Skip to content
TrackPodcasts
religionSep 5, 202618:11pending

Postmodern Noodle Soup

I am OPTimist

About this episode

Eclipsisms

What are we discerning now? Can you reflect on it and see the truth?

Oh my god. I did not think I could have survived the tornado of what the eclipsisms was. But here I am, integrating, seeing the same things from a different perspective. Allowing my body to take shape and to speak to me how to integrate what I have been able to witness and where I am going right now. It is an exciting moment, yet I must walk slowly just to make sure that the steps I take are solidly grounded, and where I want to go. The intuition is still the same: being solar, being radiant, being creative. But now with what I have seen, with all the ugliness and anguish, I am more aware that every step I make on a moment to moment basis is defining the shape of the kind of life I am living.

I am also conscious of the surface of what I am seeing on the outside that is reflecting what is inside.

I am taking my space and my position within the system. Remaining helpful, but not trying to overwrite, to overpower. Being patient, avoiding any urge of control. Being attentive, inquiring into even my place in community.

The Mirror of Merging

I want to give an example about the way I’ve been relating to relationships in general, and how different they are right now because I am not attaching myself to what it would mean for me to not have those relationships in my life, and what do they mean right now that I’m aware.

Throughout my life, whenever I entered a new relationship, it was out of an intense attraction and compulsion, out of an eagerness to merge and to become one with it, to feel transformed by that vitality of it that would last from the beginning until the end. I was never afraid of ending it, but always very concerned about living it fully, fully, because that’s what gave me life.

The new awareness is slightly different. I am conscious about the triggers of wanting to merge as one, knowing that with time, that’s going to make me feel resentful and frustrated. Because all I want is to be able to be in true relationship with myself, without the compulsion of the merger, nor the compulsion of fixing, giving, or caring that actually happens at the end of the union when I realize that I have given all to the relationship and am left empty inside.

Needs and values have given me leverage over the past ten years since I started becoming conscious of my behavior. Many called that intensity; for me, that was simply my norm until I saw it as a window to explore, and shadow work became a daily practice.

In relationships that are being rebirthed again, like the spiral, you do not start where you left off. You start where you are at. If you had left off in a part of the circle and you have already engaged in some reflections and some evolution, you start where you are at. Therefore, because you are in a different place altogether, you can see the difference. If you start in the same place you left, you are going to start reacting out of habit instead of responding from a place of truth.

Using inspiration rather than force, using aspiration (breath) rather than fear.

I could be in a room alone with myself. The next test of that is always the room with another person, situation, or thing in it. These mirrors keep on appearing, and now they expand to two floors in Massachusetts of a Judiciary building.

Equilibrium, Ethics, & Integrity

I am going to Massachusetts next week. I started a new Public Art Commission. I am excited. It is going to be in a Judiciary building (Regional Justice Center), designing an artwork that envelopes two floors in the waiting area. What moves me is to create an atmosphere where people can have a place of reflection. The building was designed in a way that there’s a lot of light coming from the outside, so it’s not dark.

My work, always colorful, uses geometry. The building won’t be finished until 2028, so we still have time, yet the design has started and needs to be completed in one semester before fabrication. The main concept is that equilibrium is a process. Unlike a flat line, equilibrium moves like emotions or wavelengths, having different moments where rhythms create frequency. The frequency is really the relationship between one point and the other that translates into time. So it is through time that one can see emotional waves as clarity.

My intent with the commission is to create a space where people can take their time to inquire by looking at beautiful things that reflect on where their lives sit in relation to choices—such as landscapes, old maps, and city shapes embedded in abstract geometric shapes that stem from surveying the local architecture, shaping the idea of what equilibrium could be.

Now, if we go deeper into what ethics means to me in relation to morals: I just have to retreat a little bit to first principles as a foundation where humans can stand. And then integrity as the individual capacity a person has to measure their own ethics. Integrity is the core of humanity, of an individual, and it is what keeps a person aligned with their virtues. Ethics is a practice of virtues such as honesty, excellence, humility, gratitude, generosity, kindness, discernment, and courage. And that creates equilibrium when it is in a state of awareness. People have called me individualistic and I have always responded affirmatively. There is no collective or tribal container without individual ones. Carl Jung put it plainly: the individual is the only real carrier of life, and all collective identity without self-knowledge is just a crutch.

