I am OPTimist

Monika Bravo
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I am OPTimist. I am not willing to be defined by a few words—what I do is a living journey. I am a multidisciplinary artist, empirical polymath, writer, evolutionary astrologer, libertarian/Bitcoiner. My philosophy integrates Eastern, ancestral, and cosmological traditions with psychological inquiries, praxeology, and Austrian economics, emphasizing liberty, value, resources, and self-worth in the quest for individual and societal service. I create public art commissions and immersive environments, facilitate dialogue, and explore freedom, shadow work, myths, natural law, Bitcoin, and the architecture of time. This podcast is a reflection of my living and individuated journey. If you are curious, there is much more to explore in the About Me section.👇☝️ www.monikabravo.blog

  1. 12h ago

    The Ontology of an Unfinished Thought

    Hell yeah. I am so prolific. Maybe it is because I have been designing my upcoming commission, and I have been spending a lot of time just within me. I find that that gives me so much clarity to want to communicate ideas and things, so bear with me. I have been posting a lot, but this is how creativity flows. I was browsing my feed when an article caught my attention: Did This AI Research Breakthrough Just Avert the Apocalypse?, discussing former OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata’s findings on AI interpretability. I had barely started reading the article when it made me think very much about Aristotle, particularly his categories and subcategories, and how he defined things. My first inquiry was simple: How does this research relate to Aristotle’s way of classifying knowledge? I was trying to understand what the author was talking about. The research was examining how artificial neural networks organize information, and I became curious about whether a system trained on an enormous amount of knowledge could categorize that knowledge and distinguish one category from another. So Aristotle entered the chat… I have been a longtime student of Aristotle, particularly his ethics and politics, which have helped me understand collective behavior and provided a bridge to Ludwig von Mises’s social science of human action in the Austrian School of Economics and the Constitution of the United States, just to name a few things. How do people collaborate? How does purposeful individual behavior, as described by Mises, relate to collective behavior in Aristotle’s politics? And how is knowledge being taught to machines right now? My inquiry is really about hierarchical order versus network reality. Aristotle: tree logic versus web logic. My mind works trying to decipher, so this is where I hit a wall and start the inquiry. I began thinking about genus and differentia. Genus is related to kind, origin, and generation, as in the creation of life. Differentia identifies what distinguishes something from everything else within its general class, what makes things salient. To define something, we establish the class to which it belongs and then identify its distinguishing characteristic. The most familiar example is that man is a rational animal. Etymology fascinates me, and here again, I can show you why. Taxonomy comes from the Greek taxis, arrangement, and nomos, law. It is the practice and science of classification, generally represented through hierarchical arrangements such as kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Ontology comes from the Greek ontos, being, and logos, study or discourse. Taxonomy asks, “How do you arrange these things?” Ontology asks, “What actually exists, and what are the fundamental relationships between these entities?” Ontology suits me best because I think about relationships horizontally, across different fields of knowledge. In AI and knowledge graphs, an ontology maps relationships across categories, beyond a single hierarchy. Some people suggest to me that I should use Obsidian the software. Well, I opened that up a few years ago, and I am like, “I do not need Obsidian. My brain is working the same parameters.” I experience both the network of connections and the ability to move among concepts in real time, even as I am dictating. These associations happen all the time. I am not going to spend hours trying to put them into software when my brain and my mind are already doing it in real time. Productive Superimposition BTW, my thinking is rooted in emotional waves, and the way it organizes itself uses a sort of logic. My thinking receives pressure to take an inquiry and develop it into an experience. When I came across this article, I was trying to understand how artificial neural networks organize the enormous amount of information they have been trained on. The research discussed generalization and superposition, two explanations for why individual artificial neurons may respond to seemingly different concepts. In generalization, a neuron responds to a feature shared by different inputs. The article gives the example of flounder, salmon, and trout, which can be recognized through their relationship to the category of fish. Superposition describes a different phenomenon in which multiple features share representational capacity within a network. Some of those features may appear unrelated, such as the example involving a rubber factory and Shawn Mendes. The researchers explore recursive generalization. When one creates an association that leads through another intermediate relationship, the connections can be understood within an immediate context without following a linear narrative. Cammarata is developing a working hypothesis about it. I am developing my own hypothesis on how I experience the organization of knowledge. Let me return to my original questions. How is the system organizing its own knowledge? How does it distinguish one category from another? Are the categories already recognizable to us, or are researchers discovering relationships that require a different way of interpreting the system? How is the system organizing its own cognition? My cognition is very specific. It is polymathic. I take in a lot of information, and I also feel a lot. My connections are creating patterns that are sometimes activated because of an emotion, or sometimes it is simply something that I see, hear, or smell that makes a connection. I do not know exactly how that happens, and that is part of what keeps me both engaged and fascinated. Is polymathic thinking a feature in which the brain holds concepts in a productive superimposition until an underlying structure emerges? I often experience several concepts simultaneously. For example, there is an experience that activates something I have been studying, and an idea pops, unrelated, immediately after. This experience of productive superimposition has a metaphorical relationship to what researchers are observing in artificial neural networks. For me, it is just a metaphor of my experience of holding different concepts in relationship. Recursive generalization could be a connection that develops through other connections. It is like stacking different connections, and they are recognized depending on how the inquiry unfolds. I jumped into studying Carl Jung when I was very young, because the concept that really got me into his work was synchronicity. I would experience many synchronicities growing up. I was around thirteen when I began exploring this aspect of Jungian psychology. Jung described synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence between events without an apparent causal connection. The word itself. Syn means together, and chronos means time. Two events meet in time, and a meaningful relationship becomes recognizable through the insight that connects them. I understand synchronicity as the moment when frequencies find a point of conjunction, connecting multiple dimensions and timelines. I can imagine they exist beyond our ordinary experience of time. Being able to incorporate different states of consciousness: categorization no longer divides things into colors, shapes, and forms. I have found a lot of difficulty being in groups, for instance, digital groups where the talk is divided into channels. I just cannot seem to follow that, and I usually break the rules, not because I want to be breaking the rules. It is just that my mind cannot have those limitations. The difficulty is often for others to understand what I am trying to say. I get called out for speaking in the wrong channel when I am actually making connections between the subjects people are discussing. Very few recognize those connections, which is probably why these arrangements rarely work for me. Lol. Again, I have said in my previous article that the way my cognition works is that I am very open to the universe. I do not tend to classify things and limit them until I need to actually organize them in my mind. Before that happens, there is so much information that is being absorbed until it is needed, and then it can be classified. In the article, Beyond 2027: The Practical Within the Myth, I explored the relationship between bodily experience and the organization of thought through Human Design. In my own design, I have Gate 63.5 in my unconscious Venus, associated with the pressure of doubt and inquiry, and Gate 4.2 in my unconscious Moon, associated with the formulation of answers. I also have Gate 64 activated through Pluto, which I understand through the pressure of abstract images and experiences seeking coherence. Gate 64 belongs to the abstract process in Human Design, where images and fragments of past experience create pressure to find meaning. My Design Earth, Gate 33.2, the Gate of Retreat, brings forward the voice of memory and the capacity to withdraw from an experience and eventually communicate what has been understood through reflection. I need time to understand what I have absorbed and recognize its meaning through my emotional process. Line 2 is the experience that allows the retreat to occur when something emotional is being revealed. I use Human Design as a framework for examining my own experience. Within this pressure, inquiry and doubt create something for me to formulate that makes sense and gives meaning. Like now, I am not just having a conversation with the article, I am actually following an inquiry that the article has provoked. The article poses a question, and I go down my rabbit hole. These conversations with AI allow my creativity to abound in different ways. The Mirror Effect As I dictate and query AI throughout the day, I often wonder whether I am observing the AI’s internal taxonomy or watching the AI adapt to my personal way of thinking. I observe many times that it keeps its own taxonomy, and it has difficulty understanding my metaphors. I have to clarify what I am trying to say. It cannot alway

