/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22608789]

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:

[Anonymous No.22608812]

So it's not that the objet petit a (that which is more me than me myself, what haunts the puer aeternus/Shinji archetype) is some internalized kernel of objectivity that the Gnostic, rejecting the author of nature, must also reject: it's the subject himself that cinches shut the circle of objectivity at his level (of pre-subjective 'development'): the Real is 'didactic' only as far as I myself correspond to its soteriological grammar: because that grammar is my own: I am not an ego or sensorium, but a point of (non-)ontological cohesion: that which, through a period of extended solitude/sense-restraint, reveals my own mind to me as fraudulent: a discrete phenomenological entity: literally, an entity whose very substance is phenomenological: having 'eroticized' everything but the basis of my eroticization, I am reunited with my positive void like a prodigal lover: probably why early monastic demonology could only have a concept of the demon as something external, and why the Cartesian makes us consubstantial with evil spirits: sense-restraint gradually externalizes the demonic in me until I am visited by a 'spirit of fornication': Anyways, Gnostic predestination makes sense now: the Real of (my) reality is my own background specularized, projected into nature: that's how I coincide with my buddha-matrix, as well as my own potential for hell: the potential for wisdom in individuals in general is linked to their degree of a kind of pre-subjective integrity, the luster of their Boltzmann brain: now dimmed: