--- ### Introduction One of the most striking facts of life is that the great multitudes of mankind go about their lives in roughly the same way. Though they are divided into countless nations with strange and variegated customs, and though the masses are spread across ages marked by their own peculiar delusions, all men nonetheless share in the common experience of _mundane life_. We all awake in the morning, hurry about our business throughout the day and complete the thousand needling demands that the world burdens us with. We feed ourselves, we curse the weather and we count out our money when evening comes around. We pass months like this, even years. One day passes after another, spent in toil and drudgery. Ever busy and ever fretting, our days become nothing more than one drab task after another, completed for the sole purpose of perpetuating the process for yet another day. Only rarely do we see anything beyond this and when we do it rarely makes an imprint. Most members of our species are born to live their entire lives in the gray scale. Their eyes never stray far from the next task at hand. But some of us are _not_ like our peers. We are not quite content with the slow march of daily chores that fill the time between birth and death. We wonder at the absurdity of it all, at the strangeness of life and of the very fact that we exist at all, much less as ourselves. It feels as if we never had a choice, thrown into the vastness of life without context or clue. One moment I was not. Now I am. I have been given _this_ life – from whom or what, I do not know – and the meaning of it all eludes me. What is this thing that I call _my life_? Whence did I come? Where am I going? Why am I here? _Who_ even am I? These are the questions that haunt those of us that look at the comings and goings of the world with a longing heart. We long to peel away the veil of life, to hunt after those moments when we can glimpse the answers to the riddle of existence. For men like us, dear reader, the drudgery of everyday life is a _distraction_. It is neither the purpose nor the substance of our existence. Our purpose is to find that truth which teases mankind from behind the gray scale. To us, life appears as the _Great Mystery_. It is that eternal riddle that must be solved anew in every age. It is the great enigma that every man must contend with if he wants to understand the meaning of his own existence. It is the final culmination of every question posed by curious mankind to that taciturn world of which he is a part. Whenever we peer beyond the veil of mundane life, it is the Great Mystery that we are seeking, the final answer to who we are and what all of this is. This book traces my journey through the tangles and trails of the Great Mystery. In it is composed my own exploration of life and death, beauty and love, nature and cosmos. I have arranged these insights in an ascending manner, beginning with the shattering reality of death and culminating in a final recognition of the true nature of the Self. In this way, I hope to peel away the layers of reality one by one, initiating the reader one step at a time in the many subtleties of life as it appears beyond the mundane. To help me in this ascension, I make liberal use of the insights of those great men who have come before me. Mythology is invoked regularly to supply the living symbols needed to make the secrets of the world comprehensible. Meanwhile, the metaphysics of Neoplatonism, the life affirmation of Nietzsche and the spiritual insights of Vedanta are woven together into a single understanding of life. It is this combination of eclectic philosophy and mythological exegesis that forms the theoretical basis for my unveiling of the Great Mystery. This book is not an academic project, however. Though life appears to us a certain way, we cannot glean the meaning of it without taking on a variety of perspectives. There is simply too much depth and complexity for one perspective to suffice. Myth and philosophy are therefore called to serve as the shifting perspectives needed to interpret the _facts of experience_. It is the experience of life that serves as the fulcrum around which myth and philosophy turn – the latter always serving to make the former intelligible. I do not claim that this book is the final word on the Great Mystery of existence. Life is unending and ever-fecund, and all thinking beings must discover its secrets anew for themselves again and again. But it is _my_ answer, as succinctly and simply as I can present it. Though we will explore many facets of the Great Mystery, it ultimately extends beyond all categorizations that we can make of it. No matter how detailed of a map we draw, there will always be more to explore. Likewise, I do not aim to peddle dogma. Dogma is thought ossified around common ignorance or useful lies. As the Great Mystery is itself a living reality, so must all conceptions of it also live, evolve and change. What I offer is not the final dogma that closes the mind for good, but a way of seeing that emphasizes the union of dualities, the fundamental enmeshment of man and cosmos, and the active, willful and erotic creativity of existence _as such_. Instead of closing the mind, I intend to open it so that the wonder of life can be _seen_ for what it is. And that is what the ultimate purpose of this book is. I aim to strip from life the miasma of everyday boredom and infuse it again with the sense of power and meaning that belongs to it. I want to arouse the mad desire for life and evoke the great value inherent to existence itself. Within and around you dances a being of terrifying beauty, creating and destroying in an endless outpouring of ecstatic bliss. But you are blind to this. I want to awaken you to the presence of that being, to the presence that animates both you and the world. Above all, I seek to praise the beauty of existence. Seen with the proper eyes, life is a thing of indescribable majesty. Everything in existence serves some role in enhancing that majesty. You yourself are a spark of life’s beauty. In seeking the Great Mystery, we seek also the form and the means for that spark to grow and prosper. If nothing else comes from my book, I hope it will at least _inspire_. With that hope, we begin our descent into the underworld. ### Death _**Death as Beginning**_ The fact of death is the birth of philosophy. We learn as much from Plato in his _Phaedo_, where he has Socrates declare that philosophy is preparation for death. We see it likewise in Camus when he declares suicide to be the only truly philosophical question, or in Cioran when he names death as the ultimate problem. And could it be any other way, when we understand philosophy as the bloodlet corpse of myth? Do not the most profound myths deal with death and dying? The Egyptians raised the Osiris myth above all others in their tradition, which begins with the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Set. Far north, the Norse told tales of how the world began with the murder of Ymir and would end in war and slaughter. Among the Hindus, Shiva stands out as the oldest of all the gods, dancing wildly in the cremation grounds and covered in the ashes of the dead. Wherever we look, myth is pregnant with the force and power of death. Among gods that die, their deaths are often more central to their character than their births. It is so for Balder, who is nearly synonymous with his death. The death of Persephone – framed as an abduction by Hades – constituted the most venerable cultic tradition of the Greek world. In the Orphic tradition, Dionysus is scarcely born before he must die, torn apart by the savage Titans. And the Hindus likewise recognize that Yama, the lord of the dead, received his title by being the first to ever die. But where myth sees the most profound vision of death, it also sees in death the vision of life. Adonis, Narcissus, Crocus, Hyacinthus – all had to die so that beauty could blossom. Shining Balder is fated to return to the world after Ragnarök, and Persephone likewise returns, bringing with her the warmth and growth of spring. In Osiris and Dionysus both is seen the vision of eternal youth in the god that dies, and it is from Yama that young Nachiketa learns the secret of enlightenment that takes him beyond birth and death. The reader will therefore understand why we begin our investigation of life here, at the end of life. To know the mystery of life, we must first confront the reality of death. _**The Death Denial of Modern Man**_ It is a conceit of modern man to think he has rid himself of the need for confronting death. He believes that the colorful ideas of death we see in religion and myth arise from a need for man to cope with the anxiety of his inevitable demise. They are stories meant to distract us from the reality of death by promising the chance of an afterlife, and modern man thinks himself too refined and educated for that. But this is false. When we look at the myths and religious doctrines that deal with death, it is immediately obvious that they do not exist to soothe the fear of death. The Greeks imagined Hades as a dark and dreary realm where those who once lived reside as bloodless shades. The Norse thought the same, believing that only those slain in battle would escape that fate and be destined instead to die at Ragnarök. All major religions and many ancient philosophies teach that some kind of judgment awaits us after we die. Though the doctrine of heaven may well soothe the fear of death, most religions are far more inventive in their descriptions of the torments of hell. Christians have always gloried in the hellfire that awaits the heretic and the unbeliever, and the mind reels at the unrelenting cruelty of Buddhist hells. It is perhaps easy to dismiss such ideas as mere sadistic revenge fantasies, and I tend to agree with that dismissal. But such an attitude fails to take into account a key point – the believer is never entirely sure that _he himself_ will escape such a fate. Even the teaching of reincarnation does not absolve death of its terror, for the cycle of death and rebirth is commonly understood as a prison of suffering. We see, therefore, that religion and myth – religion being myth ossified under the pressure of doctrine – does not shield us from the reality of death. The man steeped in religion and myth must still face the terror of death even if he believes that life does not end at the physical death of the body. The inevitability and uncertainty of death, its force and power, is never lessened by myth. On the contrary, it is brought forth all the more clearly and vividly. How different then is not the case of modern man! Having traded the depth of myth for the false succor of secular materialism and political utopianism, he stands completely unable to meet with death head on. Instead he retreats into his mundane little life, hiding in the womb of work and entertainment. Never has man been so ill-equipped to handle the reality of death as we are today. The mere mention of death evokes shudders and a stubborn silence. Do not disturb the office serf in his grinning optimism or he will hush you like an offended woman! Even more ridiculous are the empty promises of immortality that the religion of science has cooked up. They offer to freeze our corpses so that the cause of our death may one day be remedied, as if this does not merely postpone the problem. We are promised that our minds may one day be uploaded to a computer, an impossibility even in theory. And have we not been regaled by wild claims that we will one day stop aging? Yet Death still stalks the machine mythology of science. There they call him Entropy, and he declares that all things must rot. Even Bryan Johnson. So we understand that it is just a point of empty vanity when modern man dismisses the philosophy of death as coping. He has no answers to offer, and seeks his solace in the weakest way possible. In this way he betrays life. It is modern man that copes, but those who would live must _contend_. _**The Appearance of Death**_ The appearance of death in our lives has the quality of a gunshot. It instantly shatters the flow of everyday drudgery. Our first such sighting is often with the death of a loved one. At the very moment when the quivering words that announce death reach our minds, it is as if time collapses in on itself. Our senses reel from the force, the world spinning around us as we desperately reach for any thread of sense or reason to hold unto. We argue and deny, we refuse to believe our ears, but there is never any recourse but to accept the inevitable. Though our drab lives remain where we left off before the fateful phone call, still nothing is the same again. In the appearance of death we can understand its true character. It arrives with immediacy. Though the process of dying may last months or years, the fact of death is always instant. When we recognize death, it is always in a single moment of shattering. With this comes finality. Once that moment has passed, we can never go back and prevent what happened. It is now carved forever into the black pillar of fate and nothing can erase it. We are rendered utterly powerless, perhaps for the first time in our lives. It is this moment of immediate finality that arouses in us the terror of uncertainty and the hopelessness of the inevitable. We never get any other choice before death than to accept it, no matter the burning sorrow it brings. And so it will be also with our own death. None know the moment when they themselves shall die, but we all know that it will come to us as it comes to all living things – as a single moment from which we can never return. We see, therefore, the folly of those who try to flee death into the gray banality of everyday life. All their bright ideas turn to ash and their vain talk is silenced when death claims the ones they love. Neither our cherished noise nor our distractions can resist the power of death when it arrives, for it scatters it all like a murder of crows. All we are left with is the silence and the void and the hopeless, bitter grief. Such is the character of death. _**Death and Finitude**_ Death is by its nature a loss and a change, but what is it that is lost? And what is that is changed by that shattering moment when death appears? It is not, as may seem the obvious answer, the loss of the person that has died. They do not belong to us nor do we belong to them. The people in our lives come and go as a natural course, and death is in that regard no different. We can also see clearly that the surfaces of our lives are not changed by death. That irrevocable loss happens within the very heart of our life. On the surface it is the same life, same job, same drudgery – with the exception of the absence of the one now lost. We understand the change to our lives first in the months or years after the passing of our loved one, when the grief has scabbed over and we no longer pick at it. We notice that the drab motions of our lives have lost their meaning and their comfort. We aren’t quite there – there is a silence within us that deafens every moment. In this silence, every smile looks like a rictus grin. The lean bodies of the young look like corpses in the making, and the fat-bellied seem already to be bloated by rot. The faces in the crowd flow away into nothingness, a steady stream of beings moving into non-being. It is here that we see the world exactly as Arjuna saw it when Krishna revealed himself as the Destroyer of Worlds. Rich and poor, man and woman, me and you – all are we blindly dancing into the gaping jaws of Death. _Everyone that you see before you will die._ This is the truth that we can never again unlearn. With it we realize a new dimension to the character of death, and thus to the character of life. In immediacy there is no past, in finality there is no choice, in uncertainty there is no knowledge and in inevitability there is no future. The appearance of death has brought with it _finitude_. Death has circumscribed our lives, cutting away everything but _this_ life. What we have lost is our infinity. When death appears, we lose everything. _**Death and Time**_ There are two kinds of fear that death evokes in us. The first is the animal fear, the instinctual fear that lives in the blood. This is a mindless fear, a fear in the body, shaped by Nature’s hand over millennia to drive us beyond all reason to survive for another fleeting moment. But there is another fear, one much more subtle. This is the existential dread that man alone feels at the realization of his own finite existence. This dread arises in the face of time, for with death we realize that our own time is running out. While before we lived in the dazed passing of day after day, year after year, we now feel the weight of each moment. When there is no longer the certainty of another sunrise, each moment becomes a demand on our very being. We are indebted to life for living, and we must pay up before the bell tolls. With the knowledge that we were not before our birth and that we will not be after our death, we are faced with the question of what the time in between will amount to. That question is enough to kill a man outright. When every moment becomes irreplaceable, the actions we take can damn us. It is not so strange that men are petrified by this realization, shocked into complete paralysis. But such men meet the worst fate of all, for they never even live. With the realization of our finite time, time itself is transformed. Instead of being a procession of events, it becomes what the poets revealed when they spoke of Chronos as the father that eats his own children. It is not just that kin die and cattle die – _every moment dies_. Death is constant, present in time itself as the inexorable movement of what is into the shadowy Hades of what once was. That path is one we ourselves must tread, swallowed whole by time at the end of our lives. This is _dread_. And somehow, from somewhere deep within, it compels us to act. _**Death and Power**_ Dread is not confined solely to the aspect of time. Our finitude does not just define our extension in time, but also in action. More than anything else, the appearance of death shows us the limits of our own power. There is no action we can take to prevent our own death, for it is inevitable. Nor is there any action we can take to reverse the deaths of those we love, for death is final and irrevocable. Taken in this aspect, death is the surest symbol of the limit of mortal power. Our finite power plays into dread in the following way. It is our limitation in time that compels us to act in order to pay off the debt to life that we owe for living. But what we must do is not clear to us – we only know that we must do _something_, must live _somehow_. So many of the courses that we could take in life end in failure or a premature death. Our fulfillment is not guaranteed, and so the course of action that will bring meaning to our mortality is elusive. This is further compounded by the existential circumstances of a particular life. We have certain gifts and abilities, while we lack others. Certain opportunities are given to us, while other we must make do without. We are born with certain wills and desires, and they compel us in a variety of ways. It is not for me to do all things, only what is congruent with _my_ nature, _my_ place in the world, _my_ life. But how do I come to knowledge of what I really am and, thus, what it is I must do in my life? This is yet another limitation brought about by the appearance of death – that of _finite knowledge._ Death is uncertain and therefore life is uncertain. With the appearance of death comes the realization that I do not know when death will come for me and for those I love. I realize that I do not know where I will go, or what will become of me, or if I will ever be again. What am I? What is my ultimate fate? _Who_ am I? This is finitude of knowledge, and it feeds into dread by the addition of doubt. When this realization of finitude in both time and power strikes us, it is enough to extinguish us where we stand. Every moment seems to leer at us, demanding something from us that we feel as if we can never give. Doubt assails us – all actions become vague, without hope or meaning. Seen from behind the bars of mortality, life seems like a prison. And it is a prison from which none can escape, for at the perimeter stalks the unconquerable Kerberos. In this prison of life formed by the reality of death, we stand before the first secret taught by the Greeks in the Lesser Mystery of Eleusis. The reality of life is that all things die, that we are mortal, limited, finite. Our very lives are a prison forged from the conditions of finite existence. To the gods belong freedom and eternal youth, but I must struggle and die. This is Hades and I am already dead. With this secret of life uncovered, we near the true significance of death to life. We cannot escape our death, for it is already present as the very condition of our mortal life. Fear is therefore useless. Shying away is useless. The only step that can be taken is _forward_; the only way out is _through_. _**Death and Value**_ The monumental significance of death to life can never be understood if we refuse to confront head-on the reality of death as it appears. Without the dread and the doubt, without the surety that time is running out and that we must pay our debt before the final call, we would have no chance whatever at living. Death takes from us the false certainty of our mundane life that we may instead find the true substance of existence. Through the pain of finitude, death forces us _to value_. That dread we feel at the passage of time is the realization that we traded our gold for glass beads. Aging terrifies us because we see how little we gained for the loss of our youth. Man shies away from death because in its piercing gaze he cannot hide his disappointment in himself. _I could have been someone_, he thinks. But he did not _value_ properly, or perhaps at all, and so his chance at life is lost forever. This, then, is the path forward and through. We must step boldly into the silence of death and from there we must speak and shout and sing. We must see what is gold in every moment and grasp at it with recklessness and passion. For when we dare look through the dreadful countenance of death we see that all contrasts are sharpened. What means something stands out from what does not and it falls on us to say our Yes and our No. What does it matter if you trip and fall, or lose your footing and fail? A thousand ways there are to die, as Sarpedon said to Glaucus. Choose how this passing moment dies, and either let there by glory in this moment or in the fact that you tried. In the act of valuing we find something that reaches beyond death. This is why death harries us to make our choice – in value is death fulfilled. Death circumscribes and denies, but in valuing we extend ourselves out into life and affirms all that is good in it. This is why it is said that the gods envy mortals. It is not until we realize that we are doomed that life becomes truly beautiful. This is the purpose of death in life. This is why we must die. _**The Fear of Value**_ Death, as the great limiter of man, forces us to declare our Yes and our No. This is no arbitrary distinction that we can decide upon on a whim. Life reveals things of value to us and expects us to grasp them before our time is up. The nature of this process of recognizing value will be investigated further on. What concerns us now is a different question – if death forces us to evaluate life, then how can it be that we fail to do so? The limits that are placed upon us by death draw a clear line in our lives between something and nothing, between worth and worthlessness, between the shadowy realms and the real life that flows through us. When death first appears in our lives, it leaves us with the surety of our own powerlessness and yet it demands that we find strength enough in life to reach beyond ourselves. This strength we find in life’s revelation of value. When man in his smallness approaches something of true value, its beauty and sublimity terrifies him as much as it captivates him. He becomes intimately aware of the gulf that separates his own feeble self from this immaculate manifestation of life’s perfection. He sees in it all the things he wishes that he were, and is on that account awakened to his own inadequacy. He is like the man who, upon seeing a beautiful woman, stands there tongue-tied and trembling. Before her is no longer so sure of himself. True value orders everything in accordance with the standard of its own being. To be forced to value is to be forced to recognize that there is something greater than myself, _something of which_ _I am not yet worthy_. When Eros is awakened in me for this sublime thing, I wish desperately to reach out towards it and likewise as desperately to pull back. Life, in its revelation of itself in death, is precisely this Eros. This harrowing desire to both step forward and to flee – it is here that man fails. Rather than dedicating himself to the great value that he seeks, he flees like a coward to nurse his wounded pride. He does this by convincing himself that the valued thing isn’t truly valuable, that it does not deserve to be valued. He invents elaborate excuses and imbues them with all the wonders of word-magic and rhetoric. He hides his despair behind self-satisfied smugness, falsely thinking himself too smart to value anything. This is _nihilism_, and it comes in many forms. _**The Hero and the Herd**_ I mentioned in passing that we cannot call the death of a loved one a “loss”, because they do not belong to us nor we to them. This may perhaps seem like a perplexing thing to say to some readers, but it is a significant point that must be understood if we are to glean the nature of death. When we speak of life, we do not just mean the physiological processes of the body. This is not what is meant when I speak of my life or your life or even of life itself. What is meant is rather the existential circumstances of the individual. What constitutes my life is not just my body or its processes, nor is it simply a period of time between my birth and death. I am referring to all those things which revolve around me to form my unique experience of life. I am the focal point of innumerable factors that arise from the depths of life. I have history and ancestry, a nature and a character inherent to mind and body which determines what I am and what I can do. All this has arisen from causal chains that stretch far before and after me and in which I participate with my actions. I have fate and destiny, purpose and struggle. All this is mirrored in my internal reality as a complex universe of emotions, impressions, thoughts, memories and experiences. All of this, and much more, constitutes _my_ life. My life is not a biological process, but a _tapestry of being_. This tapestry is woven from all the facets of my individual experience of myself and my circumstances. Its defining aspect as _my_ life arises from it being stamped all throughout with the character of _who I am_. My life is my unique experience of life as it is lived by me. This includes all the people I meet and their effects on me. They are a part of my tapestry and are colored by who I am – in my life they are not truly themselves. They are only themselves in their own lives, in _their_ unique experience of their own being as _they_ live it. From my perspective, I am the entire world. What all individual lives have in common is that they are lived in _existential solitude_. We cannot live for someone else, nor can we die for them. The existential bridge that separates us cannot easily be crossed. Thus, we do not lose the one that dies, for he is still woven into the tapestry of our lives. In memories he still exists, and in the causal chains that his actions have set in motion he still influences our life, albeit in a shadowy and impersonal