zazen

Shabby roads and infrastructure: Their building cities just to show off and ''flex'' - not because they need to urbanize and lift 100's of millions out of poverty and rural living: China's political system: People used to also view Japanese products as mass market trash and ''unreliable''. That's how industrial economies develop - they master mass manufacturing and climb up the ladder to advanced manufacturing and quality. The value for money in China is strong too. Which is also what PPP compares better compared to just GDP - meaning, people in their local currency have decent purchasing power and therefore better living standards. For people coming in with stronger currencies its quite a place to enjoy: You can stay in 5 star hotels for £100 - £200 a night that would cost anywhere from £300 - £600 a night in the Western cities. Grand Hyatt, Sheraton etc. Even on their tropical island of Hainan with beaches. What happens when you focus on building and re-investing in the foundation of a society instead of financializing your economy for a parasitic financial elite that bid up and milk the populace through a rentier economy that jacks up the price of essentials rather than supply them at scale. Of course no place is perfect - but there are lessons to be taken.

Real “change” in the transformative sense happens to a society - rather than solely by a society. Incrementalism manages a system but transformation changes a system - and most people and systems resist any significant change until crisis point. Incrementalism (small steps) from the elites above preserves the system through policy tweaks, symbolic gestures, concession’s etc. Incrementalism from the society below prepares the ground for change but isn’t groundbreaking by itself ie galvanised energy into movements, shift in consciousness/culture etc. Both (elites and society) need crisis or enough pain to cross a threshold - where the old system’s operating logic needs to be abandoned for a new one. For society the status quo becomes intolerable to their material security and sense of dignity. For elites the status quo continuing risks revolt (heads rolling), mass non compliance or systemic failure. It’s more incentive driven then morally driven for the elites who risk loss of legitimacy and control - while society risks material well being and dignity. Transformation will come when the price of staying the same becomes higher than the price of changing. Surely AI will force its arrival.

Epstein was a node in a wider ecosystem largely revolving around financial crime : Criminal underworld - intelligence agencies - finance - and now tech. Shorter if ya’ll busy actualizing:

@Jodistrict Nice share. We’re gonna see so much cope in the next decades lol Tristan Harris who made Social Dilemma : We have to get our shit together to tackle the changes AI is going to bring. Perhaps that will bring the world together better than Covid did.

I share your optimism too. At the same time - the transition to get to the baseline where everyone is lifted up will be bumpy. Abundance still doesn’t solve for ego - and the resulting power dynamics that come with it. Even if survival pressures are solved - power dynamics and new hierarchies can be created. The infinite abundance in output also relies on the finite resources of input. Geopolitical tension and rivalry will be over that material base including choke points. At the national level states will have to have the capacity, coordination and cohesiveness to keep pace with the change. Job displacement will have to be plugged with some sort of UBI - but that requires taxing and containing the very companies that will wield immense influence and leverage. States that subordinate capital / private interests for national interests will fair better in this regard ie China, Singapore, Nordic and Gulf countries for example. US is notorious for functionally acting as a corptocracy where the state is a platform for private / capital interests that subvert national interests. Will the state discipline and step in before it’s too late, or will it take crisis to force them to do so? In the end - the incentives will force the elites to provide UBI to prevent revolt and because they still require consumers. It will be some form of circular economy - but it’s not certain what the UBI will look like - it could be conditional basic income where we’re surveilled, programmed and nudged to behave “well”. Also, if AGI then leads to Artificial Super intelligence - that’s something that could be completely out of our hands. It won’t be confined to whichever country reaches it first - because it could be far beyond our capacity to reign in. Check these out:

That's one city your talking about - Chongquing. If anything that shows the engineering capacity to build a city in a place nature wouldn't so easily allow. We marvel at road networks in Switzerland cutting through mountains but in China its ''urban planning sucks'' lol. It's incompatible for China to be the logistical manufacturing hub of the world and have universally poor roads of which those logistics depend on. Chinas consumed more concrete in a few years than the US used in the entire 20th century. The scale of build up is enormous - including the time-scale its all done within. Of course there's going to be viral failures and corruption here and there where standards are dropped or sub-standard materials are used. In the West not a whole lot is being built anywhere near this level. When new things finally get approved they act like its a big achievement - for example in the UK we just got the go ahead for another runway at Heathrow Airport that was deliberated over many years and will cost over £40 billion (will go over budget as always and not be on time) lol meanwhile: Also, what my above comment was talking about regarding containment of parasitic financial elites and steering private capital away from speculation and towards more productive domains. Here is what I mean:

- Leading the world doesn't mean leading in the way the West has and has felt entitled to (Western exceptionalism) with some missionary zeal. States can lead through industrial capacity, logistics, trade corridors, technological innovations etc. It doesn't mean imposing its moral framework onto others - which the West makes synonymous with ''leading''. China doesn't trade with African nations with strings attached for them to accept a neo-liberal framework - which is why they'd rather deal with China than the West in the first place. - On innovation. Every civilization builds upon others - civilization is cumulative. Japan copied from the West, Korea from Japan, US from UK for its early industrial base. UK and Europe colonially plundered the world and built on top adding their own ingenuity and genius. It's not just who copied who but who takes and builds further upon the shoulders of giants. - We need to look at trajectory and not just where things stand today. China has the largest science and tech talent pool in the world. The pipeline of STEM graduates is insane. They're filing a lot of patents and already leading in key areas: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-technology-tracker/ 'The Critical Technology Tracker is a large data-driven project that now covers 64 critical technologies spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. It provides a leading indicator of a country’s research performance, strategic intent and potential future science and technology capability.'' The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies. https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outperforming-the-united-states-in-critical-technologies/ BRICS+ isn't some coordinated mass uprising against the old imperial guard of the West. It's more pragmatically a coming together to equalise the global order in such a way as to not have 15% of the world population dictate to 85% of the world through the institutional leverage these colonial legacy powers have had and maintained till today. The ability to uni-laterally call the shots is what is fading. This doesn't meant the West is going to collapse or the US won't be a super power - it just won't be THE superpower. Some countries will fair better than others - Europe will stagnate most likely closer to how Japan has been the past decades, whilst US still has plenty of strong fundamentals. We're in a world of transition and it's also not guaranteed what way things will go. Things will be turbulent - especially with the advent of AI. There's actually not many countries who are equipped to handle that turbulence. If (perhaps when) AI causes mass job displacement at a rate that economies are unable to replace those jobs - it's the countries which have competence, cohesion (social/cultural unity) and containment ability (state capacity to contain the excesses of capital and private interest that serve themselves above the national interest) - that will cope better. Small Nordic countries, Gulf monarchies, Singapore, China come to mind immediately. The world looks to be on the precipice of transforming faster than most states can transform themselves to keep pace. The baseline of humanity may raise in the end with all these innovations, but there will be wide variation and friction on the way there. If a country and culture is allergic to the idea of state intervention (due to liberal freedoms, libertarian impulse) they will resist the much needed coordination and authority that only a state structure could provide to stabilize society among all the changes on the horizon. If the state is captured by private interests and capital elites (US for example) - will they wrestle with the state needing to reign them in and tax them enough to replace the lost incomes their tech companies will bring? There is going to need to be an inversion in that dynamic - state controlling capital rather than the other way round. But when a system has been captured already, it's much harder to reverse things until a breakdown of that system and a re-building with a proper hierarchy in place of what the state is for and its role - which is the service of the people and the containment of private interests (capital) when they grow unchecked. Right now, when China checks capital (notoriously Ali Baba) the West cries authoritarian. Liberalism's Achilles heel is that it’s scared of looking illiberal. And this is due to some juvenile notions of freedom of the individual - a flat binary 2D way of thinking about freedom without much context for a much wider framework of freedoms within which the individual is embedded. This will have to change and things will need to become much more holistic rather than crowning the individual and freedom as the apex values - no serious society can build cohesively and sustainably upon such values.

