A Loving Space
Hey gang,
A few updates.
Some good progress has been made with the website update project that Raine Revere is leading. Raine has asked me to check to see if I can get 2-3 volunteers. Ideally, Raine could use the help of:
1-2 people that are experienced in JavaScript
1 person for web design for WIX (no programming experience needed)
This is a short-term project, maybe around two weeks. It is not a full redesign. If you're interested in helping out, please reply to this email, and I will forward your email over to Raine.
In event news, Tyson Wagner’s Flowing Through Unknowningness will be moved to Sunday for the month of October. Also, he will be experimenting with a new event …
Rap Unbattles w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Monday from October 5th to October 26th. RSVP by clicking the image below.
Rap battles tear another down through insults and boasting, while a rap (un)battles build another up through compliments and admiration. This will take place right after Daniel Schmachtenberger’s “Sensemaker in Residence” events, and it will be on the same Zoom link.
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. EverydaySunday @ 10:00 AM ET.RSVP here.
Empathy Circle Training w/ Edwin Rutsch. October 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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October 3, 2020
I am currently involved in a private practice group being led by Theodore Taptiklis, where we are practicing his new “Entangled Bodies” method. This is an intersubjective modality I would eventually like to have people at The Stoa practice.
In this session people were noticing my intrapersonal awareness skills, and somebody said I was a “genius of context.” Of course, my ego started singing a little when I heard I was a genius at something, before I looked at it sternly and told it to hush.
I think building greater intrapersonal awareness naturally leads to developing social intuition. The more you are aware of the facets of yourself, the more you will be aware of the facets of others. There is a saying I first heard from Conor McGregor, which I think is very true: Know yourself, to know others.
This goes back to Socrates of course. Know thyself, or as the man himself said: To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. I took this very seriously when I was younger. I engaged in many things to get to know myself, such as psychotherapy, philosophical counselling, and lots of private journaling.
I was all about taking psychometric tests at one point, and took over 100. I took the corporate favs like Myers-Briggs, DiSC, and the Strong Interest Inventory. I did all the tests from Martin Seligman, and I did the 5 Factors test when I was the client of Jordan Peterson, who analyzed the results for me. I also did stuff like the Enneagram, IQ tests, and the implicit-association test. You could go to the Measurement Instrument Database for the Social Sciences website and take some obscure ones. I took most of them.
Now some of these tests are controversial, and some of them are probably bullshit. That is not the point though. I treat these the same way I treat astrology, which I am kind of into as well; when I read something that intrigues me or triggers me, then I treat this as an opportunity for inner-exploration.
This practice has extended to every aspect of my life, especially in the interpersonal domain. This Hermann Hesse quote really speaks to this: If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. If somebody intrigues me or triggers me, I lean into that. Instead of crudely placing some narrative on those emotional pulls and pushes, I trust that there is a lesson for self-discovery. All of this builds one's social intuition.
I sense the development of social intuition has helped me understand the memetic tribes roaming in the noosphere. When you study memetic tribes, with an intuitive eye, you get a sense of the attractors that call them into existence, along with the terms they use to describe those attractors.
This all helps with mimicry, which is the evolutionary biology term where one organism mimics another. Sometimes mimicry is done to protect against predators, and sometimes predators use it to help catch their prey. When it comes to the liminal war or the culture dance, I sense we are attempting both here at The Stoa.
One aspect of mimicry we can borrow from is a kind of self-decoration camouflage, using select borrowed terms from other memetic tribes, as well as weird meta terms that have not been weaponized in the culture war yet. This helps scramble the pattern-matching ways of the more aggressive memetic tribes, so they view us as either an ally or something harmless, like a cute kitten meme.
The other aspect is a kind of aggressive mimicry, but repurposed towards non-rivalrous dynamics. In order to get memetic tribal chieftains or followers to The Stoa, we encourage them to visit through mimicking whatever signals their attractor (truth, justice, free speech, etc.) and then seduce them into our attractor, which is something to do with being cool with unknowingness, and engage in genuine dialogue.
I sense it is a good thing to have a space that secretly serves as a reality tunnel dance hall, so all the memetic tribes can bump into each other. And when they bump into each other, a meta-boner inducing curiosity gets invoked, instead of the fight or flight response.
The current social media ecology encourages people to egoically collapse into narrative warfare, which perpetuates their trauma. The Stoa is a place where people can follow the wisdom of Hermann Hesse instead, and recognize that when they are triggered, it is really something within that is bothering them. You need a space for this, and it is not a safe space that is needed, but a loving space.
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