sense. Death is not a loss for us, but for the one that dies. His tapestry is unwoven – he loses himself. When death comes for us, it does not matter how many people we surround ourselves with. Whether we die among friends or alone in the mountains makes no difference, for we always meet death alone. The moment when death strikes me and takes from me everything I believe myself to be – that moment comes to me alone and to none other. It is the playing out of _my_ finitude, the fulfillment of _my_ dread, the final payment of _my_ debt to life. Thus the demand that death makes of us to value is made to _me_ and to _you_, but never to us together. Our lives may echo each other and our destinies may touch, but the revelation of life in value does so only to the individual. It is I who must value, it is I who must see life revealed in its fullness and perfection within the tapestry of my being. As my life is not merely a thing that happens to me, but _what I am_, I understand therefore that I am both weaver and weave. In the act of valuing, which I must endure on the pain of death, I craft myself in the image of a greater Being revealed in life itself. You craft yourself in accordance with that same Being, but we must each walk our path alone. This is the conclusion we must draw from the individuality of death. Since I must die alone, I must live alone and value alone. Though we may figure as the most remarkable figures in each other’s lives, the fulfillment of each of our lives must happen as its own indivisible unity. No man can make the ultimate claim on my life, for that claim was made by death long before time and death shows itself in its fullness only to the solitary man. No herd can ever claim me, for the circumscription of death has decreed that I must be _me_ and none other, live _my life_ and no other. To live is to be oneself fully and completely. Life is that revelation of great value that occurs within the bounds of individual finitude. Death is that finitude that both demands of us that we be individual and that we reach beyond ourselves to join with the essence of life and become supra-individual. _**Where We Touch**_ Is there any way to breach our existential solitude, to touch and be touched by the life of another? It would seem that this is impossible, given what has just been said. My life – and thus myself – occurs only as the tapestry of my own being, woven by me and for me alone. The same is undeniably true for you. To the extent that we figure in each other’s lives, we do so only as external phenomena. We each exist, as individuals, in a state of alienation. We struggle to even know ourselves much less anyone else. Though we reach out to grasp our own lives we often catch nothing but smoke. This is so because we are, through our mortality, confined already to the dark realm of Hades. We are finite beings, limited in power and knowledge, certain only that we are devoured piecemeal in every moment in preparation for final darkness. That we do not know ourselves nor our own lives, though it is all we truly can know, is a function of the limiting effect of death. Death circumscribes existence such that I must live _this_ life and no other. Therefore, I can never truly know another life aside from my own. And yet life itself stretches so far beyond my life that I can never catch full sight of it. Though I participate in the weaving of my own life, the raw material of life out of which I weave is no passive observer. It weaves itself in accordance to an ineffable intelligence. I am the made as much as the maker, and my life – though it belongs to no one else – is not truly mine. This is why mortal life appears in mystic metaphor as a realm of shades. But in this weaving madness that constitutes my life, life reveals its sublimity in the image of the valuable. These are the golden strands of sunlight that shine through the haze and the gloom, and out of which I can weave the only portions of my own existence that are truly enduring. And it is here, and here alone, that our lives can touch. For when life reveals its sublimity in my life, it sometimes does so _as you_. That great value from which I can weave a life worth living, that strand of sunlight that reveals the essence of life, sometimes appears in the guise of another person. How can this be? Because the value that shines from you into my life is _the same value_ that shines in your life. The golden strands that you have struggled so to weave into your life – those strands also reach into my life _through you_. The sublimity and awe, the beauty and the bliss, the joy and the vitality of life – this is the only thing that we can truly share, the only thing that can reach beyond the border of our existential solitude. This touching of lives that occurs when immortal Life shines from mortal life to mortal life – this is _love_. Through love we reach beyond ourselves and thus beyond the limits of death. Not just into the lives of each other, but into the life that lies beyond all lives. _**The Two Voids**_ We are now nearing the true meaning of the mystery of death. Everything must die, so everything must live. In living, it must value, which is done by becoming the fulfillment of the infinity of life within the finitude established by death. But one key question remains. When the great tapestry of our being is unwoven – that is, when death finally strikes us and everything that we are is dissolved – where do we go? What happens to us when we die? To die is to lose oneself in the most complete sense imaginable. This is the unrelenting terror of death. The whole of my life, which is the whole world as I have known it including all the struggles and triumphs, the beauties and the terrors, the friends and loves that have come and gone – all this will be taken from me. My every accomplishment, my every dream, my every heartbeat must be returned in full. I merely borrow it for a finite time that stretches between nothingness and nothingness. But what is this nothingness that stares at us from either side of our short life? If we look back at the time before our birth, we are met with an opaque blackness. We may remember some few blazing memories from our first years. As we go beyond them we find them replaced by increasingly vague impressions and half-memories. But these in turn must eventually fade, until we are met with an unyielding void beyond which we cannot conceive of anything. We can only look back towards our origins so far before we are met with an impenetrable shroud, this terrible nothingness before birth. Likewise, when we look towards death this same opaque blackness meets us. We may try to imagine our own death, the moments leading up to it and even the process itself. We can imagine how we recede into ourselves, how our thoughts and emotions cease until there is only the self alone in darkness. The nearer we come to imagining the final moment the greater our terror grows, until we reach that same unyielding void. Then the mind recoils back and we can look no further. These are the two voids that meet us at either side of our life. Since the first one is behind us it does not arouse as much concern in us. It is the future void that concerns man and fills him with such dread and terror, that drives him towards living. This then raises another question which we must now consider – what is the relationship between these two nothingnesses? From where we stand in the present moment, they both seem indistinguishable. Both are an impenetrable shroud beyond which we cannot look. We are therefore faced with a curious result. If the nothingness from which I came is identical to the nothingness towards which I am going, then it means that I must inevitably return to the state I was in before I was born. If it was possible for my life to come out of nothingness, to then exist for a short while before returning to that same nothingness, it must follow that I can return from that nothingness to live again _once more._ There must be life after death because life first _came_ from death. _**The Nonexistence of Nothingness**_ One may perhaps object that the two voids are different and that the state we are moving towards is not the same as the one from which we came. It is entirely possible that we were plucked from some unknown realm of life and that we will enter into a separate but equally unknown realm of death. If we maintain that the two voids are nothingnesses, however, then this is impossible. Two things can only be different from each other if they differ in their properties – otherwise they are identical. Furthermore, nothingness cannot have any properties, for if it had properties it would be something and not nothing. We must therefore conclude that if it is a nothingness that meets us at the point of death, it must be the same as the nothingness before our birth. There can be no property to distinguish one void from another – it is all the same void. Our inquiry does not stop here, though. The fact that nothingness cannot have properties raises another important question – does nothingness itself exist? For a thing to exist, it must be something. Existence is a positive, a presence rather than an absence. If a thing lacks all properties then it also lacks all existence and is thus non-existent. But if nothingness has properties, then it is a something _as defined_ _by those properties_. It cannot be nothing. We must therefore conclude that _nothingness does not exist_. The word “nothing” is an empty concept – it refers to nothing that actually exists. There is no “nothing”. Only something can exist. And yet despite all of this there exists a type of being which we believe to be empty of properties, to be nothing. How can this be? All things that exist have properties, and these properties demarcate one thing from another. This means that the properties must have some relationship to each other which allows for this demarcation to occur. A thing can only be larger than another, for example, if both exist in space, the substratum that allows for size comparison. For a thing to be hot another must be cold relative to it, meaning that these two properties share a relationship in terms of their relative heat content. All comparison between properties, which demarcate one object from another, must have some underlying substratum for comparisons to be possible. This relation of property to substratum can be further expanded to include seemingly unrelated properties. One thing may be hotter than another because it is closer to the fire. The comparison in terms of space influences the comparison in terms of heat. Space and heat, as substrata for properties of nearness and hotness, must _themselves_ relate to each other. This means that there must be a substratum wherein they can relate. This same argument can be expanded to all conceivable properties. What this means is that there must exist a property that transcends all properties, a _metaproperty_, that acts as the substrate in which properties can have relations to each other. This metaproperty would be mistaken by us as a nothing because it is not defined by any property – it is rather that which defines properties. Space cannot be defined in terms of nearness or distance because space is what _defines_ nearness and distance. Thus, the metaproperty is itself indefinable, indefinite, undifferentiated. How does this relate to the questions we have asked of death? The states of pre-birth and after-death cannot be nothingnesses, as we have seen, but must be somethings. They must exist, since nonexistence does not exist. But we are still concerned with their relation to each other. We have seen that if they are nothingnesses, then they must be one and the same state. This also holds if what we mistake for nothingness is an undifferentiated state. This is so because there cannot be more than one undifferentiated state, since for there to be separate states they must be differentiated. If differentiation is absent, then the state is identical to the undifferentiated state. Death, therefore, is a return to an undifferentiated state. This is not the same as nonexistence, but rather a return to the _source of life_. When we die the tapestry of our being is not destroyed but unwoven. The weaver and the thread both remain. It is by the unraveling of the weave that they may _weave again._ _**What Remains of Us**_ The promise that we will live again after we die may come as a relief to many, but to others it will only raise more questions. If it is true that I return to the original source of life, what does that mean _for me_? If death is a complete unraveling of myself, where I lose all that I am, then what “me” even is there to be born again? What carries over and what is it that dies? Make no mistake: _you will die._ You will be unraveled and you will cease to be this person that you are now. That is only a temporary state that you embody. It will change and must change. This is not so different, however, from what you already experience moment to moment. You are not the man today that you were ten years ago, nor are you the same from one moment to the next. Your mind changes, your body changes – even the very matter that makes up your body is replaced continuously. And yet some portion of you still remains which is fundamentally _you_ and makes all these psycho-material configurations into something that _you_ are. The thing that makes you fundamentally _you_ – that thing is exactly identical to the source of life. It is not that you are it, but that _it is you_. There is no aspect of yourself that is apart from that ever-burning spark of life. This is what carries over, but you must not misunderstand what this means. Your essence does not move between lives, for you are not a little ghost living inside of a body. Rather, your lives move within it, forming and reforming according to its inscrutable will. That same will defines you as the person you are by limiting Life to a single life. Likewise, some part of your individuality lives on in the chains of lives that you live, since these lives are a willed limitation of Life to a multiplicity of lives all connected in some fashion to each other. The Hindus conceive of this connection between lives as the law of karma, which many Westerners misunderstand. The law of karma is nothing other than the law of cause and effect. Life responds to the ways in which we act, or fail to act, and in this way the tapestry of our being is woven. But it is hard to see how this could carry over between lives since the lives we lived are as opaque to us now as the lives we will one day live. What future lives our actions will forge, whether there are other realms for us to live in or not – none of this can be known. I do not think such musings are meaningful. We must live now and trust that the world unfolds as is proper to it. What we can know is that our actions arise from within us, as a result of our will and desire, our Eros. This will is inscrutable to us, for it is precisely identical to the inscrutable will of life. All that we know is that our actions are propelled forward by Eros, and that we weave the tapestry of our lives to his eternal tune. We know that our lives are shaped by it, that we live by it, that it arises from life and that it seeks the sublime value inherent in life. The whole law of karma is therefore nothing other than life responding to Eros – which is to say, life responding to life. We are driven to act by a force far beyond us and our only duty in all of this is to lean into our desire for the highest values that we can find in life. Only in this way can we trust that life unfolds as it should, guided by the highest aspect of Eros in accordance with the law of cause and effect. _**The Secret of Death**_ We have arrived now to the end of the end, or to the true nature of death. It is not an end, or a void, or nothingness. It is not oblivion, nor is it a negative or deprived state. Most importantly, death does not exist in any opposition to life. It is rather a process of life, a way of expressing life. As we have seen, the pre-birth state and the after-death state are one and the same. Life grows from death and inevitably returns there, only to start the process anew with fresh births. Death is rightly seen not as the end of life, but the transformation of it to facilitate more life. This is also why death forces us to value, which is to say that it forces us to _truly live_. Without death, life would not be demarcated in a way which would make for the uniqueness of individual existence. No moment would end and no change would occur, and so there would be no meaning to the passage of time. Instead, with death, life becomes an eternal outpouring of unique forms that live and die for an experience of life that is fresh each and every time. To live is to experience value, substance and depth, an intoxicating chorus of experience that rises from being itself. Death serves the purposes of life by admitting into it finitude and with that both uniqueness and intensity. Death is a mode of life, a necessary aspect for life to be life in its fullest. They are one and the same. With this realization, we now know where we go when we die. We return to the heart of life where we become pure and undifferentiated, to exist in timelessness before bursting forward again for another great bacchanal between the knife-sharp delineations of birth and death. This is the secret of death, and one part of the Great Mystery. Having seen how intimately life and death are entwined and how they work in tandem to bring forth a dizzying variety of lives, our attention will now move to the all-fertile mode of life. With the secrets of Hades learned, we move on out onto the earth, among trees and flowers, the beasts and the birds. We direct our gaze to the next part of the Great Mystery, which is revealed in the vitality of nature. ### Nature _**What Is Nature?**_ The concept of nature is one of the most curious that mankind has formulated. It is a given that man will name and speak about the objects in his midst, the things he depends on or that have some significance to him. But nature is not an object in the proper sense – it cannot be easily pointed to or delineated. Indeed, nature is an all-encompassing term for a kind of _sphere of being_, a realm in which things exist in a certain way. We see this in the Greek word for nature, _physis_. It is derived from _phyein_, meaning to grow or become, often associated specifically with plant growth and from where we derive the word for plant, _phyton_. Nature in the earliest Greek sense was thus associated with the springing forth of plant life. A related idea is found in the Latin _natura_, which is derived from _nasci_, meaning to be born. This meaning continues in Aristotle, who used the term _physis_ to refer to things which come into being spontaneously and through their own essence as opposed to being produced by an agent. Nature, therefore, is the state in which things spontaneously come into being. It is notable that we see a contrast between spontaneity and human action. To the Greek mind, _physis_ was contrasted with _techne_ and _nomos_, meaning craft and custom respectively. Though undeniably a part of nature, man also crafts for himself a realm of his own making. In this contrast we sense a frightful tension between nature in its primordial self-generation and the carefully constructed world of man. Nature is not merely a productive force, but productive according to its own will and purpose. These ideas and more are voiced clearly in the Orphic Hymn to Nature. There she is presented as ancient, first-born and immortal. She is the untamed tamer of all, present throughout all things, infinitely abundant and the creator of all. She is the source of her own essence, the mother of her own father. Her feet trace the circle of life and death in their dance, and though she is common to all and known by all things, she is unknowable and alone. These traits are further compounded by the descriptions found in the hymn to Proteus, the ever changing sea-god. It is in his display of mutability that all of Nature’s principles are clearly shown, the hymn says, and it is he to whom Nature first consigned all things as a multiplicity of forms. Nature is _protean_, which is to say that it is fluid and dynamic. In the great sprouting and birthing of nature, change is an ever-present fact. A primordial and cyclical process of polymorphous self-generation – this is the most concise way of describing the nature of nature. But if we wish to truly understand the riddle of our own existence, we must venture into the intricacies of this all-containing womb of the earth. We must understand the principles behind its creative motions, its sprouting and birthing. Having learned what it means to die, we must now learn what it means to be born. _**Subterranean Nature**_ What is the relationship between birth and death? Birth is the beginning of a life while death is the end of that life. A life comes into the world through birth and leaves the world through death. This leaving is not annihilation, or the transformation of something into nothing, for we know with certainty that nothingness does not exist. When a life ends it is changed but not destroyed. It becomes something different, leaving what it once was behind in the shadowy halls of death. The womb of the earth from which all things spring is deeply connected with these halls of death. We bury our dead in the earth, returning their corpses to the murky realm of the underworld. But the earth into which the dead are returned is the same earth from which the flowers blossom and the wheat fields grow. The haze of the underworld is the fertile mud from which everything springs – womb and tomb are one. Life and death are the fundamental motions of nature, undulations on the surface of the undifferentiated state of being. The union of life and death is the revelation of the mother as nurturer and devourer, a birther and a killer. This revelation is that of _subterranean nature_, the chthonic state of life dying into life. Where Hades was the Lord of Death in its terrifying and inescapable form, this cycle of living and dying is Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld. Where Demeter is the existential fact of birth and Hades is the existential fact of death, Persephone is the union of the two, the cycle of rebirth that completes the subterranean realm of nature. This realm that Persephone rules is not one part of nature or a process within it, but rather an entire _mode of being_. It is a way in which things exist. It did not happen at one point in time nor in one point in space. This mode of being has always been, is happening continuously and ever-presently throughout the whole of nature. Wherever things live, there they are born and die. These iron-hard laws of existence are what we call the _realms of nature_. Life in this chthonic realm is the procession of countless lives doomed to die. It is the state of _mere life_, of life merely existing with no greater differentiation than that of birth and death. There is a great comfort to be known in this mode of life, for it is endlessly fecund and pours itself out forever. The comfort is short-lived, however, for it is life wholly defined by the inevitability of death. In the realm of the chthonic, life will always exist and so will death. Here, the only value is the mere biological process of generation and growth. It is the end-all and the be-all – beyond the womb lies only the tomb. This fundamental state of biology exists in an intimate relationship with that of the inanimate world. Subterranean nature is not merely the realm of generation, but also the realm matter. Hades is not only the shadowy harvester of life, but also Pluto, the Lord of Plenty. In his realm beneath the earth are found not just the bones of people long dead, but the whole world’s wealth of minerals. This source of inanimate plenty forms an indispensible part of the cycle of birth and death. Indeed, chthonic life is so basic and fundamental that there is no clear division between animate and inanimate. The interplay of biological life-cycles with the cycles of the inanimate world forms the basis of _ecology_. Plants feed on nutrients, water and sunlight from the inanimate world and use it to grow and multiply. Herbivores feed on these plants, and carnivores feed on them in turn. The corpses and excretions of these living beings become food for saprophytes, and these render it all down and return it once again to the earth. The oceans are heated by the sun, evaporating into clouds and precipitating back into the oceans as rain. The sun’s motion in relation to our planet drives the cycle of the seasons, which in turn drives the biological processes of living beings. In this way, matter and energy are churned through complex and intertwining cycles. These cycles form the vast procession of births and deaths that constitutes the highest expression of subterranean nature. But though this process is breathtaking in its complexity and genius in its perfection, it is still bound by the limits of the subterranean. This undulation of undifferentiated existence, viewed from the lens of the subterranean, is only the pouring of beings from womb to tomb. Death limits this nature to _a life_, but not yet to _this life_, this unique life. To arrive at the revelry of nature in its myriad forms, we must move onwards from this realm of crypts and uteruses. We must emerge out onto the surface where the struggle of life forges each life into something vital and strong. For life to be more than mere life it must _evolve_, and it can only do so in the crucible of _blood, soil and time._ _**Blood, Soil and Time**_ We already know how deeply intertwined the forces of time and death are. Every moment dies, swallowed whole by time itself to make way for new moments. This quality of time is not present merely in the moment-by-moment procession of time, but also in the great motions of the ages. The passing of a moment is no different from the passing of an eon. The latter is just the same principle seen in extension as opposed to without extension. Thus, the Chronos that devours his own children is seen in nature in the form of _deep time_. In the inanimate world of our planet, this is geological time, or time as it relates to the forces of the earth. It is the titanic motion of time that grinds the mountains into dust and then compacts them over millennia to form new mountains. It is the slow groaning of tectonic plates as they move the continents, displacing mountains and valleys in their wake. It is the blistering cold of a Europe buried under ice for a hundred thousand years. It is in this monstrous depth of deep time that we understand the true horror of the _chthonic_. In subterranean nature, the indestructibility of life itself is contrasted with the complete irrelevance of individual life. I do not matter, only the life force that animates me. In the same way, the titanic power of deep time demolishes and reforms the very ground beneath our feet over timespans that stretch far beyond the existence of our species. The monuments we build will be returned to the mountains from which they were hewn, the trees we plant will be turned to stone and even our very bones will be petrified under the gaze of the Medusa of deep time. This horror is further compounded when we stretch our concept of time even beyond the Earth and into _cosmic time_. Here stars are born and die, galaxies collide and reform and even the universe itself is born and must therefore die. Beyond this stretches the unknowable reaches of time before and after the cosmos, the cycle of birth and death of universes called _kalpas_ by the Hindus. In this realm a single human life – indeed, the totality of all human and non-human life that ever was or ever will be – is insignificant. This is a realm where only mass and motion matters. That is the horror of the chthonic. But the inanimate world, as we have