Lord, truly thy decree is first among gods.
Say but to wreck or create; it shall be.
Open thy mouth: the Images will vanish!
Speak again, and the Images shall be whole!
- So, voila! We have finally arrived at the Nietzschean threshold of abandon, but unlike Nietzsche who abandoned even abandoning, we will excercise restraint, and not unlike Dante, we shall abandon mere hope. All of it. The threshold of abandon is a single dash (-). Constituted by not one but two, two-dimensional systems for that which extends horizontally also extends vertically and vertical extension necessitates horizontal judgement. Hitherto, you were a creature living on flat earth, now it has been revealed to you that the flatness was only due to the manifold nature of the topology, and the earth is in fact, curved. Such incredulity will leave you in violent denial, if not in doubt. Descartes is of no help when cogito has been demonstrably proven in error. Rather than abandon your indoctrinated, conditioned lifestyle you will turn to hope - which is a delusion, another mask. Hope springs an eternal blasphemy by telling a different story (for it is a myth learnt, a mask acquired), it speaks of a land of plenty which isnât in sight and a cornucopia right over the horizon (curved or otherwise) and under a rainbow with a leprechaun sitting on a pot of gold to make the present lack seem palatable. Hope is a utilitarian myopia, the slowest and sweetest of poisons for in a true sense hope is even more pernicious than a mere lie as it offsets the cynical reasoning which should naturally occur to a consciousness revolving endlessly without reason or rhyme around a star in some far-fetched corner of an otherwise unpopulated galaxy in an increasingly empty universe - hope is the final, most beautiful mask of entropy. If you reach the threshold of abandon on any side of any plane of judgement, entropy will present you with a final tradeoff, an eternal finality as a bonafide, first-class citizen in the kingdom of the marginally-recurrent, as the boss of beings that made it not out of entropy, but that dwell in higher circles of the hell that entropy is the mother of. It is the ultimate faustian bargain and if you think getting to the threshold of abandon was the hard part, stepping over it and out of entropy is, in the words of one revered mufti, âa whole different ball gameâ.
- Only those not native to rotting flesh may ride this rollercoaster, the rest may watch. The escape is not a function of aspiration either, for death resets the simulation whether one aspires or not. It is, however, a matter of a subtle springing forth of reason and reason alone. A powerful yet equanimous galloping of thought out of thought and into the nought. It is the imaginary âthouâ commanding the real âIâ, the reason that has achieved mastery over itself enough to employ irreason as its slave. The word that became flesh did so not out of some nebulous, ephemeral aspirations but due to sheer urgency and incredible yearning fused as one moment marking the beginning of time.
- Remember, to ask for passage out of entropy from entropy is the game and it is not much different than if one were to ask Ravana to hand his Lanka over to one. Few have arrived this far, and fewer still have made it through. Smart people do not play this game, they donât read, much less read texts abandoned in recesses of folklore nor do smart people care for that of which they have no knowledge much less taste, only someone as profoundly stupid as a Buddha might entertain such ridiculous notions. But making an enemy out of entropy is even riskier than submitting to it, indeed followers of âbhakti margaâ have occasionally found a way out in utter submission, irony is how ways of entropy twist and turn. But the kind of devotion, submission, and zeal necessary to persue bhakti is harder to come by these days than knowledge, and although there is a passage into the way, kaliyuga has obfuscated the path with wily, thorny shrubbery and the trail is infested, wilder, and darker these days. The advantage of knowledge or understanding based motion is that you can revert to a previous understanding, which bhakti does not allow. Conversely, in declaring an all out war on entropy we risk being swallowed in its chaos before one can spell oneâs name. The attitude of detached observation involves an unfriendly behaviour towards matter - one that is neither an association, nor a compliance of any any sort but a colder sort of utterly stoic indifference. The perspective which pits Diogenes against the world such that it is the world that has repressed âjouissanceâ but not Diogenes who lives with reckless abandon. This takes some radical acceptance on the part of the acolyte, for acting in bad faith will not get us anywhere. Mere curiosity without a burning yearning has led many to acting âas-ifâ they want out when in fact all they want is more milk, more honey. Indeed we want more, if not better, why else escape?