Now, my beef is with morality. When that word was translated from the Greek ethos to the Latin moralis, it started shifting because its value was assigned by an external authority outside of the individual. Morality is a curse, and if you are thinking that I do not have any morals, then you have to understand that the morals I do not abide by are the ones that have taken authority outside of the individual and handed it to something outside of yourself.

What started as just an insight about eclipse release builds these questions:

Where are you standing?

What is your integrity?

How are you bringing light to your life, and therefore how are you radiating your essence to contribute to humankind?

Integrity is mine. Morality is just something society wants to borrow.

Postmodern Noodle Soup, instead back to Ancient wisdom

Nowadays, society throws around words like Democracy without really understanding their real meaning and connotations, or the current sense of confusion they invite. We live in a Postmodern Noodle Soup where symbols and concepts are stripped of their origins, leaving individuals completely lost because they rarely do the inner inquiry required to know what these words actually mean, what they actually signify, and how to use their meaning properly. A circus, a puppetry of sorts, yapping against each other: please turn the noise off.

To decipher the semiotics of our times, we have to tune to the ancient foundations.

Look back at what happened to Socrates, who was put on trial by a democratic court in Athens in 399 BC, accused of corrupting the youth and failing to acknowledge the state’s gods, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. A democratic vote executed the most virtuous man in the city.

Hemlock acts as a progressive neurotoxin. It paralyzes the body from the feet upward, slowly creeping through the system until the respiratory muscles freeze and the victim suffocates while remaining fully conscious.

That physical execution is the exact mirror of what happens to a society that abandons self-inquiry. When individuals stop asking questions, stop practicing the Socratic method with themselves, and accept empty symbols without inquiry, a mental hemlock takes over. The mind paralyzes from the ground up. First, you lose the ability to discern truth; then you lose your personal agency; and eventually, the collective suffocates under its own compliance.

And this is where the word discipline reveals its real meaning. Discipline shares its root with disciple, from the Latin discere, meaning to learn. A disciple is simply one who learns, and discipline is the devoted, daily practice of what you are learning. We only truly learn within ourselves what we can actually practice. Choosing the right mentors and the right principles allows us to become disciples of life itself.

Plato learned from Socrates. Traumatized by the democratic execution of his master, Plato dedicated his life to writing The Republic to expose how unexamined crowds inevitably corrupt justice, before passing his pursuit of wisdom down to his greatest disciple, Aristotle.

Aristotle became the absolute foundation of Western civilization as we live it today. In works like the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, Aristotle taught us that virtue is not a static theory or a set of external rules handed down by authority. Virtue is an active, disciplined practice, a daily habit of how a human decides to achieve equilibrium and live a noble life. At its core, Aristotle shows us how to cultivate good in action, anchoring the central question I carry into my own daily life: How can I do good, not just for myself, but for the common good?

What is behavior? It is the way we compose ourselves with ourselves, how we make decisions, and how we keep our integrity. When you do that through relationships, whether one-on-one, with your clan, or collectively, that is what determines the outcome. I do not need to quote the things being spoken in the media, because you all already know.

This brings me to praxeology, the science of purposeful human action, which was formally developed in the early 20th century by thinkers like Ludwig von Mises. Grounded in John Locke, Cicero, and Aristotle, Mises showed that praxeology is always intentional: individuals make conscious choices over time to achieve chosen ends.

Human action is the root of true economics. Politics is the collective behavior of a civilization, but praxeology focuses on the individual. That purposeful action is how our choices relate to our own sense of value. That value gets projected outward across the scarce, mortal time we have in our lives. We do not know when we are going to die. Therefore, every single decision we make is an economic one based on opportunity cost.

Money, as a technology, is an economic good. Just as food is a good that satisfies hunger, or defense is a good that provides security, money is a specialized good designed to facilitate trade and store value across time. Economic systems are not separate from us. They are mirrors of human behavior and human values. When you lose your internal integrity, your sense of value breaks down. When you stand in your authority, every decision becomes a clear statement of what you actually value.

