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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 177 (Mar 3, 2024) — Real Wealth, Lovingkindness Practice, Frequency Holders, & 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 pursuing holistic human development?
Although I read the books last year, I finally summarized Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology (Book Summary) and Integral Spirituality (Book Summary). The former was great; the latter not as much. Most importantly, they both cover the developing subject-object relationship which is the focus of this new Premium synthesis: 🔒Integral Psychology & Spirituality Synthesis: How to Develop Holistically (10+ Visuals)
I’ve also added the following quote from Ken Wilber to the post: 🔒Stream of Consciousness: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
- “The ecological crisis—or Gaia’s main problem—is not pollution, toxic dumping, ozone depletion, or any such. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have developed to the postconventional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness, wherein they will automatically be moved to care for the global commons. And human beings develop to those postconventional levels, not by learning systems theories, but by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia.” — Ken Wilber
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
What is real financial independence?
This week I’m curating some of my favorite quotes from Vicki Robin, co-author of the classic book Your Money or Your Life (which I’ll be reading soon). Pair the quotes below with Vicki’s stages of the financial independence journey from Sloww Sunday #67:
- “Financial independence is the process of liberating your mind and liberating yourself from debt and obsessive materialism … Everybody needs to be on this path. It’s a self-preservation path … The FI path is a certain kind of awakening that the pattern that’s been presented to me of the way to live your life does not sufficiently cover the territory of my life.”
- “The first level of financial independence, the one that’s most important to me, is waking up—being able to extricate your mind from the messages of the society about who you are, what’s important, what you have to have, what makes life worth living—being able to have a witness at that level to be able to question who wins if I buy this, who wins if I believe this, why am I doing this, why am I buying this, what do I really want? Being able to wake up from that is the basis of financial independence … All of the paths will lead eventually to these questions of: who am I, who are my people, what am I here for, where do I belong, how much is enough?”
- “You have to want something more than you want stuff. You have to want something more than the life that you have in order to make the journey worthwhile. Otherwise, it feels like deprivation.”
- “You designed a work life. Now design a life work … Don’t be afraid to shop around for where you come alive.”
- “In our society, we have conflated four things that are different, but we put them all in the same bucket: work, job, income, and identity. This is why a lot of people go through an identity crisis when they get FI … All FI does is give you a fuller opportunity to encounter these deeper issues around identity, purpose, belonging.”
- “For me, FI has simply been the freedom to pursue a higher purpose—to grow spiritually, to learn, to create and to serve … I don’t see financial independence as the ultimate goal. I see it as just a ticket to the greatest show on earth—the earth itself with all her beauty, complexity, critters and currently crises. The opportunity to ask the Mary Oliver questions: What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? I’m writing this to invite you to look past the numbers to the meaning of life.”
- “The work of existence is to metabolize the energy that’s coursing through you, and make it into something that you yourself deem as worthy. And, most often, it’s making a contribution in the lives of other people … We are designed to work for the benefit of all.”
- “The new roadmap 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, and your ‘enough point’ is having everything you want and need to have a life you love and full self-expression with nothing in excess … 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.”
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Could your purpose be a “frequency holder”?
The term “frequency holder” sounded like spiritual woo-woo when I first heard it years ago, but it makes a lot more sense to me now. Eckhart Tolle mentions it in his book A New Earth (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis) as well in multiple videos (here and here). Here’s what it means:
- “In past ages, they would probably have been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on his planet. I call them the frequency holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through ‘just being’. In this way, they endow the seemingly insignificant with profound meaning. Their task is to bring spacious stillness into this world by being absolutely present in whatever they do. There is consciousness and therefore quality in what they do, even the simplest task. Their purpose is to do everything in a sacred manner. As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives.”
- “Human beings have different callings and different destinies in whatever they do as a person. A frequency holder is somebody who is not called upon by a desire or a destiny to do something big—to create a big enterprise, to have a big impact on the world, to set up some big structure, to manifest something big—but somebody who is happy doing small things with great care, love, and most importantly, in a state of presence … So, this person holds the frequency of presence, and these people are very important too … This human being affects far more people than is obvious on the surface of things because whatever happens to one affects the totality—all humans are connected at a deeper level.”
- “Maybe you’re a frequency holder who’s not interested in creating. You can just be—aligned with the source. And yet, there too, you’re still here in this dimension—something of the source will flow through you into this dimension.”
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
What is lovingkindness?
I recently explored Sharon Salzberg and curated some of her top quotes on suffering, happiness, love, lovingkindness, interconnection, mindfulness, meditation, breathing, and more.
- Defined: The term lovingkindness is the common translation of the word metta in the Pali language, the language of the original Buddhist text. It’s a state of freedom of the heart—a state of inclusion and paying attention differently to ourselves and to others. The literal translation of metta is friendship, so it’s like developing the art of friendship with ourselves and with others—a profound knowing that our lives are interconnected and intertwined.
- What it’s not: Lovingkindness doesn’t mean you like everybody, it doesn’t mean you approve of everybody—but you know deeply our lives are linked to one another.
- What it is: Lovingkindness is a deep, deep acknowledgement and live, vital sense of connection. It’s understanding the truth of life that we’re part of this greater web, this greater whole, this network—that our lives have something to do with one another and all impact one another. It’s wisdom, insight, seeing clearly, and understanding things as they are based on a truth of interconnectedness—the truth of an interconnected universe, the interconnected nature of things, and how interconnected our lives are.
- The practice: We can respond to one another from the place of understanding. The practice of lovingkindness is most likened to a practice of generosity—it’s like generosity of the spirit. It cultivates space, opening, expansion, and a bigger sense of who we are by looking at ourselves from another angle and stretching how we pay attention so that we can come closer to the fundamental truth.
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Wisdom from Watts
It’s long overdue, but I finally read a couple Alan Watts books: The Book (Book Summary) & The Art of Contemplation (Book Summary). The second is a short book written in his own handwriting that you can read online for free. Stay tuned because I’ve got more from Watts coming this week!
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
Never knew this is the video where one of the most famous Alan Watts quotes came from:
“This is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you’re doing in the here and now—and instead of calling it work, realize that this is play.” — Alan Watts
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
