Memeing Through Europe
Events for the week of November 1-7:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Tuesday @ 3:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Power & Systems w/ Barry Oshry. November 4th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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October 31st, 2021
I am in correspondence with Richard Dawkins at the moment. You might be aware that Richard is the guy who coined the word “meme” back in 1976. I sent him my memetic tribe white paper, which he liked and even shared via Twitter. This blew me away. I am going to unleash my inner fanboy for a moment: Richard fucking Dawkins just tweeted about something I wrote.
While true that the good professor and I no longer share the same memeplex, he was a big influence on me. It was his early documentaries, The Root of All Evil? and The Enemies of Reason, which introduced me to his work. I think it was those documentaries that got people really excited about atheism as well, which set up the famous The Four Horsemen conversation between Dawkins and Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
I did consider myself an atheist while in high school, which lasted less than a year. Interestingly enough, this was actually the same time I cut myself off from the family spirit. I took philosophy in university where my atheism quickly turned into agnosticism. This lasted for a bit before I became super philosophically pretentious and started considering myself an “ignostic.” If agnosticism is the claim that we cannot know or prove if God exists, ignosticism says we cannot clearly define God, so debates about the existence of God are needless.
It was during the ignostic turn that I stopped having intellectual debates about God’s existence, which were all the craze back then thanks to the endless New Atheist debates happening. I settled on being ignostic either in my late teens or early twenties; around the time I really felt cut off from the family spirit. This is interesting, eh? When I stopped caring about God altogether was when the sense of being cut off from the family spirit was most salient for me.
I had my spiritual return to Orthodox Christianity a few years ago, connecting with local Orthodox Christians who started advising me about spiritual matters. I am now either pantheistic (or panentheistic) when it comes to thinking about God, but I do not really think that thinking about God is the right move now. I am more interested in sensing God these days. To do that you need to switch off all of these propositional machinations. Propositions are just a pastime for me now and it is pretty boring if I stay in the propositional realm for too long.
Despite my intellectual departure from Dawkins, the man who basically influenced me away from God, it was a great honor for him to recognize the white paper. It felt like that white paper has finally arrived. It was the first intellectual piece I released on the internet. It was a piece that connected me with Jordan Hall (he read the advance copy) and it plugged me into the whole “metatribe” (Game B, metamodernism, postrationality, etc.).
That piece was the thing that put me on the path of becoming an internet person, eventually leading to The Stoa and these journals. I do not know how to classify my internet presence; perhaps I can be classified as a mini-famous internet personality. Whatever the correct classification is, it is pretty awesome having all these people living in Europe reaching out to me: inviting us to stay at their place, offering to buy me an espresso (they know my weakness), or connecting me to cool people in the cities I am staying in.
The Stoa has definitely made the world feel more interconnected for me. Case in point, yesterday Camille and I were eating at this restaurant near our hotel in Lisbon and there were some people sitting near us, who turned out to be Toby Shorin and Sam Hart from Squad Wealth. Toby and Sam visited The Stoa back in February and I was talking about the good work they were doing at Squad Wealth to the BSDv0 cohort only a week ago. So deliciously random. When Toby recognized me, he said, “Peter Limberg from The Stoa!”
Having your name said in full, alongside the project you’re daemonically fused with, when privately dining with your wife, is an interesting experience. I want to stay mini-famous forever, as anything more than this would probably be obnoxious, and these connective perks I am currently receiving are good enough for me.
While I will surely connect with people on this trip, this is not really the main thing I am interested in doing here. The main thing I am interested in doing here is Camille. I had my last BSDv0 gang meeting last night, and Ryan Campbell asked us at the end of the meeting what is the most alive question for us. My question was this: how do I get into the right relationship with Camille?
We are not in a bad relationship, far from it, but I am here in Europe, with her, and I want to sink into her. I want to sink into us, by sensing into all of our difficult moments, the moments of tension and withdrawal. I want to breathe into our fears, unprocessed hurts, and whatever relational hiccups may arrive.
I do not only want to process the emotional unpleasantries though, I want to experience all the joyous moments as well. The hot moments, the beautiful moments, the goofy moments. Especially the goofy moments. For example: yesterday after ordering late-night room service while watching Halloween movies with Portuguese subtitles, I got so excited I jumped on the bed like a dolphin and shouted, “We are in a hotel!”
We laughed our asses off at my boyish burst of joy. Moments like this not only justify the price of the trip, but imbues the mystery of why we are here with a sense of joyous meaning.
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