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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 209 (Feb 2, 2025) — Intentional Living Inspiration, Self-Actualizing Transcenders, Reversed Effort Law, & More
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🌀 Maslow on Self-Actualizing Transcenders
The last newsletter covered Maslow on self-actualization. As a bridge between self-actualization and self-transcendence, we’ll focus this week on characteristics of self-actualizing transcenders and do a deeper dive on self-transcendence in general next week. In the work near the end of his life, Maslow noticed some differences among the most developed people:
· Healthy self-actualizers (non-transcending): living more in the here-and-now world (the D-realm of deficiency-needs and deficiency-cognitions); tend to be ‘doers’ rather than meditators or contemplators; useful (in fulfillment not only of one’s species-hood but also of one’s own idiosyncratic potentialities); effective/pragmatic rather than aesthetic, reality-testing/cognitive rather than emotional/experiencing.
· Self-actualizing transcenders (or simply, “transcenders”): much more often aware of the B-realm (Being-cognition) and living at the level of Being (of ends, intrinsic values); have unitive consciousness, peak experiences (with illuminations/insights which changed their view of the world and of themselves), and plateau experiences (serene and contemplative B-cognitions rather than climactic ones); more obviously metamotivated.
Maslow goes on to list 24 characteristics that distinguish the two stages and says, “It is my strong impression that the non-transcending self-actualizers do not have the following characteristics or have less of them than do the transcenders”:

0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🔥 What initially inspired intentional living leaders?
Almost anything can inspire intentional living:
- Me: existential crisis a decade ago from busyness plus purposelessness in my marketing career
- Courtney Carver (Be More With Less): life-changing health diagnosis (Multiple Sclerosis)
- Leo Babauta (Zen Habits): quitting smoking
- Brooke McAlary (Slow Your Home): diagnosed with severe postnatal depression
- Joshua Becker (Becoming Minimalist): frustration while cleaning out his garage
- Cait Flanders (Simple Living Author): $30k of debt
- Joshua Fields Millburn (The Minimalists): questioned everything after mother died and marriage ended in the same month
- Ryan Nicodemus (The Minimalists): laid off from the “American Dream”
- Carl Honoré (Slow Living Author): realization that he was speed reading bedtime stories to his son
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🧠 How Viktor Frankl survived concentration camps
I’ve read two of Viktor Frankl’s books—Man’s Search for Meaning (Summary | 🔒Premium) & Yes to Life (Summary | 🔒Premium).
But, this video interview is the first time I’ve heard Frankl attribute some of his survival to Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle (Wikipedia):
- “I applied the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper: you cannot prove any hypothesis—the only thing you can do is falsify it, show that it is not valid, that it is not tenable … I applied this theory in as much as I told myself, ‘Viktor, the chances are very, very low and small—probably you will be sent to the gas chamber.’ And still, there is nobody who can guarantee me and convince me with 100% certainty that I shall not survive but end in the gas chamber. As long as I have no guarantee that I will have to die within the next days, I continue behaving and acting as if I would spare this fate.” — Viktor Frankl
What is falsifiability?
- “Falsification is the opposite of verification; you must try to show the theory is incorrect, and if you fail to do so, you actually strengthen it … The idea here is that if you can’t prove something wrong, you can’t really prove it right either.” — Shane Parrish (The Great Mental Models Vol 1)
In Karl Popper’s own words:
- “A theory is part of empirical science if and only if it conflicts with possible experiences and is therefore in principle falsifiable by experience … If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted.” — Karl Popper
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⬅️ Backwards Law (or Law of Reversed Effort)
Alan Watts covers this in his book The Wisdom of Insecurity:
- “I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the ‘backwards law.’ When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it—which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.'”
- “This book is an exploration of this law in relation to man’s quest for psychological security, and to his efforts to find spiritual and intellectual certainty in religion and philosophy. It is written in the conviction that no theme could be more appropriate in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain. It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves … This book, however, is in the spirit of the Chinese sage Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink. Here, then, my aim is to show—backwards-fashion—that those essential realities of religion and metaphysic are vindicated in doing without them, and manifested in being destroyed.”
- “By the same law of reversed effort, we discover the ‘infinite’ and the ‘absolute,’ not by straining to escape from the finite and relative world, but by the most complete acceptance of its limitations. Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the ‘mystery of the universe’ only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.”
Bonus: Aldous Huxley also talks about it as featured in Sloww Sunday #090.
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☯️ Alan Watts on Free Will (& Far Beyond)
I finally curated and organized about 50 Alan Watts quotes on free will (spoiler alert: he clearly says there’s no free will). Watts is an incredibly popular philosopher/spiritual teacher/entertainer, yet he’s sharing the incredibly unpopular message that you are not a separate, responsible, independent, free agent (I call this the “Alan Watts Paradox”). What gives? Does the average Watts fan actually misunderstand his message? Given that 80% of Western minds are still in conventional stages of psychological development, I’d say that’s exactly what’s happening.
Ultimately, and more importantly, Watts acknowledges that “free will” as a concept and question is a non-issue:
- “Does the concept of will fit in? Not really, no … The will implies a separation of man and nature, and therefore we ask the question, ‘Do we have free will?’ or, ‘Are we determined?’ That means: are you a bus or a tram? And both concepts are off the point, because both of them presuppose a fundamental separation of the individual from the universe.” — Alan Watts
- “The self that you think you are doesn’t exist. In other words, the ego has no reality, except in the sense that the equator has reality. It’s a social institution … When we find out that it doesn’t exist, the problem is solved … See, you cannot do anything about it, and you cannot do nothing about it. Because there isn’t any ‘you’ to do it, or not to do it—not in the sense in which we ordinarily think of ‘you,’ of one’s self. That is an abstraction. It cannot do something to transform itself, it cannot do nothing to transform itself. But when that is understood, the problem is solved. Because then, you see, what you find out is that although you, as the ego, do not exist, nevertheless you’re still breathing, still circulating your blood, your hair is still growing, life is still going on, the wind is still blowing. And you find out then that, instead of what you thought you were, there is a happening. And that happening is the whole universe going along. You are not its victim, you are not its puppet … There is neither fate nor free will. There is just this happening. There is nature going along, and that’s you.” — Alan Watts
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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This is a widely shared excerpt from Einstein:
- “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.” — Einstein
However, this version is a closer English translation to Einstein’s original handwritten German:
- “A human being is a spatially and temporally limited fragment of the whole that we call the ‘universe.’ They perceive themselves and their feelings as separate from the rest—an optical illusion of their consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this illusion is the sole subject of true religion. It is not the nurturing of the illusion but only its overcoming that provides us with the attainable measure of inner peace.” — Einstein
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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