Mapping Heaven
Tomorrow’s event:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
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September 21st, 2021
Here are the titles for the next three sessions at The Stoa...
Sensemaking the Parapolitical: An Introduction to Worldview Warfare
Wow. I am such a geek, as seeing this line-up excites me so much. What else do we have coming up?
Demystifying Wisdom, Uncertainment Lounge: Thriving in Uncertainty Together, The Flow Game: The Art of Crafting Powerful Questions, The Jhānas, A Guide to Green Burial, Practicing Compassionate Self-Inquiry, and tons more.
Yeah. I am geeking out about all this. But why? I am not sure, but seeing such a weird lineup of events does fill me with thumos.
I remind myself often: this place is just a place, and not something else, like the words on the main website indicate: The Stoa is not a school, think tank, clinic, or commune, and it is definitely not a fucking YouTube channel. Stewarding this place simply involves having a Zoom account, a minimalist website, and reaching out to people who the daemon suggests having on.
The daemon does not seem too interested in inviting “big names” here, moreso people who are doing great work with a great passion, mostly under the radar. The Stoa is going to change, of course, like it has been changing since day one. I do like how it is now though. Simple. Weird. Zero fucks.
This is the place that I wished always existed. What I loved most during my university days were the intellectual adventures that happened outside the pressures of the classroom. I do not see a place where adventures like this can occur anymore. The university culture has now been captured by the culture war, and most intellectual discussion groups you would discover on a place like Meetup are often narrowly focused (such as on atheism or eastern spirituality), hence biased by the framing of the group.
I always wanted a place that had an openness to as many perspectives and viewpoints as possible. I did not want just another intellectual discussion group though. I wanted a place where the importance of practice was emphasized. Practices deriving from self-help, psychotherapy, and spiritual traditions all have a place at this place called The Stoa.
Besides the recurring practice sessions we have in our wisdom gym, most of The Stoa sessions now gravitate towards the presentation or interview format followed by a Q&A. This just emerged to be the case, probably because this format is the best way for both in-person attendees and YouTube viewers to enjoy what is happening.
The Stoa used to do a lot more non-recorded experimental events when the pandemic first started and I am called to do more. Malcolm Ocean suggested to me that we actually do a “Forgiveness Party” at The Stoa, as I mentioned in my last entry. That would be cool. There is so much cool shit we could do like this. I sense there are at least two reasons why I am not doing these kinds of events right now.
The first reason: I am pretty good at bringing people together but not good at having people stay together. I do not see myself as a “community builder.” It is not that I do not want to be one, I am just not good at being one, or called to be one at the moment. This creates tensions it seems, because when I do stuff that invokes a sense of community, people get super excited, then unspoken expectations emerge. When I do not deliver on these expectations, frustrations follow.
This is weird, eh? A “steward” who always blabs about communitas and finding the others not engaging in community building work. There is probably a good explanation for this though. The obvious one has to do with my particular psychological schema, which you could get a glimpse of in past entries such as Chess Player.
I also have a great ability to live solo dolo, and I probably could be a monk. I often look at the wisdom of my Church Fathers, and a part of me wants to attempt to join them: grow back my big ass beard and engage in hesychasm all day.
The most charitable explanation is probably this: I want to get this thing called “community” right. I am called to really figure out the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intersubjective capacities needed for me and others to commune. I want to do this before attempting to do community, as I often see well-intended communities turn into enmeshed shitshows.
The other reason for me not engaging in more community building events is a focus on livelihood. At the moment, between the Patreon and my philosophical coaching practice (both situated in the spirit of the gift economy), along with my wife’s salary, we can live humbly. But this feels precarious at the moment, especially now Camille and I are back in baby-making mode. Given this, it strikes me as wise to engage in experiments in the market economy, such as Beyond Self-Discipline, which will have a strong community component, albeit a more exclusive and intense one.
I am not going to do these experiments just to make a buck though. I am only going to do them if they are aligned with the daemon, and if I believe I can offer real value with them. If they are going to be situated in the market economy, then fuck, I am going to pour all I have into them to make the experience as beautiful as possible, so I feel comfortable putting them in the digital market place.
All this being said, these seem like good reasons why The Stoa is currently doing the kind of sessions that it does. This could all change though. I do not want it to seem like I think what The Stoa is currently doing is a bad thing though. Not at all. I sense it is doing a heavenly thing actually.
I was talking to Jasun Horsley the other day. He is coming to The Stoa to do a session called Mapping Hell to Attain Heaven. He engages in a sophisticated analysis of the intersection of the occult and parapolitics (aka hidden politics), or what he calls the “superculture.” Things can get quite hellish if you fall down that rabbit hole. His basic argument is that in order for us to have a chance at heaven, we need to contend with hell, the one happening both outside and inside.
I sense we do need to bring back hell as a concept, so we can cultivate a sensitivity towards it. As God advised Saint Silvanus the Athonite, keep thy mind in Hell and despair not. Having a hell blindness can be a hell of a thing, which probably leads to hell. Having a hell sensitivity might be the thing we need to get us to heaven. As Jordan Peterson conveyed to me during my first therapeutic session with him:
We may not know what heaven looks like, but we know what hell can look like. You move away from hell, then you have a chance to get closer to heaven.
As I was discussing with Jasun, awareness of hell can propel one away from it but there is a point we need some sense of heaven as an attractor. This is what I sense is missing from the Petersonian vision. More hell than heaven. When telling Jasun about all the cool shit we have been discovering here at The Stoa, especially “we-space” stuff, I realized that instead of mapping hell, we have been mapping heaven.
This steward has a pretty good meta-perspective of what is happening in the noosphere, and with the daemon by my side, perhaps I am sensing into all the heavenly fragments out there that are not yet “talking” to one another. They are not talking to one another yet because the perspectival lens they have on are like horse blinders, allowing goodness to happen where they can see, while limiting their directionality.
The art here is not to force these fragments into conversation, but to allow those drawn to this place to witness them pass by one another. I trust this witnessing. I trust your witnessing.
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