Maybe the End of The Stoa Party
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath: Sunrise Edition w/ Steve Beattie. Every Monday @ 6:15 AM ET.RSVP here.
Deep Code Dialogos w/ Jordan Hall. December 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th. 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Metaphysics, Philosophy, Civilization Design, and Various High Arts w/ Forrest Landry. December 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th. 5:00 PM ET.RSVP here. 90 mins.
Slow Down, Calm Down, Scale Down, and Step Down w/ Tyson Yunkaporta. December 21st @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
Complice: Beyond Getting Things Done w/ Malcolm Ocean. December 22nd @ 11:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Ultraworking Ethos w/ Sebastian Marshall. December 22nd @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Not So Secret: The Law of Attraction, Positive Thinking, and the New Thought Movement w/ Mitch Horowitz. December 22nd @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Bridge: Deep-Dives w/ Evan McMullen. January 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. 5:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Consciousness and Spirituality Explained: Part 1 w/ Frank Heile. January 9th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Transparency Tube w/ Mark Ledwich and Sam Clark. January 13th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Convergence for Consensus Building w/ Brent Cooper. January 14th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Consciousness and Spirituality Explained: Part 2 w/ Frank Heile. January 16th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
How René Girard Helps Us to Understand Our World w/ Wolfgang Palaver. January 19th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Maybe the End of The Stoa Party w/ Peter Limberg. March 21st @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 3 hours.
***
December 20th, 2020
What is The Stoa? I finally came up with an answer ...
The highest signal place on the internet that nobody knows about.
Well, you know about it.
I was musing in my recent journals about ending this thing, and that seemed to send ripples out into the digital colonnade; people have been reaching out to me asking if this is true.
Well, maybe it is true. I am committed to continuing with it until March 21st, which will be the one year anniversary of The Stoa. I think I’ll throw a party on that date and call it the following: Maybe the End of The Stoa Party
That “maybe” is annoying eh, but hey, I am the one getting tugged around by this creative force, working on a project that feels like three jobs packed into one, glued to Zoom screens all day, and playing chess with the hungry ghosts.
I sense by March I will know for sure. It is fluctuating between 40-60% certainty at the moment. If it does stay, things will change, and the character of this place will be different for sure. I did a visualization yesterday on how it will end. I closed my eyes and witnessed the very last goodbye. It was simple and beautiful, at least for me. I gotta keep a little bit to myself.
Perhaps the Patreon supporters will start dropping with this announcement, or maybe more will come, in an effort to try to get me to stay. I do not have a good sense of that, but I do know that I only want people to support me who trust me, because trust has a certain magic to it, and I want this place to keep feeling magical.
At the Glass Bead Game last night we were playing with tarot cards, and the tower card was chosen. From the website that was used to describe the card …
The Tower itself is a solid structure, but because it has been built on shaky foundations, it only takes one bolt of lightning to bring it down. It represents ambitions and goals made on false premises.
Was The Stoa built on false premises?
Well, during its first few months, when I was increasingly becoming untethered from reality, I thought this place was going to be the place. I thought it was the place where the meaning crisis was going to be solved, where communitas would be rediscovered, and where I would finally find my people. Sometimes you've got to build on false premises, or else you won’t build at all.
I do feel like a perennial loner though, and this feels sad to write, but loneliness has become an acquired taste for me. I also happen to be good at social dynamics, and bringing people together, and many people have said to me that I am the man for the job, whatever this job is.
A few people also said The Stoa is like a “sand mandala.” I did not know what those were so I looked it up, and man they are cool. These Tibetan Buddhists build these beautiful mandalas out of coloured sand, and then they destroy them afterward.
Sounds like good practice for when lighting strikes towers, and yeah, what fool builds a tower with the belief that it will last forever? Maybe that fool was me. When you are creating, and I mean truly creating, you are not thinking of endings. Maybe this is because a spirit that has no end channels through you.
It feels like it is channeling through me now. I do not have exclusive rights or access to this thing. He comes and goes. I know you feel what I am talking about. I sense you may even be feeling it now. When it is here, there is no loneliness. That acquired taste that I was talking about, the one that I have probably become egoically attached to, gets temporarily released when this thing is here.
From now until March 21st we will all play in uncertainty, but what makes this different from any other day? This is an opportunity of course to practice our Stoicism, and not only get into the right relationship with this thing called The Stoa, but for us to get into the right relationship with uncertainty itself.
This move, while perhaps bold, is a move that is inspiring me to keep going, at least for a few more months, and I only want to continue here with that sense of delicious aliveness. The next few months are going to be special, and we are going to make this place as beautiful as we can.
It is a dangerous game out there, this meta-crisis thing, and we’ll all have to be nimble, with loose grips, and be prepared to brush away what was built as if it were sand. A mandala is apparently created to set up a sacred space, and maybe the best mandala is the one that gets you to the next. Like The Stoa, they are lifeworks.
Now, with all of this being said, let us act boldly, and steal this culture, and burn this motherfucker to the ground, with so much thumos the gods themselves will be impressed. We may not have that much time, but where we are going, I sense we do not need time.
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