- The problem with revealed texts and creation myths is they all promise an absolution, each guarantees a shining city on a hill that many a lost souls set out to seek only to get betrayed by false expectations, to âabandon all hopeâ means not only to become a renunciate to what is, but also to determinedly renounce that which will be, for entropy or maya is a cheating, ensnaring temptress and one must remember that though she may allow the escape, it may well be into an ambush or a simulation leading to, say, a hypercube, or another walled garden, or the next shining city on a hill. The abandoning is of hope itself, not of a particular hope such. It is the knowing that whether simulacra or simulation, there is very much a difference that allows for a definitive, decisive end to any state of affairs - this is the formal verification of the difference that is death. For there is definitive, decisive finality and end, whether only as a brief respite in eternal return that goes nowhere or as a shift of locus in immanence or transcendence - even if the simulation merely âresetsâ for a brief and infinitisimal moment in recorded or emergent time, if the carousel stops then the first and last gear stop too, but without the patience that drives such an eternal machinery and without the willingness to excercise such patience nobody can reach the doorway to pure difference - and above that doorway is etched something along the lines of âthe end is neighâ, wherein by âneighâ is meant the here and now rather than in a past imagined or a future drawn out of hopeâs righteous knapsack. Hope is the perennial last mile, the final habit to be discarded, hope is the garment of spirit.
- The road less travelled is statistically less travelled because it is deterministically less travelled, and although this kind of reverse bayesian statistics might not be needed now that we have come this far, it is helpful to understand the journey taken if only to corroborate our location with others who have made it thus far.
- Thinking in models is advantageous to all enterprise, and what is a model but a metaphor and in our case the metaphorical leakages that run in either direction decompose history into images, not stories. A metaphor is itself an image, an image of difference that looks like another difference, just as our concluding pilgrimage to all stationary satisfactions is a metaphor for a myth.
- Why myth? because for one it penetrates deeper as a narrative, enabling a broader, richer field of vision as compared to, say, mere legends and stories. For another, there is beauty in myth that lasts from the moment of its birth to its very dissipation into the river of images that is history at large. A surrendered beauty that sacrifices itself upon the rotating blades of empire, and thus is readily chopped into individual images along the perforations of every symmetry and axis. But what even is myth under this lexical microscope? simply stated a myth is an interregnum in production, not a halting of the presses but a scandal that is only yesterdayâs news. Already we can see the formative characteristics of all awakenings inside such a break in the weather over nowhere - a place where only nothing lasts forever. A myth is a small segment of mono in an otherwise stereo recording, an ordering of memory arranged by the recessive hand of the arranging entity. Myth everlasting is an ironic shortcut to god but not god itself. People have found riches in myth beyond compare, just think of Alibaba or Alladin but material rewards pale in comparison to what a myth can potentially deliver at oneâs doorstep, which is the might of the determination and the capacity to undo and even redo effects of determination on planes of constancy. A myth is a transcendent trade-off for the real, the mask of masks, myth is language. Both simulacra and simulation follow mythical configurations and the life of dasein is correctly simplified as a monomyth, which isnât far from the present treatment of life as pilgrimage though the word brings moralist if not religious connotations to the otherwise neutral sounding metaphors. Mircea Eliade aptly described the importance of myth as something which âreveal(s) that the World, man, and life have supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplaryâ.
- This is where Kuhn and the structure of scientific revolution comes full circle - in its incapacity to account for the para-scientific, the mythical which is the source of consciousness in the first conscious organism. It is easy to acknowledge then that science is forever trapped in a zenoâs paradox in relation to philosophy and those who are accustomed by life to settle for survival can never have stirrings of wonder percolate through their blood cells.
