims responsibility afterwards.
“‘I think, therefore I am’ presupposes that there is an ‘I’ that does the thinking. However, the thinking is producing that ‘I’ that thinks it’s doing the thinking. ‘I’ am not actually generating my thoughts about what ought to be—they’re just popping into awareness and the mind says, ‘Yep, that’s me, I did it.'” — Nicholas Lattanzio (🔒)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil:
“A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Pair with: Nietzsche quotes on free will, responsibility, causality, and more
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
