The Next Sage Is the Stoa
Tomorrow’s events:
Embodied Book Club: Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Saturday from October 3rd to November 7th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins. Review the information sheet here.
Bespoke Psychotechnology w/ Christian Sawyer. October 24th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
The Glass Bead Game w/ Laurence Currie-Clark and The Arch. Every Saturday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 120 mins
Newly posted event:
Stoic Provocations: The Problem With Social Science w/ Jane Gatsby. November 2nd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Stoic Provocations is a new series that allows us to practice our Stoicism. A speaker visits The Stoa, shares some edgy thoughts, we possibly get triggered, then we stop the recording and get into a collective dialogue about is “alive.” Jane Gatsby launches the series with a short talk on “The Problem With Social Science.”
***
October 23, 2020
The next sage is the Stoa.
I like that.
The phrase was crafted by the fine folks that are active on The Stoa’s Discord. It is a riff on the phrase: the next Buddha is the Sangha, which I previously riffed on myself, with the phrase: the next Christ is communitas. I see these as different things.
That sangha stuff is what Ken Wilber refers to as “waking up,” and seeing reality for what it is. I got some push-back from my “Communitas > Enlightenment” entry, for not understanding Buddhism, and painting a cartoonish version of it. It is true, I do not understand Buddhism.
I guess the non-goal of the Buddhistic stuff is to see ultimate reality, and the illusory nature of the self, and yeah, throw in some koan in here about how we are already here. It is a pastime for this Stoic to tease Buddhistic types, and if they can see ultimate reality they should see that these teases are coming from a loving place.
I see this “next Christ is communitas” thing as something different, because it is about love. You can become enlightened, or whatever the Buddhistics want to call it, but that is a different thing than getting into communitas. This whole communitas thing is about falling in love with a group, without becoming a cult, and then collectively benefitting from the collective wisdom.
This “next sage is the Stoa” thing is about wisdom. I mentioned in a recent entry how the Stoics have this person called the sage they look up to. This is someone who has reached sagacity, and is perfectly wise. I think this wisdom thing is different from enlightenment or communitas, and I do not think it can be measured with a ruler like some modernists and their “Procrustean beds” would like you to think.
Referring back to Wilber’s model: waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up—I added another for the communitas thing, communing up, and I think there should be another for this wisdom thing, wising up. This is about prudence, or phronesis to sound fancy. This is the first and most important cardinal virtue, and it is the virtue that is about applying reason to everyday life.
And yeah, my dear rationalist friends, it is also about knowing the limits of reason, and when to start listening to the daemon. Once you start listening to the daemon, it is about figuring out how to get into the right relationship with the daemon, which is about getting into eudaimonia, as the ancient Greeks called it.
In that “Communitas > Enlightenment” entry, I argued that we if had to choose, we probably should put our efforts into getting into communitas first, instead of getting into enlightenment. Despite getting pushback about being uncharitable to Buddhism, nobody has disabused me of this argument yet. Given this the next sage is the Stoa thing, I sense the order of operations needs a rejigging.
First comes wisdom, then communitas, then (for lack of a better term) enlightenment.
Maybe another phrase is needed, aka “the next Freud is the clinic,” to describe the “cleaning up” category, aka that shadow-work trauma healing stuff. “Growing up” needs one as well, maybe “the next adult is the academy,” or something like that.
I am going to stop shitting myself here: I have no idea what is the correct order of operations. It feels like I am becoming a boring modernist with these order of operation musings, because it feels like I am abstractly engineering things from nowhere land. That being said, I sense there is something here with a focus on collectively discovering wisdom, and then seeing what branches from there, aka individuation, “becoming an adult,” communitas, enlightenment, etc.
This is all to say that I am ready to “interface” with the community that is forming at The Stoa more, in order for us to better source the collective wisdom.
I need to slow down now, and stop posting a ton of events. There is a similar joke I am hearing from many different people, which indirectly compliments my ability to get “big names” on The Stoa. As an example, somebody said to me earlier this week: who are you going to get on next, Trump?
Of course my ego likes hearing this, but if I indulge in liking hearing this too much, then I will become a clout chaser. I sufficiently demonstrated that I am capable of getting prominent figures on, which has given The Stoa and myself a sufficient amount of hype amongst the metatribalists.
I am going to chill with this now. We can always pull that trigger later and continue to get prominent figures on. Getting too much, too soon, will just bombard us with too much egoic noise. It is better to stay small for a little longer, so we can cohere together more, and inch our way to a collective sagacity.
After telling that design wizard Joe Edleman my crazy daemonic ideas for The Stoa, some of which I mentioned in the “Finding the Expiration Date,” he recommended that I get small project groups for each project. To recap some of the projects mentioned in that entry:
Communitas Club
Sovereignty Society
Psychotherapy Cafe
Power Posse
Buddhistic Buffet
X-Risk Gang
Reality Artistry
I see these as research projects bounded by an attractor, aka communitas, power literacy, the meta-crisis, etc. I also sense it would be good to have some goals at the end of each project. A fully developed “anti-debate” modality can be one of the goals that can be achieved after the “Communitas Club” for example.
In that entry, I also mentioned continuing with the Post-Script series with Letter. They are killing it over at Letter with the epic epistolary exchanges they are having, and they are open for us to have post-letter exchanges here at The Stoa.
Two other projects I mentioned in that entry are “Platonic Fight Club,” aka PFC (aka the UFC of the mind) which is a psychotechnology I designed a few years ago that I may reveal soon. I also wrote that this should be complemented with a course on reasoning, which I think would be good to call Wild Reasoning. The idea here is twofold: to reason in the wild (aka outside of institutions), you need to rewild your reasoning.
Other psychotechnologies that could be released, and courses that could be developed, are inspired by Peter Wang’s excellent “Mental Model” series at The Stoa. We could have sessions where we collectively reflect on certain mental models, and try to link them together. Not only to grok reality better, but to have idea sex, increase connections, and turn our minds into a Deleuzian Rhizome. “The Mental Model Funhouse” as a title feels both descriptive enough and sufficiently cringeworthy for my stewarding tastes.
And maybe a few meta-psychotechnologies can be developed, ones that can help new psychotechnologies emerge. I have always viewed The Stoa as a “psychotechnology incubator,” so it would be good to have something like this. Ken Wilber said: The best theory is one that gets you to the next. You can say the same thing about psychotechnologies: The best psychotechnology is one that gets you to the next.
Bespoke psychoteching and ecology architecting, along with Nicholas Benjamin’s concept unfolding, would all be useful skills to develop. Maybe a meta-psychotechnology talent stack could emerge, which will then afford one to become a bona fide “wisdom trainer” in our wisdom gym.
I also just launched a new series called “Stoic Provocations.” This is a series where we invite a speaker to come in, to share some edgy thoughts, which could possibly trigger us, as an opportunity to practice our Stoicism. Then we stop the recording and get into a collective dialogue for about two hours or so.
Lastly (at least for now), I want us to return to the Metagame Mastermind, and start with a special session which relates to taking back our attention from those limbic hijackers. I will probably call it something playful like the “The Order of the Limbic Unhijackers.”
The idea here is to have short accountability sprints where we practice our temperance with the various social media addictions we have, along with other supernormal stimulus that plagues us. I have some decent techniques to do this, which I sense can be scaled to a group rather nicely.
I am Stoically excited about all of this.
***
patreon.com/the_stoa