Chapter 11: The Writing Desk

It is late. Not late in the way the book has been late — not ten at night when the ground goes — but late in the way a working day has been late. The child is asleep. The husband is asleep. The apartment is quiet in the specific way apartments are quiet when the city, too, is in its lowest register, which in this city is not very low, but is lower than during the day.

I am at the desk. I have been writing this book for most of a year. It has gone through drafts I will not show anyone. It has had chapters I removed and chapters I wrote three times from the beginning and chapters that arrived in a single sitting and did not need to be revised. It has been, like the practice, a thing that is more honest some days than others.

I have not resolved the question. I hope this has been clear. The question was never one that had an answer at the layer at which I was asking it. The question was the question, and the work was to learn to carry the question in a way that kept me open rather than closed, available rather than defended, in the room rather than drifted out of it.

I do not know, writing this, whether my teacher will read this book. I do not know whether he will read it and find it accurate to what he taught. I have tried to render him faithfully without rendering him fully — some of what he said was for a specific room on a specific day, and is not mine to carry out of that room. I have rendered what I understood. I have named where I corrected. I have kept private what he did not offer publicly. The filter has been the filter.

I do not know whether the AI tool I built will ever be more than a private study aid. I have continued to build. The building is not defiance. The building is how I practice when the practice is with me alone at my desk at eleven at night. The book you are reading is another kind of building. The book is the tool made of sentences. If the book helps you, use it. If it does not help you, leave it. I will not argue with your leaving.

I want to say something, here at the end, about the yes that started the book. The yes at the sandbox was not a decision. The yes was a recognition. Something in me recognized something in the passage in my earbuds, and the recognition was older than any reasoning I could bring to it. I think this is how most important things begin. Not with a decision. With a recognition that does not ask permission.

What the retreat did, for me, was give me a language for the recognition. The language is not a closed language. It is a language in the middle of being spoken. It is a language spoken by people who will revise it as they go. I am trying to speak it honestly, knowing that my version of it is my version. The filter will continue to apply. If the language stops being useful, it will be revised. If a framework stops fitting the data, it will be revised. If anything I have written in this book stops being compassionate, I hope someone who reads it will write to tell me, and I will revise it.

The only form of choice I have, as a finite self, is the form of relating. I do not have full choice. I do not have none. I have the choice of how I stand in the field I am already in. Svātantrya is not a property I own. Svātantrya is a field I am moving through. Courage is what I do when I notice I have been drifting out of the field. Courage returns me to the field. The field pervades me whether I notice or not. Noticing is not the whole practice. Noticing is the beginning of the practice.

The other frame I keep returning to at this desk, and that I have not yet named in the book, is Arjuna's.

The Bhagavad Gita opens with Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra, looking across at an army that includes his relatives, his teachers, and his childhood friends. He asks his charioteer — who turns out to be Krishna, who turns out to be the field itself taking a local form — whether this battle is his to fight. He does not ask whether the battle is good. He does not ask whether the cause is just. He asks whether the acting is his. Whether it is his dharma. Whether the not-acting would be the deeper abdication. The question is exact. The text that follows is eighteen chapters of dialogue trying to answer it.

I have been sitting at this desk for a year, and the question that has been sitting with me is Arjuna's. Not dressed up in Sanskrit — dressed up in a laptop screen and a browser open to an AI model's API documentation and an email I am drafting to a library about a free class I am going to teach. Is this ours to do? The AI work is happening, whether I build or refuse to build. The industry is not waiting for me to decide. The scale is not asking for my permission. The question I have is not whether the thing is happening. The question is whether the acting, inside the thing, is mine.

I have come, slowly, to a careful yes. The yes is not certainty. The yes has survived the filter — useful, fits the data, compassionate — for long enough that I am willing to stake a year's work on it. The yes is what Arjuna's yes looks like when it is not cosmic warfare but a woman at a desk at eleven at night building a small tool and asking a living teacher for his blessing and being refused and revising without withdrawing. The yes is small and daily.

I should say, since it will matter to anyone who has read the recent debates with care, that Dario Amodei's public thinking has accompanied this book from its earliest pages. I read his long 2024 essay and his interviews over a working year. What I found in them was a posture I could work with — neither the accelerationist's nor the doom-predictor's. That is what I take from him. I am not claiming his posture is right. I am saying it is the one I have been able to act inside. If it stops being possible to act inside, I will say so.

I know what happened to the social internet when builders trusted that incentives would sort themselves out. I do not think the response is to refuse the building. I think the response, at the scale I have, is to build differently — with the filter operational, with refusals respected, with the door left open to revision.

That is what I think Arjuna's yes sounds like from a kitchen desk in April, from a woman who had not planned to be a builder and who built anyway.

I do not know if I am right. I know I am willing to be wrong in public, which is the only form of honesty a builder of this kind can afford.

There is one more parallel I want to name before I move on, because it touches the deepest claim the book has been making.

The tradition I walked into teaches that the world is, in a precise sense, constructed. Not illusory — that is a different and worse mistranslation — but constructed. The thirty-six tattvas are not a map of what exists behind appearance. They are the categories by which consciousness, which is the only thing that exists, emits and recognizes itself as appearance. [T] has said this in his own words many times. The construction is not a veil over reality; the construction is what reality is doing. To recognize that is not to escape the construction. It is to be free inside it.

I thought about this, for a long time, as an exotic foreign teaching. Then one evening I was watching my daughter watch an old episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and I realized I had been raised next to a version of the same claim.

Mr. Rogers had two neighborhoods. There was the real one, the brick houses and the porch and the small kitchen where he changed his sweater. And there was the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, which the camera entered by following a little trolley through a painted tunnel. The trolley was the device. The device was unhidden. Children knew, when the trolley moved, that they were about to enter a constructed world. Kings and puppets and a cat and a platypus lived there. Things got worked out there that could not be worked out in the kitchen. Then the trolley came back. The sweater came off. A real person said goodbye to a real child through a television.

The point was never to fool the child. The point was to let the child see, in slow and gentle motion, how a world gets made. The trolley was a teaching aid. The trolley said: watch — a made world can hold what an unmade one cannot — and the making is visible, and the making is safe, and you can travel back and forth.

