/lit/ - Literature

Light of the world, you concuss the devil with flowers. Imagine life as an intertemporal prisoner's dilemma played with your future self at the moment of death (Ainsley; SN 22:79). Conceit overcome by conceit, you bait the monster out of hiding with its own droppings: approach Yaldabaoth's Hollow Face manfully, decoupling seeing by seeing and apperception from objectivity like a boss: inverse correlation of form/content transparency: what Americans mainly suffer from is a glut of empathic reinforcements in childhood, a primary narcissistic debt they intuit as garmonbozia: to the metalangue not victims of capital, but of budding total information superiority over reality, the first angelnet: extinguish the veridical or if you're one of those soft eternalists become a light beam in an ocean of parallel light beams, some star of unreflected output where colors aren't raped into qualia

Light of the world, you concuss the devil with flowers. Imagine life as an intertemporal prisoner's dilemma played with your future self at the moment of death (Ainsley; SN 22:79). Conceit overcome by conceit, you bait the monster out of hiding with its own droppings: approach Yaldabaoth's Hollow Face manfully, decoupling seeing by seeing and apperception from objectivity like a boss: inverse correlation of form/content transparency: what Americans mainly suffer from is a glut of empathic reinforcements in childhood, a primary narcissistic debt they intuit as garmonbozia: to the metalangue not victims of capital, but of budding total information superiority over reality, the first angelnet: extinguish the veridical or if you're one of those soft eternalists become a light beam in an ocean of parallel light beams, some star of unreflected output where colors aren't raped into qualia

We all know Gnostic salvation is an inner work: the hand reaching down from the heavens is my own hand topologically looped, etc. - not unlike how the Tower of Babel in that Ted Chiang story is so tall it punctures the celestial vault only to wrap back underground: with some qualifications, I think the Gnostics would agree with Lacan that there's no such thing as a metalanguage (unless we consider the pleroma the domain of metalanguages; each Aeon a positive language that is a positive individual, no signifier-signified quilts draped over any of them: but like I said, with some qualifications): in other words, there's no such thing as a Rosetta Stone for immanence: they'd also probably agree with the Tendai formula that wisdom is delusion contemplating delusion: yet the desert/Buddhist monks have it right that wisdom is also an accordance with objective universal truth, a dhamma or Real: an active effort to perceive all of the adumbrations of the Husserlian cup simultaneously and not sequentially, so to speak: to see Woman as a superposition of skin and viscera, yadda yadda: there's no room in Gnosticism for a soteriology of the wilderness, no reason to want to be clarified by the sobriety of desert life except insofar as desert is still preferable to the concentric prison of civilization: how do we make these two streams play nice, do I depend on an internalized naturalism to save me by draining my subjective (read: METABOLIC) excess or do I cultivate a radically autonomous spark? What am I allowing to guide me if I force a perception of the sky or whatever into a moment of anger, greed, aversion, delusion? How do we also do justice to the Lacanian Real proper and the shadow of its axe that hangs perpetually over the symbolic universe? The horror of that Real is an effect of a discrepancy between human unreality and the peramorphic bias of nature (especially evident in the animal domain): maybe Dolpopa can point the way: against the dead-end of Nagarjuna's 'self-emptiness' and its analysis of essences - the cutting of the Democritean cheese until all possible identities are exhausted (which, for the purposes of enlightenment, leads nowhere) - he leverages the concept of 'other-emptiness', the definition of which I still think is the non-philosophical One verbatim, and a formulation of what Antony must have felt looking out over the wastes beyond the Nile: an emptiness that is empty of everything that is other than itself:

Narcissism: feminine or masculine? Sophia's primal sin: impregnated not by her oedipal transgression of the Father, but by her own image in pure latency: what do you see, le no-god, etc. The Valentinian male angel: there is two-ness in the One and it's the autistic loop of the womb, now unafraid of heterons: no longer tortured by (your) rules of construction but being spontaneously saved by your own power of modeling reality into loving yourself: "What need have I of Woman? I have Her in myself" ... great men are stained by our knowledge of them, like great solitaries ... the immortality of the tic(k) ... there is no salvation, only an asymptotic sublimation of evil ... survivorship bias is inherently intertwined with the problem of evil ... the Orthodox doctrine that death enters the universe because of the moral failure of one man (not necessarily the first) isn't a bad one: by being the first to "delight in food", the entelechial background of matter is patched to include the isotropic possibility of evil, now distributed everywhere like gravity: it's as if the failure of one man was enough to drag the rest of nature down with him into some kind of lower energy crater, only surmounted by the energy released by a crucifixion: you can read Kant's work as a handbook on how to surmount the entire domain of the senses, incidentally: on how to paint particulars with the same transcendental brush in order to refine your cognitive rehearsals of suffering and temptation: or maybe it was the animals that taught man to sin: sort of like animals, demons are eyes that are image planes: they perceive only the "actual and immediate", in Hegelese, a world of pure and instantaneous abstraction ... you have to get over what entifies your pulsions, the enmeshment of spirit and anxiety: Angels of course are heuristically unbound: anyways, I've been plateauing hard ... I want to write a novel about whatever debauchery the prince Siddhartha must have experienced to have such a grasp on the mechanics of sensuality ... it'd be like a much tamer (because there's a limit to what an aspiring Buddha will get up to) but still provocative 120 days of Sodom without the French proto-foppery, laced with the hangover of an age and ending with a lion's roar ... maybe the Buddha himself was a carpocrate in a past life ... Here I propose a dualism of man and the human body: the body is the compounded sediment of an inferior order that meets the One 'in the middle', as it were: or else the non-appropriation of the body would be impossible:

I don't think anyone's written a book on the metaphysics of temperature yet: there's a wonderful tension between Lacarriere's Simon Magus - for whom the generative fire of the universe, though materialized in the blood, milk, and semen, is still a conductor of vertical tension - and the murkier flame of pagan sexuality ... compare, also, what's supposed to be the warmth of divine love vs. the despirating coolness of nibbana ... In any case, there's no contradiction between Gnostic asceticism and Gnostic 'debauchery' if we take Yeats' formula that "every man must become the opposite of himself" to heart ... Each, the ascetic and the libertine, is an experiment in reversibility, kind of like how, in the desert, sensual natures learn to convert their excess fluids into tears ... see also: the curious etymological link between the cell/cella of the desert and the Latin word for sky: caelum, maybe even the Albanian qielli... in the absence of external stimulation, the soul sanitizes itself: becomes a model of autistic purity ... this is what it means to be (a) God, the supreme Alien folded 8+ times in his mind shell but who still has ears to hear [that "over countless eons the labor of countless bodhisattvas has not emptied samsara by a drop"] ... there exists a law of the conservation of pain as much as energy, and it's why the roomiest souls - the open air gymnasiums to the last man's broom closet - pray to shoulder the sins of others, and it's also why pop breath meditation can stink of ego reinforcement ... instead of inhaling light and exhaling darkness, the aspirant inhales evil and exhales virtue ... unspooled ourobori, synclastics: they who have inverted the proximity bias of their bodies and minds: moral correlates of the Neoplatonic principle that, at any given moment, there is always at least one member of the world-mind who possesses universal knowledge: at any given moment, there is always at least one person who is experiencing the full weight of humanity's moral terror: Gethsemane "in a soap bubble": maybe the bodhisattva, born in the recognition of universal parenthood and the eternal correlativity of all suffering, is the best argument against Laruelle's humanity for which no master set exists, and the best argument for the inviolable oneness of the sufferer, the n + 1 of the spirit shredded through the trypoaic tongue of the false God into a trillion trillion atoms ... better a dog-man under Heaven's table than a dog: though the Gate is shut, "better to perish in the desert than return to Egypt".