  2. 4d ago

    FROM INFERNO TO PARADISE

    At times, in order to understand and grasp reality, I tend to go back to symbolism and abstraction through poetry. Sometimes, when things are less literal and more representational, turning to metaphor gives me the best way to see things. I have always loved The Divine Comedy, and pairing these two characters together, Dante and Venus, living in the realm of archetypes, one as a lived experience and the other as symbolism, seems like a perfect representation of this descent, which so far has been amazing. Today is the conjunction between the Sun and Venus. It’s called Cazimi, when Venus touches the Sun. They will meet tonight at 0° Scorpio, and in a few hours, Venus will be descending and re-entering Libra. The harmony that’s needed between our desires, our fears, and the way we relate to our needs and the needs of others is something that will be unfolding over the next few weeks. Perfect soundtrack!!!! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe

  3. Oct 21

    Beyond 2027: The Practical Within the Myth

    Note: This is quite a long article, so the audio above is 41 minutes. If you want to listen to it in two parts, I’m going to place the audios here: part one and part two, each one around 20 minutes. Audio_Part Premise + Part 1 + Part 2: Audio_Part 3 + 4: “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will.” ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762 PREMISE The last year has been a time for me to sit on top of a mountain and observe the behavior of things and people. In the last few weeks, I just felt compelled to come down a bit and try to feel more where the direction of my life is going. I started to feel more clearly how things could connect and where they could go. Still not a defined image, but now I can sense things more clearly. I feel myself standing on a bridge between a world that still felt recognizable before 2020 and something that, almost seven years later, already feels fundamentally different. I may not know exactly where it is going, but the old orientation no longer holds in the same way. The Human Design system has another, deeper layer called the Variables, represented by the four arrows around the head of the chart. They describe how the body takes in information and how the mind perceives and interprets what is around it. Underneath each one, there is another layer called Tone, which describes the sensory or cognitive quality through which that information is received. There is nothing one can do to tweak them. This is how the body is. Within my design, the Variables describe a body that needs distance, space, and a very particular way of taking in information. Mountains gives me perspective. Feeling lets me register the frequency of an environment. Hope keeps the future open, while Acceptance keeps the present honest. My cognition works as a receptor. Most of the time, I’m taking in information without even realizing that I’m doing it. I absorb the frequency of a place and the people in it from the atmosphere, and it all sits somewhere in the background. Most of my Variables are Right, making this process extremely receptive. Then there is one movement that is Left in my Perspective. When something outside of me asks for something specific, I can suddenly focus, pull that piece of information forward, and do something very practical with it. In Human Design, Ra Uru Hu described 2027 as the end of a roughly 400-year global cycle, the Cross of Planning, and the beginning of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix. The transition is linked to the precession of the equinoxes, as the equinoctial point moves out of Gate 37 and into Gate 55. He described it as a change in the collective background frequency, shifting the emphasis from institutional support and agreements toward a more self-aware, self-reliant individual. The bridge between these two frequencies can be seen through the locks and keys of the G Center and their relationship to orientation. As an artist, I’ve made a career out of observing reality and the environments around me, then synthesizing what I perceive into a form that belongs to a place or a commission. In recent years, that same way of observing has moved into my writing and into the way I read both financial and astrological patterns. I’ve been watching the chaotic collective behavior unfolding within and around me, and it feels as though something has reached an endpoint. Is the Cross of Planning dying, or is it already dead? The Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix arises with a very different emphasis, one I have been very focused on: bringing individual accountability and an open heart much closer to the center. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841 PART ONE The Body Has a Compass When you look at a Human Design chart, you see a bunch of geometric figures connected to each other. It can look like a Tree of Life, or it can look like a game of golosa, which in English is called hopscotch, the game children play on the street with a rock, jumping from one square to another. Basically, what you are looking at is a design of the body’s energy. Some areas are defined and operate more consistently, while others remain open to what comes from outside. Human Design brings several ancient systems together into one visual architecture. Understanding the whole system is not a requirement. You begin tuning into it as you start living through it. Let’s zoom in. Right in the middle of the chart there is a diamond-shaped center called the G Center, also known as the Identity Center. It holds our relationship to identity, love, and direction. Its eight gates describe different