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I am OPTimist: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Monika Bravo
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.
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- 6 days ago6 min
Some thoughts on private property
Hi everybody. Times are weird, and when times are like this, I kind of settle into deep thinking. This week, I have been writing about lineage, I will publish the article sometime later. For now, here are some thoughts on property rights and what it means to own something. 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
- 1 weeks ago23 min
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 SuperimpositionBTW, 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 wor
- 2 weeks ago5 min
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
- 2 weeks ago42 min
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, 1762PREMISEThe 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, 1841PART ONEThe Body Has a CompassWhen 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, l
- 3 weeks ago7 min
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
- 3 weeks ago24 min
What Is Bitcoin Becoming?
THE INQUIRYI’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.GENESISIn 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.CYCLESAll 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 exis
- Oct 5, 20268 min
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 ano
- Sep 30, 202622 min
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 st
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About I am OPTimist
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.
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