Christ signifies the heat death of the soul: the (re-)construction of the "indefinitely idling" caloric engine that the human body once was before Adam corrupted it with his desire for food: we can say that the 'philosophy' of the desert is a philosophy of (sacred and profane) metabolism: for the Desert Mothers and Fathers (against the pagan world and its charioteers of the sexual drive, a drive they believed could only ever be administered and never uprooted, and maybe even against the vulgar gnostics and their sexualized cosmos), original sin was not fornication but hunger: the intake of Bataille's "accursed share" through food and drink (all life that exists in the light of stars cooler than our own are holy): from the beginning desert spirituality has resonated with the East's autarkic turtle-sages and their own cooling of the body's demoniacal heat: the sexual drive is an effect of this heat, stellar in origin and essence: Angels do not have the mouth-anus body plan that is imposed (isotropically) on all biological life across the universe by matter's background engineers (the Archons): Reich: man orgasms because he is not radially symmetrical like a mollusk (Adam): for an Angel there is no distention in time between food and feces that we experience as slaves to our kundabuffer remnants: inputs and outputs coincide in one appearing: all phenomena mixed with a kernel of revulsion: as we know, the skin is Apollonian, and "the Soul is ... the solitary daughter of the Soul", not the World: "do not trust in your own righteousness, do not worry about the past, but guard your tongue and your stomach." And you will be saved.

In accordance with the perfection of their intellect, an immortal being in the Platonic/Aristotelian scheme is immune to simulacra. They could never be fooled into mistaking pixels for the real thing: more broadly, we could say they are immune to fiction(ality): their Real is too robust to fall for the high-res pareidolia involved in the reality we attribute to images: we could say that an Angel can never misapply Kant's transcendental object = x which ends up synthesizing shapes and colors into an audiovisual persona. A minimal misrecognition is always operative in everything Baudrillard talks about: Angels lack a kundabuffer, an organ which inverts the hierarchy between reality and its appearance and which colors the colorless manifold of the fecal meat world: the neotenization of skulls is a correlate of this: the discharge produced by the 'expectations' of a neotenized (image-laden) soul at the moment of death with the actuality of death itself feeds the world-process of Hegel: differentials are the only absolute value in this realm: there exist Angels which are born into aggregates the light despises to commit suicide-by-God: the 'default' pilot of such a body is a demon; they push this demon out to prevent the calamity of its self-project: these are the suicides, blessed by shame and self-loathing, the sarkic (= fecal) Jesus ejected upon the ascension of Christ: is there an object more reviled in this world than the body of a suicide? Who will love it? "The mind is the master."

Maybe Freud was onto something all along: in the Bardo Thodol a human birth is activated by the self's prenatal desire for its parent of the opposite sex: imagine that life really does begin with a kind of (pre-?)incestuous vortex, or: bhavas/karmic imprints wait years if not centuries in the intermediate state for the right aggregation, i.e. the right body to karmically coincide with in a public physics: desiring this coincision means desiring one's self through one's parents: a sort of autoerotic or centripetal swerve in the zero, recoiling off the centreless deities of unborn space: the Tibetans are inverted Lovecraftians: their primordial Void is a stellar field of buddhas, not "seething nuclear chaos": until then, however, I depend on this matrix and its 'transcendental' credibility to be, this garland chain of vicious attractors, Boehme's salt necklace: stab hole fucking and million year old sunshine entailed in the same noumenon: a good test of Gurdjieff's objective consciousness is how well you can guess the time without checking your phone (try it with your friends): people who guess right have a phenomenal experience of time that is neither distended nor contracted by their cognition, ie they have a soul immune to heteronic compulsions: the young and the old are mutually irrelevant to one another: there is a time for everything under the sun, and that is the only real theodicy of this world as an abyss not of forces but of music: there is a time for evil and there is a time for good, there is no such thing as a Gnostic yin/yang where one principle contains within itself the seed of the other: light and darkness are tessellated in time: that is, the problem of evil is REGIONAL, like Zorn's bourgeois demiurge: buddhahood is the fruit of the refusal to be histrionic, which forbids the impulsive suicide out the jump: such a death is, if nothing else, dramatic, which violates the first principle of any real aspiration: aryanid sobriety: isn't the scientific disenchantment of the world a perversion of this sobriety, as Descartes' cogito is a perversion (read: epistemologization, etc.) of the gnostic kernel? Maybe touching grass was the real answer all along, or at least touching grass at a christic octave: give up the orgasm as a derivative clear light of death in all its forms, achieve meditative stabilization in the pure field of knowing-awareness and become a communication body fountaining love if not truth like a headless god:

