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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 178 (Mar 10, 2024) — Steps Ahead, Polar Vision, 8 Perspectives, & 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 this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
How many perspectives can you take?
I’ve been fascinated by perspective-taking for a long time now. I know I’ve shared quite a bit on Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory lately, so I’ll make this the last thing until his new book Finding Radical Wholeness comes out in June.
Did you know you can take at least 8 perspectives on anything? I’ve seen this referred to as “perspectival yoga,” “Integral Perspectivism,” and “Integral Methodological Pluralism.” Here’s how to visualize it:
Here’s what each perspective/zone focuses on (1st visual) and an actual example using art (2nd visual):
If this is intriguing, check out this detailed overview:
🔒 Premium members can dive deeper:
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
An Intentional Lesson about Steps
Building on the section above about perspective-taking, this is a subtle yet critical insight to remember about virtually anything in life: your interpretation and impression of people is based on where you are in your own journey. Here’s a good way to remember it:
- “When you’re one step ahead of the crowd you’re a genius. When you’re two steps ahead, you’re a crackpot.” — Shlomo Riskin
Very few people seem to get this, and even fewer talk about it. But, Jacob Lund Fisker of Early Retirement Extreme (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis) mentions it all the time:
- “Those who are a little bit ahead of you look inspiring, whereas those who are further ahead are either extreme or even downright insane. And, those who are a little bit behind you have potential if only they would try a little harder, whereas those too far behind you are the assholes who are destroying the world. No matter where you are, you will always have this asymmetric ‘Overton window’ opinion of others.” — Jacob Lund Fisker (Note: Watch Jacob explain the concept here and here, the ‘Wheaton levels’ here and here, and the ‘Overton window’ in Sloww Sunday #100 and Mini Mind #163)
How it generally works:
- 3 Steps/Stages Ahead: Downright insane, entirely unreasonable, subject to ridicule.
- 2 Steps/Stages Ahead: Extreme, overdoing it.
- 1 Step/Stage Ahead: Inspiring.
- You: Your current paradigm, worldview, stage of development, etc.
- 1 Step/Stage Behind: Lazy, have potential if only they would try a little harder.
- 2 Steps/Stages Behind: Dumb, holding things back, uninformed or misinformed.
- 3 Steps/Stages Behind: Downright irresponsible, the sand in the airplane’s engine, the assholes who are destroying the world.
Bonus: Alan Watts touches on this lesson as a key principle of growth:
- “The basic process of biology is one in which lower orders are always being superseded by higher orders, but the lower order can never figure out (or only very rarely figure out) what the higher order is that’s taking over—and may see it as a terrible threat, as total disaster, as the very end.” — Alan Watts
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Ultimate Guide to the Lottery of Birth
I came across the meme below this week (this version is my personal favorite because I’m from Ohio 😂). It instantly reminded me of the lottery of birth, so here’s the ultimate guide that you won’t find anywhere else online:
Concept Introduction:
- The Lottery of Birth: All the Things You Don’t Control in Life
- 10 Birth Lottery Videos to Realize Your Luck in Life
- 25+ Birth Lottery Implications to Clearly See why it Matters so Much
- 50+ Birth Lottery Quotes to Question Who You Are
- “Creating Freedom” by Raoul Martinez (Book Summary)
Thought Experiments:
- The Ovarian Lottery: A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
- What is the “Original Position” or “Veil of Ignorance” Thought Experiment? (John Rawls Excerpts)
- Condemned to Choose: Cake vs Oxfam Thought Experiment (Galen Strawson Excerpts)
- The College Graduate & The Garbage Collector: A Thought Experiment from Robert Sapolsky (Short Excerpt)
- The Life of Luckia: A Thought Experiment on the Birth Lottery, Moral Responsibility, & Free Will
🔒 Premium members can dive deeper:
- Lottery of Birth Synthesis: How to See Yourself and the World Drastically Differently (+ Infographic)
- Behind the Scenes: Dissecting my own Lottery of Birth Ticket
- Stream of Consciousness: Do You Control Your Life Path?
- Behind the Scenes: How I Live with the Lottery of Birth & Lack of Free Will
- Behind the Scenes: How I Live with the Lottery of Birth & Lack of Free Will (1 Year Later)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
What is polar vision?
I’ve previously explored the idea of polarity thinking, but it was fun to see Alan Watts describe it as “polar vision”:
- “To understand the reciprocity or mutual interdependence of polar opposites—being and nothing, center and surround, self and other, doing and happening—might be called polar vision.”
- “The relation between an organism and its environment is mutual, neither one is the ’cause’ or determinant of the other since the arrangement between them is polar … Cause and effect, action and reaction, are simply two aspects or poles of a single process, or two ways of looking at it.”
- “If self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are the poles of a single process, THAT is my true existence.”
Watts says there are two ignored factors which are the mainstay of the ego illusion and the failure to know that we are all one:
- “The first is not realizing that so-called opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and off, inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect, are poles or aspects of the same thing.”
- “The second, closely related, is that we are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of perception is not only the real way of seeing the world, but also the very basic sensation of oneself as a conscious being, that we are fully hypnotized by its disjointed vision of the universe. We really feel that this world is indeed an assemblage of separate things that have somehow come together or, perhaps, fallen apart, and that we are each only one of them.”
The Iain McGilchrist brain hemisphere fans may notice Alan Watts covered the same stuff:
- “Our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight consciousness, and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness alone. ‘I am my spotlight consciousness—my conscious attention, that is my ego—that is me!’ And, very largely, we ignore the floodlight consciousness that’s working all the time … Because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued, we have this sensation of ourselves as being just the spotlight—just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other. So, we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our being.” — Alan Watts
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Who are we really?
We recently wrapped up Alan Watts week in Wise Walk. It was so good that I kept going and read his books The Book (Book Summary) and The Art of Contemplation (Book Summary). I also updated this post of the all-time best Alan Watts quotes.
After more deeply investigating Alan Watts, I’ve noticed a super strange dynamic: He’s an incredibly popular philosopher/spiritual teacher, yet he’s sharing the incredibly unpopular message that you are not a separate, responsible, independent, free agent.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start with Watts, I enjoyed these lectures the most so far: Myth of Myself, Individual and the World, Mind Over Mind, Being Far Out. It was also great to see actual video footage of him in “A Conversation with Myself”: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
🔒 Premium members can dive deeper:
- 🆕 Alan Watts Synthesis: How to Answer the Ultimate Question of “Who am I?”
- Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
“In the twenty-first century the world will not be run by those who possess mere information alone … What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” — E. O. Wilson (Consilience)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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