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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 188 (May 26, 2024) — The Synthesizer Manifesto, Swapped at Birth, Multiply by Zero, & 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
The Synthesizer Manifesto
This week I recorded a new 5-minute YouTube video overview called “The Synthesizer Manifesto” that covers the challenge, vision, why the course exists, and who the course is for:
The new Synthesizer course crossed 50 students this week! That means there’s good news and bad news…
😢 Bad News: The $50 off FIRST50 coupon code spots are all gone (except for Sloww Premium members who can still get $50 off with the code here). As a last call, I’ll leave the code active for 24 hours longer, so it’s now or never!
😃 Good News: I checked with Circle (the software that runs the course + community), and they said we can have up to 100 people in live calls. So, that means the next 50 students can still get the live group calls for free ($500 value)! After that, I’m going to create a higher payment plan for the live calls, so don’t miss out if you’re interested.
Course Updates:
- Course comparison: I’ve compared 50+ courses here (look where Synthesizer is on the spreadsheet)—many courses start in the $thousands without delivering this much value
- Student testimonials: I’ve added a bunch of (unsolicited) testimonials from the early students so far
- New FAQs: I’ve added FAQs about why the course exists and who the course is for
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Never “Multiply by Zero”
I feel like every day in the news we see people who seem to “have it all” (think of professional athletes for instance) who are caught illegally gambling, drunk driving, high-speed racing, you name it. In some cases, these can be immediately and completely career-ending mistakes. We often wonder how someone who seemingly “has it all” could “throw it all away.”
But, we often forget that we can all encounter circumstances with the potential to have disastrous impacts on our lives. The idea here is to never put yourself in situations where your life could be “multiplied by zero.” Why? Because anything—no matter how large or how great—multiplied by zero is zero! Not only will avoiding these situations save you from the potential downsides and what-ifs, but it will also make your life lighter by not having to worry about them in the first place.
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
“Swapped at Birth” Thought Experiment
This is a new short post sharing two versions of the “swapped at birth” thought experiment from Raoul Martinez, author of Creating Freedom (Part 1 Lottery of Birth Book Summary):
- “When I was 13, my worldview was changed by a simple idea. I was walking home from school with a friend of mine, and we were debating religion. He was religious; I wasn’t. And, it seemed clear to me that he only believed what he believed because of his upbringing. The thought experiment popped into my head: imagine you’d been swapped at birth with another baby and raised in a totally different faith. Don’t you think now you’d be defending with the same passion those beliefs, that religion, instead of your current beliefs? Isn’t it obvious that you’re only saying what you’re saying because of the lottery of your birth? And, I realized, didn’t the same thing apply to me? Everything about me: my beliefs, the language I spoke, my habits—it had all happened to me. I hadn’t chosen any of it.”
- “Imagine two enemies on a battlefield … Suppose we could go back in time and swap them at birth so that each would be raised in the other’s culture. In time, would each not end up fighting for the other side—a different flag, different religion, different ideology? … This outcome would certainly surprise no one. It seems like common sense. But, the implications are significant. We’re readily admitting that the deepest convictions of these two individuals are, in a sense, arbitrary.”
- “We are rooted in our environment and depend on its offerings no less than a tree whose health is inextricable from the sunlight, air and soil that surround it. We, too, begin as a seed whose growth and development depend on its environment. Our capacity for happiness, confidence, ecstasy, empathy, love and hate, is not of our own making. None of this means that we cannot change, learn and grow, or that making the effort to do so is unimportant – on the contrary, it is essential – but it does mean that the extent to which we succeed in our attempt, relative to others, is not something for which we can take credit. Just as the tiny seed that grows into a giant redwood cannot take credit for its height, we cannot take credit for what we become. In an important sense, our achievements are not really our achievements. We are notes in life’s melody, not its composer.“
🔒 Sloww Premium 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
Alan Watts on Free Will
Believe it or not, it’s not the easiest exercise to find what Alan Watts said about free will. That’s because he didn’t seem to often explicitly use the words “free will”—but he still talks about it a bunch if you can connect the dots. Here are some examples:
- “Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does.”
- “Does the concept of will fit in? Not really, no. I will try to show you, practically, why it is an unnecessary concept; how you can have far more energy without using your will than you can with using it. See, the will implies a separation of man and nature, and therefore we ask the question, ‘Do we have free will?’ or, ‘Are we determined?’ That means: are you a bus or a tram? And both concepts are off the point, because both of them presuppose a fundamental separation of the individual from the universe. Does it kick you around or do you kick it around? And if you think in that way, you lose energy. Just as my finger would lose energy if I separated it from the hand.”
- “We come to have a very arbitrary definition of Self: that much of my activity which I feel I do. And that, then, doesn’t include breathing most of the time, it doesn’t include the heartbeats, it doesn’t include the activity of the glands, it doesn’t include digestion, it doesn’t include how you shape your bones, circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now, if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find that your body knows that you are one with the universe. In other words, that the so-called ‘involuntary’ circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out that it’s you who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that’s going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean, your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos—and it’s all you. Only: you’re playing the game that you’re only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there are—in physical reality—no such things as separate events.”
More Watts:
- 50+ Alan Watts Quotes on the Meaning of Life, Knowing Yourself, Slowing Down, & More
- The Ultimate Taboo: “The Book” by Alan Watts (Book Summary)
- 🔒 Alan Watts Synthesis: How to Answer the Ultimate Question of “Who am I?”
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Where are all the women spiritual teachers?
I see this question asked a lot, but it turns out there are tons of women in spirituality. As part of Wise Walk, I’ll be exploring the teachings of 26 women by the end of the year. Here are highlights from 10 so far: Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Sharon Salzberg, Cynthia Bourgeault, Diane Musho Hamilton, Dorothy Hunt, Joan Halifax, Bernadette Roberts, Jac O’Keeffe, and Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche.
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
A couple versions of the famous command of Saint Augustine:
- “Love, and do what you will.”
- “Love, and do whatever you want.”
Rupert Spira explains:
- “He meant, of course, understand and feel that at the deepest level everything and everyone are one single indivisible reality. As long as that’s your bottom line, and that everything you do is consistent with and an expression of that understanding, that’s the only moral code you need. In fact, the only reason we need a moral code is for those of us that don’t understand that, and so we need to be kept on the straight and narrow until we do understand it.”
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
