Benji

• Since the principle of interbeing and interpenetration in the Avatamsaka Sutra refuses to accept the concepts of inner/outer, big/small, one/many as real, it also refuses the concept of space as an absolute reality. With respect to time, the conceptual distinction between past, present, and future is also destroyed. The Avatamsaka Sutra says that past and future can be put into the present, present and past into the future, present and future into the past, and finally all eternity into one ksana, the shortest possible moment. To summarize, time, like space, is stamped with the seal of interdependence, and one instant contains three times: past, present, and future

• As Peter Thiel observed in his famous Stanford lecture, founders occupy a peculiar place in the Valley's collective psyche, simultaneously worshipped and vulnerable to sacrifice.

• The Valley's founding stories often follow ancient mythological patterns: the outcast-turned-hero (Jobs), the boy-king (Zuckerberg), the Prometheus figure bringing divine fire to mortals (Musk).

• As Thiel observes, the evolution of founders into sacred figures follows a consistent trajectory: the initial blessing (funding), a period of adversity (the "valley of death"), and eventual triumph or failure.

• When founders succeed at scale, their companies can transcend mere business to become something approaching cosmic centers.

• True sacredness is rooted in forms of value that cannot be bought or sold.

• The crypto space serves as a concentrated laboratory for understanding how sacred narratives can be corrupted into sophisticated fraud.

• The attention economy has created a new priesthood, where the sacred rite of "founding" requires no actual founding, only the ability to perform the outward signs of “founding.”

• When a critical mass of sacred narratives is exposed as cynical manipulations, the ability to discern genuine visionaries diminishes.

• This essay is less a prescription than a reckoning, a meditation on what we stand to lose.