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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 152 (Aug 6, 2023) — Truth about Minimalism, Unanswerable Questions, Awakening Stages, & 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
10 Life-Changing Ideas (Updated!)
Sloww recently crossed 550+ posts, so I took a moment to update this post with the latest and greatest: 10 Most Life-Changing Ideas I’ve Discovered after 500+ Posts
Which ideas have been most impactful for you? Any that you think I’m missing? Just reply to this email and let me know.
Explore more: 25+ posts on Lifelong Learning (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
The Truth about Minimalism
Despite what you may have heard, minimalism isn’t about how much stuff you have. It’s not like you can get rid of everything except a specific number of things and then that magically makes you a “minimalist.”
It’s less about: the objective/quantitative stuff you have (what and how much you have).
It’s more about: the subjective/qualitative experience with your stuff (your relationship with what you have and why you have it).
This is why you can see very different types of minimalists:
- someone pursuing “radical minimalism” who has virtually nothing but is still unhappy and unfulfilled because they are highly attached to the few things they have (and maybe even still attached to all the things they got rid of)—in other words, they are still dependent on their stuff (likely as part of their identity), and their relationship with their stuff is one where they would not be okay if it disappeared.
- someone pursuing “rational minimalism” who has more stuff but is happy and fulfilled because they are less attached to the things they have—their relationship with their stuff is one where they would be okay if that stuff disappeared because their identity is not dependent on it.
“Minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things so we can make room for life’s important things—which aren’t things at all.” — Joshua Fields Millburn
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Deeper Purpose
What are the unanswerable questions about why you are the way you are?
Here are a few of mine I continue to think about:
1. Why do I care so much about fun? For my entire life, if something stops being fun, it’s just a matter of time before I quit (quitting competitive swimming in high school after ~7 years, quitting competitive running in college after ~6 years, quitting my career after ~11 years, etc). Why does the fun factor have such a big sway in my life? I don’t know. My best guess after recently watching many hours of family home videos starting when I was ~2 years old is that my entire childhood was essentially doing and following what was fun. But, ultimately, this is an unanswerable question.
2. Why do I care so much about purpose? I could be making a ton of money had I continued my purposeless career. Why wasn’t I content just doing what so many people do and pursuing money above all else? Why did I have an existential crisis when I was being paid the highest salary in my career up to that point? I don’t know. My best guess (after learning about what Morgan Housel and Daniel Kahneman say about how your money memes are formed early in life) is that I’ve never been primarily extrinsically motivated by money (even when I got my first “real” job as a lifeguard when I was 14 or 15 and never stopped working since then). But, why am I wired in a way where I care so much about purpose in what I do? Ultimately, this is another unanswerable question.
3. Why does purpose outweigh fun? Putting #1 & #2 together, I’ve realized that fun is necessary but not sufficient. Purpose is required on top of something being fun. For instance, if you said you’d pay me big money to play basketball on my driveway (which I find fun), that pay and fun doesn’t offset the fact that I don’t find it purposeful. So, that’s a dealbreaker. Why I’m wired this way is ultimately unanswerable.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Better Mind
The Biology of Free Will
Robert Sapolsky’s new book on free will comes out in October. In the meantime, here’s his perspective in 5 key points:
1. All behavior is always multifactorial with multiple levels of causality:
- evolution + genes/epigenetics + prenatal environment + sensory environment + hormone levels + neural plasticity + culture + traumas + stress + mood + nutrition + subliminal/unconscious + more—and factoring it all into the previous minute, this morning, the last few months, you in adolescence, you in childhood, you as a fetus, your ancestors, and more.
2. There’s no homunculus or free neuron:
- “There’s nothing in the biology of our behavior that just happens from out of nowhere … Show me a neuron that fired that had an action potential for no reason whatsoever, a neuron whose firing was not regulated by the physical laws of the universe that happened for no prior causal antecedent reason. Show me a neuron that works that way, and then we could talk about free will … A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science.”
3. We are going to be very wrong:
- Remember 500 years ago when hailstorms were caused by witches? That was wrong. Or, when epileptic seizures were caused by sleeping with satan? That was wrong. Or, 75 years ago when schizophrenia was caused by psychodynamically screwed up mothers and their ‘schizophrenic mothering’ (a mother who unconsciously hated her child and wished that the child hadn’t been born)? That was wrong. We’ve since learned that schizophrenia is a neurochemical disorder, that epileptic seizures are neurological disorders often from a mutation in a rectifying potassium ion channel in the nervous system, that certain types of learning disabilities are not children being lazy and unmotivated but instead cortical malformations, etc. Just think about all the things we’re still currently wrong about…
4. We have misplaced attribution:
- “All we’ve been learning for the last 200 years are more and more things that we used to attribute to this nebulous concept of ‘free will’ where we instead at some point say, ‘Oh, I had no idea that was biological’ … People are going to look back on how we think of people with bad self-control, people with an inability to feel somebody else’s problems, people who are remorseless, people who are cold-blooded this or that, and it’s going to be as misplaced of attribution that we have now—when saying these are attributes that are deserving of punishment—as people saying that epileptics were consorting with satan.”
