Quietude is anything but passive. It is pre ontological, vibrational, temporal, psychological, and cosmological. The Gnostic interval between worlds is a mode of being through silence, insight, and disciplined refusal.

The Latin axiom taciturnitas est aurum occultum / taciturnity is hidden gold must be read not as a decorative aphorism but as a compressed metaphysical thesis. It asserts that silence, far from being a mere absence or a social virtue, constitutes a form of value whose potency depends precisely on its concealment. Gold, in alchemical and symbolic registers, never refers simply to material wealth.

The first light of a new day

Let's celebrate meditation, today! World Meditation Day, observed on 21 December, coincides deliberately with the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest night of the year and the astronomical turning point at which the slow return of light begins. This is not a poetic coincidence layered onto a modern wellness calendar but a structurally precise alignment between human neurobiology, circadian regulation, and the oldest symbolic grammar through which cultures have understood inwardness, stillness, and renewal.

Today is Yule, let's celebrate! Yule stands as one of the most ancient and symbolically dense ritual complexes in the religious history of Europe, a calendrical threshold in which cosmology, ecology, social structure, and metaphysics converge with unusual intensity. It is not merely a festival but a temporal ontology, a way of inhabiting time at the moment when light is reborn from its apparent extinction.

From today's Book of the Day, I have chosen the following sentence for a brief, deeper analysis: The most important reason is that states depend on the employment and profits from capitalist enterprise for both finances and legitimacy.Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber This sentence reveals the structural embeddedness of the state within capitalist social relations, asserting that political authority and operational capacity are contingent on the continuous reproduction of capitalist production.

Today's, and last book of 2025 Book of the Day is Confronting Capitalism, written by Vivek Chibber in 2022 and published by Verso Books. Vivek Chibber (born in 1965) is an Indian-American sociologist and political theorist, currently a professor of sociology at New York University. He is widely recognised for his contributions to Marxist theory, particularly his defence of structuralist approaches to understanding capitalism and class formation.

Mauna and the ontology of withholding name a discipline that is routinely misunderstood as negation, repression, or retreat, when in fact it articulates a positive mode of being in which reality is allowed to appear without being immediately seized by language. मौन / mauna (vowed inward silence) does not merely refer to the abstention from speech, nor even to the quieting of overt mental chatter, but to a structural refusal to collapse experience into prematurely articulated meaning.

Colours, and clouds

Silence enters thought not as an absence but as a discipline of refusal, a deliberate suspension of the compulsive production of meaning that modernity mistakes for intelligence. The phrase that names this discipline in the early Buddhist corpus, अरिय तुण्हीभाव / ariya tuṇhībhāva (noble silence, the state of liberated muteness), does not signify mere muteness, nor the social courtesy of withholding speech, but an ontological stance in which cognition withdraws from premature crystallisation.

The ultimate alchemy of the silent self reveals that the observer and the silence observed are not two. In the realisation of the asankhata, silence is no longer something one practises. It is what one is.

Liminal science names a mode of inquiry that refuses the false opposition between reason and transformation, between empirical clarity and ethical courage. It emerges in the interval where established explanatory frameworks no longer account for lived reality, yet new ones have not hardened into orthodoxy. In such thresholds, science either contracts into technocratic management or expands into a reflective practice capable of interrogating its own conditions.

Nyx recharging her batteries

Liminality names a condition that resists ownership, resists stabilisation, and resists the grammar of the settled world. It is the interval in which a form has ceased to function while a new one has not yet cohered, the zone where identity loosens, where habits lose their authority, and where the future briefly becomes negotiable. The term enters contemporary discourse through anthropology, yet its deeper significance lies elsewhere, in its capacity to illuminate how freedom is not produced by accumulation or reform, but by passage, by exposure, by the unprotected moment in which the structures that govern perception temporarily fail to reproduce themselves.

Crossing a threshold gives you a fragile freedom, provisional, and relational. It mirrors the nature of reality itself, empty yet luminous, contingent yet coherent, groundless yet capable of boundless care.

The liminal body emerges wherever the flesh ceases to function as a mere instrument of labour, display, or optimisation and instead reveals itself as a threshold, a site of passage between forces that cannot be fully stabilised or owned. In martial, meditative, and ecstatic practices the body is not treated as an object to be mastered nor as a resource to be exploited but as an intermediary field where transformation unfolds through tension, release, rhythm, and attentive presence.

No Egg, this morning...

Rites, Signs, and Shadows may be approached as a field in which the symbolic architectures of art and literature reveal themselves as liminal events that puncture the apparent solidity of everyday perception and disclose the latent multiplicity of existence concealed beneath capitalist standardisation. The threshold in artistic and literary creation is never a mere motif and never a decorative flourish. …

Art, literature, and creativity all possess the capacity to preserve the delicate, unquantifiable aspects of human experience that capitalism persistently attempts to eradicate.