Wanting affordable housing, healthcare or education isn't being a super-consumer. Going into debt to wear Loro Piana clothes with a Patek watch and eat at Nobu every weekend is a super consumer lol. People don't go to fancy colleges and in debt themselves to the degree they do because they want to simply party though. The path to higher living standards can and often does require going to good schools to gain access to credentialed professions that you can't do otherwise. Those cluster in more expensive cities - and those jobs and career paths require working and living in those same cities. The fact that those same people can't afford to or struggle to live in the same place they work is where the major disconnect is. Moving to a cheaper city can work on a individual level but it's not a mass scale solution to something which is structurally constrained. The fact they need to move shows the system isn't working. Re-locating moves the pressure to elsewhere which then causes prices to increase there. Those areas become mini-Austins or Denvers. The main issue is cheaper cities are disappearing faster than new ones can emerge. If you magically invented a machine to make houses super fast and cheap - would the government allow you to use it? Or would they regulate it away because the value of housing as collateral underpins the entire financial system and thus the empire? You wouldn't only meet demand but exceed it (flooding supply) thanks to your new genius invention - which would threaten the system itself. That's a good thought experiment. Individuals can re-locate, as many already do due to high prices and affordability. The issue is other places don't offer the same opportunities and the prices in those area's also increase as more people relocate. The issue just gets kicked down the road without being resolved structurally. This happens within cities also ie gentrification. Take your example of Albuquerque. ''According to HUD, no more than 30% of monthly household income should go to housing costs, including utilities and insurance, to be considered affordable. To afford the median sale price of $345,000, a household must have an annual income of $108,935. Currently only 12% of the state’s population can afford the median priced home, assuming an interest rate of 6.5%, and 5% downpayment. The state’s median household income increased 22.2% (from $48,059 to $62,125) from 2018 to 2023, while the median home price increased 72.5% (from $200,000 to $345,000). As home prices outpace wage growth, the ability to achieve homeownership becomes more difficult.'' Source https://housingnm.org/uploads/documents/2025_Housing_Needs_Assessment_Key_Facts-_final.pdf The price to income ratio is 5.5x which is much better than other cities but still worse than baby boomers had it or the healthy 2-3x ratio. 4x starts stretching, 5x is stressful, 6-8x becomes un-affordable, and over 8x income is crisis (when 2008 hit). ''Housing affordability remains a critical issue, with 74.9% of U.S. households unable to afford a median-priced new home in 2025, according to NAHB’s latest analysis. With a median price of $459,826 and a 30-year mortgage rate of 6.5%, this translates to around 100.6 million households priced out of the market, even before accounting for further increases in home prices or interest rates.'' https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/housing-economics-plus/special-studies/2025/special-study-households-priced-out-of-the-housing-market-march-2025.pdf?rev=557833ecb28e410c983deb86813645a8 - You ended there with systemic intervention - so it is clearly systemic and not just cruelly cultural - although they feed into each other to varying degrees. You underestimate the structural causes and how it takes away the available choices ''free individuals'' have to choose from to better their lot. If people are drowning in water the systemic lens finds out why the water level is so high, the individualist lens says the people should just swim better so they don't drown. Both can be true - but as we know not everyone is of equal ability and we can't expect everyone to deal with unfavorable conditions well - it isn't a workable solution at scale. Which is why left leaning, socialist type policies exist (though they can't be so utopian either) and which is why the libertarian every man for himself capitalist worldview flops in reality because in reality a rising boat doesn't just lift the tide for all boats but drowns many. - Americans work more hours than almost any developed nation, have less vacation time than any developed nation, and run around doing multiple jobs and "side hustles" these days. Don't think their lazy in that sense. It's indicative of a broken system. You can't become a credentialed doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer etc at a library. - If they built so much in 2008 we'd have a surplus and prices would have remained low. But the issue isn't that things are built - its that demand was artificially pumped to outstrip supply ie more money chasing few goods = hike in prices. Fraudulent finance caused both high construction and the inevitable crisis - no supply can satisfy artificial demand. Real demand should be met with real supply to avoid that. - The inheritance math doesn't work because people have more than one child. So say your parents have a house but you are two children - now your not just one household but two households needing to share a single house. This also doesn't include the fact that people live longer, live alone, get divorced etc. The housing demand multiplies non-linearly rather than simply being added to. People also require moving to where the jobs are in a much more mobile world. Maybe population decline solves that, but not so easily as I'll explain with Japan: Watch the video. Tokyo built more homes (140k) than California (80K) whilst both have similar population size. Godzilla must be the demolition man. Demand for housing in Tokyo grew just as much as London and New York in the past 50 years. But they built to keep up with supply and don't rely on housing a collateral to uphold their entire system which is supported by industry, tech, exports etc instead. They didn't financialise housing which should remain shelter. They actually suffered a property bubble pop and then fixed the cause structurally. They overrode NIMBYism and zoning restrictions. Per capita - Tokyo builds 3x the US, 4-5x the UK, 7-10x more than Aussie or Canadian cities. https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/can-tokyo-show-us-how-to-solve-britains-housing-shortage/ About population decline solving the issue. Even if national population declines or stagnates, metro populations still grow because of urbanization, opportunity etc. Cities attract people and everything clusters there in the modern world. Even with the rise of remote work - people crave connection and proximity beside just opportunity. We do have digital nomad types making their own communities in Bali, Thailand, Mexico etc but again its not a scalable solution and that works for certain types. For most people they don't want to uproot themselves. Japan as a example - the population peaked in 2010 (128 mill), stagnated and has slightly decline now to 123 mill. But Tokyo's population increase from 37 mill in 2010 to 41 mill now. Like wise the GDP of Tokyo has increased also even if nationally it hasn't increased the same as the entire GDP of the US. Urbanisation cancels out population decline - and if the national economy struggles that only causes people to further need to go to where the jobs are ie cities. So unless the structural constraints aren't resolved - the affordability issue remains and will be crushing.

