Finding the Expiration Date
Tomorrow’s events:
Embodied Book Club: Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Saturday from October 3rd to November 7th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins. Review the information sheet here.
The Glass Bead Game w/ Laurence Currie-Clark and The Arch. Every Saturday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 120 mins
An event to get excited about:
Reflective Structured Dialogue w/ Jill DeTemple. October 20th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP by clicking the image below.
Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD), “is designed to help communities and organizations disrupt those patterns to hold open, honest, constructive conversations about potentially divisive topics." This event is a part of the “Communitas Club,” where we investigate various conversational and intersubjective modalities.
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October 16, 2020
It felt like something got congealed after the last few journals. I feel more me now since I am no longer shy about the demon stuff. Okay, let's get real about stealing this culture. Let me take an inventory first …
Morning espresso. Check.
Tons of thumos. Check.
Listening to the daemon. Check
Prepared for the demons. Check.
Ready to rescue our father. Check.
Metagame talent stack. Check.
A really big meta-boner. Check.
Weird inside jokes no one understands. Check.
Okay. Everything seems in proper order. It is time to steal this culture now fam. There are so many ideas the daemon is giving me. I am going to have to tell him to chill actually, because I cannot keep up with all of them.
I will do some more daemon sketches with this entry though, as to what some of these ideas are.
I sense there is a newfound excitement at The Stoa amongst some of the regulars, and there is a hunger for more community involvement. I feel there needs to be more steward-community interfacing going on. This does feel needed, but I want to be careful here. I do not want us to get doped up on collective excitement, and lose the plot that is being revealed.
I also sense it would be good to see unofficial Stoas pop up, like the Temporary Autonomous Stoa (TAS) idea I mentioned before. This way, more conversations can emerge without my bottlenecking getting in the way, and different sessions can be field-tested “outside” The Stoa, and once they “work,” they can be ported into The Stoa.
I would like to eventually take up the offer from the brothers who founded the Letter platform: they are willing to create a page for The Stoa community, so we can engage in letter exchanges with one another. For the most part I have been against having social media pages, but Letter has a humane tech mission which I am really supportive of.
We also have a collaborative series with Letter called “Post-Script.” This series consists of post-letter conversations that happen at The Stoa. We have had two thus far, both with Buster Benson, and the second one on toxic masculinity was really good. They are having amazing exchanges on that platform, and the Letter brothers are open for me to keep experimenting.
This series could also be a great opportunity to develop the anti-debate modality that I have been itching to create. This modality could be informed by what we discover at the “Communitas Club” series that Margaret is leading. We are investigating all these awesome conversational and intersubjective modalities. For ones that are especially awesome, we can bring them to The Stoa, and practice them ourselves, like we are doing with Edwin Rutsch’s Empathy Circle modality on Sundays. We can then make up our own modalities at The Stoa, and give them jazzy titles, before we let them loose in the noosphere.
I would also like to do a similar research project called “Sovereignty Society,” where we invite the likes of David Allen, B.J. Fogg, Tiago Forte, and Sebastian Marshall in order to learn from their productivity and personal effectiveness techniques. Maybe also things like Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Jacob Lund Fisker’s Early Retirement Extreme methodology, which is a method very applicable beyond finances, might be useful here.
Also, I would like to launch a “Psychotherapy Cafe,” where we investigate different psychotherapeutic modalities—beyond ones like cognitive behavioural therapy or psychoanalysis—such as: acceptance commitment therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, focusing, gestalt therapy, narrative therapy, transactional analysis, family systems therapy, etc.
There are so many good therapeutic modalities out there, and they all have their own amazing techniques. Let us do the same thing with these modalities that we will be doing with the conversational and intersubjective ones at Communitas Club. Maybe we can eventually have modality sex with all of these psychotherapies, and invent our own psychotherapeutic modality.
I can see a TAS popping up organically, using this modality, in order to lovingly respond to a personal or collective issue. Once we've got something here, we unleash it into the noosphere, so others can use it. We have to start thinking differently when responding to the traumacene. Cody also had a cool idea about having a “Psychotherapist in Residence,” like our “Sensemaker in Residence.”
I also want to launch a “Power Posse” series, where we investigate power, so we can collectively develop a power literacy. Robert Greene has agreed to come to The Stoa, so I imagine that would be a good session to launch this series. It would be good to read Venkatesh Rao’s Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths, Li Zhongwu's Thick Black Theory, and Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't.
As well, other useful stuff to know with this would be: classics like Machiavelli, applied game theory, political ponerology, the possibility of a pedophocracy (as a backdoor to get into the “Epstein didn't kill himself” territory), and learning about the “talent stack” of Cluster B types, aka dark triad assholes. All of this would be super helpful, but I am going to approach this one with extreme caution, because it needs to be complemented by “heart-based” practices, e.g. Jesus Prayer, metta meditation, and things like that.
A “Buddhistic Buffet” would also be good, to explore all of the different Buddhistic and non-dualistic psychotechnologies. We can experiment with various practices such as Headless Way, Big Mind, Daniel M. Ingram’s Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma book, and some practices that will engender the jhanas. To be honest, all of this Buddhistic stuff is above my spiritual paygrade, and I am not really interested in getting enlightened, so it is probably best to hand this one off to somebody else.
Having an “X-Risk Gang” series would be super cool, where we investigate the contours of existential risks and suffering risks, and all the existential ultracatastrophies that the meta-crisis has in store for us. Once we get a sensitivity of these contours, we can engage in some fun enlightened doomsaying together.
It would be really fun to geek out about having a “Reality Artistry” series, taking inspiration from the Nordic larp scene where we can repurpose acting techniques so we can be playful with our personas and identities. We can repurpose Keith Johnstone’s Impro techniques, emotional effective patterns, Patsy Rodenburg's “Second Circle” method, the Meisner technique, etc. I do agree with Venkatesh Rao when he said: Theater is, in a sense, the true laboratory for the humanities and social sciences.
Lastly, I want to launch something called “Platonic Fight Club,” which is a debate modality I have been sitting on for a while. It is too dangerous to release without some “aftercare” modality to follow it up though. I strongly sense we need a prerequisite course on reason as well, where we can learn the basics of reasoning, and be aware of cool mental models like verbal disputes, deep disagreements, logical rudeness, weaponized metalanguage, and others that would be needed to disagree well in the wild.
There are so many other daemon ideas, and other series I would like to launch that would engender a potent existential hope, such as a series on earth regeneration. I also want to bring back the Metagame Mastermind, with a rite of passage this time, and start a Stoic prison gang, but that is probably too ridiculous to write about now.
We might not do any of these things here at The Stoa, or we might do all of them. If we end up doing some of them, they might shake out way differently than what the above daemon sketch looks like. Overall, I am not attached to any of this.
When Bonnitta recommended I keep riding (and writing) with the daemon energy, she also wrote:
You are genuinely exceptional at what you do. You are running on exceptional energy. Don't let the moment pass you by. Because it will. One day you will be dropped from the sky. Hopefully you have a strong tush.
Wouldn't it be great to find out what the expiration date of the daemon is?
Yeah B, that would be great to find out.
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