The 'chud' is a stranger to life's warm center for the same reason space travel is so difficult … Both are the effects of finely tuned teleological filters … What if 'I' am unloved not because of le demiurge but because, by all rights, I shouldn't be? If we agree with Marcion that the cosmocrator is the god of justice then we must also accept he is the god of the anti-psychotic mean or beautiful humanity (or that in humanity which is beautiful because of the world and not in spite of it): something of Gnosticism really is born in a Lynchian (even Gigerian?) horror of feminine potential dominated by the masculine God: the Gnostic so-called always watching from the closet and afraid that he likes what he sees: always this momma's boy horror of the no-thing taken from behind by the thing (of the symbolic): the Manichaean Ruha is that aspect of the nothing which “enjoys” its desecration by Being: not an identity but a parallelism of Sophia and Acamoth: the horror of being coalesced with heteronic fascinations: degrees of syntony with these drives corresponding to the planets, with the Sun as axiom of experience/local demiurge: desire is not a break or rupture within the infinite but something like a (perverse & ramifying) relaxation of the reality principle … against Daoism's turtle-vampires the Chinese Buddhists opposed the phoenix of self-immolation: at death you don't float up but sort of rapturously sink into your ground, become worldless: there is no community in the afterlife except in hell, where, as the Hermetics say, you are judged and uploaded into the 'open air' of the universe while earth's seraphs sing holies in the Van Allen belt ... In the center of heaven there is a dark point which the celestial light never touches: for Milton this was supposed to be the kingdom where Satan dwells, but for us it is the void-fountain of individuality, the 'unprethinkable' excess of existence over essence in ourselves: here we might be tempted to identify Lacan's Real with the gnostic 'spark', so long as the former is understood in a dirempted mode (having renounced the drive to fill the 'void of signification'): generally speaking, 'gnostic' individuality – the built-in soteriological grammar of the Real which shelters me from all power-systems and is more me than me myself - is the cause-in-the-last instance of the impossibility of the sexual relationship: what haunts in the other's gaze is that which has given its identity to itself, a circuit of exchange which brooks no God or Other and so no blame if you don't like what you get: Schelling's Cybelians are not afraid of their flesh so much as the a posteriori, which in the last instance IS the flesh and its lace of nerves: but on a long enough timeline, everyone is bound to become a Buddha: radical foreclosure giving way to radical eschatological optimism: 'the Good is infinite in Time':

OCD is low temperature feng shui ... which is low temperature pneumaticism ... if reality is school, then it is an accidental one, which is the same as saying it's unilateral: ... The Demiurge is death is the veridical; the "so this is what [x] is like" of Nagel's real difference ... if someone tells you the white light is a trap, they mean the comfort in surrendering to the next bardo: what a certain French gnostic calls the great circle of the transcendental: I am driven by an autonomous thought synthesizing myself behind me ... there exists something that convinces us we have to die like it and die with it

God did not become Christ, but Judas ... It makes as much sense to deny the reality of evil because heaven dries all tears as it does to claim we can make fire wet by converting it to water ... this is a classic defense of Zoroastrian dualism, by the way ... One that holds the law of identities must be respected ... So the Problem of Evil is really the Problem of the Essence or Quiddity of Evil, not the problem of its mitigation, deflation, etc. ... But in that case, even God cannot relieve Himself of being God, even if he became man to the point of sin ... So it wasn't God who became Man in Judas, but Judas who became "God" in Man ... Judas who is damned because he became the author of damnation himself ... What is one day on the cross to becoming one with the sum of all iniquity? ... To know evil is to be blessed, to become it is to be anything but ... and Judas was both: he was an agent of evil who defended with all his power his right to curse himself for it ... His suicide was an honorable one, like God's should be ... Judas was a black Gnostic proper: one who dared a gnosis of the Demiurge by becoming him, over and above the pantomime of sin that occupied the antinomians ...

Hegel is a philosopher of the afterlife ... That is, he's a philosopher of the time at the end of time ... of that which (dis)possesses itself at the end of its rope ... of the ledgers tallied in eternity, and the clarity of post-jump regret ... Hegel is a philosopher of the asymptotic moment of death, extended indefinitely into a Hell or Heaven as appropriate ... You can't perceive the moment you fall asleep, just like you can't perceive the moment you die, and so immortality is guaranteed by paradox ... What if both Mainlander and Hegel are right? ... The dialectic is the quantum suicide of the world-soul ... a description of how the gun at God's temple keeps jamming ...

