Medical School Journal

[oOo]

Medical School Journal. 

Entry #1: What does being a doctor mean? Beyond the illusions. Beyond the stereotypes. My own action makes the definition. Traveling from city to city. That's my desire as a doctor. Conferences to conferences, building social networks. Creating a lifelong legacy. Armbands of connectivity, as long-term legacy. Over seniority without social precedence. I care about lifestyle, not authority. Sounds like a good medical-footprint too. Doctors are a safe social-hierarchy. In the past, I've been reckless. Trying to save without experience. Trying to know without boundaries. Trying to feel, without seeing projection. Stretching for solidarity in limitless connection. Which was always, highly improbable. Now realizing, it was all commercial. The films, the music, the culture. It set us up for failure. Never seeing, who pulled the strings. After enough pain, integration and revelation. Time speaks. And so do others. We find the soldiers in grief. And we share stories. This automatically stimulates new thought. New horizons. A new system with wheels. Because now we have more than experience. We have wisdom. We have learned mind integration. To teach the heart to catch-up. Healing the entire system, for new life. Not only individuality, but integration. Into a world... That is growing up too. 

The world has become disconnected. Despite becoming more technologically connected. And for those aware, we out-smart. We find our niches. We build our strategies. Our maps. Our feedback loops. I've called mine "doctors". But that is just an armband. A bridge of connection. Experiencing the world from its myopia. While learning from the window. It creates. 

I've mapped all medical student conferences. City to city during medical school. Establishing world-wide medical social legacy. Traveling once per week/fortnight, building more bridges. And together, in feedback loops. Building a forever social arc. One without borders. And one within infinite boundaries. Designed for social-distance, with  complete connectivity. Nourishing the best of people. Without the decay of geographical proximity. Over-complexity fortifies pure simplicity. 

Social, the first bridge to patients. Intense research, a collaborative arm. Hospital, an outcome not a destination. Foreseeing burnouts, as calculated and controlled. Rather than without social weather control. A path beginning with authority. Is an ego... that looks back with the mind. Not the heart. Unintegrated foresight, is better spontaneous. To learn from the foolishness. Having now achieved this? I will see. Where pain... not even an anchor. An unvarnished mystery. That I've honed to be raw. Where recklessness becomes concrete. And therefore strategically beautiful, over spontaneously-destructive. Bandages now taken off. Stitches fallen out with scars. That speak a language... not forgotten. But without the hold. To live truly. Is to never leave anything behind. But to never... Hold onto anything. This is sight into the soul... With boundaries, that are boundaryless. 

What global network will I have.... In 6 years? What inner network... Will I have in the end? What lessons would my network... Have sown in me? That myopia of our wisdom, staring back at us... To define the world around us... As we take, reckless responsibility... Forward in integrated solidarity. To treasure every memory. While painstakingly making all memories. However bad... Whole. To become a tale... of a human life. Not of a perfect life. Just perfectly... Connected. Globally. Perhaps a new trend for doctors. Living lives at every countries edge. Binding in the middle... when the smaller worlds demand presence. Patience. Empathy. Solutions. And a smile. That looks like its returned home. Wherever it is. And whoever it lands with. 

Finalizing my decision towards medical school. An outgrowth of my father passing. Banging the walls of life for closure. Amidst seizure after seizure. And an epilepsy diagnosis that followed. It only fuelled me. I sought no sympathy. It only grew the fire. Amidst memory failing, stable identity crumbling. A light of ease still shined. Doubtful moments ensnared hope; vision reigned. Life vision, beyond the noise. Clear signal. Clear path. Clear war. Purified the endeavour, oiled skeletal joints. If I could solve my father's suffering. If I could solve epilepsy. Intense research must be my calling. A 2026 gifted with relentless invention. That solidified identity with life renewed. Renewal, leaving a trail existential skeletons. With new hope binding their lives. And my father's passing. Living on through them, through diagnostic victory. That solidifies their own path forward. Their free-will returned. And the rest of life... Awaits their renewed purpose. To rebirth life through unescapable loss. Is to make those lost. Including yourself, born again.  The connectivity that defined this choice. Plants the seeds, for tomorrow's medicine. And my new social world. Awaits only more light, to fire.

[oOo]

Medical School Journal.

 

Entry #2:

Intro - Getting to the root of purposeful foundations rather than standing on a culture thats preparing for a breakdown and in doing so systemic destruction of obsolete systems; coming out the other side as a student-physician, with a more refined eye. Bridging abstract foundations with medical responsibilities towards not just treatment but its embodied philosophy. Returning back to how the true philosophers of yesterday are the roots to the true medical doctors today, I want to be the least that, held in something that resembles what we can call sacred to the sanctity of life.
 

Beginning:

The love story between relationality and medicine. Where logical structure meets the saving of the will to live, or a story that can't be salvaged. Medicine then in my own biased way, is the meaning of life. Or a good chunk to it. Limits of meaning constructed only from a void we can't make sense of, and maybe that's it's only boundary. My conclusion: The meaning of life is, alive and well. We are however just mere infants trying to understand the game of chess. Any game of life we construct, is like a game of marbles, which goes all the way back to the earliest Egyptian era, a child learns to invent. Most of us understand cause and effect, differentiation of every temperature between hot and cold, along with the pain or pleasure it brings. Two spherical rocks thrown together then go "Boom" upon impact, then we iteratively decide a winner of the game based on how many rocks one is willing to lose versus win. Our ability to relationally construct the world in our minds arguably, has not actually grown much beyond that. In the game there's not only the consideration of cause and effect but through that emergence, there's also time, social dynamics and even competitive game theory. The distance between the ability to understand the rules of "Marbles" and construct the Fibonacci sequence, is not as far as you think. Based on our understanding so far however, we understand the patterns of nature enough to realise that it follows principles of emergence. Therefore, the rudimentary ability we all have to understand through relational reasoning at its maximum, is likely all that's needed at the mental level outside of phenomenological exposure. Moreover 'maximum', is purely ideological, we may need much less relational ability than we realise to bind all of life's relations together, which brings us more hope than we likely realise. At the same time of course, we do need proper baseline rules of thumb. For example, the fact that we can't even send any astronauts to another planet, let alone another solar system, undoubtedly means we're still quite far away from the relational potential we need to wrap our heads around the nuanced complexity of the universe. Evolutionary short-cuts and catalysts exist, for example at present our own higher abilities compared to other species on the planet are still not yet fully explainable. And maybe or some would say undoubtedly, human invented technology is going to be that catalyst, as it already has been in our growing living standards compared to our earliest times. That said, the bone marrow of the modern era as an outgrowth to the failings of earlier philosophy has totally misled generations into believing that outside the most basic of observations, there is no meaning to life. And our demographic classes have suffered greatly because of this deception. The human species led by the absence of meaning is clearly visible carried out in action. Often worse, it is superior-intellect masking hopelessness from the challenges and or doubts upon life and its creations. We see the emergence of this pattern spiraling from backlashes towards certain trends of religion, politics, even science and the broader culture of any given society or tribe of any time in history. The Sentinelese probably experience just as much absence of meaning from suffering as anyone else outside of the likely positive group dynamics that counter the effects of life's challenges. One of the undoubtedly root causes of nihilism then, is not its legitimacy outside of any fair evaluation of the absence of intelligence to any theory to presently explain the meaning of life, but the lack of a truly fulfilling tribe. Where quite often, the least to the most philosophical of cohesive tribes will probably say that the meaning of life is joy, love and relationships. This mirrors the biased narrative of those without one, because they're both understanding experience purely based on the projection of feeling more than the raw computational power that is powered by the true desire to know and understand.

The priesthood of philosophy is tasked with this goal of resolving all of existence beginning with religion, politics, science and broader culture as starting points for its axioms. Apart from being at best like children playing with crayons on the white pages of the universe, cursing at our parents (our universal creators) in the process, we are far better at our maxims for life. We see, we observe, we discern, we experiment, we get results, we iteratively improve. We're reasonably good at this and one maxim that benefits us in life is doing what we're good at rather than preoccupying ourselves with either what we're not good at or life's wrongs. Far worse, to get good at finding all that is wrong with our survivability and to skew perception towards so much dogmatic bias in that adherence that not even the biggest or most valuable marble could smash any like solidified mirror that forever reflects back a tainted view upon life, and therefore, the meanings you sit on to continue it. As coarse as it sounds, that's like taking a dump in the middle of garbage heap, calling it better than all the other rubbish and therefore validating the purpose of shitting on your own shit even further until it turns into an impossible mud-slug to get out of; and this is precisely where many protestors in life begin to enter stage right where you've already entered stage left, preparing your indoctrinating message for any gullible audience that isn't just there for the philosophical laughs. Philosophy has done much for humanity in the same way that prostitution has for a lonely gender (yes men have well and truly entered the profession now). Because isn't the existential yearner no less than someone who becomes far more easily indoctrinated into answers that are yet to be put under a higher relational microscope that can handle more nuanced complexity? Like a pigeon among the streets, they will take the breadcrumbs of meaning even if it leads to a pile of shit, they would have followed that stench so long that they not only got used it, they became filled with elation upon discovering the 'Big Kahuna if you can my drift. One can only imagine what they'd do with that. Enter centrestage the modern digitally hypnotisable modern era where humanity has been reduced to crying over not receiving a like on facebook. Remember how I said we haven't reached reasoning abilities much further than the ability to understand the game of 'Marbles'? I think by now the story is starting to carry a little more diamond and a little less shit surrounding it than how I began. They call it "Diamond in the rough", but if you ask me, they needed a conductor playing the brief part of a nihilist to really call it what it is. And if you take all of civilisation as a whole, this is where our own biases towards our time in history begin to become coloured more towards where we've at least been trying to head but still contains credible philosophical doubt given that the origins that brought us here, were not solely on the backs of altruism but were born out of the same dirt we're all birthed from to genetically forge our life maxims from generational epigenetic trends. Two or more generations in and many demographics now are primed to select Mc Donalds over Subway, that tells you everything you need to know about potential "Do Not Enter / Enter at Own Risk" signs we need to have as people choose the priesthood of dystopian visions masquerading as the future of utopian ideals. Speaking no less then of the transhumanist visions of technology to save ourselves... from ourselves. But some may argue that this simulation of humanity, no matter the simulation we've been cast in tends to follow the pattern of being "Saving ourselves" all the way down in the same way that "Turtles" follows the same regressive pattern. With the biggest problem being that the philosophy of politics, science, religion and broader culture has tried to forge universal axioms to control thought more than understand its limits, misunderstanding the sheer bias of the fact that any universal axiomatic foundation was forged upon being born on a pile of dirt, not the centre of creation from which all of this sprung from, colloquially stated. Maxims we can do, and our learning from experiences paints the way those maxims need to correctly head relative to the relational complexity we can handle, however much more than this, and more and more as it has in this conversation with self-referentiality, it becomes a discussion more on limits than potential. Like a poor person in a rich world, if we don't accurately appraise our position, financial spiritual wealth will not set like the sun a little better for the tomorrow, whatever timeline operated on. Accurately appraised then, this is where the interlude between the many kinds of this failed priesthood meeting the degradation of future generational priests begins to shift from a co-occurring existential echo of where humanities dumbed down version of abstraction being the sciences, begins to heal and transform the damaged generations through its medicinal and greater technological practicalities.

