Thumotically Wholesome Energy
Tomorrow’s event:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
An event to get excited about:
Missing the Green Temple for the Trees? w/ Jordan Hall and Brent Cooper. May 13th @ 6:00 PM ET. Patreon event.
The dialogos that the Game B and Metamdorn worlds have been waiting for is finally here. Jordan Hall and Brent Cooper will engage in a dialogos this Thursday about a blue church, a red religion, and a green temple.
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May 8th, 2021
I have an inbox full of emails. I am one of those ‘inbox zero’ type of guys, so it annoys me when I have all these unanswered emails. I do not know how some people coexist with an inbox that has thousands of unopened emails.
Maybe I should let go of this annoyance though. Maybe I should let go of a lot of things.
Some people sent me “mixtapes” after my last entry, and one in particular I am finding really inspiring. The person who created it wrote me the following when she emailed it to me ...
Sometimes you remind me of the joys of youth, this enthusiasm and vitality appropriate to being young, this thumotically wholesome energy developing its roots and stretching out into the world!
Reading this made me all sorts of happy and sad, and I do not know why.
This emotional mix was amplified when I was on a call with two friends yesterday, and we were talking about how suffering is related to the drive to become awakened. I invited some nuance to that perspective and suggested, while that seems to be often the case, there are other motivational ingredients in the mix, as I find people who pursue awakening have a non-rational ‘calling’ towards it that others simply do not have.
I might have that calling one day, but I do not have it today. It was subtly suggested that I have not suffered enough to want this. The “comparing suffering” game is not a game I play, because Stoics like James Stockdale are never far from my mind, or a dear friend of mine who is also a Stoic, who has suffered way more than me.
I do honour my years of social isolation and depression though, along with the suicidal ideation that came with them, which I have not written much about here. I also honour my almost getting fully possessed by demons on multiple occasions, especially the time it happened publicly, and the professional and social aftermath of it, which was a pretty good opportunity to experience suffering.
This is to say that my friends gesturing that I have not suffered enough to want awakening made me feel unseen, which made me feel sad, but oddly pleased as well, because I was seen by a really beautiful person in a way that gestures towards the following impression: Oh, Peter has his shit together.
Peter has some of his shit together, but it seems that my polished impression game has the capacity to misinform. This also made me realize that I am holding a lot of space for others to be seen these days, and there is not much space for me to be seen, besides these weird journal entries.
For some reason I am pretty good at holding space, and I like being of service to others in this way, but a balance is needed here. Maybe this is why I have that communitas hunger. Maybe this is also why I have that ‘thumotically wholesome energy,’ as the person whose playlist I am listening to now suggested.
You can be in the right relationship with thumos and the wrong relationship with thumos, or euthymia or dysthymia to sound fancy about it. You can leverage thumos to be superior to others (mesothymia) like Donald Trump does or you can use it to be seen as an equal to others (isothymia) as Marcus Aurelius did.
You could also do what the transhumanists recommend, and attempt to engineer hyperthymia, like Saint Christoph has. Maybe the transhumanists are right and the world will be better if we all had hyperthymic temperaments, but I do not know if I could handle a world with multiple Christophs running around.
The throughline with all these variants of thumos is the desire to be recognized by others, or said in another way, to be seen by others. I like the thumotically wholesome energy wording, because I want to be seen in the right way, which is to be seen in a whole way.
There is this song on this playlist by Beach House called ‘Take Care’ and their chorus is really getting to me ...
I'd take care of you if you'd ask me to
I have a hard time asking for this. How can I be whole if I have a hard time asking for this? Maybe it is my fault. Maybe I have designed my life to have the capacity to see but not really be seen. Maybe this is why I have been spiritually stripteasing here in front of you.
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