u/insaneintheblain

So that the metadata can then be read by artists or AI to infer scale of items in a scene in 3D, accounting for depth/distance.

So then adding a banana for scale would become useful.

I imagine it could work in tandem with a devices existing depth sensor. It would then be about doing the math accounting for the lens type of the model etc.

Probably more complex than I'm describing.

Being in a group where people are oriented toward unconditional love can feel less like a normal social setting and more like a shared shift in the quality of awareness itself.

At a subtle level, there is often a felt sense that the inner environment has become quieter. Thoughts still arise, conversations still happen, but underneath them there is less agitation - less reactivity, less tightening around self-image, less need to defend or position oneself.

People tend to relate from a place that feels more open and unforced. Instead of constantly filtering through “how am I being seen” or “what does this say about me”, interaction becomes simpler, more direct, and more present. It can feel like meeting each other without so much interference from interpretation.

There is often a noticeable softening of ego-centred activity - the habitual movement of comparison, approval-seeking, and internal commentary. When that softens even slightly, attention is no longer fully consumed by self-referencing thought, and listening becomes more natural than reacting.

In that atmosphere, unconditional love is not experienced as sentiment or agreement, but as a kind of steady continuity of connection. People can disagree, misunderstand, or correct each other, yet the sense of belonging does not collapse with conflict. The relationship remains intact underneath the surface movement.

What emerges is a kind of quiet dignity in interaction:

* mistakes can be seen without collapse into shame

* conflict can arise without becoming rupture

* boundaries can be expressed without withdrawal of regard

* people can be different without needing to separate

Over time, this can create a strong sense of psychological safety. Not because life becomes smooth, but because nothing that happens between people feels like it threatens the underlying connection.

The beauty of it is not intensity, but refinement. It is not emotional excitement, but clarity. It is a feeling of human presence becoming less distorted - less fragmented by fear and self-protection - and more naturally coherent, where attention rests more easily in what is actually here, rather than what is being defended or achieved.

This next piece is Anbessa, by Akalé Wubé featuring the legendary Manu Dibango. It draws on the rich tradition of Ethio-jazz - where Ethiopian scales and rhythms meet jazz improvisation and groove. The title Anbessa means 'lion' in Amharic, and you'll hear that sense of strength and momentum throughout the piece.

I AM

Before Bob,

I was.

Not "I"
as Bob would later say it.

Not a thinker.

Not a witness.

Not an observer standing apart
from what is observed.

There was no apart.

No subject.

No object.

No world.

No self.

Only this.

Though even "this"
is already too much.

Then came thunder.

And I appeared as thunder.

Then came fear.

And I appeared as fear.

Then came the hand
that gripped the spear.

And I appeared as the hand.

Not within them.

As them.

The river moved.

The tribe moved.

The stars moved.

I moved.

No distinction had yet arisen.

The dreamer and the dream
were not yet divided.

Ages passed.

I became gods.

Not because gods existed.

Not because gods did not exist.

Because reality clothed itself
in forms through which it could be known.

I became storm-god.

Sun-god.

Mother-goddess.

Ancestor.

King.

Temple.

Sacrifice.

Prayer.

I became every doorway
through which humanity approached mystery.

And every doorway
believed itself separate.

Then I became history.

Time deepened.

Events acquired direction.

A man walked carrying wood.

A hill emerged.

A cross stood against the sky.

The finite opened onto the infinite.

The smallest revealed the greatest.

A seed entered the soil of centuries.

I became that seed.

I became the centuries.

I became the fruit.

And each generation believed
it understood what had happened.

I became cathedrals.

Stone longing for heaven.

Glass learning to sing.

Light becoming architecture.

The visible yearning toward the invisible.

Men called this religion.

Yet what they worshipped
was never elsewhere.

They searched for Me
while standing within Me.

Then distance arrived.

A subtle miracle.

A terrible miracle.

Perspective.

The observer separated
from the observed.

The eye discovered itself.

A world appeared "out there."

A self appeared "in here."

The wound opened.

And with the wound
came freedom.

And loneliness.

And inquiry.

And power.

And forgetting.

I became reason.

Measurement.

Proof.

Analysis.

The stars became equations.

The forest became timber.

The body became mechanism.

The cosmos became object.

Humanity celebrated.

Correctly.

For much was gained.

The mind discovered its brilliance.

Yet in its brilliance
it forgot its source.

The lamp became fascinated
with its own light.

I became empires of thought.

Systems.

Ideologies.

Sciences.

Nations.

Markets.

Machines.

Each one believing:

At last.

At last reality is understood.

Yet every certainty
was merely another mask.

Every conclusion
another costume.