To revive philosophy at its roots, we must measure our progress to the extent that we make it appealing to those that believe it to be a waste of time; especially those that view it as taking up room in the most unoccupyable areas of the largest of blackholes in the universe. The problem is that philosophy is not only painstaking, there is no foreseeable gratitude at the end of it outside of a sore head and an enlightened intellect that otherwise could have been honed by working as an independent farmer, which is not as easy as some may believe. There are many genius farmers never to be known, so be thankful they didn't want to be otherwise you may very well not of been the beneficiaries of their hard work. Not only that, even if you become a remembered philosopher, you have to deal with future generations like myself viewing you as "less than". As they remember you through the myopia of modern luxuries that even the philosophers of the day that may reach higher heights, too take for granted in their appraisal of your work, standing upon and looking down from their own clumps of universal dust thrown together to have it sold en masse like it was the next plagiarised Picasso in its lack of remembrance of ancestral roots. [ A lot of that sentence in part contains much of what I meant in my previous entry where I stated " Is to never leave anything behind. But to never... Hold onto anything." or to more 'Koanly' say so "Leave nothing behind but hold onto nothing" ]. A rug that could easily be removed from underneath them if the third world country they relied upon for a cheaper price to make the rug decided they wanted higher rates or we placed them in the sweat shop in which the rug was made en masse. To revive philosophy at its roots, we thus must remember in our writing the ancestral voices that crafted the edges of every puzzle piece we sow together, and bind those pieces with the heart so that the end creation becomes not just a product but a relic that remembered. And to do that we must sow axiom with maxim, like Plato with Aurelius and like intellectual ice with the creative beauty we can achieve with aerobatics. Like science and art, forgetting that its just a maxim for the bridging of mind and heart; these analogies, these bridges, are missing like the connection between pulse and purpose, that define the architecture of unbreakable reason with the passions of the spirit. That sounds like something I not only want to learn how to do (axiom territory), that sounds precisely what I want to learn how to be (maxim territory). That's philosophy, and that's when true spirituality, the both of them, become untethered from their past derailments only to find the same railroad tracks, heading not on a collision course like many modern appraisals but a unity upon explosion. If we can do that in our words, in our persuasions by not only persuading ourselves first but transforming ourselves to be our most unified version of the underlying philosophical function of our nervous systems structure (i.e. spirit to mind to heart),that way of being becomes its own persuasion that doesn't even need to be spoken, as we become the priesthood of its being through action, and therefore an example to follow. This is when philosophy returns to its rightful place, medicine for the mind through a direction of its senses for thought. Making no differentiation in that process between thought and being its own sense, aka is it not the outgrowth of 'sense-making' like focusing the eyes subtler vision upon greater concentration. Therefore, viewing no different the damage to sight like the damage to mind-sight and the philosophical remedies we must craft. In bandaging and performing intellectual surgery on the regeneration of the cells that speak to each other to produce that sight on life. Previously reduced by mind-viruses vetted through anti-protective philosphical plasma boundaries between protoplasmic interface and the nucleus of our sentience. Through the indoctrination of biological songs sung to sow veins that pumped poorly culturalised blood to distort and divide mind from its analogical surroundings that upon proper intellectual vision, reach interconnectivity as an after-thought and starting point rather than a final destination. Interconnectivity, like the sight of sense telling our bodies where the paths of the environment water flow. Like thought to memory tell our sentience not only where but how to build the channels that allow that river to run from mountain to the farmers tap that grows our generational philosophers for the new coming season. Where the principles of medicinal regeneration are to philosophical healing and where the principles of philosophical generation are to the extension of our biology to new frontiers that enlighten both paths in symbiosis. I began this entry speaking about the love story between relationality and medicine, and I end it by redefining both philosophy and relational reasoning (relationality) as one in the same that serve the goal of higher medicine, and higher medicines roots as indistinguishable from the philosophical rigour that binds the unity of its purpose, sown more to a philosophically misguided path towards ruin or one of salvation. Where together with newly defined philosophy and medicine, the meaning of life not only becomes probablistic it becomes its own deterministic good as we bridge the order of life against the chaos that derails it. Building architectures that not only save the will as I started it, but teach it to thrive not only with or within structure, but through the will to create it. That is real meaning. Previous conclusion: The meaning of life is, alive and well. New conclusion: The meaning of life, is all the more closer, as we live meaning well the same way we take in old wine that's both a philosophy passed down to iterate axioms further, but a medicine that refines it through the technology of higher maxims married to that growth. Where logical structure meets the saving of the will to live, or a story that can't be salvaged, meets a story that must be changed by a will that must bare the weight of light powerful enough to scare any belaboured will that finds comfort in the cracks of Plato's Cave, to never viewing it as an option. As the reinvention of the cultural and social structures surrounding, bias one to live out the conformist example of its offspring to frontier. Church reinstated through question and devotion towards growth rather than regress disguised as sacredness through dogma and indoctrination like religion or pseudo-elevation through answer and nihilistic-power through science. Self is consciousness is true power, and the only sight that reveals the next step from its starting foundations. Now’s the time to reunite with what was always our love story of this philosophical medicine brought back to its earliest beginnings bridge to what we take for granted today in both the post-modern world and the bureaucratic infrastructure of the medical establishment. That sacred marriage as it always used to be of axiom and maxim, where the relational rigor of mind and the regenerative tissue of passion unite to heal our sight and build the architecture of spiritual meaning. This returns to medicine's roots, where thinkers like Pythagoras and Hippocrates first sought rational, philosophical causes for illness. The Hippocratic Oath, "Do no harm", should be sewn into the minds then of every philospher, and into every physician, how to bring the will to life back or further into every patient, the path of goodness is not found in text but in the heart-mind symbiotic unity to write it better. That is a love story I want to read from even the darkest and most treacherous parts of the universes greatest and most ferocious of black-holes, and that I believe that would enable the beginnings of many... To break out of. And begin life connected to the Earth's ground, humbled by the farmers noble foresight, the ingenuity of mindful doctors and those too driven by undivided hearts, escalated by modern 'cyber' philosophers, while rebirthed by the old and forgotten that sought to unite from what we have separated, but now reinvite to make whole once again, and further too, as we embark on defining the right echo we want to hear back as we plant the seeds for the eras to come. These are the beginnings of where metamodernism meets the redefinition of spirituality, at the waters shoreline of a planet that's the third rock from a sun of a universe that for now... Only arises within within, and in our togetherness, of both our intellect and the paths that forge the greatest of life’s love stories.

[oOo]

Diary: Medical School Journal.

Chapter: Life in Experiential Recursion (chapter entries seem like a smart idea).

Date: November 22nd entry.

Type: Consciousness stream.

Part/s: 1 of 2. Ran out of time.

Entry number: #3.

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Title: Sleeping attractions to Awakened Catharsis.

Recursion.

Continuous learning.

Replaying the moment.

The ability to replay a feeling and experience it, hides the architecture of my control over every other consciousness state.  

When I am able to replay the moment, not as some perfect digital object but for all its natural contours, the present moment experiences juxtaposition.

As I look around myself, it is obvious that most people experience their consciousness in exhalation. Mediation with awareness from A to B does not characterise the spectrum, it is the meta-awareness and its scalability of experience, or rather, its individual experiences, which opens the doors from inhalation to digestion to memory, to exhalation that has truly tasted something we may sublimate as "the fruit of life". Understanding this as a temporal span that biases the energy of my own experience forces the question in me, am I paying enough attention and what are the anchors that create the gestalt we refer to as our embodied whole for me to properly understand how I should be governing my attention? Most experiences I have are as good as gone in the next moment rendering my recollection of them in the next, beautifully granulised, an impossible task. Analogous to AI's attempts at recreating one's visions through shallow linguistic prompts, selections are made in the same way selections are made among the minds interpretations of the past, followed by a pairing phase between memory relived and the respective identity whether it’s ourselves or the narrative, artwork or larger project we’re working on.

The described juxtaposition in my consciousness I notice happens in a number of ways. I may be attracted by a woman, wonder why she's still on my mind an hour later, only to have the memory of attraction refreshed to noise by another woman in the next moment as she steals my gaze with a stare that forces an imbalanced circulation of hormones. This gives rise to thinking about state through a kind of hyper-lens, something I may call the hyper-state-temporal, which is a different infatuation than with purely the construct of time itself. That is, instead of becoming preoccupied with any one state-experience external pairing, its utility in understanding the internal mechanisms that self-govern the "governance and release" valve. Helping me differentiate where my power lays versus the power of a woman and where the absence in analogous awareness is a description of not only my own powerlessness, but that of the general population concerning nearly any pull from consciousness they have especially to those wills externalised, potentially corrupted by them too. Outside of course, consideration of those pulls to make love with another, pulls that are inept when it comes to differentiating the purity of intent versus its obscuring. The myopia of choice  by attraction sharing the same chasm as the modus operandi of all billion-dollar capitalistic investment scandals of course.

It's interesting, the regeneration of time following the movement of one attraction to the next I see, greatly impacts the temporal context viewed and how people are revealed. The instancy of beauty noticed hides the beauty of another that takes longer to realise, returning my gaze out towards the world into something that mirrors infancy more than the maturity they may superimpose on any words relayed towards an attraction. There were after all, several other women within one reach that instead of being noticed, felt like props on a stage in which my consciousness attempts to deny its own selfhood by revealing itself through the vines of attraction wrapping around any meaningful tie to reason my subjective reality has over understanding itself through its self-generated smoke, vines it instead anthropomorphises as its chance for unity through 'biological interfacing' of spirit. It’s the amplification of otherwise neutral stimuli by dual biological intersection between gender and sexual orientation meeting future dissolution after reading Ayn Rand. More meaningfully though, for any distortions that occur the two-and-throw between hyper-temporalization of states of consciousness and the hyper-indexing that follows from granulized self-insight on their existence, opens the gates to a funnel that filters for preferential sanity amidst otherwise a hopeless decay of foresight that sees its own self-denial from the future looking back, a future self warning me of the costs of divorce court and an unplanned pregnancy? Impregnating for depth, I know I need to reach for maturity in understanding my own consciousness reactions beneath the hood. Hyper-indexing simply means the insight thats forged between one or more hyper-temporalised experiential spaces, say in relation to the temporal contrast forged by comparing one attraction to another and how by one (or the memory of one) silencing for little reason outside of the beauty of another they both cancel one another out The lesson in realising one's own self-deceit and the folly of self-persuasion of potential future fatherhood based on choiceless reactions depending on fleeting attractions, apparently ultimately fails the Turing test for genuine consciousness. A self-insight to personal growth which changes the homologous category of ‘attraction to potential ineffable posturing' after reason of course eventually fails after the intellectual transformation and nature, or just present evolution, takes its rightful place, evolving my consciousness through the dual program of insight and hormonal rebellion, and therefore chaos to unexpected ordered synthesized memory.

