No Art
Hey beautiful people,
Collective Presencing is one of the more beautiful intersubjective meditation practices I have come across. The Stoa is lucky to have its founder, Ria Baeck, and various adept practitioners, holding space for this practice in our wisdom gym.
Collective Presencing usually opens with a “living question.” Here are the living questions we are cohering around now…
For Tuesday’s session: How do we live the deeper embodiment in relating to each other’s uniqueness and diversity, from the heart, towards renewal of co-created aliveness?
For Friday’s sessions: If we collectively attune our attention to what we and the planet—and what we as the planet—need together, what radical new worlds do we co-create?
If you have not been to a Collective Presencing session, I highly recommend you check it out. You can watch the very first session at The Stoa here.
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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January 20th, 2022
Game B premiered at The Stoa.
To be more precise: The Stoa premiered a short animated film called An Initiation to Game B, produced by Jim Rutt and others, followed by a dialogos.
The film is getting good feedback. Some have been saying it is cringe though. It is probably going to get more accusations of being cringe, especially if the snarky left and the trollish right - the “cool” sides of the culture war - start seeing the film.
If a cringe response got invoked for you, then you might be cool, or at least concerned about not being cool. Your coolness is something to be honored. It might also be useful to feel into the cringe you are experiencing. I know cringe feels uncomfortable in the body, but if you can stay with it for a while, you can discover what is underneath.
For me, with the film and the whole Game B scene in general, I sense a good-heartedness and a desire for wholesomeness. I do understand cringe reactions though - I thought I was cool once and still often forget I am not. Sarah Perry has probably the best take on cringe: The failure of an attempted sacred experience often results in the subjective experience of cringe.
From Sarah:
At its most general, cringe is the experience of witnessing failed emotional manipulation: a theater production’s failure to induce suspension of disbelief, a joke followed by silence, a grandiose boast that fails to impress. In the specific sense here, it is the attempt and failure to induce a sacred experience. But the sacred experience, unlike, say, mirth or admiration, is a rare emotion. Many people never experience it, and most who do experience it only rarely. Those who would learn to induce sacred experience must accept that cringe and embarrassment are part of the learning process.
You need to be brave if the sacred is your aim, as Sarah writes: Those who experiment are brave, for the road to sacred experience is paved with cringe. If true, we need to get our cringe reps in, practicing towards the sacred with what Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset” rather than a “fixed mindset.”
Being a Stoic allows one to have a good relationship with cringe, along with weaponized copes like snark and trolling. Stoicism, if practiced with a “growth bodymindset” allows one to transmute any unpleasant thing that comes their way. So perhaps a Stoic is needed for the sacred to emerge. At the Game B dialogos, Stoicism came up in relation to art, and Jordan Hall said the following:
The difference between dialectic and dialogos is the degree to which there is a third at the center of the whole. The thing everyone is listening to and trying to find a way to speak for. One of the things that the Stoic does is create a protective boundary for that space. It actually creates a spaciousness or a coolness or a quietness that allows the whole to settle, and then begin to be able to speak itself.
In essence, the Stoic is a spiritual bouncer, keeping the noise outside so the signal can have a chance on the inside. Real Stoics, like real bouncers, have a “resting barbarian face” for a reason; the reasons contextually differ of course, but the protective essence is the same.
My potential gripe with the Game B film is the same with any attempt at art that has an explicit aim to proselytize a philosophy. When you attempt to instrumentalize art in order to shine light on a philosophy, it is experienced as infotainment or propaganda. I am not directly accusing the film of this, but I do see this risk with the Game B scene, as well as the adjacent Integral and Metamodern scenes.
As people who read my journals know, I view Stoics as Pierre Hadot does: “artists of life.” The real Stoics tap directly into the primordial creative drive, aka the daemon, attempting to get into a good relationship with it, aka eudaimonia. Attempting to be an artist of life, you begin to see your life as art, along with everything in your life. You are also going to create a shitload of cringe, as evidenced by my past journals.
I ended the dialogos by inquiring about being an artist of life, asking how each member in the dialogos is making their life more artful. Tyson Yunkaporta artfully waited to respond last …
There is no word for art or music in my language. It is interesting, the kind of art and music you do when you do not have words for those things. It is a very unselfconscious thing, when it is not a thing but a process.
Yes: once everything in our life becomes art we no longer need the word art. What a beautiful way for the session to end. And for us to begin.
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