Caveh Zahedi
Hey friends,
I hope the liminal is treating you well. Good sessions with Tomas Bjorkman and Michael Brooks today. :)
It is a packed day tomorrow!
Writing Meditation w/ Davood Gozli Every Wednesday @ 9:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Unasked Questions w/ Nora Bateson. May 13th @ 1:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Relational Exegesis: The Guru Papers w/ Freyja. May 13th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Radical Honesty During a Pandemic w/ Brad Blanton. May 13th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Concept Unfolding w/ Nicolas Benjamin. May 13th @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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May 12, 2020
I have had many people compliment me on these letters so far, saying they appreciate my level of honesty, and my willingness to be truthful in a public way. They are saying they are taking inspiration from them. You may reasonably think that my main inspiration for these journals is from my fellow Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, who wrote to himself regularly as a spiritual practice.
Or you may think that it's my favorite Stoic, Epictetus—or maybe Seneca, or James Stockdale. It would also be reasonable to think it is my philosophical mentor Andrew Taggart, or his main philosophical influence, Pierre Hadot. Both of whom made me realize that philosophy could be a way of life. Yes, all of these individuals influenced me, but I think the person who influenced my approach for these journals the most is Caveh Zahedi.
Caveh is a filmmaker in New York, and created these enticingly strange autobiographical films such as I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, In the Bathtub of the World, and I Am a Sex Addict. He is most recently known for the brilliant show called The Show About the Show. I discovered him when he had a holy moment, in Richard Linklater's Waking Life.
I was like, who the fuck is this guy? This internal rhetorical question inspired me to watch all his films, and I was lucky to have a holy moment with him when he first came on my podcast. Since then I have gotten to know him better, and I am looking forward to continuing to do so. The reason why he is such an inspiration is his consistency with honesty and his willingness to tell difficult interpersonal truths in a public way, in such a way that it feels like a sacrifice.
When he came on my podcast he mentioned he had no special skills except being truthful. Of course he was being humble, as he is a talented filmmaker. But his professed sentiment stuck with me. His approach to honesty is what makes him special in my eyes. I think we are both in agreement that if we want a more beautiful world, we need to aspire to new levels of truthfulness together.
We were both influenced by Brad Blanton, author of Radical Honesty, who is coming to the Stoa this Wednesday. Brad suggests that our white lies are slowly killing us, and we need a radical approach to combat the habit of bullshit we have adopted. I think Caveh has a similar trajectory as me, in that our love affair with being honest did not come from some noble philosophical justification, but because we stumbled on the fact that it feels so good, and pervertedly so, in a world so thick with bullshit.
I wrote a few times in these journals that I want to look good naked for you, in both the physical and spiritual sense. In order to look good naked you have to risk looking ugly, and there is beauty in taking a risk. All this impression management, and personal branding, is an attempt to ask for a guarantee from another. The truth does not care about guarantees. And you sacrifice the image you consciously or unconsciously cultivated by being truthful in the right way.
Being consistently truthful together is a prerequisite towards the new world, and we cannot get around this. It can be a wicked game though, and it can cause us pain. But with the right disposition, it will filter out the noise and brings us closer to something that feels like a home. Home is where communitas is, afterall, and that is where beauty is found.
John Vervaeke said something that I thought was profound in one of our in-person Circling sessions: In order to be somebody's peer, you need not only to be able to peer through them, but you need them to peer through you. If you do not approach conversations with this spirit, then you are instrumentalizing the other person, probably for goals you do not even truly own.
On the opposite of approach to truthfulness, Josef Pieper, the Catholic philosopher, said it best:
A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other’s share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality. And so: corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication--these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself.
Reality is too delicious for me to want to deny you of it. I am starting to see these journal entries as a slow striptease, in the most spiritual sense, where I remove one item of clothing at a time. The surprise, I suspect, is that there will be nothing here when all the clothes are removed. It is then we will have a chance to truly see each other.
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