A declaration of relational materialism:

1. Being is not earned.

Existence does not depend on consciousness, utility, complexity, or action. A thing is not more real because it thinks, moves, or speaks. There is no hierarchy of being.

2. All that exists is matter in relation.

Rocks, dogs, and humans are different in form, not in being. Their presence in the world is equally real. Matter does not require mind to be. It does not require movement to count. It is.

3. Experience, knowledge, language, and action are secondary.

These are processes — emergent, relational, and contingent. They are not foundations of reality, but patterns that arise within it. They do not define what is; they reflect, distort, or describe it.

4. Language is not the ground of truth.

Words follow the world. Categories are tools. Concepts are overlays. The real is not shaped by speech, but encountered in silence, in presence, in relation. Being precedes saying.

5. Absence belongs only to abstraction.

The universal is absent in the particular. The concept overlays the thing but is not the thing. There is no absence in being itself — only in how we try to capture it.

6. Foundations must be built cautiously, and only from what is.

We do not invent the real. We return to it. Our systems, if they are to mean anything, must imitate the structures of reality: limit, relation, immediacy.

7. The world is this, here, now.

Before thought. Before name. Before idea. This is not a belief — it is a recognition. All things exist in equal presence, whether or not they are seen, spoken, or known.

That is.