Wise Agency: The Philosopher's Stone
And how to avert the coming Wisdom Wars.
“Do away with Sages,
Discard Wisdom.
The folk will Benefit
A hundredfold.”
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Chi
This, my friends, is my last entry where I will be writing about wisdom. I promise you this. New vibes are here. Namesake vibes. Besides, with wisdom, when directly looked at, you see nothing.
I am moving away from it, because I like to be ahead of the curve, and it is said we are moving from “knowledge work” to “wisdom work” or a “wisdom economy,” which means a “charlatan economy” is close behind.
More randos are going to come out of the woodwork, selling all sorts of wisdom-woo to capitalize on your pain with nebulous promises to enlighten your life. The great enshittification of wisdom is upon us. A cycle that has been repeated since time immemorial, really.
Wisdom has to go. But before it does, let’s leave this wisdom-thirsty phase of this Substack behind with a bold claim:
I found the philosopher’s stone.
The alchemical goal that turns base metals into gold.
Some thought it imbued immortality.
Closer to the concerns of this Substack to date, it represents inner transformation, allowing one to attain a kind of perfect sagacity.
It was the most pursued goal in alchemy, but alas, no philosophers stone was ever found.
Over the ages, pursuing it was deemed to be a fool's errand—an impossible, quixotic quest leading nowhere.
I have a radical proposal. A reframing of this fool’s errand to suit modern man’s longing:
The philosopher’s stone = wise agency.
Wise agency, as we discussed before, differs from mere “high agency”—the capacity to accomplish things within complex constraints. High agency is all the rage today. However, wise agency doesn’t just accomplish things; it accomplishes the right things. It’s the marriage of worldly competence and a deep sense of morality.
It’s for people who want to be effective in the world and do good in it—the meta-skill that finally concludes the dialectic of being an evil winner or a good loser.
I’ll be teaching a workshop in Toronto soon. A limited number of people will be allowed in, and applications will be required. Everyone is a fool in my view, but this class needs the right fools only, the ones who are called toward the philosopher’s stone.
Of course, I’m only fooling. Who would actually claim they had found the philosopher’s stone? All this is playful hyperbole to promote a fun workshop and to welcome the gracious support of my subscribers, which allows me to do more of what I love: writing here.
That’s all this is. No foolish business or holy tricks. I promise you this. It’s not like I’d be so daring as to reveal the secrets of navigating reality with perfect sagacity.
Or maybe I could? 🤔
It’s good to be ambitious, but this ambitious?
In any case, wise agency—in the way I understand it—does have historical precedents. In fact, it draws from the three wisdom traditions that most shaped me:
Taoism: Wu-Wei or Effortless Effort
Stoicism: Kata Physin or Living According to Nature
Orthodox Christianity: Synergeia or Cooperation with God
We’ll take a tour through each, then compare them against wise agency, foreshadowing the upcoming “Wisdom Wars,” and how the philosopher’s stone averts it.
Buckle up.
Wu-Wei
I do not write much about my Taoist influences, but the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu was the first philosophy book I read when I was 16.
When I read it, my mind was blown.
“What is this?!” I thought.
These sharp, short, mysterious passages, such as:
Keep your mouth closed
Guard your sense.
Temper your sharpness.
Simplify your problems.
Mask your brightness.
Be at one with the dust of the earth.
This is primal union.
Many of the passages did not make sense to me. I had a thought after reading: what if this guy is just messing with us? What if he was this crazy Chinese guy hanging out on a mountain somewhere, making up passages just to sound deep and fool people?
The book felt even deeper after that thought.
The Tao. The Way. The subtle, invisible vector that is the source of all things. Uncontrollable, ineffable, and nameless (but yeah, he gave it a name). Yet, if you are receptive and yield appropriately, you can live in harmony with it.
Such harmony is called “wu wei,” or effortless effort. It is doing things, even accomplishing things within complex constraints, but without force and only with flow. You choose to let go into its current. It is easeful, yet optimally effective.
In Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science and the Power of Spontaneity, sinologist Edward Slingerland describes it well:
Wu-Wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bring the entire world into harmonious order.
Goals.
