Attempting To Reorient
Hello friends,
I am going to take tomorrow off. Heading to the cottage to reorient.
Tomorrow’s event:
Breaking the Frame w/ Travis Mann. Every Wednesday @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
***
June 23, 2020
I had a chat with Collin Morris yesterday. Collin ran the Existential Dance Party but stepped away to do some COVID hibernation and exploration. He seemed to find his way and is moving to a spiritual community soon.
Collin was at The Stoa from the beginning, and I was reminded of the first month The Stoa started, and all the excitement then. Doing things I had never done before, like dancing badly on a Zoom camera with my meta weirdo Twitter friends.
Collin might return to The Stoa one day, or he might not. Other people are coming and going as well. All of this helps with the summertime sadness, but my thinking is muddled here, and to use Raven’s favourite phrase: I am attempting to reorient. There is a sense of community forming at The Stoa, and these people are beautiful, but it is time to be a sober Stoic.
People come and go. Some who go return, and some never return. Life changes, and people's reasons for wanting to go to something changes. The same thing happened with my in-person philosophy groups here in Toronto. Summer will also influence The Stoa attendance as well. People are not going to want to be in Zoom rooms. I do not want to be in Zoom rooms.
Niklas previously asked: "Why are so many hot people attracted to The Stoa?" A few of us joked that this project felt like highschool. It did feel like we were the cool hot kids, with secret love plots forming behind the scenes. It made me feel like I was a teenager again, before my youth felt like it was robbed from me by depression. It felt like a second chance actually. I am not a teenager though, I am 35 years old, and The Stoa is not a highschool.
It does feel like “Phase 1” of The Stoa is over. During this phase I was having a lot of strange spiritual experiences. I still cannot make sense of what happened to me on April 20th. Someone suspected I was having a Kundalini Awakening and at times it felt like I had extrasensory powers. I was feeling people like I never felt them before, and I was experiencing an incredible amount of synchronicities that were related to archetypal patterns.
I was writing about how I missed feeling normal, because it felt like I was going crazy. Now I miss feeling crazy, because I am back to feeling normal, and feeling crazy felt like I had super powers. I was doing so much, and facilitating so much, in such a short amount of time. While it was a rough ride, I had a deep sense that the daemon was on my side, which made me feel invincible.
Andrew Taggart and a few of The Stoa facilitators had a talk yesterday about how The Stoa can use the gift economy, and he said something that gave me pause: "do not expect the gift economy to support your livelihood." This was my intuition but my intuition has been tainted by expectations. If you expect too much from a gift economy you will corrupt its spirit, despite whatever lip service you give to it.
It was a very informative session and it made me realize I have to take things very slow. I am doing weekly “project management” sessions but the essence of them feels off. It feels like the wrong move right now to make The Stoa into a “project” that has goals, and measurables, and key performance indicators, or whatever business buzzwords I could use here.
My desire to blab about “stealing and seducing the culture during the liminal war” has also left me. It feels like something a first year University student who took their first philosophy class would get excited about. More modestly, The Stoa is an experiment which is testing out a few new things: a gift economy, a wisdom gym, a psychotechnology incubator, a new way of “podcasting,” etc.
All these experiments could “fail” but the attempt is important, because it will inspire myself or others to do it better in the future. People were also saying that The Stoa felt like a “digital burning man” and stuff. Who knows, maybe it will be, but I want to manage expectations and I do not want to egoically get seduced by such statements.
After that session I reached out to Andrew and told him I want to return to our philosophical practice. My first conversation with him was seven years ago. We philosophized about what matters most for about two years, then stopped. We became good friends, engaging in adventurous philosophical projects together. Now I feel deeply called to continue our conversations. The Stoa does not need to be informed by goals right now, it needs to be informed by philosophy.
I feel an energetic shift. Camille and I will be moving this weekend and I think it is about time I get a haircut. A new environment and look will help with this Phase 2 transitioning. I do not know if I will be posting more events, or fewer, and I do not know if I will continue to write here on a daily basis or not.
I do know that I do not want to put the pressure on The Stoa to support my livelihood, which means I have to think about making money again, which means The Stoa will most likely no longer be my obsessive focus. Fuck me: a cover of Nico’s The Fairest of the Seasons just came on my playlist …
Now that I smile
Now that I'm laughing even deeper inside
Now that I see
Now that I finally found the one thing I denied
It's now I know do I stay or do I go
And it is finally I decide
That I'll be leaving
In the fairest of the seasons
***
Gift Economy / The Stoa currently operates through a gift economy. We are offering the Stoa as a gift, for people to freely use during these troubled times. If you are inspired to provide a gift to The Stoa, email thestoa at protonmail dot com. Your gift can take the form of money, support, services or ideas. If you wish to gift money, you can do so here or here for ongoing gifts. If you would like to gift directly to our lovely facilitators and featured sensemakers visit this page.