Letter 23 to Alex Wagner about Superior Act
fast path to enlightenment and cooperative billionairedome
Dear Alex,
This might turn out to be the greatest sales letter ever written. Not only does it have a foolproof method to become a cooperative billionaire, this letter also contains a surefire pathway to enlightenment. You could become enlightened within the next two sentences -. The pathway towards Enlightenment is immediate, and instant, whereas the rout towards cooperative billionairedom will take a few delightful years. To awaken, keep asking yourself the question “who am I” until you realize that you are a mask of the everything. This truth can be forgotten, very easily. I forgot it for nine years. Then I remembered it again. The first time I awoke it was with the “Who am I” method. The second time, the four questions did it. These are Byron Katie’s four questions. Robert Kegan also has four questions, as so does the Passover ritual. Here was how I used the four questions.
(1) When I felt bad, I found a belief underneath the feelings. This belief was usually about being “stuck” in Bangkok, or being a failure.
(2) Ask myself, “Is this belief true?” This is a yes or no question. If the answer is “no” - then go ahead and skip this quetsion: Is it absolutely true - this belief? Are you really “stuck” in Bangkok? Are you really a failure?
(3) Next ask yourself, how does it feel to hold this belief? When I feel stuck in Bangkok, I lose energy, I feel sad, I start to yell at myself. It hurts to have the belief.
(4) Ask yourself: where would you be without the belief? Without the belief that I am stuck in Bangkok, I am free in my experience of Bangkok, free to notice, to learn, to enjoy, to sense the city. Being without this belief frees me.
(5) Turn the belief around: I am not stuck in Bangkok. I am free in Bangkok.
This turned around belief is not anymore “true” than the first belief. But it feels better to hold. I kept meeting all my bad feelings with curiosity, and the curiosity lead me to the beliefs, and then, I took the beliefs to the four questions. Then the beliefs passed over the horizon, and the sun continued to shine. Satcitananda: existence, consciousness, and bliss: the ultimate reality.
Is this all - to use the language of Steiner - a Luciferean unlocking from the shared material reality? Am I just losing myself in the all-is-one-ness? It would be fine if I were called upon to leave “Malkuth” and go, permanently, to higher realms and meditate. Contemplative life sounds difficult, but pleasurable. Yet the world calls me; I call the world. Hence, the second part of the letter wherein I explain how to become a cooperative billionaire.
Let me review Kegan’s stages of development - specifically, the three “adult” stages. Existence at stage three is socialized, relational, it’s about achieving our function. According to Kegan, 58% of the population are at this stage - I’m not sure when that number is from, or what population it measures. Stage 4: “The Self Authoring Mind” - the individual has an identity, they make choices, they have a plan, they want to be the hero in their own life. 35% of the population. Stage 5 is the “Self-Transforming Mind.” - here, the individual has many different identities, they are the hero in some stories, an ally in others, perhaps even a villain in some.
Now I am going to make a very big jump. What follows is massively speculative. My speculation has to do with the relationship of mental stages and business structures. Preindustrialized society needed, more or less, only functional mental states. Certainly many individuals achieved level three state: they became the heroes of their own lives, wrote their stories, made their world. But most people followed socialized patterns. The development of the modern corporate form — the international corporation, an organization that extends over borders, over generations. Such a form requires the increasing mass production of self-authoring labor. The trend that begins with clerks working for international merchants leads, over time, to the development of companies filled with organized self-authoring intellectual labor: “tech companies.”
At the very edge of these companies, in their leadership, in their owners, you have a conscious cultivation of stage 5 mentality: the appeal of the renaissance man archetype. But the corporate structure of capitalist tech firms blocks the emergence of a stage-5 workforce - why? Because a stage 5 workforce would be, by necessity, self-organizing. “Decentralized” is not the most opportune way to describe such a structure, because it would have many centers, in fact. Each part of the system would be a center. This, though, is starting to get somewhat obscure. The point is to set up the prospect of a ‘stage 5 workforce’
Superior Act is both created for such a workforce and a tool for such workforces. I have a palpable, almost urgent, intuition about what the actual application will do: how it will let distributed creative teams put together experimental cultural projects, and then, also, connect them to patronage. It isn’t exactly a fusion of Slack and Patreon, but that description could be useful.
But in order to fund the creation of such a tool, we must pass through the Pathway of Saturn. In the Tree of Life, this is the path that leads from Malkuth, the Kingdom, earth, the “real world” up to Yesod, the Moon. In our case, the Pathway To Saturn means a cooperative get-rich-quick scheme that generates enough return to prove the viability of the fusion of blockchain and experimental culture.
Perhaps this could be through Virality.Coin first blockchain-mediated ownership of a body of work. “Body of work” is the typical unit for most contemporary artists, they don’t just make an individual painting, but a series of the similar kind of paintings. In this case, it’s the Virality Panels. These panels are still in process.
There is something very elegantly simple about direct response marketing: you get a list, you make an offer, you test, and then you expand the list to increase results. It’s an OODA cycle. Those OODA cycles are (at least one way) towards becoming a cooperative billionaire.
Just imagine the nondual cooperative banquets!
_Comrade Pony