This Time It Will Be Alright
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing W/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing W/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Newly posted event:
Philosophical Life Coaching W/ Pamela J. Hobart. May 2nd @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Writing Meditation W/ Adam Robbert and Peter Limberg. May 13th @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event.
Adam Robbert from The Side View returns to The Stoa to co-host an innovative writing exercise. We will be collectively writing in silence, on individual writing projects, with fun accountability prompts and exercises. Join us and bring a writing project you have been working on (or sitting on). Lots of beautiful sensemakers will be there, writing what wants to be written.
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April 22nd, 2021
I am really enjoying the new intro that is on The Stoa’s YouTube channel. It comes in hard, and the graphics are less obvious than the previous one, and it actually makes the previous intro seem kind of dorky.
For year two of The Stoa I wanted to keep the overall minimalistic vibes, but I also wanted some subtle aesthetic changes. We have a new logo, which is an illustration of the bust of Marcus Aurelius wearing sunglasses—to indicate the old meeting the new—and with a toothpick in his mouth in homage to my toothpick fetish. There is a new quote and description on the website as well which is less obvious about what this place is, and being less obvious is truer to the spirit of what this place is.
I originally wanted a new song for the intro video, but was having trouble picking one. Camille convinced me to keep the old intro song we had since this place started: Kali Yuga Blues by Bardo Pond, which is an epic song.
She gave the example of the show Friends, and how that Rembrandts song, and specifically the chorus line, I'll be there for you, is forever memetically associated with the show. She said that Kali Yuga Blues could be that for The Stoa, especially the verse you hear in the intro …
This time it will be alright
That felt right, and when something feels right, I usually go for it. This time it will be alright, sung with some knife’s edge, led in with hardness. That also feels right. It turns me on actually. This whole place turns me on actually. An intense eros comes when I am riding with the daemon, or when the daemon is riding with me.
The more sophisticated I become with feeling into the subtle energies, the more sophisticatedly I am feeling into sexual energies, coming from me, and coming at me. I had a whiskey via Zoom with Tada Hozumi on Monday, and Tada seems pretty somantically plugged in, and was describing the strong sexual aspect emitting from The Stoa, and said it was pretty hot.
I do like being sexually attractive, I am not going to be shy about that. It feels good, it feels powerful, it feels hot. I have been stumbling with these sexual energies since this place started, but I am becoming more sophisticated with them now. I am also firmer now, with my boundaries.
This was actually a theme when I was a client of Jordan Peterson, and he said something to me that I thought was pretty brilliant, and I am paraphrasing: you want to be the man who has the capacity to attract many women, but you want to have the capacity to commit to one.
I am not the type of guy who prescribes universal rules to others, but his advice really resonates with my temperament. I do want to honour the fact that I am a sexual being, and that I like being a sexual being. I find many people sexually attractive, and I enjoy being sexually attractive myself, but at the same time I want to be in deep with my monogamous commitment.
I think it is cool to engage in subtle flirting, with both men and women, as a way to acknowledge the following: yeah, we hot, we know it. Let us not bullshit ourselves here, but let us be wise about it as well. There is a super fine line though, and I do not want to cross that line, especially in the wild way I am becoming.
It’s hard though, in many ways. The good thing about my marriage is that there is an openness for me to express all of this, and I do. I am very truthful with my wife, she has my word, and my whole being feels corrupted when she does not. I do not commit to many things, but when I do I really try to get it right.
How do you get it right though? Yeah, that question again: how do we fucking live our lives? Virtue keeps coming to mind. This virtue thing will not leave me alone. In yesterday’s letter, when I was plugging an upcoming event on Stoic virtue ethics, I wrote:
… it is time to bring virtue back, in a hard way, and nobody did virtue harder than the Stoics.
I am actually horny for virtue. It is kind of hot for me. Does the cultivation of virtue have any connection to eros? Can strong sexual energy be transmuted into virtuous living? I do think there is a connection between virtue and eros that is very worthy to explore.
Stoicism has so many negative connotations associated with it in the noosphere. It almost has a desexed vibe about it. Most who write about Stoicism do it in a dry way. There is a sterile quality about their writings. Sensing into the image of Marcus Aurelius, the following question does emerge for me: does this dude even have sex? He seems like this super masculine sexless dude on 24/7 war campaigns.
In a previous entry about fuck buddies and holy sluts, a new concept was introduced: the horny sage. That entry ended with this passage …
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, or that it is below them to co-opt some of the superficial qualities that “work” in the spectacle or sexual marketplace, aka the Game A world.
Yes. I like this, and I would like to start seeing Marcus like this. I concluded that passage with the following: If it is not below the sage, it is not below me either, and yeah, I would not trust a sage who does not get horny.
I like that Marcus is seen as doing virtue hard, but I would like to know he could fuck hard as well. That is hot. Juxtaposing virtue and eros does feel like the right move. It is like they need one another.
All these sexual energies are so powerful. They are dangerous, and that is what makes them hot. I become concerned when I see a lot of these spiritual communities, going on about sexual energies, and engaging in various practices to express them, and going on retreats to express them together. Things could get real bad real quick if these energies are not handled with great care.
If we are going to address these sexual energies—and we will have to address them if we commit to truthfulness—then we will have to address these sexual energies with wisdom. Counterbalancing them with virtue seems like the right move, and not the stale shamey kind of virtue that seems to be the popular perception that comes up when city folks hear the word.
There is so much bullshit going on in relationships, and so many lies. Perhaps they were noble lies at one point, but now they are just lies. I strongly sense that “friendships of virtue” are the way forward, within the sexes and between the sexes. What does that look like though?
I do not know, but being “virtuously hot” is the thing that comes up when I sense into that question. This time I want us to get it right, and this might be my existential hope showing, but I sense this time it will be alright.
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