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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 234 (Mar 29, 2026) — Conscious Work, Cosmic Unity, Nonduality, & 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):
💭 Where do your thoughts come from?
The last few newsletters have covered various aspects of thinking such as the weird spontaneity of thoughts and our general lack of awareness of thinking itself. But, where do your thoughts actually come from? This excerpt is from Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything (Book Summary):
- “The cultural community serves as an intrinsic background to any individual thoughts I might have. My thoughts do not just pop into my head out of nowhere; they pop into my head out of a cultural background, and however much I might move beyond this background, I can never simply escape it altogether, and I could never have developed thoughts in the first place without it. The occasional cases of a ‘wolf boy’—humans raised in the wild—show that the human brain, left without culture, does not produce linguistic thoughts on its own. The self is far from the autonomous and self-generating monad the Enlightenment imagined. In short, my individual thoughts only exist against a vast background of cultural practices and languages and meanings, without which I could form virtually no individual thoughts at all.” — Ken Wilber
Pair with: 🔒 Is Free Thinking Even Possible?
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🧘♀️ What are the rewards of conscious work?
Philosopher and teacher Vernon Howard has some amazing quotes attributed to him. Some of my personal favorites include:
- “You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.”
- “Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will.”
- “Apparent misfortune is our greatest fortune.”
And, I just stumbled upon this one (thanks to the YouTube Channel nobody really):
- “You should be more or less indifferent as to how you earn your living. It has no importance. Just be sure to perform inner work while performing outer work. The idea that one kind of work is more honorable or valuable than another is a delusion created by prideful men. And it makes no difference how much money you make or don’t make. Your rewards are of an entirely different nature. Mechanical work supplies the visible rewards of food and other daily necessities. Mechanical work, whether that of a carpenter or a professor, is work done without an aim of self-awakening. Conscious work provides the invisible rewards of self-harmony and other spiritual necessities. Conscious work, whether that of a carpenter or a professor, is work performed while using it for inner dawning. You can do mechanical work without receiving payment, but you can never do conscious work without payment, though at times it may seem delayed. You can learn to do mechanical work consciously, and when succeeding, you have overcome the world.” — Vernon Howard (Esoteric Mind Power)
Pair with: Abraham Maslow’s concept of “metapay”
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🧠 Why aren’t most aware they’ve been culturally conditioned?
Building on the quote above from Ken Wilber saying our thoughts come from a ‘cultural background’, it’s surprising that most people aren’t aware that they’ve been culturally conditioned in the first place. Here’s what theoretical physicist David Bohm said:
- “Any tradition, good or bad, makes people accept a certain structure of reality, very subtly, without their realizing they are doing it, by imitation, or by example, or by words, just by statements. So very steadily the child builds up an approach in which the brain attributes things which are in the tradition to a reality which is independent of tradition. And it gives it tremendous importance. I think it’s in every culture. Tradition has real effects of all sorts, which may even be valuable in some ways. But at the same time it conditions the brain to a certain view of reality, which is fixed. In our culture we get a conditioning as to what is sensed to be real and necessary and right, what you have to make of your life, what sort of person you should be, what is really the right thing to do and so on. All this is picked up from tiny little indications. They don’t seem to be thought, but seem to be the perception of reality. The brain treats thought as some reality independent of thought, and it becomes fragmented. A person may look at that reality and say, ‘That’s reality, I’ve got to keep my feet on the ground.’ But this ground has been created by tradition, by thought; it is no ground, it has nothing under it at all.” — David Bohm (The Limits of Thought)
Which reminds me of this incredible excerpt from sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann:
- “In primary socialization there is no problem of identification. There is no choice of significant others. Society presents the candidate for socialization with a predefined set of significant others, whom he must accept as such with no possibility of opting for another arrangement … One must make do with the parents that fate has regaled one with. This unfair disadvantage inherent in the situation of being a child has the obvious consequence that, although the child is not simply passive in the process of his socialization, it is the adults who set the rules of the game. The child can play the game with enthusiasm or with sullen resistance. But, alas, there is no other game around. This has an important corollary. Since the child has no choice in the selection of his significant others, his identification with them is quasi-automatic. For the same reason, his internalization of their particular reality is quasi-inevitable. The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world, the world tout court. It is for this reason that the world internalized in primary socialization is so much more firmly entrenched in consciousness than worlds internalized in secondary socializations. However much the original sense of inevitability may be weakened in subsequent disenchantments, the recollection of a never-to-be-repeated certainty—the certainty of the first dawn of reality—still adheres to the first world of childhood. Primary socialization thus accomplishes what (in hindsight, of course) may be seen as the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual—to make appear as necessity what is in fact a bundle of contingencies, and thus to make meaningful the accident of his birth.” — Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality)
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🤯 Are we all (ultimately) the same?
An intriguing thought from theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson (who was a teenager when this happened):
- “Enlightenment came to me suddenly and unexpectedly one afternoon in March when I was walking up to the school notice board to see whether my name was on the list for tomorrow’s football game. I was not on the list. And in a blinding flash of inner light I saw the answer to both my problems, the problem of war and the problem of injustice. The answer was amazingly simple. I called it Cosmic Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one of us. We are all the same person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi and everybody. There is no problem of injustice because your sufferings are also mine. There will be no problem of war as soon as you understand that in killing me you are only killing yourself … For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger.” — Freeman Dyson
At the end of his life, Dyson was asked if the idea still resonates with him:
- “Eighty years later, I look back on the ‘Cosmic Unity’ episode not as a youthful folly but as a lasting gift.”
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Two Steps to the Not Two
Swami Sarvapriyananda delivers one of the clearest descriptions of nonduality I’ve ever heard in this video.
For Sloww Premium members, I’ve outlined everything in step-by-step detail in this new post: 🔒 How to do the Two Steps to Nonduality with Swami Sarvapriyananda
- “Advaita makes the bold claim that not one thing which Advaita says is beyond your experience right now. The highest spiritual realization is not beyond your experience right now.” — Swami Sarvapriyananda
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