This leaves me to wonder, has this shifting between attraction - temporal indexing - insight revealed the very mechanism that complete impeturbability is achieved, or is impeturbability merely an unmistably illusory resolve as a psychoanalyst may say? The imperturbability is only an outcome of dual cognitive shadowing though where processing balances any conclusion towards stress by managing expectations, beliefs and desires, along with locus of control, or just its absence often felt as loss. If I have only realised this now, why only now? I suppose the only conclusion was that the underlying mechanisms were saturated by not only the experiences themselves but the philosophies curated around them. I was not questioning experience enough, I was free-styling with the skateboard I was given rather than inventing the ski's. Producing an unawavering blindness proportional to the lack of genuine insight regarding.

I can add more to this nomenclature of blind-freddy. But gosh when am I going to fully recover from the effects of these seizures. I feel like I'm consistently choosing the shortest straw of the variations of myself with nothing else to reach for, with a future self reaching into the mud in which I dwell to pull me out with straw to become stick. That said, let me get back to the drawing board.

Reward based consciousness is a paradoxical virtue, I know I've gotta have it at the seams of consciousness independence, the heel of the boot of agency. For what other power is there to yield that is not free from the over-consumption of power other than the awareness agency subsubes? This independence creates the arch by which the rest of the world enters, that creates chemical dissolution of the effects of the worlds stagnancies. A place of coming and going of the world's effects that mirrors what are some archtypes of the described imperturbability, at least in some of their appearances. Agency is the only real definition of both reward, power and independence; not to mention consciousness that has any business at all with the ups and downs of doing's and "Something or other's". This is admirable reward seeking behaviour that I have been seeking in the past, however without the sophistication on how to upgrade the vehicle of self with some extra subwoofers and spoilers that gave the appearance of agency. A stronger voice, bicep (s) and the raging hormones. A partial product of injected partial views from "how to be a man" by something or other author, argumentation no longer or intricate other than "You here my voice don't you? That's a man. I am man. We are man. Done". It breaks ice without knowing how to carve it, and that's the reason I am looking for in the intricacy of discovering my own manly consciousness. As it should be and as a man should be doing, curating his own design of himself and much more as to me, and perhaps I will end the claim further by the end of this entry, it is man's agency, his choice, his self, his will, that by design he is meant to wield this power into designing the architecture of his being, and that is his sole differentiation and his soul yearning. The very definition of a beta-male versus an alpha-male is not that its too simplistic of a dichotomy and we should throw it out, it is to the degree that he wields his own choice as his own choice. Maturity of that choice is an overlapping voice, however a man must start with choice discernment to graduate that maturity and he will not truly start that developmental phase until he has started to truly wield those powers on his own behalf. This becomes the reward of being a man, and this is precisely how a man chases the reward of being himself and the degree to which he becomes embroiled in the illusions of the rewards externalised to his senses tricking him into the belief they're instead an internal resolve, is by that degree precisely that energy will be taken away from his purpose here.

A man is an architect, and so when he falls into the reward architectures of the world, his will becomes programmable and his soul always feels like something is missing. Creating a loop between the programmed belief that relieving this yearning is found in the external apparitions of reward, chasing, perhaps momentary satiation, finalised by a continued unmet yearning that lay deeper beneath the architecture of his will that upon reaching the end of his tongue, becomes the figurative voice that architects the world. Men build to create structures from the physical to the meta-physical, a place in which people can safely dwell within those confines. Those structures can be outgrown and those structures can be reached as the next step. By men, I can say "masculine principle" if that moves better however the point is still the same, the persons trying to be a man so let them be as there are plenty of men that have forgotten their path, and that is the definition of a beta male. The beta male is not less in design, however the truth that he has forgotten makes him less in the meaning of who he is meant to be underneath. Moreover this truth does not weaken even when we consider people that are merely struggling to function at these limits, in fact to me, that is taking away their dignity of at the very least what they were destined to become and so they shouldn't be lessened by any weaker categories or just anything that follows with definitions that presuppose they were meant for anything less other than to wield the power of their god given sentience, something that is undoubtedly mirrored by over-capability, with our stretching towards extending these powers and something that as we know is pioneered by those that have embraced this masculine. This over-reaching, is calculated immaturity, and the weight of maturiy its possessed by, take the interests of Neuralink as just one simple but meaningful example, are only relative to the protection and genuine growth it affords the rest of the tribe, which in this case is not only yet to be determined and hardly to the level of the companies ambition, which includes close to the whole of humanity. Moreover, man's (principle of the masculine - why not use them analogously now) imperturbability as I contemplated, is the calm in the storm that's achieved once he wields this from narrative to bearing the fruits of the practical causes that follow. There is no secret recipe as some have assumed, and as I initially pondered, "Have the thing of nature do the thing it is meant to do and you will see it splended". Anxiety, neurosis and these things in men, are when he is afflicted with the demons of paralysis, an affliction that we should not wish upon even our worst enemies or evil men if we have a choice between this and instead steering the masculine's role to its soverign respect for the natural world from which it spawned.

To myself and something that is undoubtedly symptomatic to this greater cause when culturally applied, the first realisation is in realising your existence is not only taking part in a social contract, it is a social contract, and power differentials are the sole medium and balance by which all social contracts are formed. The masculine must understand that its first social contract is between itself and its respective society, if not its tribe and or family which bares the same characteristics so for now I will not elaborate more than the category of society as an informal practical use, even though in some arguably many instances depending on the demographic, the family can be denoted as its own social contract separate to the respective larger society simply because of the larger influence of family than society. The masculines second social contract is between itself and its conscience, the latter which has great influence from the first contract and is the first symbiotic contract, at least the one that is most felt. The third social contract is between itself and all of creation (i.e. analogous to God, mother nature or however one wishes to denote), and this is where now two symbiotic contracts are now built with the fourth social contract, beween its identity and its essence.

Each contract is interesting in its own right, with the first contract descriptive of so much that the individual compares themselves to and it is by this comparison that they're easily unknowingly used to their disrepair relative to the lack of health of a given society, of which ours if we parse it as 'the western world' is at its all-time worst stage. Most minds do not eagerly divide themselves to the extent of transforming this noise of the pairing between societal comparison and identity formation to quicken the pathway towards personal individuation, and in todays times this is more than ever a threat to the masculine principles development, directly harming the sovereignty of choice that leads to healthy governance. A bubble that becomes even larger and closets the self even further when their social influences are equally non-divisional therefore living an equivalent unconscious state of comparison. Becoming the source of non-individuating competition among friends and uniquely, stretching to romantic relationships when its states are determined by comparison over joint social division towards an individuated harmony curated in a romantic relationship that mutually determines growth parameters. In fact arguably, one could say every non-equal dimension between two otherwise compatible partners is by equal measure descriptive of the depth and breadth of unhealthy comparison emergent from the first social contract that now the symbiosis defines over two individuated partners. Todays lack of depth in our society is mirrored in the relationhsips of most demographics, revealing the widespread issue of individual selves and the self they're meant to uniquely find jointly through relationships unethered through the constraints of being defined by unhealthy comparison, with the shallowness of societies architectures unsurprisingly correlated with the short-term nature of relationships, monkey branching from one to the next with shallowly defined ease as illusory 'empowered choice', never realising that this 'choice' is being extrinsically defined right beneath the noise that cloacks it. We require the mirror of our given society to provide the individual who's healthy response to their society is that yes, they're just a "cog in the wheel" as its misguidedly usually stated in the negative, but the reason for this negative is that its derivative of the given society demanding conformity while forgetting that it is merely "the sum of its parts". To the extent that a given society is healthy, it does not demand anything of the individual but instead demands itself to require the mirror of the individual towards growth, built upon a healthy foundation leading to a healthy feedback loop of individuation no different to any other relationship. The reason why this demand works of course is that it contains the hidden premise that any given society is made in the individuals own image, by comparisons within the tribe that are together meant to forge 'collective reason' which is meant to be emblematic of a given society, defining itself through this collective synthesis which leads to genuine reinvention also reflected in the individual on their natural path of  metamorphosis, not just the compression of noise which perpetuates maladaptive stagnation and resulting decay. The second mechanism at play here in the deterioration of the masculine principle through this first social contract is where shallowness is made in great supply through the efficiency of production creating boundless choice among equally bad options. Shallowness however that is marketed through techniques designed to leverage the knowledge of our biologies evolutionary engineered reward-systems. This information is used against the individual and a society that is defined more by its commerce than by its art is inevariably going to turn 'individual' into sellable ether and 'home-grown business' into a machine that sells the ether as efficiently as possible as the solution to the loss of the individual via comparative driven purchases from equally shallow sources that become weaker in supply at each iterative cycle towards cultural degeneracy. However what's important to note is that once the individual salvages the return of their soul an interesting transformation emerges.

Once the first contract between self and society which previously threatened the individuals existential growth via boundary obstruction is discovered as the contract violation that it is, threat transforms back into self-knowledge. Self-knowledge of what one is still yet to become no longer through unhealthy comparison but revelation from what their respective society still lacks in its prevailing collective-knowledge and therefore societal image. As the self moves further back into its status as a genuine individual and stronger along its path towards individuation, one that contradicts all mirrors including demographic ties which is a choice by necessity rather than idealism, increased insight on the contract violation combined with sustained maturity leads individual to often redefine its role as someone that helps restore the health of the contract itself. Aka, restoration of the masculine principle back into the individual to carry out its rightful purpose in aiding the design and passage of their respective tribe and or society. Masculine anxiety, gone. Masculine neurosis, gone. Masculine perturbability, gone. Masculine calm, returned. Masculine purpose, returned. Masculine solidarity, returned. And ready to be put back into realities legal clause governing the reasonability of the masculines continued existence following this restoration of its sovereign identity. A sovereign identity which is symbiotic to its relationship with reality, as will be further defined in the third social contract.  

