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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 193 (Jun 30, 2024) — Life of Books, Useful not True, Ultimate Concern, & More
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📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
How much can you read in a life?
The following comes from Mortimer Adler, author of How to Read a Book (Book Summary). If this piques your interest, I go into way more detail in the Synthesizer course.
When asked how many books can be read in a lifetime, Adler said:
- “I would think in a lifetime, considerably less than 500, might even be as little as 200-300 books in a lifetime. Read well. Read actively. Read for the purpose of deepening one’s understanding and lifting one’s mind up to a higher level of insight and understanding.” (Note: My full reading list has under 500 books)
Adler says books are like a pyramid:
- “I like to think of all the books in the world as forming a vast pyramid. At the baseline of that pyramid, are the books that one doesn’t have to read even once (95% of books) … Above the baseline is a second level of the pyramid—the books that are good enough. They are good books, but not great books. Good books, good enough to read carefully just once, but if you went back to them you’d find no reward in them at all. They wouldn’t hold up. They would not lift your mind any further. They wouldn’t reward you … A little higher than that, a much smaller number of books I would say now, 2% of all the books that are written are worth reading more than once, two or three times perhaps … Then, at the very apex of the pyramid are the very small number of books, I would guess a hundred or less, that are inexhaustible, in the sense that you could read them over, and over, and over again, any number of times in the course of one’s life, always learning more.”
Here’s a good way to think about it from Adler:
- 10 books/1 day: I can read 10 books in one day, in the sense of inspecting them and finding out what they’re about and putting them on the shelf for future reference.
- 1 book/10 days: Just as I can read 10 books in one day, sometimes it takes me 10 days to read one book or even longer than 10 days because I’m really working at it. I’m trying to make that book part of myself. I’m trying to find out everything it says and understand everything it means and think about and criticize what I’ve learned from it.
- 10 books/1 year: Reading for the sake of really lifting my mind up from a state of understanding less to understanding more, I doubt if I read 10 books a year. I handle hundreds. I examine many. I get information from a great many. I get pleasure from the books I read at night to go to sleep with. But I assure you the books that I learn from in a genuine sense of deepening my mind, gaining insight and some degree of wisdom, I hope, I doubt if I read 10 a year. I read them very slowly. It’s hard work. I read them usually at a desk, with pencil and paper, marking the book.
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- How to Read Intelligently with “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler (+ Infographics)
- How to Make a Second Memory with “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens (+ Infographics)
- How to Learn Better with “Make It Stick” (+ Infographic)
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
New book by Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers’ latest release is available now: Useful Not True.
I thoroughly enjoyed his previous book How to Live (Book Summary).
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
What is your ultimate concern?
Which of the following questions are most alive for you right now?
Ken Wilber’s book Integral Spirituality (Book Summary) included the following:
Wilber’s new book Finding Radical Wholeness (finished the book, summary coming soon) included a slightly revised and expanded list:
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
3 New Posts on Luck
I guess I’m lucky that I think luck is a fun topic to explore 😂:
🆕 Four Types of Luck: “Moral Luck” by Thomas Nagel (Essay Summary)
- “Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck.” — Thomas Nagel
🆕 How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility: “Hard Luck” by Neil Levy (Book Summary)
- “The hard luck view is the view that agents are not morally responsible for their actions because luck ensures that there are no desert-entailing differences between moral agents. It is luck that precludes moral responsibility.” — Neil Levy
🆕 Death, Freedom, Self: “Things That Bother Me” by Galen Strawson (Book Summary)
- “In the end, luck swallows everything … It all comes down to luck: luck—good or bad—in being born the way we are, luck—good or bad—in what then happens to shape us. We can’t be ultimately responsible for how we are in such a way as to have absolutely, buck-stopping responsibility for what we do.” — Galen Strawson
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- Stream of Consciousness: Is Ultimate Moral Responsibility a Myth?
- Stream of Consciousness: What’s our Problem with (Mis)Attribution of Agency?
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Schrödinger on Vedanta
I’m a big fan of seeing bridges between science and spirituality (like the conversations between David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti). So, it was a pleasant surprise to learn of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s inspiration from Vedanta. From his book My View of the World:
- “What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father…thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference—the difference between you and someone else—when objectively what is there is the same?“
- “Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.'”
- “Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. It is the vision of this truth (of which the individual is seldom conscious in his actions) which underlies all morally valuable activity. It brings a man of nobility not only to risk his life for an end which he recognises or believes to be good but—in rare cases—to lay it down in full serenity, even when there is no prospect of saving his own person. It guides the hand of the well-doer—this perhaps even more rarely—when, without hope of future reward, he gives to relieve a stranger’s suffering what he cannot spare without suffering himself.”
More on Vedanta:
- Vedanta & Mandukya Upanishad: “Who Am I?” by Swami Sarvapriyananda (Book Summary)
- 50+ Swami Sarvapriyananda Quotes on Advaita Vedanta, Reality, Self, & More
- 50+ Pravrajika Divyanandaprana Quotes on Inquiry, Awareness, Happiness, & More
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- How to Practice Self-Enquiry with “Be As You Are” by Ramana Maharshi (+ Infographic)
- Nisargadatta Maharaj Synthesis: Everything about the Witness (+ Infographic)
- Atmananda Krishna Menon Synthesis: Everything on the Direct Path (+ Infographic)
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
From Ken Wilber’s new book Finding Radical Wholeness:
- “Suppose I were to ask you, ‘Who are you?’ Get a sheet of paper, and write down your answers to that question. You might include things like my name is such-and-such; I’m this tall and weigh this much; I graduated with a degree in such-and-such; I make this much money; I live in a house whose address is such-and-such; I have a romantic partner whose name is so-and-so; I like these types of movies; I read these kinds of books; I enjoy video games; I have several pets including two dogs; my hobbies are such-and-such; I enjoy this kind of food, and so on. Notice, however, that as you were thinking of all of those characteristics, you were seeing them as objects—all of them are objects of awareness—none of them are a true Subject or your true Self. Those objects are, in other words, exactly what you are not. They are all illusory, pretend selves or pretend subjects; none of them is your true Subject. They are all things that can be seen; they are not the true Seer, not your true Self. Everything that you think is your true Self—and that you wrote down on the sheet of paper—is exactly what you are not. Your true Self is neti, neti—not this, not that—radically Free of all objects. It is a pure Subject or Absolute Subjectivity. Proceed with this type of radical disidentification until you can truly recognize the basic and profound Freedom at your very core.” — Ken Wilber
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Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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