Philosophical Coffee Shop
Hey lovely people,
I hope you are all doing well. :)
Tomorrow’s events:
The Psychotechnology Playground w/ Bonnitta Roy Every Friday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Who's Sensing the Sensemakers w/ Brent Cooper. June 12th @ 5:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly Every Friday @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
The Dark Stoa w/ Pat Ryan. Every Friday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 11, 2020
I will try to sketch out what the daemon wants.
For years now I wanted to open up a philosophical coffee shop in Toronto and I wanted to call it the Stoa. I wanted to call it the Stoa because I organize the largest Stoic community in the world and the Stoics got their name from hanging out at the Stoa Poikile. This is where our homeboy Zeno of Citium first taught his philosophy.
The idea was that this philosophical coffee shop would daylight as this cool indie coffee shop and moonlight as a philosophical event space, where an ecology of practices emerge, that would form a wisdom gym. Before COVID, my dear friend John Vervaeke (sometimes known as Johnny V in these journals) gave me the title of Adjunct Researcher at his Consciousness & Wisdom Studies Lab at the University of Toronto.
The idea was for me to shamanically encourage these wisdom gyms to emerge and then see if legitimate scientific research could be done. I originally suggested and piloted the wisdom gym for the Rebel Wisdom community, but then COVID hit and the daemon told me to pivot. That is when I launched the digital campfire that is the Stoa. I am glad I did not open up the actual coffee shop before COVID, but I am eager to open it up once the quarantine lifts.
A beautiful community online is developing and I think a local community would complement the online one. I also think in our interregnum, between Game A and Game B, one may need to have their foot in both the market economy and the gift economy in order to thrive during this transition. This might be a more realistic approach if I want to support a family during the meta-crisis.
In these journals I keep talking about stealing the culture, and seducing it, and winning the liminal war. It is fun using these phrases but I will not talk like a comic book today, instead I will write about what I think the daemon’s master plan is, but really this is more like a daemon sketch on the back of a napkin.
I think it is pointless and dangerous to attempt to win the liminal war by trying to win the metanarrative through propositional violence and memetic gaslighting. I wrote about that already and it is a pyrrhic victory. Instead, let us attempt to be delicious tricksters, and the most daring tricks are done in the daylight. The trick is not to fight with the memetic tribes, but to seduce them to become embodied tribes.
It is time to end the age of memetic tribes, and it is time for the age of embodied tribes to emerge. Not ones that develop into some deindividuated herd mentality, or ones that turn into a cult through the will of a charismatic leader, or worse, one that gets co-opted by the cult state itself, which is run by those power hungry developmentally stunted sociopaths.
The embodied tribes I am referring to will be composed of sovereign individuals, ones who are individuated. Ones who are in the right relationship with all of their subpersonalities and who are not at risk of becoming enmeshed. That is when communitas can emerge, and when dialogos can truly do what it needs to do. I have no idea how to engineer something like this, but I sense the daemon knows, and I sense it has something to do with the emerging wisdom gyms.
The idea is that these wisdom gyms will help us attain the sovereignty needed in order for communitas to form. I think both sovereignty and communitas can emerge in online platforms like the Stoa and Rebel Wisdom, and in in-person spaces like the philosophical coffee shop. I also sense it is not wise to be too smart about how these emerge. I am just going to listen.
While these wisdom gyms are forming, the other front of the liminal war that the Stoa is involved in is memetic mediation, which I am viewing as getting all of the memes into the right relationship with each other. The approach here is to invite chieftains of memetic tribes, which are key nodes in the noosphere, to come think at the Stoa, and eventually get them and their followers to dialogue with each other.
I am well positioned to make this happen. My Stoicism affords me an immune system that prevents me from getting triggered by philosophical allergies. As well, my Dale Carnegie-esque metagaming social skills affords me to authentically code-switch, with a perspectival pidginism, which I believe helps to communicate with lots of different people, who have wildly different temperaments and reality tunnels.
I sense this talent stack would help inviting these representatives to come in, and allow them to feel the warmth of the Stoa's digital campfire, so they can become inspired to put themselves at the knife's edge of their thinking. It is at the knife's edge of one's thinking where the truth bleeds out, and where unknowingness emerges.
This is where the most alive kind of thinking happens, and it is a very seductive state to be in. Having a fossilized weltanschauung that is in a constant fight-or-flight mode has its own pleasure, but it does not compare to the adventure and romance that knife's edge thinking can bring.
This is really nothing new, Socrates has already modeled the way. Us metamodern Stoics are simply living in his legacy. In the spirit of my philosophical homeboy, I am not attached to anything I wrote above, and I am swimming in unknowningness.
This is just a daemon sketch after all, and as an epistemic cowboy I think the best daemon sketch is the one that gets you to the next.
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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 visit this page.