5. We are going to be very sorry:
- “We’re going to sit there and look back at this and say, ‘Oh my god, the things we didn’t know about then—the damage that we did thinking we understood behavior and that there was choice and responsibility and agency.’ And, that’s not just going to be scientists 300 years from now. Almost certainly, we’re going to last long enough to sit there in some of these realms, and we’re going to say, ‘My god, the way I’ve treated people in my life thinking that there was responsibility at that juncture, and we had no idea about that part of the brain, that hormone, that neurotransmitter, that gene, that childhood experience, whatever, my god, the damage that we have done.'”
Pair with:
- No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky
- The Homunculus Fallacy & Mitigated Free Will (Robert Sapolsky Short Excerpt)
- 🔒 Stream of Consciousness: What’s our Problem with (Mis)Attribution of Agency?
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Beyond Mind
The Stages of Awakening
Rupert Spira says it took him 20 years to wake up because for years he was “busy trying to still my mind and those kind of practices.” A good reminder that you can’t fake it til you make it in spirituality (the doing is a byproduct of the seeing). According to his lived experience, here’s how he describes the stages of awakening:
1. The Recognition (What am I?):
- “First of all, what am I? I am obviously that which is aware of my experience … I am aware. It pervades all experience—its ever-present in all experience … What I essentially am is simply the presence of awareness … I am that which is aware of my experience—that with which all objective experience is known but which itself cannot be known as an object … What we have been calling ‘I’ all our life is that which is aware of all this changing experience.”
2. The Investigation (What is the nature of this awareness?):
- “The investigation into the nature of awareness/consciousness is another stage after the recognition ‘I am awareness’ … The exploration is, ‘What is the nature of the knowing with which I know my experience?’ There seems to be evidence for it being temporary and finite, but when I look at the non-objective experience of simply being aware, I don’t find any objective qualities there … Being without objective qualities, it has no limits—either in time or space.”
3. The Experiential Discovery:
- “What I essentially am, the very knowing which is now knowing all of this experience, itself has no limits. That is the freedom from the sense of limitation: in time (the belief I was born and I will die), and in space (I am not finite, I am infinite). The experiential consequence of this discovery is that I don’t need anything. I am complete. I am full in myself. This puts an end to the sense of lack.”
The two discoveries:
· I am not located in time (I do not appear, or disappear; I was not born, I will not die) puts an end to the fear of death, and
· I am complete by myself (I, consciousness, don’t need anything from the mind, the body, or the world) puts an end to our sense of lack.
- “The two essential feelings that define the separate self are: the fear of death, and the sense of lack. The imaginary, separate, self’s activities are designed to allay the sense of fear, and fulfill the sense of lack. That is what everybody who believes themselves to be a separate self is doing in their lives. The recognition that what I am is ever-present and has no limits provides a new basis from which to think, from which to feel, from which to relate, and perceive, and act … This colonization of the entire realm of experience—thoughts, feelings, sensations, activities, relationships, perceptions—that’s an endless process. It’s really the art of life: to live all realms of our life in a way that is consistent with, and an expression of, this understanding.”
What about choice?
- “Take a very simple example of choice. It’s breakfast time. Somebody asks, ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ You just hear the question, pause, the thought appears ‘I would like tea’. It just appears like all thoughts. That thought is not chosen—no thought is chosen. All thoughts just appear.”
The experience of choice:
1. First of all, you hear the question, ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’
2. Next thought: ‘I would like tea.’
3. Next thought: ‘I chose to have tea.’
- “The separate self is created with that third thought. That thought is the separate self, the chooser … It’s an afterthought. Nobody actually chooses the thought, ‘I would like tea.’ Choice is an interpretation of an experience in which there is actually no choice.”
- “In retrospect, we look at the succession of thoughts … We look back and imagine that there is a ‘chooser’ in the system between each thought … It’s not actually there in between each of the thoughts. The chooser itself is not there in between each thought choosing each time between a range of possibilities: ‘I’ll have that thought next, and then I’ll have this thought.’ That chooser is not there. The notion of a chooser is simply itself a thought which appears retrospectively. The thought says, ‘I was there in between each thought choosing it’. It’s the clown that takes the bow. It wasn’t actually present, but it claims responsibility afterwards.”
- “We have to make a clear distinction between what is actually something quite subtle. There is a choosing thought, but there is no chooser. There is a thought that says, ‘I’d rather have tea than coffee’. That thought contains a choice between two drinks, but there is nobody there choosing that thought. The choice is the thought. There is no chooser of the thought. The separate self is always the one in between—it’s like a filler thought that is either considered to be the initiator of our actions, thoughts, choices, etc, or the subsequent enjoyer of them. It’s never present in the actual thought itself. It’s imagined in between. The ‘I’ thought is like a filler that seems to be both the initiator that’s prior to the action and the enjoyer of it after the action.”
Who am I?
- “The ‘normal’ view of our experience is that ‘I’ (this body-mind) experiences a world. Nearly every formulation of our experience is conceived in those terms. ‘I’ (this body-mind) experiences something or someone … Our experience is conceived as a subject doing, or experiencing, or knowing an object. This is considered to be so obviously and fundamentally true as not to need investigation. Any investigation that takes place tends to take place with this as the basic presumption. So, before we add anything to that idea, we look at that fundamental idea and just simply measure our current experience with that formulation and say, ‘Is this a true premise?’ Just one look at experience shows us that this basic idea, this basic attitude, of experience is so far from the actual reality.”
Pair with: Being Myself by Rupert Spira (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Realization (Sloww Stage 4)
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
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