🌴⛓ Chainletter - Issue #8
🌴⛓ Chainletter
Our new weekly newsletter covers Chainforest - a recap of our latest happenings, our members’ accomplishments, and our projects to come. We’ll also offer a collection of the best threads and articles sparking conversation within our Discord.
In the past 7 days, 18 new Rainmakers have joined the forest.
The top three channels were: 🎨│ nfts-general, 🟡│ bitcoin, and 💡│ project-ideas.
Pianos & Inner Worlds: the Josh Lavine Interview
Josh Lavine is a Holistic Personal Development Coach focused on leadership and teamwork who’s worked with Chainforest’s Conscious Leadership Development group in the past. A practitioner and figurehead of the Enneagram, he’s recently begun producing a variety of content intended to make the Enneagram more digestible and accessible. Check it out here.
D: What is the Enneagram and What is the History of It?
J: The Enneagram, as we know it today, was developed into a personality typology in the 60s by a guy named Oscar Ichazo. It is a map of the human psyche that illuminates with precision and robustness the shadows of your inner world. It’s basically a night vision goggles for your inner world, and it’s a tool for Self Realization — for becoming the best version of yourself.
The history of it is mysterious. The symbol itself is impossible to know where it came from originally, but the geometry of it suggests it came from a culture that was advanced in mathematics, like, it certainly is consistent with Pythagorus and his contemporaries. But it could have been from a much more ancient culture that was also advanced.
The symbol was discovered by a guy named Gurdjieff, who was an Armenian mystic in the late 1800s, early 1900s. As a young man, he became convinced that there was ancient knowledge that had been lost pertaining to how human beings could become more than their automatic reactivity and fully self-actualize. He and a group of people that he called the Seekers after Truth would go on these long quests all around places like the Middle East and Northern Africa, seeking ancient wisdom, and they would come back and convene and share what they learned. From this, Gurdjieff distilled their findings and created a whole framework of psychology, spirituality and cosmology called the Fourth Way. He developed a following of students in Russia, and the Enneagram symbol was a big part of his teachings, though he didn’t teach it as a personality typology. He taught it as a central sacred symbol that, according to him, anything in the universe could be understood through. He thought the Enneagram was like this divine key that unlocked fundamental insights about anything that you applied it to. It wasn’t until the 70s when a guy named Oscar Ichazo came along that it became a personality framework. Ichazo was a Bolivian born spiritual seeker, who kind of like Gurdjieff also spent a lot of his youth traveling and reading about self actualization from ancient traditions. Drawing on Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, and some ideas from the Neo Platanus, he developed the nine personality types of the Enneagram as we know it today.
D: What is your relationship to the Enneagram and what about it captured your interest so strongly/changed the way you think about yourself?
J: Yeah. I was 27 when I learned about the Enneagram. I’m 34 now. I was living in St. Louis, three years into a journey of learning how to play the piano and then playing piano professionally at a piano bar. So I was playing piano in St. Louis and a friend of mine, who was from St. Louis was like, “Hey, I just took this weekend workshop on a thing called the Enneagram. I think you’d like it.” I was like, “Sure.” So I went just on the recommendation of a friend.
The class had an unbelievably profound effect on me. I was already pretty introspective. The whole journey of me becoming a piano player itself was a whole kind of revolution, where when I was 24 I realized I’d never done anything for myself, and I wanted to find something for myself, that was just for me. And so I quit being an academic tutor and physics teacher, and then decided to learn how to play piano and become this piano bar player.
The word authenticity was a big deal to me at the time. Now, when I learned the Enneagram, three years later, I learned that I was a type three. The virtue of type three, the literal word that they use for the virtue of type three is authenticity. The whole structure of the type three was about this idea of chasing success, not knowing who you really are, and losing yourself in the pursuit of validation. Living from the outside in, and not the inside out. Learning about the Enneagram clarified, and gave language to, something that was already very clearly in my mind as the journey I was on. At the same time, it revealed things about me that I considered very private. Things I’d never really shared with anyone, that were very plainly and compassionately written about in this book, that were just like, oh, yeah, here you go. This is the thing you don’t really want to look at. But this is the truth about you.
I remember my jaw being literally on the floor as I was reading through the chapter on type three in this book, and then taking the class and learning about becoming healthier type three, and fully revealing myself to strangers in a way that I never had before. It just was a total cracking open of the parts of myself that I didn’t really know existed or maybe had buried. And there was something so real about it, and so deep, and so accurate, that I was like… even though I was skeptical about some ancient system using an occult-looking symbol, I was just like, “This is real. I have to look at this.” And I kind of haven’t looked back since.
D: What practices have been most successful for you when it comes to integrating the Enneagram into your life?
