Aperspectival Madness to Transperspectival Lucidity
Note: Samo is taking a break for two weeks and will return to his Live Players series on July 23rd.
Tomorrow’s events:
How to Win Friends and Influence People During the Meta-Crisis w/ Kevin Crone. July 9th @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Relational Exegesis w/ Freyja. Every Thursday @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.** 90 mins.
Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp w/ A.J. Bond. Every Thursday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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July 8, 2020
Yesterday at The Stoa was informative. After our weekly Stoic Hustle we had three events with people coming from really different perspectives: Maria Clara Parente from the Emerge community, Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton from Palladium Magazine, and the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi.
I liked that Wolf and Ash followed Maria. It struck me as a rich contrast. A contrast of ideas, focus, and energies. They come from different political lineages, and the audiences that gravitate to them would normally not interact with each other. Nor do I think there is a platform out there that would invite both of them to share their thoughts.
I sense The Stoa is different, as there is a weird sort of intellectual diversity forming. I think me being an intellectual novelty seeker and a performative agnostic affords me to scout out different voices and befriend them. Along with the Meta-Sangha thing, this is one of the aspects of The Stoa that really excites me.
I’ll repurpose another word and call this aspect the Meta-Seminary. The sangha aspect of The Stoa is the wisdom gym: people can have a buffet to taste a variety of wisdom and spiritual practices. While the seminary aspect is our sensemaking sessions: people have a buffet to taste a variety of philosophical and political ideologies.
I am finding all of these meta terms to be getting dorky, but the idea holds: The Stoa is a space where a diversity of practices and ideas can co-exist. They do not necessarily interact via the practitioners or ideologues yet, but they do interact through the people who come to The Stoa.
Maybe I am misreading things here, or I am patting myself on the back too much, but I do think this is fucking awesome. One thing I was trying to promote with the Intellectual Explorers Club, my previous project, was a healthy postmodernism. To reference developmental models such as Spiral Dynamics and the Wilber-Combs Lattice: the postmodern worldview is just a step in our individual and collective development.
Our popular culture is at the postmodern phase, but it is a pathological version of postmodernism, or what Wilber calls the “mean green meme.” This is what Peterson and the IDW attempt to take to task. Wilber says this strain of postmodernism commits “aperspectival madness.” I first saw Wilber use this term when I read Trump and a Post-Truth World:
Beginning over two decades ago, with the book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, I summarized this postmodern disaster with the term “aperspectival madness,” because the belief that there is no truth — that no perspective has universal validity (the “aperspectival” part) — when pushed to extremes, as postmodernism was about to do, resulted in massive self-contradictions and ultimate incoherency (the “madness” part). And when aperspectival madness infects the leading-edge of evolution, evolution’s capacity for self-direction and self-organization collapses.
This is clearly not cool, and I do think this pathological postmodernism is ugly, but I do sense a healthy postmodernism can be beautiful, or at least lead to beauty. I would say a healthy postmodernism is having a space for a multitude of perspectives to exist, and having the ability to witness reality from each.
It is a state of radical unknowingness coupled with a perspectival diversity that does not risk collapsing into any one perspective. I do not think you can navigate reality staying in this state, but I do think it is important to get into this state in order to do so.
The benefit of getting into this state leads to what Schmachtenberger calls transperspectival. I agree with him that if you have the capacity to adopt multiple perspectives, take their partial truths and weave them together, then you will have a chance at navigating reality successfully.
Maybe my use of the word postmodernism is inaccurate here, but whatever you want to label this I think we need this space to exist, so transperspectival minds can emerge. I think this is something that The Stoa can help with. My sense is we need to collectively move away from aperspectival madness and move towards transperspectival lucidity, and my sense is we need to make this move now.
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