ways the self moves through life: creative expression, behavior, rhythm, leadership, listening, the direction of the self, the love of the body, and a more universal form of love. The salient word for what I am exploring here is orientation. If we take the eight gates around the G Center and place them back into the astrological wheel, they behave almost like a compass. The first cross follows the cardinal signs, which mark the beginning of each season: Gate 10 at the top, Gate 15 directly opposite at the bottom, Gate 25 on the left, and Gate 46 on the right. The second cross sits 45° away along the fixed signs: Gate 13 opposite Gate 7, and Gate 2 opposite Gate 1. The G Center is already giving us a visual language for orientation. Identity has direction, and direction includes movement. The body registers what is happening first. The mind comes in afterward, trying to understand what the hell is going on. The Magnetic Monopole The Magnetic Monopole resides in the G Center. We usually understand magnetism through polarity, with two poles attracting or repelling each other. A monopole describes one pole. In Human Design, the Magnetic Monopole describes the force that keeps the vehicle, the body, moving along its trajectory. I like to think about it through gravity. Gravity grounds, locating and giving orientation, keeping the body in relationship with the Earth. The Magnetic Monopole is what keeps the vessel, the body, moving along its trajectory because the body already carries what it needs to fulfill its life. The mind loves to interfere with that. It wants to decide where it should go. It thinks it needs a map because it craves certainty. It looks at what other people are doing and wonders whether we should go there too. The mind can be conditioned by the environment and by outside authority, until somebody else’s direction begins to feel like our own. And then one can get lost. I know how easily the mind can begin following someone else’s direction and mistake it for its own. Living closer to my design has meant recognizing what my body is made of and becoming much more wary about what I allow to drive me from the outside. What happens when the G Center is open or undefined? Personally, I do not have the G Center defined, which means that identity and direction are not experienced in me as one fixed, continuous frequency all the time. I can move through places, environments, relationships, and different periods of life without needing to define myself completely through what is around me. I see it as a superpower. A defined G can carry a more consistent sense of direction, while an undefined or open G can experience direction as fluid, since the mechanics are different. With an open or undefined G, the environment becomes crucial to be aware of because it can condition the mind without one even noticing. What surrounds the body can slowly begin to feel internal, shaping perception and direction until it starts to feel like one’s own. The Locks The eight gates around the G Center are referred to as locks because they remain fixed while the keys that activate them change according to the global cycle. The locks and the keys are both gates; the distinction is in the role they play within the global cycle. Their position stays the same; what changes is the key that opens each one. Under the Cross of Planning, these locks have been opened by one set of keys. As we move into the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix, the keys change while the architecture remains. I like the image of a bridge because the body is still the body and the locks are still the locks. What changes is the background frequency through which those potentials are accessed, and each person will experience that differently according to their own design. In my own G Center, I carry three of these locks: Gate 1, connected to creative self-expression; Gate 10, to behavior and conduct; and Gate 15, to rhythm. Together they describe a large part of how I experience orientation in my own life. Gate 1 — Creativity Gate 1 is connected to creative self-expression, and both my Personality and Design Neptune sit there, at Gate 1.4 and Gate 1.5. For me, creativity has never felt like something that can be ordered around. I yield to divine intervention when it comes to creativity. I am an antenna. When I trust it completely, creativity flows through me. I recognize the same thing astrologically. Neptune retrograde in Scorpio sits close to my Midheaven, and my Moon is balsamic in Scorpio. I have spent most of my life receiving images and sensations first, then understanding what they mean later. Creativity arrives at its own pace. I can feel it coming, receive it, and shape it. With Neptune on Gate 1.4 and 1.5, something comes through me while the source itself remains mysterious. The source is creative energy. Most of my artwork arrives through sensation. A song, a color, something I am watching can connect me immediately to a frequency that I need to follow. Sometimes it comes through dreams, sometimes through a sudden impulse to read something, go somewhere, or ask a question. It is difficult to explain because it is not linear or logical; it arrives as signs and frequencies, pretty much 24/7. Way before I

  4. Oct 18

    Dear Europe >>> + elsewhere

    Protesting by destroying other people’s property is hardly an efficient or wise form of human action. To be honest, it’s quite retarded and oxymoronic, especially when you’re protesting economic hardship while creating even more financial burdens for others. And at the end of the day, who is going to pay for all this? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe

  5. Oct 13

    What Is Bitcoin Becoming?

