The Delicious Life
Tomorrow’s event:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Events for the week of October 10th-17th:
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.
Wake Up! 6-Day Chant and Meditation Challenge w/ Willow Monastic Academy. October 12th-17th @ 5:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
The Stomp Reflex and Emergency Emancipation w/ Luke Kemp. October 12th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Doing Philosophy w/ Gerald Rochelle. October 13th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Playing The Flow Game: Sharing Questions, Vulnerability, and Wisdom w/ Amanda Zamparo. October 14th @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 120 mins.
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.
Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation w/ John Vervaeke, Zak Stein, and Gregg Henriques. October 15th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Harmonizing to Emerge: A Stoic at the Monastic Academy w/ Peter Limberg, Daniel Thorson, and Seishin Todorović. October 17th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
Monastic Practice as a Solution to Existential Risk w/ Yuli Jadov and Vīrabhadra. October 21st @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Power & Systems w/ Barry Oshry. November 4th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
***
October 10th, 2021
I miss how much I really liked music. The years 2004 to 2008 were the years I was most into music. I used to go to concerts all the time, where a bunch of white hipsters were standing in the same place, self-consciously bobbing their heads, some taking drugs, some making out in the corner - nothing too raunchy though.
I’d say the catch-all genre was indie rock; some subgenres: indie folk, indie pop, post-punk, emo, lo-fi, sadcore, etc. A random list of bands I use to listen to during those years: Wolf Parade, Bright Eyes, Cat Power, Wilco, Arcade Fire, Elliot Smith, Spoon, TV On The Radio, The Shins, Tapes ‘n Tapes, Sufjan Stevens, Okkervil River, and older bands and artists the cool pretentious kids liked: Radiohead, Joy Division, Nick Drake, etc.
For music connoisseurs, these bands might reveal me as lame now. I was loyally following the online music review site Pitchfork at the time, not understanding how they determined what was cool, but following their recommendations nonetheless.
I still really like music. And the music I like now still invokes the same feelings, so maybe I have forgotten how much I really like music. I want to remember this, because there was something delicious about the years 2004 to 2008, when I was 19 to 23 years old.
I felt like a loser back then; no game, no success, no idea how to live my life - this last one is still totally here. I started dating Camille when I was 23, and my life changed for the better. A good friend at the time said I became a lighter person to be around after Camille and I fell in love. Maybe what is making me fond of those four years was remembering how each song was imbued with a delicious longing to find her.
Yeah, the feeling of longing for something delicious - this is what is making me remember those years. Like, my overall life experience during those years was pretty sucky; I was depressed, suicidal at times, while having a bushel of inner work to do. That longing was so fucking good though, making everything else worth it. The longing made my hyper-awkward self, along with the psychic suffering I was going through, kind of fun.
I like what I am doing right now, looking back on a certain phase of my life, honoring it all, while finding the gold I have forgotten about. I do not have a consistent experience of that kind of longing anymore. I really miss that longing. I do not want to long for another romantic partner; I have found her. I want to long for something else.
A new kind of longing does come online at times. It was at its peak around the time I started these journals, during March to May of 2020; I was plugged into some kind of crazy spiritual energy and everything seemed so fucking delicious. I was using the word delicious all the time. I even self-bestowed the title of “DJ Delicious” when I heard the music.
I am listening to the band The Good Life right now, one of the bands I was listening to during those four years. I like the lead singer’s voice; it is sincere in a way that sounds like he is trying not to sound whiny. The band’s name is what the Stoics and the rest of the philosophical Hellenistic schools were big on, living the good life.
Platonists, Aristotelians, Cyrenaics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics alike all had their own path towards the good life. I appreciate them all, but resonate most with the Stoics, who some see as proto-Christians. The Christian in me likes to call the good life the heavenly life, a life where a potent sense of beauty is ever-present.
Sometimes you need to take a word or phrase and blow new life into it, as I do with the words daemon and thumos. Other times you got to make up a new word or phrase. The “good life” or “heavenly life” does not really do it for me. The “delicious life” on the other hand? Heaven yeah. That resonates.
The delicious life is the life where you just want to fucking lick it all up. You want to savour the taste of every moment. And you do not want to do this by yourself. You want to do this with company you really enjoy. The kind of company that collectively longs for the deliciousness to last forever.
The delicious life. Yeah. I am going to sound like an Aristotelian now, as there are probably certain ingredients needed for life to be experienced in a delicious way. This is what the Willow Monastic Academy is trying to figure out with its 3-month harmonizing ecology of practice experiment.
In a recent session at The Stoa, John Vervaeke said the problem with our space of wisdom-hungry players is the lack of a meta-ecology of practices, where we trade notes, cross-pollinate ideas, and avoid redundancy in experimentation. I do not really think this is a problem though, as I have trust that the level of experiments is becoming more sophisticated, and a lot of us are cohering in decentralized ways that pro-scientism materialists simply cannot grok.
If true, all of this is really delicious. For my part, I am going to continue to listen to the daemon, in an artless way. I really like the word artless; I came across it yesterday, and some of the definitions are…
Free from guile or craft sincerely simple
Not artificial; natural; simple; uncontrived
Lacking art or knowledge
All these definitions feel aligned with how I show up in life. I feel like I have been artlessly navigating life my entire life. I have not really mastered any specific craft, while sincerely trying to be as uncontrived as possible, failing many times along the way.
I do not know if this is the best way to do life, but something feels good about owning this artlessness. During those four years from 2004 to 2008, especially in the moments where I was artlessly longing for Camille, things were so fucking delicious.
I am going to continue to be artless here, and I am going to be unapologetic about longing for the delicious life, where we want to lick up every fucking moment together.
***
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