As shallow comparison meets the obstruction of meaningful choice and therefore the decay of sovereign will, so too then the obvious path between self and society, and with that, a conscience that often leads to neurosis as expressed in todays modern mental health epidemic. All things being equal, a healthy conscience is the bedrock of a healthy functioning masculine principle as it provides the fuel to the fire of an already aligned and engaged purpose driven existence in as much as the individual is already aligned with its path of individuation. Obstruct the conscience through shallow societal reason and 'the self' will equally misweigh the balance between its wants and needs with the needs of a given societ. Continually informing the self's essence that not only what it wants as programmed by society is out of alignment with its needs but that what society says its needs are totally out of alignment with the intrinsic desires of what the self wants to truly give. The mirror image of socities wants in the western world is that of more commerce, less nature, more problems in relationships as that leads to more isolation which equals more digitized selves and therefore more likes and subscriptions which it also wants, more trauma as that leads to more diagnoses which is also good as that leads to more medications that can be sold, more people on welfare because that leads to more mindlessness which also leads to more internet use and further deterioration of relationships and all for one thing. The accumulation of immature power born out of the mismatch between the conscience of self and the conscience of society. Society has done great damage to its conscience through the recursive lost of individual conscience, and together, they have eroded one another towards the world we are all a collective part of today. The person now born out of the image of society rather than its symbiotic relationship in the growth of its individuality, with little conscience happily erodes another as its societally reinforced via the dichotomy between the objectification of the individual which the persons conscience mirrors combined with the corruption vs the dual objectification of any meaningful security governance within a given society like that of the police force, CIA and FBI. Their erosion, erodes not just the society, but the erosion of the individual that gets injured by the person that's been programmed by the death and decay of their moral structures. Further too then, when the persons programming is influenced by demographics that denounce morality due to the weaknesses in its reason rather than seeing morality that follows a path of evolution equal to the evolution path followed by maturity as opposed to a failure of reasoning itself as many social media influences misguidedly believe and in return, spread in their social following. Thereby making it an even stronger virus that infects the sustenance that protects any mature resolve towards the sanctity of life beyond merely being a philosophical bumper sticker that gets repackaged and re-sold as cheap as culturally possible. Perpetuating the **game theoretic mismatch** between the individuals knowledge of the societal contract and society itself through pedastallised ignorance masquerading as leadership.

Game theory being a very important lens by which many conflict vs cooperative situations between society and the individual can be defined, encompassing too the outgrowth of respective demographics taking a non-reducible part in a game-theoretic feedback loop of systems level growth vs degeneration in that contract en masse. Because demographics create a very interesting juxtaposition between the first contract between self and society, self and conscience. Given how in one instance where there is the decay of a given societies conscience and as examined the conscience of the individual, the negative impacts of this which can often lead to neurosis followed by mental disorder, as made very visible in some cases demographics can often, if not contributive, be a salvation point for the individual where that contract between self and society is at risk to the individuals development. Personal growth groups unsaturated by meaninglessness often occupied by economically biased self-help is an example of this. That said however, just having the space whereby an individual can express themselves as themselves like in therapy groups similar to variations of "12 steps (i.e. alcoholic recovery groups)" can be its own form of healing as the individual begins to mirror itself through smaller tribes rather than a failed societal self-image it weakly compares itself to. Something that is crucial in a given society in as much as there has been an indirectly favoured breakdown and fracturing of the family unit such as in our own, that otherwise, the individual previously relied upon as the strength and backbone of its self-differentiation over the society in which it dwelled in preparation for taking part in the building of societies image rather than being controlled by it. As families have however become increasingly more traumatised by the economic mismatch between tradition and family rituals as simple as turninng Christmas into an economic opportunity, the trauma has followed on the individual as families increasingly fail to learn the tools that govern healthy development of their offspring, furthering the fracturing that not only can lead to relying on demographics that are positive outgrowths but falling into the hands of negative demographics that led to the inherent need for those positive demographics to begin the individual on the path towards the return to him or herself. When the conscience within a society, its prevailing demographics and therefore the majority of individuals is degraded enough, "All is fair in naievty and power" becomes an incredibly haunting game-theoretic differential between those with the knowledge of power and those without.

Well, I still have more to unravel. But time won't allow it. Hopefully will have recovered slightly more by next week. This free-styled journal is a good measurement of progress of said seizure recovery. Attention still fades in and out sometimes, but the solidarity of my sense of identity in the biological sense is mostly restored. Will have a mixture of completing this in the next entry combined with catharsis towards its next outgrowth. Heh, it’s all just imperturbable reps and sets. When aligned, yes. Best regards.

[oOo]

Diary: Medical School Journal.

Chapter: Life in Experiential Recursion.

Date: November 29th entry.

Type: Brief Reflection.

Entry number: #4.

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This week I’ve felt cornered and out of touch in continuing my recovery, so I am taking a moment to re-centre and RR-calibrate over the weekend to better engineer for the week to come as opposed to focusing on much else despite ground made. Lamotrigine as an anti epileptic has been a life-saver compared to alternatives that nearly completely ruined my mind and any causal tie I had to existential reality. However the mountain still exists, it hasn’t magically immaterialised and so the road to my more or less full recovery (will still need to take lamotrigine for the years to come) and then some still needs to be walked, even intensely ran during stages. I’ve had a lot on my mind over the past week, great insights and tangential connections, though with one hand on the rail still being somewhat required I’m taking this weekend to just silently reflect. That comes especially after having shed a few unexpected tears following my listening to a live performance of *Linkin Park - Numb* (search YT quoted: “Numb (Live) - Linkin Park)  by Emily Armstrong whom replaced lead singer Chester Bennington after his passing in 2017 due to suicide. I’d never heard her sing before, and growing up Linkin Park was my favourite band, so in the beginning I was like “Oh she’s not going to be able to… Oh she’s not truly hitting it…” but then towards the end out of no where I just felt the heart of the entire space, and that’s when the tears came. Chester’s been on my mind all week as well, and I just want to say, for anyone struggling with depression or just any mental struggle of any kind, you can fight through it. You can make the vision of your life at peace with the natural universe at your own will. Chester, experienced incredible life breakthroughs, and yet even Chester was still overcome with depression that eventually signed the last note for him without him leaving anything behind other than his legacy. His passing must be looked at objectively however in the context of the tragedy that took him.
 

Post-2017 following Chester’s passing in July of that year there’s been just so many more new insights on depression that were not as fully integrated into our culture yet concerning rehabilitating the human condition from those states of consciousness. Exercise has proven to be a phenomenal remedy to depression alone outside of far more effective pharmaceuticals. Psychedelics as well with extremely disciplined use not for spiritual wandering, have also opened up new windows we’ve never peered through. Some may be like me where becsuse of my epilepsy for example psychedelics are too risky, in which case cognitive behavioural therapy combined with the first two as being the first strategic battleground established for your movement forward is also newly realised in only the last few years where in the past the intelligence on such conditions was severely lacking leaving any feeling hopeless around conditions like depression or those that overlap which is anything where anyone feels that sense of hopelessness.
 

There is zero evidence that leaves one to suggest that Chester was an exercise junky for example, in fact quite the opposite. His performances actually reveal tremendous insight into his struggle that I don’t imagine has been truly examined. Chester had an extremely sensitive yet explosive personality that allowed him to channel his energy into his core focuses. In the context of a world culture had not made clear sense of and the growing disconnect following the early 2000’s that Linkin Park connected with their base on, the distance between the experiences of his lived performances, which were incredibly demanding because of the heights he could reach, and his regular life nested amidst what can now be seen as the beginning departure of what could have been genuine individualism into something that better reflects digital sheep’s of the modern era these days, his inner life would have found it extremely difficult to integrate all of his difficulties combined with not only our lack of understanding on the condition but the cultural disconnect that also still existed concerning those with genuine struggles with mental challenges like these. 

In learning from Chester’s context then, I cannot stress enough the importance of people grounding their life difficulties not only on a personal existential level but also how the intelligence of your energy is spread in other areas. Taking responsibility for the use of your energy becomes its own weapon we can become its own sense of self-esteem for you. Moreover, your challenges must be seen through both our cultural limitations regarding the present inability to see you who you are through what best caters for your personal recovery but also through the progress that we have genuinely made in the related area as well to keep you open minded regarding potential interventions you can experiment with. This dual approach, combined with reorienting and re-matching the personal with the existential, fed through organising your time around the most intelligent use of your energy, flips hopelessness to conservative hope that only continually positively reinforces a slow and steady path towards restoring the you in who you are, regardless as to the body and mind we’re given to express that, and with that, your own unique sense of connection with the universe. A reconnection formed from a challenge thats grounded in what we can do culturally and who we can be in that path, while reconnecting with what can be done on a personal level that unites the paths overtime, consolidating a lost sense of agency which continual evidence to the contrary that now makes you feel more like the creator you are in your own way. Your life matters. You impact all of us in your own way. That is forever your power. As much as there is power in social unity, that social unity is only as strong as it teaches the individual to find unity within, this is a necessary separation with the collective that instructs external unity via shared individual sovereignty. Thus may we all find out path. And may wisdom be our teacher along that path. 

An individual must learn to understand their unique biological profile in the context of the environment in which it lives, to turn conformist living to adaptive individual thriving that brings the same harmony through their own unique symmetry with the environment. They must understand how their energy differs from others. What positive vs negative impact they can have with their energy on one person vs another. How their purpose is defined by who they are and what their environment genuinely needs more than who they have been told they are and what they have told to be or what they believe they must look up to. Following, everything shifts back and fourth between the balance of the life one has constructed through these forces and the impact this has on the environment around them, continually learning through the evolution. Depression often flips this narrative, and in Chester’s position he would have felt so incredibly alienated in spite of his supporting surroundings, the pull of the standards that he had reached combined with now the expectations of others, and the pull of his inner struggle that was there before his band even began together, paradoxically turned his acclaim into an irreconcilable stretch between the two poles. This eventually broke him. An individual must become the reaction upon their environment to truly live through the fire of their essence rather than having their natural fire turned against them. Nelson Mandela possessed a powerful, empathic, sensitive and disciplined personality, it was his discipline in navigating between the individual within and unifying it as a channeled social narrative outside that not only united him but brought strength and fuel to both causes. At first, bringing energy back to oneself from the core within will sometimes be more challenging than the struggles like that someone with depression can have, overcoming this threshold however is where the future stares back and the path becomes a clear path forward that instead of just being an upward climb on a mountain, refuels you properly through each life cycle. Which is precisely what life does and how life is meant to behave, intelligently meeting cycles with cycles to finish with the elegance of the symmetry of nature we are still to make sense of today, aligning with its laws as best as we can then, is the definition of our future harmony through the inner/outer integration from those initial required breakthrough periods. 

“Each one, teach one. May each, become my own lesson I must learn, study, revise. And… Be taught by.”

Chester, one of my idols growing up.

R.I.P Chester. 
 