From today's Book of the Day, I have chosen this sentence for out deeper analysis: “Capitalism needs non capitalist social strata as a soil in which it can thrive” Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals / The Accumulation of Capital, 1913, Chapter Twenty Six. In German, the sentence is: "Der Kapitalismus bedarf der nichtkapitalistischen Gesellschaftsschichten als eines Nährbodens…

Today's Book of the Day is The Accumulation of Capital, written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1913. Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 in Zamość, then part of the Russian controlled Kingdom of Poland, into a Jewish family marked by political repression and cultural marginalisation. She became active in revolutionary socialist politics at an early age, combining rigorous theoretical work with uncompromising political engagement.

Sky's split over the Fernsehturm.

Capitalism monetizes every interval of waiting, transition, or pause by transforming time into a revenue stream. Reclaim your time.

Ethical life within transitional states emerges not as a diluted or indeterminate form of morality but as a heightened mode of consciousness in which the self realises that its fixities were always illusions serving external regimes of control, especially those manufactured by capitalism, nationalism, and the bureaucratic apparatuses that freeze identity into consumable, governable, and predictable profiles. The ambiguous interval which stretches between one identity and another becomes a field where inherited moral categories lose their coherence, yet this loss is not a crisis but a clearing, a disclosure of the deeper ground upon which action becomes genuinely free rather than economically scripted or socially coerced.

The modern border is not a line but a metaphysical weapon, a manufactured threshold engineered to produce obedience, scarcity, and stratification. It operates simultaneously as enclosure, filter, and theatre, presenting itself as a neutral administrative device while performing the deeply ideological task of separating lives into categories of legitimacy and disposability. Within this architecture, liminality becomes perverted from a sacred interval of transformation into a mechanism of control, because the state and its capitalist sponsors recognise that every threshold is a site of potential reconfiguration, and therefore seek to monopolise the passage between one condition of being and another.

Full of opportunities ...

Alchemic rubedo contains both the culmination of transformation and the risk of co-optation by the very forces that you have sought to resist.

The alchemical imagination interprets the entire field of existence as a continuous ontological fabric in which matter and spirit interpenetrate through gradients of subtlety rather than occupying separate jurisdictions, and this continuity becomes most legible within those threshold conditions where phenomena destabilise their apparent solidity and reveal the deeper flux that sustains them. The ancient formula that the opus concerns the transmutation of base material into noble substance has always served as a cipher for the transformation of the psyche itself, for the so called base material is the unexamined self with its coagulations of habit, fear, aversion, and socially enforced identity, while the noble substance is the clarified consciousness capable of self luminosity, insight, and non domination.

The architecture of Gnostic passage, when examined without concession to modern sentimentalism or superficial psychological allegory, discloses a ferocious metaphysics of filtration and obstruction in which every movement of consciousness is conditioned by an encounter with structures of containment that present themselves as custodians of ontological thresholds. Within the ancient Gnostic corpus, these custodians were named Archons, a term whose semantic field ranges from ruler to magistrate to cosmic administrator, yet the true valence of the figure has always surpassed any civic or bureaucratic metaphor.

Nyx and Hecate

The inquiry into the Tibetan intermediate states requires an articulation that treats consciousness not as an isolated substrate but as a dynamic continuum that refuses all metaphysical and phenomenological partitions, much as any truly emancipatory political horizon refuses the artificial separation between interior and exterior life. The Bardo traditions articulate a vision in which mind is always already in transition, always dissolving and reforming, always exposing the fiction of solidity that hierarchical and possessive societies depend upon in order to maintain their apparatuses of control.

Rmi lam / dream yoga practitioners train meta-awareness so that when top down models unfold into archetypal displays, they are registered as mind-made rather than reified as external realities

From today's Book of the Day, I have chosen the following sentence for a deeper analysis. Yes, capitalist modernity presents itself as the universal that all histories must eventually inhabit. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Princeton University Press, 2000, Chapter One. The assertion that capitalist modernity presents itself as the universal that all histories must eventually inhabit reveals not only the epistemic arrogance that sustains global capitalism but also the deeper metaphysical violence through which this system legitimises its authority, since the claim to universality always serves as the first gesture of domination, and domination in turn depends upon the erasure of alternative temporalities, alternative moral landscapes, and alternative visions of human flourishing.

Today's Book of the Day is Provincializing Europe, written by Dipesh Chakrabarty in 2000 and published by Princeton University Press. Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian writer and researcher, born in Kolkata in 1948. He received his early academic formation in physics before turning toward management studies and later historical research, a trajectory that shaped his distinctive capacity to read political, economic, and cultural problems through multiple disciplinary lenses.

