Rescuing Our Father
Tomorrow’s events:
The Hollow w/ Bonnitta Roy. October 9th, 16th, 23rd, and 30th. 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Socratic Social w/ The Stoa Village. Every Friday @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
33 Myths of the System w/ Darren Allen. October 20th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP by clicking the link below.
Darren Allen, author and anarchist, visits The Stoa to discuss his book, 33 Myths of the System, which is a brief guide to the “unworld.”
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October 15, 2020
I feel obligated to crack a really good joke to lighten the mood.
Yesterday's entry was pretty heavy. There were more details I could have mentioned with that incident, but the one I will mention is the loving witnessing of Camille.
The thing I was most worried about in that situation was fearing that Camille would leave me afterward. But she did not, and it did not even cross her mind. I thank God for allowing me to fall in love with such an angel.
A tinge of fear, in a similar fashion, emerged after I submitted yesterday's entry: will this scare people away from me?
To get Stoic about it right away: it is my preferred indifferent that this is not the case, but this is out of my control. If it does scare them away, then I sense that means the individual is not ready to contend with the darkness within. That is too bad, because I agree with Jordan Peterson: I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.
I used to think that day was the worst day of my life, as the experience was so intense, and it almost broke me. In retrospect, it was an amazing character building experience. It slapped me out of a naïve slumber, and awakened me to my capacity for evil.
When I told Jordan what happened to me during my first session with him, he said I had a religious experience. I was hyper motivated to get my shit together after that, because I never wanted to visit hell again, or risk doing harm to anybody. With the help of Jordan and others, I did get my shit together.
I also agree with my friend John Vervaeke, whom I spoke with on Rebel Wisdom, where he said that in order to be somebody's peer, you need to be able to peer through them, and allow them to peer through you. This is the essence of communitas really, and this is what my spiritual striptease is in service to. It allows you to peer through me, and hopefully it models and encourages you to allow us to peer through you.
I would also like to help remove the stigma against psychotic breaks, and intrusive thoughts. The latter is much more common than I thought. After the demonic attack episode, I had panic attacks on and off for about 6 months afterward, which was always proceeded by intrusive thoughts.
The common fear with those attacks was that I would go completely insane, and then it would become impossible for anyone to reach me, and I would be alone forever. I mostly feared that Camille would go away, and so would her love.
I am too romantic to let that happen though, so I did everything I could to get a handle on those thoughts. The book that helped the most was The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts. There were some great techniques in that book that helped me get into the right relationships with thoughts I did not welcome. For the most part they went away, but if they do return, I am confident I now have the tools to deal with them.
Another part of my hesitation in sending yesterday's entry was to do with my shame around having psychotic breaks, probably because of the stigma around them. I have already processed them well enough, and talked about them privately, but never publicly. I sense it was important for me to do so, in order to flesh out, and let go of, any remaining shame.
I think our shame educator, A.J. Bond, is fundamentally right about shame. Once you learn the language of shame, and get a sense of its chess moves, you start seeing it all over the place. I had a great talk with A.J. about this in a conversation we titled Love Thy Shame.
In that conversation, I talked about the time I masturbated thinking about a man (long story), and then got teary-eyed and emotional about my unconscious complicity in keeping alive the collective shame that exists around homosexuality. Ronan Harrington tweeted about that conversation:
Wow, we've never seen a public conversation like this before: Peter Limberg (student of Jordan Peterson) meets shame educator A.J. Bond, and feels for the first time his personal complicity in the distributed trauma of homophobia.
Yes. I want to have conversations people have never seen before, and if we are going to heal this culture, like my friend Isaias suggested, then we are going to have to be truthful in a way people have never seen before, like my former therapist recommended we do.
Many people have a great hate for Jordan, but I have a great love for him. I recall our last session vividly. It was 2016, and the day was September 28th, which was a day after he posted his YouTube video criticizing Bill C-16.
That was not the reason why it was my last session, things just weirdly shook out that way. When I came into his office, he did a come hither motion with his finger to invite me to his computer to show me what he was looking at. He showed me an article The Varsity wrote about him, then he showed me an email he got from a government official, which had a threatening tone to it.
We talked about the potential consequences of him posting this video, and I had an intuitive sense it was going to go big. I actually said to him: dude, you are going to be on Joe Rogan. I do not think he even knew who Joe Rogan was at the time.
Since it was my last session with him, I got him a gift, as a thank you for all of his help. I got him one of those Crystal Head Vodka bottles. Jordan started his academic career studying alcoholism, and wrote articles like Inherited Predisposition to Alcoholism. He did so because I think he had alcoholism in his family, and I sense he learned to police the alcoholic predisposition in himself.
