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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 186 (May 12, 2024) — Synthesizer Course, Conscious Experience, Intentional Parenting, & 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
🆕 Synthesizer Course is LIVE!
I’ve never been more excited to share a new launch with you: my flagship course called Synthesizer is (finally) here! Here’s everything you need to know. It’s the best thing I’ve ever created in the last decade since launching Sloww, and it teaches you everything I know about how to catalyze a 21st century synthesizing mind—the most important mind of the future.
There’s a multitude of notetaking and writing courses, but where are all the courses about thinking? Finally, we have the course for thinkers. This is the course I wish existed years ago to help me better understand and utilize my own synthesizing mind. For the first time ever, this course shares a new synthesizing system and the step-by-step process I’ve developed over the last decade to produce almost 700 posts on Sloww including: 175+ email newsletters, 150+ Premium posts and infographics, 125+ book summaries, a full reading list, digital products, side projects, eBooks, and even this course itself! But, more importantly, it shares how lifelong learning leads to deeper development. Here’s the course roadmap:
Launch Bonuses: For the first 50 students, I’m offering $50 off with code FIRST50 (10+ students have already joined, so don’t wait if you’re interested). Premium members get even bigger discounts (check your email or see here in the community for coupon codes).
Q&A: I’d love to answer any and every question you have about the course. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask me anything.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Intentional Parenting
My wife and I have our first baby on the way this summer, and I’m going to be a girl dad! I’d love to hear any recommendations on all things intentional and conscious parenting (books, products, resources, etc). I’m especially interested in childhood learning and development, but anything goes. Please leave a comment and let me know.
PS: Just for fun since baby girl’s lottery of birth is being born in New Mexico, USA:
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
East vs West in your Sense of Self
Over 100 years ago, Swami Vivekananda said something that continues to blow my mind because it makes so much sense:
- “The Western man is a body first, and then he has a soul; (In the East) a man is a soul and spirit, and he has a body. Therein lies a world of difference … (A) most vital point, which alone marks characteristically, most prominently, most vitally, the difference between the Indian and the Western mind, and it is this, that everything is in the soul.”
Think about that “world of difference”:
- West: I am a body-mind.
- East: I am aware of a body-mind.
Most Western humans still think they are their mind. If you happen to be one of the few who are aware of your mind, just remember you are currently in the minority (<20% according to Ego Development Theory):
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Thought Experiment on Conscious Experience
Thomas Nagel outlined a now famous thought experiment in his 1974 paper What is it like to be a bat? (Paper | Wikipedia). Daniel Dennett, who just recently passed away last month, apparently said Nagel’s thought experiment is “the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.” According to Nagel:
- “No matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism … Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience.”
While it’s fun to think about what it may be like to be a bat, why don’t we often think about what it may be like to be other humans? If you really want to “put yourself in their shoes,” try to imagine yourself in their entire conscious experience of life. Ask yourself, “What is it like to totally be that person?” This is especially helpful when you think someone is “so wrong.” The more you think about all this, the more you’ll realize there’s no such thing as “wrong experience.” There are countless reasons why people are interpreting life and living the ways they are:
- “If you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.” — Axiom of Clinical Psychology
- “We can see other people’s behaviour, but not their experience.” — R. D. Laing
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Rohr on Religion
Not sure how I waited so long to explore Richard Rohr, but here are 50+ Richard Rohr quotes on Christ, God, duality, nonduality, prayer, contemplation, transformation, enlightenment, and more.
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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