Navigating the Infinite

My Deep Dive into Non-Duality and Absolute Monism In the boundless journey of spiritual exploration, there are realms where the intellect bows to the profound experiences of the soul. During my dialogue with Steve James on Guru Viking, I ventured into the profound depths of non-duality and absolute monism, sharing experiences and realizations that have illuminated my path and understanding of…

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Sometimes I think about how Adrien, throughout the series, constantly grapples with his fear of abandonment. Gabriel conditioned him to believe that any love he receives is purely transactional, and that to earn affection he has to prove his utility. Adrien is constantly trying to prove his worth to his father for scraps of affection, and Chat Noir infamously crumbles on-screen any time he feels as though he is replaceable to Ladybug. It's a constant insecurity of his, like everyone will just dump him like a sack of potatoes the moment they find out how useless he is.

Meanwhile, all Marinette wants to is ensure that Adrien is happy. Because she loves him. She doesn't give two shits about how """useful""" he is. She holds him and tells him that she will never abandon him (both as Ladynoir and as Adrienette), and her fantasies are about saving him, not about him being "useful" to her. Throughout their relationship, Adrien is forced to disappoint Marinette constantly for reasons outside of his control (amok commands), and yet Marinette is still there for him.

At Adrien's lowest point, when he is forcibly torn away from everyone who had ever showed him genuine care, locked away in an all-white room and at his most "useless", right after disappointing Marinette and unable to even join the final battle or contribute in any way, she still saves him. She still loves him. Because he doesn't have to prove anything to her. Because he is loved and cherished for who he is, not for what he does, and that love is not conditional. Adrien's "happy ending" at the end of the first arc wasn't about him finally proving how useful he can be, because he never actually cared about being useful — he just saw it as the only means to feel loved and needed. Instead, in the end, he found out that he was loved and needed no matter what.

“When toxic behavior is portrayed as romantic, it’s problematic. When problematic behavior is portrayed as a character flaw for a character to work through, it’s good storytelling.”

Katsuki Bakugou, my friends.

His behavior was problematic but never once portrayed as romantic at the same time. Katsuki said and did awful abusive things, and he also chose to be better when he was given the chance. If you’re still hung up on chapter 1 Katsuki now then I don’t think you’ve been reading the same story I have.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m not shipping Izuku with an irredeemable abuser. I’m shipping him with his most important person. His narrative foil. His childhood friend who made awful mistakes and then made it right when he saw he was wrong. The person Izuku looks up to and strives to emulate, despite their past struggles.

Bakudeku is so good because of how flawed these boys are, and how hard they’ve worked to get over it, and how much they matter to each other after it all

— If you create us a kingdom, we will write the book of our future. The future of the Church, of the world we live in will be ours, yours, and your children's. You say nothing? Why do you think we wished you a cardinal? So you would be Pope one day. Carve us out a kingdom, Cesare, and be both king and pope. I am stunned into silence.

I understand not being a big fan of the appearance of past PCs, and I shared that earlier on, and even shared the argument that I wanted Bells Hells' story to be about them...but I feel like the time for that argument has passed. As we've gone on, that is in fact the story - that they're a bunch of level 8 adventurers who have fallen into an endgame scenario because of little peripheral threads and because of who one of their companions is. The story is, on some level, about not being about them. They've had so little time to drive their own destiny; it's been fetch quests and pursuit from the start, with little in the way of the odd jobs and proper stumblings one would usually expect.

And I hope that after the solstice they'll get to do that! But I think having Keyleth and the Ashari, Beau, and Caleb there hammer the above home: this is so much bigger than Bells Hells is prepared for, and they're here because a few weird things that happened in Jrusar (which is all that Eshteross ever wanted to look into, and all Treshi ever wanted to do) were unbeknownst to them part of a plot Ludinus Da'leth has likely been working on for several centuries; and because Imogen and Fearne are involved through accidents of birth. In many ways, it echoes Laudna's entire story. It's just people who were minding their own business in a town, and someone powerful and ruthless did things beneath it that affected the population at large because of a plan with cosmic ramifications, and they became involved out of an accident of location.