People put skulls on their desk as an act to remind themselves that they will die. This is called memento mori. At the time I thought I was being clever with this gift, but it gave me chills giving it to him, in light of what I sensed was unfolding. Before I showed him what the gift was, I said I was now concerned about giving it to him, and he told me it is cruel to deny somebody a gift once you announce it.
When I gave it to him, he held it in his hand and looked at it for what seemed like a minute, then put it in an odd place in his office. I asked him why he put it there, and he said that everything has its place.
When I was leaving his office and the session was done, he turned to me and thanked me, and said he learned a lot from me during our sessions, which occurred over a period of two years. He also said we would meet again. That was the last time I saw him.
We have corresponded via email throughout the years though, and he has been quietly supportive of my projects, and he might even be reading these journals now, as I sent him a few in the past.
Jordan Hall did recommend to John and I that we privately bring Jordan into our dialogos conversations, and I wrote before how it would be good to engage in an epistemic prison break to free him from his Blue Church handlers. Besides this though, I have not written much about Jordan, especially where I agree or disagree with him on a propositional level, as I am not that interested in going there.
It was a really weird thing, seeing your former therapist get launched into the culture war, and for the longest while it was so confusing to me as to why there was so much hate coming his way. If you tease out his philosophy on a propositional level, it is not that radical. He is like a sophisticated Tony Robbins with a Jungian twist, who is somewhat politically muddled with the post-modern neo-Marxist stuff.
Why not just do what Zizek did, and agree with him where you agree with him, and disagree where you disagree with him? It was not his propositions that engendered so much hate though. I think it was because he adopted, or was projected on, the archetype of the father.
Some called him YouTube’s new father figure, and in the therapy sessions I had with him, my natural tendency was to view him in a fatherly light. I know a lot of young men did the same, and for a lot of us, it did feel like he was our father. This does make sense to me, because there is what Doug Wilson calls a great “father hunger” out there.
At the risk of “tone policing” my former therapist, I would say his fatherly tone was not always the most loving one, especially when it came to speaking with the woke tribes. He did not really speak with them, but at them. Which is fair enough, because a lot of people were speaking at him first.
But feeling into his tone though, there was a sense of disgust, like he despised the people he was talking at. I sensed no love in his voice, and with no love, there is no invitation for redemption.
My working theory is that when it comes to political shadow work, right-wing types have mommy issues, and left-wing types have daddy issues. And imagine if you have daddy issues, and daddy comes along and says you are basically an idiot, and does so in a way that does not only convey disapproval, but does so with an unloving spite.
Maybe what both the woke and reactionary tribes need is a Stoic Daddy. One who has the same talent stack of a sociopath, along with a choking fetish, and is at the knife's edge of becoming dysdaimonic.
Now, if you read the previous sentence out of context from all I have been writing here, you will miss the attempted joke, and might think I am a weirdo. To be clear, I am not a sociopath, nor do I have a choking fetish, and I am strongly orientated towards eudaimonia, but yes, I am somewhat weird.
This is all related to my impression management concerns which I wrote about at the beginning of this entry. There is so much content I am putting out there into the noosphere, and if I ever get on the bad side of the Blue Church, they have no shortage of material to use against me. I can see the lead now in one of their hot pieces:
Radicalized in Jordan Peterson's clinical practice, an individual who refers to himself as a "Stoic Daddy" befriends Russian ultranationalists and traumatized alchemic existential terrorists, while problematically refusing to bow to The Cancel God.
The Stoic Daddy joke is in service towards something though. It is in service towards what I sense is needed now. I sense we need people who see what is actually happening in the noosphere, and choose to view it as a culture dance, rather than a culture war. I also sense we need some sexiness in our philosophical swagger, so we can be embodied in a way that makes all of the memetic tribes a little horny.
In order to do this we need to cultivate a metagame talent stack, and begin to speak many “languages”: ones related to power, status, reason, perspective, and yeah, we even need to speak a primordial language.
Once we have that, we can be cultural alchemists, and start having conversations like people have never seen before, and in doing so we will transform the world. This is how Game B begins.
Everything I am doing here with these journals is basically listening to my former therapist's advice: tell the truth like my life depends on it. And yeah, while some people have given up on Jordan, I have not. I sense his intuition is right: we will meet again, maybe at The Stoa.
Jordan often talks about rescuing one's father from the underworld. He visited hell recently himself, and he still might be there. On top of this there is so much hate being projected onto him. As always, I am optimistic. I think his “image” can be restored with some good metagame, and wise chess moves. It is a long game, but I think it can be done.
I am getting a little teary-eyed reflecting on this actually, because I do want to rescue our father from the underworld.
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