Saintly Desires
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Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
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December 15th, 2021
I want to be a saint.
This is what I told a few friends recently, which felt like a risky thing to say, as most people would probably be pattern-matched as a grandiose narcissist after making such a statement. And rightfully so. It does feel like a ridiculous statement to make.
I doubt saints announce their ambitions to become a saint, so I am probably not going to become one. Naturally, I am going to get endlessly teased for stating such an ambition. I am in no way claiming to be a saint, or that I will ever become one, I am just stating a desire. Why desire this? Well, I cannot sense any better ambition to have.
All the cool kids these days seem to be into some kind of Buddhistic practice. Meditating their way to a better life, their ambitions are closer to being like Buddha than being like Christ. That is cool. I love all my Buddhistic friends, host them at The Stoa all the time, but that path is not for me. I respect, but do not vibe with, the tradition, the practices, or the aesthetics.
I am attracted by this virtue thing instead, which is the thing in common with Stoicism and Christianity, my philosophical and spiritual traditions respectfully. What is a saint anyway? One dictionary definition: An extremely virtuous person. Let us stick with this definition. I do not think we need to get any fancier here.
Does anybody want to be an “extremely virtuous person” these days? Well, there are people who put up the pretense and are usually selling something. But the rest of us? More common ambitions are some combination of money, status, fame, success, or power. Nothing is inherently unwise about each of these things; they only become unwise if they become one’s intrinsic value.
Virtue for me is embodied wisdom, not wisdom signaled through complicated mental models by the verbally intelligent. There seems to be no school for virtue these days. Maybe school is not needed. Maybe we just need some good friends. Finding friends of virtue is something I have been obsessed with my whole life.
My friend in virtue, Daniel Kazandjian, responded to my saintly ambition declaration by saying that he resonated with the desire, but the word “saint” has a sexless quality these days. It is not a word that attracts a young heterosexual man looking for a mate. I’ll be speaking as and to heterosexual males for the rest of this entry because I sense the intersection of sex and virtue holds something quite interesting. If some sex was infused with the sense of being saintly, perhaps more saintly desires would exist.
This is similar to my musing about a “horny sage” …
The Stoic sage is perfectly wise, and serene, and navigates life with prudence. They are also loyal to the cardinal virtues, including temperance, which means they do not indulge in their sexual appetites, or get yanked around by them. They do not follow the desire to fuck in a way that would fuck them over. This is not to say they cannot be massively horny though…
I ended that entry by saying: I would not trust a sage who does not get horny.
Perhaps this is why people do not strive to be extremely virtuous, there is no sense that the virtuous are fuckable. If the virtuous were fuckable, you’d bet you would have men worldwide lining up to embody wisdom. Instead, the “bad boys” have the being-fuckable cred. This is understandable through the light of evolutionary biology - bad boys display traits of those who can survive hard times. I do not see why good men cannot start displaying these traits though. Perhaps this is the current project - make the virtuous fuckable again.
Now, being fuckable is dangerous, as it is powerful, and power can be abused, especially if the fuckable man becomes the alpha male. It is tough being a man. So many rivalrous dynamics exist between us, especially related to sex, and yeah, we men who want to see red desire to be on top. What if a non-rivalrous move can be made here though, and we can desire this virtuous fuckableness to be decentralized among men who strive to be our friends in virtue? I sense before this move can be made, a man has to get into the right relationship with the powerful men in his life.
I dunked on porn here before, but I sense it can be cleverly repurposed towards psychotherapeutic purposes, leading to surprising self-discoveries. My good friend Davood Gozli and I discovered a pretty clever way to tease out some insights from one’s porn-watching habits. Davood was my acting class buddy back in the day, we took many classes together, and we infused some of our acting experience into our everyday activities. Here is the exercise we created…
Announce the porn genre you are drawn to watch most.
Sense into the emotional quality of this porn genre, fully embody it, then when spoken to, speak as if you were that porn genre.
Your friend in virtue then asks you questions in the spirit of curiosity.
One kind of porn that I was drawn to in the past was the “double blow job” (DBJ) - two women giving a man a blow job at the same time. I felt into the giddy high that this desire brought, to the point where it felt embodied, and Davood started asking me questions, and I spontaneously answered. His last two questions really brought the truth…
Davood: Would you want more than two women?
DBJ: The more the merrier.
Davood: What about denying other men?
DBJ: That is the whole point.
That ended the inquiry. My jaw dropped. I did not expect those words to exit my mouth. My desire for the DBJ was to deny other men’s desires. This might seem fucked up, but it was true. There was something hot about this. It had power. A sense of being the man. A sense of being so potent all the lips know where they want to go, ready to fight over that which brings life.
This desire just seems so silly now. The desire is still there, faintly though, without much power. That conversational experiment with Davood was the beginning of the end of it. Calling it out for what it was helped remove its power. This is ridiculous to write, but my desire to become virtuous is my new DBJ.
And yeah, I know, this is such a ridiculous entry - declaring my desire for sainthood, then writing about old desires for double blow jobs. I am debating if I should even send this. But whatever, I will send this. Those who are stumbling their way to virtue need to risk appearing ridiculous.
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