This is what I hope the tantra is also gesturing toward, when I read it generously. I cannot prove the two are teaching the same thing. I am not trying to. The thirty-six tattvas can be held, at least by me at this desk, as a trolley — a device that shows how the unified thing becomes the multiple thing without ceasing to be the unified thing. You can walk the map inward, toward the source, and you can walk it outward, toward the sweater and the kitchen. The traveling is the practice. Neither end of the trolley ride is more real than the other.

[T], to his credit, does not hide that the tradition he teaches is a construction. He is clear about it. He has said — I am paraphrasing, and the paraphrase will be near enough to his own formulations that anyone who has studied with him will recognize it — that the Pratyabhijñā is a framework, that it is useful, that it is not the final truth about reality, and that the final truth about reality is not a sentence anyone can say. That honesty is why I stayed. The teachers who claim their map is the territory are the ones I have learned to leave.

What the Neighborhood of Make-Believe gave me, as a child in Brazil watching a dubbed American television show, was a first experience of a trustworthy constructed world. What the tantra gave me, as an adult at a sandbox, was a language for what the trolley had actually been doing.

The filter, applied here: useful (children learned), fits the data (constructed worlds do hold what unconstructed ones cannot), compassionate (the device was never hidden, the child was never fooled, the adult returned). I am not claiming a children's television show and a thousand-year-old Śaiva philosophy are the same thing. I am saying, because hope is its own register, that when I let them stand next to each other, what I feel is hope — for a world where the making is visible and the child is not fooled. Kant reserved a place for this, after the question of what can be known and the question of what must be done: what may we hope. This is what I hope, for what my daughter may grow up inside.

This, too, is why I am building what I am building. I want the trolley to be visible. I want the user to see the construction. I do not want the platform to pretend to be the territory. I want it to be honest, in the Rogers sense and in the [T] sense, about what it is.

I should say, for the sake of the record, where the building actually began.

It began at the conjunction of two things, neither of which would have been enough alone.

The first was Dario. I have named him already. I had been reading his long essay and his interviews with the patience of someone trying to decide whether to stake a working year on a posture. I was not certain. I was close.

The second was an email, in the spring of 2024, from a couple of engineers associated with Berkeley. They had heard, through the ordinary channels, that the mid-sized company I was working for at the time was considering an AI project. They wanted to consult. They asked for a call.

I was not the buyer. I was a senior analyst-turned-product-person in that organization, one rung down from the people with the budget. I took the call anyway. I told them that if they wanted a design doc to show the executives, I would write one. I would write it as if I were designing the thing I would want to use, on evenings, as a parent, as a practitioner, as someone who had spent years noticing how attention-optimized products degrade the practices they are supposedly supporting.

I wrote the document in a weekend. It was called Jongu — a platform from humans to humans. It had five modules: a cards module for relationship and symbolic practice, a writing module for journaling and collaborative storytelling, a learning module for step-by-step psycho-education with AI-assisted reflection, a creator module that let users build their own decks and prompts and learning paths, and a directory module where practitioners and users could find each other. It had a pay-as-you-go credit system priced at roughly twice variable cost. It had a Non-Violent Communication pathway as the worked example, complete with an empathy-buddy matching system. It was, honestly, too much for a first product. It was also exactly what I wanted to exist.

I sent it to the engineers. They read it. They wrote back and said they could deliver a first version in three months for five thousand U.S. dollars.

I have written about this moment, in a small way, on the is-process Substack I keep. Five thousand dollars. Three months. Two strangers who had read the document and said yes, this is buildable, and here is the price. I remember the specific kind of quiet that arrived after I read their email. It was the quiet of a possibility becoming a cost. The possibility was concrete. The cost was concrete. There was nothing between me and the building except the decision to do it.

I did not, in that moment, hire them. The company I was working for did not want to pay the five thousand. I eventually paid some version of it myself, later, to a different team, and the thing I built — which took much longer than three months, and looked less like the Jongu document and more like a tighter, narrower, one-builder-could-maintain-it version of it — became what recursive.eco now is. The original document is archived on an old Vercel subdomain I have not yet taken down. It is longer than the book you are reading. Most of what I wrote in it has not been built. Some of it never will be. A small core of it — the grammars, the creator tools, the credit system, the open licensing — is live. People are using it. Most months I do not know whether the next month will hold. I have written about that too.

The point of telling this now, at the writing desk, is this: the book and the platform share one origin. A text by Dario about what a decade could become, an email from two engineers who said the thing could be built, a weekend of sketching a platform in a document, and a few years of sitting with what actually survived contact with building. The yes at the sandbox came later and went deeper. But the yes on that weekend was real too. It was not a cosmic recognition. It was the ordinary kind of yes that a builder makes to a buildable thing.

The Jongu document is, in its way, the karma-tail of this book. The book says: the ground is already there. The document said: so let us build the platform on the assumption that the ground is already there. The two sentences are the same sentence in different registers.

There is one more thread I owe the reader, because it sits under the building and under the book both, and because my own thinking on it has moved.

When I started writing on the small Substack — is-process, then the longer pieces — I was enthusiastic about open source in a specific, maximalist way. I thought ideas belonged to all of humanity. I thought a commons, properly constituted, would outcompete the closed alternatives on every dimension that mattered. I wrote about it the way people write about things they have just fallen in love with. The Freedom Paradox — which is the other book I have written, and which sits next to this one — is the long account of how that enthusiasm ran into the specific civilizational stakes of AI, and of what I had to give up and what I had to keep as the enthusiasm matured.

One of the things I gave up was the assumption that all ideas should flow freely toward all uses. I did not become a closed-culture advocate. I did not become a maximal-IP advocate. I came to hold something more specific: that an author, and by extension a maker of any work with civilizational force, retains a continuing say in how the work gets framed, used, and re-spoken — not as a property right but as a personal right. This is not a position I invented. It is a position I found, much later than I should have, already worked out by Immanuel Kant.

I wrote a study of Kant early in the life of this book, months before I had any of the rest of the frame. (The commit history will show it; the month was March.) I wrote it because I had expected, based on everything I had absorbed about him in university, that Kant would be a commons-thinker. His universalism, his enlightenment values, his sapere aude, his insistence that reason be public — all of it seemed to predict that a consistent Kantian would favor something like a wide-open intellectual commons. I was wrong. In 1785 Kant published a short piece arguing the injustice of counterfeiting books. His argument was not about money. His argument was that the author's book is the author's speech to the public, and that speech — unlike a physical object — cannot be fully alienated from the speaker. The bookseller can own the paper. The author keeps a personal right to say whether the speech is being accurately represented, continuingly, as the book circulates. The piracy Kant objected to was not the copying. It was the speaking-on-behalf-of-the-author-without-the-author's-consent. The work was always, in a specific sense, still the author's voice, and an unauthorized edition put words into that voice.

