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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 179 (Mar 17, 2024) — Slow Productivity, Willing Will, Flowing Tao, & 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
Synthesizer Course Update
I’ve been heads down on the Synthesizer course the last couple weeks. It’s getting closer! I’m thrilled about how it’s all coming together—easily my biggest and best (in my opinion) project to date. It’s 8 modules that will end up totaling 75-100 lessons with tons of video demos. The modules follow a new synthesizing system that I haven’t shared anywhere else before. As far as I can tell, nothing like this exists.
In the meantime, here are a few posts to introduce you to synthesis, synthesizing, and synthesizers:
- 25 Synthesis Quotes to inspire the Aspiring Synthesizers
- “A Synthesizing Mind” by Howard Gardner (Book Summary)
- Synthesizers: Why the Future Belongs to the Idea Connectors
🔒 Premium members can dive deeper:
- Meta-Synthesis: 100+ Quotes on Synthesis, Synthesizers, & Synthesizing Minds
- How to be a Synthesizer with “A Synthesizing Mind” by Howard Gardner (+ Infographics)
- Maria Popova Synthesis: How to be a World-Class Synthesizer like “Brain Pickings” (+ Infographic)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
What is Slow Productivity?
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, just published a new book: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Amazon). I plan on reading all three of these books in the next few months and then compiling a Cal Newport synthesis for Premium members.
Here’s something fun: it looks like this is the difference in book cover design between the US (left) and UK (right). In the US, I guess you have to scream at people, even if you’re screaming to slow down…
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
On Willing Will
I often think about Schopenhauer’s quote:
- “Man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily. But this is because he already is what he wills.”
Here are a few others who have thoughts on Schopenhauer:
- “Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, that ‘a man can do as he will, but not will as he will’, has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.” — Einstein
- “Schopenhauer was very clear that beyond human representations, nature is unitary … There is only the one will of nature … The most important and the simplest thing about Schopenhauer is that the will, as an experience of irresistible desire, is the necessity … The ‘will’ is Schopenhauer’s word for the ‘universal mind’—it is the universe, God (provided you don’t separate God from nature), whatever you want to call it. There were no outside forces; there is nothing that could make determinations beyond the will because the will is all there is. What the will desires to do is what the will must do—and what the will must do, because it is what it is, is the expression of its irresistible desire. The desire and the necessity are one and the same thing.” — Bernardo Kastrup
- “Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s. He says when you reach a certain age and look back over your life it seems to have had an order—it seems to have been composed by someone—and those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. So, he says, who composed this plot? And, he said, just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Then, he says, just as those people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony—everything influencing and structuring everything else. And, he said, it’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters are dreaming too—and so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature. It’s a beautiful idea.” — Joseph Campbell
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Tao & Flow
The main problem with Western humans is that we are taught more about individuality than interconnectedness (see more here: 🔒Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?):
- “‘Tao’ is usually translated the course of nature or the way—the way it does it, the process of things … The Tao flows without obstruction whether we know it or not, for the not knowing is no more than a variant pattern of the flow.” — Alan Watts
- “If you understand, things are just as they are; If you do not understand, things are just as they are.” — Zen saying
- “There is a Tao, a Way, a Current of the Kosmos, from which we have not deviated and could never deviate.” — Ken Wilber
- “The universe as a whole is coherent, and anything incoherent we do is just part of the coherence of the universe.” — David Bohm
- “Man has but to right himself to find that the universe is right; and during the process of putting himself right he will find that as he alters his thoughts towards things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.” — James Allen
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Unitive State & No Self with Bernadette Roberts
I finally watched A Passage through Self (YouTube) with Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts. While the video wasn’t my favorite, I’ve started her book The Christian Contemplative Journey (which is really good so far) and have The Experience of No-Self on my reading list. You can also access Bernadette’s videos with handouts for free on this tribute website.
If you’re interested in what Bernadette had to say about the spiritual journey including religion, spirituality, ego, self, the unitive state and no self, check out these top quotes.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
“When we see who we really are, we don’t crave unnecessary objects … When the world is yours, why go for a million dollars? That’s chicken feed!” — Douglas Harding
Pair with:
- “On Having No Head” by Douglas Harding (Book Summary)
- 🔒How to See Clearly with the Headless Way Experiments (+ Visuals & Videos)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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