"No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone." - Henry George Unequal Scenes (Ixtapaluca, Mexico City) by Johnny Miller, 2016-2018 I recently finished reading Walter Scheidel’s 2017 book…

"The movement of the Tao consists in Returning. The use of the Tao consists in Softness. All things under heaven are born of the manifested. The manifested is born of the unmanifested." - Laozi The Poet Lin Bu Wandering in the Moonlight by Du Jin, late 1400s Sometimes it's best to use labels yourself before others can have an opportunity to apply them to you.

"Since happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue, we must consider the nature of virtue; for perhaps we shall thus see better the nature of happiness." - Aristotle An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright, 1768 Over the course of human history, our understanding of the physical world has become more attuned with Reality through reasoning, superior technologies, and research.

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." - Aldo Leopold It's a Delicate Balance by Christi Belcourt, 2021 To live in harmony with Ji is to recognize one’s place and humanity’s place in the interconnected web of existence.

Works in the Anxious Men series by Rashid Johnson Finding someone you truly connect with is one of the best feelings and realizations there is in life. I’m not the best at describing my emotions (I probably rank somewhere near the bottom to be honest. Emotional illiteracy is what I’ll call that) but if I had to put the body-feeling into words, it’d be something like this uber-hyper sensation in my chest that compels me to move around.

One of the things I love the most about my home is the constant noise from the wildlife. There's not as much as I feel there should be on account of encroaching urbanization, but the birds, at least, are always present. Whenever I feel myself getting tense or stressed or just lapsing into a generally bleh mood (which tends to happen when I've been working or I'm stuck in executive dysfunction-induced task paralysis), going outside is a surefire remedy.

A computer simulation demonstrating how galaxy filaments, walls and voids form web-like structures The philosophical foundations laid and conclusions drawn in Jiaya’s political philosophy are not deductions from its ontology. They are derived from observations of reality: the historical, material, and social conditions that have shaped humanity and brought us to where we are in the present; patterns of flourishing and fragmentation that have accumulated across civilizations, cultures, and millennia.

"Care reveals the myth of independence. Human life is embedded in nested dependencies." - Eva Feder Kittay The Child's Bath by Mary Cassatt, 1893 Aligning with Ji means that our relationships, whether they be familial, platonic, romantic, or whichever label we may apply to them, must be approached with steadfastness, loyalty, faithfulness, and care. Attachment and possessiveness are antithetical to…

"Our self is māyā where it is merely individual and finite, where it considers its separateness as absolute; it is satya where it recognizes its essence in the universal and infinite, in the Supreme Self, in paramatman." - Rabindranath Thakur The conflict between the atomistic and relational self is cultural as well as internal. In the West, particularly since the Enlightenment, we've been trained to see ourselves as distinct individuals separate and apart from all that exists.

"A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one's own ignorance." - Niccolò Machiavelli Jiayan teaching puts forward a number of claims or statements on the nature of Reality. While all are key to understanding the way in which our universe works, they operate across different levels. Think of Jiayan claims as a sort of pyramid. At the bottom rest its most central claims.

Ji as light, refracted through the prism of manifestation, through which articulation emerges. Nothing was added to the light; it was just differentiated Ji is the central concept that underpins Jiayan philosophy or thought. It's important to have a good grasp of it before delving into anything more jargony. Put simply, Ji is what makes reality possible. Think of it as the structure that underlies all things.

ARETEIOI CANON INDUCTEE Lived 15 December 1944 - 22 December 1988 (Gregorian) 15 December 11944 - 22 December 11988 (Holocene) Eras active Modern Associated phase Descent Francisco Alves Mendes Filho (or Chico Mendes) was a Brazilian trade union leader and environmentalist who fought against the impact of extractive industries on the Amazon rainforest. Through his preservationist efforts, he sought greater rights for Brazilian farmers and indigenous peoples.

"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me?" - Terry Pratchett The recent resurgence of conspiratorial thinking, its international spread facilitated through social media algorithms that boost extremism, presents a corrosive threat to society’s political and moral attentions.

I thought that this work by Brendan Deboy was a great depiction of the pain myself and others like me experience. You can find more of his work here: I’ve touched on pain before. Living with chronic pain, it’s inevitable that I come back to it. It serves as a daily reminder to be grateful for the good moments in which I experience life free of physical discomfort.

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” - H.G. Wells After some thought, I have decided to scrap the Henosian Calendar/dating system that I’d come up with. It was overly complicated to calculate dates and not easily understandable at a glance. I also wasn’t even always sure the dates were right to be completely honest. When even the person who developed the system finds it cumbersome to work with, you know it’s time to cut your losses and look for something better.

“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.” - Simone Weil In the Modern Age, every action taken by individual members of humanity determines its collective destiny — one defined by realization of its interconnectedness and another marked by rigid tribalism and the fear and destruction that goes along with it.

Time is a strange beast. From one perspective, it seems as if the year always goes by very quickly. Then when you think about specific details, you realize just how much actually happened in the year and think "wait...that all happened this year?" I wonder if this might be a human coping mechanism for keeping all those memories in place and remaining sane through the passage of time.

"Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order." - Hannah Arendt…

“At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds.” - Henry David Thoreau…

"The reactionary of any kind condemns sexual pleasure because it stimulates and repulses him at the same time. He is unable to solve the conflict within him between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions." - Wilhelm Reich Related writings: Sexuality; The Fall of Man Augustine of Hippo is one of the most important figures in Western philosophy and Church history, given the title of Doctor by the Catholic Church for his many contributions to theology and doctrine, one of the most notable being original sin.

Each phase in the Cycle of Transience is associated with several different aspects of the world, most significantly seasonal periods, but how the planets of our solar system relate to each phase may not be immediately clear. For that reason, I'd like to explore that in a little detail. The planets were assigned to the phases largely through how they have been viewed through the lens of various astrological traditions.

"The Master said, 'A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.'" - Kǒngzǐ The Ten Virtues are those behaviors, qualities, and attitudes that align one's life with Ji. Their practice leads to eudaimonia (happiness, welfare, and flourishing on both an individual and society-wide scale) and freedom from…

"Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." - Si'ahl This page is consistently updated as Jiayan philosophy continues to change. Ji (pronounced zhi) is the foundational principle central to Jiayan philosophy; a force that both is immanent within and transcends the universe.