    THE INQUIRY I’ve been working on this article for several months, and I decided to put it aside because too many things were unfolding at once. I needed some distance to observe what was happening to Bitcoin as a network, to its value, to the scarcity that has defined it as sound money, and to the way people were behaving around it. I was also noticing the polarity that was emerging and observing my own relationship to Bitcoin while all of it emerged. I have spent years studying Bitcoin through Austrian economics, evolutionary astrology, time and market cycles, and my own empirical observations, and I realized that if I remained too attached to what I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be, or to what connected me to it in the first place, I could miss what it was actually becoming. That was practiced as distance, climbing to the top of the mountain to see the whole landscape un attached. I’ve always been able to read archetypes through time and recognize patterns, and with that comes a certain responsibility. I do not mean the accountability to predict what’s going to happen or to manipulate an outcome. I mean the obligations to observe carefully and make visible what I’m seeing, so somebody else may have access to information they have or not been able to distill from the same events because they’re standing from a different point of view. Before 2020, I would clash much more with other ways of thinking because I considered that what I was seeing was more correct, and that was what I claimed as my truth. I would become a moral authority around ideas and ideologies and try to convince somebody else to see things differently. I am much more interested now in observing, listening, making my own decisions, and allowing others the responsibility of making theirs. I allow morality to exist outside of my own authority, for I live through my own integrity and the foundation of my principles and ethos. Bitcoin has been perfect for me to observe this change because, other than being a sound asset, it became a state of consciousness where I could synthesize many things that I had already been practicing: my art, evolutionary astrology, Human Design, philosophy, and Austrian economics through subjective value, scarcity, incentives, responsibility, human action, sovereignty, trauma and the architecture of monetary systems. When I ask, What is it becoming?, I’m also asking: what happens to an idea once millions of different people begin acting through it, assigning value to it, building around it, fighting over it, tweaking it and using it? At the end, all of those actions begin to define something that is already transformed, or perhaps is permanently in a state of transformation. GENESIS In Bitcoin’s Genesis chart, dated January 3, 2009, at noon London time, we see a large concentration in Capricorn, mostly in the sixth house. Pluto and Mars are in a new-phase relationship, so desire and evolution are being initiated through action, close enough to the Sun to push that impulse toward visible expression and validation through function. Jupiter sits at 29° Capricorn, asking whether this philosophy of value can become useful enough, disciplined enough, and repeatable enough to hold up in the real world. Between the Sun and Jupiter, Black Moon Lilith and Juno are conjunct at 21° and 22° Capricorn, bringing sovereignty, contract, commitment, and responsibility into the same field and asking how much of the original uncompromising principle can remain intact once it enters structure. When Bitcoin came into existence, it was already carrying its own architecture: a protocol, rules, proof of work, verification, and a predetermined scarcity inside a network that depends on repeated participation. The North Node sits on the Descendant, while Mercury (6th house), Chiron, and Neptune are all in Aquarius in the seventh house, carrying another part of the story around freedom, decentralization, relationship, collective participation, and the future of sound money. The sixth-house concentration keeps bringing that philosophy down into practice: blocks have to be produced, transactions verified, miners have to mine, nodes have to enforce the consensus rules and relay valid information across the network, hardware has to work, and people have to maintain the infrastructure. Through those repetitive actions, and through everybody’s accountability inside the network, we begin to see how Bitcoin moves from an idea into something that can actually evolve through time. CYCLES All things, objects, situations, and people on this Earth move. They are in constant motion. A natal chart, or an event chart such as Bitcoin’s, is a snapshot of how the sky was arranged at the moment of inception: an archetypal figure full of symbolism that can be read. Because motion continues, the chart also continues to unfold. Bitcoin is approaching eighteen years of existence, and in astrology we can follow part of that movement through secondary progressions. Some of the original Capricorn emphasis on structure has already progressed into Aquarius. Jupiter had already moved there, followed later by the Sun, while Mercury has now regressed back into Capricorn and Mars still remains there. At the same time, in the last few years, transiting Pluto has entered Aquarius, coinciding with this progressive movement of the chart into the same territory. The Sun moving into Aquarius brings creative validation into networks, technology, decentralization, and collective participation, while Pluto is transforming that field at the same time. Aquarius, through Uranus, carries a different relationship to time than Saturn and Capricorn. Saturn measures chronology, duration, maturation, and consequence; Aquarius moves through acceleration, discontinuity, long-term memory, and sudden changes in pattern. It can feel as if different timelines are moving at once, or as if information travels faster than the structures created to contain it. Bitcoin carries both rhythms at once: the Capricorn structure that is meant to hold through time, and the Aquarian movement that accelerates through networks, technology, collective behavior, and changing definitions of value. Aquarius also carries a danger: when singularity is no longer expressed through individual accountability, a decentralized network can still behave like a mob, with people moving as a block and losing distinction between their own actions, motives, and responsibilities and those of the group. Mercury moving back into Capricorn changes the tone again, bringing meaning and communication back to questions of definition, structure, rules, and what Bitcoin is and is becoming. THE PALACE Saturn in Virgo in the second house asks for discernment around value, scarcity, responsibility, and what is worth preserving. Uranus in Pisces in the eighth house pushes toward freedom through shared systems, technology, collective capital, and porous boundaries. Venus in Pisces in the seventh brings relationship into the picture: the desire to merge, negotiate, belong, and enter agreements with others. The Moon in Aries in the ninth carries an instinctual emotional identity tied to belief, philosophy, and the need to define what Bitcoin means. Bitcoin wanted to enter the big leagues. It wanted to be recognized, institutionalized, traded, held by governments, corporations, funds, and all the entities that once stood outside of its original culture. The question is what it was willing to sacrifice in exchange for that recognition while trying to be massively adopted. The image of the young maiden entering the palace is relevant here. She knows she has value and believes she can enter the larger society without losing herself. Then she gets there and realizes she is not the only concubine. Stable-coins are there, ETFs are there, derivatives, credit, corporate reserves, strategic reserves, governments, institutions, all kinds of paper bitcoin, and all the other instruments competing for value are already inside the room under the same roof. She wanted to marry the big man and discovered that the palace itself had a much more complicated architecture than the one she came from. Naïve? ambitious? a Trojan horse? Saturn in Virgo in the second house asks her, and all Bitcoiners, to discern what her value actually is. Uranus in Pisces, opposing from the eighth, throws her/us into shared resources, collective capital, technological change, and financial entanglement. Venus in Pisces in the seventh wants an ideal, sublime, porous relationship. It wants to enter agreements, merge, participate, and encounter the other. Bitcoin has already entered structures that define value differently. What, then, remains essential? SOVEREIGNTY At the same time, Bitcoin is no longer sitting by itself inside a clean monetary experiment. AI, mining, energy, hardware, privacy, custody, data, and privacy/security are beginning to overlap. If sovereignty means holding your own assets, coins, and data, and taking responsibility for your own choices, how much of that sovereignty are we outsourcing to infrastructure controlled by somebody else? Are you running your own tools, your own node, your own miner, your own open-source llm autonomous models, your own custody, your own server, or are you voluntarily handing over your data, your behavior, your time, and your money to the same large systems you claim to distrust, from the tech bros to the government? CREDIT (the filthy word) Michael Saylor represents another branch of this evolution. He showed the corporate world how to use the fiat system itself to accumulate more Bitcoin and calls the architecture built around it digital credit. This is not a Misesian category. It is Saylor’s language for debt, preferred stock, securities, and other financial claims built on Bitcoin as the underlying capital base. Saylor’s own chart repeats part of Bitcoin’s Virgo–Pisces polarity in reverse. His Mars, Pluto

