Events for the Week: Rebuilding Society on Meaning, System Sensing, Bespoke Applied Science (Grand Synthesis), and Turn Your Life Into Art
Hey beautiful people,
We had a great week at The Stoa, with the return of the Bookless Club, where we discussed becoming wise in public via second selfing, hypersigils, parasocial boundary work, and dark forestry. We’ll have more bookless clubs, with “post-crisis consciousness” as our next session. We landed on an excellent format that included a mix of presentation, open dialogue, and collective journalling.
We will have rotating presenters, with each presenter responsible for the following …
Choosing a concept or theme to explore, e.g., Terrible Communities, Becoming Wise in Public, Post-Crisis Consciousness, etc.
Suggest at least three bookless materials, e.g., articles, podcasts, Twitter threads, video essays, etc. Ideally, materials come from a transpersonal lens, e.g., not all from the same “reality tunnel.”
Prepare a short presentation (10-15 minutes), cohering your thoughts and sketching a theory.
Please fill out this short survey with your suggestions and feedback if you’d like to present or attend and see more of these.
A lot is happening this week at The Stoa, aka the rabbit hole of rabbit holes. Buckle up…
Rebuilding Society on Meaning w/ Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain. January 24th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain visit The Stoa for a Q&A session to launch their new movement, Rebuilding Meaning. You can watch their excellent presentations on “Exit the Void” and “Align Social Systems with Meaning” above.
System Sensing: A Practice Space to Enliven the Senses w/ Luea Ritter and Nancy Zamierowski. January 25th, February 1st, and 8th. 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 120 mins.
Luea Ritter and Nancy Zamierowski from Collective Transitions return to The Stoa for a short series on “system sensing.” This will be a practice space where we work with and enliven our sensing muscles while widening the ways we know individually and collectively. Systems sensing can be understood as including a visceral aptitude involving intuition and emotions that draws on innate human capacities for being in relation with, listening deeply to, and momentarily embodying the elements of a system.
Having a good system sensing game is a true game changer. Read more about system sensing here, and you can watch their previous session at The Stoa above.
Bespoke Applied Science: Applying the Scientist's Skillset for Wisdom w/ Sebastian Marshall. December 28th, January 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Sebastian Marshall’s Philosopher-in-Residence series concludes with a grand synthesis of how to apply science bespoke to where we are at. Last week we had a good discussion on the components of bespoke applied science (statistics, tautologies, and value trade-offs), and we discussed a potential curriculum for teaching this skill. In the next session, we will be covering the following…
Finally, we attempt to see if we can import some of the practical work and explorations we’ve done into how to evaluate very large, abstract, qualitative ideas about the nature of knowledge, truth, society, living well, and so on.
There might not be definitively good answers to some questions we inquire into, but we can certainly bring enhanced and clearer thinking, rigor, and character development into more challenging and ambiguous ideas.
… to hopefully think more clearly and lucidly and live better.
This session will not be recorded and be highly interactive; hence if you have a specific challenge in your personal or professional life and would like Sebastian’s thoughts on how a bespoke applied science mindset could help, this will be the session to attend.
Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground w/ Caveat Magister. January 26th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Caveat Magister (Benjamin Wachs) visits The Stoa to discuss his new book, Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground. From the book’s summary:
Over 30 years, San Francisco's underground art scene developed techniques to create magical, impossible, life-changing experiences. Today big corporations are trying to figure out how to spend millions of dollars to do what these artists and anti-artists did using nothing but time, space, and imagination. It was "a movement without a manifesto," with people discovering how it worked through trial and error. Very little was written down - until now. Caveat Magister, widely seen as one of the leading voices of Burning Man's philosophy, has written this book to explain what these experiences were, why they worked, and how you can create your own.
You Will Learn the following:
What "psychomagical" experiences are, and why can they have such a powerful transformative effect
Why rag-tag groups of weirdo artists have been so good at peak experience design, and why wealthy corporations filled with equally talented people have done so poorly
Where "magical art" connects with the work of Jung and Humanistic psychologists to support personal development and mental health
How to create experiences that go beyond design and seem impossible - until you experience them yourself
Newly posted events:
Meta-muggleism w/ Dave Snowden. February 3rd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Mythopoetic Cognition is the Engine of Mind: Somatic Meditation & the Imaginal w/ River Kenna. February 10th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Tribe Mapping: A Methodology for Understanding the Present and Future Worlds w/ Nadia Asparouhova. February 27th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Wisdom gym sessions:
Collective Journaling. Monday to Friday. @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Tuesday @ 2:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Other Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
The Stoa After Socrates. Every Sunday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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I have opened more slots in my philosophy practice for new inquiry partners. I have opted to start people in the gift economy to see if we are mutually vibing. If we sense we could be ongoing inquiry partners, we can decide whether to have an ongoing relationship in the gift economy or market economy. To see if I have any openings, reply to this letter or email me at thestoa at protonmail dot com.
If you would like to get a visceral sense of the vibe of my practice, along with the movements that commonly occur, listen to this playlist.