A seeming paradox that is hard to resolve with the mind.
How does one effort, effortlessly?
There are practices for this. Zuòwàng, for example, is the Taoist meditation of deep stillness. One sits, relaxes the body, which in turn relaxes the mind, and then forgets. Everything. Worries, responsibilities, thoughts, and self. In this great forgetting, the Tao arises naturally, and one can align with it.
It is what nature calls us to do.
Kata Physin
The Stoics.
I get accused of being a Stoic often, which is not quite true. But beyond the persona aesthetics, I do think Stoic philosophy has something important to say and is in deep resonance with Taoism.
The goal of Stoicism is κατὰ φύσιν, or kata physin, Greek for “living in accordance with nature.”
To attain kata physin requires one to align with the Logos, the primordial ordering principle of the cosmos. First mentioned by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus and eventually taken up by the Stoics, the Logos is a living, ethereal fire of divine reason, the soul of the cosmos itself.
In my view, the Tao and the Stoic Logos describe the same invisible vector, but they are expressed through different worldviews shaped by their historical and geographical contexts. The Taoists’ approach to the Tao/Logos was more intuitive, attuning through meditative practices like Zuòwàng or movement practices like Tai Chi.
The Stoics, on the other hand, emphasized reason, aligning their logic with the Logos. This is precisely what my philosophical practice, and “mystical philosophy” more broadly, seeks to serve: the attainment of unimaginable clarity through poetically attuning thought to the Logos itself.
One can, of course, be logical without doing this, as modern “philosophers” show when they engage in abstract logic untethered from the Logos. This, however, only creates a kind of dead logic, separate from the whole, resulting in παρὰ φύσιν, or para physin, which means “against nature.”
The Stoics had other practices, such as prosochē, which is an attentiveness that comes with a deep stillness. Unfortunately, no detailed manuals survived, only fragmentary guidance, so we do not know how the Stoics actually practiced such stillness. I have the strong sense it was similar to the Taoist practice of great forgetting, so one can remember what has always already been here.
One of my projects with The Stoa was to remember these practices, though it ultimately led me to discover something else.
Synergeia
I suggest you stop reading and go purchase this book:
A true game-changer, Christ the Eternal Tao, by Hieromonk Damascene, makes the compelling case that the Tao and the Stoic Logos were glimpses of the pre-Incarnate Logos, before God entered history.
Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the light that shines the way, is the Incarnate Logos. Taoism and Stoicism, in this light, were not rivals to Christianity but ancient intuitions of truth, discerned by truth-seekers like Lao Tzu and Zeno, who sensed the invisible vector before it was made visible in Christ.
When one attunes with the Divine Logos, theosis awaits (divine unification), and one has synergeia: cooperation with God. This is the state of human choice, working with divine grace toward theosis. Sidestepping both predestined determinism and radical self-sufficiency, human freedom remains intact while aligning with God’s will.
“Universal freedom is a lie
Because there is only One Course in the universe, not many.
Yet universal freedom is true
Because, in following the One Universal Course
One encompasses the cosmos.
Having the freedom of choice,
One chooses freedom from choice.”
- Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao,
Orthodoxy (right belief) is not only needed but Orthopraxy (right practice) is as well. One key mystical practice is hesychasm. Practiced by the Desert Fathers and continued today on Mount Athos, it is the cultivation of bodily silence and the ceaseless invocation of the God-Man through the Jesus Prayer.
Hesychasm, like Zuòwàng, begins with quieting the mind and thus the body. Yet the ends were different. In hesychasm, stillness leads to the purification of the heart, where the mind descends and speaks from only one place…
Love.
Because “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
And loving Love allows one to find the way and enter into union with it.
A helpful distinction in Orthodox theology comes from St. Maximus the Confessor, who distinguished between Logos and logoi. The former, once glimpsed in Taoism and Stoicism and now revealed in the God-Man, is the divine reason of the cosmos. Yet the Logos contains the logoi, the various “reasons” for created things, or in human terms, one’s vocational direction.
In essence, your way.
By following your way, your logos, you find the Way itself: the Logos fulfilled in Christ, the true Tao.