seen, is deeply intertwined with biological life. It forms the very material basis on which ecosystems and complex life forms depend for their existence. Thus, deep time drives not just the formation of the Earth but also of the species that live on it. This is _evolutionary time_, or time as it relates to the blood rather than the soil. It is the force that shapes muscle and bone over uncounted millennia. The titanic motions of subterranean nature churn forth a vast array of environments. These environments in turn form a selection pressure on everything that lives in them. A single life does not matter in this realm. Adapt or die is the only rule. In this way, the great womb of the earth spawns forth countless living things which struggle and die under the harsh conditions of the inanimate world. Those that are suited to their environments survive and pass on their qualities – their _form_. Those that die are devoured by the same womb that gave them birth, only to be reborn in more suitable forms to struggle and die again. This is _evolution._ It is thus that the species take their forms upon the earth. The same horrifying quality of the chthonic is once again present here, for it is a mad slaughterhouse that spills its gore throughout time. But in its madness it also reveals an awesome and inscrutable intelligence. In every species, the form of its environment is reflected in it as the species’ own particular form. Other environments will form different species, and a particular species will no longer fit harmoniously into the workings of an ecology that it is not adapted to. Organism and ecology mirror each other and intertwine to form one whole in nature. This, then, is no longer the undifferentiated and shadowy realm of subterranean nature, but a new realm operating according to its own logic. This is _terrestrial nature_, the world of differentiated beings that make their lives upon a varied and ever-changing earth. _**Terrestrial Nature**_ In the womb of the earth, life and death are one continuous process. All that matters here is the endless birthing of new life destined to die. But once these lives emerge out into the world of ecology, life ceases to be mere life. What was before an undifferentiated life force oscillating between birth and death has become a world of _species and specimens_. These species are distinct types of life, formed to exist in specific ecological contexts with other living beings and with the inanimate world. Within these species exist individuals which embody their type, playing out their unique form of life over generations within evolutionary time. This is what we call _terrestrial nature_. It is contrasted with subterranean nature in that it is no longer the natural substrate of mere life that concerns us, but the specificity of differentiated life. This is what is meant by a _species_ – it is a type of life that conforms to certain properties and a definitive typology. It is not mere life, but _life in a defined manner_. And it is its place in the wider ecology that defines the species’ manner of life. The typology of a species is seen perhaps most directly in the form of its body. The demands of its environment lead to specific anatomical, physiological and even aesthetic adaptations that allow the species to exist in harmony with its ecosystem. These adaptations allow it to find sustenance, either by extracting it directly from the inanimate world or by devouring other life forms. They allow the organism to live through heat and cold, fight off disease and predation and to populate its niche with others of its own kind. This typological differentiation in bodily form extends even further to admit the manifested form of particular _specimens_ that share in the common nature of the species. As impressive as these bodily adaptations are to behold, they are only a shallow facing of the true mystery of terrestrial nature. Whereas even mere life contains within itself the basic motion towards differentiation, it is first in the animals that this becomes an impetus towards conscious behavior. Here the mystery takes on its most uncanny form as the blood-knowledge of _instinct_. Life does not operate solely on the blind logic of titanic force as if it were a cosmic machine. Rather, in the subtle mind of the animal, the life force appears instead as a genetically coded sense of _purpose._ The mystery of terrestrial nature does not lie in ecologies and adaptations, but in _desire and will_. Here nature ceases to be merely an external phenomenon and becomes something internal, _a nature_ that drives an animal from within. It is through these internal forces that beavers build dams, wolves coordinate hunts and leafcutter ants practice fungiculture. It is also with the formation of this internal nature that a specific animal becomes differentiated from the species as a whole. Rather than being just a specimen – a manifestation of the species – it becomes an _individual_ that experiences the species _as itself._ The fact of instinct shows that there is an inner world inherent to nature itself, _to reality itself_. It is not merely that animals know and desire. They are themselves nature - nature knows and desires _through them_. Instinct is not just a mechanical reflex in response to a stimulus, but a well-spring of the most profound intelligence. Nature knows herself. And this knowing is far beyond that of mere reason, for it is present in the most striking way even in animals that lack higher cognition. The capacity of ants to build hives with complex infrastructure, organize foraging on a mass-scale, practice fungiculture and wage war – all of this is evidence of an inherent intelligence. It is neither _techne_ nor _nomos_, for it erupts spontaneously out of nature itself, ready-formed to master an ecological niche. This knowing is not separate from the body. It is one with it. The lion knows only how to hunt _as lion_. Its body is the physical manifestation of that knowing. Thus, nature reveals the nature of its own knowing as _form_, as both internal and external form-giving. Instinct, being this knowing-as-form, has yet another profound implication which is best seen in the higher animals. They are capable of complex behavior just as the ants, but here the higher cognition reveals itself instead as keenly-felt _sentience._ Animals feel and experience, they want and desire. It is these inner sensations that drive animals to hunt and kill, to jockey for position and dominance, to seek out mates and establish territory. Despite the variety of animal forms, these inner sensations are clearly connected as one force through all sentient life. This force is what we know as _Eros_. It is the primordial driver of life upon earth, of the terrestrial nature of beasts and of man himself _as beast_. _**Eros in Nature**_ If we envision Eros as merely the sensation of desire, then we do not understand his full significance. This Eros is not emotion but rather _a_ _motion_. It is a driving force, something that pushes nature into action. Long before life even emerges into sentience from the teeming muck of the chthonic, Eros is working within it. It is the very undulation between birth and death that characterizes mere life. Without Eros, there would be no such undulation. The world would be sterile. Eros is not an outside imposition on chthonic nature, however. It is inherent to nature, coming from somewhere within reality. The difference between Eros in the subterranean and terrestrial realms of nature is largely one of resolution. In sentient beings, it has crystallized into a driving sense of purpose. The animal desires and wants, and is driven in this way towards the behaviors that propagate its way of being. But before sentience arises it is seen as the coarse insistence on life, the nagging refusal of nature to stay inanimate. It is the irrepressible tendency of living things to rise again and again from the primordial ooze. In discovering the realm of terrestrial nature, we understand that differentiation in nature arises out of evolutionary processes. This is true in both the animate and the inanimate world. The devouring fecundity of mere life and the titanic churning of deep time both drive the hazy substratum of matter into differentiation. Through these processes the forces of nature are marshaled to create living forms that exist as an extension of their ecology. These living forms in turn possess an inner world of instinctual wanting and knowing that allows them to express this connection to their ecology. It is precisely this interconnectedness that reveals the true significance of Eros. This can be seen if we consider what it means for an animal to live in accordance with its nature. As an extension of its particular ecology, the animal has been shaped to thrive within it. Its body and its instincts have been fine-tuned over millennia to enable the particular form of life of its species. When the animal reacts to this inner drive – to the primal Eros – it actively seeks out the way of life for which it is suited. The animal, driven by its particular form of Eros, _desires to be what it is_. This is true for all sentient life, for Eros in its various forms is common to all sentient life. The true significance of Eros is precisely that it is an _affirmation_. Eros drives sentient beings to affirm its particular form of life through the act of living, and thus to affirm the whole process of nature which has given rise to it. Eros is therefore the basis of all _valuation_, for valuation is affirmation. As we learned from death, finitude drives us towards finding value and meaning in existence, and _Eros is that very drive._ We see now that the finitude of differentiation – the limitation of life to a _type of life_ – also requires this very same valuation, this same Eros. That an animal desires to be what it is means it will seek out what is of value to its particular mode of being. It will hunt and forage, fight off predators and rivals, establish territory and seek out mates. These are the values of animal life, for they allow the animal to come into its own. By eating, the animal incorporates the energy of other living beings to further its own form of life. By asserting itself with violence or trickery it assures its own survival. When it establishes territory it secures the conditions of its own existence and when it finds mates it propagates itself down the evolutionary chain. This is all the result of an animalistic type of life affirmation – Eros in its most primal form. There is more to the affirmation of Eros than just the mechanical continuation of mere life, however. What Eros drives the animal to do is to _accumulate and discharge its inborn powers_. Success in its genetically-coded purpose leads the animal to establish itself not just as a member of its species, but as one its _finest specimens_. The power of this individual animal’s Eros is then transferred down its bloodline, in this way shaping the whole future of its kind. By its success, its whole species is made that much more refined in its purpose. This is the true role of the primal Eros in nature, and of the animalistic desires that it gives rise to. It leads to the development of the inborn powers of a species, allowing it to give rise to ever more refined and perfected specimens to live the life of the species in its highest degree. Everything else is just fuel for this one overarching purpose of the primal Eros, which is to give rise to the perfect animal of its type. It is this very process that Bronze Age Pervert revealed to us as the _mastery of space_. And there are two modes through which an animal discharges its inborn powers that are of particular interest to us. These are _sexuality and violence._ _**The Form-Giving of Sex**_ In terrestrial nature, species are formed as an extension of their ecologies. The demands placed on life by the environment determine the modes of life that are possible within that environment. This is the process of _natural selection_ by which life is created and refined over generations to form species that embody a defined way of being. This is an outer selection process, occurring due to factors outside of the animal itself. But there is a corresponding inner selection process – that of _sexual selection_. What distinguishes sexual selection from natural selection is that it allows for a parsing of an organism through the erotic desires of another member of its species. Where the environment selects organisms by setting the material conditions of life, the erotic desires of the species select by setting the aesthetic conditions for reproduction. Sexual selection adds a conscious, qualitative component to the selection process beyond that of mere material calculation. This qualitative component of sexual selection is absolutely vital to the formation of higher forms of life, as is seen from the fact that all higher life-forms are sexually selected. It is fairly trivial for bacteria or mold to find some ecological niche where it is not required of them to develop the highly differentiated bodily forms of higher animals. However, for the full richness of terrestrial nature to blossom, it is necessary for Eros to drive the formation of the species towards greater aesthetic development. Eros, as we well remember, is an inherent part of nature. It acts by affirming a specific mode of life in the animal through the formation of defined ways of instinctual desire. An animal desires to be what it is – this is the very basis of desire as such. But this desiring, expressed through the sexual instinct, is not just a desire for a specific mode of being. It is also a desire for a specific mode of _aesthetic expression_. Sexual attraction at its most basic is the sensual, bodily and instinctual recognition of some _ideal form_ of the species. Across the impossible vistas of evolutionary time, this consistent recognition of characteristics belonging to the ideal form is what eventually takes shape as the species itself. Every perceivable aspect of the species – how it looks, sounds, smells and acts – is made to conform to this ideal type. The great variety of such ideal types is a testament to the profound creativity of nature, but even so we can see certain recurring patterns in how nature selects its most prized specimens. Nature, so to speak, has a type. Signs of health, fertility and youth are cornerstones of sexual attractiveness across the animal kingdom. Fitness to the environment is another. Many species display attractiveness through showcasing their mastery of the environment. Symmetry, graceful proportion and strength of body show that nature has a harsh preference for the purity of form. Its more gentle side is shown in the song of birds, while the preference for elaborate ritual reveals an inherent hieraticism. Finally, nature is not without a certain flamboyance as seen in dazzling colors and bold anatomical design. What these various characteristics have in common is that they are self-sustaining, superabundant and complete. Nature does not care for that which is weak or lacking, nor for that which does not discharge its vital powers into the act of living. This is because such specimens _betray_ nature. Nature itself is wholly complete, drawing all the powers it needs from its own immensity and pouring them out into its creations. And it expects the same of us. This self-completion is seen most clearly in the ever-present rituals of the animal kingdom. Nature worships at her own altar. But what is it that Nature worships in herself? It is her own savage _beauty_, worshipped above all through the Eros of sexuality. It is no coincidence that the Greeks associated Eros with Aphrodite, who was both the goddess of sex and of beauty. It is through sensuality and conscious perception in the minds of sentient beings that erotic desires occur. These desires then drive the process of natural aesthetic expression. We need only consider the case of the peacock to see how Eros in nature reaches beyond mere material need and into the realm of living art. Sexuality has an inherent aesthetic dimension to it. Even in the midst of primal need, there is a budding seed of beauty. _**Death and Sexual Aestheticism**_ The seed of beauty that arises from the sexual Eros reveals something very profound about value as it appears in life and in nature. It shows us that there is an aspect of reality that seeks to express higher-order values. Life does not content itself merely with mechanical or biological processes, but strives towards expression of aesthetic value. The action of Eros through the whole substratum of nature and into the inner world of sentient beings is a way for nature to reveal itself as artist and artwork in one. When nature affirms itself, it does so on the basis of aesthetic value. It is notable that this sexual aestheticism sometimes runs counter to demands of environmental fitness. The peacock will once again serve as our example. The large and colorful plumage of the peacock is clearly not designed with survival in mind, for it is poor camouflage, makes the bird much easier to catch and requires more nutrition to maintain. Contrary to what certain pedants may claim, its plumage offers no benefit to fitness for the peacock. Despite this, nature has desired for this beauty to come into being nonetheless. In the peacock, nature has declared that _beauty justifies death._ This reveals a darker aspect to nature’s sexual aestheticism. Sexuality – the life-giving instinct – must coexist with the inevitability of death. This is why the sexual instinct is so excessive, so overpowering, so shameless and without moral boundary. The continuance of life depends on the uncompromising power of sex. Lust is a weapon of war against the surety of death, which we must out-mate if we are to exist. This is also why there is an overlap between the sexual instinct and the killing instinct. Consider the case of our own species. An attractive man has a certain gaze that reminds one of a hunter. Sexiness in women is often expressed through the archetype of the _femme fatale,_ the lethal woman. Danger, pain and power are aphrodisiacs. While sexuality must contend with death, it is no flight from it. Rather, it is deeply intertwined with brutality and violence. Sexuality is _chthonian_. Its force comes from the depths of nature where propagation of life exists as an extension of the most violent forms of killing and dying. To understand sexuality, we must also understand _violence._ _**The Form-Giving of Violence**_ Just like sexuality functions as a complement to environmental factors in the form-giving processes of nature, so does violence. The material allowances of the environment determine which organisms and which species can survive within it. Those that cannot adapt, die. But violence adds a deliberate and conscious component to this process by giving sentient beings the possibility of inflicting death. The killing power of nature itself is therefore channeled through the bodies and the instincts of living beings, forcing all such beings to not just contend with the dangers of the environment but also to struggle against other beings. The sheer variety of violence in nature attests to nature’s fascination with death and dying. There is the violence of predator and prey, locked in an eternal conflict of the eater and the eaten, of starvation and survival. Another kind is that within the species, where wolf fights wolf over who gets to eat and mate. There is the brute force of biting fangs and rending claws, the cunning of stalking and prowling, the sinister use of poisons and traps, and a myriad of cruel defenses meant to safeguard lives against a world of murder. This evolutionary arms race between killers constitutes one of the greatest form-giving processes in nature, tied only with that of sexuality. It is the centrality of violence in the mode of life of the tiger that makes it so powerful, terrifying and beautiful. The strong but nimble frame, the spring-steel muscles, the signature pattern of its coat, the murderous jaws and the piercing eyes – everything about the tiger speaks of a bodily perfection born from blood and gore. And the same can be said of the other big cats and of many other animals besides. But more than just its bodily form, the reality of violence also shapes the mind of an animal. It forces animals to be more intelligent, more ferocious, more cunning. It is the predatory lifestyle of the wolf that gives it its high capacity for learning, coordinating hunts and communicating within the pack. The same is true of our most immediate ancestor among the great apes, the chimpanzee. It is no great surprise, then, that it was the wolf that became the first animal to be domesticated by man. Untold millennia of violence have forged our two species into gregarious killers. We are both beasts after our own hearts. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of violence is the aforementioned connection with sexuality. In many ways, the two cannot be separated. Consider the regal form of the deer or the moose. The horns of the males of these species tower like crowns on their heads and grant them a unique beauty. But these horns are also the weapons that they use to fight amongst each other for the right to mate with the females. The beauty and majesty of these creatures comes from the union of sex and violence. This union of sex and violence is also seen in the case of certain species of scorpion, where an integral part of the mating dance involves the male poisoning the female. Among other insects such as spiders and mantises, sexual cannibalism is the rule. We see in this yet again the yawning abyss of the _chthonic_ and its horrid juxtaposition of life and death, birth and murder, sex and violence. But we must once again recognize the form-giving nature of this chthonic union – the bodily and behavioral forms of these species arise as a result of it. The terrifying beauty of many spiders owes its existence to their unique mode of life. We see, therefore, that even in the most bloodthirsty aspects of nature there exists a deep striving towards beauty and form. This is the true meaning of that horrid figure the Greeks named _Ares_. It is nature at its most ferocious and brutal, that nature which Tennyson famously described as red in tooth and claw. It is this terrible and man-slaughtering personality of nature that drove Schopenhauer, when he contemplated the fate of the turtles of Java, to conclude that the will-to-life objectifies itself by devouring itself. But it is also that aspect of nature which Homer portrays as sharing the love-bed of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and sex. Where Eros showed us that even in the depths of primal need their grows the seed of beauty, Ares shows us likewise that conflict hammers life into vital and distinct forms that are themselves darkly beautiful. Though this bloody aspect of nature is the great killer and destroyer – Shiva in his most wrathful aspect – it also serves a higher purpose. The true mystery of Ares is that of _creative destruction_. In the passing of forms, new forms arise. In struggle and conflict, life is refined and strengthened. For all the mindless terror and pain that he sows, Ares teaches us above all that suffering can be justified. Without the suffering needed to carve our own marble, we would be nothing. It is after the forest fire that life grows most vigorously. Indeed, these fires are necessary for the well-being of a forest, with certain species of trees and bushes _requiring_ forest fires as a part of their life cycle. The same nature that demands this of the forests also demands it of us – and this is Ares, the promise that _struggle begets perfection_. This striving after beauty and perfection that nature displays is far removed from the formless birthing and dying that characterized subterranean nature, the nature of mere life. It is likewise something wholly different from differentiated specimens we saw in terrestrial nature, where mere life becomes a definite type of life. This final realm of nature we will call _celestial_. It is in this realm that the sublime aspects of nature truly reside. _**Celestial Nature**_ Terrestrial nature was noted for the formation of definite typologies in nature. In biological life, these are the myriad variety of species that arise from and return to the womb of subterranean nature. But now we have seen how the subtle forces of nature shape these defined forms of life not just according to primal need or crude mechanistic necessity, but according to a kind of _intelligence_. It is the light of this intelligence as it works throughout nature that comprises celestial nature. It is in celestial nature that we begin to truly understand how these separate realms of nature that we have identified thus far are not actually realms, but rather facets or aspects of a single whole. The deepest chthonic darkness inevitably gives rise to the light of differentiated existence. The titanic forces inherent to the cosmos do not move in vain. Mere life in its constant struggle to live and procreate must eventually give way to highly defined ways of life. And yet even the most sublime of specimens in nature is that same roaring font of chthonic life, that same eternal churning of the Titans. The lowest is shaped by the highest, and the highest draws its cleanest waters from the deepest of wells. This is celestial nature. It is nature not ruled by necessity or mechanistic natural law, but by an ineffable and incomparable intelligence. This intelligence is seen in the innumerable processes of great precision and complexity that occur all throughout nature in every moment. It is the great dance that occurs without misstep from the subtlest quantum phenomenon to the greatest cosmic motion, in the passing of the seasons and the ages, in the roaring passions of vital life. It is order that emerges from apparent chaos, and the sublime plan revealed in outbursts of random events. The reader must not confuse this intelligence with what we humans associate with intelligence in ourselves. It is not denuded thinking or sterile logic. It is rather a monstrous intelligence, bearing with it all the bloodshed of Ares and every lust of Eros. It is cruelly artistic, inconceivable in its brilliance and terrifying in its beauty. It is the demiurge of blood and instinct, the architect of life and death, the inventor of every treasure and terror in existence. And yet despite the unspeakable nature of its method this intelligence is no brute. The whole world sings with the delicateness of its touch and the refinement of its taste. All the colors of the dawn, the light of the stars and the moon, the many-colored blossoms of spring and the sparkling sculptures of winter – all of this speaks of a delicate and thoughtful soul. There is a sublime artistry in all it does, no matter how dark or bloody. Indeed, destruction to it is just the painting over of old work with new colors, the blending of the eternal and the transient until nature itself appears as a living piece of art. We saw before how Eros’ nature is that of affirmation, and thus of valuation. In this we recognized that nature has a striving towards something higher, towards beauty and a natural order which arises from within it. It is this spontaneous eruption of forms of a higher order that constitutes celestial nature, the apex of natural processes. But this summit of nature is not the absolute height of reality, for nature is in essence a realm of multiplicity and transience. This realization is what allows us to understand the truth of celestial nature, namely that it is only a _reflection_ of higher forms. And since all of nature reaches for these higher forms, the lower realms of nature are themselves part of that reflection. Form does not appear _from_ nature, but _in_ nature. It is not a product of nature, but what produces nature. _**Nature in Man**_ These three realms of nature and the myriad processes