Sloww Sunday 207: Walden, Simple Purpose, Binding Problem

Sloww Sunday Newsletter 207 (Jan 5, 2025) — Walden, Simple Purpose, Binding Problem, & More

The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within and downshifting into deeper living. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.

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🌀 Maslow’s Lesser-Known, Late-Life Writings

When people think of Abraham Maslow, they often name his more popular books like Toward a Psychology of Being, A Theory of Human Motivation, and Motivation and Personality. It doesn’t seem like as many people are aware of the book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Amazon | Summary) that was published shortly after his death. Over the next couple newsletters, we’ll explore Maslow’s final thinking on self-actualization and self-transcendence. In the meantime, check out the book summary if you’re interested in Maslow’s thinking on: peak experiences, Being-Values, metaneeds/metamotivations, etc.

“Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or of selfhood, full humanness, self-actualization, etc., even a society like ours which is relatively one of the most fortunate on the face of the earth. This is our great paradox … Can we say that everyone yearns for the higher life, the spiritual, the Being-Values, etc? … Certainly we can say in principle that such a yearning must be considered to be a potential in every newborn baby until proven otherwise. That is to say, our best guess is that this potentiality, if it is lost, is lost after birth. It is also socially realistic today to bet that most newborn babies will never actualize this potentiality, and will never rise to the highest levels of motivation because of poverty, exploitation, prejudice, etc. There is, in fact, inequality of opportunity in the world today. It is also wise to say of adults that prognosis varies for each of them, depending on how and where they live, their social-economic-political circumstances, degree and amount of psychopathology, etc. And yet is also unwise (as a matter of social strategy, if nothing else) to give up the possibility of the metalife completely and in principle for any living person … And most certainly, we would be stupid to give up this possibility for future generations.” — Abraham Maslow

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🌲 Walden by Thoreau

I started reading Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden (Amazon | Summary) five years ago but never finished it because the dry parts were brutally boring—even for someone like me who is very interested in slow, simple, intentional living. This week, I finally powered through the rest of it. It’s one of those books where I’d definitely start with the summary instead of reading it in full. That being said, there are some killer quotes sprinkled throughout:

“My greatest skill has been to want but little.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

“I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.”

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

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❤️ + 🌎 = The Simplest Path to Purpose

Last week’s newsletter highlighted Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak (Amazon | Summary | 🔒Premium). I’m fairly certain Palmer is who introduced me to quite possibly the simplest path to life purpose from Frederick Buechner:

“Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need’ … Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins—not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created.” — Parker Palmer

2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)

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🧠 Brain ‘binding problem’ blows my mind

We’ve covered some fun concepts in recent newsletters: vertiginous question, open individualism, generic subjective continuity, brain hemisphere differences, and more. So, let’s keep it going with the ‘binding problem’ (Wikipedia).

In a nutshell, when you perceive something, your brain processes various attributes—like color, shape, motion, texture, and sound—in different specialized areas. Despite this distributed processing, you don’t perceive these attributes as separate elements—you experience them as part of a single, coherent, cohesive, whole. The binding problem deals with how the brain binds everything—different sensory modalities, brain regions, timing, etc—to form a single, unified experience.

According to neuroscientist David Eagleman:

“Signals from the environment are translated into electrochemical signals carried by brain cells. It is the first step by which the brain taps into information from the world outside the body. The eyes convert (or transduce) photons into electrical signals. The mechanisms of the inner ear convert vibrations in the density of the air into electrical signals. Receptors on the skin (and also inside the body) convert pressure, stretch, temperature, and noxious chemicals into electrical signals. The nose converts drifting odor molecules, and the tongue converts taste molecules to electrical signals. In a city with visitors from all over the world, foreign money must be translated into a common currency before meaningful transactions can take place. And so it is with the brain. It’s fundamentally cosmopolitan, welcoming travelers from many different origins. One of neuroscience’s unsolved puzzles is known as the ‘binding problem’: how is the brain able to produce a single, unified picture of the world, given that vision is processed in one region, hearing in another, touch in another, and so on?” — David Eagleman

Here’s a simple way to blow your mind from Sam Harris:

“Consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. It seems simultaneous—it seems like the nose touches the finger at the same time the finger touches the nose. And, while it may be simultaneous in the world, we know at the level of the brain the timing has to be different. We know that the input from the finger reaches sensory cortex after the input from the nose—this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. Our brains correct for this timing discrepancy by clearly buffering the inputs in memory and then delivering the apparent simultaneity to consciousness. So, our experience of the present moment is, in a very real sense, a memory of the present moment. And, even the simplest conscious sensations are built upon unconscious mechanisms and unconscious processing of which we are fundamentally unaware.” — Sam Harris

3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)

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🙏 = 🔥 Prayer is Fire

This new post highlights the powerful ‘prayer is fire’ short story from Anthony de Mello. It’s a great reminder of the difference between religion vs spirituality. If you want to watch/listen in Anthony de Mello’s own words:

“It’s your being that needs to be transformed. That’s the fire. That’s the transformation we’re talking about—literally another mind, another way of looking at things, another way of seeing everything. When that comes, you change, your deeds change, your life changes. That’s the fire … Anything you do to get the fire, that’s prayer. Prayer is fire—’fire’ meaning transformation—that comes about from seeing one’s illusions and dropping them … This is what spirituality is all about. Tragically, we tend to lose sight of this, don’t we?” — Anthony de Mello

4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)

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On being all you can be:

“To give anything less than the best is to sacrifice the gift.” — Steve Prefontaine

“If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.” — Abraham Maslow

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” — Gospel of Thomas

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All the best,

Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww