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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 226 (Dec 21, 2025) — Pyramid of Books, Willing Will, Awareness, & More
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📚 The ‘pyramid of books’ you can read in a lifetime
The last couple newsletters have featured highlights from the How to Read a Book video by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. Near the end of the video, they discuss how many books you can read in a lifetime. Mortimer Adler says:
“In a lifetime, considerably less than 500. Might even be as little as 200 or 300 books in a lifetime—read well, read actively, read for the purpose of deepening one’s understanding and lifting one’s mind up to a higher level of insight and understanding.” (Note: This is why my full reading list has under 500 books)
Adler says he likes to think of all the books in the world as forming a vast pyramid:
- Base of pyramid (95% of all books): Books that one doesn’t have to read even once. One could scan them and put them aside. They are not worth reading once (except perhaps for pleasure or to pass an idle hour).
- Second level: Good, but not great, books. Good enough to read carefully just once, but if you went back to them you’d find no reward in them at all. They wouldn’t hold up. They would not lift your mind any further.
- Third level (2% of all books): Books worth reading more than once (two or three times perhaps). A second time you would find other facets that you hadn’t seen the first time.
- Apex of pyramid (100 or less books): Books that are inexhaustible in the sense that you could read them over, and over, and over again—any number of times in the course of one’s life—always learning more.
Pair with: How to Read a Book (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics)
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🧘♀️ The Problem with Renunciation
When it comes to intentional living, people often jump to the extreme of thinking they’ll need to renounce everything and become ascetics living in the woods. But…
- “Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce … As long as you’re fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it.” — Anthony de Mello
Why? Well…
- “Aversion is the flip side of greed, the same desire from a different direction.” — Stephen Mitchell (paraphrasing Vicki Chang)
What to do instead:
- “The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands.” — Anthony de Mello
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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😢 Suffering is a sign to turn darkness into light
From Awareness by Anthony de Mello (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics):
- “Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere … Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering.”
Turn darkness into light:
- “How does one cope with darkness? Not with one’s fist. You don’t chase darkness out of the room with a broom, you turn on a light. The more you fight darkness, the more real it becomes to you, and the more you exhaust yourself. But when you turn on the light of awareness, it melts.”
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 Schopenhauer on freedom of the will
A couple recent newsletters have covered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. There’s a famous paraphrase from Einstein on Schopenhauer that says, “A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.” I decided to dive a little deeper into the original source by reading Schopenhauer’s prize-winning Essay on the Freedom of the Will (Essay Summary). Some highlights:
- “Man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily. But this is due to the fact that he already is what he wills. For from that which he is, there follows of necessity everything that he, at any time, does.”
- “You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.”
- “Everything depends on what one is; what he does will follow therefrom of itself, as a necessary corollary.”
- “The actions of men, like everything else in nature, take place in any given case as an effect which follows necessarily.”
- “Everything that happens, from the largest to the smallest, happens necessarily … Even the smallest accident happens necessarily and all occurrences, so to speak, keep time with one another, so that everything reverberates in everything else.”
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Awareness, Awareness, Awareness
I’m almost through the full 9.5-hour audio recording of Anthony de Mello’s 1986 prayer workshop (one year before his death). Here are some highlights specifically related to awareness:
- “I don’t know of any other means of transformation than awareness … You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don’t change; just gets repressed. But when you understand it, it changes. When you become aware of it, it changes.”
- “What you are aware of, you are in control of. What you are not aware of, is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it, you’re not controlled by it, you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.”
- “There’s only one way out and that is to get deprogrammed! How do you do that? You become aware of the programming. You cannot change by an effort of the will; you cannot change through ideals; you cannot change through building up new habits. Your behavior may change, but you don’t. You only change through awareness and understanding.”
- “Too little awareness. That’s what the world is suffering from. Not lack of religion—lack of awareness, lack of waking up. That’s what religion is all about; that’s what it’s supposed to be about.”
- (On those famous words of Jesus and what they actually mean): “‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ I would translate that as ‘They’re not aware of what they are doing.'”
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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“All mystics…are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well … The mystics keep telling us again and again, reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems only exist in the human mind.” — Anthony de Mello
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