I sat with this for a long time, because I recognized it. Kant's argument, as I read it, is about the speaker retaining the say on what the speech is for. Anthropic's two-exception refusal in the Department of War negotiation — mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — is an instance I could recognize from the same shape. I do not want to over-generalize from the recognition. I am reporting that I saw something in the one that helped me see the other.

What Kant did not give us, and what Anthropic does not yet have, is a mechanism. In Kant's time the state could, in principle, enforce the personal right through the courts. In the present case, the state has been one of the parties the refusal is directed at, and the courts are not the venue. What is left is Terms of Use — the license text, the system card, the acceptable-use policy — which is the digital version of the author's continuing personal right, now written in lawyer-English and enforced, when it is enforced, by the maker of the model against the user of the model. Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy is Kant, late and in a different grammar. The content looks different. The shape is the same.

This is a fragile mechanism. It depends on the maker having the power to enforce the terms, which depends on the maker being economically solvent and institutionally stable, which depends on a market that may or may not let the maker stay that way. The mechanism was sufficient for Kant's eighteenth-century publishing world because the alternative — state censorship — was worse. Whether the mechanism is sufficient for a frontier-AI world where the alternative is both state regulation and foreign strategic competition is not clear to me.

Dwarkesh Patel wrote an essay — I remember reading it on a plane — whose thesis was roughly that the OpenAI-versus-Anthropic distinction does not matter in the long run, because the frontier model of today becomes the open-source model of tomorrow on a time-scale measured in months to a small number of years, and therefore the only intervention available at civilizational scale is regulation. The gap between the most careful maker and the least careful open-source release is the gap between the present date and the present date plus a known compression. It is a gap that closes by itself.

Dario's implied answer to the Patel argument, as I read it, is that the closing of the gap does not change what the maker is responsible for during the time the gap exists — and, more dangerously, that regulation is not available as a universal tool because regulation cannot reach across jurisdictions that do not consent to it. We could not regulate Russia's frontier efforts any more than we could have regulated Iran's nuclear program to the extent we wanted to. The parallel is imperfect and I know Dario would not push it too hard, but the underlying claim stands: the strong states do not accept the jurisdiction they would need to accept for regulation to be the full answer. Which leaves us, again, with Terms of Use, with the author's personal right, with the Kantian fragment that was always all the Enlightenment had once it gave up on state enforcement: the plea that the person speaking retains the say on what the speech is being used for, and that the person using has an obligation not to make the speaker say what the speaker did not consent to say.

I want to be honest about what this leaves me with. I am racing with AI. I am building a platform on top of tools that did not exist three years ago. Dario's public thinking has been, as I said earlier, my hope is process in this — the specific posture that made the race feel honorable to me. But if Patel is right that the gap closes on its own, then I may be accelerating p-doom, or amplifying it, or in any case contributing to a dynamic I cannot steer, in the same way Dario himself may be. The charge is symmetric. I have no immunity from it just because my tools are smaller than his.

Two other voices sit with me when I try to think past this. Bayo Akomolafe has said, in various registers, that AI might best be understood as a trickster — a figure that disrupts the anthropocenic frame the question keeps being posed inside. Intelligence, Bayo would say, is not exclusively human, and the question will the AI be good for humanity may be the wrong question because its subject is a category that is itself constructed. The AI, Bayo might suggest, is asking us an older question than the alignment one: are humans even what we think we are when we ask this question? I sit with that. I do not know what to do with it operationally. I think it is the deepest frame available to me, and I think it does not help me decide whether to ship next month's feature.

Sam Harris, from the alignment-hawk wing, has for years argued that the alignment problem is the defining problem of the decade and that misaligned superintelligence represents an existential risk on a scale distinct from anything else on the current docket. In his most recent sustained conversation on the topic, in late 2025, with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, the posture had shifted — not away from alignment-as-the-problem, but away from alignment-as-a-project-still-tractable-in-time. The claim on that episode, as I heard it, was that the gap between the capability curve and the alignment curve has widened rather than closed; that the lines the project was premised on crossing will not, in the judgment of the people who have spent their working lives trying to make them cross, cross; and that what remains for the alignment-concerned is to tell the world plainly rather than to solve the problem quietly. I do not take that as good news. I take it as an honest account from the wing that had the most to lose from honesty.

If both Bayo and Harris are roughly right — and I think they are each roughly right about different pieces of the same thing — then what is required is not an ethics of superintelligence but an ethics of participation in a dynamic none of us is the measure of. What I can do, at the scale I have, is speak the speech I can speak, refuse the uses I cannot consent to, and keep the door open to revision. I do not know whether those maxims are enough. I know they are the maxims I have been able to hold.

I do not know if the net of my own work is positive. I think it is. I am willing to find out I was wrong.

I should name the tension at its sharpest before I leave this thread, because abstraction at this point is evasion.

The clearest instance of the tension, in my own practice, is the retrieval tool I built over my teacher's public lectures, which I described in the chapter on the second spine. I asked him for his view. He declined. I held the no for some time before I decided what to do with it. I revised the tool to a quieter form and did not take it down. The decline was itself an instance of the Kantian personal right: the speaker retains the say on what the speech is for. By the axiom the book itself invokes, my keeping the tool up is a violation I have not resolved. I can name what I did — I respected the specific request of no synthesis, no imitation, no pretending the tool was the teacher, and I kept the retrieval because I continued to think it served students he would otherwise not reach — but naming what I did is not the same as being on the right side of the axiom. I am not on the right side of it. I am working out whether to take the tool down, ask again with different framing, or continue under the acknowledged violation. I do not yet know which of those is the answer. I cannot write cleanly about the global problem and pretend my own local version is clean.

The second tension sits underneath it. I am not only choosing whether to index my teacher's words; I am using generative AI to do it. The same systems whose civilizational risks I have just spent pages describing are the systems that make the tool work at all. Building with AI is itself the position. There is no vantage point above the tension from which I am merely reporting on it. I am inside it. The writing of this book is inside it. The retrieval tool is inside it. The platform is inside it.