Accusing the Manichaeans of absurdity for being afraid to pollute bodies of water, or stepping on grass, misses the point ... What if the Good is an ethical absurdism, and anything less is a compromise formation with the World? We should bore holes into our chest with our tears, like Arsenius ...

In Lindsay's scheme, it's the desire of the light to return to its Source that agitates the medium in which it is caught and produces "the new grotesque out of the old grotesque" ... it's the nostalgia of the light that activates the dialectical whirlpool of history, precisely despite itself ... the Idea as an infernal computer, running in parallel with the worldless maze runner themselves ... where Sophia is a womb that can impregnate itself, Yaldabaoth/Crystalman is the phallus that sodomizes itself by twisting back around ... it is only the passage of the light through the Shadow that causes the Shadow pleasure; the rest (read: the Phenomenal) is chyme, greebles of the God-head ... the Gap is not a gap but more a differential membrane, mazed with taste buds, a givenness-of-givenness which radically resists the given-without-givenness of the pleroma(s) ... when I die I will not be quenched by space, I will spread to cover all of it, like the non-zero gravitational pull of even the most distant stars ... "One day I will return to your side"... Speak a word, father: Nothing Will Be Done Without the Bloodiest Blows

We are saved individually but damned in aggregate ... become like St. Nilus who could look at a naked woman with joy while the rest of the clergy averted their faces ... St. Nilus who gazes into the jouissantic vortex of the world with delight and without adhesion ... Who does not need to remind himself of its bowels because the body to him is already a superposition of grace and intestines ... the monk who imagines the object of his desire rotting in a grave wages a war on latency of his own ... the monk skins phenomena while the capitalist circumcizes them ...

Christ is the power of an immanent resurrection ... the ability to always recontextualize your life at a soteriological angle ... there's no such thing as a buddha-nature per se, a pure mirror then obscured by defilements ... only the 'contemplation of deluded by mind by the deluded mind' ... there is no privileged I-that-is-I that contemplates ... only an Uncertainty Principle that dictates two states can never be known together: the known that is defiled is redeemed by the knower whose position cannot be determined ... consciousness is a negatively pressurized vacuum ... instead of taking energy to compress, it takes energy to expand ... Weininger: the founder of a religion is what he is because he has cut a vicious circle from the inside ... a Munchausen angel ...

The Gospel of Philip inverts Plotinus: eyes don't have to be sun-like to see a sun ... I don't have to be evil to perceive evil ... More in line with what Plato always believed, anyways: the actual is untruth, the untruth is actual (immediate) ... and sort of opposed to the Tiantai doctrine of inherent entailment which demotes henads to dharmic attractors ... you experience pain because you have the capability to perceive painful qualia, the capability IS the quale ... the mind inherently entails the universe with all its coherences and repulsions ... the mind is the universe so far as the universe is not the mind ... even if the Absolute is Difference, there is still such a thing as a 'structure of divergence', an identity which pertains to the mode(s) in which things are differentiated ... this is how Buddhist world-systems differ from one another, each is a transform on the matrix of conditionality as such ... Life is an invariant function of any given set of constraints, Henry through Penrose ... the human is a local energy minimum, to escape I must diminish myself, a poverty so radical it escapes all calculation ... because the Logos must always be credible ... Suffering strips me of the strippable, it reduces me to that condition which reduces all other conditions to the status of deceptive supplements. Superfluous or redundant

If you asked a transcendental computer what form the pre-ontological Depth would take if it could take a form it all, it would reply: the human. We have to think a non-biological, even a non-anthropological, conception of man. Man as the 'default' parameter of a primordial light-field. I think this is what the Buddhists meant by the soteriological potential of being born a human being. I was wrong: Kant's transcendental unity of consciousness is not the Hindu atman. The former denotes a merely a logical unity, not some real Cartesian substance in which real properties inhere. The unity of apperception is a bear-trap, not least of all because the analytic unity of my consciousness presupposes a synthetic one. Or as Kant puts it, the condition of experience is also the condition of objects of experience. There is no consciousness without a world, and so there is no consciousness that is not at the mercy of the givens of the world. My death will relieve me of even the unity of my consciousness. What "I" am is not a unity or a substance but a knowingness, the "secret-being" of an "invisible Real."