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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 236 (Apr 26, 2026) — Wise Slowness, Extinct Thinking, Birth Swaps, & 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):
🧠 Learn to think before thinking goes extinct
Have you seen all the recent articles from teachers about how students today can’t focus or think because they are too addicted to social media and use AI to do all their thinking for them? It paints a pretty scary picture of the future…
If you really want to learn how to think, you need to learn the highest level of thinking: synthesizing. That’s why I created the Synthesizer course. With the rise of AI, this course has become even more urgent and important since it launched.
It’s for thinkers of all ages. Whether it’s for yourself or you are a parent (of college, high school, or maybe even gifted grade school kids), please respond to this email if you want to learn more—or go ahead and simply get started today:
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🧘♀️ The counterintuitive need to slow down
Very cool to see Iain McGilchrist explicitly address silence and slowness in this recent podcast:
- “There are certain things, and this is so important, that you can only realize—and ‘realize’ carries with it the sort of idea of bringing out of potential into full actuality—if you stop acting, thinking, and filling up the space with what you think is important, and instead cultivate silence, openness, awareness. And, that awareness is not some passive not-doing-anything, it is an activity in which you are not filling the space with your thoughts, but listening.”
- “The wise thing is to slow down to make space for what appears unproductive, but is the only productive time, which is when you are receptive, when things can germinate, when something can come about between something that is calling to you and you are answering. This calling-and-answering idea seems to be very important. There’s a resonance, a response, a responsibility between what is ‘in here’ and what is ‘out there’. And those two things, which are never entirely separate, are constantly coming together into the reality that I experience, that you experience, that we all experience. And it’s in that resonance that the only real can come about. It’s always created afresh. And it comes about through, first of all, being silent long enough to hear something.”
- “There is a Hindu saying—it doesn’t actually say it in these words in the Bhagavad Gita, but the sentiment is there—that hell is more, faster. And that is the world we live in: there’s gotta be more, and it’s gotta happen faster. And I say, no, there’s gotta be less, and it’s gotta happen slower. We don’t understand the paradoxical nature of reality … Right at the core of reality is the coming together of opposites: that less can be more, that unknowing can be more than knowing, and that there can be something rich in non-doing.”
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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👶 🔄 👶 What would you do if you (or your child) was switched at birth?
The previous newsletter shared one real-life story of babies being switched at birth that I recently stumbled upon. Well, that sent me down a deeper rabbit hole, and it turns out there are a bunch of real-life birth swap stories (discoveries are on the rise due to DNA and ancestry testing). I ended up searching for each story on YouTube, and there are clips of many of them over the years:
- Swaps between rich and poor families (here and here), different biological sexes (here), and even one twin each from two sets of twins (here).
- Then there are coincidental meetings between swapped babies decades later (here), some shocking stuff that seems to be nature that we would otherwise consider nurture (here and here), and even babies who were swapped and raised in different religions (here and here).
Speaking of swapping religion, Raoul Martinez offers this thought experiment:
- “When I was 13, my worldview was changed by a simple idea. I was walking home from school with a friend of mine, and we were debating religion. He was religious; I wasn’t. And, it seemed clear to me that he only believed what he believed because of his upbringing. The thought experiment popped into my head: imagine you’d been swapped at birth with another baby and raised in a totally different faith. Don’t you think now you’d be defending with the same passion those beliefs, that religion, instead of your current beliefs? Isn’t it obvious that you’re only saying what you’re saying because of the lottery of your birth? And, I realized, didn’t the same thing apply to me? Everything about me: my beliefs, the language I spoke, my habits—it had all happened to me. I hadn’t chosen any of it.”
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 Spinoza on free will
I finally read a good bit of Spinoza’s Ethics. While I didn’t love the writing style, here were some quotes that stuck out:
- “Human beings are mistaken in thinking they are free. This belief consists simply of their being conscious of their actions but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”
- “There is no absolute or free will in the mind; but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause, which also is determined by another cause, and this in turn by another, and so on ad infinitum.”
- “Human beings, like all other things, act from the necessity of nature.”
- “All things have followed necessarily from God’s nature as it is, and have been determined by the necessity of God’s nature to exist and to operate in a specific way.”
- “The universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involve eternal truth and necessity. So that to say that everything happens according to natural laws, and to say that everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God, is the same thing.”
Read more: 25+ Spinoza Quotes on Free Will
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Awakening with Anthony
Some thoughts from Anthony de Mello:
- “Reality is not problematic. You are the problem. The scriptures are always hinting at that, but you’ll never get it because you won’t understand a word of what the scriptures are saying till you wake up. Sleeping people read the scriptures and crucify the Messiah on the basis of them. You got to wake up to make sense out of the scriptures.”
- “In the East we have an image for this. The image of the dancer and the dance. God is viewed as the dancer and creation as his dance. It isn’t as if he is the big dancer and you are the little dancer. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. You’re not a dancer at all. You are being danced … To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were. You thought you were center. Now you experience yourself as satellite. You thought you were dancer. You now experience yourself as danced.”
- “Dying is wonderful, but it’s only horrible to people who have never understood life. It’s only when you’re afraid of life that you fear death. It’s only dead people who fear death. But people who are alive have no fear of death.”
Read more: Awareness (Summary | 🔒Premium)
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
