Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath: Sunrise Edition w/ Steve Beattie. Every Monday @ 6:15 AM ET.RSVP here.
Metamodern Deep-Dives: Art, Spirituality, Sexuality, and Faith w/ Daniel Görtz. October 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th. 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Sex, Drugs, and Social Justice w/ ContraPoints. October 26th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Digital Porch w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger. October 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th. 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Rap Unbattles w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Monday from October 5th to October 26th @ 9:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
MetaGame: A Game B of Sorts w/ Peth. October 27th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
When asked what to put on the event description, Peth said: "just a bunch of kids trying to build an alternative socioeconomic system, nothing to see here.” Check out their website @ https://metagame.wtf
***
October 25, 2020
Aw man. We are out of coffee beans right now, hence I have no espresso this morning. What a cruel morning this is. Moreover, I had dinner with Camille last night, and we had takeout from Red Lobster, which is my favorite childhood restaurant. I ate so much I actually wanted to cry afterward. I am feeling the unpleasant aftermath now.
I indulged because that dinner served as my birthday dinner, and my birthday is tomorrow. I am turning 36. How do I feel about that number? It is cool enough I guess. It does feel like an “I am at the prime of my life” number, and it is the kind of number that says: yeah, it is time for you to do something important.
After our dinner last night, there was a moment where I was hesitant to continue these journals. Something felt weird about writing here. Maybe it was just the food coma that was making me feel weird, or maybe it was some residue of my cult musings yesterday.
I sense it has something to do with the risk of being so publicly vulnerable. It seems safe enough now, but what if this project grows? I feel fine about continuing at the moment, but I want to flag this in case the feeling returns. I do know what is not going to return though: no more food comas and not having coffee beans in the morning!
The other thing that is salient for me to write about, is some push-back I received from the recent journal entry, The Next Sage Is the Stoa. I was not a big fan of that entry, as it felt somewhat muddled, but you do have to risk muddling your thoughts in order to get them unmuddled.
The individual’s push-back was in regard to the Ken Wilber model I was playing with. To recap, Wilber had four facets of transformation, which he called: waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up. And like a conceptually inconsiderate Stoic cowboy, I went ahead and added two new categories: communing up and wising up, to refer to communitas and wisdom via phronesis.
The individual who pushed back said the original four facets were all-encompassing aspects of transformational growth, and things like communitas and wisdom are affordances that come from following these four facets, specifically the growing up facet.
I do sense Wilber has a bias against Christian and Stoic wisdom (which are my two main traditions), but I do think this individual is probably right about the model. I read a bunch of Wilber when I was young, but not much of his recent stuff, and I only took a superficial glance at his four facet model. I was using them (or repurposing them) in past entries as concepts bounded by an attractor (enlightenment, development, individuation, dharma, communitas, and wisdom), which in turn allows us greater sensitivity in how we create our ecology of practices.
I did not reflect on how the model was meant to be all inclusive, and that if you are being loyal to the model, you're not allowed to just add things. When I got that email, a brief moment of impostor syndrome came online. It only had 3% intensity, and it was nothing some Stoic aikido moves could not handle, but if I were to stretch out that brief moment of impostor syndrome, and let it speak, it would say this:
Aw shit. Now I have to go read all of Ken Wilber’s new books, and I probably should read his old books again as well. While I am doing that, I probably should read the whole canon of Western philosophy. And since Wilber is heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy, I should read that canon as well. Reading is not enough of course, so I probably should engage in all the Buddhistic practices. I cannot be a dabbler here, so I probably should gain at least competency in these practices. Can I have another 100 years added to my life please? I promise after that I will know how to live my life and I will move forward with full thumos.
I know this seems ridiculous, and I am obviously engaging in playful hyperbole (or the “impostor syndrome gremlin” was), but I do think something akin to this is happening to a lot of people. It used to happen to me.
The Pandora's box of ideating in public has been opened for me, so I am probably not stopping anytime soon. I do sense that others at The Stoa are holding themselves back from thinking in public though, because of an intellectual impostor syndrome, and that noisy gremlin that comes along with it.
So what happens next here? I see a “let us listen to galaxy brains forever” thing going on, which creates this weird dynamic I greatly dislike. Listen, the vast majority of us are not blessed with the IQs of the Ken Wilbers, Daniel Schmachtenbergers, and John Vervaekes of the world, and we are not going to be their epistemic peers, nor do we need to be. We are doing them and ourselves a disservice if we collectively stay in permanent fanboying and fangirling mode.
The phrase, “if you meet the Buddha on the side of the road, kill him” is coming to mind, and I sense we can repurpose this towards the galaxy brains: if you meet a galaxy brain by the digital campfire, play metagame, which I will elaborate on later in this entry.
This is not to say we should not recognize their brilliance, or the conceptual work they have done, nor is this to say that we get our Dunning-Kruger on and think our ideas are awesome just because we happen to come up with them. No no no. This is to say we do need to risk thinking for ourselves, and risk thinking muddled thoughts, and risk writing them out in the open, in a place where we can get corrected, and then get our Stoic on when we do get corrected.