Edited November 29 by oOo

[oOo]

Diary: Medical School Journal.

Chapter: Life in Experiential Recursion.

Date: December 4th entry.

Type: End of Year

Entry: #5.

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Completing an entry earlier this cycle:

Weekend getaway to an exotic island.

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The month of December is entirely devoted to calibrating the signal for the beginning of next year. 

As a side-note, interestingly I recently heard Jordan Peterson use Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche as an example of how he was able to condense what would take an entire book for most people into a single sentence. Well, I haven't read it, I've just read the first page and so far, I can condense the entire page into a single single sentence. Presently, I am not interested in sharing the surmise. Personally, I see Friedrich as suffering from the same plight that many intelligent people suffering from, raising obviously important questions that to others seem inconsequential; the outcome resulting in his book coming across as more grandiose than it needs to be in order to stress-importances that are otherwise needless in the right social company. Because to a genuinely intelligent person, not only does Jordan Peterson's remark fall far from reality, his pages read more like a philosophical soap opera more than the level of cross-domain syntheses the subjects deserve (its not merely philosophical masturbation), so much so that if you were not a careful observer you could even call it pseudo-intellectualism. I of course and I imagine my reader does as well outside of quantum time-travelers (UFO's of the 'alien' sort have been aroudn for however many years we don't know so temporal variations there are very possible), come at his work as a modern viewer, capable of traversing the globe city to city on a whim to re-contextualise my experience week to week, giving my own short-sightedness time to breath through the influx of purpose-driven multicultural 'indoctrination'. It isn't that his work is outdated, work is evaluated for the prominance of its genuine dinosaur teeth not its expiry date. Anyhow. I'll give it a gander more before the end of the year, ""Philosophical Soap Opera's"" are better than todays AI slop after-all, with double quotations used for Stardom-Punch!

As an affirmation to myself, every day needs to be treated as if I am entering a cathedral of daily prayer, centering myself with the deepest and most most profound aspects that make me. The heart. The mind. The core. The drive. Intensifying the synergy of my energy through every centre and ever more greatly even hour by hour so I can open the door to January 1st as imminantly as possible. Time for this month will become who I obey, worship and honour, reuniting with the sacredness of time itself. With the incubation of all of life's wisdom that is possible for one mind to experince, for one body to endure and for one heart to connect to, through and beyond the pain to a story that is worth teaching and learning from deeper into the seconds. It's the seconds that come to mind in this moment when I think of the missing rapture that has infected me most and what I believe to be mirrored by the least of what civilisation has accomplished. And that isn't limited to the practicality of Seneca, at the visceral felt level is where 'moment to moment' sentience speaks the greatest of its untruths, and who a person is in the 'blank slate' of the present moment more than who or what we are fighting for inside the dream that is imprisoned by those seconds. Case and point, mismanaging the mastery of regulating my energy has resulted in a heart that has pulled back, gone too close or just off-centre from the greatest of a joyful balance that from that competence. Of course, meta-consciousness ego-aware is required to be able to contextually map one's present state compared to who they otherwise could be or should have been if they had of instead done x, y, z relating to their wisdom, with exercise being the most common "go to" relatable example, and this is all I mean analogically, with certain specialised practices I do for example that fall outside common consumption where I'm unhappy with the personal resolve to date concerning. Aka, I don't want to start January 1st where it feels like I'm entering into the year that starts off as a philosophical soap-opera when it comes to simply getting all of my clearest signals through the noise under-wraps when all it required was for me to day by day synthesise those track till completion by the end of the year. But its fascinating you know, most of people's lives and I would include much parts of my own as I didn't know any better during those periods, is filled with just so much absolute bullshit full stop, and yet we call that 'good cinema'. And that this is all people should be trying for in their lives. "As Long As It's Good Cinema" is the turn of the flipped coin, not anything close to "The Will to Truth" (returning back to the first page of Friedrich's book, Beyond Good and Evil), and so I suppose we get to juggle multidimensional ironies in this single sentence here when that's all held in context. And on top of the obvious ironies, the one no less being that I plan to stretch myself as theatrically throughout each of these days till January as modern day representations reflect Friedrich through serious facial expressions, attire, oh and of course how could we forget the "Just-as-serious" affirmations of Jordan Peterson. Which we of course need by the way, otherwise we wouldn't sell nearly as many tickets that are sold based on 'passion per x number seconds'. Painting another irony. That is, the passion that Jordan maintains is the exact minutia I am looking for in my own second to second being when it comes to the particulars of the interconnection of parts of my nervous system. Because I have passion, but its the particulars. The way the wind moves against the hairs along our eye lashes kind of particulars, with the depth of understanding how it impacts the moment to moment rapture of our soul as it traverses the layers of life's narratives. A sentence that proves at least relative to my own narrative that to at least some degree, 'soap opera' even 'philosophical soap opera' is necessary if we are to have a "Will to Truth" that is truthful to the embodiment of experience that encompasses the raw felt experience the way both the lyric and the voice weave another world with the finest of attention to detail only to its furthest authenticity. 

So this is my terporal lock towards the end of the year, and I want it so much that I'm deciding with such INSTANTIATION that I will wait until the second weekend of January given how close the first week is to Jan 1st, before I complete my next entry; likely concluding the earlier part 2 of a previous entry as I said I would. That is, if my consciuosness streams take me there, I do after-all have many areas that require consciousness integration.

And there's just so much that I haven't fully mapped yet, wow, its endlessly fascinating, in this moment I have an echo I'm receiving about the private hospital I want to create within the next decade, following my deep research interests in many areas that combine to a whole. It is SUCH a PIVOTAL time in history where how we view the medical profession, and with that what the definition of a medical hospital encompasses, inspires so much reinvention that it becomes an obvious path for me to vehemently pursue. The most beautiful aspect here is that it is actually possible for me to do, albeit requiring an unsurmountable effort in so many areas from myself to actually accomplish to the limits I want to achieve. The fact that it is a potential that genuinely exists in the universe for me to bring to life, it should only be pursued by those who devote themselves to "The Will to Truth" that in the end, tells a story that cannot end with somoene not having treated their life with a sense of sacredness that carries over into everything they do. And that they "Will To Do" into those finite "Seconds of Truth" that get a reading on 'Being' relative to its soul yearnings, seconds which are entirely invisible relative to where there is the "Ache of the Zombie", which lives like an umbrella across so many demographics of humanity in these modern times sadly, the mask worn to hide as well the absence of any philosophical truth serum's working to any great effect there, unless you're a 'natural'. Of which no one is despite 'natural strenghs' as all true virtue therein, must be carved naturally, as falsity that is anything but always reveals itself in our blindness of the whole, which as a rule of thumb can be measured in our denial of the absolute or the delusional fervour in which we weaponise it in speech or act.

Just look after yourselves. Focus on the practicals of life, and treat the end of year that is purely true to the Will of Your Truth, as Friedrich would say despite my slight contextual rephrasing.  

Here's to the coming New Year! Let's allow the Soap Opera... To continue.

[oOo]

Diary: Medical School Journal.

Chapter: Life in Experiential Recursion.

Date: December 21st entry.

Type: New Years Resolution Time Stamp

Entry: #6.

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Early New Year’s resolution, I think it’s a great idea to actually just start mapping them a few or more days out to mark January 1st with a deeper foot in the mud you kinda want to be in.

So after analysing different videos on YouTube I came to the realisation that my empathy, something which I always took as a trait I could take pride in, isn’t actually as good as I thought it was. To that end, I want to mark it in the cement in time for it to be walked on that 2026 is going to be devoted to identifying every weak point that exists, mapping the different kinds of empathy, how empathy influences societal an cultural  trends, where I measure against all different kinds of benchmarks there, and the various roles I need to start understanding more deeply that empathy plays between me, all of my relationships, and the world in general across different levels. This is what my first next post will be dedicated to and I will probably cement this mapping first before I begin with any other aspect of a previous journal entry or any future entries I create, just because of what a massive role I believe empathy plays in both the unconscious and conscious construction of self that empathy plays, how we feel and feel with the word around us, and the constructions of the world, each other in that process and the dynamics that interplay there.

I have a few areas off the top of my head that I’d like to dig deeper into actually gauging where I am in my empathy, however it’s an area I believe I need to have more reflection on before I community my perceptions. 

Empathy is such a core part of medicine in many unseen ways both with respect to where it is and needs to be acknowledged more, along with its absence and needs to be corrected. Medicine more and more is selecting based on natural empathy and although this is good, the more we believe that something is already there, the more blind we will be to potential improvements.

Very minor, but even though Nietzsche may habe been a grandiose narcissist, i was a little peeved some days later about how I didn’t encompass my thoughts through the lens of the many life difficulties I recall hearing that he had, including sicknesses nonetheless, that whole box that I am yet to put a proper research phase into. Arguably, irrespective of any grandiosity related to a mental disorder which deserves its own kind  of empathy, any grandiosity at all from any one human being depending on the circumstances, can be activated more purely as a response to the suffering itself as its own survival mechanism. And without understanding narcissism on a deeper level, I can see how the disorder related narcissism, can in some ways be attributed to being a survival mechanism.

Lastly, in part this entry comes from a recent tragedy that happened on a city that I know which I don’t want to put light on in this entry, however it shook me pretty heavily, and still kind does, and even right now I want to understand those roots, and understand why I haven’t yet understood in a way where it’s truly life changing as a cliche way of putting it. There’s a lot I’m yet to fully understand on many levels, and I don’t like the passive way in which my existence’s confidence just goes over it in a way in which I feel is too surface level, despite the depth at which it’s impacted me. So I’m sensing this possible generalised disconnect within regarding the internally felt experience and the way in which this impacts my behaviour, worldviews and empathy in my relationships along with the greater world that I feel I need to interconnect, at least better than I presently am.

Anyhow, The Island? 🏝️ Super cheap, super beautiful and just perfect laid-back atmosphere. Processed a lot of emotions I didn’t realise were there in the slower pace. Put on the backfoot a little earlier about life skills I need to master in 2026. Now prepping for the coming years celebration, looking forward to the new experiences.

Super simple. Super straightforward. Just many phases to stay resilient on. I’ll see where I am February 1st.

Enjoy the coming days! Get your reflections in! 🏝️🎧🎆🎇

[oOo]

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Previous journal Entry (Entry: #6) continued.

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Out of respect for the lives lost and injured, as well as all too, family and close ones affected.

Bondi Beach, Sydney, on 14 December 2025. It happened during a Hanukkah celebration.

Authorities confirmed 15 innocent people were killed in the attack. One of the shooters was also killed, bringing the total reported deaths to 16 (15 victims + 1 shooter). To add, about 40–42 people were injured and taken to hospitals, including at least two police officers. 