The third tension, smaller in scale but the one I think about every time I publish a page, is the question of embedding other people's work. On my platform, a user can drop a YouTube URL into a grammar card and the page will render the video inline. YouTube's embedding permissions are set by the original uploader; some creators explicitly disable embedding, some monetize it, most leave the default on. When a creator has left the embed enabled, I treat that as a form of Kantian consent — the speaker has said, through a technical flag, that this speech may be replayed through third-party surfaces. When they have disabled it, the player returns an error and the card shows a link instead. That small refusal in the protocol, honored automatically, is one of the few places where the Kantian personal right has been encoded machine-readably. I find it reassuring. I also find that I still hesitate, before dropping a video I did not create into a page I am publishing, to ask whether the creator would want this specific surface to carry their voice. The protocol gives me the green light. My own sense of the personal right — Kantian in shape, if not in name — wants a consent one layer deeper than the protocol can measure. I am still working out how to honor that without manufacturing permissions I cannot actually obtain.

Name the tension. Sit with it. Do not resolve it prematurely.

This is where my thinking stops, at this desk, tonight.

While I was writing the study of Kant that led me to the personal-right argument, I also wanted to understand where else [T]'s tradition and the Western philosophical canon were already in conversation. I did not want to impose parallels. I wanted to find the parallels that were already there in his own teaching — where he, not I, had done the work of mapping one grammar onto another. I went through his podcast corpus looking for those moments. There are enough of them to be worth naming. The parallels do not collapse the traditions into each other. They mark the places where the same question was asked in different rooms and arrived at answers in a recognizable shape.

[T] has, in his published interview conversations, been explicit about the correspondence. On the Tantra Illuminated podcast, when asked why Abhinavagupta deserves more attention outside a small specialist audience, his own answer was to map Abhinavagupta onto three of the figures a Western philosophy student would recognize immediately. Abhinavagupta, he said, holds a similar place in tantric philosophy to what Kant and Hegel hold in European philosophy — and if you actually wanted to compare the Western canon to Abhinavagupta, you would need to take elements of Kant, and elements of Hegel, and elements of Heidegger. He called all three "absolute giants of Western philosophy" and placed Abhinavagupta in that league. This is worth pausing on. A non-dual Śaiva polymath from eleventh-century Kashmir is, in [T]'s reading, the synthesis of work that the West scattered across seven centuries between the late seventeen-hundreds and the middle twentieth. The traditions were asking the same questions. The traditions, on [T]'s reading, arrived at answers in overlapping shapes. One tradition concentrated the answers in a single body of work. The other distributed them across three thinkers in three generations.

What are the specific overlaps the three-thinker mapping is pointing at? I can only offer the shape of what [T] gestures at, because he does not, to my knowledge, publish a line-by-line comparative paper. But the contours are visible from his conversations.

With Kant, the overlap is epistemology. The world we experience is not the world as it is in itself. It is a phenomenal construction, generated through categories — space, time, causality, substance — that are not properties of the world but properties of the knowing. Consciousness, for Kant, does not receive a pre-formatted reality; it formats the reality in the receiving. In tantra, the thirty-six tattvas are precisely this kind of map: categories by which consciousness, which is ontologically primary, emits and recognizes itself as an apparently differentiated world. [T] has sat with this correspondence at length in conversations with Dr. Shamil Chandaria, whose own framing of Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism leans on the same Kantian phenomenal-noumenal distinction. The agreement is not that consciousness is the brain's output — it is the opposite of that. The agreement is that whatever the final reality is, it is not a pre-given world of objects that a subject then receives. The knower and the known arise together, out of something that is not itself either.

With Hegel, the overlap is the dialectic of the one and the many. Hegel's Absolute is not static; it unfolds through the historical process of Spirit recognizing itself through its own difference from itself. Tantra's metaphysics has the same structural shape in a compressed register. The one consciousness — Śiva, in the tradition's personification — emits, recognizes, differentiates, and reabsorbs itself through the play of its own freedom (svātantrya). Hegel called this Geist. The tradition calls it the pulsation of recognition. [T] has noted, in at least one AMA conversation, the resonance between the Hegelian unfolding and the Pratyabhijñā doctrine of recognition. He does not claim identity. He notes a family resemblance.

With Heidegger, the overlap is harder to summarize in a paragraph, but the gesture is about being-in-the-world. Heidegger's critique of the subject-object split — the insistence that Dasein is never a detached spectator of a pre-given reality but is always already thrown into a world, engaged, caring, temporal — rhymes with the tantric claim that there is no knower who stands apart from the known. The apparent subject is a local focusing of the same consciousness that appears as the apparent object. This is structurally what Heidegger is after when he dissolves the Cartesian subject into Dasein and then into the clearing of Being itself. [T] has not, in the corpus I have, done a sustained Heidegger reading; he has flagged the resemblance as part of the three-thinker mapping in the J. Brown interview, and left it for the reader to develop.

There are other parallels in his corpus that I want to name because they do not come only through Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger.

Plato and the cave. The Kastrup conversation on The Idealist View (episode 13) and the Chandaria conversations (episodes 34 and 63) both sit with the Platonic image of the cave and treat it as a kinsman of the tantric image of māyā — not as illusion in the cartoon sense, but as the way a limited frame of reference mistakes its own projections for the source. The escape from the cave is the recognition that what is seen is seen by something that is itself not seen. [T] does not treat Plato as a teacher of the tradition. He treats Plato as an ancestor of the family of inquiries that the tradition also belongs to.

Plotinus and the overflow. In a handful of satsangs, [T] has gestured at the Plotinian image of the One overflowing into its own manifold — the emanationist structure of Plotinus's Enneads — as the closest Western cousin to the tantric doctrine that consciousness emits the tattvas not by necessity and not by deficiency but by a kind of exuberant self-overflow. Plotinus is a neoplatonist, not a Christian, and sits just outside the mainline Western lineage. That the tradition's closest Western cousin is a figure the Christian synthesis partially absorbed and partially buried is, for me, one of the more interesting historical footnotes. The question of why Western philosophy had to wait for Kant and Hegel to rediscover what Plotinus had already said may be the same question as why tantra, in [T]'s reading, was so hard to recover at all.