I'll admit - I do prefer a story where people are actively seeking something, or running from something, rather than caught up in bigger and bigger webs of conspiracy, but that's not the one being told right now, and the version in which far more powerful allies don't appear is a tragic and cynical one, whereas one with Keyleth, Beau, and Caleb says "yeah, this is fucked up, and it's not fair that you're here on your own to deal with this rip current of an event."

reminder that numbers and notes do not define your writing. i want you to stop limiting yourself. when you write freely, you don't care about how it will do on tumblr or how many notes it will get. you do it for yourself because you always wanted to write it. trust me on this because the best fic i've written is at 227 notes but a random headcanon got 13k. but you know what? in the end, i always find myself thinking about the reblogs and comments under the 227 one. so don't let the numbers get to your head. you are amazing.

I couldn’t find a good way to work this into the main post, but I want to also say… I have to imagine it was cathartic for Kabru to hear Mithrun talk bluntly about his past self & call himself an asshole. Kabru tries to simplify him into a very stereotypical Perfect Elven Warrior and Mithrun is just like. No. Lmao. And it’s even specifically the extremely ingrained cultural standards that he points to as shitty.

Like… growing up surrounded by a culture that can’t stop singing it’s own praises, when you can see the harm they are going… I dunno, it’s gotta be great to have someone finally turn to you and be like “yeah I was supposedly the perfect elf and I sucked”

my two cents are that people outside of finland (and even the more left-leaning circles in finland) are not really taking into account that an average person here doesn’t know jack shit about israel or palestine. the first and only time either of them got mentioned in my 12 years of schooling (i’m a few years younger than jere) was an optional history course focusing on post-ww2 history in my final year of high shcool. jere went to vocational school and they don’t teach history at all there so he’s relying on his junior high education which isn’t saying much considering he’s said multiple times he didn’t pay attention at school.

it doesn’t help that the mainstream reporting (which he’s forced to rely on since he doesn’t speak fluent enough english) about the palestinian genocide has been frustratingly neutral and both-sides-y here in finland. obviously some of that is due to journalistic ethics and responsibilities because our news medias can’t get their reporters within gaza’s borders and they can’t report on things unless the information comes from a reputable source or they can fact check them.

all this is to say that i'm willing to bet actual money he doesn’t even know the definition of genocide in finnish, not to mention IDF or zionism or even judaism. those things are simply not taught here and the idea of him being a zionist is laughable. i studied anthropology at university and the amount of times i’ve had to explain fairly simple concepts like colonialism or genocide to people, even highly-educated ones, is staggering. and i didn’t really understand those things either before i went to university. finland used to love to rave about our PISA scores but the truth is that the level of basic education here has been really poor for decades.

"bylers need to be humbled" and it's just us shipping our ship that's ALREADY HALF CANON because Will is canonically in love with Mike, and hoping that the explicit parallels in the text of the show put there by the writers mean that Mike reciprocates so that they can be happy together. the majority of us even think that El is gonna be perfectly ok because she doesn't want to be in a relationship anymore so we're not even hating on the other love interest no matter what people want to tell themselves... and we're doing this while constantly being harassed by homophobic fans too that reached the real level of delusion of thinking that Will likes Eleven when he's clearly canonically gay, only because they wanted to deny even the smallest possibility that Will and Mike could be queer

no but if i was an nhl player and was staring down a few days off and then fans said actually you don’t get that holiday, you have to go and do silly little hockey things all weekend i would lose my mind

man you gotta love how people will shout from the rooftops how autistic laois is and then in the next breath call him a little freak that no one can possibly understand the perspective of

current art mood are these posts i saw in the clip studio help board

scar

i see that YOU wanna be bothered too and that you're a d4 enthusiast like me (they're my pookies!!) soooo what's your thoughts on the hc that annie was a career?? 🤭🎤

omg first of all thank you for sending this also i just saw your header and that’s such a slay

this is SUCH a good question and i know it’s so controversial so this is just my personal take!! i totally understand why people might think it’s wrong-

but i do believe that annie was a career and volunteered for the games. i think all victors are damaged from their games in a way and annie is just a different (perhaps more extreme?) example of the affects of being in the arena.

the thing is, you can have all the training in the world- but nothing really prepares you for that kind of violence. especially not seeing your district partner, someone you knew, being decapitated. that is extremely heavy and traumatizing to witness even for someone who volunteered for it. and yes, maybe most careers wouldn’t be impacted by that to the extent that by the human brain is a weird thing and all people react differently.

i saw someone make the comparison between soldiers signing up to join the military and still coming out deeply traumatized by what they saw and i think that’s a pretty good example. you can know what you’re getting into, you can train, you can do whatever- but you’re never truly 100% prepared to go through something like that.

in my opinion, that actually makes her a much more interesting- and no less sympathetic- character! i think a lot of people don’t want to associate annie (and even finnick i see a lot) with being “careers” because the careers are associated with being the bad guys and no one wants their faves to be the bad guys. but the careers were not evil/bad people- they were brainwashed children. but that’s another rant for another day.

so yeah idk if any of that even made sense but basically:

yes, annie is a heavily traumatized- but real- career.

