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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 068 (July 11, 2021) — A Theory of Everything, Infinite Knowledge, Mastering Your Mind, & More
Hi friends,
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week.
To respect your time and attention, every newsletter can be read in under 5 minutes. If you enjoy it, please take 5 seconds to share it with someone who could benefit from it.
Happy learning and living!
New News
📚 This was a fun exercise. Someone recently asked me if the Premium book summaries are longer or shorter than the public summaries. So, I crunched the numbers. Not only are all the Premium summaries more actionable, but they are also further distilled to half the length of the free summaries. Learn more in less time!
Here are a few examples:
“In Praise of Slowness” by Carl Honoré: Full Book (80,071 words), Public Summary (5,781 words), 🔒Premium Summary (2,213 words)
“Atomic Habits” by James Clear: Full Book (48,575 words), Public Summary (5,627 words), 🔒Premium Summary (3,316 words)
“Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl: Full Book (46,397 words), Public Summary (9,607 words), 🔒Premium Summary (4,041 words)
Sloww Stuff
🆕 An Intro to Integral Theory: “A Theory of Everything” by Ken Wilber (Book Summary)
Ken Wilber is the creator of Integral Theory—a “world philosophy” (or “integral philosophy”) that synthesizes an incredibly wide range of Eastern and Western knowledge and wisdom. It attempts to include matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit as they appear in self, culture, and nature. In essence, it attempts to be as comprehensive, balanced, and inclusive as you can get. I’ve now read this book and “The Integral Vision” to attempt to get the gist of Integral Theory.
“Integral: the word means to integrate, to bring together, to join, to link, to embrace … not in the sense of uniformity … but in the sense of unity-in-diversity, shared commonalities along with our wonderful differences.” — Ken Wilber
Modern Knowledge
♾️ The Beginning of Infinity
(66 mins | YouTube)
It’s been a bit since I spent any time with content from entrepreneur-philosopher Naval Ravikant. Lately, Naval has been publishing short lessons with Brett Hall about the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Naval credits the book as being one of only a few books in the last decade that has literally expanded the way he thinks and changed his worldview. This new podcast compiles all of the short lessons together in one place.
Podcast Highlights:
- Know the fundamental theories: You don’t have to memorize and know every fact. If you understand the deep underlying theories behind everything, then you know at a high level how everything works.
- What is Deutsch’s worldview? In a nutshell: reality is comprehensible, everything is knowable, problems are solvable (or “soluble”), progress is inevitable if we have good explanations, and everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is eventually possible through knowledge creation because knowledge is what transforms the world.
- What are good explanations? Humans are unique in our capability to understand things. We are the entities within the universe that create explanations. Good explanations are acts of creativity that are: testable/falsifiable, hard to vary, and make risky and narrow predictions.
Pair with:
- If you’re looking for the ultimate guide to Naval’s knowledge, I truly don’t think you’ll find anything better than this out there: 🔒 Naval Ravikant Synthesis: How to Build Wealth by Being Yourself (+ Infographics)
“I remain a student of science. I remain fascinated by it. All of my real heroes are scientists, because I believe science is the engine that pulls humanity forward.” — Naval Ravikant
Timeless Wisdom
🌊 Ceasing to Be Caught in the Waters of Mind
(65 mins | YouTube)
Some people are consistently a joy to listen to, and bestselling author Michael Singer is one of those people. Singer has the rare ability to distill complexity into simplicity. The Michael Singer Podcast is a new 5-episode production in partnership with Sounds True. So far, episodes 1 & 2 are live.
Pair with:
“Eventually, if you work enough on yourself, you’ll find that what’s happening is that you are resting on your mind like you would float on water … You are not your mind. You are resting on your mind. Therefore, you are experiencing the state of your mind … The key is you are you … the consciousness, the awareness of being, and you are resting on mind.” — Michael Singer
Mind Expanding
🤯 A Theory for Why Water Has No Taste
This comes from the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland (via Tom Morgan):
“The psychophysicist Mark Changizi has a simple evolutionary explanation for why water ‘doesn’t taste of anything’: he thinks that the human taste mechanism has been calibrated not to notice the taste of water, so it is optimally attuned to the taste of anything that might be polluting it.”
💭 Deep Quote
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” — Pema Chödrön
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Have a serene week!
Kyle Kowalski
Solopreneur & Synthesizer, Sloww
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