@Thought Art @Miguel1 My comment below resolves the apparent difference you guys have. Age is too arbitrary a line to draw on the complexity of reality.

Relevant for your guys discussion: If two high schoolers have consensual sex - one of them is a day over the age of 18 after their birthday, the other is just a day away from turning 18 themselves - is it immoral? It’s still illegal according to law - standardization creates such edge cases. The law is intended obviously to protect against much wider age gaps that create power asymmetries where exploitation happens. Yet, there can still be two legal adults with a wide power asymmetry (that oddly created the attraction in the first place). A 20 year old “legal adult” and a 40 year old “legal adult” ie Leo Di Caprio dating young women. Both are legal adults consenting - but the asymmetry is massive in who has the years of experience, status and power that comes with all that. It comes down to maturity - physical, emotional and psychological. Not just an arbitrary (yet protective) line drawn in the sand along just the simplest to measure metric ie age. When someone’s biologically mature - they should be mentally and emotionally mature for the responsibilities that come along with the act and its consequences. Legality doesn’t equal moral symmetry. And standardization draws a blunt line to protect society, but it flattens nuance at the same time. Where the guy in the above video is wrong though is that he says Aisha married that young because she was intellectually and emotionally mature for her age ie the exception - but that wasn't the case at the time of marriage. Who she married most likely aided in her becoming exceptional later. She became a prodigy because of the environment and role she grew into. Still - this wasn't a case of pedophilia either, because the Prophet didn't have a psychological fixation or pattern of predation upon the young and “pure”. Most of his wifeys were older, divorced or widowed. Aisha was the exception as daughter of one of his closest companions who entrusted him. It was a norm of the time the Prophet was acting within in pre-modern society. Power asymmetry is the thing modern ethics condemns - yet isn’t it power asymmetry that fuels the attraction in the first place? Models date Leo because of it - not despite it. The attraction of human nature is drawn to inequality - but our liberalised worldview of equality psychologically resists that fact. This is why Leo’s case makes many uncomfortable and is debated. To get around all this the loophole of consent is used to sanitize the inequality, not eliminate it. But then - consent requires maturity (capacity) as a pre-requisite. And maturity is difficult to quantify - so society defaults to “if they consent it’s fine - and we assume the capacity for consent is there once they cross the age of 16, 18 etc”. The line (standard) is needed for society to run at scale smoothly - but that line in turn influences society to think linearly and without nuance.

