A Timeless Condition
Hey beautiful people,
The applications to the Beyond Self-Discipline (BSD) MVP on October 16-31 are now open. You can apply here.
What you’ll experience:
4 live workshops facilitated by Peter Limberg and Daniel Kazandjian.
A private online discussion group with a highly selected group of people.
Your own “digital gang” of motivated, like-minded individuals.
2 collective “Dialogos" sessions.
The BSD experience integrates the following:
Finding and running a “digital gang”
Personal Sovereignty: what is it and how do we cultivate it?
The problems with traditional notions of “self-discipline”
How to practice truth-oriented relationships
Friendships of virtue
Having difficult conversations
Habit forging and goal setting
Addressing practical shit and the meta-crisis
Communitas via getting shit done
Mitigating addiction in the age of abundance
Maybe some Stoicism
Definitely some THUMOS
Admissions:
Is this program right for you?
BSD is a commitment of time, money, and effort. Participants should be prepared for a challenge and be willing to spend at least 15 hours a week to make real change happen.
Enrolment is limited.
Program dates: October 16th to October 31st
Cost: $150 USD*
Patreon members: $100 USD
*This MVP will be informing how we design the official BSD launch in January 2022, which will probably be around $350 USD. If you are deeply interested in participating in BSD but truly cannot afford it, you can request a scholarship by replying to this newsletter.
You can read more about the philosophical aspect of BSD in last week’s journal entry.
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Events for the week of September 20-26:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
The Daemon Knows w/ Bernardo Kastrup. September 20th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Erotic Magic and Mass Media w/ Mauricio Loza. September 23rd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Sensemaking the Parapolitical: An Introduction to Worldview Warfare w/ Son of Korg and Ezekiel-73. September 23rd @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Second Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Ontological Flooding w/ Jack Hunter. September 24th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation w/ John Vervaeke, Zak Stein, and Gregg Henriques. October 15th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Practicing Compassionate Self-Inquiry w/ Susan Campbell. October 28th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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September 19th, 2021
Some pressures are here now …
A pressure to make this entry “good.” Whatever good means.
A pressure to write quickly, to finish this entry, because I want to respect my new editor’s time.
A pressure to do profane things, like clear my email or complete some outstanding tasks.
These pressures are blocking me from journaling. These are not the right conditions for me to journal under. I will Stoically address these one-by-one…
A pressure to make this entry good. This entry might not be enjoyable for me to write, or enjoyable for others to read. It does not have to be. I do get a high when people tweet out a passage from an entry or respond to this letter with something like: wow steward, this is dope. It is not wise for me to instrumentalize my words to receive this high though. It is out of my control for the finished product of this journal to be perceived as good. Arriving at a good outcome is not what these are about.
A pressure to write quickly. If nobody can edit this entry, I have the option to send it without an editor, or to not send it at all. I am leaning towards the latter. I do not need to send this out.
A pressure to do profane things. Okay. Go look at my calendar now. Block out no more than 2 hours in today’s calendar. When that time comes - make some of that delicious organic herbal mushroom coffee substitute you like so much, turn on Brain.fm, then get some profane shit done. With the right focus, I can get inbox zero and complete all of my outstanding tasks.
Okay. Cool. A wise zero fucks has arrived. There is an openness to focus on more sacred matters now. I have to journal under a certain condition, and one of those conditions is having a sense of timelessness. The pressures that time brings really fucks with my daemonic transmission.
I was really plugged into the daemon when the sense of tomorrow died in April 2020. The sense of tomorrow did come back to life a few months later. It could be a good thing for that sense to stay alive, but I do kind of wish it would die again. Not feeling like tomorrow existed really plugged me into a sense of timelessness.
However, my sense of “consensus reality” really got messed up with no time. I stopped seeing the point in following basic rules, probably because my base of operation was not coming from a profane place. I do have the capacity to enter a temporal state of timelessness now, which is good enough for the purposes of me writing here.
Another condition has to do with something along the lines of not writing to receive social validation. This one is hard because it is so nebulous. It is easy to conceptually demarcate things like this; it is another thing to have an embodied sense when I am seeking social validation with my words, compared to when I am mapping my words to the daemon.
I experience the latter like this: the daemon comes rushing at me, and my attempt is to meet it with a word. Just one word is needed - another will surely come after that. That is the “art” I am attempting here. It might be better to call it a practice, as I am practicing meeting the daemon in these journals.
So, when I become concerned with an outcome, especially one that is out of my control, it is like I forget how to journal. This might be a good thing because this means my sacred sensitivity is increasing, and my ability to write for profane reasons is diminishing.
Or maybe everything I just wrote is spiritual-sounding bullshit. I am open to that. Regardless, if this is spiritual-sounding bullshit, or indeed a sacred practice, the conditions for writing are the same. Here are the two conditions concisely summarized ...
Condition 1: write with a sense of timelessness.
Condition 2: write so my words meet a certain energy.
Both of these conditions actually seem the same to me. To write with a sense of timelessness, I need to meet a certain energy. To meet a certain energy, I need to write with a sense of timelessness. My preferred word to use for “certain energy” has been the daemon. In my more Christian moments, I use the phrase “spirit of truth.” I imagine other phrases could work as well: source, essence, genii, etc.
A part of me does not think words matter much, and a greater focus should be put on the felt-sense itself. Another part of me thinks the words deeply matter, as a word can be filled up with a certain felt-sense, to the point that speaking the word can fill my whole body with that felt-sense.
This happens to me with the word thumos. I come alive in a certain way when I say that word. When the word thumos leaves my mouth I just want to fucking get after it. Get after what? I have no clue. But I want to get after something. The word daemon has a different effect on me. Saying it puts me into a sense of timelessness. It is like lightly touching a primordial realm when I use the word. This is probably why I use it so much here.
As a Stoic, albeit weird one, eudaimonia is my aim. For me, eudaimonia is about getting into the right relationship with the daemon. How do I go about doing this? Well, the same way I attempt to get into the right relationship with anyone who is a part of my life: spend time with that person as if time does not exist.
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