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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 199 (Sep 22, 2024) — Egos, Heroes, Tricks, & More
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📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
Postautonomous Ego Development
I’m finally reading Susanne Cook-Greuter’s book Postautonomous Ego Development: A Study of Its Nature and Measurement (Summary Coming). It’s as excellent as expected and a must-read!
“(My) thesis begins to bridge Western conceptions of psychological growth as increasing individuation and self-integration with Eastern notions of the permanent self as a transitional phenomenon that may be recognized as a guiding fiction and transcended.” — Susanne Cook-Greuter
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- My Ego Development Theory Self-Assessment
- How my Personal Development Journey maps to Ego Development Theory (Sloww Stages vs EDT Stages)
0️⃣ Sloww Stage Support Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
🧠 Sloww Stage Support Featured Product: Synthesizer Course: The Flagship Course for Synthesizing Minds (the most important mind of the future)
🌎 Intentional Living
What I wish I knew about birth & babies
I wrote up a comprehensive overview (🔒) of what we’ve learned over the last 11 weeks since our daughter was born: easy baby vs hard baby, owning your own health, when birth plans don’t go to plan, second-order effects/consequences, painful breastfeeding, appointments galore, sleep deprivation & side effects, and much more.
I also posted short skim summaries of two books (many more to come from my “Conscious Parenting” reading list):
- The Montessori Baby by Simone Davies & Junnifa Uzodike (🔒Short Skim Summary)
- Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook by Maria Montessori (🔒Short Skim Summary)
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive: Reminder that all my conscious parenting writing will be shared exclusively with Premium members in the “Conscious Parenting” space in the Sloww Society community
1️⃣ Sloww Stage 1 Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living
😃 Sloww Stage 1 Featured Product: The Hierarchy of Happiness: 100+ Powerful Perspectives on How to be Happy (Free eBook)
🧭 Life Purpose
Hero’s Journey or no Hero’s Journey?
I’ve highlighted the “hero’s journey” in a variety of ways over the years in a bunch of Sloww Sunday newsletters: 017, 028, 058, 063, 067, 097, 098, 149, 154, 192.
The classic story of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (Book Summary) can be viewed as a hero’s journey. Even Vicki Robin describes financial independence as a hero’s journey. But, of course, the concept itself is most associated with Joseph Campbell (and his books The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces are on my reading list):
- “The landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he’s ready for is the one that he gets.” — Joseph Campbell
However, Nora Bateson (who also has two books on my reading list) questions the story of the “hero” because we can’t pluck individual heroes out of the interdependent context that created and shaped them:
- “Is there a part of any of us that we can point to and truly say, ‘that is me—untouched or influenced by any of my history, my culture, education, family, religion, social life…’? … When we look through the lens of interdependency, it is impossible to separate individuals from their contexts of influence and experience. This blurs the ‘hero’s story’ … (which) can better be attributed to the town or village that nourished a person than to that person’s individual qualities … Can we extract a stand-out entity from that mutuality and call it a break-away? Isn’t the break-away a product of the mutuality? … Should we not point to those mutualities as heroic?” — Nora Bateson
And, taking it another step further, Galen Strawson (you guessed it, who also has two books on my reading list) questions the entire notion of your life as a story in the first place:
- “‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story,’ according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner; we are all constantly engaged in ‘self-making narrative’ and ‘in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.’ Oliver Sacks agrees: each of us ‘constructs and lives a ‘narrative’. . . this narrative is us, our identities’ … Human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories … To be narrative is ‘to be naturally disposed to experience or conceive of one’s life, one’s existence in time, oneself, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and—in some manner—to live in and through this conception’ … I’ll call this the Psychological Narrativity Thesis. It’s a claim about the way ordinary human beings actually experience their lives. This is how we are, it says, as a matter of empirical fact; this is our nature. It’s often coupled with a normative or evaluative or ethical claim, which I’ll call the Ethical Narrativity Thesis, according to which a richly narrative outlook on one’s life is a good thing, essential to living well, to true or full ‘personhood’ … One may think both theses are false. This is my view … My suspicion is that it almost always does more harm than good—that the narrative tendency to look for story or narrative coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding: to a just, general, practically real sense, implicit or explicit, of one’s nature.” — Galen Strawson
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- Is Life a Sine Wave of Repeated Hero’s Journeys?
- Do You Control Your Life Path?
- What’s our Problem with (Mis)Attribution of Agency?
2️⃣ Sloww Stage 2 Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose
🧭 Sloww Stage 2 Featured Product: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
🧠 Mental Mastery
The Most Important Confidence Trick
The 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann (Summary Coming) was ranked as one of the top 5 sociology books of the last century. I think about this quote in particular all the time:
- “In primary socialization there is no problem of identification. There is no choice of significant others. Society presents the candidate for socialization with a predefined set of significant others, whom he must accept as such with no possibility of opting for another arrangement. Hic Rhodus, hic salta. One must make do with the parents that fate has regaled one with. This unfair disadvantage inherent in the situation of being a child has the obvious consequence that, although the child is not simply passive in the process of his socialization, it is the adults who set the rules of the game. The child can play the game with enthusiasm or with sullen resistance. But, alas, there is no other game around. This has an important corollary. Since the child has no choice in the selection of his significant others, his identification with them is quasi-automatic. For the same reason, his internalization of their particular reality is quasi-inevitable. The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world, the world tout court. It is for this reason that the world internalized in primary socialization is so much more firmly entrenched in consciousness than worlds internalized in secondary socializations. However much the original sense of inevitability may be weakened in subsequent disenchantments, the recollection of a never-to-be-repeated certainty—the certainty of the first dawn of reality—still adheres to the first world of childhood. Primary socialization thus accomplishes what (in hindsight, of course) may be seen as the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual—to make appear as necessity what is in fact a bundle of contingencies, and thus to make meaningful the accident of his birth.” — Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
🔒 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
3️⃣ Sloww Stage 3 Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery
🧠 Sloww Stage 3 Featured Product: Mini Mind: 365 Days of Bite-Size Brain Food
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Pantheism vs Panentheism in a nutshell
Some of the wisest humans to ever live landed on these philosophies that I’m continuing to explore:
Pantheism (Wikipedia):
- God = universe
- God is immanent
- God is all, all is God
Panentheism (Wikipedia):
- God ≥ universe
- God is immanent and transcendent
- God in all, all in God
As I mentioned in Sloww Sunday #189, I found myself revisiting Iain McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere work, then it occurred to me that how McGilchrist sees the brain hemispheres seems to match his view of panentheism, and then it occurred to me that you could add consciousness (nonduality) and the contents of consciousness (duality)—all visually represented in the same way:
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive: Nondual Empiricism Synthesis: How to embody Nonduality with Nicholas Lattanzio
4️⃣ Sloww Stage 4 Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing
👣 Sloww Stage 4 Featured Product: Wise Walk: Growing Wiser while Moving More in 2024
💬 Final Thought
“When you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up. And if you’re not ready, you’re going to stay pretending that you’re just ‘poor little me.'” — Alan Watts
Pair with: 10+ quotes on readiness to awaken (Sloww Sunday #176)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
