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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 183 (Apr 14, 2024) — GRACE Method, Separate Selves, Free Will, & 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 Coming (Very) Soon
It’s 8 modules totaling 75 lessons. It’s filled with videos, infographics, and text. It’s self-paced, lifetime access, and offers options to add on live calls and coaching. And, I can’t wait to share it with you!
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Cultivate Compassion with the GRACE Method
If you want to cultivate compassionate interactions, try Joan Halifax’s GRACE Method (see more on this new quotes page):
- Gathering attention: How do we get really grounded? How do we focus? How do we get really present? By gathering our attention—usually through the medium of the body.
- Recalling intention: How do we touch into our motivation—the ethical foundation for what it means to be a full human being in our world today?
- Attuning to self/other: Attuning first to oneself at the levels of body (somatic), heart (affective), and mind (cognitive). Really being able to tune into our biases, to see where we’re at, and to prime those networks that actually relate to our capacity to sense into the experience of others—and then sensing into the experience of others.
- Considering what will serve: To use insight, metacognition, our basic wisdom, as a means for engaging in interactions in ways that are really principled.
- Engaging and ending: To engage with people, to engage with communities, and then to complete that engagement.
“We can do it now, that’s the beautiful part of it. We don’t have to wait. We can gather our attention now, we can remember really why we’re here, we can attune to ourselves and be really present, we can sense into others, we can look deeply into our fundamental wisdom and see what will really serve, and then we engage.” — Joan Halifax
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
The Happenstance of Who You Are
Susanne Cook-Greuter (creator of Ego Development Theory) recently posted on LinkedIn about the diversity of identity formation and human experience. She reminds us:
- “No one is just a stage. And no measure can explain what it is like to be an individual human. What it is like to walk in your shoes, look through your eyes, feel your feelings and think your thoughts etc.”
First, that reminds me of a couple of my favorite quotes:
- “If you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.” — Axiom of Clinical Psychology
- “We can see other people’s behaviour, but not their experience.” — R. D. Laing
Cook-Greuter goes on to note that while we share the human condition, the following contexts, variables, and complex interactions influence how we make sense of our lived experience (and who we are and can become):
- Historical, geographic, cultural, language and life circumstances, i.e. the happenstance of birth and growing up.
- Brain variables including genetic and neurobiological factors; cognitive ability such as speed of processing, memory strength etc. and impairments.
- Physical and psychological health: age, height, weight, skin & eye color, sensory acuity etc. Mental health, trauma, injuries…
- Personality type, traits, temperament, motivation, preferences.
- Multiple Intelligences, creative/artistic talents and intuitive sensibilities and gifts.
Note that in #1 above she specifically called out the “happenstance of birth and growing up.” But, from my perspective, all points #1-5 are part of the “lottery of birth” (in other words, you chose none of them, and they affect everything about who you are).
🔒 Premium member deep dive:
- Lottery of Birth Synthesis: How to See Yourself and the World Drastically Differently (+ Infographic)
- Behind the Scenes: Dissecting my own Lottery of Birth Ticket
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
The Root of the Meta-Crisis is Separation
Continuing with the theme of Ego Development Theory, it explains a lot about our current meta-crisis. My take is that the meta-crisis is a me-crisis (🔒). In other words, it’s a crisis rooted in thinking we are separate selves.
The first half of the EDT journey arc (see image below) is about increasing separation, and the second half is about increasing integration (aka deconstructing separation). Cook-Greuter says:
- First half of EDT Journey: “Finding your own voice and becoming your separate self identity as an adult is the most widely supported and rewarded movement especially in the modern West with its emphasis on agency and individualism. The transformation from being a part of a group identity to finding one’s separate identity and finding one’s voice…”
- Second half of EDT Journey: “The transition from conventional to postconventional meaning-making also signifies an overall, large-scale shift from increasing differentiation and the creation of an independent self-identity towards increasing integration and deconstruction of the separation developed in the first half of the growth trajectory … The second half can also be likened to an ongoing individuation towards a more holistic, full-bodied, and integrated self that is fully aware of its interdependence with other systems and one that can take a perspective on its fundamental non-separateness.”
That all makes sense, but here’s the kicker: ~80% of Western humans are still developmentally “stuck” on the first half of the journey—meaning they still think they are separate selves. And, as Cook Greuter says:
- “Our separate self-sense in the West has caused much of the trouble we are in now.”
So, the most urgent and important project of humanity is to wake up the West beyond the “watershed” (the dotted line in the middle of the journey):
🔒 Premium member deep dive:
- Stream of Consciousness: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
- Behind the Scenes: My Ego Development Theory Self-Assessment
- Behind the Scenes: How my Personal Development Journey maps to Ego Development Theory (Sloww Stages vs EDT Stages)
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
The Advaita Vedanta Spiritual Lineage on Free Will & Freedom
In Sloww Sunday #172, I highlighted the nondual “direct path” spiritual lineage of Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, and Atmananda Krishna Menon.
Now, I’m down the rabbit hole of the Advaita Vedanta spiritual lineage of Swami Sarvapriyananda, Swami Vivekananda, and Ramakrishna. Interestingly, the 3 stages of free will understanding that Swami Sarvapriyananda outlines are incredibly close to the 3 stages of understanding I outline here under “how to understand everyone” (🔒). So, I synthesized everything in this new post: Are there Stages of Seeing Free Will? (🔒)
Swami Sarvapriyananda piqued my interest, so I investigated what Swami Vivekananda said about free will and freedom and what Ramakrishna said about the doer and God’s will. It’s the strangest thing that Eastern philosophy and spirituality has understood there’s no free will on the level of the body-mind for hundreds (or thousands) of years, and the vast majority of the Western world still doesn’t get it even today!
“The Western man is a body first, and then he has a soul; with us a man is a soul and spirit, and he has a body. Therein lies a world of difference … (A) most vital point, which alone marks characteristically, most prominently, most vitally, the difference between the Indian and the Western mind, and it is this, that everything is in the soul … The Western man does not want to think his mind is governed by law. In India it was accepted as soon as it was propounded by the most ancient Indian system of philosophy. There is no such thing as freedom of the mind; it cannot be.” — Swami Vivekananda
🔒 Premium member deep dive:
- 🆕 Stream of Consciousness: Are there Stages of Seeing Free Will?
- Behind the Scenes: How I Live with the Lottery of Birth & Lack of Free Will (1 Year Later)
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
From the new post 25+ Deep Quotes on the Open Secrets of Spirituality:
“This is my secret: I don’t mind what happens.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
What’s that mean?
“(Krishnamurti) didn’t mean to imply that he did not care. He simply meant that his happiness was not invested in the content of experience … It means that we are no longer seeking fulfillment in objective experience—that is in objects, substances, states of mind, activities, relationships … He wasn’t speaking on behalf of a temporary, finite mind with all its likes and dislikes. He was speaking on behalf of awareness: I, awareness, that with which all experience is known, that in which all experience appears, that out of which all experience is made. That I, the only I that truly is, don’t mind what happens.” — Rupert Spira
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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