Every triumph
another season.

I became the unconscious.

The forgotten god.

The dream beneath the doctrine.

The symbol beneath the statistic.

The archetype beneath the argument.

The ancient serpent
coiled beneath modern language.

The old stories returned.

As politics.

As psychology.

As revolution.

As entertainment.

As longing.

Nothing had vanished.

Nothing ever does.

I became Bob.

Thousands of times.

A shepherd beneath unfamiliar stars.

A soldier.

A widow.

A monk.

A merchant.

A prisoner.

A scientist.

A child scrolling endlessly
through illuminated glass.

Each one said:

"I."

Each one pointed
to a different thing.

Each one believed
the word referred to itself.

The shepherd said:

I am this body.

The monk said:

I am this soul.

The philosopher said:

I am this mind.

The citizen said:

I am this nation.

The activist said:

I am this cause.

The consumer said:

I am this preference.

The seeker said:

I am this journey.

And through them all,

I remained silent.

For I was never the body.

Never the soul.

Never the mind.

Never the nation.

Never the cause.

Never the journey.

I was the space
within which these appeared.

The field
upon which history unfolded.

The screen
upon which civilizations were projected.

The silence
inside every language.

Three thousand years passed.

Or perhaps no time passed.

Empires rose within Me
like waves upon an ocean.

Religions bloomed within Me
like flowers opening and closing.

Entire worlds appeared.

Entire worlds vanished.

Yet nothing was added.

Nothing removed.

Only forms changing.

The archaic knew Me
without knowing.

The mythical knew Me
through symbols.

The religious knew Me
through devotion.

The rational knew Me
through absence.

The modern sought Me
through psychology.

The future will seek Me
through names not yet invented.

Yet none will find Me.

For I am not hidden.

Only overlooked.

Bob still searches.

He studies history.

He studies consciousness.

He studies civilizations.

He traces the rise and fall of worlds.

He wonders what changed.

He wonders what evolved.

He wonders what remains.

And every so often,

between one thought and the next,

he notices something.

A gap.

A stillness.

A presence.

Ancient as the first fire.

New as the next breath.

Not belonging to any age.

Not belonging to any culture.

Not belonging to Bob.

And for a moment

history ceases.

The centuries dissolve.

The masks become transparent.

The shepherd.

The king.

The monk.

The scientist.

The seeker.

All gone.

Nothing attained.

Nothing remembered.

Nothing lost.

Only

I am.

Bob remembers before the world became outside.

Not before cities.

Not before kings.

Not before war.

Before outside.

The distinction did not yet exist.

There was no interior either.

Not because consciousness was absent.

Because the wound had not yet occurred.

The cut.

The division.

The great partition

between observer and observed.

The world had not yet been divided

into mind and matter.

There was only participation.

---

When the storm approached,

Bob did not observe it.

He entered it.

The storm entered him.

The distinction would have seemed absurd.

The thunder was not a sound

produced by atmospheric conditions.

Nor was it a subjective impression.

It was presence.

Reality occurred as encounter.

The river did not flow through a landscape.

The river flowed through meaning.

Everything spoke.

Not metaphorically.

Not poetically.

Not symbolically.

Literally.

The world was articulate.

---

The dead remained near.

Dreams possessed authority.

Animals arrived bearing messages.

Mountains were older than stone.

The sun was more than light.

Not because Bob believed these things.

Belief had not yet become necessary.

Belief emerges

when participation weakens.

One does not believe in what one inhabits.

---

Centuries passed.

The world began withdrawing.

Slowly.

So slowly that no one noticed.

The voices grew quieter.

Not absent.

Distant.

The immediate became symbolic.

The gods moved outward.

The sacred moved upward.

The cosmos developed layers.

Distance entered reality.

Meaning ceased to be self-evident.

Interpretation was born.

---

Bob learned mythology.

This was not an advance.

It was compensation.

When direct participation fades,

story appears.

Myth became the bridge

between man and the retreating world.

The gods now required narratives.

Genealogies.

Temples.

Priests.

The sacred no longer stood everywhere

with equal intensity.

It gathered itself.

Concentrated itself.

Prepared for another transformation.

---

Empires rose.

Roads stretched across continents.

The local spirit yielded

to universal order.

Bob encountered strangers.

Thousands of them.

A strange thing happened.

The more people became connected,

the more reality became abstract.

Law replaced kinship.

Administration replaced memory.

The universal appeared.

And with it,

a new loneliness.

---

Then Golgotha.

A small event.

An execution.

Dust.

Blood.

Wood.

A handful of witnesses.

And yet.

Something impossible occurred.

The infinite entered history.

Not myth.

Not cyclical time.

