Just the Crazy Journal of a Stoic Cowboy
Hey beautiful people,
I had a good conversation with our buddy Guy Sengstock from the Circling Institute. We discussed the peril and promise of dialogos. He totally did me dirty with choosing this video thumbnail though.
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tuesday-Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon events. 3 hours.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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February 25, 2021
A person prominent in the metamodern scene told me that The Stoa has been a “supernova in the meta world's solar system,” and another prominent person in the adjacent sensemaking web said that The Stoa is where most of the pioneer thinkers are at. Somebody also recently said this place has a young “cool kid” vibe about it. I liked that take the best.
I wanted this to happen. I wanted to recreate a certain aspect of my University experience, especially the first few years. Those were fun years, intellectually speaking. I was exposed to so many new ideas, inside and outside of the academy. So much exploration was happening. I was not really political, nor was I possessed by any ideology. I was also surrounded by cool kids listening to cool music drinking fancy caffeinated drinks while wearing stylish peacoats. That was my favorite part of course. Why not be cool while stumbling around with aporia?
I think I did a decent enough job recreating this experience at The Stoa. What is next though? I do not know. While I have not booked anything beyond March 21st—when the “Maybe the End of The Stoa Party” is happening—I am 95% certain that The Stoa will live beyond the party, and will at least live quarter to quarter. I will probably be annoying though and let that 5% hang and not officially announce anything before the party.
If it does live my sense is that something needs to happen. I am reaching out to a bunch of people with good discernment, to help me sense the possibility space. To prepare for those conversations, I will leisurely meander around in this possibility space for the rest of this entry.
One thing that I think is really cool, which I’d like to do more of, are the symposiums we had at The Stoa. We have had two day-long symposiums thus far. The first one was called “Let Us Maybe Get Triggered By Jordan Peterson Symposium,” and the second one was called “The Unsuccess Symposium: Let Us Get Successful So We Can Stop Giving a Shit About Getting Successful.”
In sticking with the “Let Us” verbiage, the next symposium I am thinking about doing is “Let Us Make Solving the Meta-Crisis Our Superordinate Goal Symposium.” I do think it is important for a collective to be playing an infinite game together, but I also think it would be good for us to be playing a finite game together as well, and that finite game might as well be solving this meta-crisis thing. When you sink into the reality of all the existential and suffering risks we are faced with, all of the culture war shit just looks like a really bad outrage porno.
I am optimistic we can escape this porno, but the escaping will not happen with the obvious calculative reasoning that put us in this situation. I sense some of you get the long game being attempted here with The Stoa. I wrote in a previous entry: The Stoa is a space that does not need to be named The Stoa. Yeah. The Stoa is not in service of The Stoa, and I hope it does not morph into something stupid like that.
In a previous entry I wrote about the two broad daemonic movements that are happening here: seducing the culture and healing the culture. To briefly address the first one, the rough plan is this: we get all the pioneering intellectuals hanging out at this place, and mix them all together, into a delicious galaxy brain dialogos cocktail. Seduce them and their followers into aporia, by making uncertainty sexy. Let us get all of the galaxy brains feeling like they are back at their first few years of university. Then get the artists to come play their music, because the daemon speaks through them in a way that more people can hear.
Somebody is particularly key here, who I am one degree away from: Jordan Peterson, my former therapist for two years. He has been the lightning rod of the culture war since he entered it, and if he can get into good faith conversations with people such as ContraPoints—who already visited The Stoa—then that could create a pretty seismic shift in the culture in unexpected ways. I think The Stoa is the only place where conversations like that could happen at this point.
Of course, all of this is a part of the long game seduction to nudge the memetic tribes to start paying attention to the meta-crisis, but we cannot do this in a disembodied way. Those disembodied days are over. This is where the second broad daemonic movement of The Stoa comes in, and Steve Beattie’s session last night called “The Pneuma of The Stoa: Breathwork Will Save the World” gave me a glimpse.
This image clearly came to my mind during that session: an ecology of coaches at The Stoa, who have a one-on-one practice in our “coaches in resonance” series, and who also have a recurring session in our wisdom gym. An ecology of practices, that is public for all, will be here. This has to be situated in the gift economy to keep it pure. All of this is already happening organically but how can this happen in a more sophisticated way?
How can this happen in a way that can lead to reliable results, towards creating more sovereign, individuated, and awakened humans? Ones who have the capacity to get into communitas with one another. Perhaps I should talk to my friends at the Monastic Academy, and see if I can port the spirit of what they are doing here, and start treating The Stoa as a digital monastery.
All of this might eventually lead to that philosophical coffee shop that the daemon has been pushing me towards for years now. Imagine Stoa Cafes, found in a major city near you, secretly serving as urban monasteries, in connection with the digital monastery, deployed towards the meta-crisis, by helping all of us gain the capacity to get into the right relationship with reality.
But yeah, this is not about The Stoa. This is just the crazy journal of a Stoic Cowboy, who is trying to help midwife a new world.
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