Praxeology tells me that every choice is made against the length of a human life.

Purifying Legacy

We have a New Moon on September 10th that falls at 18° of Virgo.

September 10 and 11 for me are very charged. It is the title of the video piece that I recorded the day before the World Trade Center was attacked, 25 years ago from Tower 1, 92nd floor. I am not going to celebrate this quarter of a century for many reasons, because there is nothing to celebrate, and also because given what we know right now, more than what we did back in the day, I am more in the realm of the conspiracy theories that this was an attack that was prepared and enacted for us to start yielding our rights to the powers that be, governments as a long form program of compliance. This was one of the first Psyops of many, going really way back and as near as the 2020 horrendous program.

Next week on the 11th marks the third anniversary of my mom’s death, and so it overrides the World Trade Center. That is in the order of appearance. This is what is most important: how to keep her legacy, keep her name, keep her love, keep everything that gave to us, her children, and humanity in a way that is purified, discerned, clarified, refined, so we can keep the essence of it.

This Virgo New Moon is absolutely fantastic given the times we are in, because it is a new way to refine, to edit out, to bring in, and to use discernment instead of judgment. In my case, this is the full circle, because it falls directly in the house of how I merge with others. I am giving myself the opportunity to understand how I compulsively want to merge with something outside of myself, but giving myself also the time, the space, and the awareness of taking it slow to understand my commitment and compromise when I merge with something.

The aspects are very supportive. A T-square between Chiron in early Taurus, Pluto in Aquarius, and Venus in Scorpio, all in early fixed signs, creates a set of crises of what we value, how we leverage and allow transformation in society to enact, focusing on refinement. Venus and Mercury enter a new sign, in a part of the sky that will soon activate Venus and Mercury retrograde this fall. Later at the beginning of 2027 we will have Mars activating Virgo and Leo, while the planet of action reverses and gives us an opportunity to revise discernment of action and learn how to behave solarly.

Refining the legacy of my mother, it is a full act of discernment.

A Semiotic Interlude (A Note on Process)

A quick note on process. Halfway through editing these dictations, I kept thinking about the word semiotics, which in my understanding is the study of signs, symbology, and perhaps more important, how we assign meaning to things. Derrida (différance) and Baudrillard (simulacra) came to mind. One Greek ex-boyfriend (Omiros) and one Viking ex-husband (Dag) both became scholars of semiotics. Maybe I was attracted to them because I’ve always been attracted to finding the meaning of things, but my school is not that. My logic is not that logic. Mine, as you can see, is the logic I search to decipher from something emotional, how I process the wave.

So I decided to run an exercise with Gemini, one of the three LLMs that I work with, translating my raw morning thoughts into semiotic terms to see what the surface symbols of my life were actually trying to tell me from the semiotics point of view. Because it is not one of the lenses that I use. As you know, because you’ve been a reader, I use other kinds of logic. I use evolutionary astrology definitions, I use systemic constellations, Austrian economics, mathematics, harmonics, Mythology, Psychology, I use Jungian psychology and shadow work. I use different devices.

So Gemini this morning is saying, an eclipse, as in sky event, also becomes the signifier for a total season of disruptions: No s**t! And the word that started as a typo, and then was coined, Eclipsism, just fitted fully. A relationship with a person, situation, a thing, also works as an icon I have been using to chase completion through merging. The Judiciary building is set up as a stage testing external morality against internal methods.

So it has been a fascinating exercise to decipher the symbols to decode my process. But once I mapped it all out, as always, I knew I have to come back to my own voice, my own words, and my own integrity.

Because after all, semiotics can help me read the mirror, but only I can decide who is looking back.



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

Get every episode summarized

Each time I am OPTimist publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.

Email me new episodes

Free for 3 shows. No card needed.

Hosts & guests

No transcript yet

This episode has not been transcribed. Request it and it moves to the front of the queue.

Postmodern Noodle Soup

I am OPTimist

0:00
18:11

More episodes

More from I am OPTimist

View all episodes →