which occur within and between them are not mere outer occurrences that we perceive as disinterested observers. Man is himself a product of nature, _is_ nature himself in one of its infinite forms. The much-maligned “human nature” is just nature as it appears in human form; the human condition is nature conditioned by the limits required of nature to be human. Everything that we have and are we borrow from nature, such that we are more rightly considered an expression of nature rather than beings in and against nature. From the subterranean realm of nature man has his whole being as a living and dying creature. Our bodies grow and our cells multiply, we procreate and fill the world with our offspring and we inevitably wither and die, returning to the earth from whence we came. The material of our bodies is the same roiling matter that composes the dust and the stars, and it obeys the same eternal law of the Titans. We are children of deep time, part of a great chain of beings that stretches into the eons of prehistory and ruled by evolution and geology, the uncaring chthonian laws of blood and earth. Like all living things we are born to die. Mere life demands of us that we procreate ceaselessly or face extinction. Therefore, we have become one of the most suffocatingly numerous species on the planet. And yet our clinging to life must inevitably end in death. This death, as we saw in the previous chapter, is no end. It is a transformation and a rebirth. As we give up the basic processes of biological life within our bodies, and return our crude matter to the womb of the earth, we are given bodies and lives anew. The cycle of birth and death continues and we wander it once more between womb and tomb. Such is the way of our subterranean nature. The terrestrial nature in man is present in the image of Man-As-Beast. Like all animals, man has a defined set of traits that mark him as a unique species, suited for a defined way of life. His physical form speaks of this way of living and being. His face shows the wide range of emotions, thoughts and deceptions that fill his mind, such that the identity of every man is contained above all in his face. His vocal apparatus is complex and allows for a wide range of sounds rivaled only by the birds. All this is to facilitate communication with his fellows, marking him as a pack animal, an animal of tribes and nations. A wide range of instincts accompanies man in this gregarious existence. He is petty and envious, sly and deceptive, violent and domineering – all traits suited for life in the tribe. It is here that man shows that he is ape through and through, for the myriad social behaviors he displays exist first and foremost to secure him _status_ in the tribe, and through that his continued existence. Language assists man not just in communication, but in every social endeavor – he lies and flatters, pleads and threatens, manipulates and indoctrinates. So complete is this cynical social striving in man that Aristotle called him the political animal, though it would be more correct to call him the _Machiavellian animal_. Man’s beastliness appears more clearly, however, in the abyssal depths that slither underneath his social façade. Here Eros and Ares make their home in the nature of man and conjure forth unspeakable lust and bloodshed. Few mammals are as dominated by sexuality as man. He rivals them not only in insatiability but also in sadomasochism, a trait inherent to sexuality as such. Man in his earliest days was a prey animal and I believe his ravenous sexuality was a response to this fact. Like the rabbit, man kept death at bay with promiscuity. This is seen in his bodily form, for humans display greater sexual dimorphism than most other mammals. As regards Ares, he can hardly be spoken of enough in reference to man. The history of man is the history of war. Murder and cruelty on both the smallest and the largest of scales has been a constant throughout the whole of our existence. War has been a driving factor of innovation and culture, birthing industry and construction as much as it has birthed empire and epic poetry. The natural complement of man’s gregariousness, war allows him to throw aside the social spectacle and satisfy his petty will to power in what has always been the final culmination of political existence. There is nothing in the rest of the animal kingdom that resembles the gulag. It stands as an unmistakable image of man’s nature. The intelligence of celestial nature is present in man no less than in the whole of nature itself. In man it takes a unique expression in the form in _mens et manus_, or mind and hand. Man is a thinker and a maker. Where other animals act purely from the instinctual knowledge in their blood, the blood of man instead tasks him with a different kind of knowing. He is driven by his inherent being not just to ponder nature and to know its mysteries, but to interact with the world and shape it. This is the _techne_ and _nomos_ of the Greeks, which are in truth nothing but the expression of celestial nature in man. From this celestial nature comes _culture_, a unique expression of man’s nature. His desire to know and make, coupled with the demands of his social existence and the knowledge of his own mortality, drives man to reach beyond himself and create culture. In this man-made realm of celestial nature we find every shred of man’s essence – we find the highest philosophies and the crudest vulgarities, his greatest monuments, his worst lies. In culture man seeks refuge from the cruelties of nature, only to find himself struggling instead against the cruelties of _human nature_. Culture possesses all the gentle and monstrous aspects of celestial nature. Here we find religion sharing bed with inquisition, the highest transcendental mysteries wielded like weapons in the social game. We find art rubbing elbows with pornography, and the tool-making capacity making weapons as well as monuments. With one hand, man built the Sistine Chapel. With the other, the atom bomb. Has Nature ever been more _honest_? Just as Eros in broader nature drives its myriad forms on towards expressions of beauty, so likewise does man possess this higher Eros as a desire for the sublime. Man’s instinctual desires are not merely occupied with the animal concerns of food, sex and status, but with aesthetic and metaphysical yearnings. The same Eros that gives rise to the beauty of the peacock has in man given rise to a love of beauty and a desire for the transcendent. Here, also, we find the more idealistic notions of brotherly love and friendship, from which so much of man’s greatness flows. We see, therefore, that nature’s expression in man is just as polymorphous and dynamic as it is in nature itself. Given the introspective capacities of man – celestial nature appears as an inner curiosity as much as an outer – it should be no wonder that he finds himself at odds with himself. A lion is what it is in perfect accordance with its nature as lion. Man, on the contrary, lives in constant conflict with himself. Here the forces of Titanic nature, mere life, animal instinct and monstrous intellect – all the permutations of the higher and lower Eros – are in constant dramatic tension. But this is exactly the nature that man has been gifted _by nature_. This _tension of opposites_ is what it is like for man to be in accord with his nature. Man is a living conflict. _**The Nature of Nature**_ We have now reached as far as we can in our investigation of nature. We have seen that it is a process of growth, of change, of differentiation. We have seen that it is driven by natural processes, which are in turn an expression of an inner drive or motion inherent to nature as such. And we have come to understand that this motion is not the senseless floating about of matter, but rather the result of an uncanny intelligence that acts throughout all levels of nature with brilliant and terrifying artistry. More than that, we have also recognized that all of these various sides of nature are present within ourselves in the form of our human nature. What we call nature is not merely a world of trees and birds that exists outside of ourselves. Nature is what we are – or perhaps more correctly, _nature is us_. It lives through us, as us, expressing itself in the core of our being. Just as the whole world of objects exists as an extension of nature, so is man also an extension of that same nature. Nature is not a world of beings, but a single Being existing in dynamic multiplicity. Throughout its inherent mutability and conflict, nature maintains its unity through the great forces that work underneath its surface. That is the true essence of nature and not the mere motions of matter that concern us in the physical sciences. Nature reveals itself as an all-encompassing presence, the beauty and terror of which is present in everything around us. What remains now is to go beyond the surface of nature and into the hidden forces that lie underneath it. We have already seen one such force that reaches from the very depths of nature to its loftiest heights. This force we called Eros, and we came to understand it as the force which seeks to affirm value. It does this in living beings by driving them towards an affirmation of the highest potential of life that they can live. This potential is embodied in the _form_ of the being, around which nature swirls and surges. The violent dynamism of nature with all its tensions of difference and limitation, conflict and change, revolves around form. In order to continue our initiation into the Great Mystery, we must therefore understand what is meant by form. With this, we leave the world of matter and of living beings to enter into a world of _unseen light_, the same light which glimmers in the beastly mind of Nature’s cruel intelligence. ### Form **What Is Form?** In our investigation of nature, we saw that the many processes inherent to matter, biology and instinct are _form-giving_. By this we meant that the changes and motions of the natural world work to further order and differentiation. Nature is not merely a formless muck, nor a cancerous growth that propagates without thought or reason. Rather, it is a vast and intertwined web of causes and effects which give rise to things with _specific natures_, specific ways of being. This fact of reality, that things can have a _defined way of being_, is what is meant when we speak of form. The Ancient Greek concept of the Forms – capitalized and usually spoken of in the plural – is perhaps Plato’s most iconic idea. Plato’s term for it in his native Greek is _eidos_, which means image, shape or appearance. From it are derived a number of words related to seeing or objects intended to be seen, such as the verbal form _eidomai_, to resemble or appear, and _eidolon_, meaning a statue or idol. We see, therefore, the strong connection between seeing and form, such that form can be further understood as the way in which things appear that distinguishes them from other things. In Plato’s understanding, the Forms are what allow the perceivable world – that is, the world of the senses – to be what it is. We can see that two things differ in size because Forms such as Largeness or Smallness belong to them. Likewise, things are loud or quiet based on their participation in the Forms of Loudness or Silence. All objects of sense perception, therefore, are shaped by the Forms into things which can be perceived. The Forms themselves, however, are _intelligible_ and not perceivable. They lack material existence and so cannot be perceived by the senses. They can only be apprehended by the intellect, a faculty of much finer seeing than that of sight. This finer form of sight, this eye which gives things their differentiation, has long been embodied in myth by the radiant figure of Apollo. The Orphic hymns speak clearly of this, naming the god as both the Eye in Heaven that sees all and as the author of all nature’s differences. Both the forms of animals and the passage of the seasons are credited to the god, and all art flows from him as the leader of the Muses who inspire all creative endeavors. The conceptual identification of seeing, perceiving and intellection is all accommodated by the concept of Form, which is embodied in Apollo’s creative sight. These conceptual relations were all further developed in modern times by Paglia, who built on Nietzsche. She uses the concept of the Apollonian to refer to the tendency of objectification and delineation within the Western mind – a tendency which she refers to as the Western eye. It is her understanding of the Apollonian which underlines the now well-known comparison between the Venus of Willendorf and Michelangelo’s statue of David. The one shows the fecund formlessness of subterranean nature, of the chthonian womb-tomb of mere life. The other shows the clarity and definition of Apollonian form, the bright and pure contemplation of ordered perfection. From all of this we begin to sense a theme and a pattern – a _form of Form_. It is into this light that we must henceforth venture if we wish to understand the Great Mystery. Since it is no longer any particular form that we consider but rather Form itself as a fact of being, we will now capitalize the term. And rather than do as Plato did and speak of it in the plural, we will speak of it in the singular. _**The Problem of Universals**_ Why is it that two non-identical objects can share one or more properties? That is the metaphysical question that underlies the Theory of Forms as established by Plato. To understand the significance of this question and of Plato’s answer, we must begin by considering what it means for a thing to have properties. In the simplest sense, properties are what make a thing what it is. Hot things are hot, bright things are bright and so forth. If two things do not share properties then we know them to be different things, for a thing must always share properties with itself. But what if the objects do share properties? In this case, we arrive at a problem. Two objects are different if their properties are different. This is what forms the basis for the indivisibility of identity - an object which differs in its properties from another is a _separate entity_ from the other object. It has its own being and its own existence independent from the other object. But if it can share one or more properties with another object, then the indivisibility of its identity comes into question. It has _partial identity_ with the other object, which presumes some metaphysical connection between the two. This problem is called the _problem of universals_. How can it be possible for two objects which we recognize as separate and non-identical to share properties when the properties are what determine separation and identity? The Theory of Forms is the radical answer that these properties have an existence independent of the objects that possess them. The objects exist on a lower level of a metaphysical hierarchy, borrowing their existence _as objects_ from the Forms they participate in. We can derive this answer to the problem of universals by simply realizing that just as we can recognize that two objects are separate, we can also recognize a property they share as separate from them. We can conceive of brightness as separate from a given bright object, and even consider the hypothetical possibility of what a non-bright object would be like if it were bright. This suggests that properties are independent of their objects, and we can further develop the idea by considering two theoretical scenarios. The first is what would happen if all objects with a given property were destroyed. Suppose that all cylindrical objects in existence were destroyed such that they no longer form cylinders. We intuit that this would not imply that no cylinders could ever exist again. We could take another existing object and shape it into a cylinder by adding or cutting away from it. The property itself would remain in existence even though no object exists with that property. This further suggests that properties are independent of their objects in some way. The second possibility is to imagine that the property itself could be destroyed such that no object can have that property anymore. In this case, we intuit that all cylinders would somehow cease to be cylinders and instead become some other type of object, an object with some other type of property. It is not just that the property is independent of the objects but that the objects require the property to be what they are. We see, therefore, that the Theory of Forms is easily derived from our base intuitions about the world. But as elegant of an answer as this is, the Theory of Forms raises as many questions as it answers. It is not entirely convincing. Worse yet, it is a _bloodless_ theory, one which reduces reality to abstractions and verbal hair-splitting. But must this be so? _**Separation of Object and Form**_ The immediate problem with the Theory of Forms is that it proposes that objects can be separated from their properties. But does this even make any sense? If all the properties of an object were removed, what would it even _be_? _Could_ it even be? It seems obvious that if a thing has no properties, then it cannot exist. It must be _nothing_. As the reader will remember from the first chapter, _nothingness does not exist_. When a thing seems to us to be nothing, it is in truth only in an undifferentiated state. When a thing lacks Form, it ceases to be a thing and becomes a no-thing – that is, no _particular_ thing, a thing no different from what all other things also are. The reader will also remember that there can only be one such no-thing, since multiplicity presupposes differentiation. This answers the question of what an object is without a property, but what is a property without an object? A property is that which determines what an object is, which to our minds is no different than what can be sensed, comprehended or conceptualized about the object. It is how the object is seen, felt or tasted; it is its inner and outer workings, its place in the broader context of existence. Without an object, a property seems to collapse into pure abstraction, a fantasy of the mind. If a property does not refer to an object, isn’t it just a word, a sign without a signified? This is not so. As we have already seen, the property is independent of the object. Universals are independent of particulars. What a property without an object – that is, a Form – implies is not the property itself as it is experienced in the object, but its _possibility of being experienced._ Forms are inherent patterns, ways in which things could be by virtue of being. It is the ordered state of reality, rather than the disordered everythingness of the undifferentiated state. This also solves the classical critique of the Theory of Forms, called the _third man problem_. Given two men, they both share the property of being men. This property, the classical critique says, must itself be a man. These three men still possess the property of being men in common, which leads to the formation of a fourth man, and so forth. The Form, according to this critique, collapses into an infinite regression of itself. But this is not so, for the Form does not possess the property that it gives rise to. It is the possibility of that property. Abstraction from the properties only points to the pattern being there. The pattern itself is a higher-order phenomenon. _**The Unity of Form**_ Another problem that arises when considering the Theory of Forms is the question of how many Forms there are, and what they are. One reading of Plato is that true knowledge comes only by discovering the Forms, and thus mapping out the intelligible realm in which they supposedly reside. But this runs into an immediate problem – how do we demarcate the Forms themselves? Is “chairness” a Form? What about “stoneness?” If we break a stone into pebbles, is it still a stone? If a leg is removed from the chair, does it still conform to its Form? The reader of good taste will immediately be disgusted by these questions. There is a distinct feeling whenever one hears them that the speaker has entirely missed the point. And this is certainly so, for these questions are completely meaningless. Nonetheless, the mere fact of these questions presents a problem for the Theory of Forms. Since the Forms are responsible for ordering reality and giving it distinctness, we suppose that there must be a vast number of them in order to facilitate the great variety of properties that we see in the world. But is this really so? Before, we derived the idea of Form by abstracting the properties of things and declaring that each such higher-order pattern must be independent of the object itself. We also declared that such higher-order patterns must determine the properties of the objects which they govern. What happens if we continue this style of reasoning? Suppose we begin with an object of some kind, say, a dog. This dog has certain properties which makes it a dog. We can therefore establish a Form of Dog. All objects which are dogs must conform to this Form or they are not dogs. All possible iterations of dog have now been subsumed into a single Form of Dog. A multiplicity of objects has been reduced to one all-encompassing Form. We can perform the same operation on all other mammals, reducing them in turn to their Form. But why stop there? All mammals share certain properties which make them mammals, and are therefore subject to their own Form. We can therefore reduce all our newly acquired Forms to one Form of Mammal. The same can be done for all other types of animals, and these can in turn be reduced to one all-encompassing Form of Animal. From there we can continue, reducing all forms of life into one Form of Life. This same style of reasoning can be applied to all other kinds of objects. Inanimate, man-made, conceptual and so forth – all objects can be reduced in this same way to find common Forms. As we do so, the total number of objects considered is decreased. From all existing dogs to one Dog, from all existing Forms of animals to one Animal, and from there on to only one Form of Life. Each step of abstraction decreases the total number of objects in a pyramidal structure until we presumably come to one final Form from which all other Forms arise. What would such an end-point be like? Each step of abstraction represents the finding of common properties between separate objects. Therefore, all objects governed by a specific Form have that Form in common with each other. For there to be one final Form of Form, all objects in existence must be reducible to one common property. But is this possible? And can we prove it? Let us borrow a technique from mathematics and attempt to _disprove the opposite_. Suppose our scheme of pyramidal reduction does _not_ end in one Form of Form. Suppose there is a multiplicity of these top-level Forms. For this to be true, there must exist at least one object which does not share properties with any other object. To find this supposed unique object, we can take any known object and compare its properties. I will take myself as our known object. I have a vast array of properties which determine who I am. One of them is that _I am_. I exist. Existence is one of my properties. Therefore, our supposed unique object cannot share this property with me. It must have the property of _non-existence_. But such an object, by its very definition, does not exist! We have therefore disproved the idea of there being an ultimate multiplicity of Forms. At the deepest level of reality, there is only one Form which gives rise to all others. All properties, all patterns, are reducible to Being Itself. Form, therefore, is a _unity of_ _the universal and the individual_. It is a non-dual aspect of reality, the unity of the part and the whole. When a thing is what it is perfectly, it mimics the most basic property of existence itself. Formlessness is the universal without the individual, the darkness of the indistinct. When we recognize higher-order patterns in nature, we are recognizing the way in which universality fosters individuality within itself and in unity with itself. What our proof entails is that all transcendentals are in unity. There can be no war in heaven, even though this unity paradoxically leads to war on earth. _**Form and Formlessness**_ The method used so far of deriving the Forms by abstracting from the properties may seem like it is nothing but that _bloodless verbalism_ which we recognized as the worst offense of the Theory of Forms. And it most certainly is. But from all of this bone-dry philosophizing, we are beginning to see some valuable distinctions that point to deeper truths about our existence. In the great ensemble of ever-changing beings which constitute nature, we have managed to conclude that there is an inherent reason or order. This order is universal and hierarchical, extending throughout all of nature and proceeding in conceptually distinct layers from the universal to the particular. We have also recognized that this order is unitary. Though it contains inner gradations, it is ultimately an indivisible whole. This unity is inherent to existence itself in such a way that every individual instance is in accord with existence even when separate instances are seemingly in conflict. Finally, we have come to understand that there is interplay between _definite and indefinite_. What we call objects exist as a juxtaposition of the definite and the indefinite, as formlessness given an instance of Form. In this way, Form and formlessness limit each other. The _everything_ of the formless is limited to the _somethin_g of Form, and this gives rise to _a thing_. We have already seen what this meant in the first chapter, where we concluded that life oscillates between the formlessness of death and the limitation of life. Likewise, we saw how the intelligence inherent to nature shapes chthonian darkness to give rise to defined ways of being, and to perfected examples of these ways of being. This interplay between the indefinite and the definite forms the entire drama of conditioned existence. Form and formlessness condition each other and give rise to a world of change, cycles, dynamism and limitation. Neither of these polar worlds are limited in themselves, however. The indefinite is the roiling substratum of death-life and womb-tomb, not beholden to be anything in particular. The definite by comparison is the unmoving gaze of eternity. It is _still life_, life frozen in cold perfection before the Eye of God. Rather than degrade Form into verbal abstractions, we recognize it as the _eternally defined_ aspect of reality. Its definiteness explains how it can possess inner gradations while still maintaining its indivisibility. All throughout itself its own image is repeated as a way of furthering its self-definition, explaining the seeming multiplicity of Forms. And yet it maintains its individuality, since individuality is precisely the state of being self-contained, of abiding in one’s own definiteness and separation. We see that all change occurs because of the juxtaposition of Form and formlessness. It is not possible, however, to conceive of change without conceiving of matter and time. Matter is the constantly recombining substance of objects, while time is the ceaseless inevitability of these recombinations. In order to understand Form, we must understand how it relates to matter and time. _**Eternity as Self-Contained Moment**_ The Form conditions the indefinite and brings forth a world of changeable objects. As we have seen with our verbal abstractions, Form transcends the individual object – it is not limited or conditioned by the object in any way. The object may change, but the Form does not. Like in our thought experiment where we destroyed all cylindrical objects, the possibility of objects being cylinders is unaffected. Forms are _changeless_, but what does this mean? Since objects cannot possess