Sign up to get the Sloww Sunday newsletter via email for free:👇
Sloww Sunday Newsletter 189 (Jun 2, 2024) — Babies, Metacognition, Developmental Deaths, & More
Sloww exists to share the art of living with students of life. The Sloww Sunday newsletter delivers my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ lifelong learners every week. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
🆕 New News
🎙️ New Podcast Appearance:
My first podcast appearance in a year is now live: The Nick Daigler Podcast. I also published this handy guide to all my podcasts so you can see exactly what I talk about (topics), where I talk about it (which podcast), and when I talk about it (time stamps)—allowing you to skip to segments you find most interesting. You can also catch all my podcasts on this Spotify playlist and YouTube playlist. Enjoy!
🧠 Synthesizer Course Updates:
Don’t forget to check out the 5-minute manifesto video, 20+ early student testimonials, and new FAQs about pricing.
The inaugural live group call—what I’m now calling “Synthesizer Summits”—is scheduled for June 14th! If you’re interested in joining the course, it would be ideal to join before then. I checked with Circle (the software that runs the course + community + calls), and they said we can have up to 100 people in the live calls—so I’m giving away live calls for life ($500 value) to the first 100 students. After that, I’m going to create a higher payment plan for the live calls. Spots are filling up, so don’t wait:
Learn more about the course or Join Synthesizer
📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
The ‘Deaths’ of Development
I recently read Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology (Book Summary) and Integral Spirituality (Book Summary) back to back—and created this Integral Psychology & Spirituality Synthesis (🔒). One thing that stuck with me is how Wilber describes self-development as a ‘life’ and ‘death’ process.
3-Step Process (each time the center of gravity of the self moves through a basic level, it goes through a fulcrum/milestone):
- Identify: It first identifies with a new level.
- Disidentify / De-embed / Transcend: Then disidentifies with it (transcends it, de-embeds from it). What you are identified with or embedded in at one stage of development (and what you therefore experience very intimately as an ‘I’) tends to become transcended, or disidentified with, or de-embedded at the next, so you can see it more objectively, with some distance and detachment.
- Include / Integrate: Then includes and integrates it from the next higher level.
But, here’s the kicker:
- “Each time the self identifies with a particular level of consciousness, it experiences the loss of that level as a death—literally, as a type of death-seizure, because the very life of the self is identified with that level. Letting go of that level is therefore experienced only with great difficulty. In fact, I believe that each of the major milestones of self-development is marked by a difficult life-death battle, involving the death (or the disidentifying with, or the transcendence) of each level, which can often be quite traumatic.”
- “The only reason the self eventually accepts the death of its given level is that the life of the next higher level is even more enticing and ultimately satisfying. The self therefore disidentifies with (or de-embeds from) its present level, ‘dies’ to an exclusive identity with that level, and identifies with (or embraces and embeds in) the life of the next higher level, until its death, too, is accepted.”
- “According to the perennial philosophy, when all deaths have been died, the result is only God, or an awakening to the what the Sufis call the Supreme Identity of self and spirit.”
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Intentional Parenting (continued)
My wife and I watched the documentary Babies over the weekend. Great perspective reset! So, I did some quick research on baby/child/parenting films, documentaries, etc. Here were the ones I saw recommended the most, but please let me know if you have others you’ve enjoyed:
- Babies (2010 documentary)
- Babies (2020 docuseries)
- The Beginning of Life (2016)
- The Business of Being Born (2008)
- Child of Our Time (2000)
- The Milky Way (2014)
- Baby Human (YouTube)
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Metacognition & Thought Experiments
I often wonder if life will emerge in a way where the masses eventually have more metacognition (Wikipedia). It seems like it only takes one extra ‘level’ of metacognition to realize:
You can do as you will, but not will as you will:
- “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.” — Schopenhauer
You can do as you want, but not choose your wants:
- “You are free to do what you want, but where do your wants come from? … Where is the freedom in doing what one wants when one’s wants are the product of prior causes—which one cannot inspect, and therefore could not choose, and one had absolutely no hand in creating? … We can’t choose what we choose in life. When it seems that we choose what we choose, we don’t choose to choose what we choose.” — Sam Harris
Want new wants?