Amen. ❤️
Wise Agency
In Orthodox Christianity, the exemplar is the saint, the one who attains theosis through synergeia. In both Taoism and Stoicism, the precursor to the saint was the sage. The Taoists advocated attunement to the Tao/Logos through intuitive approaches, which resulted in wu-wei, while the Stoics emphasized reason, which resulted in kata physin.
In the first entry of this series, I offered a 2x2, later updated by Scott Britton, as an alternative framing for modern minds: the agentic sage who leads with wise agency, contrasted with the agentic fool who mislead with mere high agency.
Wise agency is not a new way of being but a very old one. Today it is expressed, imperfectly, through a phrase that speaks to modern minds: those who already have the capacity for high agency but are wary of the motivational schema underlying it.
These minds, at their core, are firmly secular, either atheistic or agnostic. Yet they have been cracked open metaphysically through intense experiences such as psychedelics, meditative practices, or spiritual emergencies born of deep personal suffering. As a result, they tend to be intellectually flexible (sometimes called “meta” or “Kegan 5”) and gradually become lovers of wisdom.
Wisdom, as I defined before, is “existential wayfinding”: finding the way, hence your way. It is a deep attunement to the invisible vector that lights the path. My definition has shifted slightly. I no longer view wisdom as merely finding the way, which risks creating a permanent seeker, but as attuning to it so acutely that one is not merely finding it, nor only following it, but ultimately indwelling in it.
When it comes to this invisible vector that serves as the way, the Taoists, Stoics, and Orthodox each have their own name for it. But what do the moderns have?
Many today have what’s known as “Church hurt,” a trauma that originates from negative experiences within the Church. As a result, they are cut off from the best the tradition has to offer due to their understandable wounds. Given this, they will not resonate with it and, depending on their degree of hurt, may even be triggered by it.
As a result, they look elsewhere for the way. The closest secular-friendly metaphor I have seen is the “holotropic attractor,” coined by systems theorist Ervin Laszlo and a foundational concept behind Tom Morgan’s The Leading Edge.
The holotropic attractor, Laszlo argues, is the organizing force that moves life toward increased complexity and integration. It suggests that evolution is not random but has a pull toward greater wholeness. Wisdom, then, is attuning to the holotropic attractor. Tom’s attunement approach is being deeply curious. Another way to say this is sensing into what “resonates,” which allows for “unfoldment,” the effortless effort of today’s modern wisdom lover.
The most popular expression I have seen at The Stoa and adjacent wisdom spaces is “follow your aliveness,” which invokes the conversational greeting: “What’s alive?” This phrase harkens back to Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss,” which he later rephrased as “follow your blisters.”
Regardless of how hard one follows their bliss, they will inevitably come across blisters. The Christians call this “soul-making”: you become more whole through the character-building suffering that life brings.
There are many collective blisters ahead and soul-making opportunities before us.
The Wisdom Wars
I find that most people who want to do good, are truth-oriented, and have reached a certain degree of “meta” capacity tend to gravitate toward the phrase “meta-crisis” (sometimes called poly-crisis, omni-crisis, permacrisis, etc.).
Former monastic Daniel Thorson defines it as “the multiple overlapping and interconnected global crises that our nascent planetary culture faces.” The concerns of the meta-crisis focus on potential economic and ecological collapse, the threat of World War III and nuclear holocaust, and misaligned artificial superintelligence (ASI).
For more, you can look at this infographic, read this 101 summary, or watch this thorough presentation at The Stoa from Josh Williams:
While the meta-crisis framing as a diagnosis brings a certain sense of agency, even if only at the conceptual level, it can also be quite defeating without any robust response. The focus is entirely on the bad, with little attention to the good. And the complexity is overwhelming.
How do we actually solve the meta-crisis?
Note: The following will be a bit of insider baseball about what is happening within a niche scene of wisdom-seekers, but it will also foreshadow what will happen in the wider culture.
The consensus emerging among those literate in the meta-crisis is something like this: inner transformation leads to outer transformation, and vice versa.
Another seemingly effortless-effort paradox.
The resolution of this paradox is settling on one word: wisdom.
