Categories
Philosophy

Eulogy

We come together not to dress the truth in lace, but to speak plainly: humanity had within it sparks, flashes, even storms of brilliance. The rhythm of its thought pulsed in breaths both shallow and profound—an inhalation of vision, an exhalation of confusion. Yet in ensemble, the cadence collapsed. What was sharp in one mind […]

Categories
belief

Friction

Belief systems—political, spiritual, cultural—are not merely catalogues of doctrine or symbolic taxonomies but function as frictional zones where indeterminate claims meet, clash, and persist. The turbulence generated by unprovable assertions—whether about metaphysical truth, national destiny, or social justice—creates a binding tension. This tension provides the continuity through which institutions, rituals, and governance structures stabilize themselves, […]

Categories
life

Apple-Picking

He walked with his head tipped back, eyes pressed into the wide blue, clouds dragging their shadows across him like indifferent hands. The paddocks on either side were brittle with grass, and the orchard ahead leaned heavy with fruit. Apples, not just apples, he thought—each one a record of chance, a refusal to collapse. He […]

Categories
Philosophy

Strategic Balance

Historically, the divergence between Eastern and Western approaches to war reflects not merely strategic preference but foundational differences in epistemology and system logic. Western traditions, from Thucydides to Clausewitz and Mahan, have typically conceptualised war as a discrete extension of political will—goal-directed, adversarial, and mechanistically bounded. Mahan’s emphasis on sea power, for example, exemplified a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Digital Sand Mandala

Compassion, Entropy, and the Limits of Logical Systems A pattern drawn in code is no different from one drawn in sand—only its decay differs in rhythm. The digital, for all its permanence, is no less impermanent. Every transmission is a temporary suspension of noise, every system a slow yielding to entropy. There is no final […]

Categories
Philosophy

Wisdom

The more I learned, the less I understood—because understanding itself is emergent, fractal, and always context-bound. Human identity is not built from sameness but from friction: subtle gradients, differences in tone, expectation, belief. Civilisation, in this light, is not a smooth structure but a kind of turbulence engine, generating its own continuity through sustained dissonance. […]

Categories
art

Miyamoto Musashi

Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1584–1645) was a legendary Japanese swordsman, philosopher, artist, and ronin whose life became the stuff of both history and myth. Undefeated in over sixty duels, Musashi was a master of strategy whose innovation, adaptability, and relentless practice made him the Paganini of the sword: a virtuoso whose craft rose far beyond mere […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reflections

It seems quite petty and inadequate to aspire to “simply” solve just one of the world’s complex problems. Let’s solve them all, simultaneously. What is the one thing that every thing shares? What essence or abstraction binds the world together in some way as “reality” or intelligibility and experience? While it may be possible that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Aristotle and Alexander, Albert and the Atom

I’ve never been entirely certain that educating a person who as a probable consequence then goes on to conquer the known world (of their time) is necessarily a good thing. Of course, we can never be certain what someone will do with the technical knowledge or practical wisdom we might be fortunate enough in all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Healing Circles

The circle is and has always been a strong symbol of community, of culture, and of equality. When a person engages in the experience and living tapestry of shared value and responsibility that this geometry represents, the literal (or symbolic) circle of communication represents an optimal solution for equitable outcomes and adaptive growth. The Great […]

Categories
Philosophy

Self-ish Resonance

This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Eternal Absence of Knowledge

If wisdom consists of knowing that you do not know, knowledge and all that ever creatively emanates from it can only ever be built upon such shifting sands. Technology is, for better and for worse, an extension of this principle. In every innovation, every inflected discontinuity of human ingenuity, and in every ratchet up the […]