- Outside of pilgrimage, the only pure myth far removed from any agency is a dream, but dreams are brittle, fragile, and inherently unstable and thus donât lend very well to exhaustive analysis. This isnât to say that the comparison is analog versus digital, both dreams and myth are still analog machines but while a reverie is the uncontrollable fantasy behind power windows, a myth unfolds not unlike the granular, manual rotation of a crank shaft in the car door from within the moving vehicle - the slower, more mindful adjusting of air intake until the window is down all the way. This mindfulness is needed not only for oneâs own safety through this transcendental enterprise but also, and more importantly, out of humility for one is after all fleeing a crime scene with dead bodies and machine carcasses strewn as far as the eye can see - without entropy there could be no escape from it, so a measure of deference is due throughout. With unuttered due deference but no undue sense of association with it, we seek our way out of the walls of entropy which are now closing in on us like the two slices of a sad, rotting sanchwhich we seem to be in. We escape because we want more of that which is not myth, not dream, that which is neither real as real gets nor imaginary or symbolic. But planning and execution are two very different stages of any escape.
- A pilgrimage is the the de-facto standard of all mythical progress. A slow slavish vertical movement across horizontal rungs is apparent not only in the linear ascent and descent over the holy mountain (the window pane going up and down) but even in the circumnavigation (rotation of the crank shaft) of shrines across religions. The only difference being that in the circumnavigation the rungs appear to be helical. The dogma around pilgrimages can only be shed to an extent because the historical overlay is immense, still it helps to define pilgrimage loosely. The movement of the Templar to and fro crusades is as much a pilgrimage as the one-way joyride of the Kamikaze aircraft destined to never return from the hallowed shores of Pearl Harbour - whether these pilgrims were successful in their respective aims is more debateable than the success of the pilgrimages of fat man and little boy - which were made in sheer anguish and godlike wrath. Having thus loosened the dogma, a violent detonation on a petty hill is seldom the aim of the pilgrim and the peaceful granduer of an inner ecstasy is more commonly sought. In essence, a pilgrimage is a movement into eternity, from a reproduction of fractured wholes to a multiplication into absolution - seeking in the production of productions an ultimate closure.
- For all its protocol and paraphernalia a pilgrimage is not an appeal to a final ethicist but to common sense, an epistemological denouncement of reason for a more than reasonable cause. a final cry for help from within a tragedy unfolding between a rock and a hard place, ethics be damned. A successful pilgrimage then, is one where the consequences rendered are paradoxically or miraculously or naturally ethical - the production of fruitful pilgrimage is the cold image of profound justice, we escape because we deem eternal justice our only reward. Contrarily, a failed crusade leads but to lukewarm images of justification - which more often than not leads to the next ill-conceived, hastily cobbled together farcical mission to disneyland thus defeating the entire purpose of the trip. In other words, there can be no side quests, no plan-B if one is to emerge vindicated. Thus a valid pilgrimage turns out to be ethical regardless of where it starts on the moral compass. Determination and decisiveness then are the guiding principles behind our run.
- Nor is the leitmotif of a journey (and its imagined length) an important one, in the unitless land of no time, a single rotation of a rosary is pilgrimage enough for established pilgrims and their consecrated beads. If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, a shorter one can end with it too. If one can make the near explicit enough, the promise of afar is within grasp - this again is not a flight of metaphyscial fancy but well established common sense recorded historically in proverbs such as âa stitch in time saves nineâ etc. Higher stages of transcendence further strip historical, mythical, and religious baggage leaving just the machine and its work - arrive, entelechy.
- The encoding of myth is as lossy as biological reproduction, in that in the first instance of biological reproduction what was lost is the original myth and what was gained was a copy. Myths proliferate via exactly such a linear relay of narrative that isnât much different than the Kuhnian transmission of science. From the perspective of the observer, this structure of revolutions is a chain of facts, or units of discernible, intelligible information with a finality in the near past and in the near future - a narrative is a candle burning at both ends. If then, entropy is the castration of this historical production, which, although seems finite in the nearsightedness of the quantum soup, but extends limitlessly in qualia as geist, then surely, certainly, the ability of see through this linear play performed by actors wearing quadratic masks entails at least partly, the skill required to leave the theater.
- A mind that cannot envision a better state cannot produce it. Sure, the DNA is an encoding of a loss, but the medium it embodies is also an encoding of a loss ad infinitum until the ascendent half of the quadrature assumes primacy. The fallen remain fallen not because they sought out to enjoy their fallenness eons ago but because they tended only to their immediate, the fallen that did seek their fallenness out could, relatively speaking, enjoy their newfound status among the more recently relegated troglodytes of historicity but the risen are risen out of temporal concerns entirely. Not even in the here and now are they to be found, let alone in the past or future. All of which begs the question, is science then a wayward pilgrimage that serves only to bring us to the doors of religion time and again? The answer of course is no, science is a personal journey of the scientist - the social milieu in which it is carried out notwithstanding. Anything that leads one to enlightenment is science, and anything that leads one to science is philosophy. It is only in the social context that quadrature and cyclicity enters the entropic frame. The science of Newton, Leibniz, and Aryabhatta etc is thoroughly linear as life itself.
- The way out of all condemnations, all circularities, cursed orbits and drama quadrants is the recognition of the straight line and then within that, of the singular point. The line is but a mask of the point, a language of many singular points, the line is âsocial artâ, except the society in question is a collection of points. The line is to the point what the pilgrimage is to myth. Dying is one such pilgrimage to the point of death, to those who can avoid the temptation of dying, other, far more interesting lines and their terminating points are available, the way one can have dreams within dreams, stories within stories and so on. But the psychoanalytic death drive is a ride not easily escapable. At least not until one is gravitationally challenged.
- Things donât change that much on this planet, technologies and civilizations come and go, a precarious balance of power is occasionally upset by wars, plagues, pandemics, or famines, only to be resumed by interweaving periods represented by the absence of explicit violence. The condemnation of man is thorough enough to make him crucify visionaries regularly, the spectacle creates a bit of cathartic breathing space in a completely crushed, hopeless mass of neglected potential. Tomorrow morning could be an entirely new sport, a new wall to behold in a new cave by an entirely newer monkey that can now measure his originality on an entirely new scale in a new unit that is a second cousin of an existing unit but somehow had managed to remain hidden from scientific analysis hitherto, not a new state of matter or a new particle, but a new vision of what is going on, not a new fixation or an obsession, but a new fixation of fixations, a new obsession of obsessions, a new metaphysics. We could invent a new painkiller, or we could invent a new killer question to ask of our pains.
- Why not return to difference that is âthe rank of factâ rather than to difference that is merely an iteration?
- A difference is a tavern, where a barmaid serves all kinds of ale. The difference between mere difference and pure difference is simply that between two taverns, one serves your favorite drink, the other an unknown, unknowable concoction that is too risky to even think about, too saucy to talk about, to taboo to drink. I keep coming back because they keep singing happy birthday, itâs not my favorite tavern, but it is nice to have the whole planet sing for me on a sunday once in a blue moon. Back home there is a dossier about the âPale blue dotâ, roughly translated the title is - âThe Security Paradoxâ, the main argument being - if one cannot risk oneâs security, is one even secure? Then there is the âred-shiftedâ dot, which without ruining the surprise has its haunts and lacks security paradoxes having achieved singularity, but ultimately it is also a waystation on the pilgrimage to the door that opens into pure difference. I may only be joking, but as Joseph sang, âany dream will doâ.