That graph is from chart 8 here: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/economic-bulletin/articles/2020/html/ecb.ebart202005_01~7749d3224d.en.html#toc10 Measuring the EU, not the US, but it's still applicable and true - just irrelevant to the point of affordability for essentials. It's measuring consumer goods or durable goods - one of the few categories that have fallen in price due to globalization and offshoring / cheap labor arbitrage. Electronics and gadgets getting cheaper (technological deflation) doesn't mean people aren't being squeezed in housing, healthcare or education - the biggest expenses and investments of peoples lives. Inflation increasing the price of apples or cherry pie isn't going to bankrupt or squeeze people the same way those big bills would - but even then, the fact that people are now financing groceries shows how much they are being squeezed. Depends what definition we want to use but if living standards simply means a increase in access to goods and services or increase in consumption then sure - they have increased, but like you said, at a cost. The question is does that cost eat away at peoples quality of life in the form of mental health, gig economy work to maintain a standard of living a regular job can't etc. This is why we have hustle culture as a phenomena - regular pay isn't enough - people feel the only way out is through extra hustles on the side, or asymetric gains made in a casino economy betting on crypto pump and dumps or bitcoin because the older wealth ladder has shrunk away. People are medicated to their eyeballs too. It's cool to have 100's of ice cream flavors and cheap TVs to brainrot in front of - but it's overshadowed by crushing debt and having to live in perpetual anxiety not knowing how to pay it off and questioning how you'll ever retire. The water quality improving doesn't mean people aren't drowning in water. Yeah I agree - the ROI isn't as strong anymore. But some professions are gate kept due to standardization and credentialism - and those providing those credentials have monopoly as the standard bearers so they can inflate the price and years of education to milk as much out of it. Credential cartelism lol. Also - skills aside (which lets say can be obtained elsewhere) there is a prestige effect and alumni network that you get from these places. They get your foot in the door - although they don't guarantee a strong outcome by themselves today. I went to private Business school - and the people you meet or become lifelong friends with can open doors and provide insight or other connections that would be hard to come by otherwise. Especially as everyone gets older and busier in their lives ie more closed off to giving their time away to new people. For example I have a friend who's in tech and venture capital - grew up in Atherton and has been around that whole scene. He was at the White House recently when Saudi's MBS met Trump as he's been raising capital from sovereign wealth funds in the gulf. Similar to credentialism for certain professions - even venture capital has barriers to entry to get into seed rounds or early stages of investment that are oversubscribed by the time people even hear about them. The internet democratizing education can lift the baseline up, but certain professions are gate kept and create a moat around access to the best opportunities that only widen inequalities. The top 10% live in a entirely different world than the majority. Speaking of tech and AI more generally - I do think they could help bring down costs in health care and education though. Imagine every child getting a personalized AI tutor tailored to them - and then mimicking the social aspects in some other ways that aren't as costly. Housing will be the toughest to handle. Tech deflation provided cheaper consumer goods that elevated peoples lifestyles the past decades. Essentials got monopolized and financialized - education, healthcare and housing. AI and tech breakthroughs will most probably bring down the cost of healthcare and education - not without a political fight from big pharma and academia - but when the costs go down so much it just won't be politically viable to demand extractive profits the way they do. As far as I understand it - housing is the key collateral that holds up the entire Western financial system. The US was on the gold standard before - that placed a hard limit on credit and the money supply (finances). Then the dollar moved off the gold standard and in came the petro dollar and fiat currency - which meant the US could run trade deficits and issue more debt without runaway inflation. Then housing was financialized into a new collateral base via mortgage-backed securities - which scaled the debt even further by turning suburban mortgages into global grade collateral. Real estate being the largest asset class in the world meant insane amounts of collateral to issue debt against. Housing turned from shelter into a asset class - ie got financialized. Each transition removed the old constraint and unlocked a larger credit system. That’s why the system grew so large - gold set limits, oil loosened limits, housing removed limits. As to why that's a issue that will get in the way of bringing housing costs down in the same way other technological breakthroughs might: basically - the value of housing can't deflate like the others because the system depends on their value remaining high - against which they are collateralised for debt. So housing is bidded up instead of built up - its engineered and maintained scarcity to keep the entire system afloat and far away from imploding. Beside that - zoning, NIMBYism and asset holders (boomers) and the real estate industry represent a important and powerful bloc of voters. It's a catch 22 of sorts for the West - particularly the US and UK who's backbone is reliant on housing asset values. And what's worse is that with AI coming to displace plenty of jobs (according to a lot of people apparently) - that threatens the entire system too. Because if incomes go down or away - that threatens house prices - which threatens the collateral upon which the entire system depends. This is why the bankers were bailed out in 2008 and protected instead of the citizens - to protect the system. This is why a UBI or emergency basic income is almost a structural necessity in order to keep the system alive.The hard thing to know is how much hardship will be allowed to occur until they step in to do so. Whats the precedent for that? 2008 showed us citizens got crumbs or nothing. This is the bind that financializing housing causes - or a FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) based economy. The other catch 22 is that the West have no choice but to go all in on AI to maintain tech primacy against China (geopolitics) - but this causing labor displacement means citizens will need to be socialised into a techno-feudalistic welfare system to maintain the system itself - like discussed earlier = asset housing values must remain propped up, which requires incomes. But the problem with that is - the tax base from which that will be funded can only come from the same mega corps and techno-garcs that have influence over the state. And we expect the state to discipline them and close the loopholes from which they avoid tax. Which goes back to our discussion - capital influencing the state vs the other way round as in China - where capital is contained and directed to socialise its gains down to the people. To put it bluntly - do we think capital elites give a fuck .. and does the state capacity exist to exercise control over these parasites? Only incentives will shift them - and the sobering realization that they must work with the state in order to keep the entire platform and system upon which they depend afloat - by maintaining domestic order and preventing a revolution from burning their asses. I heard someone say - to beat China the West will need to become more like China - in a way that's true. American with Chinese characteristics. It seems like two paths the West has - Sinification or Japanifcaiton. Either become more like China and discipline capital (but this requires a cultural / political orientation the West lacks, including the social cohesion for it) or become a techno-fuedalist power that stagnates like Japan and rides off its past glory as a empire into the sunset, whilst hollowing out and cannablizing its own atomized, polarized citizens living within their virtual worlds that sedate them like dopamine junkies. Check out this video on Japan's housing being affordable compared to other developed countries (didn't financialize): And check out this great article: https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Just not progressive cats Type sheeet

