Stumbling Towards the Sacred
Tomorrow’s event:
Bioenergetic Workout w/ Devaraj Sandberg. Every Second Saturday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
The Glass Bead Game w/ The Metabeaders. Every Saturday @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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February 12th, 2021
I was driving home after an unnecessary jaunt to the Whole Foods Market last night. I hardly buy anything unnecessary these days, but I am totally hooked on these Buda Juice shots. It was -10°C or something Canadian like that. I was listening to The Rural Alberta Advantage again, the song To Be Scared came on, and for a moment everything felt like it was in the right place.
It was a simple moment, but sometimes a simple moment can be a holy moment. That is how our friend Caveh Zahedi refers to them, and that phrase fits, but I prefer the following phrase instead: a sacred moment. I do like Durkheim’s sacred–profane dichotomy, and how the profane is about the individual, and the sacred is about the whole, or holiness.
I have been stumbling on these sacred moments more and more these days, and I sense it has to do with where the daemon has been leading me. I am reminded of my conversation with Soryu Forall back in April, when I reached out to him for advice on some of the spiritual craziness I was going through. He listened with a patient heart for about an hour, and he left me with the following advice …
Embody, don't explain.
This is of course inspired from my favorite saying from our homeboy Epictetus: Don't explain your philosophy, embody it. I sense he knew that my spiritual journey is not meant to be in a monastery, due to me having strong Stoic proclivities, hence he used the wisdom from my own philosophical lineage to advise me. It was exactly what I needed to hear, and it is exactly what I have been doing since we spoke.
Writing these journals feel really embodied for me, along with the entire stewarding process. It is me listening to what is calling me forth, while being as truthful as I can be, and being as virtuous as I can be. I lose my balance often, and stumble, but I do find my way back onto the narrow way. All of this embodied stumbling is my teacher, and it is helping me feel into the subtle realms with more nuance, and it is affording me to become more sophisticated with “speaking a language” that people have forgotten how to speak.
The Stoa project has also helped me stumble in a way that affords a unification of all of my interests, that is to say all of the things that the daemon encouraged me to explore for exploration's sake. There was a point when these interests were not talking to each other, and things felt fragmented in my life. Now all of me is in the game, and I am feeling more whole. Perhaps this is why I am experiencing more sacred moments.
For whatever reason, one of my interests is the culture war. I went on a 4-part “culture war battlefront” exploration here earlier in the week, and those entries felt quite different from my usual ones. There was less of me there, and the tone was more objective. I quite enjoyed them though, and they did feel authentic, and I did want to keep writing about the war. Jordan Hall read them and gave me a shout out: As usual, Peter tracks the culture war (and culture dance) at the top of the game.
Even though all of my non-journal writings have been exclusively about the culture war, I never really saw myself as an epistemic authority (or “sensemaker”) in that area. Maybe I should lean into this role more? I honestly do not see many people reading the culture war well. The people I personally go to in order to sensemake the culture war are very few: Jordan, BJ Campbell, and Venkatesh Rao.
I find the majority of people filter the culture war through the lens of the memetic tribe they belong to, or are myopically focused on one battlefront, and reduce the whole war to that front. Moreover most people I see writing about the culture war are writing in a way that attempts to present the “truth” about it.
That is not how I like to write. I like to write at the border of what is and what will be.
Maybe I am good at culture war sensemaking because my Stoicism affords me not to get triggered by things; I am pretty sure I have no philosophical allergies at this point. Philosophy and cultural anthropology were the two main things I studied at University, and perhaps that combination informed how I see things. And surely both my professional and cowboy pursuits towards developing interpersonal and intersubjective excellence gave me an edge in sensing into the culture war, not just analyzing it through a propositional lens.
If I am “at the top of the game” in sensemaking the culture war, it is not something I want to be known for. I do not want to be one of those talking heads that go on podcast circuits. That is not my thing, and I would not be listening to Soryu’s advice if I did that. Maybe another reason for my hesitancy is that The Stoa, which is probably now the epicenter of the so-called “sensemaking web,” is involved in a battlefront itself ...
Culture Warriors Versus Culture Heisters
It is not wise to even frame this as a battlefront though, because this is where the culture war gets alchemically transmuted to the culture dance. This is the liminal front of the war, where we collectively start stumbling towards the sacred. Sensing into the daemon’s game plan for The Stoa, this does seem to be where things are stumbling towards.
My whole life I have been looking for the sacred in all the wrong places, and I sense the right move is for me to keep stumbling forward—from one sacred moment to another—in a way that is embodied, not explained. I will also not be shy in saying that I would very much like to have you stumbling alongside me, in your own weirdly bespoke way.
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