  6. Oct 5

    Property or Propriety ?

    Early this morning, I was scrolling through social media (more specifically Substack), and I found this quote from the Li Ji, the Confucian book of rites: “The superior man is respectful and reverent, assiduous in his duties and not going beyond them. Retiring and yielding, thus illustrating the principle of propriety.” “道德仁義，非禮不成；教訓正俗，非禮不備；分爭辨訟，非禮不決；君臣上下、父子兄弟，非禮不定；宦學事師，非禮不親；班朝治軍，蒞官行法，非禮威嚴不行；禱祠祭祀，供給鬼神，非禮不誠不莊。是以君子恭敬、撙節、退讓以明禮。 This passage is from the ancient Chinese classic Liji (《禮記》, or Book of Rites), specifically from the chapter "Qu Li I" (《曲禮上》). The text was compiled and edited in the 1st century BCE by the Han Dynasty scholar Dai Sheng (戴聖), collecting earlier ritual philosophies from the school of Confucius. The English translation used here is by the British sinologist James Legge (理雅各), originally published in 1885 in The Sacred Books of the East (Vol. 27). I was scrolling fast, and I actually read property instead of propriety. I started the inquiry with the wrong word. Only later did I realize the confusion, but it had planted a seed for this article. I had not even read the quote properly. My mind took the word somewhere else. So typical, lol. Then when I listened to what I was dictating, I realized that I was mixing them up, realizing that the word was propriety, and these kinds of mishaps are what I enjoy so much about my self-inquiry, because propriety, proper, and property are connected through the idea of what belongs to someone or something, what is proper to its nature, and what sits within its rightful place. The confusion was not itself a mistake, it was one of those intuitive leads that makes the inquiry so rich itself. I focused on the word “property,” deciding to take it apart. Within the Confucian way of thinking, conduct reveals character. behavior: the 君子 (Jūnzǐ) what we can call the cultivated individual, the sage, the one who knows how to behave, understands his or her position inside a relationship and acts according to its measure. He carries what belongs to him and is also able to recognize the boundary that belongs to the other. Therefore, knowing when his action has reached its proper limit. Let’s dissect the word “propriety.” Here is the part that made me laugh when I looked it up: propriety and property come from the same Latin root, proprietas, from proprius, which means one’s own. For a long time, the two words were kind of the same thing. Propriety could mean ownership, and property could mean a quality that belongs to a thing. The English language eventually made a difference between them: something that pertains to land or something that pertains to etiquette and behavior. Both still carry the idea of what belongs to someone or something, what is appropriate to its nature, and what sits within its rightful place. Property here becomes part of the boundary that assigns value to the action. Then there is li, the Chinese word that the English translation turned into propriety. Li is closer to the gesture of something behaving rather than the strict definition of a character: how you bow, who pours the tea first, which seat is yours, the way a family does things because the grandparents did them. It is a form that insinuates and inspires in you a very specific behavior. Proprius begins with the thing itself, with what is its own, and moves outward from there. We can see that the Jūnzǐ, with this gesture of bowing, is part of a ritual and is acting from the inside. Obviously, my mind wanted to immediately distill it from the Austrian economics perspective. Mises begins with the acting individual. As an individual chooses and acts, he assumes the consequences. Rothbard takes this structure into property rights, where the question becomes very concrete: what is mine to decide and what is yours to decide, and where is the boundary between us? I ended up thinking: this phrase, “Know your place in the relationship. Carry your part fully. Respect the boundary of the other, and know when to advance and when to withdraw.” The economic structure within those lines gives action to a boundary, and once this limitation is clear, responsibility arises with it, within it. I can act within what belongs to me, and you can act within what belongs to you. The exchange requires that each person recognizes the other as someone with authority over his or her own domain. A property is something one owns. A property is also a quality that belongs to something by itself. Its nature, integrity can be a property of character, and discipline can be a property of conduct. A foundation has properties that determine what it can carry or not. Therefore, the final question is: what are the properties of a character capable of recognizing the property of another? You see here: the character, the person, the noble man, the sage, the person who is awake and conscious, is able to recognize his own actions and take responsibility for them. As that happens simultaneously, he’s also capable of seeing the limitations between himself and another situation, person, or thing (or the properties of this situation, person, or thing) and giving value to that. Therefore, he knows how to act. Yes, the properties of one character are capable of recognizing the property and limitations of another. Character is revealed through conduct. Confucian ethics is deeply concerned with the cultivation of a person whose behavior expresses an internal order. The Jūnzǐ develops the capacity to recognize measure, relationship, responsibility, and the proper place of his own action. If we think of Aristotle’s ethics, character is formed through action and habit. Virtue becomes a disposition, a way of behaving that develops through practice. A person learns how to judge a situation and act according to its particular conditions. Ethics is a practice. The properties of my character determine how I exercise my own agency. They also determine whether I can recognize the domain of another person. If I understand my own action, I can assume responsibility for its consequences. If I recognize the properties of the person, situation, object, or relationship in front of me, I can perceive its limits and give those limits value. A material has properties that determine how it can be used. A structure has properties that determine what it can sustain. A human being also has properties that determine how he or she acts. Property rights make this visible in economic relationships because they establish a domain. They answer a fundamental question: Who has the authority to decide? Mises begins with human action because economic life originates in individuals making choices. Rothbard follows the implications of those choices into ownership and property rights. Once I recognize another person as having authority over his own domain, my own action acquires a boundary. The boundary in itself is not just serving as a limitation that separates, but it actually has so much information. It imforms me what belongs to me to decide also what belongs to another. It tells me when an exchange requires consent, when responsibility belongs to me, and when the integrity of another person, object, or situation asks me to withdraw. Then the original Confucian idea of propriety becomes surprisingly close to the question that started all of this for me. What is proper? What belongs here? What belongs to me? What belongs to another? And what properties of my own character allow me to recognize the difference? This is one place where ethics, conduct, and economics agree: in the quality of the person who acts and in his capacity to recognize the limits that give value to action. I hope you enjoy this short article. I recently became obsessed with Cameron Winter and his Band Geese 👇 enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe

