Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. EverydaySunday @ 10:00 AM ET.RSVP here.
Evolving Ground 02: View w/ Charlie Awbery and Jared Janes. October 18th @ 12:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Empathy Circle Training w/ Edwin Rutsch. October 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Flowing With Unknowingness w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Sunday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
An event to get excited about:
Entrepreneurialism as a Spiritual Practice w/ Derek Sivers. October 20th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP by clicking the image below.
Derek Sivers visits The Stoa to discuss entrepreneurialism as a spiritual practice. This video looks like what is happening at The Stoa.
That is some sexy daemonic dancing. I think it is time to bring back the “Existential Dance Party.” 😉
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October 17, 2020
The international Stoic conference is on today, called Stoicon, which is run by the Modern Stoicism team, headed by Donald Robertson. I am organizing their “lighting round” today, where Stoics around the world share their thoughts on Stoicism during rapid-fire talks.
I spoke at the Stoicon conference last year in Athens, and it was pretty cool hanging out at the birthplace of Stoicism. It happened last October, and my talk was actually called: How to Start a Modern Stoa. The reason why I called it that, and why I was invited to speak at the conference, was that I organized an in-person group called Stoicism Toronto, which was the largest Stoic group in the world at the time.
When I delivered that talk, I had no idea I’d be launching The Stoa six months later. If I did I probably would have titled the talk, How to Start a Metamodern Stoa. While I maintain good relations with the wider Stoic community, I do not hang out with them much, nor do I really vibe with them.
I playfully tease my Buddhistic friends often, but I do vibe with them much more. I think the reason is that all of them are “metamodern” (or “metarational”) for lack of a better term. John Vervaeke, Andrew Taggart, Jared Janes, Travis Mann, and everyone at the Monastic Academy, such as Daniel Thorson and Jasna Todorovic, are pretty much in the metamodern category.
Everyone in the Modern Stoicism community does seem “modern” to me, and I can epistemologically code-switch enough to hang with that, but I do not really vibe with that. What is this metamodern stuff anyway?
When I was a matchmaker for the Letter platform last year, I matched Dave Chapman with John Vervaeke. They had an amazing exchange on Letter, and Dave had a good take on metamodernism, along with modernism and postmodernism:
The modern public intellectual makes rational arguments for one system over another; or, within a tacitly assumed system of construal, argues that policy A is rationally preferable to policy B. This can be hugely valuable, but it is increasingly impotent, due to postmodern incredulity toward meta-narratives.
The postmodern public intellectual points out that the pretensions of modern systems to absolute truth and foundational justification are hollow. No ultimate ground for meaning is possible, due to the nebulosity of relevance. This valid correction has gradually filtered down to the least-informed, so we live in a “post-truth era.”
The metamodern public intellectual explains how meaning arises, why some things are more true than others, and whereby some groundless systems work surprisingly well. Those systems now need emergency maintenance, though, requiring collective meta-systematic work. The metamodern public intellectual inspires and provides tools for that task.
People like Dave and John, and all of our “Sensemakers in Residence” really—such as Gregg Henriques, Daniel Görtz, Bonnitta Roy, and Zak Stein—are all about this meta-systematic work. I had no idea what this metamodern stuff was, until I released that white paper on the memetic tribes, and the metamodern tribe started geeking out about it, which led me to go on a metamodern podcast circuit, and I got plugged into that ecology of thinkers, and found my “metatribe.”
I am cool with adopting the “metamodern” title. I do not consider myself an “intellectual” though, so I am not in the meta-systematic game. If anything, my metamodern role is probably a stewarding one, which is what my main skill is.
I want to “hold space” in the time between worlds. I want to do this so that people who do not have a home in premodernity, modernity, or postmodernity—and who are aware that we are in the liminal—can build a relationship with unknowingness, and with the anxiety it brings while we all help the meta-systematic builders do their thing.
I am the only Metamodern Stoic really, and probably the first Metamodern Stoic, and maybe the last Metamodern Stoic. This reminds me of the great questions Andrew Sweeny asked, which I mentioned in an earlier entry, but I never addressed:
Is stoicism a ruse? What does a stoic worship? Is stoicism the religion that is not a religion?
Ah. The daemon probably does not want to tell me his long game. As I have written about before, a Metamodern Stoic may need to be a trickster: I sense that we Stoics need to become tricksters, who move in unpredictable ways, whose public words are authentically masked in a healthy postmodern language, in order for us to arrive unnoticed and to avoid the egoic noise of the mob.