I get you and agree with your larger post - all this limitlessness is true at the level of essence. It's just that it doesn't translate to form, which is limited by definition. Essence being limitless doesn't mean the expression of that essence is limitless - essence is absent of limits but not form. A expression or manifestation of the limitless is limited, even if its source isn't. The absolute created the limit to begin with. The essence/form distinction honors both truths - that we are one (in essence), but many (in form/manifestation) - simply put, we are not the totality only a locality. We are parts (of a whole), but not apart (separate). And structurally, the part can't contain the whole - but only expresses the whole locally - just as the wave expresses the ocean.

The specific manifestation, the self, the vantage point, whatever we call it, is made of the essence of the absolute, but also of the totality of form. I think it's important to see this. This doesn't mean there aren't more vantage points, but rather that the center is an energetic construct, an "illusion" (a misleading word), and what you are contains the totality of form. The gears that make you move are in the cosmos in its entirety. A butterfly flaps its wings in the parallel universe xj12700, and you think that your neighbor is hot. Everything is totally interconnected; nothing is separate, neither in essence nor in form. Or if you prefer, a thought about your neighbor appears creating a center of tension that wants, a self, and that self , with wanting, is the cause of a limitless line of effects Distinction matters (between essence and form) - we are not the totality of form, but of essence. The part contains the whole in essence, but not in form - how can it? Are you totality in form? Do you have the power of the absolute, of totality? Of course not. We are in totality, arising from it - but not totality or the absolute in form. Ocean water is in a particular wave, but the wave isn't the ocean in its entirety. If every vantage point “contains the totality'' then the term “vantage point” becomes meaningless - because everything is everything. This is what spiritualists do when they get reductive and harp on about ''all is one''. Everything is interconnected- but that doesn't mean sameness. Conflating the two is the trap. The butterfly flapping its wings in the parallel universe affects things - but that doesn't mean you ARE that butterfly. Things being related and interconnected doesn't mean the same or identical. This is conflating relational inter-connectivity with ontological totality. ''Everything is everything'' erases distinctions to the point nothing matters - including the relationship between forms affecting each other. Saying "we contain the totality of form" or ''we are god'' from that level - is like saying because we're connected to the internet, we ARE the entire internet. But obviously we aren't - we're just accessing it from a local device ie a vantage point, a particular localized point of access.