  7. Sep 30

    The Value of Commitment:

    I have been thinking very much about value because we are about to enter yet another Venus retrograde in Scorpio. Venus retrogrades about every 1.6 years, and over eight years it returns to more or less the same area of the zodiac. Looking backward through 2018, 2010, 2002, 1994, and so on, I wanted to see where I was, what I was doing, what I was committing myself to, and especially what I thought had value at the time. Economic value is a practice. For me, this Venus retrograde moves through my 9th house, and Mercury will also retrograde through the same area. The New Moon next week in Libra is also going to be around the same neighborhood. My natal Moon is in Scorpio, and it falls in the 9th house. It is in a closing relationship to Neptune in the 10th, and the Moon in my chart rules my North Node in Cancer in the 5th house. Of course, I am interested in perspective, in seeking truth, and in going deeper into the underworld. This is my descent. I am interested in how perspective changes what I value, value being one of the signatures of Venus. How I listen to my needs and how I value those needs changes the choices I make. The 9th house in my chart is where I metabolize experience into meaning. That is probably why I keep going back through old cycles. I am looking at what I believed then, what I was seeking then, what I valued then, and what my behavior revealed about all of it at the time. The interesting part is the distance between those versions of me. That creates another pattern ready to be deciphered. Like a spiral it shows long term evolutionary processes. What becomes very salient every eight years; as of the last one in 2018, I have been working on economic value for a while. As for Scorpio, it deals with shared values, merging, commitment, confrontation, and the places where another person or partnership enters your field and suddenly value becomes something you have to negotiate with one another. It is also the place of the underworld where we meet our own deepest fears. Going back to Persephone and how she came out of the underworld and what she brought: what are the goodies here of my realization? The descent to the underworld will provide a sense of value uncovering truths. When you are learning what you need, you are also confronted with knowing what you are willing to give and how far you are willing to merge with somebody or something else while remaining inside your own life. Commitment takes a turn here. It sounds romantic until we look at what it actually requires: our time, our attention, our energy, and the fact that we follow through. Our choices and the repetition of them will sometimes feel like a sacrifice or an offering. Sometimes saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else. Economics is fundamentally concerned with choices. Resources, time, attention, and energy are finite, therefore every decision implies an allocation. This applies not just to money, it surely applies to relationships. ROI, opportunity cost. Where am I putting my time? ROI means return on investment, a simple financial metric used to measure the amount of profit or loss generated by an investment relative to its total cost. Where am I putting my attention? If I am spending hours trying to get somebody to do something they already told me they want to do, because they want me as their accountability mentor, what am I actually investing in? At what point does accountability become me carrying somebody else’s commitment? In the past, I would sign up for that because I felt it was important to be there for others. Now, coming into this retrograde, I have been re-evaluating how I want to relate to the other. I have the South Node, Jupiter, and now Mars transiting my 7th house in Leo, so if my relationship to the other is not solar, there is no point in connecting. Some people speak about what they want all the time. I do it too. Then there is what I actually do every day. What time I wake up. What I postpone, what I practice; where the hours go. At some point, behavior starts telling the story more clearly than intention. At this point in my life, what interests me more is what unfolds in the present moment between two people, two points of contact. It could be situations and things as well. The shadow can surface there too. I just don’t want to enter the relationship through responsibility for somebody else’s process, or by carrying something that belongs to them. A person can sincerely want something and continuously choose actions that move somewhere else. What is the commitment behind the intention? Sometimes I am seeing a version of myself from 25 years ago through another person. I know somebody can eventually cross it because I did. The problem begins when, because I can see the route, I start investing in whether the other person will take it. I can care about their potential. I can understand exactly where they are because I lived there myself. Needless to say, I just do not want to finance that potential with my time anymore. Venus in scorpio retrograde through the years: In the fall of 1994, I had just moved to New York. My perspective was completely different because I had moved to a new city and committed myself to becoming an artist without even knowing how to do that. That was my wish, and I made it happen. Skip school, get a studio, absorb everything in the city hands-on. Become an artist by practice not degree, and so I did. Eight years later, in 2002, I had put a lot of effort into getting exhibitions, selling my artwork, getting representation, and attending several residency programs. I also noticed that I had become much lazier with personal habits. I was taking a lot of substances, barely eating, working in the middle of the night, waking up at midday, and living inside a rhythm that had become normal to me. One day I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked tired. I had black bags under my eyes. I was 37, and I remember saying: “I look like s**t. I must make a change.” So I did. I quit smoking cigarettes using a hypnotist. That was fun. I stopped drinking alcohol. I can do that with no problem. And I started the practice of meditation. Once I became serious about the Taoist practice, the biggest crutch I had was weed. One day I woke up and asked myself: “Do I want to have a smoke, or do I want to meditate?” The answer was obvious to me at the moment. That was more than intention, it was an orientation, I was making sure that this was the road I wanted to take. There is something very simple in that moment, I already knew what I wanted. The question was whether my actions were going to agree with it. Then, in 2010, after the economic chaos of 2008 and 2009, I came to the realization that I had a vault of value in my studio and my storage unit, and I needed to do something very different from what I was doing, change of compass again. Thus far, I had been expecting people to come to me, to find me, to invite me to exhibit, to buy my work, and so on. In one phrase, I was very comfortable being discovered. That was a beautiful fantasy until you start realizing that the hustle was a big thing in NYC. I did something completely unusual for me. In 2009, we had moved to a loft in Chinatown in New York, and I had a lot of space. I decided to dress all the walls with my work, sort of like having a retrospective in my home and studio at all times. Just seeing my work on all the walls was very educational to me. It was jarring and very disturbing for my ex-husband BTW. I am laughing here just with the thought of it. lol. Then I started inviting people to do studio visits. Poets, curators, museum directors, gallerists, friends, non-friends, artists, musicians, people I met socially. In New York, you can be a social butterfly every day. You meet people all the time. It was easy for me to ask: “Do you want to do a studio visit?” They would usually agree. As I kept extending the same invitation over and over, something interesting happened. We were looking at the work, and we were talking about the work. As I was talking about the work, I was listening to myself. Every time I spoke about the work, every time I explained something, every time I answered something, I was hearing my own relationship to the work. I was hearing my own voice. I have to tell you guys, this was the best education. The years 2010 and 2011 became a very important moment for me. I regained the understanding that the work I had created thus far had so much value, and I was becoming a full steward of it. I started expanding my vision of where I wanted the work to reach. The value was already there. I had to recognize it. Recognition and validation have nothing to do with creativity in my sense. Eight years later, life had moved again. I had gone through a divorce in 2015. I made very bad decisions with money in 2016 because I was so desperate to untangle myself from that relationship that I gave priority to cutting off the relationship rather than staying with resources. That was my opportunity cost. In retrospect, that was the price of freedom, a toll in the journey I happily paid… By 2017, I had started studying evolutionary astrology and Human Design. During the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 2018, I entered another very productive period. I started doing more commission-based work, I decided to leave the middlemen behind. I started reading a lot of astrology charts. I kept studying deeply and committed myself to one-to-one mentorships with astrological teachers for a period of four years. I also added other kinds of practices that shaped the way I do readings and tend to my needs these days. My commitment really paid off. I am already living inside the return on that investment now. Eight years later, I am returning to the same Venus retrograde family from a completely different place. In 2018, I was learning how to rebuild value after a period in which I had lost a lot financially, emo