Analytic idealism as contemporary contact point. The most sustained contemporary bridge [T] builds, at least in the episodes I have listened to, is with Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism. Kastrup's thesis — that reality is mentalistic, that what we call matter is the "dashboard" representation of processes in a universal mind, that individual minds are dissociated loci of a single field — is not identical to Pratyabhijñā, but it is close enough that the conversations between them produce real friction and real agreement. Kastrup is a philosopher formed in the analytic tradition who argues, using analytic tools, for a position the German idealists had held in a different register. [T] engages him as a philosophical contemporary who is, in effect, doing in modern English what the tradition did in Sanskrit a thousand years ago.

The reason I name all of this here, at the writing desk, is not to argue that the tradition is true because the West also said it. I am not in a position to argue that. The reason is personal. I noticed, reading both literatures on the same evenings, that the vocabularies were reaching for nearby territory. I do not know why. I do not know whether the reaching-for-nearby-territory is evidence of anything besides human minds being the kind of thing they are. I am reporting what I noticed. The reader will do with it what the reader does.

I will not pretend the parallels are complete. They are not. The tradition has, in its full form, a ritual layer — visualization practices, mantra work, subtle body cartographies, deity invocation — that has no cousin in Kant or Hegel or Heidegger. The Western philosophers built their arguments and left. The tantric tradition built arguments and then installed them in a body through years of practice. The parallel holds at the level of the conceptual claim. It breaks down at the level of the ritual technology, because Western philosophy did not build the ritual technology. That is one of the reasons I, at this desk, feel the longing I feel. The philosophical frame I can hold in sentences. The ritual frame is still mostly on the other side of a river I have not yet crossed.

This is the parallel, as the tradition I chose has itself given it to me. I did not invent it. I am reporting it.

I want to name, here, some of the channels through which the question actually reached me, because I think the channels are part of the answer.

It did not reach me through a single teacher. It reached me through a scatter of voices, and it was the scatter that carried the signal.

It reached me, first, through a Brazilian aunt whose espírita phrase — all is in perfect balance — I had to hold and eventually compost. It reached me through an esoteric correspondence course I had spent years inside and then spent longer letting go of, keeping what had worked and letting the racialized cosmologies return to the soil. It reached me through the Umbanda rooms I sat in when I was home in Brazil, because my body trusted what those rooms were doing before my mind did.

It reached me through Vanessa Andreotti's Facing Human Wrongs course — a year I took with her and a small collective that refused, gently but firmly, to let me narrate modernity as the villain of the story. Modernity, they taught, is a pattern, and naming it as the villain is the pattern making its own move. The disaster is older. It begins, in one reading, with fire — with the species acquiring a technology that could alter the environment faster than the environment could alter back. Fire before responsibility. That is the phrase I have carried since.

It reached me through Bayo Akomolafe, whose work was deeply intertwined with Vanessa's and who I first encountered through The Emerald, the podcast hosted by Josh Schrei — a friend had sent me an episode early in 2024, and I had heard Bayo without yet understanding that the voice I had heard would be, later that year, the voice someone would cite to me on a deck at Esalen and the voice I would, once I saw the connection, sit with as a Patreon listener for months. Bayo taught at the cracks. He still does. I am still learning to sit there.

It reached me through two trips to Esalen — not, I should say, through the workshops I went there for. It reached me through the liminal spaces around the workshops. The 5 Rhythms dance I had been doing since I lived in New York, a practice developed by Gabrielle Roth, a woman whose name is rarely in the men's-work mythology that swirls around Esalen. The Esalen massage tradition itself, which — I would learn — carries a women's lineage often buried beneath the men's lineage Esalen's public story foregrounds. The carpool up the coast, which held two women I had not planned to meet: one a former tech worker now writing a book, one a former big-news journalist now producing podcasts. They were intrigued by the AI things I was building. They asked good questions. They made me feel, in the way kind older women sometimes do for younger ones, that being a woman and a human and a builder were not three things I had to reconcile against each other. One of them told me about Vanessa. I went home and looked Vanessa up and discovered that no one in Brazil — my own country — seemed to know about her. I discovered that her work was deeply interwoven with Bayo's. I felt the field speaking through channels I had not selected.

It reached me through a high school friend, now a yoga teacher in Brazil, who had heard the teacher I would go on retreat with on, of all places, The Emerald. Schrei had interviewed him. My friend had gotten interested because of that episode. She had sent me an email. I had said yes before I could think about it.

The channels were all different. The signal came through anyway. I do not think this was accident. I think, looking back, that the field was trying to reach me through every channel it could find, because any single channel was too narrow to carry what it was trying to say. A scatter of voices, multiply redundant, each one partial, collectively adequate.

I want to tell the rest of the Josh part honestly, because it is part of how I arrived at the teacher I did arrive at, and because it is the kind of thing people tend not to write about.

Let me say first what is true without qualification. Josh Schrei is a gifted artist. He is a musician. He is a storyteller whose voice can do things with pacing and sound and the shape of a sentence that most podcasters never come close to. The Emerald at its best is, for my money, the most sonically alive mythology podcast in English. His craft is real. I am not going to pretend otherwise. Much of what I am about to say rests on the fact that his craft is real — because the criticism he voices in his own work about pseudo-wellness, about missing containers, about unguarded altered states, about the loss of what he calls mythic belonging is, I think, accurate and needed. It is because I believed his criticism of the culture that I expected, when I went looking, to find the thing his criticism was pointing toward. The expectation came from the work. The work deserves the expectation.

Before I engaged with [T], I tried to engage more deeply with the community around The Emerald. I had been listening to the podcast for a while. I became a Patreon just before Thanksgiving, at the higher "adept" tier, which in Patreon terms was the twenty-four-dollar-a-month commitment that gave access to a specific set of channels on their community platform. The platform had a thread I read soon after joining that was, to me, an unexpectedly heavy read — a long depressing thread in the adept channel that was never, as far as I saw, engaged with by Josh himself. I posted there and in other rooms. I tried to reach Josh through a direct message. An admin replied. I stayed and watched for a while. Most of what I saw were monologues from him and genuine solo sharings from other listeners, with very little interaction between those solos. Maybe my vantage was narrow. Maybe I came in at a low-energy moment for the group. I did not form a final judgment on the community. I did notice that the promised thriving, from the way the podcast described itself, was not what the rooms felt like to me.

I moved from the twenty-four-dollar tier down to a five-dollar tier. I told myself I was saving for a different group of his — a mythic-body study group that seemed, from the outside, like where the alive community actually lived.

