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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 210 (Feb 9, 2025) — Praising Slowness, Fulfilling Meaning, Transcending Self, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within and downshifting into deeper living. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
🌀 Maslow on Self-Transcendence
In the last few newsletters, we’ve been covering Maslow’s late-life writing, thoughts on self-actualization, and characteristics of self-actualizing transcenders. Now, we’ll finally get into what Maslow said about self-transcendence in general. Maslow defines transcendence as:
- “Transcendence refers the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos … Transcendence of self—living at the level of Being—is assumed to be most possible for the person with a strong and free identity.”
Maslow goes on to describe transcendence in 35 ways that “each overlap with each other” (full descriptions here):
Some that stand out to me include:
- 19. “Transcendence of dichotomies (polarities, black and white oppositions, either-or, etc.). To rise from dichotomies to superordinate wholes. To transcend atomism in favor of hierarchical-integration. To bind separates together into an integration. The ultimate limit here is the holistic perceiving of the cosmos as a unity. This is the ultimate transcendence, but any step along the way to this ultimate limit is itself a transcendence … All these can be transcended so that the mutual exclusiveness and oppositeness and Zero-Sum game quality is transcended, in the sense of rising above to a higher viewpoint where one can see that these mutually exclusive differences in opposites can be coordinated into a unity which would be more realistic, more true, more in accord with actual reality.”
- 21. “Transcendence of one’s own will (in favor of the spirit of ‘not my will be done but Thine’). To yield to one’s destiny or fate and to fuse with it, to love it in the Spinoza sense or in the Taoistic sense. To embrace, lovingly, one’s own destiny. This is a rising above one’s own personal will, being in charge, taking control, needing control, etc.”
- 29. “Transcendence of effort and of striving, of wishing and hoping, of any vectorial or intentional characteristics. In the simplest sense this is, of course, the sheer enjoyment of the state of gratification, of hope fulfilled and attained, of being there rather than of striving to get there, of having arrived rather than of traveling toward … It is the Taoistic feeling of letting things happen rather than making them happen, and of being perfectly happy and accepting of this state of nonstriving, nonwishing, noninterfering, noncontrolling, nonwilling. This is the transcendence of ambition, of efficiencies. This is the state of having rather than of not having. Then of course one lacks nothing. This means it is possible to go over to the state of happiness, of contentment, of being satisfied with what is. Pure appreciation. Pure gratitude. The state and the feeling of good fortune, good luck, the feeling of grace, of gratuitous grace.”
Sloww Premium members can dive deeper:
- 🔒 Behind the Scenes: My Self-Actualization Self-Assessment
- 🔒 Self-Actualization Synthesis: How to be a Healthy Self-Actualizer with Maslow (+ 2 Infographics)
- 🔒 Transcendence Synthesis: How to be a Self-Actualizing Transcender with Maslow (+ Infographic)
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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🐌 In Praise of Slowness & The Slow Fix
I’m revisiting my notes from Carl Honoré’s books In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed & The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed. Why? Because now that I’m a dad, Carl’s initial epiphany that he shared in his TED Talk resonates on a much deeper level:
- “My wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son. I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room, and I just couldn’t slow down. I’d be speed-reading The Cat In The Hat—I’d be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page. And, of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. What should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills, a clash between my speed and his slowness. This went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people. One of them made reference to a series of books called The One-Minute Bedtime Story. I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, ‘Hallelujah! What a great idea! This is exactly what I’m looking for to speed up bedtime even more.’ But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different. I took a step back and I thought, ‘Whoa, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I’m prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day?’“
- “Bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. It’s become my reward at the end of the day, something I really cherish … A few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed downstairs by the front door waiting for a taxi. My son came down the stairs, and he’d made a card for me and was carrying it … He handed it to me, and I read it. It said, ‘To Daddy, love Benjamin.’ And I thought, ‘Aw, that’s really sweet. Is that a good luck on the book tour card?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, Daddy, this is a card for being the best story reader in the world.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work.’“
Sloww Premium members can dive deeper:
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
😃 Featured Product: The Hierarchy of Happiness: 100+ Powerful Perspectives on How to be Happy (Free eBook)
🧭 3 Ways to Meaning from Viktor Frankl
Years ago, I read two of Viktor Frankl’s books: Man’s Search for Meaning & Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.
