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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 214 (Mar 30, 2025) — 10 Years of Slow Living, Growing Up, Psychic Epidemics, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. 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):
🌀 Growing Up interprets Waking Up
In other words, stages (of development) interpret states (of consciousness). This is one of my most important learnings from Ken Wilber’s book Finding Radical Wholeness (Summary | 🔒Premium). As Wilber explains, it’s one thing to tap into a higher dimension (state); quite another to actually live there (stage)! Although you can have a temporary spiritual experience, the self still has to develop in order to permanently accommodate it (in order to turn ‘a temporary state into a permanent trait’). Spiritual experiences do not allow you to simply bypass psychological development.
- “You can have a profound Waking Up experience at virtually any one of the stages of Growing Up … Think of Growing Up as the major process used to interpret our world … The stage you are at in Growing Up determines how you interpret and make sense of any experience that you have—and that includes any Waking Up experience (or any spiritual experience). This changes everything … All of our experiences—including our spiritual experiences of Waking Up—will be interpreted or explained by the structure-stage of Growing Up that we are at, which profoundly changes our entire view of spirituality itself.” — Ken Wilber
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🧠 Featured Product: Synthesizer Course: The Flagship Course for Synthesizing Minds
🎉 10 Years of Slow Living
It recently occurred to me that this year marks the 10-year anniversary of my discovery of ‘slow living’! If you are just beginning your own slow journey, here are some of the best places to start:
- Slow Living 101: What is Slow Living?
- Slow Living 201: A Deep Dive into Slow Living & The Slow Movement
- Slow Living 301: How to Start a Slow Living Lifestyle
- Busyness 101: Why are we SO BUSY in Modern Life? (7 Hypotheses)
- Busyness 201: A Brief History of Work & BUSY in America
- Busyness 301: The Future of BUSY, Work & Leisure
- Research Says We’re Not Busy—So Why Do We FEEL So Busy?
🔒 Sloww Premium members can ask me anything about my experience with slow living
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)
🤯 Is the meta-crisis a me-crisis?
I just made this Premium post public due to its increasing urgency and importance: Is the Meta-Crisis a Me-Crisis?
If you’re new to the meta-crisis, start here: A Crisis of Crises: What is the Meta-Crisis? (+ Infographics)
If you’re looking for others in the meta-crisis space, check out my side passion project: MetaCrisis.org
- “This entire world is disturbed with insanity, due to the exertions of those who are confused about themselves.” — Shantideva (685 – 763)
- “We have met the enemy, and of course it is us.” — Ken Wilber
- “The ‘me’ is the mischief in the world.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧭 Featured Product: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
🧠 Psychic Danger & Psychic Epidemics
The newsletter section above about the meta-crisis pairs nicely with Carl Jung’s concepts of ‘psychic danger’ and ‘psychic epidemics’. I first learned of these in this interview with Jung:
- “One thing is sure: a great change of our psychological attitude is imminent. That is certain. Because we need more psychology. We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil … Nowadays we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes. There is no such thing as an H-bomb. That is all man’s doing. We are the great danger! Psyche is the great danger! … It is nowadays particularly that the world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.” — Carl Jung
As usual, I decided to investigate further and landed on The Collected Works of C. G. Jung:
- “The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.” — Carl Jung
- “Nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all, and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on the human psyche and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of world-wide epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity.” — Carl Jung
- “It is my conviction that the investigation of the psyche is the science of the future. Psychology is the youngest of the sciences and is only at the beginning of its development. It is, however, the science we need most. Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled … It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them … It is my hope…to throw light on this fundamental problem for mankind.” — Carl Jung
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Science meets Spirituality
I’m enjoying these new conversations between Bernardo Kastrup and Francis Lucille. I recently read Kastrup’s new book Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell (Summary | 🔒Premium), and Lucille’s book The Perfume of Silence is one of the best spirituality books I’ve ever read. Enjoy!
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
As someone whose self-worth was directly tied to a hard work ethic for 30+ years, I can’t stop thinking about the truth in this:
- “Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” — Attributed to Oscar Wilde
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