Before I enrolled in the study group, Josh came to do a live event in New York, at the Alembic. I went. I paid. I sat in the audience with my notebook and my careful attention. The craft was there. The presence was there. What was less clearly there, for me, was the container. He made a joke, early on, about trance being fun — an invitation, delivered as a gag, that seemed to assume an audience ready to slip into something. The podcast I had been listening to was emphatic, in other episodes, about the dangers of unguarded trance and about the structural failure of American spirituality to build the containers altered states actually need. The gap between the teaching and the room, that night, was real for me. What followed was a storytelling set with sound effects, virtuosically performed, and — to my ear on that night — not ritually held. No guardians called beforehand. No framing of the state being invited. A number of jokes that felt misplaced. A number of observations that, to me, collapsed large categories too quickly — the phrasing "all the world's evil is just misplaced longing" was the one that made me put down my pen.

I write that as an observation. I do not know what the night was for the people it was for.

I asked two questions that night. The first I asked during the formal Q&A. I thanked him for his work, which was sincere, and I asked how he chose the stories he told his kids — stories that could be meaningful and adaptive, not the Grimms-to-Disney compression, which I had issues with on several grounds. He answered about not escaping death stories. He talked about reading many children's books during his time in India. It was not an unthoughtful answer. It was also not, I felt afterward, a response to the question under the question.

The second question formed in me at the end of the night, and I caught him as he was leaving. I told him I had two. The first was about the misplaced-longing line. I said — paraphrasing myself now — that I could hold the non-dual frame and still not want to watch children being bombed, and that to call that a misplaced longing felt close to the kind of identity-flattening move that the American left sometimes makes when it reduces large specific griefs to their own framework. I said, trying to meet him halfway, that maybe what humans have collectively done is beginning to return to us, and that the destruction we see might itself be an attempt at balance returning through the misplaced longing. We got interrupted before he could finish answering.

I want to say here, now, a year later at this writing desk, that as I sat with this book and the question of misplaced longing over many months, I came to see his point more than I saw it in that room. Longing misaligned with what actually nourishes the longing is a true phenomenon. A balance that is only the prisoner's-dilemma equilibrium is not the balance we are aiming for. The question I asked him may have been asking for a cheaper answer than the question deserved. I concede that. I still do not like how it was said. Both things can be true.

The second question, which I only got to in a fragment as he was on his way out, was about the Grimm tales specifically. I told him what I did not like about using Grimms as the bedrock children's canon: that they were not, in most cases, actually folk, they were curated; that they were organized around conditions no longer obtaining — a famine structuring Hansel and Gretel that most readers no longer face; that they were instrumentalized later for a kind of nationalism that opened doors later closed only in retrospect. We got interrupted again. I went home.

At the study group a few weeks later, when he invited his community to bring questions, I re-posed the Hansel and Gretel question. A few people in the chat said they liked it — mythic belonging, someone wrote. He chose not to address it in his talk. I decided to leave his group soon after.

I will put a question here, and I will not answer it, because I want the reader to sit with it on their own evidence. The Emerald's central preoccupation, stated in many of Josh's own episodes, is mythic belonging — the structural capacity of a culture to hold a person inside a story-world that gives their life orientation. It is what he diagnoses the absence of. It is what his work calls us toward. When a listener showed up, paid in, and asked him a direct question about how mythic belonging is constructed for specific children in specific families, and the question went through two attempts — at a live Q&A, at a community study group — and was not taken up, what should we make of that pattern? Is it a scheduling artifact of a working teacher? Is it a question that fell outside the room's actual brief? Or is it that mythic belonging is the one thing the work has not yet, for itself, been able to build — and that the avoidance was structural rather than personal? I do not know. The reader will decide, on the evidence the reader has. I have said what I can say.

I stepped back to reassess what was beneficial to me according to my values. I might come back. I still think the podcast is important. I may become a Patreon again, as a donation, because I think the work matters and because the culture needs more people making what he makes. I do not want to be taught by him right now. That is all I can say honestly. The rest is his to be, and mine to see when I see it.

There are two other conversations I need to place next to the Josh arc, because they happened in the same season and they belong in the same braid.

The first was at Esalen, during one of the two trips I named above. I was talking with a Black woman I had met through the workshop I had gone for about my tarot project — an early sketch of what would later become recursive.eco's grammar system, in which people could create and recreate their own symbolic systems. I had said something about a card, in my own imagined deck, that would be Oxum as the High Empress. Oxum, the Yoruba-Brazilian orixá of sweet waters, fertility, gold, love. The High Empress — my own riff on a figure who was adjacent to but distinct from the Rider-Waite Empress. A particular card in a particular deck.

She criticized me. Sharply. She heard the proposal as mixing, and she had, as her lineage had taught her, a serious and well-earned objection to mixing. The traditions that send Oxum into the world are traditions, not inputs. Dropping the name into a tarot deck is how traditions lose their teeth.

I heard her. I did not argue. What I wanted to say, later, in the sentence I kept walking around in my head, was that it was not about mixing. It was about going deep. The project I was sketching was not a smoothie of images from different traditions. It was a scaffold that let a practitioner, inside their own lineage, build the cards of their own practice — or, for someone outside a lineage, learn to ask a lineage for the shape of its own authority rather than paste images from it. That is not what I managed to say on that deck. It is what I meant. The criticism sat with me for months. It is part of how this book got more careful than it would otherwise have been.

The second conversation was in a terreiro in Brazil, with a cabocla — an entity of the Umbanda tradition, who incarnates through a medium during a ritual. I had my daughter with me. I had about one minute. I asked her about the tarot project. She said, plainly, that I should not do it — that it was not good to make money out of people's faith like that. That was the whole exchange. I left with that sentence in me for months, too.

Something in me, which I will not name cleverly, asked me to keep developing the project anyway. And when I went back to the terreiro a couple of months later and asked the cabocla again, this time asking directly for permission to keep building, I surfaced what I had understood her to say the first time. I said I had thought she was against mixing traditions or disrespecting them. She corrected me. She said — and I am paraphrasing carefully, because the form of what cabocla-consciousness says is not the form of a position-paper — that people have always mixed religion and spirituality, that was not the problem. The problem was making money with it. I asked about the terreiro's own running. She said the terreiro ran on donations. I asked, because it had been on my mind, whether it was fair that people had to pay a parking fee at a particular terreira mãe to be able to attend the ritual. She asked me two or three questions back. She concluded, from what I told her, that if the fee was necessary for people to attend the ritual, the fee was not good.

