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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 233 (Mar 22, 2026) — Voluntary Simplicity, Awareness, I Am That, & 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.
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🤔 What if we aren’t aware that we are thinking?
The last couple newsletters have covered the weirdness of thinking, so let’s stick with that theme another week here. Spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti’s collected works is a whopping 17 volumes—he had a lot to say. So, what’s the gist of all those teachings? Physicist David Bohm spent significant time in dialogue with him over the course of decades. Here’s what Bohm says was Krishnamurti’s major discovery:
- “We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti’s major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or, to put it differently, it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening when we are engaged in the activity of thinking … Ordinarily, we tend to be aware mainly of the content of this thought rather than of how it actually takes place.” — David Bohm (The Limits of Thought)
Explore more:
- “The Limits of Thought” by Bohm & Krishnamurti (Book Summary)
- “Thought as a System” by David Bohm (Book Summary)
- 🔒 Bohm & Krishnamurti Synthesis: Everything from the Meetings of Science & Spirituality
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🧠 Featured Product: Synthesizer Course: The Flagship Course for Synthesizing Minds
🥣 What is the value of voluntary simplicity?
Some highlights from a 90-year-old essay on voluntary simplicity by Richard Gregg (Essay Summary):
- “Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life … It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose.”
- “There is one further value to simplicity. It may be regarded as a mode of psychological hygiene. Just as eating too much is harmful to the body, even though the quality of all food eaten is excellent, so it seems that there may be a limit to the number of things or the amount of property which a person may own and yet keep himself psychologically healthy.”
- “If such simple action by me seems too tiny and insignificant to make it worth while to attempt, I should remember that it is not really insignificant, because it is an organic part of the great spirit of millions throughout the ages who have voluntarily lived simple lives. The meaning of my part in such a movement does not lie in the size of my accomplishment so far as I am aware of it, but in the quality of the principle and the quality of my participation.”
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
😃 Featured Product: The Hierarchy of Happiness: 100+ Powerful Perspectives on How to be Happy (Free eBook)
👁️ Is the universe becoming aware of itself?
Are ‘U’ the universe? The following idea and sketch comes from theoretical physicist John Wheeler (short video):
- “A picture to inspire a thought … There’s the letter ‘U’. The U starts with a thin stem, the beginning of the universe. At the beginning, the universe is small. This stemmed-U gets fatter as we go up to this side of the letter. And at a certain point it’s terminated by a big circle, and there, there’s an eye sitting and that eye is looking back to the first days of the universe … In so far as the act of observation has anything to do with what we do when we ascribe reality to what we see, then we can say, this observer who was brought into existence by the universe, has, by his acts of observation, a part in bringing that universe itself into being.” — John Wheeler
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧭 Featured Product: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
🧠 Why was Einstein Einstein?
From Livewired by neuroscientist David Eagleman (Book Summary):
- “Why was Einstein Einstein? Surely genetics mattered, but he is affixed to our history books because of every experience he’d had: the exposure to cellos, the physics teacher he had in his senior year, the rejection of a girl he loved, the patent office in which he worked, the math problems he was praised for, the stories he read, and millions of further experiences—all of which shaped his nervous system into the biological machinery we distinguish as Albert Einstein. Each year, there are thousands of other children with his potential but who are exposed to cultures, economic conditions, or family structures that don’t give sufficiently positive feedback. And we don’t call them Einsteins.” — David Eagleman (Livewired)
Explore more:
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
🧠 Featured Product: Mini Mind: 365 Days of Bite-Size Brain Food
☯️ The spiritual classic I Am That
I’ve been dabbling in a bunch of books by spiritual teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj lately: I Am That, Beyond Freedom, Seeds of Consciousness, Prior to Consciousness, Consciousness and the Absolute, and The Ultimate Medicine. Here are some highlights from the first 25% of I Am That:
- “Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am l’? After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The ‘I am’ is certain. The ‘I am this’ is not.”
- “We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we overcome it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious.”
- “l appear to hear and see and talk and act, but to me it just happens, as to you digestion or perspiration happens. The body-mind machine looks after it, but leaves me out of it. Just as you do not need to worry about growing hair, so I need not worry about words and actions. They just happen and leave me unconcerned, for in my world nothing ever goes wrong.”
- “No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is … You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is … Everything is inter-linked. And therefore everything has numberless causes.”
- “You cannot possibly say that you are what you think yourself to be! Your ideas about yourself change from day to day and from moment to moment. Your self-image is the most changeful thing you have. It is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of a passerby. A bereavement, the loss of a job, an insult, and your image of yourself, which you call your person, changes deeply. To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not. And to know what you are not you must watch yourself carefully, rejecting all that does not necessarily go with the basic fact: ‘I am’. The ideas: I am born at a given place, at a given time, from my parents and now I am so-and-so, living at, married to, father of, employed by, and so on, are not inherent in the sense ‘I am’. Our usual attitude is of ‘I am this’. Separate consistently and perseveringly the ‘I am’ from ‘this’ or ‘that’, and try to feel what it means to be, just to be, without being ‘this’ or ‘that’. All our habits go against it and the task of fighting them is long and hard sometimes, but clear understanding helps a lot. The clearer you understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your search and realise your limitless being.”
Explore more:
- The Misguided Pride of Achievement (Nisargadatta Maharaj Teaching Pointer)
- 25+ Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes on Free Will, the Doer, & More
- 🔒 Nisargadatta Maharaj Synthesis: Everything about the Witness (+ Infographic)
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