Recently, I listened to hours of his interviews and curated all of Frankl’s best quotes. He consistently says there are 3 ways to find meaning:
- 1. Through Doing / Creating: By answering life through our actions—creating a work, doing a deed, etc (the way of achievement or accomplishment).
- 2. Through Being / Experiencing: By experiencing goodness/truth/beauty), by experiencing nature/culture, or by experiencing another human being in their very uniqueness and loving them (experiencing is more or less a passive path without any striving or any doing).
- 3. Through Thinking / Attitude: By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering—by bearing witness to uniquely human potential at its best, by courageously going through and shouldering our suffering, by transforming a personal tragedy into a triumph (even when meaning is not possible in the first two ways, we can still find meaning when we take a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of our possibilities by how we adapt to this limitation, react toward it, accept this fate).
“Our freedom is a finite freedom, a limited freedom. That is to say, a human being is never fully free from conditions—be they biological, psychological, or sociological. But, the ultimate freedom is always, and remains always, reserved to ourselves. That is the freedom to take a stand to whatever conditions might confront us. How we react to the unchangeable conditions is up to ourselves. In other words, if we cannot change a situation, we have always the last freedom to change our attitude to that situation.” — Viktor Frankl
Sloww Premium members can dive deeper:
- 🔒 How to Find Meaning in Life with “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl (+ 2 Infographics)
- 🔒 How to Live Meaningfully No Matter What with “Yes to Life” by Viktor Frankl (+ Infographic)
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 What ultimately matters to Iain McGilchrist?
Iain McGilchrist has written two massive books: The Master and His Emissary (600 pages) & The Matter With Things (1500 pages). I’ve only made it partway through the former and published a summary of the brain hemisphere differences.
Since I have no idea when I’ll finish the first book or even begin the second, I took a different approach to get the gist of his worldview. I watched a few of his speeches, lectures, and presentations. I find it interesting to see what someone so prolific in their writing chooses to speak about when forced to present with a time constraint.
Interestingly, McGilchrist ended three different videos I watched in the exact same way with philosopher Max Scheler’s hierarchy of values. In a nutshell, McGilchrist says “we live in an upside-down world” where we’ve inverted the values hierarchy based on the left hemisphere:
- “The early 20th century philosopher Max Scheler was much concerned with questions of value … Scheler thought there was a hierarchy of values with those of pleasure and utility—the values of utilitarianism in the left hemisphere—at the lowest level, and rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred which he considered the highest—a value which I suggest is incomprehensible to the left hemisphere. In between, were first the Lebenswerte—or values of life such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility—and then the geistige Werte—the values of mind or spirit such as beauty, goodness, and truth, which I suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere’s raison d’être being power and control, it naturally puts values of utility and hedonism first … In the world we live in, reductionist materialism inverts Scheler’s perception. And, in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human, we have exalted the individual ego over all else, and it has rendered many virtues—including but not confined to beauty, goodness, and truth—obsolete. These values, I believe, far from being human inventions, are ontological primitives for they are aspects of the ground of being. Our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever further into being is our privilege and indeed, I argue, our purpose. That is why there is life at all … We’ve completely lost direction because of the the value we’ve come to espouse. As I get nearer to the end of life, I’m more and more convinced that not only is being receptive to the summons offered by values the key to a fulfilling life, the key to a flourishing society and a flourishing natural world at large, but every bit as important as survival itself.” — Iain McGilchrist
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ The Great Tree of Religion
I’ve always heard that there are 3,000+ religions, but this is wild to visualize some of them (see more here):
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” — W. H. Auden
Pair with:
- “Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.” — Herman Melville
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
