The Question
Tomorrow’s events:
Lost Will: Reclaiming the Wild Voice of the Soul W/ Rebecca Altman. April 15th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Speak Only if It Will Improve Upon the Silence W/ Peter Limberg and A.J. Bond. April 15th @ 7:00 PM ET. Clubhouse event. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Circling: History, Ecology, and Potential W/ Taylor Barratt. April 22nd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Verbal Aikido: Mini-Practicum W/ Luke Archer. May 10th, 17th, and 24th @ 1:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Social Meditation: Mini-Practicum W/ Vince Horn and the Buddhist Geeks. May 11th, 18th, and 25th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Conflict = Energy: The Transformative Practice of Authentic Relating W/ Jason Digges. June 1st @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Existential Hope W/ Allison Duettman. April 21st @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Allison Duettman, president of Foresight Institute, visits The Stoa to give a presentation on the meme that all the cool meta kids drawn to The Stoa are doped up on: existential hope. This is about having hope despite the annoying Stoic opportunity called the meta-crisis we are live playing in.
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April 14th, 2021
What is all this in service to?
I was thinking about this question in terms of the potential “Stoa Experience” offerings that were mentioned in my previous entry, which is what I am considering will be The Stoa’s version of course offerings.
This same question also comes up for The Stoa’s wisdom gym as well. As you can see from the newly posted events, we will be experimenting in-depth with a lot of cool intersubjective practices: Circling, Authentic Relating, Social Meditation, Verbal Aikido, and Family Constellations.
Some of these may be brought into the wisdom gym, but really: what the fuck is a wisdom gym? I hope it is clear that I have been using that phrase lightly, evidenced by the cheeky and carefree vibe of this whole place. It has been annoying me though, this question of service, and this question is not going away. I was musing on the “spiritual units” that all of this could be in service to, such as individuation, communitas, and awakening. Those do not feel quite right though.
The “right relationship” phrasing might be a better framing, e.g. getting into the right relationship with the self, the other, the we, and the all. Maybe it is better to lean on some pre-existing wisdom taxonomy instead, like the Monastic Academy did with Ken Wilber’s Four Facet Model. Or maybe The Stoa is best to go old school and be of service to the cardinal virtues.
These all might be the direction The Stoa takes, but with the unknowingness that comes with a transperspectival mind, none of these feel quite right. Related to this, Andrew Taggart and I are in conversation about designing a Stoa Experience, potentially about the religion of tomorrow to use Wilber’s language or the “religion that is not a religion” to use John Vervaeke’s.
We were considering wisdom as the thing for the experience to be in service to. Wisdom is cool and all, but it is one of those words that gets thrown around often, by myself included, without proper consideration for what it really is. Musing on all of this I recall the impetus of this whole project, which I wrote about in my very first journal entry here over a year ago:
What seems like months, but in reality was only a week or so ago, I received some personal bad news, which I won’t burden you with now. This was before COVID-19 received pandemic status and before the collective panic set in. I went through a mini existential crisis because of this and felt an inability to act on anything. A thought occurred to me: I do not know how to live my life. I have always felt this in some form or other, but never verbalized it in that way.
I expressed the same thing in my Chapel Perilous conversation with Rebecca Fox, but sprinkled in some punk rock in the expression: I do not know how to fucking live my life. There is something freeing about admitting this, as I mention in that journal entry: There was always judgment associated with this lack of knowledge. An adjacent thought occurred soon after: nobody else knows how to live my life either. An existential weight was lifted for me at that moment.
Whenever I get stuck with an issue these days, I return to this insight, and this does seem like “the insight.” I am sensing that The Stoa, its wisdom gym, or any of the daemonically inspired stuff that comes from this place need not be in service to some spiritual unit, or some taxonomy—either a new spiffy one from Wilber or some antiquated one from the Stoics.
Maybe all of this could be in service towards the question that most naturally emerges from this insight, sprinkled with some punk rock of course …
How do we fucking live our lives?
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