/lit/ - Literature

>>18979369
>That's the issue I'm having trouble with...

I can at least tell you the Zoroastrians beat us to it. They're able to think a "positive" privatio boni if there ever was one. I will now paste the passage from a very good introduction to David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus which does justice both to my intuition of hard dualism and also my intuition of the One as a kind of phase-space of all possible senses. Brace for abstraction nigga:

>Crystalman perpetrates his own existence, and produces — not creates — the universe, by obtruding his “shadow-form” before the rays of “Muspel,” the divine Light, which is the same ineffable essence as the “Sun beyond the sun” of the mystics, or the ultra-dazzling white radiance referred to, for example, in the cult of Lao-tsze.

>The ontological implications of the work, as must needs be in such a metaphysical allegory, are in some respects para- doxical. Thus, Muspel in its aspect of Deity is not omnipotent, but is “fighting for its life against all that is most shameful and frightful”; yet Crystalman, as evil, is “but a shadow on the face of Muspel.”

>This must mean that, although Crystalman has merely a phenomenal existence, yet Muspel, whose life is involved in the essential life of the souls, or creatures, is also involved in some way in the pernicious effects of the “shadow” that has disparted the sublime rays The “shadow” has no substance, its effects, nevertheless, are formidable; so that, as “Krag” — a terrible Being who represents redemptive pain — expresses it, “Nothing will be done without the bloodiest blows.” Also, this “shadow” has been produced, for there is nothing else to have produced it, by Muspel itself, IN WHICH, HOWEVER, EVIL IS NON-EXISTENT.

>One might infer as a way out of the quandary, that the “shadow” is, analogously, in the nature of a sun-spot on the Celestial sun — a sun-spot being not actually a darkening, but, rather, the effect of an excess of radiance — “Dark with excess of bright”; while, to extend the analogy, a sun-spot is a cause of phenomenal (i.e , electrical) disturbance.

"Dark with an excess of bright" - what do you get when you lock the Light in a Logoic cell? You get a sun-spot, like water going stagnant. I won't pretend this solves the dilemma for you but it might lead you on the right track.

Continued.