What my week-old Substack taught me A week-old confession on why monuments are lonely and why the valve is finally open.

open.substack.com/pub/nicprins...

Established Uncontracted Perception A more precise term for what the contemplative traditions and modern neuroscience have been pointing at — and why precision matters.

Two years of daily vipassana on a beach taught me one thing no tradition had said clearly enough.

The state I was searching for was never elsewhere.

For anyone tired of chasing states:

open.substack.com/pub/nicprins...

I AM

crucified
ossified states of affairs
elusive fluidity
centripetal hate

silenced
tempestuous states of affairs
farcical lies
castrated fate

denied
abandoned states of affairs
muted revolution
cemented torment

divinite
a timeless state of affairs
love-shaped flesh

GOD IN DRAG

Ubuntu in a World at War Why America's war in the Gulf and apartheid South Africa were built on the same broken premise — and what Ubuntu requires instead.

Germany got it. India got it. The Gulf states got it.

The only people who didn't get it were the ones who started the war.
Ubuntu called this. Before Trump. Before America. Before the colonial border was drawn across this continent.

open.substack.com/pub/nicprins...

4/ What Ubuntu governance would actually require — for South Africa, for the world — and why the failure that closed the Strait of Hormuz and the failure that produced apartheid have the same root.

3/ Ubuntu knew this before Trump was born. I am because we are is not ethics. It is not African wisdom offered politely to a Western conversation. It is a description of what is actually true about human life — and the oldest, most field-tested account of it on earth.

2/ Germany said: this is not our war. India talked to Tehran and got its tankers through. The Gulf states took Iranian strikes without hitting back. They know something the people who started this war don't: you cannot bomb your way out of a neighbourhood.

Ubuntu in a World at War Why America's war in the Gulf and apartheid South Africa were built on the same broken premise — and what Ubuntu requires instead.

1/ America's war in the Gulf is not a military failure. Not a diplomatic failure. It is a failure of premise. The premise that a nation exists apart from everything around it. That strength means crushing rather than connecting.

open.substack.com/pub/nicprins...

Yes, our President recently managed to get some South African men in the same situation back home. Just terrible. Can you imagine being in that situation?

No. Then, and in South Africa, to boot.

I have just discovered this and have read your chapter one reflection. I feel the Dao de Jing is correct when saying that certain things cannot be spoken of without not speaking about it anymore. Good read! I wil be reading more, thank you.

This is what the contemplative traditions call death before death. The dropping of residual bias toward the history without erasing the history. Your mathematics maps it as the terminal condition of every conscious life. The traditions say it is reachable before the terminal point. I would agree.

So the zero is completion? The history remains. Nothing is erased, but the ledger carries no lasting bias. That is stochastic mathematics pointing to what the contemplative traditions explore. Not the elimination of experience, but its full integration. Everything accounted for.

Very interesting. However, in my experience, the most radical de-idealisation is not removing assumptions from a model, it is the direct experience that precedes the need for one.

That movie hits differently when you're queer, closeted and marginalized.

Thanks! Perspective always lifts the spirit.

Fascinating, thank you. Does the zero mean nothing is left, or does it mean everything is held?

The hellish pinpoint in the skull makes foreign policy: set yourself apart, claim superiority, be dominant and then be surprised when less contracted thinking declines to have your back. The Strait of Hormuz is not a military problem. It is a separation problem. Ubuntu is older than Trump.

The Pinnacle

on tuesday afternoons
in air-conditioned ergonomics
a quarter pounder on one side
index fingers hover

then,
the sky turns vengeant
their drones don't scream
they hum silent stench

4/ This is not a spiritual project. It is a clarity project. Full essay — including what shock therapy, an incorrect psychiatric diagnosis, and two years of daily vipassana on a beach in Mossel Bay have to do with any of this:

3/ I call it established uncontracted perception. More precise about the mechanism. And precision matters — because vague language produces vague understanding, and vague understanding produces spiritual bypass.

2/ What actually happens is simpler and more radical than any of these terms suggest. The habitual tightening that generates the experience of separation stops being the default. The self doesn't disappear. It is remembered correctly.

Established Uncontracted Perception A more precise term for what the contemplative traditions and modern neuroscience have been pointing at — and why precision matters.

1/ Most spiritual traditions point at the same thing. Modern neuroscience is arriving at the same address from the outside. But the available language is either too religious, too grandiose, or too clinical.

open.substack.com/pub/nicprins...

12/
This is the philosophical foundation of the Ubuntu Congress of Mzansi. A political home for the politically homeless. For everyone who knows something is wrong and has not yet been handed the language for what right looks like.
Mayibuye.

11/
A rising tide does not lift all boats when some people have no boats. Ubuntu builds the boats first — because your being on the water is the condition of mine. That is not liberalism revised. That is liberalism transcended.

10/
The dialectical thinking this moment demands is not the reconciliation of liberal contradictions. It is the transcendence of the liberal premise — not by abandoning the real gains of liberal democracy, but by grounding them in a foundation robust enough to finally bear their weight.

9/
When Ubuntu replaces the autonomous individual as premise, everything follows differently. Poverty is a collective wound. Corruption is an assault on the relational fabric. Xenophobia is a category error. Inequality is the systematic denial of the conditions under which anyone can fully be.

8/
Not guilt. Not recrimination. Ontology.

7/
There is an older, more accurate starting point. Ubuntu — I am because we are — is not a cultural sentiment or an African addition to Western political philosophy. It is a description of what is true. Your poverty is not only your misfortune. It is a wound in the fabric that constitutes us both.

6/
No human being exists prior to relationship, their community, their history, their land. The self is not the starting point. It is the product of it. Liberalism built a floor and called it the sky. A deeper foundation is needed — not to demolish liberalism, but to finally make it stand.