universal properties without them arising due to the action of Form, then all possible states that an object can change into must already be inherent to it as its Form. When an object changes, its new form is not disconnected from the old. A boy that grows into manhood has changed, but the change is still in accordance with his individuality. The same being that once was himself as child is now himself as adult and will become himself as an old man. All his possible states are accounted for in his Form – it is this _himself_ which does not change. Understanding this, we can see why Form is changeless. It is changeless because all changes that can occur to an object are already present in the Form itself. Time does not exist in the world of Form because the totality of the contents of time is already perfectly unfolded in Form. This is why it transcends time, and this transcendence we will refer to as _eternity_. Eternity is therefore not just a very long time, nor is it even the totality of time. Eternity is that which time attempts to express. As Plato defines it, time is a _moving image of eternity_. The whole of time is merely a limited expression of eternity, limited because it must progress from state to state in order to form a piecemeal expression of eternity. Eternity, therefore, is not spread out across time. It is not a procession of moments, but a _single all-encompassing moment_. _**Materiality as Indefiniteness**_ Just as Form implies eternity, formlessness implies matter. Where we moderns associate matter with what is real and unmoving, this was not the view of the Ancients. The Platonists saw matter as a state of relative non-being devoid of any definite nature or essence. Materialists such as Democritus saw matter as something which is in constant motion. Substantiality is therefore not an obvious fact of matter, even though we moderns often assume it to be. But what is the truth about the nature of matter? Does it possess substance of its own, or is it a state of indefiniteness? Part of the reason why we intuitively feel as if matter is the substantial building block of reality is precisely because it seems so unyielding, so stable and changeless. The mountains were here long before we were and they will be here long after we are gone. A boulder is impossible for us to move, and to break it into pieces requires a monstrous effort. Material reality is experienced as possessing _thereness_, a commanding robustness. This experience of unyielding, Titanic nature makes it intuitively seem as if matter is the stable point for existence. However, even a casual look at modern physics shows us that our intuitions here are wrong. We know that all material things are composed of atoms arranged into molecules and other more complex structures. We also know that atoms themselves are composed of neutrons, protons and electrons. A curious fact of the composition of atoms is that they are not solid objects. In fact, most of an atom is merely empty space. What this means is that solid objects, regardless of how unyielding they may seem, are almost wholly insubstantial. The boulder that seems so imposing is mostly empty space. We can take this even further by considering the nature of quantum phenomena. As the reader may well know, matter behaves in radically different and unintuitive ways at the atomic and subatomic scales. At this scale, it is impossible to simultaneously know where a particle is and where it is going, a law of nature referred to as Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. There is no _thereness_ to matter at its most intimate level. When we look into matter, it becomes hazy and indistinct. Furthermore, the very idea of particles as we think of them comes into question at the quantum scale. We think of a particle as occupying a defined space, and of maintaining its form in that space as long as it is not broken. If the particle is moved along a line, then it will be present at the end of that line. A bullet fired from a gun will hit the target aimed at, unless some other force changes its path. At the quantum scale, however, this does not hold true. If a stream of electrons is fired through a sufficiently large gap towards a receiver, then the receiver will register that the electrons are forming a pattern consistent with the shape of the gap. However, if the gap is sufficiently narrow or if the electrons are fired at two sufficiently narrow gaps, the receiver will instead register a diffraction pattern consistent with a waveform. This is referred to as the double-slit experiment. What this means is that there is no clear distinction between particles and waves at the quantum scale. Once again, the _thereness_ of matter vanishes the further into it we look. There are many more such quantum phenomena one could consider, but the point is that what we consider to be the robustness of matter is not inherent to matter. It only begins to appear when matter on the quantum scale forms larger and more complex structures. Since these structures are formed in accordance with natural laws – that is, in accordance with an inherent order in nature – we can rightly identify that the robust _thereness_ of matter is due to its Form and not due to matter itself. As we can see, the Ancients were correct when they declared that matter is _indefiniteness itself._ It is not a stable and robust point of reference for reality. It is rather an inherently chaotic state, a random swirl of possibilities not yet determined. It is Form which is unyielding and definite, not matter. Materiality, therefore, implies both changeability and indefiniteness. If science will ever succeed at arriving to the very foundation of material reality, I theorize that they will find precisely what we found when staring into the void of death. It will be an opaque nothingness, a state of complete formlessness. _**Form and Perfection**_ We have come to understand that the basic building blocks of material reality – such as matter and time – are hewn into a structured whole by the action of Form. In the mingling of the definite and the indefinite, a world of changeable objects arises. Form conditions the changeable object, but in what way does the changeable object relate in its turn to Form? Because both Form and formlessness are unities, all plurality occurs in the meeting point between the two. Nature, which is the realm of plurality and change, is a constant interplay between the definite and the indefinite. Form raises distinct beings from the womb of the formless and returns them in the Ouroborian cycle of creation and destruction. The coming and going of the changeable object is therefore centered on the unmoving reality of its Form. Since its Form is limited by the formless, the object does not possess the fullness of its Form. Instead, it moves closer to and further away from the fullness of its own nature as it moves through time. Our very nature is broken up by time, available to us only piecemeal. From one moment to the next, we resemble our true selves more or less, either closer to or further away from our essential reality. We revolve in time around our essential Form, taking on transitional states that are inherent to our Form as we change in time. This is why hierarchies of value occur, why there are distinctions of greater and lesser. For while Form is distinct and sharply outlined such that it carves the formless into something definite, the objects themselves exist in a hazy juxtaposition of Form and formlessness. The more the object fails to cohere with its essential Form, the more it ceases to be something and becomes _nothing_ – which is to say, nothing particular. This can be clearly seen in the cycle of birth and death. The newborn is formless, possessing potential but no actuality. As it matures, it more and more starts to express its inherent nature. It shapes itself and its life around this inherent nature. At some point it will reach the apex of its life, where it is at its strongest and most vital, where it lives out its purpose as far as its capacities allow. Then, as it grows older, it loses what it has achieved, becoming senile, sick and sclerotic. Entropy inevitably takes its final toll and the creature dies. Death, as we now know, is the ultimate return to formlessness, from which Form will raise it again at the start of a new cycle. It is this hazy fugue state between wholeness and brokenness that is meant by the Lesser Mysteries of Eleusis. The meaning of this mystery, presented in the form of the abduction of Persephone, shows that we are already dead. We already exist in the land of shades, and are in fact in a constant state of dying from the very first moment of our birth. We are indistinct shadows cast by the great light of Form as it shines on the formless, and this is true for all of conditioned existence. We experience this brokenness as _imperfection_. Our beckoning wholeness we experience as _perfection_, as something divine. Form, therefore, implies not just an ontological hierarchy but also an axiological one. It defines what things are and to what extent they are what they are. This in turn means that all objects relate to each other in terms of their Form, their essential nature. This process is the basis for valuation because all value is derived from what things are. The more imperfect a thing is, the more shadowy and hazy, the less it embodies the value of which it is capable. It becomes lesser, as opposed to that which embodies value to a greater degree. Imperfections in any conditioned being are unavoidable, since if it were not imperfect then it would be unconditioned Form. But likewise, some degree of completion is present in all beings since if it were not so then it would not exist as a defined being. Even the greatest of beings in existence are broken and doomed, the great tragedy of mortality which so concerned Homer. But on the other hand, even the most wretched and degraded being can have some hope of elevation. As we saw in the previous chapter on nature, Eros is that force within nature that drives all levels of it towards value. It orders existence towards the blossoming out of Form at every step between the definite and the indefinite. At its lowest, it drives us to survive and procreate. In its medial form, it drives us towards mastery and discharge of power. At its highest, it draws us towards some perfection which we humans are only vaguely aware of. This perfection is what shines forth the light of Form. This is the light that Eros is drawn towards. Everything in existence derives its beauty and wonder from this shining forth. It is impossible for us, therefore, to posit anything that is greater than this perfection, this unity and completion, for all greatness is only a limited copy of it. This same indestructible hierarchy of being is what gives rise to the great anxiety we feel over our existence. To be perfected, we must become what we are in our deepest being. But this is unimaginably difficult due to the fugue state of relative formlessness that we exist in. This is the cause of the great anxiety of existence, which people cope with through nihilism and the hatred of beauty. To live is to stand in the glare of a judging eye that demands perfection of things destined to rot. _**The Tyranny of Sight**_ There is a tyranny inherent to seeing that explains the harsh perfection of Form. We can feel it whenever we notice that we are being observed. The eye of the one who sees us freezes us in that single moment, a snapshot of existence. We are brought out of time and forced to feel the weight of being merely what we are. All conscious beings look sheepish when they notice that they are being watched, for they all feel their own existential nakedness. It is as if they showed up to that moment wearing less than their whole selves. We can likewise intuit this tyranny in the unnerving appearance of the eye itself – direct, aloof, piercing. It judges but is not judged. The eye is an expressionless seer, a cruel razor that cuts us into the unflattering silhouette of this bare moment. Within the white purity of the eye hides the opaque void of death, the place where our broken image goes to drown. Only the autist truly understands the relentlessness of the eye, its cold, suffocating bondage. Sight is the murdering arrow of Apollo, unleashed from afar to transfix the world. The tyranny of seeing is what gave rise to the understanding among the Ancients that seeing is _active._ It was not thought of as a passive act. To the Greeks, sight was a beam of light sent out into the world which illumined it like the rays of the sun. The eye was not imagined to be a receiver, but a transmitter. It had an effect on the world rather than passively receiving impressions from it. The eye sees, but is itself unseen. This illumination has a terrifying quality to it that is felt in all acts of seeing. Whether it be the freezing reaction of prey animals, the evil eye of the superstitious or the looming dread of the surveillance state, there is a terror in _being seen_. When all our veils are torn away we become vulnerable, mortal. The seeing eye limits us, freezes us in _this_ moment, _this_ life. This is precisely the finitude of death, the opaque void of the pupil, which arouses in us such anxiety. The seeing eye _judges_, and in being judged we must reveal our value or be cast aside. It is this terrifying quality coupled with the perfection of Form that accounts for the chilling beauty of celestial nature. The processes of nature serve the greater scheme of Form because they are _selective_. They affirm and they reject, leaving some specimens to fail and die while others live and procreate. Form forces things to be what they are, which is what constitutes nature in its most basic sense. Once stamped with a specific nature, one is fated to live and die a certain way, to desire and to will according to certain patterns. We can further understand this harshness when we compare the act of seeing to what we have come to know of the relationship between the definite and the indefinite. An object obscured by darkness can be anything – it exists to the seer as something indefinite, something shadowy. This is object without Form, the everythingness of the chthonic. But when the object is forced out into the light, the seeing eye robs it of its veil and forces it to stand naked in its definiteness. It is now illumined, forced to be what it is. And yet, upon stepping out into the light, the object leaves something of itself in the shadows – the promise of what it could have been. What we call Form is exactly this light-emitting eye. It illumines the shadowy world of the indefinite and forces it to become something definite. Where before there was a roiling mass of possibilities, there now emerges a single defined being. This being has an essence, a truth about what it inherently is. This truth carries with it a unique value, the promise of timeless perfection made flesh. But it also carries with it the debt of finitude, which is the certainty of death and of the judgment so abhorred by the nihilist. The gold given to us by the Eye of God must be repaid. Form is both the gold and the Eye, the giver and the given. What remains is to see what its ultimate relation is to the _one given to_. _**The Eye Unseen**_ In our investigation of Form, we have seen an apparent dichotomy emerge. This is the dichotomy of the definite and the indefinite, the perfect and the imperfect, the infinite and the finite. We have seen how the interplay of Form and formlessness explains objective existence, how they limit each other to give rise to a world of changeable things. From this we derived a unitary and hierarchical theory of existence where all things derive their nature and value from Form. And finally, we have recognized the conceptual identity between sight and Form. But one question remains unanswered – what is the ultimate relationship between Form and the formless? We first discovered the formless in our excursion into the lands of the dead, where we saw that it was an undifferentiated metaproperty underlying all properties. It appears to us as an opaque and unknowable nothingness because it has no properties to distinguish it. It is that which _cannot be seen_. In contrast, Form is the metaproperty that causes all properties to occur. It is itself none of these properties, but that which makes them possible. It appears to us as harsh tyranny of sight, as the eye that judges but is not judged, that sees but is not seen. _That sees but is not seen_. It is in this image of the Unseen Eye that we come to the dramatic realization that Form and formlessness _are one_. Both condition existence and the world of objects; both limit us to finitude; both force us to value and to be evaluated. Both cause us fear, and both live within us as the core of what we are. They are both unities, complete and self-contained in themselves. They have both always been, transcending time and space. Where one is present, so is the other. And this is so because they are the same thing understood from two different perspectives. Form is the eye that makes as it sees, a creative contemplation. But what it contemplates is _itself_. Just like the physical eye cannot see itself except in reflection, so it is with Form. The physical eye, however, must look outside of itself for a mirror to see itself. Form can _self-reflect_. It can shine upon itself to illuminate itself to itself. In doing so, a procession of forms appear – the world with all its structure and dynamism. But as it is with all seeing, the eye of Form leaves behind the possibility of what it could have been. This is its own inexhaustible fullness, seen as the opaque blackness of formless depth. The paradox of the Unseen Eye seeing itself in self-reflection is solved by the formation of _duality_. Form and formlessness are non-dual, and yet they become a duality in order to facilitate seeing. For the activity of sight to be possible, there must be the passivity of _something seen_. It is here that the subject-object distinction occurs. In the specific case of Form, it plays into the subject-object distinction through _object-making_. Form is the process by which the Absolute objectivizes itself, which allows the unknowable to be conditionally known. Self-reflection, therefore, is the creation of an artificial metaphysical space where subject and object are divided. This, then, is the light that shines through the world to make it what it is. In investigating Form, we have learned to see and to understand a new aspect of the Great Mystery. It is the aspect by which the unknowable becomes conditionally known through object-making. As sublime as this aspect has revealed itself to be, it is still only one aspect. Our next step is to learn of its counterpart – the _conditioned subject_. With this we leave the palace of Apollo and turn instead to the revelry of his divine half-brother. _Dionysus_. ### Ecstasy _**The Problem of Suffering**_ To all conscious beings, the world presents an unimaginable vista of possible experiences. These experiences first and foremost present themselves to us as _things_, a staggering multitude of objects all relating to each other and to us. Whence do they come, and why are they so seemingly inexhaustible in their variety? This was the question that concerned us in the previous chapter. The answer we found was Form. The great multitude of objects is unceasingly hewn from the depths of formless Being by the Unseen Eye of Apollo, its light illuminating a world of things with defined ways of being. Gilded bow in hand, his sight transfixes the endless possibilities of _everything_ into the definite actuality of _something_. This is an act of dream-like contemplation that brightens, defines and crystallizes – a creative perfection abiding through all of time. But this creative light is also a great tyranny, for it divides and orders. A thing which has been defined by Form is carelessly plucked from the depths of Being and set loose into the world of objects, forced to be what it is in the context that it finds itself in. To the great multitude of objects, this is an acceptable state of affairs, for they have no inner world with which to care or protest. To a certain class of beings, however, this limited state of existence poses a great problem. These are the _conditioned subjects_ and their lot is one of _suffering_. No aspect of human existence was so deeply felt and so unflinchingly confronted by the Ancients as suffering. To the Greek mind, true happiness was reserved for the immortal gods alone. Man was a wretched thing, forced to toil in the muck of an unforgiving world. Death, too, was his inevitable fate. Desert played no part in this – whether just or unjust, all mortal men are destined to suffer and die. So deep was the pessimism of the Ancients that the great god Pan declared to King Midas that it would have been best for mortal man to never have been at all. To the Greeks, bliss and immortality were one. And yet, there was one god who died despite being immortal, and who suffered despite his divine bliss. This was Dionysus, the eternal complement to Apollo. Born of a mortal woman, it was the fate of Dionysus to die and to emerge triumphant from the realm of Hades to prove his divinity. The method of his death, repeated in ritual, was the _sparagmos_ – the ritual dismemberment. The existence of every conscious being is this _sparagmos_. Ripped from the primordial whole and set to the world as a limited being enmeshed in the motions of the world, we suffer and die. We are Pentheus, whose name means suffering, rent asunder by the frenzy of life. But we are also Dionysus, the triumphant god who never dies. How can this be? Though we know not why, we can hear the answer somewhere in our own depths. It is the sound of _ecstasy_. _**Why We Suffer**_ The origin of suffering is the _sparagmos_, the original division of unified reality into a piecemeal ensemble of beings. These beings become _limited_ by their nature into what they are and what they are not. They _multiply_, as the limitation of the individual being does not limit the source from which it springs. They are _projected_ in time, forced to unfold their nature piecemeal through change and mutability. These factors of the world of objects constitute _conditioning_, which is the state by which the unlimited becomes limited and the unknowable, knowable. It is this state of conditioning that constitutes both our definiteness and our limitation. We are doomed to be what we are. This fact excludes us from the great vastness of reality, which will be outside of us for the whole of our lives and reachable only by our meager strengths and powers. We are all _existential exiles_ excluded from the fullness of Being, showing up to life as less than our whole selves. Though heirs to the cosmos and born from the womb of eternity, all we have is _this_ life. Therefore, we suffer. This state of exile means that we can never truly be sufficient _in ourselves_. The full breadth of possibilities and experiences lies outside of us. To even continue living we must seek for the means of life in the world at large. And the world responds to our presence. It tugs at us from every direction, putting us in servitude to whims and sensations. We fret and toil, driven by fear and desire for the greater world of which we are just a part. By ourselves we are nothing, so we seek our fulfillment in the world of objects. Therefore, we suffer. As a result of our conditioning, there are certain requirements for our existence. The demands of our whole bodily existence are minute and specific. Should nature sweep away the conditions of our life we will burn, drown or freeze. Likewise, we all participate in the bestial rumbling of fang and claw. No conditioned being can maintain its existence without wrenching it from the dead hands of an unwilling world. If I am to live then others must die. If they are to live then I must die. This is the _omophagia_ of Dionysian ritual, the eating of the raw meat of the sacrificial victim. As conditioned beings, we are doomed to eat and be eaten. Therefore, we suffer. More than this, we are enmeshed in the motions and changes of nature. Nothing we have and no satisfaction that we find is permanent. Though I eat today, tomorrow I will be hungry yet again. No comfort I can find in this world will last and even my own body will fail me in time. Inevitably, all things that I depend on will change, and I too will change until I no longer resemble what I once was. Time is a cruel tyrant, taking what little we have to call our own. Therefore, we suffer. The whole of existence calls to us as something that must be acquired and possessed, yet it fights us at every step. Our powers are limited, while those of the world are titanic and monstrous. Tossed about by forces far beyond comprehension, we are born and snuffed out in the course of a single cosmic spasm. The innumerable principalities of God, nature and man demand their tenth from us until nothing of life remains for ourselves. Slaves chained by cause and effect, our victories are few and our defeats are inevitable. Therefore, we suffer. In the midst of all this limitation, we are tormented above all with what could be. Dreams hound us and ideals beckon to us, leading us on with gossamer promises. In the passage of time, we see all that could have been. We see the things hoped for that never were. We see the man we could have been if our short hours had not been so carelessly squandered. This pain is perhaps worse than any other, for it is the surety that our limited lives could have been so much grander. Instead, we are even smaller and more feeble than we had to be. Therefore, we suffer. Uncertainty plagues us – about the world and about ourselves – for our minds are as limited as our bodies. The only certainty we have is that of death, stalking unknown somewhere down the road from this moment. And with the surety of death comes even more questions. Who will remember me when I am gone? Who will sing of my tales, my struggles, my triumphs? Who will remember my smile and my hope? Was it all for naught? Was I ever truly alive and will I ever be here again? These thoughts haunt our minds, but there is no answer to be found in the world at large. Therefore, we suffer. _**Author of My Own Misery**_ The great tragedy of our suffering is not that we struggle hopelessly against an uncaring world. It is that we cannot even rely on our own selves. The _sparagmos_ which causes the division of the world into me and not-me also causes a division _inside_ of me. My inner world is one of strife. My desires topple over each other in their bid for dominance, tossing me to and fro while my fears undermine all higher striving. Most of our suffering arises from this, that we are _at war with ourselves_. This is the essence of _human nature_. Despite our better judgment we time and time again lead ourselves down paths to our own self-destruction. The source of this lies in the hazy indefiniteness of our own selves. We are all children of Form, possessing an inner spark of creative light that defines what we are. But we are also children of the void, of chthonic formlessness. Thus, like all objects in the outer world, we exist in a state of juxtaposition. At one and the same time, we are eternal image and a play of shadows. That is the essence of our conditioning. Our various desires all play into this fractured nature of ours. They pull in every direction along the axis between completion and limitation. Some rare few desires dream of lifting us above our common experiences, to something greater and more real than _this_ life. But most of our desires are more provincial. Aiming towards laxity and indefiniteness, they are the heralds of _second-rate life_. They seek for us a state of barely-satisfied _numbness_. Form, as we have seen, is a hierarchical force. It orders and gives rank, and all conditioned beings have their place in that ranking. Form