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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 187 (May 19, 2024) — Busyness & Slowness, Found Purpose, Immediate Experience, & 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
Become the Best Thinker You Know
In case you missed it, the brand new Synthesizer course launched a week ago! Here are a few quick updates:
1. Free Live Calls: For a limited time, I’ve decided to include everything in the base price: course + community + calls ($500 value for live group calls included free)! To make all of this a total steal and no-brainer, you can even stack the coupon code FIRST50 for $50 off. Both the free live calls and coupon code are only valid for the first 50 students—35/50 spots have been filled, so don’t wait!
2. Course Comparison: With the combo of self-paced plus live calls, this now makes it one of the most affordable and highest value courses on the market. I compared 50+ courses here (look where Synthesizer is on the spreadsheet)—many start in the $thousands without delivering this much value. Not to mention, you get lifetime access!
3. Installment Pricing: You can now join with 4 quarterly payments instead of paying the entire price up front to help make it more financially accessible. My goal is for everyone who wants to take the course to take the course.
Bonus: In only a week since doors opened, the first synthesizers have incredible things to say:
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Busyness & Slowness
When I first discovered slow living, I had been working 60-80+ hour weeks for essentially a year straight in a purposeless marketing career. I was the definition of busyness. But, it wasn’t until a couple years later that I actually attempted to better understand busyness in general (and my own busyness in particular). That’s when I did a deep dive post series on: Busyness 101, 201, 301.
- “I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.” — Maria Popova
The flip side of busyness is unbusyness—which we could say is a synonym for slowness. So, I did the same deep dive post series on: Slow Living 101, 201, 301.
- “Slow Living means structuring your life around meaning and fulfillment. Similar to ‘voluntary simplicity‘ and ‘downshifting,’ it emphasizes a less-is-more approach, focusing on the quality of your life … Slow Living addresses the desire to lead a more balanced life and to pursue a more holistic sense of well-being in the fullest sense of the word.” — Beth Meredith & Eric Storm
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Have you found purpose?
If you feel like you’ve successfully found purpose and meaning in life, I’d love to hear from you: What is your purpose, and how did you find it? Please leave a comment and let me know.
As you may know, I had an existential crisis in late 2015 that was the spark (and continues to be the fuel) for this decade-long journey with Sloww. In 2016-17, I really started attempting to discover purpose. And now 5+ years after that, not only did I find purpose, but I can put it in a single sentence: synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development. How did I do it? It’s all outlined in detail in the Ikigai 2.0 eBook + workbook.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Immediacy of Experience Principle
I don’t know what made me think of this recently, but I’m revisiting the Pirahã people from Sloww Sunday #141—indigenous hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon. As a refresher, the Pirahã people don’t have numbers in their language, don’t have social hierarchy, don’t have religious beliefs, don’t concern themselves with past and future, and don’t fear death.
But, the part that I continue to think about most often is that they require evidence based on direct, personal experience for every claim made. Daniel Everett, a linguist and author (featured in the water in the photo above), has studied the Pirahãs for 40+ years (check out his TEDx Talk & Long Now Talk). Here’s what Everett says:
- “The ‘immediacy of experience principle’ is not that they can’t think about the past or the future—but they prefer not to talk about things in the distant future or in the distant past for which there is no evidence.”
- “The cultural value of the ‘immediacy of experience’ produces a value to keep information slow and to keep it verifiable. It must be witnessed (you saw it or someone who saw it told you) … (What is) the source of the evidence: Did you hear about it? Did you see it with your own eyes? Or, did you deduce it from the local evidence?“
- “The Pirahã, who in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make—helped me realize that I hadn’t been thinking very scientifically about my own beliefs.”
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Science + Spirituality with A. H. Almaas
Last week I dove into some teachings from A. H. Almaas (also known as A. Hameed Ali). Almaas has a unique perspective because he was working on his PhD in physics when he reached a turning point in his life that led him to inquire into the psychological and spiritual aspects of human nature rather than the physical nature of the universe. I curated 50+ quotes, but here are some of my favorites about science and spirituality:
- “I use inquiry, similar to Socratic inquiry, as a particular method. That, for me, is more important than sitting meditation … The approach uses inquiry but uses the scientific method which means it has to be verified—not by experiment but by experience, by one’s own direct experience.”
- “In science, you have to be detached from the experiment. The observer can’t be part of it. The more detached, the more the experiment is pure. In the inquiry into oneself, it includes the subject, the observer. So, I’m inquiring into both the experiencer and the experienced. They’re both there in the field of experience.“
- “Recognize you are consciousness, and everything is consciousness. This experience of realization has been like this for thousands of years regardless of what the scientific point of view is—the scientific point of view keeps changing.”
- “My understanding is that the actual truth is indeterminate. Just like quantum theory, until you experience it, it’s not set … The spiritual truth is indeterminate until we experience it. And, how we experience it depends on our worldview, our view of reality, our expectation, our readiness and openness.”
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
