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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 202 (Nov 17, 2024) — No Rush, Find Courage, Analytic Idealism, & More
In a crazy world, Sloww is a calm oasis of conscious wisdom. The Sloww Sunday newsletter helps 10,000+ readers downshift into deeper living. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by sharing this newsletter with others.
📘🌀 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
New Meta-Crisis Books
It’s been great to see more voices in the meta-crisis space organize all their ideas into books (if you’re wondering what the ‘meta-crisis’ is, check out this intro post and my side project MetaCrisis.org). Here are a few new publications I’m excited about:
- Awakening From the Meaning Crisis (Book 1: Origins) by John Vervaeke & Christopher Mastropietro (Amazon)
- UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge by Gregg Henriques (Amazon)
- A Universal Learning Process (Book 1: The Evolution of Meaning) by Brendan Graham Dempsey (Amazon)
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive: Stream of Consciousness: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
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
Reality isn’t in a rush, so why are you?
Revisiting some of my favorite reminders to slow down:
- “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu
- “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” — Hermann Hesse
- “He is a slow person, timed to Nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, plants and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work … Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The difficulty of describing things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel … We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it … It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.” — Alan Watts
And, some punchy one-liners:
- “For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” — Lily Tomlin
- “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” — Socrates
- “He who hurries has one foot in the grave.” — Ancient proverb
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive: How to Slow Down with “In Praise of Slowness” by Carl Honoré (+ Infographic)
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
On the courage to follow your purpose
If you’ve been looking for a little extra courage to find yourself or follow your dreams:
- “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” — Bronnie Ware (on the #1 regret of the dying)
- “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” — E. E. Cummings
- “If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.” — John Irving
- “Inquiry means asking questions, over and over again. Do we have the courage to look at something, whatever it is, and to inquire, what is this?” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
- “‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” — Kant (in other words, sapere aude or ‘dare to know’)
- “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond by removing impossible obstacles … The world will not grind you under, it will lift you up…by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.” — Terence McKenna
- “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
- “You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed … Life is always on the edge of death, always, and one should lack fear and have the courage of life. That’s the principle initiation of all of the heroic stories.” — Joseph Campbell
2️⃣ Sloww Stage 2 Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose
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🧠 Mental Mastery
Analytic Idealism (in a nutshell)
Sometimes Sloww is fast! Bernardo Kastrup’s new book Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell (Amazon) was released a couple weeks ago, and I’ve already published the Book Summary & 🔒Premium Summary (fair warning: it’s all a bit hard to grasp, so the Premium Summary includes detailed breakdowns of two helpful analogies).
Overview:
- Physicalism believes: Reality is physical; characterized through quantities & math; the qualitative/mental can be reduced to the quantitative/physical; brain generates mind.
- Why Physicalism is wrong: 1) Thinking the ‘physical’ world perceived is external to the perceiver and the real world out there; 2) Thinking the map precedes the territory and somehow generates the territory; 3) Failing to account for any experience. Kastrup says the greatest embarrassment of mainstream Physicalism is its fundamental inability to account for phenomenal consciousness (the existence of experience) which is nature’s sole pre-theoretical, given fact (phenomenal consciousness precedes theory epistemically, in that all theories arise and exist within it).
- Analytic Idealism believes: The only irreducible entity, nature’s sole pre-theoretical and empirical given fact of reality, is subjectivity itself (aka phenomenal consciousness, the existence of experience, the one field of subjectivity that nature is). The whole of nature is one subject (one field of subjectivity) whose excitations are everything experienced. Experience (felt qualities, subjectivity, mentation) is irreducible; configurations/patterns of excitation of the one field (behaviors of the field) are all reducible to the field. There is only the universal subject, and it is you. Your core subjectivity is the subjectivity of nature-at-large, so what you really are isn’t going anywhere ever. Where could your core subjectivity possibly go, since it is all there is?
“This is a book about the nature of reality. It elaborates on the best hypothesis we have today, based on leading-edge science and analytic reasoning, about what reality is … Analytic Idealism—the subject of this book—represents a correction of our known metaphysical mistakes; a step forward. As I shall soon argue, it offers the most plausible and parsimonious hypothesis we have today about the nature of reality.” — Bernardo Kastrup
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- How to think about Idealism with “Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell” by Bernardo Kastrup
- Bernardo Kastrup Synthesis: Everything about Free Will (+ Infographic)
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
The Hard Problem of … Matter?
Perhaps you’ve heard of the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ The ‘hard problem’ is to understand and explain why and how subjective experience arises from physical processes in the brain. But, what if it’s only an unresolved problem because of how we’re thinking about it? Nondual spiritual teacher Rupert Spira says:
- “There is no hard problem of consciousness. What’s really interesting is the hard problem of matter. The hard problem of consciousness is like the problem of how screens are generated by movies, how the sky is generated by clouds, how the ocean is generated by waves. That’s the hard problem of consciousness; the answer is it’s not. It’s based on a massive assumption, namely that matter is the fundamental reality of the universe and that matter eventually gives rise to consciousness … What’s really interesting is if consciousness is the fundamental reality, how then does the apparently physical world contained in time and space arise from consciousness? That’s the hard problem of matter; that’s a really interesting question.” — Rupert Spira
Here are some highlights from Spira (minimally paraphrased):
- Matter: All we ever find or know are conscious experiences. We extrapolate the existence of physical stuff called ‘matter’ that exists independently of consciousness, but nobody has ever found that stuff let alone found how consciousness is generated from it. We found what appears as matter when we look at reality through our perceiving and conceiving faculties.
- Consciousness is primary: Most people think there is the world first, and then the body, and then the brain, and then the mind, and finally at the last minute something called consciousness appears. And the consciousness comes and goes, but the world always exists independent of consciousness. But, that is not our experience, and there is no evidence for it. Consciousness is our primary experience, so we should put consciousness first. Everything else is downstream of consciousness.
- Think about your own experience: The normal, conventional view, the founding principle of our world culture, is that there are 8 billion little parcels of consciousnesses all seeing 1 world. But, strangely, nobody has ever found that 1 world—because all each of the 8 billion of us knows is our own perception. The ideas of ‘8 billion consciousnesses’ and ‘1 world’ are presumptions that are not validated by experience. Instead of 8 billion consciousnesses and 1 world, could it not be that there is 1 consciousness and 8 billion worlds? What we share is not the world, it is consciousness.
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- Rupert Spira Synthesis: Everything about Nonduality (+ Infographics)
- How to See with the Screen Analogy from Rupert Spira (+ Infographics)
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
Arthur Schopenhauer is often paraphrased as saying truth passes through three stages:
- It is ridiculed.
- It is violently opposed.
- It is accepted as self-evident.
Here’s the original quote:
- “To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
