Hello!
Tomorrow the party begins.
What party?!
IT IS (MAYBE) NOT THE END OF THE WORLD ELECTION PARTY!!!
Here is the full line-up for tomorrow …
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg@ 7:00-9:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
The Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie @ 9:00-10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Election Meditation w/ Jasna Seishin Todorović @ 10:30-11:30 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck@ 12:00-1:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Chapel Perilous w/ Rebecca Fox@ 1:30-2:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp w/ A.J. Bond @ 3:00-4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Election Redesign w/ Freyja and Joe Edelman @ 4:00-5:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly @ 6:00-7:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Existential Dance Party w/ Collin Morris @ 8:00-9:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Painting With Words w/ Tim Adalin @ 10:00-11:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Rap Unbattles w/ Tyson Wagner @ 11:00-12:30 AM. RSVP here.
Raw Sexuality w/ Maybe Gray @ 12:30-1:30 AM ET. RSVP here.
***
November 2, 2020
I like to journal in the morning near the backdoor, with the door slightly open, because I get to feel the Canadian cold brush against my body, while I take pensive sips on my delicious espresso. Socrates comes and goes, and visits me every now and again. It just snowed lightly here. He is experiencing the snow on his little paws for the first time. He is over a year old now, and he still does not like being petted, but he likes sitting in front of me while looking at me with that freaking cute face of his.
We relaunched the Metagame Mastermind yesterday, and it was fun. I was somewhat nervous, as I do not like being the center of intellectual attention. I am cool sharing my thoughts in writing form, but I dislike doing it live in person. I have been invited to do a bunch of podcasts recently, and I have been turning them down for this reason. I have an idea as to why this is the case, but I prefer to unpack this in another journal.
I brushed off my presentation game last night and unpacked what the metagame is, as well as what a mastermind is, and what can happen when you put those two concepts together. I shared some new concepts, such as a “glocal spectrum” and the “daemonic algorithm.” You do not need to understand these, or even agree with the framing, in order to start playing the metagame mastermind well.
I do sense the glocal spectrum thing is useful though. Glocal is a portmanteau of the words local and global, and it acts as a way to compress the “think globally, act locally” phrase. I like this idea of being glocal, because when you are being glocal, your local actions are not detached from global considerations.
On one end of this glocal spectrum there is Jordan Peterson’s “clean your room” phrase, and on the other end of the spectrum there is the meta-crisis. The idea here is that getting your shit together is in service of addressing our most pressing issues, and all that room cleaning is not alienated from making the world a better place.
The first game we are playing at this week's Metagame Mastermind was negating one thing in service to “limbically unhijacking” ourselves, which was the title of last night's session. This is basically The Stoa’s version of Lent.
This “game” is starting off as a one-week sprint, where we put our names on a shared accountability spreadsheet. We then added what we are negating, and any parameters or exceptions that come along with that negation. We also put our “credence level” down, which is our belief expressed as a percentage. After this, we added an “if-then statement,” basically: if you are tempted to do X, then you will do Y instead.
I like the idea of starting from this simple foundation, while iterating slowly, and committing to one week at a time. Each week we can add another thing we want to negate, or maybe something we want to add. We can eventually integrate Joe Edelman’s excellent understanding of values, as the connective tissue of both negative and additive games.
Also, we can leverage the wisdom of Richard Bartlett’s microsolidarity approach, and start wisely forming dyads, crews, and congregations around the Metagame Mastermind experiment, maybe using Theodore Taptiklis’s “entangled bodies” method to determine how these groups can be formed.
The applied rationality movement, along with solutions-brief coaching, have excellent techniques that can be repurposed away from goal setting and goal pursuing, towards game design and gameplay.
I sense we can take the “hamming question” from the Center for Applied Rationality, and mix it with the “miracle question” from solutions-brief coaching, and throw in some of Daniel Schmachtenberger’s “dharma inquiry” questions, then anchor them in a “modality love-child” of Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing and Forrest Landry’s Ephemeral Group Process. Now that is hot, and I sense that could help people source the collective intelligence to “game unfold” in the wisest way.
I was getting pretty annoyed with the questions at the Daniel Schmachtenberger’s “Digital Porch” sessions to be honest. Why? Because we can answer this shit ourselves fam. If we keep playing the metagame mastermind together at The Stoa, we will progress through the glocal spectrum pretty quickly. We’ll clean our room, figure out our individual dharma, and then start gaining enough wise power to address our wicked problems.
In regard to last night’s session, Isaias tweeted this out in anticipation: Something tells me this will be one of the most important sessions to be hosted at The Stoa. This is the spiritual war of our times.
I think why he sensed this is because this modality is about actuating all of the deep insights we are getting at The Stoa. It is about putting some skin and soul in the game, and us moving away from intellectually masturbating to the impressive verbiage of the galaxy brains that our “communal podcast” format encourages.
One thing that impressed me last night was how everyone is so fucking smart and keen here. This got me thinking: as a steward, I am simply a gentle initiator, and it is my responsibility to see the collective intelligence blossom. I am not a storyteller, like my boys David Fuller and Alexander Beiner at Rebel Wisdom are, neither am I some galaxy brain intimidating people with my epistemic authority.
I am also not some guru, who spiritually gaslights people away from listening to their own intuition. Camille and I are watching the HBO documentary on NXIVM called “The Vow,” and it seems like cults or cult-like religions try to discourage people from accessing the wisdom their own intuition provides them. It seems like they try to make one deaf to the daemon’s whispers.
I’d rather emancipate the daemon, and for that to happen, we all need to start playing games that will give us minimum viable sovereignty, and we need to become rational enough to know when to put rationality in its place. This is when things start to get delicious.
Dang. I got a rush of throbbing thumos writing that, and now I feel like putting all the demonic sociopaths hurrying us towards the meta-crisis on notice: we are coming to give our gifts.
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patreon.com/the_stoa
Peter, I love what you're doing here. You're tackling something that I've tried to get Daniel Gortz to do with his Metamodern forum: to draw some threads together to find a relational pattern. We so easily use different words and structures for the same things...not that we need a universal language...but we do need to enfold our efforts rather than build silos of preciousness like the universities do. And also to say, I'm learning lots from our emerging friendship. Best, Theodore