And you know what, I say fuck that four facet model, and all of the other models out there. Let us use them, and not have them use us. I am having fun with these journals with all of the conceptual “boundary-play” I am doing here. This proclivity to play with conceptual boundaries is thanks to my exposure to how the postrationalists operate.
I sense this boundary-play is important to do in the liminal war. How far can we stretch concepts, and how well can we repurpose them, away from the intellectual architecture we originally found them in. What emotions arise in us when we do this, and what emotions do we see arise in those who are tethered to those models when they see us do this?
The opposite of boundary-play is boundary-work, which is reinforcing the integrity of a concept, like the individual who emailed me was doing. This conceptual demarcation work is good enough, and in order to become good boundary-players, we need to have the skillset to be good boundary-workers. But in the liminal war we need to know how to play with the porous boundaries of concepts, and not just defend them. One aspect of this is Nicolas Benjamin’s brilliant “concept unfolding” psychotechnology.
This boundary-play is related to being a good metagamer. To recap my thoughts on this metagame thing: the metagame is the game of discovering the right relationship with your ecology of games.
Basically, you “go meta” and zoom out from all of the games you are playing, or could play, in order to have a bird's-eye view of them, which allows greater awareness and choice in your gameplay. This is related to the Stoic practice of the “View from Above,” which John Vervaeke did a talk on, and who Donald Robertson followed-up with a practice, at the Stoicon conference I hosted last year in Toronto.
Related to the metagame, I engaged in some Venkat-esque 2x2-fu and drew a 2x2 filtering model on a sticky note, in service to gain awareness of our current ecology of games. On one axis you have games you are currently playing and games you are not currently playing (but can). On the other axis you have games you are consciously playing and games you are unconsciously playing.
What kind of games can we play though? I suggest we be playful in how we organize them. We have Jame Carse’s finite and infinite game categorization, and we have the 4Game Dynamic model from our boy Jamie Combs, which has a short game, mid game, long game, and deep game. Let us be playful here with our use of the word game, and gamify other models.
All of these models can be gamified, and be seen as games we can play ...
Wilber’s four facet model: waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
The cardinal virtues: prudence, courage, temperance, and justice
The heavenly virtues: the cardinal virtues plus faith, hope, and charity.
Plato's theory of soul: logos, thymos, and eros
Zak Stein's three modalities of psyche: transcendence, ensoulment, development.
Jordan Hall’s three aspects of his philosophical system: sovereignty, right relationship, and coherence.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness needs, esteem needs, and actualization needs.
Jack Donovan’s tactical virtues of masculinity: strength, courage, mastery, and honor.
Patsy Rosenberg’s three circles of energy: the first circle, second circle, and third circle.
Tony Robbins's 6 basic needs: certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth, and contribution.
There are many more models that we can see as games we play, even the boundary-play and boundary-work mentioned above can be seen as games. As well as The Stoa’s lightly held battle cries: stealing the culture, seducing the culture, and healing the culture.
Why view these as games? Because games are fun!
Unless you have some schema that responds well to shaming you into doing something, then you need to reframe things so that they inspire play, because we like playing games for their own sake.
I want to caution the tendency to engage in some nerdy meta-systematic work, in order to have all of these models interface with one another. Stop that. That is probably coming from fear. It is a fun game to play for the meta-systematic builders, but not all of us need or want to play that game. Relax into not having a meta-system that explains everything for you. Weird Stoics are cool with hanging out in the liminal, where all these awesome models are not unified. This is an opportunity for us to practice our Stoicism, which is a game we can also play, and one I personally really love playing.
I also want to caution us about being too concerned about understanding the intellectual architecture that comes along with all of these models, you just need to know enough of that in order to understand the model.
The galaxy brains who came up with these models are not even fully aware of all of the unseen intellectual architecture they are using, or what our live player friend Samo Burja calls “intellectual dark matter.” According to Samo: this is the “knowledge we cannot see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because our institutions would fly apart if the knowledge we see were all there was.
Repurposing models and translating them into games we can play is one thing, but I would also say it is important to create games on the spot, maybe using the knowledge from game studies, game design, game mechanics, and all of the other things that have the word “game” in it that I just found on Wikipedia.
Similar to the method of concept unfolding, maybe we can call this “game unfolding,” which is the ability to create a new game on the spot. If you are not playing your own game, you are playing somebody else’s game. This is what becoming a live player is all about, and if we are going to engage in the Herculean task of resolving the meta-crisis, awakening from the meaning crisis, and playing chess with all the demons, then I sense we need to start engaging in some holistic play.
And yeah, the play may be serious, but serious play is way more fun anyway.
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patreon.com/the_stoa
Reading this was like watching a kaleidoscope work it’s magic in slow motion. Watching a new pattern form from the beautiful muddle. Take away the boundaries and the pattern can’t be held, take away the motion and nothing new emerges. I feel very connected to the rhythm of my breath (in , hold ,out) sensing into this kaleidoscope image.
Agreed Peter. I had to do a light stoa detox because I had too many models in my head ;-)