The essence is God, the structure is Gods manifestation. Understanding the structure helps avoid delusions like taking literally “I am god” (as a totality) or that form is just illusion (reductionist). Those are the two traps - either inflation of form or deflation of form. We are identical in essence not in totality. A person (“I”) is local - essence is total. Local and total aren’t opposed as the local IS total - particularized. It’s more that we are OF God rather than we ARE God as a “I” or identity. We aren’t God as a entity (form) but as a essence (formless) from which all forms arise. There is no separation, but there is distinction. There is nothing but God (ultimate reality) unfolding (manifesting) - we are the distinct, local and particular expression of God, not God in totality. What we call “I” or “you” are localised vantage points within and of God unfolding. But the vantage point can’t claim to be that which it is pointing to - only that it is not separate from that it points to. The vantage point is made of the Absolute, but doesn’t encompass the Absolute. A vantage point is finite by definition, whilst the Absolute is limitless. But this limitless includes the capacity for self-limitation - because a limitless that couldn’t express as a limit would in fact be limited. If essence means what something is made of - and totality means all possible expressions of that essence: then we are made of the same essence - but not expressing all of its possibilities or manifestations. Therefore we are absolute only in essence, not in total. Like an ovum in a mother - the ovum arises within the mother and is of the mother - yet still distinct. The ovum is the mother in essence (dna) yet not in total. Same with the wave - the wave can’t claim to be the Ocean but is of it, from it, and within the entirety of its field or ground of being. — Opening to truth is important as is understanding it to integrate it. Like the thread on psychedelics - people are conflating or arguing between seeing (being open), understanding (interpretation) and integrating (living truth). All are important. Drugs can reveal, but not elevate or integrate the truth. Some conceptual frameworks can prime you for what you see, just as seeing directly allows for understanding those frameworks better. Living from that truth is always the hardest part. Thats why though revelation happened in Arabia (of Tawhid - Oneness) civilisation was built in the Levant/Persia where they already had a foundation of philosophy, poetry and a vocabulary to build on what was revealed. The Islamic orientation was filtered through that ecosystem to produce civilization. That’s why after Islam we got Ibn Arabi, Rumi, Hafez etc and Arabia produced little to none of those gems. Even Hallaj was from that same environment. When he claimed “I am truth” there was no “I” making the claim. It wasn’t as a an ego identifying itself as the total, but more so realizing that there is nothing but the truth (all is God, truth) and that everything arises within it, from it and of its essence. But language is limited and “I” was used as a way to express it. The Levant inherited Greek logic + roman law, Persia had sophisticated administration and poetry - Baghdad was in the middle which is why it became the epicentre of the Abbasid empire. Hallaj being executed was more political than metaphysical - because the implications of his words (I am Truth) destabilised the political centre of the empire. He brought the truth into the bazaar rather than remaining in the house of wisdom. It’s not like it was foreign - as the house of wisdom contained sufi metaphysics etc. it’s that it was brought into the public square. It threatened power political and religious because it would imply bypassing both - even if it’s a matter of fact. It’s the same way how we are advised not to jump straight into drugs or psychedelics without some foundation of understanding or preparation - it can lead to crushing us or delusion that threatens stability. Most people aren’t ready or equipped for revelation. Me you or this forum can perhaps understand Hallaj - he was like the DMT of his time lol. But imagine if everyone was exposed to it.