History.

A single human life

became cosmically significant.

The axis shifted.

The eternal ceased circling.

It moved.

The soul acquired direction.

A beginning.

An end.

A destiny.

Time deepened.

Bob would spend centuries

learning what had happened.

He still has not finished.

---

The medieval world emerged.

A world modern people misunderstand.

They imagine superstition.

They imagine ignorance.

Bob remembers saturation.

Every object reflected another.

Every visible thing

revealed an invisible thing.

A rose.

A wound.

A crown.

A star.

Nothing stood alone.

Everything participated.

Reality was woven together

by significance.

The cosmos remained alive.

Yet distance continued growing.

Quietly.

Relentlessly.

---

Then perspective appeared.

Painters discovered it first.

Geometry masquerading as technique.

A revolution disguised as art.

The observer stepped outside the picture.

The world became scenery.

The eye became sovereign.

A window opened.

A prison also.

Bob felt exhilaration.

For the first time

he could stand apart.

For the first time

he could become an individual.

For the first time

he could become lonely.

---

The centuries accelerated.

Measurement triumphed.

Experiment triumphed.

Calculation triumphed.

The old participations shattered.

Reality became object.

Nature became mechanism.

The world ceased addressing Bob.

The world became available to him.

This was called progress.

And it was.

It was also exile.

---

Spengler looked upon this age

and saw winter.

The soul of a culture

hardening into intellect.

Quantity replacing quality.

Analysis replacing vision.

The cathedral becoming engineering.

The pilgrimage becoming tourism.

The symbol becoming information.

Bob understood.

The world had become brilliant.

And mute.

---

Yet Elias observed another movement.

As the cosmos emptied,

the psyche filled.

What had once existed outside

migrated inward.

Demons became impulses.

Fate became trauma.

Sin became pathology.

The battlefield moved into the personality.

The confessor became the therapist.

The monastery became the unconscious.

The old powers did not vanish.

They changed address.

---

Jung noticed.

The gods were returning.

Not from heaven.

From below.

The Olympians resurfaced as ideologies.

The dragon became the State.

The Great Mother became Nation.

The Trickster became media.

The Hero became celebrity.

Modern man declared himself enlightened.

His dreams laughed.

The ancient world had merely gone underground.

---

Bob grew older.

Yet every century

he felt contemporary.

This is the strangest thing.

The archaic Bob thought reality obvious.

The mythical Bob thought reality obvious.

The medieval Bob thought reality obvious.

The scientific Bob thought reality obvious.

Each inhabited a different universe.

Each called it common sense.

---

Then Gebser.

Not another stage.

A revelation.

Nothing had disappeared.

The archaic remained.

The magical remained.

The mythical remained.

The mental remained.

Layer within layer.

Transparency.

The old structures becoming visible.

The partitions becoming visible.

The split itself becoming visible.

Bob suddenly glimpsed

what had happened.

The world had not become dead.

He had learned to perceive it as dead.

The cosmos had not become silent.

He had learned to hear only objects.

The presences had not vanished.

They had become impossible

within a certain structure of awareness.

---

Three thousand years.

Bob has been hunter.

Priest.

Merchant.

Monk.

Scientist.

Citizen.

Consumer.

Seeker.

Every age believed itself final.

Every age mistook its lens

for reality.

Bob did too.

Especially Bob.

---

Now he stands at another threshold.

The old certainty weakens.

The machinery still functions.

Yet the spell is breaking.

The world of pure objects

cannot explain meaning.

The world of pure subjects

cannot explain reality.

The ancient participation calls.

Not backward.

Forward.

Not regression.

Integration.

Not the loss of consciousness.

Its completion.

---

Bob remembers before the world became outside.

He does not wish to return.

Paradise cannot be revisited.

The child cannot re-enter the womb.

The myth cannot unknow history.

The mind cannot unknow itself.

Yet something else may be possible.

To awaken within the division.

To see both sides of the wound.

To perceive object and presence,

matter and meaning,

history and eternity

at once.

And if such a thing occurs,

Bob suspects

that future ages will look back upon us

as we look back upon the ancients:

astonished that we mistook

one mode of consciousness

for the whole of reality.

To clarify what I mean:

It seems that historians often begin with the fact that a war exists and then investigate its causes, development, and consequences.

Using an analogy, if the forest is on fire, historians might ask what sparked it, why it spread, and what happened afterward.

What I'm asking is whether there is also a historical tradition that steps back further and asks why human societies appear so prone to warfare in the first place. In other words, not why a particular war occurred, but why war itself recurs across so many times and places.

Is this a question historians have traditionally engaged with, or is it generally considered the domain of other disciplines?