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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 204 (Dec 15, 2024) — Intentional Challenges, Soul Stages, The Abyss, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers downshifting into deeper living. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
🌀 8 Soulcentric Stages of Human Development
I keep seeing Bill Plotkin’s name mentioned, and his books have been on my reading list for years: The Journey of Soul Initiation (Amazon), Wild Mind (Amazon), Nature and the Human Soul (Amazon), and Soulcraft (Amazon).
This week I stumbled upon his 8 stages of soulcentric/ecocentric human development, along with experiential activities for each stage:
You can listen to Bill outline the stages and more in this recent podcast:
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🧠 Featured Product: Synthesizer Course: The Flagship Course for Synthesizing Minds
🎉 New Year Intentional Living Challenges
Challenges often involve removing something existing from your life or adding something new to your life. In my experience, it’s been much easier to remove something existing—for instance, I’ve successfully done a no-buy year with clothing and no-drinking year with alcohol (🔒). Up next is a no-social year (well, I’m quitting social media on my phone by deleting all apps, but still using it here and there on my computer).
But, it’s been much harder for me to add something new—for instance, I fell off with Wise Walk this year over the summer after our daughter was born. So, even adding something as seemingly simple as a 30-minute daily walk can be tough. But, I’m giving it another go this year to see if I can do 30 minutes of walking or working out daily.
What are some things you can intentionally remove from or add to your life this year? For inspiration, check out the challenges outlined here.
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🌄 If you are going through the abyss…
Inspiration from the depths:
- “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for … We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” — Joseph Campbell
- “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.” — Thomas Merton
- “I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone … Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s land between two worlds.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “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
- “Every transformation demands as its precondition ‘the ending of a world’—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” — C.G. Jung
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 What are the real differences between the two brain hemispheres?
If you want to move beyond a ‘pop psychology’ understanding of the left and right brain hemispheres, here’s the most detailed summary you’ll find online of the insanely long chapter 2 of Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Amazon):
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
🧠 Featured Product: Mini Mind: 365 Days of Bite-Size Brain Food
☯️ Rupert Spira on the Subject-Object Relationship
If you’ve been following Sloww for a long time, you’re probably aware that I believe the subject-object relationship is the ‘secret’ to essentially everything—it’s the key that connects psychology and spirituality. Nondual spiritual teacher Rupert Spira further explores the subject-object relationship in some recent videos (here and here). Here’s a highlight:
- “There’s always a distance between a subject and an object. If there was no distance between them, there wouldn’t be a subject and an object … The reason we can’t see our eyes is because there’s no distance from our eyes to our eyes. There needs to be a distinction between the subject and object in order to see something. The only thing the eyes cannot see is themselves because in order to see something you must stand apart from that thing in subject-object relationship … (Similarly) it’s only possible to know something in subject-object relationship. That is why all our experience—thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, perceptions, memories, and so on—all take place in subject-object relationship. I know my thoughts, I feel sad, I perceive the tree, I love you, and so on. We can only know something that is at a distance from ourself. Now, what happens when we try to know ourself? It’s like trying to see our eyes … We can be ourself knowingly, but we can’t know ourself objectively because we’re too close to ourself. We can’t stand apart from ourself to know ourself. We can only know something that is other than ourself … Consciousness can only know itself by being itself. It can’t stand apart from itself and know itself in subject-object relationship.” — Rupert Spira
To go deeper, Sloww Premium members have access to the most comprehensive synthesis I’ve ever produced: 🔒 Rupert Spira Synthesis: Everything about Nonduality (+ Infographics)
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
The truth about ‘ego death’:
- “What dies is not the ego. What dies is your identification with the ego.” — Art Ticknor
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