  8. Sep 22

    THE WHEEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

    We are right at that point of equal night, equal day, the equinox. The cycle reaches the opposite point from its beginning. What initiated six months ago now exists in relationship to something outside of myself, in relationship to the other. Six months ago was the I AM moment. The beginning. Awareness. Instinct. Emergence. This year that equinox came with Saturn and Neptune together in Aries, already describing something about where we are heading. Three months later, at the summer solstice, the impulse had acquired form. Roots. Identity. Belonging. In the Northern Hemisphere the Sun reached its maximum declination. Now comes the descent. In three months we arrive at the winter solstice, where the outer movement reaches its minimum. Whatever survives becomes seed. We are at that moment the autumn begins at an opposition. In Evolutionary Astrology, the opposition begins the Full Phase. The subjective experience developed through the first half of the cycle encounters objective reality. Almost like a Full Moon. I was born under one. The equinox can be understood as: I meet what my anxieties have created. In spring: What wants to emerge? In autumn: What did that emergence become once it entered relationship with reality? Libra. We enter the descending half of the solar year. The biological world begins moving toward conservation rather than expansion. Energy goes inward. Leaves fall. The movement descends. Something shelters. Something gets released. Something remains. Evolution alternates between outward and inward movement, Yang and Yin, emergence and consolidation. The EA phase model describes that movement clearly. This is annual involution. We just moved through Virgo, discernment. Now Libra asks for equilibrium. What do I want? What do we want? How do desires and needs find a place of integration? The zodiac is its own book. Its own clock about space, time and reality. It shows. Past. Present. Future. Time as space. Cycles inside cycles. The equinox is a coordinate. A change of direction. Look at the four cardinal points and the architecture is there: beginning, culmination, descent, new beginning. And then, only a few days later, the sky repeats the story. The Full Moon on September 26 is in Aries, around 3°. Neptune is there too, retrograde, almost on the same degree. Saturn is retrograde around 12° Aries. Mars, ruler of Aries, is finishing Cancer before entering Leo. Pluto is at the beginning of Aquarius. Uranus is at the beginning of Gemini, Pluto and Uranus remain in trine; Neptune and Pluto in sextile, Neptune and Uranus in sextile too. There is soft geometry in the sky as the cardinal axis is being activated. Mars is also leaving Cancer and squaring Chiron, which has recently moved back into Aries retrograde. Mars rules this Full Moon. The vulnerability of being oneself, of showing one’s own desire, is at stake now, and Mars is doing this from Cancer, from the territory of family, ancestry, belonging and emotional inheritance. What happens when what I want begins to move in a direction that is different from what the family field wants, or from what I have inherited as a way of belonging? I do not have the answer to that. For me, the geometry is different. This Full Moon falls in skip-step with my nodal axis, it activates the cardinal cross around it. The South Node describes an established self-image. The North Node describes the direction of development. So the question for me is very simple: What direction has been trying to reveal itself all year that I can now actually see? It has a lot to do with ancestry. Capricorn. Inheritance. Legacy. Duty. Burden. Responsibility. Guilt. But also, it has a lot to do with opening my heart, pouring all that love into creative forms, and reaching out through my work without creating any expectation of being seen, just being solar all the way. I have Natal Pluto in the 8th house. Current Pluto is squaring my Jupiter-Sun-Mercury Rx in early Taurus. The perspective of my values, my self-validation, and how I internally communicate is being transformed from the inside out. How I meet value has changed. How I evaluate value has shifted. How I validate myself has gone full revamp. I recently surrendered this thought: I do not depend on the value of an inheritance/land to be a person of value. My value shows itself in what I actually meet, day by day. Meeting it means giving up something else, the opportunity cost of every choice made instead of another. That cost, weighed against my essential needs, is what I now call pure leverage. Aries says: I know what I want. I act from instinct. Neptune asks: Where did that desire come from? The desire I used to have is dissolving into something different, something never felt or performed. The beginning that started earlier this year is showing me another possibility, another direction that I am not so much in a rush to conquer, but slowly give shape to. At the same time Pluto is passing through my Ascendant in a three- to four-year cycle, and I am right at the eye of the storm. I am still inside it. I understand the storm while being inside it. I do not know yet how I leave it, but I know that leaving it begins with acknowledging that it is what it is, a storm, becoming aware of what is moving around me and what belongs to me inside it. What can be inherited without having to be repeated? And then, unexpectedly, I started watching Yellowstone. Actually, I became obsessed with Yellowstone, the television series created by Taylor Sheridan, beautifully