- “Suppose you do want to acquire a want you haven’t got. The question is, where did the first want—the want for a want—come from? It seems it was just there, just a given, not something you chose or engineered. It was just there, like most of your preferences … The question just re-arises: Where did that want come from? You certainly can’t go on like this forever. At some point your wants must be just given. They will be products of your genetic inheritance and upbringing that you had no say in. In other words, there’s a fundamental sense in which you did not and cannot make yourself the way you are.” — Galen Strawson
Bonus: Coming off the thought experiment in last week’s newsletter about being swapped at birth, I figured I’d include all the thought experiments I’ve highlighted to date:
- The Ovarian Lottery: A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
- What is the “Original Position” or “Veil of Ignorance” Thought Experiment? (John Rawls Excerpts)
- The College Graduate & The Garbage Collector: A Thought Experiment from Robert Sapolsky (Short Excerpt)
- The Basic Argument against Ultimate Moral Responsibility (Galen Strawson Summary)
- Condemned to Choose: Cake vs Oxfam Thought Experiment (Galen Strawson Excerpts)
- Desires & Decisions: Free Will Thought Experiments (Sam Harris Excerpts)
- Tea or Coffee: Who is the Chooser of a Choice? (Rupert Spira Short Excerpt)
- The Life of Luckia: A Thought Experiment on the Birth Lottery, Moral Responsibility, & Free Will
🔒 Sloww Premium deep dive:
- Is Free Thinking Even Possible?
- Is Ultimate Moral Responsibility a Myth?
- What’s our Problem with (Mis)Attribution of Agency?
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Synthesizing Science & Spirituality
It’s not impossible to bridge science and spirituality. They point to the same things all the time—just from different perspectives:
- Science = 3rd-person external/objective.
- Spirituality = 1st-person internal/subjective.
Maybe you’ve seen this image before:
A few weeks ago, I found myself revisiting Iain McGilchrist’s work about the right brain hemisphere (or “master”) and left brain hemisphere (“emissary”):
Then, it occurred to me that how McGilchrist sees the brain hemispheres seems to match his view of panentheism:
Then, this week, I added another piece of the puzzle when it occurred to me that you could add consciousness (nonduality) and the contents of consciousness (duality):
Anyway, I’m just playing with all this, but the similarities are certainly interesting…
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
The Wisdom of Jiddu Krishnamurti
I really enjoyed spending last week immersed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings (I also have several of his books on my reading list). This new quotes page covers what I learned about: mind, thought, separation, conflict, will, choice, self-inquiry, and of course, the observer is the observed.
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
Any moment when you realize or remember your luck in life, remind yourself:
- “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” — Unknown
Pair with the Bible verse:
- “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” — 1 Corinthians 15:10 (KJV)
Raoul Martinez, author of Creating Freedom:
- “We are not, and can never be, free from the forces that shape us. The kind of responsibility that would make us deserving of punishment or reward, credit or blame, is an illusion, a sacred myth passed on from one generation to the next with no rational basis. The impossibility of ultimate responsibility is taken for granted when we talk about anything else in the natural world – sharks, trees, apes or amoebas – but for some reason we assume humans possess it. Aspects of our culture betray an awareness of the limits on our freedom – think of the proverb, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’ – yet, on the whole, we go about our lives, form our opinions, educate our young and organise society according to the myth of responsibility.”
Share: Sloww Sunday currently sends to 10,000+ students of life each week. If you enjoyed this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to some friends and family. It’s free for them to subscribe here.
Support: Sloww is a one-human labor of love (it’s just me over here 👋). Your support keeps the site ad-free and invests in me while you invest in yourself—a true win-win! There are free and financial ways to support.
Speak: Have something you want to say, or just want to say hi? It’s always greatly appreciated. Just leave a comment or reach out socially.
All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
Leave a Reply