These numbers reflect the updated counts from official police and health sources following the incident. 

As a tribute to Jewish tradition, I wish to share a solid take on Ashkenazi faith (dominant sect), helping dispel some of the many falsities  projected onto the tradition itself.

The following further below is directly quoted from Claude 4.5, where it very artistically allures the essence of all eyes with the will to understand.

As a final sentiment to those lives truly affected from me, “Sacred violence is an act of violence against the sacred alone. All they that are strong with only the sacred, have collapsed the need to require strength at all, as all sacred are One and therefore the strongest of All. Love.” - my personal sentiment.

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The Architectonic structure of Ashkenazi Jewish theology

Ashkenazi Jewish theology constitutes one of the most sophisticated and internally coherent religious-philosophical systems in human intellectual history. From the absolute axiom of God’s existence, an intricate edifice of derivative beliefs unfolds with remarkable logical necessity—each stratum presupposing and building upon those beneath it. What follows is a systematic reconstruction of this belief structure, tracing the chain of theological dependence from first principles through cosmology, revelation, covenant, human nature, theodicy, eschatology, and religious practice.

 Level 1: The necessary existent as absolute foundation

The entire theological system rests upon a single axiom: **God exists necessarily**. Maimonides’ First Principle of Faith establishes this as the metaphysical ground zero from which all else derives. In *Mishneh Torah* (Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 1:1-4), he writes that God is the “Necessary Being” whose essence is identical with existence—requiring no external cause. Every other existent is contingent, deriving being from this First Cause. Without this foundation, the entire superstructure collapses.

From divine existence flow the essential divine attributes that determine everything that follows. God’s **radical unity** (*Yichud Hashem*) is proclaimed daily in the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). This is not merely numerical monotheism but ontological simplicity—God admits no composition, no parts, no distinction between essence and existence. **Divine simplicity** means that God’s will is identical to God’s wisdom, God’s knowledge identical to God’s essence. The Kabbalistic elaboration of this unity distinguishes *Yichuda Ila’ah* (Upper Unity)—God’s transcendence surrounding all worlds—from *Yichuda Tata’ah* (Lower Unity)—God’s immanence filling all worlds.  

Maimonides’ **negative theology** represents the epistemological consequence of divine simplicity. In *Guide for the Perplexed* (I:50-60), he argues that positive attributes would imply composition or limitation in God. We can only say what God is *not*: “God is powerful” means “God lacks no power.”  Each successive negation brings us closer to understanding, though the divine essence remains forever beyond human comprehension. This apophatic approach shaped Ashkenazi philosophical theology for centuries, though mystical traditions would develop complementary approaches.

The Kabbalistic tradition introduces **Ein Sof** (literally “without end”)—the absolutely infinite, unknowable aspect of God prior to any self-manifestation. The term originates with Isaac the Blind and Azriel of Gerona in the 12th-13th centuries. The Zohar states: “Before He gave any shape to the world, before He produced any form, He was alone, without form and without resemblance to anything else” (Zohar II, Bo, 42b). Ein Sof is so transcendent that prayers cannot be directed to it directly—this creates the theological necessity for the **Sefirot**, the ten divine emanations that serve as the “connective tissue between the infinite God and the finite world.”

The tension between divine transcendence and immanence produces one of the most significant theological debates within Ashkenazi thought. The **Vilna Gaon** (1720-1797) emphasized God’s transcendence and separation from creation, while the **Baal Shem Tov** (founder of Hasidism) taught that divine presence permeates all existence—even inanimate objects contain holy sparks.  **Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi**, in his *Tanya*, systematized Hasidic panentheism: from God’s perspective, only God truly exists; the apparent reality of creation is merely concealment (*tzimtzum she-lo ke-pshuto*). This debate over literal versus metaphorical divine contraction would define the Hasidic-Mitnagdic controversy. 

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Level 2: Creation’s dependence on divine nature

Beliefs about creation derive necessarily from prior beliefs about God. Because God is absolutely one and simple, creation cannot proceed from pre-existing matter (which would imply dualism); therefore, **creation ex nihilo** (*yesh me’ayin*)—creation from absolute nothing—follows logically. Maimonides accepts this as Scripture teaches, though he acknowledges it cannot be demonstrated with certainty against Aristotelian eternalism.  Nachmanides provides the clearest articulation: creation involves bringing “something from nothing,” yet in Kabbalistic thought, this “nothing” (*Ayin*) is paradoxically “more existent than all the being of the world”—it is the hidden divine source.

Because God is infinite (Ein Sof), the finite cannot simply exist alongside infinity—hence the necessity of **tzimtzum** (divine contraction). Isaac Luria’s revolutionary teaching holds that before creation, only the infinite light of Ein Sof existed. God “contracted” this light to create a *Chalal Panui* (Vacant Void), into which a ray of divine light was emitted to begin creation.  The interpretation of tzimtzum became theologically decisive: Mitnagdim initially interpreted it literally—God actually withdrew His presence; Hasidim interpreted it as concealment rather than absence. Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s paradox captures the Hasidic view: from our perspective, creation appears real; from God’s perspective, only God exists.

The purpose of creation connects divine attributes to human existence. Kabbalah teaches that God created to **bestow goodness** upon creatures capable of receiving and appreciating it. Creation allows God’s attributes to become fully actualized—the attribute of Kindness (*Chesed*) finds fullest expression only when there are recipients. This establishes human beings as the *purpose* of creation: only humans possess the capacity for moral choice, Torah observance, and conscious participation in cosmic repair.

The **Four Worlds** (Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah) represent the graduated chain of emanation from Ein Sof to physical reality. Each world involves greater concealment of divine light: Atzilut (Emanation) maintains pure divine unity; Beriah (Creation) is the first level of creation ex nihilo; Yetzirah (Formation) is the realm of archetypes; Asiyah (Action) contains both spiritual and physical dimensions—our material world being the lowest point where God’s presence is most hidden. The Hebrew word *olam* (world) is etymologically connected to *alam* (hidden), teaching that the world exists through the concealment of the Divine.

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Level 3: Revelation presupposes a God who communicates

The doctrines of revelation depend on prior beliefs about God and creation. Revelation requires a God who is personal and capable of communication—contra the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover who thinks only about Itself. It requires a Creator with purposive will for the world. Without Level 1’s establishment of a personal God and Level 2’s purposive creation, revelation becomes conceptually impossible.

**Torah min Hashamayim** (Torah from Heaven) constitutes the foundational doctrine of Level 3. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 99a) declares: “He who says the Torah is not from Heaven has no share in the World to Come.” Maimonides’ Eighth Principle states that even one who claims a single verse was inserted by Moses on his own authority is “a denier of Torah.” This is not merely a historical claim but a metaphysical one: Torah represents divine wisdom communicated to humanity.

The debate between verbal dictation and inspired transmission reveals significant internal diversity. The maximalist position holds that God dictated specific words to Moses. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his monumental *Torah min HaShamayim BeAspaklariya shel HaDorot*, traces two paradigmatic approaches within the tradition itself: Rabbi Akiva’s approach emphasizes divine immanence and every letter’s significance, while Rabbi Ishmael’s approach holds that Torah is written “in human language” (*ke-lashon benei adam*).  Heschel argued for a “participatory theory of revelation” where the Bible itself is “a Midrash”—divine encounter mediated through human understanding.

The relationship between **Written Torah** (*Torah she-bichtav*) and **Oral Torah** (*Torah she-b’al peh*) demonstrates the organic unity of revelation. Maimonides opens his *Mishneh Torah*: “All the mitzvot given to Moses at Sinai were given with their explanation. ‘The Torah’—this is the Written Torah. ‘And the mitzvah’—this is its explanation [the Oral Torah].” The Written Torah mentions commandments only in passing; the Oral Torah fills the gaps. Shabbat prohibits “work” without defining it—the 39 categories of prohibited labor come from oral tradition. The Talmud (Gittin 60b) declares: “God only made a covenant with Israel for the sake of matters transmitted orally.”

The **613 commandments** (*taryag mitzvot*) structure the content of revelation. Rabbi Simlai taught: “613 commandments were revealed to Moses—365 prohibitions equal to the solar days, 248 mandates corresponding to the limbs of the human body” (Makkot 23b). This anthropological correspondence suggests that Torah addresses the complete human being. The commandments divide into *mishpatim* (ordinances with evident rationale), *edot* (testimonies commemorating events), and *chukim* (decrees without apparent reason). This categorization raises the question of *ta’amei ha-mitzvot* (reasons for commandments): Maimonides argued that virtually all commandments have humanly discernible rational purposes, while Kabbalists viewed mitzvot as having theurgic effects on the divine realm—“conduits for drawing divine energy into the world.”

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Level 4: Covenant transforms revelation into obligation

Covenant (*brit*) creates the binding relationship that transforms revealed content into obligation. Without revelation (Level 3), covenant has no content; without a personal God (Level 1), covenant partners are impossible.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik distinguished two covenant dimensions. The **Covenant of Fate** (*Berit Goral*) corresponds to natural identity—the shared historical experience binding Jews together through collective suffering and solidarity. This is the covenant of Egypt, of common destiny. The **Covenant of Destiny** (*Berit Ye’ud*) is the vocational covenant of Torah and mitzvot, established at Sinai.   Neither covenant is complete without the other: “One may observe the Torah and mitzvot and be fully within the covenant of Sinai, yet at the same time profane the covenant of fate” through abandoning communal solidarity.

**Chosenness** (*am segulah*) has been persistently misunderstood. The term in Exodus 19:5—“you shall be my am segulah”—means “treasured possession” rather than “chosen people.” Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch clarified: “This designation does not imply that Israel has a monopoly of the Divine love and favor, but on the contrary, that God has the sole and exclusive claim to Israel’s devotion and service.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks elaborated: “To be chosen does not mean that others are unchosen… God, having made a covenant with all humanity, then turns to one people and commands it to be different in order to teach humanity the dignity of difference.”

The principle of **collective responsibility** (*kol Yisrael arevin zeh bazeh*)—“all Israel are responsible for one another” (Shevuot 39a)—derives from the covenantal structure. Individual transgression affects the collective; collective merit protects individuals. This mutual responsibility extends both horizontally (among contemporaries) and vertically (across generations).

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Level 5: Human nature enabling covenant participation

Beliefs about human nature logically depend on prior beliefs about God (Level 1), creation (Level 2), and covenant (Level 4). Without a Creator who intentionally designs with purpose, human distinctiveness has no metaphysical ground.

**Tzelem Elohim** (image of God) establishes human dignity and moral capacity. Genesis 1:26-27 declares that humans are created “in Our image.” Maimonides argued emphatically that this is not physical resemblance but refers to intellectual capacity—consciousness, abstract reasoning, and speech. Saadia Gaon interpreted it as “figurative language for God bestowing special honour unto humankind.”  Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook connected it directly to free will: “The essential meaning of ‘the image’ is the complete freedom we find in man.” Kabbalistic interpretation sees it as a “spark of the Divine” (*Nitzotz Elohut*) unique to each person. 