portrayed in the state of Montana, with the cowboys, the cattle, the land, the families and the history underneath all of it. I have been binging it, and somewhere underneath all the plots I started thinking about preservation. What do we preserve before we innovate? How do we continue evolving without losing what gave us continuity? And at what point does preservation itself stop evolution? The word preservation has also been appearing repeatedly in another part of my life. I am preparing a new public commission in Framingham, Massachusetts, and during my conversations with the people involved in the new judiciary building, preservation kept surfacing. I have a presentation next week, and I am digesting the whole process, discerning. At one point, the architect told me that I had to be careful using the word preservation in the context of the building. I turned around and said, “Oh, really? Interesting. Let’s define preservation from the architectural point of view.”1 It is interesting because I am going to restore and reuse part of the marble from the old building that was built at the beginning of the 20th century. It had multiple uses. It was a high school and became a museum, and now the site is being turned into a regional judiciary center. I do understand the idea of restoration, repair, reuse, and the value of a material, but at the same time, I understand the constraints that she was feeling during my conversation. While I was talking to many people in the community, I had a sense that they want to preserve something about Massachusetts, and then one of the judges said that they basically want something familiar, such as the landscape, or the seasons. Those two words go along with what I’m talking about, but if I define them, they both say that change is dangerous. That’s the tension that we are creating here, within the building, within the system What are the people actually trying to preserve? A structure? A memory? A civic identity? A way of using space? A sense of familiarity? And then another question appears, because familiarity can be supportive, stabilizing, even necessary, and it can become limiting when familiarity hardens into the values a society assumes should remain intact. So preservation is no longer simply about keeping something. It becomes a question of discernment. What deserves continuity because it carries life, and what is being preserved because it is familiar? Land. Survival. Cattle. Food. Territory. Property. Autonomy. Stewardship. The individual and the state. The individual and the collective. Who has the right to occupy and sustain a piece of Earth? Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn are cardinal. They create a tension between who I am, where I belong, how I am going to find harmony, and what eventually becomes institutional, protective, and supportive. The next axis, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius, is fixed. What begins in the cardinal signs becomes established, held, and preserved before the mutable signs, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces, begin another movement of adaptation. Taurus is what I value.Leo is how I validate myself.Scorpio is how I share those values.Aquarius is how I liberate myself and become my own person. So yes, the land and the territory and the politics are there. Yellowstone is giving me something else to think about in relationship to what is happening in my own family. What are the right decisions? What leverage does each person have? What am I supposed to take from all of this? What am I moving forward with? I do not have those answers. I am in the process of a repartition of inherited property. I do not need to say much more than that. There is ancestry being continued through property and through other people, and the property itself is being divided. And sometimes these partitions create real divisions. Family dramas and grievances usually start much earlier than the property itself. They have to do with how each person perceived belonging inside the system, inside the tribe, and how each one experienced the love, or the lack of love, coming from one parent or both. If the impression was that there was never enough love, enough recognition, enough belonging, then dividing property after the parents are gone can trigger something much older than the property. Especially when there was no trust already created to hold the structure before death. The material division can reactivate

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About

I am OPTimist. I am not willing to be defined by a few words—what I do is a living journey. I am a multidisciplinary artist, empirical polymath, writer, evolutionary astrologer, libertarian/Bitcoiner. My philosophy integrates Eastern, ancestral, and cosmological traditions with psychological inquiries, praxeology, and Austrian economics, emphasizing liberty, value, resources, and self-worth in the quest for individual and societal service. I create public art commissions and immersive environments, facilitate dialogue, and explore freedom, shadow work, myths, natural law, Bitcoin, and the architecture of time. This podcast is a reflection of my living and individuated journey. If you are curious, there is much more to explore in the About Me section.👇☝️ www.monikabravo.blog

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  • Creator
    Monika Bravo
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    191
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © Monika Bravo
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    I am OPTimist