is tied to the expression of _value_ in existence, that same value that Eros seeks in the blossoming out of nature in all its forms. We are that same nature, tied into its motions and dynamism through the _sparagmos_ that gave us our individual natures. This is that same value which death forces us to seek out by the threat of collecting ahead of our time what we owe to life for living. Value is what shines through a world divided into _greater and lesser._ It is what ties such a world of division together by mutual relations. The war within ourselves is fought on this battlefront. Some of our desires ask greatness of us for the price of pain, while others give us numbness with the surety of suffering. No matter what we choose, Death will have his due. It makes no difference to him. But to us this choice matters, for it sets the value of our entire existence. As we have seen, this great weight of value arouses in us the desire for nihilism, which is the desire to escape from the implicit judgment of value by choosing that which has no value. Seeing value is painful to us – we are liable to lash out against it in our resentment and disappointment. This lashing out comes in the form of revenge, in wanton destruction, in the rejection of what has value in favor of what does not. We spite the promise of joy by wallowing in _self-authored misery_. But our wretchedness does not end with spiting the very idea of meaning and value. When we lash out, we lash out into the world. Other conditioned beings are made to suffer by our hand, preferably those that can feel and weep as we do. We rob them of their value and of their potential as surely and as wretchedly as we rob ourselves. Where lies the foulness of murder if not in the destruction of the life that could have been? What is perversity if not the sacrifice of the refined states of a fulfilled being for the sake of sadism and cruelty? In these ways, man authors not just his own misery but that of all other conscious beings. Here, also, lies the full realm of _morality_ in any meaningful form. To choose the lesser over the greater – this is the meaning of _evil_, and it is always motivated by petty desires. Life is a moral endeavor only in so far as we are tasked with the cultivation of value in our lives against our own impulse towards nihilism. Beyond that morality has no meaning. But even though we act to lessen our suffering we can never be free of it. Suffering arises from the _sparagmos_, the primordial division. The cultivation of value is an act of _integration_, but we must ultimately suffer nonetheless. That is because the _sparagmos_ is no thoughtless ripping apart – it is a _deliberate willing_. There is a necessity to suffering because it serves a purpose in the great web of greater and lesser. It is that purpose which makes our suffering _bearable_. _**The Necessity of Suffering**_ That suffering can serve a purpose is a claim that will be sardonically cast aside by anyone who is in pain. The only thought that concerns us when faced with the unbearable is how to escape it, how to be freed from it. Thoughtful monologues meant to make us bear the pain are experienced as a prolonging of it. The resentment that such a statement engenders in the sufferer will therefore blind him to the truth of it. But there _is_ purpose to suffering, just as there is purpose to desire. The two coexist and feed into each other. We saw this purpose most clearly in the dual forces of Eros and Ares and how they act to shape the natural world. Desire sets our whole inner world into motion towards various degrees of value. Conflict, likewise, forces change upon us so that we may survive and win. Struggle shapes us – it is the creative destruction of Ares. This should not be surprising. The same tensions that we found in the different layers of nature are echoed within the inner world of the conditioned subject. The titanic forces of the material world, the birth-death unity of the chthonic, the battle for existence that is terrestrial life and the violent contrast between beauty and brutality found in celestial nature – these all find their equivalent in the world of emotion. Pain, fear, determination and triumph are experiential modes of nature. Suffering is the creative tension of nature experienced subjectively. The self-contained eternity of Form is broken apart by the _sparagmos_ into _time_ – the procession of moments. Because all conditioned beings exist in a hazy juxtaposition of Form and formlessness, we are never in possession of our full powers at any given point in time. But since Form contains within it all potential states that we can be in, it means that the full unfolding of our power already exists within us in seed form. It does not grow, however, because it is locked behind what we currently are. Struggle is the process that destroys current states so that potential states may flourish. This is done by the constant marshaling of great forces within and without us towards the creative process. This is why the universe moves without care for us and why we are so violently buffeted by its forces. We must move with it or be crushed by it, our token resistance a sacrifice for the sake of the unfolding of some other part of reality. What this means is that the very facts that cause our suffering also cause the sprouting of our hidden potentials. What we could be always lies on the other side of suffering. Because it is so that all states of existence want to maintain themselves despite their own impermanency, we experience the forceful change of ourselves as something painful. It is that same terrifying _sparagmos_ that birthed us, but now the rending is done as sacrifice _to ourselves_. In suffering, I am Odin hanging on the branches of Yggdrasil as a sacrifice of myself to myself. Struggle always requires the formation of an oppositional duality. As all dualities must be reconciled in an underlying unity, this means that there is never a case where one side is fully destroyed in the conflict. A trace of it always remains in the new form of that which triumphed. The eaten strengthens the eater, giving its strength to fuel the development of its vanquisher. There is no loss of potential in the struggle, only a movement of its actualization from one being to another. This is the meaning of Sarpedon’s exhortation to Glaucus – let us see if this death be ours, and either claim glory for ourselves or give it to others. Suffering is necessary, therefore, because it is _glory in motion._ And since we are the authors of our own misery, we are also the authors of our own glory. All the possible ways of suffering that open up before us are pathways leading towards or away from the value inherent to us. We must learn to choose that suffering which leads towards our peaks rather than our valleys. Whether we rot or grow, we are always active participants in our own misery. Therefore, we must choose wisely. _**Suffering Not a Moral Problem**_ The metamorphic nature of suffering means that we cannot attach moral judgments to it. For conditioned beings, which are not fully themselves at any one moment in time, constant change is necessary. This change is experienced as painful, but without it we would be neutered on a metaphysical level. Suffering, like death, is a natural process that all conditioned beings must undergo. The fact that we do not _like_ it is, in context, irrelevant. The earth has no love for the plough that rips it apart and turns it over. Yet without the work of the plough, the seeds would not grow and the earth would lie barren. It is the work of the plough that makes the fruit of the earth possible. Can we on that account fault the plough? Can the earth? If it were to see the beauty of the fruits that the plough makes it bear forth, we should think the earth would welcome the plough. It is in those fruits that it finds its _value_. For if the earth would rather be barren, what value would it have? We are no different from the earth in this regard. We are forced to struggle and suffer, and this is the catalyst that makes our various potentials blossom forth. We find this process to be an injustice against us, however. We ask ourselves what we did to deserve our difficulties and our losses, why others do not suffer as we do. We may even go so far as to condemn life itself, as if our pain could dim the light of the stars! To cope with our pain, we occupy ourselves with taking _moral offense_ at the world. The world is broken, oppressive, sinful. It must be fixed, made just once more – by which we mean that we must receive some kind of restitution for our suffering. We do not deserve our suffering, you see, so we must have been wronged. We are therefore owed reparations for our pain, preferably from those who have not suffered as we have. Life has slighted us and we demand that our case against it be heard! But this is infantile nonsense. Life has not wronged us merely because we are displeased. I do not suffer because I deserve it, nor is it an injustice that I suffer when someone else seemingly does not. Furthermore, it is not possible to compare the suffering of two different individuals. They do not suffer in the same context, or in the same way, nor does their suffering mean the same thing to them. Suffering, simply put, is one way in which we weave our _tapestry of being_. Our suffering is therefore incomparable, because we are incomparable. My suffering is _uniquely mine_. And how could this be any other way, when I actively participate in creating my own misery? It is here that the only moral aspect of suffering comes into play. I create my own misery, which is to say, I choose the course of my own _metamorphosis_ in time. Since I am intimately woven into the fabric of the world, that means I _also_ choose how the world will change. When my own choices destroy what has value rather than cultivate it, then my suffering is unjust and it is _I_ _and I alone_ that bear the moral burden for having overturned the hierarchy of value. All blame falls on me when I rip apart my own tapestry. Moral disgust against the world is nothing but petty seething. It is the resentment of the beaten and the humiliated. There is no great courtroom in the sky that will hear your grievances and so your whining is wasted breath. Even worse, the tendency towards resentment leads us without fault towards nihilism, towards the destruction of value as a way to spite life. It is not just that we author our own misery, we also condemn ourselves by the very same noose we tie for others. And in all of this, the world itself remains as innocent as ever. Suffering, therefore, is not a moral problem. It is not a question of desert or of justice, nor is it possible for us to condemn life because we are offended by the facts of nature and by the reality of suffering and death. This is not a grand cosmic injustice. It is a necessary process for the flowering of value in limited life, and is in fact the very metamorphosis of life that allows certain forms of value to shine forth. For this same reason, the world does not need to be saved. All things fall into place. A man need save only himself to justify his life. _**Universal Sadomasochism**_ That suffering is not a moral problem cannot be more clearly seen than in how perversely the world ignores our standards of morality. The whole ensemble of conditioned existence is an orgy of killing and begetting, of creation and destruction. This is the great interplay of Eros and Ares which we saw most vividly in the animal world of terrestrial nature. Seen from the view of the conditioned subject, this unity of erotic creation and violent destruction takes on a particular flavor. The conditioned subject does not merely float along in the violent clashes of nature – it _feels_ them. Eros and Ares live within the conditioned subject as the principle of _pleasure-pain_. Both sensations drive us on, as Eros and Ares are both motive forces within nature. Since creation and destruction cannot be separated from each other, Eros and Ares are ultimately non-dual. Unified in nature, they express the totality of the motive force that drives metamorphosis in all living beings. Unified in the subject, however, they are the pure _intensity_ of sensation. Much like the primordial division of the _sparagmos_ divides us into a world of subjects and objects pitted against each other, it likewise divides our inner world into a world of _sensations_. These sensations fall somewhere in the realm between pleasure and pain. Since our conditioning means we are spread out across time and woven into the net of cause of effect, this means that our sensations of pleasure and pain are likewise spread throughout the tapestry of our lives. What this means is that we are not only trapped within our limitations and forced to endure a life of uncertainty and suffering, but we are also goaded onwards by the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain. The great irony here, of course, lies in the fundamental unity of pleasure and pain. Where one is present, the other is never far away. We can see this all throughout nature. The animal that eats experiences profound pleasure; the animal that is eaten suffers horribly. Where one feels the rush of victory, another must feel the humiliation of defeat. Eating, drinking, fornication – all great joys! But sample them long enough and you are left with nausea, a hangover and syphilis. This fact of the unity of pleasure-pain can be further seen in the fact of each sensation. Any sufficiently intense feeling of pleasure inevitably becomes painful. This is what I mean when I say that the unity of pleasure and pain is pure intensity. Increase the intensity of one and it begins to resemble the other. This is as true of pain as it is of pleasure. Pain at certain high intensities is easier to bear than a milder pain because it will crowd out all thoughts, emotions and sensations. You will remain only as a detached observer in a world of white-hot, one-pointed attention. So we see that pain and pleasure can never be truly divided. Though we may run from the talons of pain and into the arms of pleasure, we will find that it is the talons that meet us. This fact of conditioned existence is conclusively shown by the fact that pain itself _can be pleasurable_. There are many ways, some perverse and some more celibate, in which we torment ourselves purely for the joy of it. Conditioned existence, therefore, is ruled by _universal sadomasochism_. Conditioning is a cosmic self-flagellation, an orgasmic writhing in self-imposed agony. Our limited existence is a bondage dungeon and the great forces beyond us are master and mistress of our whole being, ruling us in waves of pleasure and pain. And we respond to it, hopelessly and submissively. Seen from this perspective, our moral offense at the world is little more than a squeal under cracking whips. _**The Insignificance of Suffering**_ That the moralistic view of suffering is nonsense is further evident when we consider the broader significance of suffering. It is the nature of suffering that it demands our immediate attention and cannot be ignored. True pain, physical or emotional, is unbearable. We desire an escape from it at any cost, and will devote ourselves fully to finding release from that which torments us. But the importance that my pain has _to me_ is greatly diminished outside of myself. And outside of the community of fellow-sufferers it has no importance at all. What does the world care for my pain? The stars do not weep for me and the sun is not dimmed by my tears. And what arrogance it would be for me to insist otherwise! I am but a speck in the grand scheme of things, as are all conditioned beings. Even the sun in its glory and might is but a speck before the grandness of the Whole. Understand that the fact of conditioning means that there are forces at work far greater than us and that all we are is an _expression_ of these forces. We cannot expect the motions of the world to stop at our convenience. It is this very fact of the indifference of the world towards suffering that so angers the moralist. It is sinful and cruel for ignoring his wants and his pleas. He expects the sun to dim so as not to burn his face, as if his face was more important than the radiance of the sun! And when it rightly refuses to do so he takes it to court in his own heart, bearing grudges against a world that has done no wrong. Is this not the height of childishness? And yet we all fall into this because of our _limited perspective_. We cannot see beyond ourselves. Thus, we esteem our own desires and our own suffering to be the fulcrum around which the world should turn, because they _are_ the fulcrum around which we turn. Where we go wrong is in failing to see that there already is a center and a fulcrum to the world. We do not appreciate that all things turn as they should. Even our suffering. That we cannot see beyond ourselves is precisely why we _cannot_ judge the world. Were we to lift our gaze only a little we would see the extent to which this cruel and sinful world acts with generosity towards us. Form has given us not just our limitations but our very nature and place in the world. Nature has sent us to war, but not unarmed. And we need only consider the ebb and flow of our own lives to see how much depends on _Providence_. There is not one living which does not live by the grace of Providence. Life provides for us. We are often blind to how much we have been given because we are offended by what has not been given. It is from this, and always from this, that we curse the world and demand justice of what is already just. Our due has already been given to us by the world. Yearn for more and your own actions must supply the remainder. So we see that it is no great horror that the world is indifferent to our suffering. It is no injustice and no cause for moral outrage. That our suffering is of no cosmic importance means that we are left to care for ourselves. We need not fear life. If our suffering does not concern the world, then it does not concern itself enough to actively torment us. The terrifying intelligence of celestial nature is not motivated by a desire to torment but by a desire to create. As we now know creativity is not separate from destruction. By these facts we can dispel all talk of devils and demons – there is no malice in the stars. It is understandable that the hare would curse the wolf, but his curses mean nothing to the world. There is no great courtroom in the sky where we get to bring our grievances against life. Life is no courtroom drama, but a drama of a _very different kind_. _**The Meaning of Tragedy**_ Our suffering has meaning not only in the metamorphic sense. Remember that the conditioned subject is different from the conditioned object in that it possesses an _inner world_. It feels and experiences, which is also why it suffers. Suffering is the qualitative feeling of separation and change, of being ripped apart and chewed by life. It is this chewing, this _rumination_, which allows the juices and flavor of our life to pour forth. If we were to give a name to that flavor, it would be _tragedy_. There is a peculiar problem with tragedy as an art form, one which we can never understand if we maintain moral disgust at the idea of suffering. Tragedy at its core is the aesthetic confrontation of suffering. It occurs when a suffering hero takes center stage in art, poetry and drama. This raises a problem – why is it that we can find aesthetic fulfillment in the sight of extreme sorrow and pain? The elements of tragic suffering would seem anathema to any shallow understanding of beauty. Horror and perversity mix in tragedy, like in the awful realization of Oedipus that he has murdered his father and slept with his mother. How can such a fate arouse in us a sense of aesthetic satisfaction? Or take the image of Glauce wearing the poisoned robes given to her by the vengeful Medea. Consumed by alchemical fire, her face and eyes destroyed beyond all recognition, the very flesh falling off of her bones – what grotesquery! How can this be the stuff of beauty? And yet it _is_ beautiful. We see it clearly in the power and majesty that these scenes possess. Seeds of beauty lie hidden somewhere within the perversity of our passions and the hideousness of our bodily decay. The cruelty of fate that spells for every man a doom he can never escape, and the great loneliness that haunts us in our existential exile, serves in some way to show us the path towards beauty. Tragedy is a _metamorphosis of suffering_, the transformation of misery into art. What tragedy reveals to us is that great suffering comes with the possibility of aesthetic fulfillment. It is not that life can be beautiful despite suffering, as if life is at best a consolation prize. It is that _suffering itself can be beautiful_. Darkness as well as light, war as well as peace, sorrow as well as joy – beauty is not bound by these categories. It smiles serene in harmony and perfection, but it also stalks the night in howling, blood-filled madness. Once again we see the terrifying beauty that we saw in nature, seen also in the creative power of destruction and in the certainty of death inherent in every birth. Tragedy works as an art form because suffering played out in a certain manner can open our eyes to this terrifying beauty. But it is not just the tragic hero on the stage that suffers horribly and who can therefore be transfigured into an epiphany of beauty. That is also the nature of our very own lives. We are all Pentheus, torn apart and made immortal. What we see as spectators watching the tragic play can also be seen in our own lives, where we are both _actor and spectator_. It is I who must suffer through _my_ life, _my_ fate, _my_ death. That is my part to play. As actor in life, I must create my misery and my downfall. But I must also see the unfolding of my own life _as spectator_. To be a conditioned subject means both to _feel_ life intimately and to _see_ it from a distance. This is where the true meaning and significance of tragedy reveals itself. For if I-as-sufferer am the stuff that opens the eyes of myself-as-observer to the tragic beauty of _my_ life, then _my_ life can be justified _to myself_. Tragedy, therefore, is not just the promise that life can be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. It is the promise that this justification arises from within. How different is not this from the moralistic attitude! There the great hope is that a cosmic arbiter will reimburse us for the indignity of existing. But the aesthetic attitude to life says that we already possess our treasure. We must only learn to see it as such. And to see it, we must first feel it. To feel _without reservation_ – this is the tragic secret of Dionysus! _**Glorification Through Suffering**_ Drama as an analogy for life is not limited to just tragedy. All narrative and dramatic conventions are echoes of life, because life reveals itself in storytelling. Tragedy is unique in how it unflinchingly contends with suffering, the same contending which we recognized in the beginning as the only true mode of dealing with the problem of death. Other forms of drama and storytelling also contend with suffering, however. This is especially so with the _epic_, which shares the tragic view of life with tragedy itself. In the epic, suffering is present primarily as _conflict_. Where tragedy focuses squarely on the downfall of the hero and the great horror and pain that follows, the epic is concerned instead with titanic struggles between legendary personalities. The epic hero is man enlarged beyond all human constraints and set against forces which no mere mortal could contend with. These forces frequently overpower the hero – it is not victory or defeat that concerns us in the epic, but the scale and force of the struggle. The defining characteristic of the epic is not, as is often claimed, its scope in space, time or subject matter. The epic is a _magnification_ of all elements of human life. Scope is merely one of the facets so magnified. Houses and hovels are replaced by shining palaces and gardens forever in summer bloom. Men become examples of indomitable courage and knife-sharp cunning, while women become beauties that launch a thousand ships. The embers of passion become volcanic and apocalyptic, while quirks of character become fatal flaws that doom nations. This magnification is always done in the service of glorifying _the struggle_. Where epic magnificence cannot serve the purposes of making conflict more titanic and forceful such magnification does not occur. It is not noses or shoes that are magnified in the epic – that is the stuff of comedy. It is all the glorious and all the tragic aspects of man that are magnified. The world is set as the stage for what is glorious and tragic. Man serves the struggle by his enlargement, and in turn he is rewarded by the struggle with the glory of having fought. Like in tragedy, this is done because struggle drives us towards _aesthetic fulfillment_. Life seen through the eyes of the epic is no humdrum monotony. It is grand and venerable. Time and space, which so bind and tyrannize us, shrink to accommodate the infinite and the eternal. The horrific face of Strife snarling down on man since primordial times steps out onto battlefields where thousands give their lives. The very heavens bleed down onto earth, and heroes emboldened with second sight see past the veil of mundane life and into the heart of divinity. This is what life is secretly like in every moment, and _especially_ when we suffer. Through the epic, we become aware not just of the aesthetic quality inherent in the dark primordial night but of the beauty of those mortal men who defy it. We see that the limits and obstacles in life can be fought against and overcome. This emboldens us to throw our own lives into the ring to see what we can achieve. Suffering and struggle, far from crushing us, has the potential to elevate us and to bring forth that very _value_ which death demands of us to seek. The great cause of our suffering is that we are limited beings, but suffering also contains within it the promise that we can be _greater_ than our limits, that some aspect of us extends beyond them. It is not just that life can be justified in the face of suffering. Suffering _glorifies_ life. _**Laughter as Overcoming**_ For all its pain, life is not just misery. It is true that suffering is unavoidable for all conditioned beings, but we do not suffer all the time. The very same conditioning that makes suffering unavoidable for us also makes life changeable and inconstant. Even our pain must give way to joy, no matter how short-lived that joy may be. As we have seen, within suffering there is a seed of beauty and glory, but there is also a seed of joy. Suffering can elevate, yes, but it can also _entertain_. _Comedy_ is the dramatic analogy for the humor inherent in suffering. The components of good comedy all come from the very same source as human suffering. Absurdity, convoluted struggles, misunderstandings and misrepresentations, human pettiness and folly, the inevitable downfall as we succumb to our nature – these are all staples of humor. But they are also staples of tragedy, and the two art forms have been united in the figure of Dionysus since the dawn of Greek theatre. No matter how great our suffering gets, there always seems to be some element of it that amuses us. Men bond over shared hardship with humor. Few things will earn a man such esteem as telling a funny story about great personal hardship. And it is well-known that doctors, soldiers and others who deal with injury and death in their line of work develop a taste for gallows humor. I do not believe this can be explained as merely a coping mechanism – there must be something inherently funny in suffering. It is in the figure of the _satyr_, that great companion of Dionysus, that we see this union between the tragic and the comedic. All the ridiculousness