Harmonizing with Life
Tomorrow’s events:
The Psychotechnology Playground w/ Bonnitta Roy Every Friday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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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July 16, 2020
Last night I recorded The Cancel God clip with Lubomir for Rebel Wisdom. This will be my fourth Rebel Wisdom appearance. I freeze up and feel like an incoherent shitshow when camera lights are on me and when I have pressure to talk like an epistemic authority on something, even if that something is my own creation.
I have a disappointment in my body because of this, but fate willing it turns out well enough. If it does not, I already did my negative visualizations. Afterward Lubomir and I got a beer at a patio nearby. We were contemplating how others are going to react to this minimal viable meme of ours. The noble idea was to create a superordinate goal for the memetic tribes to rally around, The Cancel God wants to cancel all of us after all.
After reading a bunch of hot takes on cancel culture I am not optimistic this will occur. Philosophers Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin coined a term I really like called weaponized metalanguage. The idea is that the metalanguage used to describe an ongoing political argument gets weaponized and becomes part of the argument. This might happen with The Cancel God meme. My dispreferred indifferent is it does not but at this point it seems like all memes get sucked into the culture war.
The meme might be too geeky though, and only fellow meta geeks will geek out about it, and that will be that. That might be for the best anyway. We’ll see. Anyways, the highlight of yesterday was drinking that beer with Lubomir, who is a true brother. The city streets felt alive and I oddly enjoy the apocalyptic feel of seeing people wearing blue masks walking by.
I was telling him about my hurt. He understood and he said that it was important for me to process. People think Stoics are these emotionless creatures, but this Stoic is not. This Stoic is full of emotions, and I am going to continue to write about them, despite my impression management concerns about being emotionally confused in front of you.
Seneca advised: Let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let speech harmonize with life. Yeah, exactly. This is why I do emotional check-ins when I facilitate an event at The Stoa. I want to feel my words when I speak. This is one of the reasons why I write here every day as well. I want to exercise my truthfulness muscle, with both the spoken and written word.
Here is Pierre Hadot on Marcus Aurelius’s practice of writing to himself: As he wrote the Meditations, Marcus was thus practicing stoic spiritual exercises. He was using writing as a technique or procedure in order to influence himself, and to transform his inner discourse by meditating on the Stoic dogmas and rules of life.
Writing is my spiritual exercise and I am here to harmonize with life. The hurt is still here and I did my syllogisms as best as I could. I see no magic wand to make this hurt go away. I want this to be the case, because this is the case, and now I am getting fired up again. There are a lot of things to do, a meta-crisis to respond to and a meaning crisis to awaken from. I want to create what's asking to be created, and every day I will practice harmonizing with life.
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