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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 195 (Aug 4, 2024) — I’m a Dad, Real Progress, Zen Koans, & More
Sloww exists to share the art of living with students of life. The Sloww Sunday newsletter delivers my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ lifelong learners every week. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by sharing this newsletter with others.
📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
Development in Progress
After a two-year hiatus in publishing, we finally have a new article from The Consilience Project: Development in Progress. According to TCP co-founder Daniel Schmachtenberger, the article explores: the narrative of progress, where the current narrative falls catastrophically short, what authentic progress would entail and require, and specific suggestions for how it could be realized.
Side note: The key theme throughout the article is human maturity, so you may also enjoy my take on all this: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
Pair with: This recent podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
- “This article explains how our current idea of progress is immature: it is developmentally incomplete. Progress, as we define it now, ignores or downplays the scale of its side effects. Our typical approach to technological innovation today harms much that is not only beautiful and inspiring, but also fundamentally necessary for the health and well-being of all life on Earth. Developing a more mature approach to our idea of progress holds the key to a viable, long-term future for humanity … If we continue to measure and optimize progress against a narrow set of metrics—metrics focused primarily on economic and military growth, which do not account for everything on which our existence depends—our progress will remain immature and humanity will continue its blind push toward a civilizational cliff edge … Our idea of progress needs to mature. If humanity is to survive and thrive into the distant future, we must transform and elevate the very idea of progress into something truly good and worthy of our shared pursuit and aspiration. As we understand more about the universe and find new ways of changing it with our technologies, we must account for the endless ripple of cause-and-effect beyond our immediate goals. We must factor both the upsides and the downsides that will continue to impact reality long after the technologists of today are gone.” — The Consilience Project
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- The Consilience Project Synthesis: How to Think Clearly in the midst of Information Warfare
- Daniel Schmachtenberger Synthesis: How to Think Holistically about Civilization
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Conscious Parenting Reading List
Apologies for missing a few weeks of the newsletter. You could call it my informal paternity leave because my wife and I became first-time parents a month ago! It’s hard to believe it’s already been four weeks because the sleep deprivation makes it feel like it’s just been one continuous day. I’ll spare you all the nitty gritty details, but it’s been a wild ride so far. All in all, it’s hard to complain about anything, and I feel very lucky and grateful that everything worked out how it did. We have a healthy daughter, and my wife is already a super mom!
I’ve started compiling a reading list for conscious parenting (see second tab). If you don’t see your favorite parenting book(s) on the list, please reply to this email and let me know.
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- How to pursue Genius Education with “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (+ Infographic)
- How to Read Intelligently with “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler (+ Infographics)
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Revisiting the Lottery of Birth
Naturally, having a child has brought the “lottery of birth” to the forefront of my mind once again. For those new to the concept, here’s the ultimate guide:
Concept Overview:
- The Lottery of Birth: All the Things You Don’t Control in Life
- “Creating Freedom” by Raoul Martinez (Part 1 Lottery of Birth Book Summary)
- 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
Thought Experiments:
- The Ovarian Lottery: A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
- Swapped at Birth: Lottery of Birth Thought Experiment (Raoul Martinez Excerpts)
- What is the “Original Position” or “Veil of Ignorance” Thought Experiment? (John Rawls Excerpts)
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
- Lottery of Birth Synthesis: How to See Yourself and the World Drastically Differently (+ Infographic)
- Behind the Scenes: Dissecting my own Lottery of Birth Ticket
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
Metacognition with Bernardo Kastrup
I’m enjoying these new podcasts on metacognition from author, philosopher, and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup:
- Metacognition Podcast #1
- Metacognition Podcast #2 (along with idealism & integrated information theory)
What is metacognition?
- “Experience without meta-consciousness is conscious experience that you have—you experience it—but you may not explicitly know that you are experiencing it … To know that you are having a certain experience, you need at least two things: 1) you need to be having the experience, and 2) you need to re-represent that experience cognitively. There arises a meta-experience, also called a re-representation, in your mind that points to the original experience. Every time you report an experience to yourself or to others, what you’re reporting is the re-representation at a metacognitive level of that experience. Re-representation creates a sort of a copy of the experience in a higher level of cognition, a higher level of abstraction, that is amenable to reporting. So, metacognition is a higher level mental function tightly connected with attention … To meta-cognize an experience, you have to sort of step out of it as a subject that is in some sense distinct from the experience and then report that experience to yourself as a subject.” — Bernardo Kastrup
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Zen Koans with Henry Shukman
Henry Shukman (Top Quotes) is a Zen teacher, author, and poet. Here’s his take on a couple of the most famous Zen koans.
What’s the point of a koan?
- “People who haven’t practiced with koans might get the idea that they’re sort of puzzles or riddles, but they’re not. They’re invitations to awaken out of dualistic mind … Every koan is about dropping the separate self and falling back into boundlessness.” — Henry Shukman
On the koan of the ‘gateless gate’:
- “The ‘gateless gate’ means there’s no gateway. It’s all one. How can there be a gateway? It’s gateless. But, there’s realizing that. So, that’s a kind of gate. Before we realize it, there’s a gate. After we realize it, there’s no gate … Before we awaken, there’s a gateway. Once we’re through the gateway and awakened, there’s no gateway. It’s just one awareness, one body, one consciousness, one reality, one marvel—and it’s just functioning all the time as this very moment in all its details.” — Henry Shukman
On the koan ‘what’s the sound of one hand clapping?’
- “The idea is that we know what two hands clapping sounds like, but do you know what one hand sounds like? It’s slightly strange language—the sound of one hand—but, actually, it’s the same thing. It’s an invitation. What do we find one hand is when the separate self is gone? It’s inviting a deep experience—a deep sense of things. What is it in the boundlessness? What is one thing—a pen, a hand, a leaf, a car, a door, a seat, a bird—in that boundlessness? What is it really? In a way, the koan’s not like, ‘Well, here’s the answer’. It’s more like what do we experience from it? You could say it’s a move from dual, two hands, to one—all inclusive one. It seems like it’s some riddle about hands and one hand. It’s not. It’s an invitation to awaken from duality into nonduality.” — Henry Shukman
🔒 Sloww Premium Deep Dive:
Explore more: 75+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Wise Words
“The most profound thing you can see is the interconnectedness of all things.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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