of life is captured in the image of this goat-man of Antiquity. He is wit and cunning, so often employed by the comedic hero. He is a fool, a drunk, a lecher – qualities both destructive and risible in equal measure. He is part man and part beast yet wholly divine, a union of the higher and the lower aspects of life. He is just like his lord and master the Loud-Roaring Bacchus and in his connection to the deity, he is brother and foil to the suffering Pentheus. Just like life has appeared to us throughout our journey as a companion to death and as the womb-tomb of nature, as sublime but terrifying intelligence and as the Unseen Eye of Form, and even as the sparagmatic Pentheus, it now reveals itself to us as bawdy satyr. The form of the satyr is precisely the form of conditioned life. The satyr exists in a jumbled state where higher and lower cannot be meaningfully distinguished. This is what conditioned existence is – a juxtaposition of the infinite and the finite, of the higher and the lower, of misery and joy. What the satyr teaches us is that this state is not to be grieved. It is a revelry filled with wonders both strange and amusing. _Strange and amusing_. The satyr is a joyful sufferer because he can abide in a state where pain and pleasure, certainty and uncertainty, the hideous and the beautiful are all muddled together. He can do so precisely because such a muddled state – which is the state of conditioning – allows for a _beauty_ to life only possible with the contrast that such a muddling creates. It is the beauty of strange places and strange circumstances, of unlikely occurrences and twists of fate, of human characters and human lives that stretch the limits of believability. The satyr-nature of life reveals itself when our world becomes a drunken assortment of traits and events that come together with showmanship into a _singular whole_. In that state we are largely immune to misery, high on the joy of a life that never ceases to fascinate us with the strange, the lawless and the ribald. This is why the satyr is so associated with wine, for it is in drunkenness that this ribaldry is most commonly found. Some men exist almost entirely in this state and they are themselves like the satyrs of myth. Such characters – for they are both more than and less than men – arouse great joy in us by the mere fact that they exist. Life in this state is a testament to the joy present in even the most bizarre circumstances. And it is this joy, this _beauty_, that is celebrated in comedy. Seen from the perspective of the comedian, life is a great procession of satyr-like figures. It is a great play of figures that by any rational measure should be less than men and yet succeed somehow, through the mystery of life, to become more than men. The conditioned subject – and man in particular due to his self-reflective nature – is a protean being. He is like the great god Dionysus himself, changing his shape in response to the eye that sees him. Where one eye sees Pentheus, the other sees the satyr. Life changes masks in turn, transforming the nightmare into a midsummer night’s dream. _**The Omophagia**_ Conditioned life is a narrative phenomenon. It is a chain of events in time and space connected through cause and effect and which take on dramatic flavor based on the perspective of the experiencer. Like all narrative, life itself thrives on suffering and strife, which is ever-present in conditioned existence. Far from being something which detracts from the story, suffering _enhances_ it. We have seen three ways in which this is so, which correspond to three types of drama. Whether it is by the beauty of tragedy, the glory of epic or the laughter of comedy, suffering serves a crucial purpose for the conditioned subject. That purpose, which we have already hinted at, is that it provides that _value_ which we have seen recur again and again in our investigation of life. While the fact of conditioning limits us to _this_ life with all its crushing limitations, that same conditioning also acts to _actualize_ our limited life into something with substance and depth. Suffering adds contrast and value to life – without it, the infinite well-spring of Being could not express its full creative potential. Finitude adds uniqueness and intensity to life. Much like the fact of death forces us to value our lives, so does the fact of suffering. While we can never make sense of our pain from a moral perspective, as suffering happens to all regardless of desert, we can make sense of it from an aesthetic perspective. Suffering is pain and horror, but it also gives us skin in the game. It forces us to commit ourselves fully to _this_ life, to the experience of Being mediated through _these_ limitations, the limitations that constitute our nature. This is the secret that Dionysus taught us earlier – to feel without reservation. It is through this complete immersion into conditioned experience that we taste the value of the infinite and the whole. Remember that we are all Pentheus, the suffering one ripped apart in the primordial division, the Dionysian _sparagmos_. But from this _sparagmos_ arises the richness and contrast of life which we have seen revealed in the many masks of the human drama. These are the masks of Dionysus by which he is actor and spectator, drama and dramatist, the multiplicity of characters and events, of conditioned subjects. As conditioned beings we are doomed to eat and be eaten. This we recognized as the _omophagia_, the eating of the raw flesh of the victim of the _sparagmos_. But it is first here, after having seen the many masks of life’s drama, that we truly understand the meaning of _omophagia_. It is precisely _feeling without reservation_! It is to gorge oneself on life, on its joys and miseries, failures and triumphs, pain and pleasure, horror and bliss. We are both eater and eaten, for we taste the experience of living and suffering _as ourselves_. The great division of life occurs so that certain forms of value can be expressed, so that the creative outpouring of the All can find actuality and substance. But the mere act of living that life, of experiencing it without reservation as an aesthetic phenomenon, is a deep communion with the very unity that we were torn from. It is the drunken savoring of the raw flesh of a living, weeping and exultant God. This is the mystery of _ecstasy_. The fullness of Being is expressed in the richness of experience, which encompasses all. The _omophagia_ is the active participation of this richness, which is our own limited existence. It is choosing to savor life rather than to spit it out. In this way we experience _ekstasis,_ a stepping outside of ourselves into something greater. We devour the limited _thisness_ of our existence in order to taste of the unlimited _everythingness_ of the All. The great paradox of Dionysus is this, that only through separation can we be made truly _whole_. _**The Triumph of Unity**_ We suffer because of our separation from the fullness of the whole. As limited beings, we are never truly sufficient in ourselves. But the great mystery of suffering, as we have seen, is that it does not limit the aesthetic potential of life. The beauty of living remains not just in spite of suffering, but _because_ of it. Beauty is the chain which reaches from the infinite to the finite, and we must find it on the other side of suffering. Though we are existential exiles, the whole world sings of our homecoming. To live with intensity and to experience the beauty of life is ultimately a communion with the very source from which we were separated. Not one thing that exists is separate from any other. Pain is not separate from pleasure, nor is horror from bliss or darkness from light. A unity lives and breathes under all of these seeming separations. In that unity all opposites are reconciled. Life itself, the living experience, is ecstasy. It is the ecstasy of contrasting experiences felt at the greatest intensity. But this very experience is a stepping outside of oneself, a joining with the outpouring vastness that births that experience. By fullness of living, we are united with the whole once more. The great secret is just that – that we were never divided to begin with. And it is precisely in ecstasy, in stepping outside of our limitations, that we return to our source. This is the _triumph_ of Dionysus, the great victory of joy over suffering and of life over death. To reach that reconciliation with life by which we are made whole once more, we must follow those great chains from the finite to the infinite. We must live with intensity, explore the depths of our nature, and suffer woes with no loss of cheer. We must listen to the song of our homecoming and learn to see the value which underlies all of life. That value has but one face by which we can know it. _Beauty_. ### Beauty _**The Significance of Beauty**_ Beauty is the link between the higher and the lower, between the finite and the infinite. This is apparent in the ecstatic realization of conditioned existence, where the limitations of mortal life serve to enhance the beauty of existence at the price of suffering. Conditioned life with all of its imperfections bathes in a wild beauty that reveals itself because of, and not in spite of, these imperfections. What seems like a broken world full of things to revile is simultaneously an ocean of beauty waiting to be discovered. Plato was among the first to describe how the limited beauty of the physical world serves as a ladder by which we can ascend into higher states of being. By noticing the beauty of imperfect and perishable things, we refine our sensibility for beauty until we can see the beauty of that which is perfect and eternal. There is no hard line between the higher and the lower and no true conflict between them – the one reveals the other. The significance of beauty lies, therefore, in the ascension from the lesser to the greater. This is the meaning of _valuation_ – the discernment of the higher from the lower. This is why the Greeks in their wisdom married the meaning of beauty with other expressions of value in a single word, _kalos_. This word, as Nietzsche points out in his _Genealogy_, has the implicit meaning of beautiful = good = noble. We see this same pattern in the Germanic languages. A thing is called fine if it is beautiful, good or else of a higher quality. In Swedish, the cognate of fine (_fin)_ has implicit connotations of nobility. Beauty, goodness and higher value are therefore expressions of the same fundamental reality. This essential characteristic of beauty is enshrined in myth as the sublime image of Aphrodite’s birth. In the myth as told by Hesiod, Aphrodite arose out of the foam (_aphros)_ that gushed forward when the genitals of Ouranos were cast into the ocean by Chronos. This image has been a favorite of Western artists throughout the ages, showing the birth of the goddess in a triumphant burst of light and joy. To understand the significance of this myth, we must understand that the goddess first existed among the Greeks as the dawn goddess Eos, cognate to the Vedic Ushas. It is not hard to see how the goddess of the dawn, the rosy-fingered morn of Homer, would eventually split to become the goddess of beauty. The morning dazzles us with its gorgeousness, heralding all the possibilities of a coming day. It was in the merging of this dawn goddess with the Semitic queens of heaven, goddesses of love and war such as Astarte and Ishtar, that she eventually took on her well-known form as Aphrodite. The birth of Aphrodite is therefore an echo of her old identity as the goddess of the dawn. For if one were to stand at daybreak on the shores of the wide-reaching ocean and see the sun rising from the depths beyond the horizon, one would see the birth of the goddess unfold. The light of the morning will play upon the waters in a glittering streak of light that seems like pale skin. The sunburst will seem like fiery locks of golden hair thrown back into the sky. Stepping ashore from beyond the horizon, the goddess joins heaven and earth in a single moment of beauty. Beauty, then, is the joining of heaven and earth. It is how something greater than mundane life makes its presence known. It is how the transcendent reveals itself in the immanent. Beauty is the natural expression of a world that is hierarchically ordered into ascending chains of value. This is why mere physical beauty can be followed, as Plato realized, into higher states of being, and why such states appear to us as beautiful beyond anything that can be seen by the eye. Our journey through the Great Mystery must therefore continue upwards, through the ladder of beauty. Tracing the living presence of the higher in the lower, we will rise from the least of such expressions in mere physical beauty until we reach the summit where sits the _throne of the dawn_. _**Physical Beauty**_ Beauty connects the higher and the lower states of existence. It is the way in which the transcendent reveals itself in the immanent. But how is it possible for something greater than matter to be made apparent in matter? What is the basis for physical beauty? This is a fundamental problem of aesthetics properly understood. In order to answer it we must consider the phenomenon of _art_, since art is the deliberate creation of things which are beautiful. We recognize intuitively that beauty is no material substance and that it therefore cannot subsist in mere matter. Rather, it must subsist in how matter is configured. This is the first answer that art gives us. Since it is demonstrably possible to make beautiful things it must also be possible for the human mind to glean what it is in a material configuration that allows for it to be beautiful. This aesthetic sensibility is what allows for the progressive development and refinement of techniques for the creation of beautiful things. What these techniques have in common, broadly speaking, is that they are ways of configuring the _artistic medium_ in accordance with principles intuitively recognized to be beautiful. These principles include proportion, symmetry and composition. The purpose of the so-called fundamentals of art is precisely to teach how these principles are applied. Without them, a piece of art fails to communicate anything at all – it lack identity, becoming indistinct from any other heap of similar material. Consider the case of drawing. The use of the line demarcates parts of the empty page and allows _distinction_ between shapes to occur. The choice of line type and width, whether the edge is sharp or fuzzy, whether it ends abruptly or tapers off – these all signal something about how the shape is to be understood. Sharp, straight and aggressive line work gives the impression of a bold shape, while fuzzy or weak lines causes the shape to lose its distinction relative to other shapes. Proportion and composition work the same way. Each shape is defined not just by its own lines, but also by how these lines relate to the lines of other shapes. If two shapes that belong to the same object do not relate well to each other the object will come across as lacking _proportion_. It will seem too slim or thick, too long or too short. When multiple such objects are present on the same page, they too have a relation to each other which will impact the identity of each object. This is _composition_. When it is lacking it makes the assembled objects look disordered, as if they lack a coherent sense of identity. We see from this simple example that the fundamental principles of art deal with definition, distinction, identity and order. These are the very principles which arise out of Form. We remember that Form is the tyrannical eye which forces the indefinite _everythingness_ of the formless to conform to the _somethingness_ of a defined object. What the artist does is to use techniques, materials and practice to mimic this creative seeing which the Unseen Eye does through its self-reflection. We understand this intuitively, which is why we call it an _artist’s_ _vision_. Physical beauty, therefore, arises whenever Form dominates the formless substratum of matter. We remember that matter itself is _indefinite_, lacking any true substantiality. What makes an object beautiful as opposed to merely defined is that the inherent perfection of Form becomes apparent in the object. In seeing it, we look into the creative seeing at the heart of existence and feel ourselves as part of a world entirely without blemishes. This is what appeals to us in sculpture and architecture – the longevity of the material gives the sense of the timeless and the eternal, of that eternal all-encompassing moment which is Form. For this effect to be possible, the object must so conform to the limits of its Form that no essential part of it is missing. Furthermore, there can be no part to it which is superfluous to its essential nature. If an essential part of the Form is lacking, the object appears disfigured or incomplete. If a part superfluous to the Form is present, it appears as mundane, or rather as hidden behind mundanity. Only when nothing can be taken from or added to the object does it appear in that almost-perfection which is characteristic of physical beauty. In this way, the immanence of conditioned existence conforms to the transcendence of Form. Likewise, it is in this way that a physical object can be made to resemble what transcends the physical. _**Objective and Subjective**_ Physical beauty is the revelation of Form in the formlessness of matter. As we remember from our earlier discussion of Form, it is an objectivizing force. It is the eye that makes as it sees. This making is possible because the act of seeing creates an artificial space where subject and object are divided. Form makes a world of objects and subjects, dividing the everything into a set of clearly defined somethings. It is this clear definition of an object, its identity as something perfect and without blemishes, that constitutes the object sphere of beauty. The division that occurs between objects also occurs on the subjective level with the creation of conditioned subjects. What characterizes these subjects is that they exist in an unfolding state of Dionysian ecstasy, of the contrasting interplay and fundamental unity of suffering and bliss. We recognized in the previous chapter that this great drama of life is an aesthetic phenomenon – that it is characterized by a fundamental and inexhaustible beauty. This is the subjective dimension of beauty. These two dimensions of beauty coexist in the art object. The former furnishes it with a clear identity through the properties that it possesses – its shapes, symmetries, medium, etc. The latter furnishes it with the capacity to transmit an _experience of life_. This is done through making sympathetic connections between viewer and piece through use of narrative and theme, symbolism and archetype, the experiential qualities of physical properties, and so forth. The beauty of a work of art, therefore, is a quantum of living experience given physical presence in a medium through Form. That this process is possible – that an artist can capture an experience in a physical vessel – is so because the objective and subjective are non-different. Form, we remember, brings forth a world of objects through _self-reflection_. It turns its own eye onto itself to create an artificial space of seer and seen. But this is precisely the same as the _sparagmos_ by which the primordial subject tears itself apart to experience itself as a multiplicity of experiences and experiencers. The distinction between these two modes of thinking lies in whether we see the world through the distant eye of Apollo or whether we feel it through the ecstatic enmeshment of Dionysus. The common discourse on the objectivity or subjectivity of beauty is therefore a waste of time. Beauty transcends object and subject – it exists in both the object being contemplated and the one who contemplates. The object cannot be arbitrarily made or it will not be able to transmit a living experience. Likewise, the subject experiencing the artwork – and the artist trying to make it – must be susceptible to the experience being transmitted. If either element is lacking, the aesthetic spark will not ignite between viewer and piece. This transcendent aspect of beauty is what constitutes its great power. As conditioned subjects, we are beings doomed to feel the sparagmatic division of the whole. But beauty reaches beyond ourselves, crossing the space between seer and seen. Beauty can reconcile subject and object, dissolving both into the living whole of _aesthetic completion_. The experience of beauty is not trivial, banal or arbitrary. It is a fundamental aspect of reality, the conscious experience of unity and completion. Beauty is the counterpart to the _sparagmos_, the force uniting that which was divided. _**Natural Beauty**_ Nature is the great muse. Because beauty is no arbitrary illusion created by the artist or imagined by the viewer, it should come as no surprise that it is present all around us in nature. That beauty extends beyond the limits of human creativity is self-evident. We can experience the beauty of nature directly, without any human mediation. Remember that nature is _spontaneous generation_. The forms and structures of both animate and inanimate nature sprout into being in time through a complex process of evolutionary principles. Yet it always does so with some mind towards the principles of good artistic taste. Nature displays the principles of harmony, symmetry and proportion. Its processes hinge on balance and equilibrium, a harmonious flowing between contrasts. But nature is not merely dry forms. It is also _living reality itself_. Nature is the arch-experience, for it is the very stuff of all living beings and the world which they inhabit. It therefore possesses the qualities of both outer form and inner life. Nature is a self-generated aesthetic experience, a living piece of art ever making itself. This artistic quality of nature we recognize as _celestial nature_, the highest and most unified level of nature that we identified in our investigation into the _natura naturae_. It is the force of visionary viciousness and bloody artistry, reality showing itself as an incomprehensible demiurge of light and darkness. It is united in all its polymorphous variety and complete in its ever-unfolding dynamism. By observing the motions of nature through this understanding we can see the full richness of its beauty. In this way we can also understand something of the _nature of beauty_. The processes which cause beauty to come into being in nature are violent and destructive. But this violence is paradoxically also an infinite source of creativity. The celestial intelligence of high nature makes as it destroys. This cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction, is the conditioned life of the sparagmatic subject, of Pentheus torn apart by daemonic forces. The violence inherent to nature is beautiful, just as suffering can be beautiful for the conditioned subject. Thus the beauty of nature and the beauty of our living experience are non-different, as we should well expect them to be. The spontaneous outbursts of beauty which exist in nature, and which occur within our own lives, show the unity of ever-mutable sparagmatic existence. Nature aims towards beauty as its reason, goal and end. We, as living subjects born out of the womb of nature, live our lives for the purpose of participating in this beauty, in the beauty of _this_ life and as _this_ defined being. Nature is eternally revealing to itself its own grand beauty. We are creation, co-creator and audience to this process. This interplay of the One and the Many and of part and whole is evident throughout nature. Consider the case of the night sky with its countless stars, or a meadow of spring flowers. In these examples, nature produces a self-repeating pattern of expressed beauty. Each instance is a unique being, beautiful in itself. Yet when seen together, we notice that the beauty of each instance is present in all the other instances as well. It is a dazzling array of timeless Form brought into conditioned existence. In art, we see this effect most clearly in the archetypal Jane Morris face of Rossetti. Each female subject wears the same face, subtly different and yet eerily omnipresent. Were we to see all these faces present at once, we would see the same unity of One and Many that we see in the springs flowers of our meadow. All instances of beauty are like this, a _repetition of eternity within time_. The Rossetti face is the face of nature itself, an infinite variety of beings all subsisting as one reality, one life, one Being. It is the epiphany of Aphrodite, the great universal goddess. Nature therefore reveals to us much about the nature of beauty. It unifies creation and destruction, the One and the Many, the part and whole. It transcends subject and object, the inner and outer world. But more importantly, beauty is the goal of this great display of nature and of life. It is the beginning and the end, the cause and the goal, the one thing which needs no outside justification. It is for this reason that nature is the great muse. All art is mimicry of what already exists in nature. But if this is so, what purpose does art serve? Why make anything if everything is just an infinite procession of self-similar types? _**The Purpose of Art**_ As man is himself part of nature, he participates in the cycle of creation and destruction. He does so passively by the fact of his birth, his growth and development, his death and his inevitable rebirth. He eats and is eaten, kills and is killed, subsumes other beings to further his own being and is subsumed himself in due course. He is pulled along by his desires and fears, forces within him which arise out of his nature, and this passive participation charts the course of his fate. But he also participates in it in an active sense. Art is one such active participation, where man learns from nature the forms and content of life such that he can recreate it in a suitable medium. This active participation allows man to become the conduit for life to express its self-repeating patterns of beauty. Because the artist is no passive participant he can shape this expression of nature to better conform to the aesthetic receptivity of man. In doing so, the collective work of true artists create a mirror realm of _idealized nature_, nature distilled into purified epiphanies of beauty suitable for man to contemplate. In this way, art becomes a way for nature to reveal its beauty more fully to man. Where Aphrodite steps out of the ocean on her own in nature, man as artist can entice her to appear through the means of art. We must understand that though nature is the supreme artwork, the living embodiment of beauty, beauty itself must transcend nature. This is so because nature is variegated and dynamic, while beauty itself transcends distinctions of change and eternity, one and many, subject and object. Beauty reaches beyond nature and art is man’s way of reaching beauty _through the means_ of nature. The mirror realm of art is the collection of man’s attempts at following nature to that beauty which lies beyond nature. It is a deliberate peeling away of the layers of the mundane to reveal the supramundane. Strolling through this mirror realm, we see the great variety of expressions that the ineffable and transcendent unity of life takes. _God is Beauty; Art is a world of Gods_. Where nature overflows with daemons and satyrs, art overflows with manmade seraphs. Understand that I am not speaking poetically here. The world of art is abundant in symbols and images that connect us to the mystery beyond all common experience. Trace them long enough and the great personas will reveal themselves. All the old gods of myth live on in art – the museum is a pagan temple to the one who can see. And truly great artists are inspired by gods that have no