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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 227 (Dec 28, 2025) — Intentional Living Challenges, Overcoming Cultural Conditioning, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. 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):
📚 Read more books ‘over your head’
This is the last highlight from the How to Read a Book video by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (check out the last few newsletters for more):
- “If you’re reading for understanding—for deepening your mind, acquiring insight, lifting your mind up from a lower level to a higher level—then I think it’s terribly important for each of us, for everyone, to find a number of books that are over their heads. Because if a person reads only books that are on the level of his head, he can’t lift his head up. It’s the books that are over one’s head—the books which one only partially understands at first and must work at to understand more—that can possibly elevate you. You can’t lift yourself up with things at your level or below your level … What’s over your head, you should go after. The art of reading consists in having the skills required for lifting your mind up, with nothing but a book in your hand, from understanding less to understanding more.” — Mortimer Adler
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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💪 New Year, New Challenges
The start of a new year is always a good time to consider trying some of these intentional living challenges.
In prior years, I’ve successfully completed a no-buy year for clothing and a no-alcohol year (🔒).
I’ve learned it’s much easier for me to subtract something from my life than it is for me to add something to my life. While I was able to subtract shopping and drinking, it’s been incredibly hard for me to add a 30-minute daily walk to my life (aka Wise Walk).
I’ve failed two years in a row so far (granted, one year we had a baby, and the next year we moved 1500 miles across the country). Maybe this is my year when things ‘slow down’? 😂
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🇺🇸 Overcoming your cultural conditioning
Strong words from Anthony de Mello in Awareness (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics):
- “In a geographical map, there are no frontiers or boundaries. They were put there by the human mind; generally by stupid, avaricious politicians. My country was one country once upon a time; it’s four now. If we don’t watch out it might be six. Then we’ll have six flags, six armies. That’s why you’ll never catch me saluting a flag. I abhor all national flags. What are we saluting? I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it. Flags are in the heads of people. They’re fighting for a convention. They’re fighting for a frontier which the human mind put there but doesn’t exist in reality.”
- “Imagine an American baby that is adopted by a Russian couple and taken to Russia. It has no notion that it was born American. It’s brought up talking Russian; it lives and dies for Mother Russia; it hates Americans. The child is stamped with its own culture; it’s steeped in its own literature. It looks at the world through the eyes of its culture. You want to wear your cultures the way you wear clothes … Nobody’s identifying with the clothes.” (Note: Anthony de Mello tells this story (🔒) in another one of his books and ends with, “Is he Russian? American? Neither. Find out who/what you are.”)
- “You mean you’d like to do something because you were conditioned to do it? You’d like to feel something because you were conditioned to feel it? Isn’t that being mechanical? You got a stamp on you and you react according to that stamp … Part of our liberation is liberation from our culture.”
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 Schopenhauer on free will
Arthur Schopenhauer was one of those rare people who actually understood (the lack of) free will. Last week I included a public summary of his Essay on the Freedom of the Will. I decided to go a step further and do a 🔒Premium summary that breaks everything down as simply as possible. This week I’ll leave you with one of his thought experiments:
- “Let us imagine a man who, while standing on the street, would say to himself: ‘It is six o’clock in the evening, the working day is over. Now I can go for a walk, or I can go to the club; I can also climb up the tower to see the sun set; I can go to the theater; I can visit this friend or that one; indeed, I also can run out of the gate, into the wide world, and never return. All of this is strictly up to me, in this I have complete freedom. But still I shall do none of these things now, but with just as free a will I shall go home to my wife.'”
- “This is exactly as if water spoke to itself: ‘I can make high waves (yes! in the sea during a storm), I can rush down hill (yes! in the river bed), I can plunge down foaming and gushing (yes! in the waterfall), I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air (yes! in the fountain), I can, finally, boil away and disappear (yes! at a certain temperature); but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond.'”
The takeaway:
- “As the water can do all those things only when the determining causes operate for the one or the other, so that man can do what he imagines himself able to do not otherwise than on the same condition. Until the causes begin to operate, this is impossible for him; but then, he must, as the water must, as soon as it is placed in the corresponding circumstances.“
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ The Final Barrier to God
I’m almost through the full 9.5-hour audio recording of Anthony de Mello’s 1986 prayer workshop (one year before his death) which became his book Awareness (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics). Here are some highlights:
- “You’re surrounded by God and you don’t see God, because you ‘know’ about God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know … The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable.”
- “Every concept that was meant to help us get in touch with reality ends up by being a barrier to getting in touch with reality, because sooner or later we forget that the words are not the thing. The concept is not the same as the reality. They’re different. That’s why I said to you earlier that the final barrier to finding God is the word ‘God’ itself and the concept of God. It gets in the way if you’re not careful.”
- “‘God’ is only a word, a concept … Sometimes you have to get rid of ‘God’ in order to find God. Lots of mystics tell us that … You don’t need to be a mystic to understand that reality is something that cannot be captured by words or concepts. To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.”
This reminds me of Joseph Campbell paraphrasing Carl Jung in The Power of Myth:
- “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”
Campbell goes on:
- “You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination … The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas, and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short-circuit the transcendent, connoted experience. An intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience. You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind.”
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
Be like water, and flow:
- “When you cut water, the water doesn’t get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside you; you’ve got solid illusions inside you; that’s what bumps against nature, that’s where you get hurt, that’s where the pain comes from.” — Anthony de Mello
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
