Midwifing Wisdom
Tomorrow’s events:
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 Second Tuesday @ 3:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
McLuhan and the Lost Art of Sensemaking w/ Mark Stahlman. September 28th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Demystifying Wisdom w/ Igor Grossmann. September 28th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Sex, Dating, and Why Modern Relationships Are So Fucked Up (And How to Unfuck Them) + Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly. November 12th @ 8:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 120 mins.
The blackbird returns to The Stoa to discuss how a deep understanding of sex and mating can give us a personal way of relating to the broader implications of societal collapse. This will be followed by the return of the legendary Socratic Speed Dating (SSD) hosted by Raven. SSD was first featured on The Stoa back in April 2020 …
***
September 27th, 2021
I am at The Stoa now, journaling to myself. I am journaling to myself knowing you will be reading. This journaling is happening on Zoom. I looked at the Zoom screen just now and I see my miniature head amongst other miniature heads. All of this is rather strange.
We are in a strange session called Collective Journaling, a session where we journal in silence together for 90 minutes. This session serves as a journaling accountability group, one that imbues the private affair of journaling with a communal spirit. We usually journal about what is alive for us individually but today is different; today we are journaling about the same question:
How do we become wise?
I am more curious about what others' words will be rather than what my own will be. I will close off this curiosity for now and attempt to sink deeply into this question. I can answer this question in many ways. There are two threads coming to mind...
I can start by defining what wisdom is. This thread will probably continue my previous musings on wisdom here that ended with an entry called Discovering Wisdom.
I was also thinking of starting with Stoicism, the philosophical school I feel most at home with. I would write about the Stoic sage if I were to start here. The sage is the person who has embodied perfect wisdom and lives philosophy as a way of life.
I will attempt to weave both of these threads together.
I was just looking through past entries to see if I defined wisdom already. Maybe I did, but I did not find any definition. I was searching for other definitions online just now, but fuck it man, just go source a new definition directly from the daemon…
Wisdom is living artfully. Or better said: wisdom is living towards beauty.
Whoa. I did not expect that one. I like it though. It feels right. Between the transcendentals—the good, true, and beautiful—I am on team beauty. Sure, all the transcendentals are needed to create a delicious life and the good and true are indeed prerequisites for beauty to emerge, but I sense the right move these days is to put the spotlight on beauty.
The truth has been in the collective spotlight for too long. And it has been detached from the other two transcendentals. It has been pedestalized, glamorized, and given endless lip service. I hear many people talk about how they are dedicated to the truth, but when I sense into their words, I do not sense some pure quest for truth. I usually sense something else: narcissism, strategic positioning, or an existential red herring to distract from their own confusion.
Yeah, I am digging the new definition. Wisdom is living towards beauty, which is the same as living artfully. I can roll with that. Can we roll with that? How do we live towards beauty?
In a previous entry I wrote that the next sage is The Stoa, a riff on the “next Buddha is the Sangha” line, a phrase meant to mean the following: a group of practitioners will be the next Buddha. From Thich Nhat Hanh, who first used the phrase:
The Buddha, Shakyamuni, our teacher, predicted that the next Buddha would be Maitreya, the Buddha of love…. It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.
This does seem like the right move for a second Axial Age. A Stoa is aimed towards something other than a Buddhistic awakening though; it is aimed towards wisdom, which I argued before is not synonymous with awakening. Philosophical inquiry, with oneself, another, and others, strikes me as paramount for this wisdom to emerge.
Pierre Hadot called true philosophers artists of life. Each philosopher’s art is going to look different, so long as they are authentically using the materials they have been given. Philosophical inquiry is always a bespoke journey; reasoning with our challenges, circumstances, “human givens,” and most beautifully, what is daemonically alive.
A philosophical inquiry is a discovery of the way forward. It points you in a direction. The Stoics thought that Socrates was maybe a sage, but they also doubted becoming a sage was attainable. It was like this unattainable goal you get to existentially salivate over but never arrive at yourself. Maybe it was a direction that pointed to a place no individual alone could arrive at.
What if a group of individuals could arrive at it though? And what if wisdom is not something we excavate from the past, from some dusty text written by some dead wise man, but something that is continually midwifed into the world? A world that never was, but might one day still be? Perhaps when enough people become conscious agents of beauty we will see.
In the meantime, I will see The Stoa as a place where wisdom can be midwifed into the world.
***
Support The Stoa @ patreon.com/the_stoa
Receive coaching from Peter @ calendly.com/peterlimberg/coaching