I’m a huge proponent for anyone should have access to whatever tools they need to do whatever they want to their body etc but ngl it makes me sad seeing the number of AFAB transes who speak of taking testosterone as this almost like, unfortunate thing you gotta endure to get a set list of Desired Changes, or this sorta like, thing you gotta compromise on, with this whole list of negative effects that you gotta risk if you want the positives or whatever, and just constant posts that are functionally like “how long do I have to be on T until I can stop?” or “I want XYZ changes from T but I don’t want ABC changes,” and like it just frustrates me because to be frank I love testosterone. I love everything about being on it and I consider it a miracle that modern medicine has made it possible to access this hormone exogenously if we can’t produce enough of it ourselves. I feel like fundamentally my lack of proper T levels had a negative impact on me until it was corrected and I don’t feel like I was truly myself until I began HRT. Literally the only negative thing about it at all is the frustration that I’m dependent on an outside source for the rest of my life rather than able to just make it myself but there’s no doubt in my mind that I want to be on it for the rest of my life. While maybe a bit pedantic I don’t view T as having side effects, I don’t even necessarily view it as a medication in the traditional sense, it’s just an artificial way for me to correct my body to the state it already should’ve been in. I was overcome by relief after taking my very first dose when I was seeing 0 changes and even as the initial excitement has naturally died down over the years that relief is something I never take for granted. If I could keep every change T has given me and stop taking it I still wouldn’t because beneath all the desire for the changes there is an innate desire to just be on testosterone. I just idk dude I wish that HRT at least within the FTM / transmasc community was viewed with more reverence and the perspectives of those who view it as genuinely a life saving and necessary resource were given a little more voice. I think the entire idea of hormonal dysphoria and the need to alleviate it by correcting one’s hormone production separate from the laundry list of the possible more visible changes and side effects and what’s desired or not or what’s permanent or not etc etc of HRT is seen as weirdly archaic in lots of mainstream FTM spaces and it’s a bit frustrating and isolating.

I understand people saying with 18 you aren't a real adult yet but... you are. I have the feeling mostly americans see 18 yo as 'children' still because a lot of stuff you can only do wth 21 there. In Europe you will be a full fledged adult and you will be treated like on. With 18 you can drink, you can drive, you will most likely be far enough in school to starts a career, depending on what you wanna do.

18 is grown up and the brain is developed enough to not make certain mistakes anymore. Not to forget that at first it was claimed she was 'freshly 18' when she was already 18 1/2.

People have to stop infantalizing grown up people. That's why Tommy turned out the way he is, cause people kept seeing and treating him as a child. Now that dude makes rape and necrophilia jokes because people keep saying 'he's basically still a child!'

No. Stop doing that. Let people take responsibilities as the adults that they are. With 18 you should know what is Sa and what not. You should know how you can ruin someone's whole life with making allegations like this.

If Caiti actually didn't know what she was doing, then she shouldn't be a Content Creator and stay off from the public image. She admitted she was there not to befriend people but to meet big creators and do networking. That's adult thinking.

Stop trying to push the morlas of 'she's not completely grown' on people who fucked up with something that someone with their age shouldn't fuck up with.

And I am saying that as a 18 year old myself btw. She KNEW what she was doing, she knewingly used terms that SA and rape victims use in her first stream, she knew she was getting drunk as well.

Sure the brain isn't completely developed yet, but enough to not do something like that

Ok here's some more anon thoughts on all of the age/alcohol talk

Honestly I understand everyone's points tbh. Like it's all a double-edged sword that applies to each 18 year old differently because I've seen some super independent, mature 18 year olds that have been living on their own for years, but also some veeery immature and sheltered ones that can barely function in the world. It all heavily depends on the situation imo

And as soon as alcohol is introduced, it immediately becomes 10x messier so yeah this situation is just very nuanced and I think everyone will feel a little bit differently about it based on their personal experiences at that age and I get that 100%.

Like I personally was a very mature and independent 18 year old but I know people who weren't and still act like children even into their 20s. It really varies person-to-person