J: Well, first, in terms of growth, having a community of people also doing this kind of work was one of the most important things I ever did. It formed a container within which I felt accountable and felt continually called upon to dive deeper and deeper into myself, especially when the journey was too painful and too confusing and too scared to do it myself. It was this same community that I went back to on a regular basis in St. Louis with this one teacher. That also included a two year long program where we met every quarter to check in with each other. And we were challenged to take on practices for ourselves. And we did exercises every quarter with each other. The whole thing was very powerful for me.
In my daily life, committing to a daily personal growth or spiritual practice was very, very powerful. For example, meditation. I’ve had a more or less consistent meditation practice for years. Sometimes it flickers on and off, but for the most part, it’s been there. So much so that I notice now that if I don’t have it for a while, I’m called back to it. Before I started meditating, it was hard for me to do it. Now it’s kind of like I notice when I’m off. The internal equilibrium point has shifted.
Also, various forms of journaling have been tremendously useful. One I would highlight was a 100 day commitment to write a letter of appreciation to someone daily. To be clear, this was not like a three sentence thing. I spent sometimes hours a day writing. It was a very significant, very time consuming practice. The daily practice of consistency, like I’m writing a letter about someone that I really care about, and tears because I’m realizing how much I love this person, how beautiful they are, and doing that every day. It really awoke this part of my heart. Yeah. And that was very cool.
Another one of the most powerful things that I’ve ever come across is something called The Work of Byron Katie — capital W. She’s this lovely, lovely older woman who had this powerful awakening in her 40s. She now teaches this method of inquiry where basically you fill out a worksheet. You put all of your petty thoughts on the worksheet, and then you go through each thought that you’ve written down and question it from different angles, you ask yourself questions about it. And it’s actually very similar to CLG, thinking of the opposite of the story and reasons why the opposite is true.
D: What’s your favorite song to listen to on the Piano?
J: Um…. *sighs*… Blue Fields, which is a classical song by Nobuo Uematsu from Final Fantasy VIII. It’s my favorite piano piece.
D: What’s your favorite song to play on the Piano?
J: It changes a lot, but right this moment, it’s the song from Supertramp called Take the Long Way Home. It just grooves so hard. It’s a very heavy left hand bass song. It stays on one note of the bass for most of the song and has this thumping kind of feel that’s very fun to play. Also, it fits my voice really well. So it’s nice to sing it.
It’s actually an Enneagram Nine song — a song about this experience of fading into the background and being ignored. I realized that I was kind of feeling that way myself. And this whole recent arising into creating all this content and bringing myself into the world has been like an antidote for that. It has felt really good.
Josh will be hosting a 12 week live program for founders, investors, coaches, starting on March 7th.
And, on February 25th, he’ll be giving a talk with Human Ventures on the Enneagram in the context of startups.
From the Mouth of the Forest
Scandal Rocks TIME Wonderland:
@zachxbt doxxed Wonderland’s treasury head @0xSIFU as Michael Patryn, formerly Omar Dhanani of QuadrigaCX - zachxbt’s conversation with Daniele.
In addition to his connection with QuadrigaCX, SIFU has previously been convicted of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud and burglary.
It was discovered that Daniele Sesta knew of SIFU’s true identity a month before he was doxxed but chose to withhold this information.
A summary of the SIFU scandal was written by rekt.news - Rekt News SIFU Scandal
Despite recommendations to wind down $TIME, users voted to continue as ‘Wonderland 2.0’ as outlined in this Medium article - Wonderland 2. 0 Medium Article
V1/V2 Punks Drama:
In 2017 LarvaLabs issued cryptopunks. However, the first version contained a fatal flaw in the code and as a result v2 Punks were issued and the “v1” Punks were quickly disowned.
Emerging NFT marketplace LooksRare.org allowed these “v1” Punks to be wrapped and sold as “Classic Punks” or “Wrapped CryptoPunks v1”.
Larvalab’s actions drew many harsh criticisms on twitter:
Despite an initial price crash of almost 15 ETH on the floor price, the price quickly rose to stable floor prices of almost 50 ETH.
Chainforest: the Next Stage
Conversation took place on whether Chainforest Key Roles should be filled internally or externally.
For those interested, a list of key roles can be found here. Reach out to @amitmukherjee on Twitter for more information.
A conversation regarding the size of Chainforest took place, with Amit advocating for around 300 so that carry from the fund is significant.
A suggestion that we bring NFT founders and other crypto cavaliers into the town hall meetings to discuss their visions was proposed.
Making It Rain
Rainmaker Abraham Litwin-Logan (abeisr on discord) is the co-founder of Coterie Capital, a DAO launching and management platform, is launching next week. Focused on providing a seamless user experience, they will be offering two products at launch .
An automated purpose-built DAO set-up tool, giving users optionality where they need it most.
A bespoke DAO service where they can work on a one on one basis with clients looking to set up and manage complex digital organizations.
Rainmaker Jeff Park is joining Bitwise as their first Active Portfolio Manager to help build its flagship active product, as well as the broader active management platform architecture.
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