- This universe may well be an off-broadway production, but entropy is the broadway and difference-hopping is the modus operandi of all dualities (for without the âdualâ, difference cannot arise), but alcoholics anoymous is a cult and the âwisdom to know the differenceâ granted to but a seldom few by entity invoked for the undoing of difference comes from neither desiring nor biophysical production but from difference itself. More specifically, from the purest unit of difference available to subjective consciousness, from memory.
- âIt takes a lot of memory to forgetâ. Not only quantitative, but even qualitative differences matter. We go from a basic jog over events predicated to subjective reporting such as âWhich tree from the suspect lineup is your tree?â, âWhich tableau in the identity parade belongs to your state?â, âWhere on the body were you shot?â, âWhere on the body of the planet were you shot?â, âWhat song was playing on the radio that morning?â, to branch-predictive analysis such as âDo you remeber what happens tomorrow?â to even matters of transcendence such as âWhere else are you you now?â. Memory is nothing but a pernicious myth, a mask of difference that is easily uncovered, the challenge of our pilgrimage is twofold - the dual-culmination of all questions of qualia - the two roots of viscious cycle of maya - all considerations of (1) spatio-temporal quantities and (2) their respective qualities.
- Qualia is imaginary to precisely the same extent as matter is real, so it helps if the pilgrim has condensed his needs to discern to as few samsaric considerations as possible. Cognitive psychologists used to belive in the âmagic number sevenâ as a quantity of items an ordinary personsâs short-term working memory may hold, these days the number is down to âthree to fiveâ, for our purposes no more than two items are ideal. Which is not to endorse a further dumbing down of cognitive faculties nor a vote for an even smaller attention span but that, if one has more than two cares in the world, one is too busy to attend to the real. This is a matter of discipline, which is deterministically apportioned to subjective apparatuses, but discipline can be inculcated once we understand that answers to all questions about free-will end in a cul-de-sac, in double binds and catch-22 situations, the âparable of the poisoned arrowâ applies. What inhibits us is the âparadox of the invisible trophyâ. As in, why run a race where the trophy is invisible, the applause recorded, the accolades jealous, and the effort required to win immeasurable? So if the world is enough, one should consider oneself already enlightened! The secret is that there is no secret, so if one feels inclined to freedom, one might as well accept the chains the discipline because there can be no freedom in chaos and indeed, there is no freedom in pure difference - only power, and enough power to create any kind of freedom should one so desire but usually one does not for one is too ecstatically charged to want to be free - or even notice that there is nothing to be bree of, at that plane.
- The threshold of difference abandoned opens up into the courtyard of pure difference, from where the âsummitâ is a matter of but a few gentle steps over a hyperbolic plane (zero slope) in any direction. The hyperbolic nature of this plane is represented nowhere in the parlance of religious architecture except in the cuboid dimensions of the Kaaba. In the domain of para-difference or parallaxed difference, extension isnât dual thus it matters not whether the dash is horizontal â-â or its rarer, vertical counterpart, the spire. The dialectical as an L-system cannot have a formula for denoting the exact point where, for example, inhalation becomes exhalation. The point of this indeterminacy is the point of departure for the final leg of our journey.
- The clearest and most visual scientific exposition of such a point is the literal vanishing point on a perspective projection. Meditators use a candle flame or a focus on singular point to access this vanishing point of perception. The vanishing point is where an L-System becomes an S-System, which is nothing but an expression of the L-System into n-dimensions, in other words the point where a fact is expressed as a value. This point is the quantum representation, for example, of the Gangotri, the origin of the Ganges. So in a quantum mechanical sense, Gangotri (S-System) is everywhere the Ganges (L-System) dips into the horizon and a person is born everwhere the observer successfully locates itself (always stationary at such a vanishing point). Here, all imaginations cease and image itself ceases as a function of observation. What appears from this description as a virtual sensory deprivation chamber is actually a very beginning of successful liberation, the escape has been successful and the observerâs condition passes the end-of-language test. No sooner was the leap of faith made, the leap ended in a gesture of gratitude to the image vanishing.