The study of thresholds within architecture reveals a domain where spatial intention and existential inquiry converge in a single continuum of embodied cognition, antechambered anticipation, and perceptual suspension. The threshold is never an inert delimiter; it is an ontological membrane that both separates and binds, that orchestrates the choreography of movement and stillness, that modulates the psychic dilation experienced when passing from one spatial condition to another.

Early in the morning

A sustained examination of liminality in myth, ritual, and esoteric tradition begins by recognising that every culture constructs its own architecture of thresholds, each expressing a metaphysical grammar through which the human being is disassembled, reconstituted, or conveyed across ontological boundaries. These thresholds are never symbolic ornamentation. They are operational sites that rearrange identity, perception, social belonging, and cosmological alignment. …

Becoming requires dissolution, and every movement into deeper knowledge, freedom, or spiritual insight must pass through the zone in which stability collapses and potential becomes incandescent.

The daily rotation of the Earth stages an unending dramaturgy of becoming in which two intervals possess a density of meaning that far exceeds their brief duration. These are the thresholds of dawn and dusk, temporal limina in which the world seems to hesitate between ontological conditions. What unfolds in these suspended hours is not simply a shift in the angle of the sun nor an atmospheric modulation.

In Nuremberg

The ordinary is never merely ordinary; it is the theatre within which consciousness performs its most intricate alchemical manoeuvres. The assumption that transcendence is found only in remote monasteries, rarefied mystical states, or grand metaphysical events is itself an artefact of a culture that has forgotten the foundational insight of both ancient contemplative traditions and modern phenomenology, namely that awareness becomes luminous precisely when it turns toward what already is rather than what might be.

Attention, ethical presence, and engagement with the ordinary are active forms of praxis that destabilize a market-driven existence, revealing the daily life as a terrain for liberation and transformative insight.

And of course, here it is the GGSC Happiness Calendar for the last month of this year. The topic of the month is seeking out joy together. Here are my ideas about the topic. Joy, when approached as a disciplined mode of perception rather than a fleeting emotional spike, reveals itself as a profound pathway to happiness. It is not identical with pleasure, which depends upon stimulation, nor with excitement, which exhausts itself through intensity, nor with entertainment, which numbs by distraction.

And of course, here it is the GGSC Happiness Calendar for the last month of this year. The topic of the month is seeking out joy together. Here are my ideas about the topic. Joy, when approached as a disciplined mode of perception rather than a fleeting emotional spike, reveals itself as a profound pathway to happiness. It is not identical with pleasure, which depends upon stimulation, nor with excitement, which exhausts itself through intensity, nor with entertainment, which numbs by distraction.

Dear readers, here you are the last Action for Happiness' Happiness Calendar for this year. This month's topic is kindness. As usual, I leave you here some thoughts about this seed. Happiness that arises through the cultivation and enactment of kindness requires an account of human interiority that does not reduce the mind to a mechanistic apparatus, nor the world to a theatre of competitive agents driven by acquisitive impulses.

Fire, Salt, and Mercury arise not as inert substances locked within the archaic vocabularies of premodern metallurgy but as living indices of an enduring spiritual science in which the body, the mind, and the subtle strata of consciousness intertwine within a single ontological current that refuses the partition of material and spiritual domains imposed by the Cartesian and post Cartesian epistemic regime.

The modern Spiritual Alchemist integrates the intentionality of icchā śakti, the coherence of the embodied Salt matrix, and the clarity of mercurial consciousness into a single field of transformative activity.

From today's Book of the Day, I have chosen the following sentence for a deeper analysis. Our present ethnoclass conception of the human, Man, overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, in CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2003, p. 260 The sentence operates as an axial fulcrum within the entire decolonial project because it crystallises with extraordinary theoretical economy the exact mechanism through which the colonial West manufactured a descriptive statement of the human that masquerades as a universal ontology.

Today's Book of the Day is Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, written by Sylvia Wynter in 2003 and published by CR. Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican novelist, playwright, cultural theorist, and foundational figure in contemporary decolonial thought whose work traverses literature, philosophy, anthropology, Black studies, and critical epistemology with an intellectual restlessness that defies disciplinary containment. Her teaching and essays reshaped an entire generation’s understanding of the colonial invention of Man as the overrepresented centre of being and knowledge.

In contemplating the philosophical animal, one confronts the profound undoing of the anthropocentric hierarchies that have shaped both metaphysical systems and material histories, for to interrogate consciousness in its manifold expressions is to dissolve the presumption that the human occupies a privileged summit within the continuum of sentient life. The contemporary neuroscientific and ethological landscape has rendered untenable any claim that consciousness is a discrete human possession, since the gradated and distributed character of awareness that emerges from comparative studies reveals a spectrum of perceptual, affective, and cognitive capacities across species whose divergence undermines the binary distinctions inherited from classical anthropology.