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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 147 (Jun 18, 2023) — Starting with Sloww, Loving your Doing, Questioning your Self, & More
Sloww Sunday shares my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📚 Lifelong Learning
What is Sloww, and where do I start?
The Sloww site has hundreds of posts, but did you know there’s an easy way to get to whatever you want to learn? The posts below organize every single post on the entire site into the corresponding “Sloww Stage.” To make it even easier, I’ve pinned these to the site homepage for quick access.
- What is Sloww? (an overview of everything below)
- 25+ posts on Lifelong Learning (Sloww Stage Support)
- 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
- 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
- 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
- 50+ posts on Spiritual Realization (Sloww Stage 4)
I also made some updates to the Sloww Stages infographics:
🌎 Lighter Living
Why does the U.S. consumer think the way they do?
We are approaching 100 years of this quote:
- “Americanism: Using money you haven’t earned to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.” — Robert Quillen (1928)
This prompted me to reread the postscript in The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel (Book Summary) titled “A brief history of why the U.S. consumer thinks the way they do.” I’ve summarized 10 key points in this Twitter thread.
- “If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2020 you would not recognize the world around you … What happened in America since the end of World War II is the story of the American consumer. It’s a story that helps explain why people think about money the way they do today.” — Morgan Housel
Explore more: How do I design a lighter lifestyle? (100+ posts on Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Deeper Purpose
You have to do what you love to do
I recently discovered spiritual teacher Barry Long (Wikipedia). To be honest, I don’t know much about him yet, but this short video clip about purpose resonated with me. Here’s an excerpt:
- “Eventually, you have to do what you love to do. Not what gets you a lot of money. Not what is exciting because it won’t be exciting for long. You just eventually got to do what you just simply love doing. And, very few people in the world ever find that because the demand of the world is that you be successful. When you do what you love doing, it doesn’t necessarily mean much money. It doesn’t mean much success. But, it does mean the fulfillment of not having the problem of having to do what you don’t want to do.” — Barry Long
Explore more: How do I find deeper purpose? (50+ posts on Sloww Stage 2)
Get the eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Two Psychological Development Watch-outs
These come from Susanne Cook-Greuter, creator of Ego Development Theory. I think about these often because I see them at play in the world all the time (and I also try to catch them in myself). Once you know these, you’ll also start to see them everywhere.
1. Aboutism:
- “High intelligence and access to cognitively complex thought can seduce individuals to overestimate their ego development … Post-conventional topics can be acquired as objects of knowledge from a conventional mindset. One can know all about the topic without ever integrating it into one’s own personal meaning-making (e.g. learning everything there is to know about a theory without transfer to their interior life, knowledge remaining espoused theory rather than theory-in-action, etc). This is why we call it ‘aboutism.’ This confusion between knowing about something versus embodying it has become an issue in the integral community where one can learn everything about the elegant and complex AQAL theory and then get tested on one’s knowledge. A high score on the test does not guarantee that one has integrated this knowledge into one’s being. Nonetheless, thinking about and learning new distinctions is one of the levers in ongoing development.”
2. Voice of the Guru:
- “The propensity to be conditioned remains active throughout adulthood at all levels of development. There are many adult contexts which have their own peculiar take on reality which is reflected in the professional jargons that accompany them. This includes spiritual paths. In the latter case, the ‘voice of the guru’ sometimes rings through everything a student says. This makes it almost impossible to rate fairly a MAP (Maturity Assessment Profile) from such a devotee as the ‘canned’ elements of the response are assessed as conventional no matter how lofty the content. On the other hand, when students from the same school express these ideas in their own language, one has greater confidence in rating their responses according to how well their experience and knowledge seem digested.”
More EDT:
- An Introduction to “Ego Development Theory” by Susanne Cook-Greuter (EDT Summary)
- Humanity is Stuck in Development: Civilization’s Critical Evolution to the “Watershed Stage” in Ego Development Theory
- 🔒Behind the Scenes: My Ego Development Theory Self-Assessment
- 🔒Behind the Scenes: How my Personal Development Journey maps to Ego Development Theory (Sloww Stages vs EDT Stages)
Explore more: How do I master the mind? (75+ posts on Sloww Stage 3)
Get Mini Mind: 365 Daily Emails of Bite-Size Brain Food
☯️ Spiritual Realization
Who am I?
Here are 3 ways to explore this ultimate question that build on each other:
1. In my experience, asking this question initially led me to explore my psychology (e.g. personality type, Enneagram, life roles, desires, values, beliefs, strengths, talents, etc). Who am I? I am an INTJ, Enneagram 3 or 5, synthesizer, solopreneur, husband, dog dad, son, brother, etc. This is when you think you are your mind.
2. Then, I realized I wasn’t going deep enough. I began questioning how I became who I am psychologically (e.g. socialization, conditioning, enculturation, etc). Who am I? I am the amalgamation of 🔒my lottery of birth, being born in the 1980s to married parents in the Midwest USA, who taught me English and provided a good education, etc. This is when you are able to self-question and observe your mind as an object (in other words, this is when you realize you are not your mind).
3. Going even further, apparently one can eventually use the mind to go beyond mind (e.g. 🔒Ramana Maharshi’s direct path of self-enquiry—realizing you are not any of the contents of your psychology (#1 above), and not even your mind at all (#2 above)). Who am I? I am. This is when your mind dissolves in being (in other words, when subject and object merge, enlightenment, abiding nondual awareness, etc).
Note: These are all important phases/stages, but the key is to keep going further. Each step seems to be a necessary for the next one (and therefore each step acts as a filter and has fewer humans than the prior one).
- “In the enquiry ‘Who am I?’, ‘I’ is the ego. The question really means, what is the source or origin of this ego? … If the root ‘I’-thought is pulled out, all others are at the same time uprooted. Therefore seek the root ‘I’, question yourself ‘Who am I?’. Find out its source, and then all these other ideas will vanish and the pure Self will remain.” — Ramana Maharshi
Explore more: How do I see beyond mind? (50+ posts on Sloww Stage 4)
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
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