Great. But how does one actually become wise?
Eventually, this answer leads somewhere spiritual and sacred, or, for modern minds, at least something that feels spiritual and sacred. Also, pursuing wisdom within community is seen as necessary.
Two groups within this wider wisdom conversation have emerged:
One group says we need to attune to the Tao/Logos, which was fully revealed and incarnated over 2,000 years ago through Christ, allowing us to attain synergeia. Many in this group were once secular yet spiritually seeking, and eventually were called to Christ. Let’s call this group the Meta-Christians: Christians who can go “meta” and engage in friendly dialogue with people from other worldviews.
Central to this group is my good friend, the sensemaking general (now spiritual warfare general?), Jordan Hall (deepcode). Jordan helped develop the complexity-rich “Game B” framework that aims to explain the underlying factors of the meta-crisis, which influenced many who were drawn to this conversation. He is in active dialogue with other Meta-Christians, such as Jonathan Pageau and Paul Vanderklay.
Another group suggests we attune to the holotropic attractors and enter into unfoldment. They are quite secular and pluralistic, liberal in the truest sense, not attached to any single term and open to various framings. Let’s call this group the Meta-Moderns: modern minds who can go “meta” and see truths from multiple perspectives, while still grounded in the rational and scientific foundations of modernity.
Central to this group is John Vervaeke, who, instead of returning to Christianity, once advocated (though he has since reneged) for a “religion that is not a religion,” crafted through an “ecology of practices” of transformational “psychotechnologies” that could result in the inner transformations needed to resolve the “meaning crisis”—the spiritual heart of the meta-crisis. Daniel Thorson and Tom Morgan are part of this group, as are many others in the “Liminal Web,” or what is now being called the “World Wise Web.”
While these two groups are friendly enough with each other, there are tensions, and if fully surfaced their underlying truth claims would prove incompatible. If politeness were dropped, this is what would be said…
The Meta-Moderns to the Meta-Christians: You are engaging in a reactionary form of spiritual bypassing—avoiding the feminine and your shadow, aka your “demons,” which you project onto those who disagree with you. This ultimately relates to loneliness: you are joining a traditional religion to soothe your community-hunger, feeling special by appearing spiritually “based.” At worst, you are promoting regressive forces in culture.
The Meta-Christians to the Meta-Moderns: You are engaging in a pluralistic form of woo-bypassing—avoiding the masculine and instead chasing spiritual highs, i.e. prelest (spiritual delusion), while believing you are more “spiritual” than those who disagree with you. This ultimately relates to loneliness: you are creating a “religion that is not a religion” to soothe your community-hunger, feeling special by appearing spiritually “woke.” At worst, you are promoting another wave of cults.
Now that this is out of the way, I have a suggestion to avert the Wisdom Wars before they begin.
The Philosopher Stone
I am a Christian, called to Orthodoxy.
I am also knee-deep in these wisdom scenes, and I helped shape them through six years of hosting The Stoa. I have climbed Mount Meta, reached its peak, and let me tell you, once there, there is only more meta upon meta upon meta upon…
It can become masturbatory, but it does build a beautiful capacity: the ability to suspend judgment while being with another’s worldview. If modern wisdom researchers are correct, this “perspectival meta-cognition” is what is needed for wisdom today.
In truth, I love both groups, and I do not want to see them at war. My advice to each is simple:
To the Meta-Christians: Become Christ-like, and love, because love will help heal the wounds of those who have been Church hurt. Be humble. God works in mysterious ways. Love is the best apologetics.
To the Meta-Moderns: See your philosophy through. If what you say is true, that everyone has a “piece,” like a blind man touching a part of the elephant, then what wisdom do the Meta-Christians contain? It might not be obvious, but I sense it relates to what lies behind your triggers.
So, Synergeia or Wise Agency?
I am not a syncretist. Nor even an ecumenist. I do not see these terms as synonymous.
I said the philosopher’s stone is wise agency. I take that back. I think the philosopher’s stone exists someplace else, and perhaps is revealed when our agency is transfigured by a greater love.
But what do I know?
I am no sage.
And I will be discarding talks of wisdom henceforth.