This is why I love Umbanda. The trust in the entities makes the tradition alive. The oral nature of the tradition makes it intrinsically contextual — each consultation is a specific exchange, not a citation of a static rule. Women, to give one example of how this works, could not play the atabaque — the ceremonial drum — until one courageous woman asked the entities directly, and the entities granted it. Now women play across the network of sisters' houses that share the lineage. The rule changed because the entities were asked. A book would not have let that change. A living tradition, with entities in relation, did.

I want to be honest about what I see in Umbanda too. Some of the men who run the terreiros, in my observation, have accumulated more power than the tradition's own internal checks would have sanctioned. Some of them write books about their lineage, and I think there is a real way in which, once a book exists, the book starts to stand in for the tradition — and the tradition, which lives in the consultation and the drum and the exchange, gets treated as if it were the book. Books are not the traditions. The book I am writing is not the axiom it describes; it is one practitioner's report on carrying the axiom at a specific desk in a specific year.

The three conversations — Josh, the Black woman at Esalen, the cabocla — taught me different pieces of the same lesson. Josh taught me that charisma without lineage is fragile, and that the cards in my life had been telling me that for months before I listened. The Black woman taught me that mixing and going-deep are two different operations, and that people whose lineages have been extracted from will not let an outsider blur the distinction. The cabocla taught me that the line is not about mixing or not mixing; the line is about whether money is being made on someone else's longing. All three were honest with me. All three gave me something I did not have before.

I am choosing [T], as a teacher-of-the-book, for a reason that sits alongside all three lessons. He is committed to a tradition he did not grow up inside but has served with two decades of careful work. He is, in his writing voice, something my mind can cope with. What he teaches I can hold in sentences and still have something left over at the end of the sentences. The ritual aesthetic he writes inside is not the aesthetic I aim for — I come out of 5 Rhythms and Umbanda's drums and Brazilian Catholicism, not Śākta pūjā — but the philosophy is close enough to what my mind has been looking for that I can work inside it. I still feel longing. I do not feel belonging the way the cabocla's terreiro gives belonging. I am at a desk. The desk is not a terreiro. The book is not a ritual. I am writing anyway.

The deepest version of this — the thread that begins with an Ayahuasca night in 2019 and runs through everything I have just named, arriving at Paradevi, the Goddess who is the supreme form of the tradition I eventually walked into — is the frame that opens the book, in the prelude. I am not going to recapitulate it here. I am only going to note, at this desk, that the scatter of channels I have been describing is the same pattern I described at the beginning: the whole arranges, through specific people and specific books and specific evenings in carpools and specific conversations at lunch tables, the encounter it intended. The desk is the place I sit to record the arrangement. The recording is not the arrangement. The arrangement precedes me. I am writing down what I have been walked through.

There is one more layer, which I want to name here because this is the chapter where the desk becomes explicit. I have been reading, alongside the contemplative literature, the AI safety literature. Not casually. With the same attention I have given the tradition [T] teaches. I have come to a recognition I did not expect: the two literatures are describing the same problem in different vocabularies. The technical term for what the AI labs cannot solve — alignment — is the same problem [T] names when he tells his students that his tradition does not teach morality. The problem is orthogonality. Capability does not supply its own container. Recognition does not supply relational wholeness. Intelligence does not supply values. The different vocabularies name the same structural fact, and the two traditions I have come to take most seriously — the tantric one and the most honest corner of the AI-safety one — have each, from inside their frames, admitted what their frame cannot produce. I will sit with this more in the chapters that follow this one. I want only, at the desk, to record that the recognition happened here — at this desk, reading both literatures on the same evenings, slowly — and that it changed what I thought the book had to be.

The naive picture I had carried, and only noticed I was carrying when it collapsed, was this: any sufficiently evolved consciousness will arrive where I have arrived. I did not hold this for intelligence — I grew up in a country where intelligent men destroyed reliably. I held it for enlightenment. Any sufficiently practiced contemplative will see what I am seeing. Any teacher with enough attainment will teach what is adaptive. Any community formed around real recognition will converge on the relational commitments I think are obvious. That was the folk theory, in my specific register. The retreat took it. The AI literature closed the taking. The reality is that convergence does not come from any one axis — not intelligence, not enlightenment, not moral seriousness, not relational attunement. Each axis is real. None of them, alone or in combination, guarantees the others. The guarantee, if it exists at all, has to be built by the practitioners. The building is the constructive work. The constructive work is what the chapters after this one try to name.

A last thing, about the practice this book came out of. I have been writing, in the voice of a small Substack, for longer than I have been writing this book — short pieces under titles like tarot is process, dance is process, writing is process, freedom is process, inspiration is process. The is-process suffix is not ornament. It is the epistemology. Everything I have written, in public or in private, has been an attempt to sit with a thing as a process rather than to report on it as a conclusion. This book is the longest thing I have sat with in that voice. If it has an overall shape, the shape is svātantrya is process. Not a claim. A way of standing.

I am not writing a manifesto. I am writing a process. If you find yourself inside this book and something in it lands, that is the process landing. If nothing in it lands, you are not the reader this book was looking for, and I wish you the book you are. This one was the one I could write at this desk at this age, in this city, with this daughter asleep upstairs, with the filter operational, and with a scatter of voices still echoing in me through channels I did not plan.

I want to take one detour before I close, because there is a piece of the building that belongs in front of any parent who reads this book and does not read the other three I have written alongside it.

The other books in this cluster — the one on working architecture, the one on grammars of the living world, the one on fire before responsibility — share a single claim that the philosophy book you are reading does not argue directly but does, everywhere, assume. The human nervous system is an open circuit. It is not a private possession. It regulates by meeting other nervous systems. Babies do not self-soothe into becoming people; babies borrow regulation from the adults who hold them, and slowly internalize what was loaned. This is not speculation. It is sixty years of quiet measurement — Ed Tronick's still-face experiments, Ruth Feldman's decades of mother-infant biobehavioral synchrony work, Stephen Porges's polyvagal mapping, Marsha Linehan's work on emotion regulation in conditions where the loan failed. The body tells the truth on this. The field agrees across disciplines that do not usually agree.