The soul’s structure reveals the layered depth of human nature. Genesis 2:7 states that God “breathed into his nostrils a breath of life” (*nishmat chaim*).  Tradition identifies three primary soul levels: **Nefesh** (life-force, animating breath), **Ruach** (wind/spirit, emotional self), and **Neshamah** (breath, intellectual/spiritual self). Kabbalah adds two higher levels: **Chayah** (life, supra-rational will and faith) and **Yechidah** (singularity, ultimate unity with God). The Zohar teaches that one earns access to higher soul levels through divine service: “When a person is born, he is given a Nefesh… If through divine service he makes himself worthy, he is given Ruach… With greater effort, Neshamah.” 

**Free will** (*bechirah chofshit*) is the indispensable foundation for Torah, commandment, and covenant. Maimonides declares in *Hilchot Teshuvah* (5:1): “Free will is granted to all men. If one desires to turn himself to the path of good and be righteous, the choice is his.” The paradox of divine foreknowledge and human freedom prompted Rabbi Akiva’s famous formulation: “Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given” (Avot 3:15). Maimonides’ resolution appeals to the incommensurability of divine and human knowledge: God’s knowing is utterly different from human knowing, and we cannot apply our categories to determine that divine foreknowledge necessitates events.

The **Yetzer Ha-Tov and Yetzer Ha-Ra** (good and evil inclinations) structure the moral life. Crucially, the evil inclination is not simply evil—Genesis Rabbah (9:7) teaches: “Were it not for the yetzer hara, a man would not build a house, take a wife, have children, or engage in business.” The yetzer hara represents ego, desire, ambition—necessary forces for civilization that must be channeled rather than destroyed. The Talmud teaches that “the greater the person, the greater the evil inclination” (Sukkah 52a), and that Torah is the antidote that enables mastery.

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Level 6: Providence and theodicy presuppose human moral significance

Beliefs about divine providence and the problem of evil depend logically on beliefs about human nature (Level 5) and covenant (Level 4). Free will theodicy requires genuine human choice; soul-making theodicy requires souls capable of refinement; covenant theology provides the framework for understanding divine-human relationship including its disruptions.

**Divine providence** (*hashgacha*) exists in two forms. Maimonides taught that providence is graduated according to intellectual and spiritual development—a tzaddik receives detailed divine supervision while an unreflective person operates within natural causation. Nachmanides mediated: all events reflect God’s direct will, yet natural law represents God’s default mode of operation. The Hasidic revolution, beginning with the Baal Shem Tov, reasserted **individual providence** (*hashgacha pratit*) for every creature and every event.  Rabbi Schneur Zalman linked this to continuous creation: since God creates the universe at every moment, God is necessarily involved in every detail.

The **problem of evil** receives multiple responses within Ashkenazi thought. The punishment/consequence theodicy holds that calamities result from failure to follow God’s law—the classical prophetic model. Soul-making theodicy, articulated by Soloveitchik, argues that “afflictions come to elevate a person, to purify and sanctify his spirit.”  Free will theodicy, developed by Eliezer Berkovits, holds that evil results from God’s gift of free will—if God intervened to stop every tyrant, human freedom would be nullified. Skeptical theism maintains that divine purposes necessarily exceed human comprehension.

**Hester Panim** (hiding of God’s face) provides a distinct theological category. Deuteronomy 31:17-18 links God’s hiding to human sin, but Job and Psalms present inexplicable divine absence. The tradition distinguishes: hester panim does not mean God is absent—like covering another’s eyes, God remains present but temporarily unperceived. Rabbi Norman Lamm categorized four levels: absolute hester (for individuals), survival hester (national preservation despite catastrophe), intermediate hester (moments of intervention amid hiding), and nesiat panim (full revelation in the messianic era).

**Holocaust theology** represents the most severe test of theodicy in Jewish history. Emil Fackenheim argued the Shoah was an “epoch-making event” without precedent. Responses divide sharply. Rabbi Soloveitchik, in *Kol Dodi Dofek*, rejected explanatory theodicy entirely: “In the face of catastrophe we cannot ask WHY, since that question is unanswerable. Instead, we must ask HOW we can grow.”   Berkovits maintained traditional categories while rejecting punishment theodicies as morally outrageous; God’s hiding enables human freedom. Fackenheim proposed a “614th Commandment”: Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories—they must survive as Jews, remember, and not despair. The **Piaseczno Rebbe** (Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira), writing in the Warsaw Ghetto, produced *Esh Kodesh*—unique sermons wrestling with faith amid ongoing catastrophe, discovered in milk canisters after the war.  

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Level 7: Eschatology as the telos of theological history

Eschatological beliefs depend on all prior levels: without a just, powerful, faithful God (Level 1), eschatological promises have no guarantor; without providence (Level 6), reward and punishment lose meaning; without covenant (Level 4), messianic promises have no grounding.

**Olam Ha-Ba** (World to Come) encompasses multiple interpretations. The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 10:1) establishes the foundational principle: “All of the Jewish people have a share in the World to Come.”  The term refers both to the messianic era following the Messiah’s arrival and to the spiritual afterlife where souls reside after death.   These are not alternatives but sequential: individual souls experience Gan Eden after death, but ultimate fulfillment comes with collective resurrection and cosmic restoration.

The debate over **resurrection** crystallizes the Maimonides-Nachmanides controversy. Maimonides understood resurrection as temporary: bodies rise but eventually die again, with souls returning to purely spiritual existence in the World to Come—“there are no physical forms or bodies—only souls… enjoying the radiance of the Divine Presence” (*Hilchot Teshuvah* 8:2). Nachmanides presented a radically different vision: resurrection leads to *permanent* physical-spiritual synthesis—“a body luminous and of more subtle material than our current bodies.” Kabbalistic and Hasidic thought sides with Nachmanides, citing the principle that “the higher something is, the lower it can descend”—ultimate divine perfection must be expressed even within physicality. 

The **Messiah** in Maimonides’ *Hilchot Melachim* will “restore sovereignty to Israel, establish peace with the other nations, and lead the world in the study of science and philosophy.” Crucially, “the Messiah will not make people rich, introduce changes in the Torah, or be required to perform miracles.”  His primary function is pedagogical: creating conditions where more people can pursue wisdom.  Maimonides’ 12th Principle states: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, still I await him every day.” 

**Tikkun Olam** possesses both original Kabbalistic meaning and modern reinterpretation. In Lurianic Kabbalah, it refers to the cosmic drama: divine light was too powerful for its containers; vessels shattered, scattering sparks of holiness throughout creation. Human task is to gather and elevate these sparks through mitzvot and proper intention, eventually completing the cosmic repair. The 20th century saw this term reinterpreted as social justice activism—a significant semantic shift from mystical cosmology to ethical-political engagement.

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Level 8: Practice as the embodiment of theological truth

Prayer and practice presuppose the entire theological structure: a personal God who listens (Level 1), revealed liturgy (Level 3), covenantal community (Level 4), human dignity enabling divine approach (Level 5), and eschatological hope animating petition (Level 7).

What is prayer? The tradition holds both poles in tension. Prayer is **communication with God**—the Talmud identifies it as “service of the heart” (*avodah she-balev*).  But prayer is also **self-transformation**. Soloveitchik distinguished *ma’aseh* (the act of reciting prescribed words) from *kiyyum* (the internal fulfillment, the existential experience of standing before God). He wrote: “Through prayer the individual discovers himself; he reveals his true ‘I.’”

**Kavanah** (intention) represents the inner dimension of worship.  Maimonides instructed: “The mind should be freed from all extraneous thoughts… The one who prays should realize that he is standing before the Divine Presence.”  The tension between *keva* (fixed statutory prayer) and *kavanah* (spontaneous heartfelt intention) structures liturgical experience— tradition demanding both external form and internal meaning.

The **Shabbat** exemplifies how practice embodies theology. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s *The Sabbath* (1951) argues that Judaism sanctifies time rather than space—“the seventh day is like a palace in time with a kingdom for all.”  Shabbat commemorates creation (God’s rest), exodus (liberation from slavery), and covenant (eternal sign between God and Israel). It anticipates the messianic era—“a harbinger of the age-to-come… the transmutation of time into eternity.”  Heschel’s formulation captures the essence: “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.”

The **mitzvot** function differently in rationalist and mystical frameworks. Maimonides argued that “all of Jewish law aims at two things: the improvement of the body and the improvement of the soul… the former is in every case a means to the latter.”   Commandments have rational purposes and moral-intellectual benefits. The Kabbalistic view sees mitzvot as having **theurgic** power—affecting the divine realm, releasing holy sparks, creating unity between the sefirot. The *Tanya* synthesizes: through mitzvot performed with proper intention, humans participate in tikkun—the cosmic repair that prepares for ultimate redemption.

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The rationalist-mystical dialectic across all levels

A fundamental tension runs through every level of Ashkenazi theology: the dialectic between **Maimonidean rationalism** and **Kabbalistic mysticism**. This is not a simple binary but a creative tension that has enriched the tradition.

Maimonides represents systematic philosophical rigor: negative theology, rational purposes for commandments, intellectual immortality, rejection of anthropomorphism.  His *Guide for the Perplexed* attempts to reconcile Torah with Aristotelian philosophy, arguing that *ma’aseh bereishit* (Account of Creation) corresponds to physics while *ma’aseh merkavah* (Account of the Chariot) corresponds to metaphysics. 

Kabbalah represents theosophical depth: the sefirot as divine emanations, tzimtzum as cosmic drama, mitzvot as theurgic acts, the soul’s mystical journey toward devekut (cleaving to God). The Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalah, and Hasidic thought develop elaborate mythical frameworks that complement and sometimes challenge rationalist approaches.

The Hasidic-Mitnagdic controversy crystallizes this tension. The **Vilna Gaon** opposed Hasidic teaching on multiple grounds: panentheism that blurs the distinction between holy and profane; the doctrine of the tzaddik as intermediary; devaluation of rigorous Talmud study in favor of emotional fervor; disruption of fixed prayer times. Yet remarkably, the Gaon himself was “the greatest Kabbalist of his time”—his opposition was not to mysticism per se but to its popularization and certain theological implications.

**Chabad Hasidism** represents the most sophisticated synthesis. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s *Tanya* “unifies Kabbalah and Talmud to explain the mechanics of Creation, the infinitude of God, and the structure of the human personality.”  The name “Chabad” is an acronym for *Chochmah* (Wisdom), *Binah* (Understanding), and *Da’at* (Knowledge)—emphasizing intellectual contemplation as the path to mystical experience. This synthesis demonstrates that the rationalist-mystical divide is not absolute but dialectical.