Somebody emailed me yesterday, inquiring about my comment in the last entry about my lack of interest in getting enlightened, or how she put it, the most “cosmically blissful goal available to pursue in a human lifetime.”
I do not even know what enlightenment means, but I’ve read enough, dabbled enough, and hung out enough with my Buddhistic friends to believe that there are profound states, which can turn into traits, that are “cosmically blissful.”
Just because these states may exist, they may not be available for everyone to obtain, and for those whom they are available for, I am not convinced it is the wisest move for them to pursue.
Now this may be uncharitable to my Buddhistic friends, but I will risk being uncharitable here so they have an opportunity to practice some Stoicism. With the Buddhists I do know, I think their practice is earnestly held, but I sense the majority of them were unconsciously motivated to “do Buddhism” for egoic reasons, e.g. spiritual narcissism, and consciously motivated to do it in a way that is basically spiritual bypassing, e.g. they did not shine the lights on the dark corners, so they could “clean their room” first.
How you start something is very important, and I am sure there is some paradoxical Buddhistic koan that I do not understand which says something like starting for the “wrong reason” is the right reason. Regardless if that is true, I do sense that gunning for enlightenment, even if it exists, is ultimately the wrong spiritual chess move for most, especially during our meta-crisis.
I wrote about the “next Buddha is the sangha” phrase before, and maybe the “next Christ is communitas,” and maybe these are not metaphors from different traditions pointing at the same thing. I sense the right move is to arrive at communitas first, then maybe we get into enlightenment together.
My working theory is that communitas screens out two types of people: co-dependents and sociopaths. You need a “minimum viable sovereignty” to get into communitas, so if you have a lot of demanding shadow issues, the group will just collapse around that. This is dangerous because this will lead to some weird enmeshment shit.
Regarding the sociopaths, they can socially fake it pretty well in a “Gesellschaft,” that is to say a society based on contractual relating. The endgame of the sociopath, if left to their own devices, is to create a “cult-state.” To risk sounding cliché, their modus operandi is to prioritize power in relationships, not love. Without love, there will be no communitas.
This is why I sense communitas is the right move. If you just hang out in a monastery, and follow orders until you arrive at enlightenment, then you are not really protecting yourself or others from sociopathic machinations that are happening in the world, or in your own monastery. Yeah, sociopaths can get into these advanced Buddhistic states as well. This is why there are so many sex scandals in these communities.
There are bad people out there. M. Scott Peck calls them the People of the Lie, and yeah, I will dare say there is demonic energy coursing through some of these people. Jordan Peterson told me to read the journals of the serial killer Panzam, to understand how this demonic energy can be honed and channeled to do evil.
Let us not shit ourselves here, this energy is not only available to the criminal “underworld,” but it is also available to what Peter Dale Scott calls the criminal “overworld,” aka the ultrarich “elites” of our society, who have so much money it effectively gives them the “ring of Gyges,” and they can do whatever the fuck they want. As I mentioned before, I find spiritually inclined people do not have that “stormy blood,” and much less thumos than somebody like Saint Christoph, which I sense biases them against seeing the dangers of real evil in the world, which the Christians grokked.
I imagine there is a both/and response here, aka you can pursue both communitas and enlightenment. Sitting on your butt and focusing on your breath or whatever you have to do takes a lot of time and energy though, and I sense it could be an opportunity cost for most. I also sense the capacities developed to get into communitas are different than the capacities developed to get into enlightenment, and our time is limited, so what are you going to focus on?
Besides the screening out sociopaths thing, the other thing I sense the “communitas first” approach affords is a potential “escape velocity” effect for development in all the of verticals needed for us metamodern types. These verticals are what Ken Wilber calls: waking up, growing up, and cleaning up, which corresponds respectively to enlightenment stuff, developmental stuff, and shadow stuff.
I think he later added a showing up category, aka that dharma stuff. Maybe we can add another category here, communing up, and I sense gunning for communitas demands you have the minimum prerequisites in all of Wilber’s verticals, and once in it, you can source the “collective intelligence” to rapidly improve in all of the verticals.
Now I could be completely wrong with the communitas before enlightenment thing, and my thoughts are probably muddled here somewhere, so I am happy to receive propositional push-back. And yeah, these journals are not some Metamodern Stoic manifesto, or me presenting some fossilized propositions, and my fight-or-flight response will not be triggered if you disagree with me.
Everything here is a work in process.
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https://www.patreon.com/the_stoa
Roger Walsh has been writing about Giving Up - iterating on the integral injunctions in relation to Maslow's hierarchy of needs