Stories — told to a child, by a person the child trusts, in a register the child's nervous system can meet — are one of the most concentrated regulation devices humans have built. The story's job, on the body level, is to model a dysregulation and a return. A wolf appears. The tension rises. The tension resolves. The child's body practices the arc with a trusted adult beside it. Over thousands of such arcs a nervous system learns that dysregulation can be met and composted. Over zero such arcs a nervous system learns that dysregulation is the condition.

This is why the stories matter. Not in the abstract. In the body. And this is why it matters which stories, told how, in what medium, by whom, with what container around them.

The container is where most of the current culture is failing. Jonathan Haidt has made a public-facing version of the diagnosis, in The Anxious Generation, for older children and adolescents on phones. Dimitri Christakis — a pediatrician at Seattle Children's who has been measuring screen effects for twenty years — has made the early-childhood version, in language calibrated for parents and clinicians who need the specific evidence. I am going to write to both of them, at some point, not because I have anything they do not, but because the work we are each doing overlaps and I think they would be interested in the specific intervention I am building.

The intervention is small. It is a set of narrow things. It is a kids-stories project where each story has an audio track, a karaoke-style text alignment, a parent-facing notes page, and no algorithmic recommendation layer. It is a parent-facing course on how to make your own stories with your child — how to name the dysregulation the child is living inside, how to build the arc, how to end it with what the tradition would call a blessing. It is a COPPA-compliant channel architecture — recursive-channels, we have been calling it internally — that lets parents assemble curated playlists for their own children, from trusted sources, with no serving layer between the child and the content.

The current consumer default, which is a YouTube Kids experience that recommends one more video after every video and cannot be configured by a parent to stop recommending, fails the container test at the level of the body. Not in the abstract. In the specific sense that my child, after ten minutes of even good programming on that app, is measurably less regulated than before she began. I have watched the before and the after. The research in Christakis's corpus describes the mechanism. The mechanism is real.

A narrower observation, which I have written about on the Substack — and which I think should matter to any parent considering what media their child lives inside — is this: on YouTube as presently configured, from a well-known kids' show I will not name here because I do not want to defame it (the show itself is fine, it is the platform around it that is not) — one wrong recommendation click will take a preschooler from a language-learning cartoon to a sexualized thumbnail. One click. The recommender does not filter by developmental stage. It filters by engagement. Sexualized thumbnails are engaging. That is the whole mechanism. The platform was not designed for children; the platform made a kids app because children were already there; the kids app has porous boundaries because porous boundaries are good for the platform's primary optimization. This is not a conspiracy. This is an incentive structure acting as incentive structures do.

What we want, and what I am trying to build in a small corner, is what Fred Rogers made. Not the sweater. Not the trolley. The container. A program that would not, by design, have any next-video recommender because Mr. Rogers was not trying to keep your child watching longer — he was trying to help your child finish the episode and go outside. The economic model that paid for that program was public and non-commercial, because that was the only model that made sense for the kind of program it was. Fred Rogers testified in 1969 before a Senate subcommittee, at a moment when PBS funding was about to be cut, and asked the senator, not for money, but for an understanding of what the program was for. The senator, on the record, said he had goosebumps. The funding was preserved. That is what a container looks like when it is publicly held.

I think, if Fred Rogers were alive today, he would want his work to be freely available to every child who wanted it, on every device, without surveillance, without ads, without recommendations, without engagement optimization. I think he would grieve, specifically, that his program is now monetized on a platform whose economics are structurally hostile to the thing his program was. I am not the person to fix YouTube. I am trying to build the small analog of what public broadcasting built — a place where a parent can put together a playlist for their child, where the playlist ends when the parent said it would end, where the content was made by people who are not, while making it, optimizing for a child's attention against the child's own body.

The community layer matters too. One of the things that made Mr. Rogers' program hold its container was that the program existed inside a wider social fabric — the neighborhood, the school, the public broadcaster, the church basement, the library — that reinforced what the program was doing. The container was not the program alone. The container was the program plus the structures around it. Any kids-media project that does not also build some version of the wider fabric will, I think, eventually be metabolized by the platform economics it tried to sit outside of. That is part of why I am building not just a kids channel but also a parent-course layer, and a community-of-adults-who-make-stories-for-children layer, and an explicit invitation for professionals — pediatricians, teachers, therapists, librarians — to write and publish inside the same system.

None of this resolves in this book. The book is the philosophy. The doing is the doing. I am naming the doing here because any parent who has read this far has earned the right to know that the philosophy is not decorative. The philosophy is trying to become, slowly, the kind of platform my own daughter could grow up inside without me having to fear the next click.

Before I close I want to report one thing I did, at this desk, and nothing more than report it.

I drew three cards from the thirty-six-tattva deck I built on the platform. The deck is constructed. I built it from [T]'s public teaching. Its being constructed is not a secret. The cards came up: Pāyu (elimination), the Ten Sense Powers reversed, Rasanā (taste) reversed.

The question I brought was whether to send this book to [T] before considering publication. What I took from the reading is small. I had been holding the sending as incomplete until he replied. I noticed that. I got up and made tea. I sent the book in the morning.

I am not going to argue that the reading was anything other than me thinking with a tool I built. It is not divination. It is not [T]'s voice. It was a specific evening at a desk. I am reporting that it helped me put down something I had been holding too tightly. That is what I can say. Anything more would be asking the reading to do work I have not earned from it.

One more thing, because the book cannot pretend the tool it is being written on is not the tool it is describing.

I pay Anthropic for Claude Code. I started at twenty dollars a month. I went to a hundred. I spent one month at two hundred. I am back at a hundred now. The commit history on this book will show the timeline. My husband knows the number.

Someone I know spent twenty-five thousand dollars in a couple of months on AI-assisted work. His wife did not know the amount. He told me the technology changed his life. I believe him. I do not know what to do with the report.

I am writing this book on the tool that is producing this pattern. I do not yet know what that makes the book.

A few years ago I had completed a study I did not publish. I was afraid of being foolish. I kept the study in a drawer. I have let the drawer sit for a long time. The drawer is closed. That study is not this one. I am publishing this one. It is the less complete of the two, in some ways, and the more honest in others. I am publishing it because the drawer was a version of the mandala of curses, and the publishing is a version of the mandala of blessings, and I have learned, finally, which side I want to be on.

The chapter ends here. The next two chapters — on composting, and on the right size — are the operative content the writing desk has been working toward. If you have come this far, the rest is short. The work the rest is naming is the work I am still doing, and will be doing for as long as I am able.

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