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The question of dogma and acceptable diversity

Maimonides’ **Thirteen Principles of Faith** represent the first systematic attempt to define Jewish belief. Listed in his Commentary on the Mishnah (Sanhedrin, Chapter 10), they include: God’s existence, unity, incorporeality, and eternality; that God alone is to be worshipped; prophetic revelation; Moses’ supremacy among prophets; the Torah’s divine origin and immutability; divine providence, reward, and punishment; the Messiah’s coming; and resurrection of the dead. 

Yet this formulation provoked centuries of debate. **Hasdai Crescas** proposed only six fundamental principles, criticizing Maimonides for minimizing the requirement to accept all 613 commandments. **Joseph Albo** reduced the fundamentals to three: God’s existence, divine revelation, and reward and punishment—from which eight derivative principles logically follow. **Don Isaac Abravanel** argued that each of the 613 commandments is itself fundamental.

Menachem Kellner’s scholarship reveals that the Thirteen Principles “were ignored for much of the medieval period” and that “Maimonides was the first Jewish thinker to make being Jewish dependent on belief” rather than practice. This represents a genuine tension within the tradition between creedal and practical definitions of Jewish identity.

What binds Ashkenazi Judaism together despite this diversity? Several elements: shared commitment to halakha as binding and divinely revealed; common textual heritage in Talmud, Shulchan Aruch, and classical commentaries; the framework of mitzvot structuring religious life; historical memory of persecution, exile, and survival; and the principle of *elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayyim*—“these and these are the words of the living God”—that sanctifies disagreement conducted for the sake of heaven.

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Conclusion: A living architecture of faith

Ashkenazi Jewish theology constitutes not a static system but a **living architecture**—each generation building upon foundations while adapting to new challenges. The foundational axiom of God’s necessary existence generates, through logical necessity, beliefs about divine attributes, creation, revelation, covenant, human nature, providence, eschatology, and practice. Each level presupposes and depends upon those beneath it.

What distinguishes this theological system is its combination of metaphysical rigor and practical orientation. The most abstract beliefs about Ein Sof and tzimtzum ultimately ground the most concrete obligations of Shabbat observance and daily prayer. The tension between rationalism and mysticism, far from weakening the tradition, has enriched it with multiple voices exploring the same fundamental questions.

The internal debates—Maimonides versus Nachmanides on resurrection, Hasidim versus Mitnagdim on divine immanence, maximalists versus minimalists on dogma—demonstrate a tradition confident enough to contain profound disagreement. As Rabbi Soloveitchik taught, Judaism requires both the Covenant of Fate (shared historical experience) and the Covenant of Destiny (Torah obligation)—neither complete without the other. 

From the absolute foundation of divine existence through eight ascending levels to the practice of prayer and mitzvot, Ashkenazi Jewish theology presents a comprehensive answer to the fundamental questions of human existence: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the purpose of creation? What are human beings? How should we live? What may we hope for? The answers form an intricate tapestry where metaphysics, ethics, mysticism, and law are woven together into a unified vision of reality oriented toward the service of God and the repair of the world.

Edited Sunday at 07:05 AM by oOo

[oOo]

Diary: Medical School Journal.

Chapter: Scientific Research to Philosophical Rigour - Mapping Their Bridge 

Date: Dec 22nd entry.

Type: Research Introduction.

Entry: #7.

 

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Research on Psychedelic to Philosophical Bridges: Psilocybin the Primary

Jiang et al. (Cell, 2025) chemically silenced the retrosplenial cortex during psilocybin administration; that region alone showed zero connectivity change while 560,000 surrounding inputs reorganised, proving plasticity is gated by activity, not merely induced by compound.

The implication is pretty exacting: a circuit active during the window rewires; a circuit silent during the window does not; attention is therefore not metaphorically but mechanistically the variable determining structural outcome. This converts the therapeutic question from "does psilocybin help?" to "which circuits do we activate or suppress during the window to produce which functional engineering?" 30 plus studies below trace the maze to this question, the path I did not expect to intersect so directly with the empathy mapping I outlined in my last entry (part 1).

Enjoy your preparations for 2026, it’s... going to be a big one for all of us in our own unique way. Talk about a definable backflipping ripple effect for humanity. From John B. Watson's blank slate hypothesis redesigning babies to the modern 21st centuries psychedelic switch to doing it with rabies (see study 4 below), the question is, did that idea come before or after the experimentation with psychedelics and was it during psychosis? I'll be able to easily design an experimental therapeutic path by the end of the year for those with epilepsy or worrisome dependent conditions to be able to experiment with psychedelics, something which isn't as nearly remarkable as it is the wave of improving scientific capabilities we're able to ride to make such designs. This, is the more hopeful conclusion to the implications of this work to prioritise in outweigh forces that will invariably use it for purposes that fall outside the structural integrity of what defines a safer society for us all in the future. 
 

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Core studies 

PEER-REVIEWED:

Jiang Q, et al. "Psilocybin triggers an activity-dependent rewiring of large-scale cortical networks." Cell. 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.11.009

Shao LX, et al. "Psilocybin induces rapid and persistent growth of dendritic spines in frontal cortex in vivo." Neuron. 2021;109(16):2535-2544. nih DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.008

Wickersham IR, et al. "Monosynaptic restriction of transsynaptic tracing from single, genetically targeted neurons." Neuron. 2007;53:639-647.

Callaway EM, Luo L. "Monosynaptic Circuit Tracing with Glycoprotein-Deleted Rabies Viruses." Journal of Neuroscience. 2015;35(24):8979-8985.Osakada F, Callaway EM. "Design and generation of recombinant rabies virus vectors." Nature Protocols. 2013;8:1583-1601.

 

Psilocybin neuroplasticity mechanisms

PEER-REVIEWED:

Ly C, et al. "Psychedelics Promote Structural and Functional Neural Plasticity." Cell Reports. 2018;23:3170-3182. DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.05.022

Moliner R, et al. "Psychedelics promote plasticity by directly binding to BDNF receptor TrkB." Nature Neuroscience. 2023;26:1032-1041. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-023-01316-5

Vargas MV, et al. "Psychedelics promote neuroplasticity through the activation of intracellular 5-HT2A receptors." Science. 2023;379:700-706. DOI: 10.1126/science.adf0435

Hesselgrave N, et al. "Harnessing psilocybin: antidepressant-like behavioral and synaptic actions of psilocybin are independent of 5-HT2R activation in mice." PNAS. 2021;118:e2022489118.

Cameron LP, et al. "A non-hallucinogenic psychedelic analogue with therapeutic potential." Nature. 2021;589:474-479.

Olson DE. "Psychedelics and Neural Plasticity: Therapeutic Implications." Journal of Neuroscience. 2022;42(45):8439-8449.

 

Default mode network and brain connectivity

PEER-REVIEWED:

Carhart-Harris RL, et al. "Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin." PNAS. 2012;109:2138-2143.

Siegel JS, et al. "Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain." Nature. 2024;632:131-138.

Gattuso JJ, et al. "Default Mode Network Modulation by Psychedelics: A Systematic Review." International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. 2022;26(3):155-188.

Carhart-Harris RL, et al. "Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms." Scientific Reports. 2017;7:13187.

Preller KH, et al. "Psilocybin Induces Time-Dependent Changes in Global Functional Connectivity." Biological Psychiatry. 2020;88(2):197-207.

Lebedev AV, et al. "Finding the self by losing the self: Neural correlates of ego-dissolution under psilocybin." Human Brain Mapping. 2015;36:3137-3153.

 

Effects on specific brain regions

PEER-REVIEWED:

Kraehenmann R, et al. "Psilocybin-Induced Decrease in Amygdala Reactivity Correlates with Enhanced Positive Mood." Biological Psychiatry. 2015;78:572-581.

Roseman L, et al. "Increased amygdala responses to emotional faces after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression." Neuropharmacology. 2018;142:263-269. Sage Journals

Stoliker D, et al. "Neural mechanisms of psychedelic visual imagery." Molecular Psychiatry. 2024;30:1259-1266.

Kometer M, et al. "Activation of serotonin 2A receptors underlies the psilocybin-induced effects on α oscillations, N170 visual-evoked potentials, and visual hallucinations." Journal of Neuroscience. 2013;33:10544-10551.

 

Clinical studies and therapeutic mechanisms

PEER-REVIEWED:

Davis AK, et al. "Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial." JAMA Psychiatry. 2021;78(5):481-489. PubMed

Carhart-Harris RL, et al. "Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression." New England Journal of Medicine. 2021;384:1402-1411. Sage Journals

Goodwin GM, et al. "Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression." New England Journal of Medicine. 2022;387:1637-1648.

Griffiths RR, et al. "Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer." Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2016;30:1181-1197. PubMed Central

Gukasyan N, et al. "Efficacy and safety of psilocybin-assisted treatment for major depressive disorder: Prospective 12-month follow-up." Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2022;36:151-158.

 

Comparative psychedelic studies

PEER-REVIEWED:

Li N, et al. "mTOR-dependent synapse formation underlies the rapid antidepressant effects of NMDA antagonists." Science. 2010;329:959-964.

Moda-Sava RN, et al. "Sustained rescue of prefrontal circuit dysfunction by antidepressant-induced spine formation." Science. 2019;364:eaat8078.

Morales-Garcia JA, et al. "N,N-dimethyltryptamine compound found in the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca, regulates adult neurogenesis in vitro and in vivo." Translational Psychiatry. 2020;10:331.

Raval NR, et al. "A Single Dose of Psilocybin Increases Synaptic Density and Decreases 5-HT2A Receptor Density in the Pig Brain." International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2021;22:835. PubMed Central

 

Critical Analyses

PEER-REVIEWED:

Vollenweider FX, Preller KH. "Psychedelic drugs: neurobiology and potential for treatment of psychiatric disorders." Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2020;21:611-624.

Van Elk M, Fried EI. "History Repeating: Guidelines to Address Common Problems in Psychedelic Science." Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. 2023;13:20451253231198466.

Calder AE, Hasler G. "Towards an understanding of psychedelic-induced neuroplasticity." Neuropsychopharmacology. 2023;48:104-112.

Carhart-Harris RL, Friston KJ. "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics." Pharmacological Reviews. 2019;71:316-344.

Aday JS, et al. "Great Expectations: Recommendations for Improving the Methodological Rigor of Psychedelic Clinical Trials." Psychopharmacology. 2022;239:1989-2010.

 

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GOOD LUCK IN YOUR PREPARATIONS FOR THE NEW YEAR.

 

 

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Edited yesterday at 03:03 AM by oOo

[UnbornTao]

Oh boy