names and no temples. Moreau’s Jupiter only borrows the name – he is a demiurge of a very different cosmos, one that beckons to us with equal intimacy and foreignness. The mirror world of idealized nature created by art is a way in which higher aesthetic values can be expressed within the material world. We remember from nature that it is Eros as expressed through sexual selection that drives the development of the aesthetic qualities of living beings. Base material calculation gives way for a burning desire for beauty. Art is that same drive expressed in its most sublime form. In art, the bridge between physical and the metaphysical is crossed. Matter is transfigured through Eros into something more than matter. True art, therefore, has a _theurgic purpose_. It opens us up to spiritual revelations that we would otherwise be blind to. It allows the great powers of nature and of the beyond to step forward in such a way that we can see them clearly. In going beyond into the realm of ineffable beauty, we begin to sense that oceanic unity that ties all of reality together. The dividing line between contradictions begins to blur as they are fused together and resolved; ordinary reality unites in ways primordial and unexpected. Part is now greater than the whole, and the whole is one without parts. _**Art and Idolatry**_ When an artwork is created, a unique expression of beauty is born with it. Where before there was only inanimate matter there is now a window that opens into the _sublime_. The artwork is both a piece of material and a vision of beauty. These two aspects of it are not in conflict – the artwork is a union of heaven and earth, of the transcendent and the immanent, of eternity and immediacy. When a thing is beautiful it acquires significance beyond what its mere material properties communicate. It radiates a captivating power; it draws us in and dominates our mind and our senses. The distinction blurs between ourselves and the object. We unite with it and become part of its universe, beholden to its vision and its law. It is in this way that art acquires a _religious_ significance. As we gaze through the window of the piece, divinity gazes back at us. Image becomes _idol_. This magnetic power of beautiful objects is neither superstition nor magic. It is a direct result of the nature of beauty as unifying force, as a dominating hierarch of existential unification. To affirm the power of beauty as it appears in objects – to recognize it and seek it out – is _idolatry._ It is to understand that something far greater than the object can make itself known _through_ the object. The idol stands as proof of divinity, so recognized because of its aesthetic power. There is no difference between art and religion. The artist is a midwife of idols, art the progenitor of idolatry. In the image made manifest the inner truth of the world can be displayed and a direct experience of the power of life can be communicated. In this way we tear away the veil that separates us from the truth, from the indistinct haziness of mundane existence. It is a mistake to think that the power of art is illusory merely because it is an exercise in mimicry. It is true that the marble does not _speak_, but what it says is more profound than words can convey. It is not just the crafted object that displays this power. Natural objects such as trees, rivers and mountains can serve as idols just as well. Nature is the living artwork and everything found in nature reveals the unity of existence. The waters carve paths through rock over unimaginable vistas of time. The moon pulls the rising tide and the sun drives the winds and the rains. The bodies of animals are living idols to their specific way of living. Our own bodies as men and woman are likewise living idols, proof of the divinity of human existence by the beauty of which they are capable. The power of symbols, themes, moods and ideas can be given physical form in art. In this very direct way, that which cannot be touched or named can be given a body and an objective identity. Idolatry is neither the worship of matter nor the worship of things. It is not the worship of nature or of the body. It is rather a mode of worship, the conscious connection of the earth and heaven. It is the realization that there is no breach or separation between the spirit and the body, the universal and the particular. _As above, so below._ It is natural, therefore, for mankind to seek after the divine in the embodied physical world. In art we express the idealized image of nature – unity and perfection as it reveals itself to us. But what is the meaning of this revelation and how does it come to us? How does one see in order to make a window into the heart of reality? _**Imagination and Originality**_ The epiphanic nature of art is made possible not just through mimicry of nature but through a unique faculty of the mind itself – _imagination_. As the word implies, imagination is image-making or image-invoking. It is the faculty of _coaxing images_, of compelling forms to erupt within the mind. The skill of the artist, learned from nature, allows him to give these images a bodily presence through which others can perceive it – image becomes idol. The capacity of the mind to bring forth images is due to its similarity to Form. Mind is also an Unseen Eye that makes as it sees. From the conceptual womb-tomb of blank thoughtlessness, images arise both spontaneously and through acts of will. The mind acts on its perception of nature, causing it to sense the patterns that underlie all things. But it also acts on itself in an act of self-reflection, causing the patterns dormant within itself to rise to the surface. Most of the images that arise within the mind are echoes of pre-existing things, combined and recombined in ever-unfolding repetitions. It is wrong, however, to think that imagination is merely a faculty of mixing. Rather, it is the faculty that sees beyond the image towards the reality that hides underneath. It is this act of seeing that causes the image to arise in the first place. When the mind touches that which is beyond nature, beyond form and even _beyond itself_, the reaction is a violent eruption of images. This is the moment of artistic inspiration, when the epiphany that is to become art reveals itself. This inspiration is the source of _originality_. Originality is not, as is commonly thought, the creation of something from nothing. Nothingness does not exist, and so all creation – even original creation – is an act of self-repetition. Creation is the drawing out of what is pre-existent from its undifferentiated state. Since all distinction is contained in Form, all form-giving activities must repeat the eternal patterns that exist within Form. How then can originality be possible if all creation is repetition? The essence of originality does not lie in making the unrepeated. It lies rather in fidelity to the image. The images that arise through inspired imagination are not mere copies or mixings of things found in the world of the senses. Remember that the image arises when the mind touches what is beyond the image. This is _living reality_. The image that arises from this meeting is itself an entity imbued with life. When this image is faithfully reproduced in all its living power it appears to us as unique, individual, _original_. The seat of originality in art is therefore the very same as the seat of our individuality as persons. Form, remember, is the union of the universal and the particular. It is the shining forth of the ever-existent as that which is here and now, the universal becoming the particular. But only the ever-existent is truly living, truly existent. Whenever its light is dimmed, the particular becomes hazy and indistinct. Persons become cyphers and art becomes unoriginal. This is a death-like state, the shadowy realm of Hades, where things appear as mere echoes of life. The unoriginal is an abortion, the failure of a living image to be born. The mind mixes and reconstitutes all its various impressions in much the same way that evolution in nature mixes specimens to bring forth new species. The fertility of this process is due to the life principle of reality, that the patterns that constitute reality are inexhaustible in their creative power. Nature is living art because it is a union of the transient and the eternal, the part and the whole. This fertile power is not present as such in the constituents, however. Rather, it arises from the pattern itself. Mixing, therefore, stimulates creativity not in the material sense but in a _compositional_ sense. Patterns emerge when parts are ordered into a whole. _**Beauty of Whole and Part**_ All beauty arises out of _composition_. Aphrodite does not deign to leave the ocean if things know not their proper place. The secret of composition is the great secret of part and of whole, of the One and the Many, of the One-in-Many. The great drama of sparagmatic division is revealed in composition. When composition is perfected we see the return of the original unity, the Dionysian triumph. It is in this way that beauty acts as a unifying force. It unifies not by fusing what was divided, but by revealing that there never was any division, that whole is present fully within the part. This is the hidden meaning of Plato’s _Euthyphro_, one of his most misunderstood dialogues. When considering nature as a totality of interconnected parts, we must ask ourselves what relationship the part has to the whole. Do sun, tree, water and man share any commonalities? It is here that we remember from our study of Form that despite the formal distinctions between objects, Form is still one. The universal and the individual are not at odds. It is likewise in nature. That same nature which sets the stars in motion, that moves the year through the seasons, that revolves the whole ensemble of living beings through the womb-tomb cycle of birth and death – that same nature is present in all things. The laws of nature are active in every part of you as much as they are in the sun. There is no breach in the order of nature between you and the sun. Thus, if we were to fully know a single raindrop at the deepest possible level, we would know the whole of nature. The whole is present in full within the part. The part does not lose its individuality here, but becomes one manifestation of the universal law. The part expresses, contains and concretizes the whole. Nature in its entirety is present within you, while you are present in your entirety within nature. Without the whole, the part could not be. Without the part, the whole would not be complete. This is the mystery of composition – the whole gives context and meaning to the part and the part expresses the beauty of the whole. Therefore, where the basic elements of art such as line, shape and contour communicate Form, composition instead communicates the unity of Form. The living experience which has been crystallized in an ideal form within the artistic medium expands through composition. Rather than being a single experience, the artwork now encompasses a much more complete vision of life. The image expands until it becomes a _universe_. _**Jupiter and Semele**_ We can see the mystery of part and whole by considering a piece of masterful composition. Take Moreau’s _Jupiter and Semele_, mentioned above. I said before that this Jupiter is the demiurge of an alien realm, one that is both foreign and recognizable to us. Beginning at the very bottom of the piece, we see the familiar sight of nature in its overflowing fullness. Everywhere we look are chimeras and nymphs decked with flowers and the parts of animals. This is fluid nature self-propagating within its own chthonian depths, depicted in the reclining woman in the foreground that seemingly melts back into amniotic fluid. Within these depths stand out two figures in particular – the Sun and the Moon, two winged goddesses. The Sun takes center stage, shining upon a world of beast-plant hybrids. The Moon is set to the side but closer to us, less distant. We notice the intensity of the Moon’s staring eyes and we recognize her as Hecate, the goddess of crossroads, crossing into our world with the intensity of her stare. These are the same eyes that all figures in the piece bear. Her face stares at us from every chimera in nature. Sitting atop the ensemble of nature sits the great god Pan, the Everything of nature. Half man, half beast, overflowing with flowers and vines, he contemplates his own fullness in silence. Behind him is an eagle, the only truly Jovian symbol in the whole piece, a memento from the god that gave his name to the enigmatic demiurge of this world. The eagle’s wings rise behind Pan, granting him wings like all the other godlings of this world. On either side of Pan sit two women at the feet of Jupiter’s throne. One is Death, holding a white flower, the symbol of new beginnings. The other is Sorrow, hiding like Leto behind her veil and cradling the bloody sword that steals the life of all mortal beings. They each contemplate a winged figure of their own that rises up to the throne of the Lord himself. The one is a mourning Hermes, standing by Death as the great caretaker of souls. The other is Apollo, deep in contemplation before Sorrow. Here is the order of human life, unfolding across suffering and death, ever-living and ever-dying. Rising further, we reach the jeweled throne of this foreign Jupiter. It overflows with jewels and flowers, with chimeras and godlings. The first we see of the god is his mighty foot, resting gently on the Ouroboros, the symbol of eternity. We see that even his armrests have eyes, staring at us with uncanny intensity like the eyes of the Moon. On his lap, seeming to slide off in orgasmic abandon, lies the bleeding Semele. Her tiny form is dwarfed by the King of Heaven. We realize that it is her blood that covers the sword held by Sorrow. She has been struck down by her divine lover – this Jupiter inseminates through _murder_. What we next see is the demiurge himself enthroned in majesty. It is his eyes that we first notice, the uncanny intensity of his stare, the androgynous beauty of his perfect face. With a flash of recognition we see that it is his face, his eyes, that stare at us from every other being in the painting. He is ever-present. He reaches even into our world with his piercing gaze and possesses us just like the bleeding Semele. He is decked in flowers, overflowing with greenery like the realm beneath his jeweled feet. In one hand he holds the white lily, the same flower held by Death and the mourning Hermes. He is the renewal and the killer. In his other hand he holds the lyre of Apollo. It is he who strums the melody of life and death, the order of nature and the song of suffering mortals. He is the ever-fecund one, the self-propagating hermaphrodite god of this universe, solitary and unknowable in his perfect self-completion. He is the true centerpiece of the painting, and yet we see how his signature being is present in every other being that lies before his feet. They are parts of him, having no existence without him. And yet his fullness, his overflowing creative power, would be lost without the myriad godlings that spill forth beneath his divine throne. He is the whole and they the parts, and they are all him fully and completely. About his head shines forth the light of creation, illuminating the whole world. Not even the Sun can match it. This is the light of the dawn goddess rising from the ocean – this is beauty revealing itself in the ensemble of nature. It unites all and flows through all, for it is the essence of the foreign Jupiter we see upon the throne. This is the _nature of beauty_, revealed in the _beauty of nature_. We see, therefore, how the entire cosmos of _Jupiter and Semele_ is a fractal unfolding of the central god himself. He copies himself endlessly, in whole or in part, and appears within himself and to himself, all parts of himself contained by himself. Not content to bind himself to one form, he chooses instead to step forth as _all forms_. Inhabiting the infinite fertility of Being, he also inhabits _all beings_. And the binding power of all these beings, the unifying identity of the god, _is_ _beauty_. _**Concrete and Abstract Beauty**_ The beauty of nature and of art is a concrete form of beauty. The thing is beautiful _as thing_ – it is a distinct instance of beauty shining forth. But beauty, as we have seen, is an appearance of the whole in the part. It is the experience of the unity of existence. Concrete beauty is the immanent aspect of this unity, of unity as it appears in the thing. But there is also a _transcendent_ aspect. This is beauty _in itself_. It is the unity of the whole considered without reference to the part. This we will call _abstract beauty_. Understand that I am not referring here to abstract art as a category of art. Much of abstract so-called art is pretentious and uninspired, depending on moral or ideological commitments rather than on beauty to captivate its audience. There is no epiphany in abstract art because there is no image, no persona, no life. When beauty does occur in abstract art, it is the beauty inherent to color and shape. It resides there not because of the artist but in spite of him. No, abstract beauty is something else. We recognize it when, as Plato tells us, we become aware that the beauty of beautiful bodies is _one_. Though the bodies are different, though they be beautiful in different ways, the beauty is still the same regardless of which body it resides in. Beauty transcends the One and the Many – abstract beauty is the beauty of the One, while concrete beauty is the beauty of the Many. The goddess of Rossetti is both One and Many. To know beauty for what it is we must see what lies beyond her many faces. How do we look beyond the many beauties towards the one beauty? We do so by following the signs of beauty from one thing to another, using the same _process of abstraction_ that we used to recognize the unity of Form. This is the method that Plato teaches in the _Symposium._ We begin with the beauty of one body, then the beauty of many bodies. We see what unities them in their beauty. Next, we look at the beauty of ideas, of symbols, of patterns. We continue on like this, finding beauty in as many things as we can and reconciling them until we become aware that there is one pattern of beauty that shines throughout all multiplicity. If we succeed, we will see that all of existence breathes this beauty because it is _identical to Being itself_. The mere fact of existence is beautiful because existence itself is unity without contradiction or dissonance. When this sense of the beauty of things expands to encompass the beauty of _all things_, we have come to the shore of Plato’s _ocean of beauty_. This is the ocean of Aphrodite, the throne of the dawn where the world is renewed eternally as living art. To reach these shores is to see that which cannot be described, because it is not comparable to any one thing. All that can be said about it is that to find it is to find the object of all our desires. All lesser things that we thought we wanted are revealed to be only the droplets cast from this great ocean. We desire them because of their _resemblance_ to it. The minor beauties and simple pleasures of life are echoes of it, a memory of the throne of the dawn for mortals who still live in the night. Knowing this, we finally come to know what has _value_ in life. _**Beauty and Value**_ In our meditations on death, we found that the only thing that can endure in the face of death is _value_. To live is to die and to die is to be faced with the burning question of the worth of life. What is the point of living at all if it only ends in death? This same question was posed to us in our meditations on suffering. How can life be justified if conditioned existence is defined by sorrow and pain? The answer here was the same, that we must find some value in suffering, some meaning in pain. Indeed, again and again we have seen value recur in our journey to the heart of the Great Mystery. It resembles the self-repeating face of Rossetti’s goddess because _beauty is value_. To recognize beauty is to recognize value – it is how we find what is valuable. Beauty is the one thing which is _self-justifying_. The beautiful is that which is desired for its own sake, without reference to anything else. The beautiful has no utility and serves no purpose other than its own existence. It is that which is desirable _in itself_. This can only be truly understood when we have seen the great ocean of beauty which flows in silent perfection beneath the stormy waves of conditioned life. This is why the valuable – which is to say, the beautiful – can justify life in the face of suffering and death. We remember that conditioned existence is suffering because of limitation. We are sparagmatically divided from all other things and forced to relate to them in order to maintain ourselves. But the beautiful is _self-sufficient_. It is complete in itself, needing nothing else to complete it. This self-sufficient perfection explains the hierarchism inherent to valuation. Because the beautiful is self-sufficient, needing nothing else to complete it, it towers above everything that is incomplete. The extent to which anything is complete and full in itself is the extent to which it is beautiful – beauty is the _standard_ by which all things are measured. Since conditioned existence is variegated not all things can be judged equally by the demanding eye of beauty. Some things are naturally greater than others. Death, in contrast to beauty, is a metamorphosis and a leveling. It is the flow of conditioned life back to the undifferentiated womb-tomb of chthonian nature where it must inevitably be born again. The beautiful withstands death because, being complete in itself, nothing can be taken away or added to it. The mutability of the life-and-death cycle is merely the waves passing over the ocean of beauty. The waves come and go, rise and fall, but the ocean remains unchanged. This is why it is the standard – it is the only thing that remains what it is throughout change. All of this is evident in the fact that beauty is the experience of the unity of existence. To see beauty is to taste to some degree the fullness of life, thus raising us above the limitations of our own existence, the limits of nature, death and suffering. And since we ourselves are part of that existence, are united to it in the depths of our being, we ourselves _and our own lives_ are beautiful. The purpose of art and its drivers – desire, conflict, suffering, death, the sadomasochistic orgy of change that is nature – is to reveal to us what beauty is so that we may find it in ourselves. Part of the suffering of life is that our own existence seems like a jumble of meaningless events. This is our _existential exile_, the fact that we find ourselves alone in a senseless world. But when we learn to see the beauty in these passing moments, they begin to knit together. Our struggles and our woes, our few triumphs and our many small pleasures, our darkest nights and brightest mornings – these are threaded together by the beauty inherent in all aspects of life. The tapestry of being is an artwork, and we ourselves are beauty, beautifier and beautified in one. That is our unity with life, the very core of our being. It is when we see this that our lives begin to have meaning. Everything that we do and that has been done to us becomes lines in the great poem that we write by the mere fact of living. And since that poem is beautiful, we are _justified in being ourselves_. _**Dawning Love**_ When we see the beauty in our life shining through both our brightest and our darkest moments, we see that our existence is justified. Our existence, however, is not separate from that of the existence of the whole. As conditioned beings, we are tied into a web of being that encompasses all other things. To see our own life as beautiful is to see all of life and all of reality as beautiful. It is to recognize that everything is justified. Life, in all its conditioned madness and savagery, is self-justifying through its beauty. This recognition of the beauty of the whole seen in our own lives is no different from the beauty we saw in the composition of Moreau’s _Jupiter_. His strange Jupiter is not a character but an entire universe of self-similar beings. This is precisely what our own life is – we are one face of beauty, one expression of it. By recognizing this, we leave our existential exile and rejoin the whole. When we touch the much greater Being of which we are a part, we are no longer alone. The desire to reconnect in this way with the All is what we know as _love._ Beauty can be known as such because it excites love. This is another meaning to the birth of Aphrodite. She is born from the severed genitals of Ouranos because beauty is inherently _erotic_. Beauty attracts through its perfection and excites in us a desire for unity and self-abandonment. It is the promise of a return to our original state of primordial union before we were severed from the All through the _sparagmos_. There is never any true doubt as to what is beautiful – our heart knows it at a glance. The dawn goddess that rises from the foam of the ocean to illuminate the world with her splendor is not just the goddess of beauty. She is also the goddess of love. The journey that we have taken towards her throne at the heart of reality has been a journey of _lover towards the beloved_. From our first meditations on death, to the vastness of nature and the sublimity of Form, to the suffering and ecstasy of conditioned existence and, finally, through the gilded halls of beauty, we see that all of this must be _loved_. The mystery of beauty is this, that the unity of life means that even our death and our suffering must be loved if we are to rise above them. We cannot live in contempt for life, for nature, for our own selves and the tapestry we weave and inhabit. To do so is to blind ourselves to the beauty of the All, and thus to lose the only hope we have of reconciliation with the whole. Love, therefore, must be our next excursion into the Great Mystery. We have recognized ourselves as shades and sufferers, as beasts and ideas, as artist and artwork. Now we must learn to see ourselves as _lovers_. ### Love _**Our Kind of Love**_ Aphrodite, as the goddess of beauty, embodies the epiphanic nature of beauty. Just as she rises naked and radiant from the foam of the ocean, so does beauty shine forth from the simmering mutability of nature. Nature surrounds us on all sides with its visceral displays of force and change, but it is in its beauty that man finds something which goes beyond nature. By truly seeing the beautiful, man is raised from the muck of mere existence into a state which is complete and perfect in itself. This is not the totality of the great goddess, however. While Aphrodite as the goddess of beauty tells us of the nature of beauty, it is Aphrodite as goddess of love that tells us about the effects of beauty. One tells us what beauty is, the other what beauty does and how we can recognize it. These two sides are ultimately one and the same. To see the beautiful is to feel _love_, as love is the recognition of beauty. This is the true meaning of Plato’s _Symposium,_ which charts the path towards true beauty through the means of love. This understanding of love may perhaps puzzle the reader. We intuitively understand love as a relationship between people. What I am proposing here is the existence of a love that occurs between a seer and something seen, or between a thing experienced and the one who experiences it. It is the love which completes us and reconciles us to the whole, of which relational love is only an expression. It is in this sense that we should understand the many varieties of love recognized by the Greeks. Six in particular were important to them – _philia, storge, philautia, xenia, agape_ and _Eros_. _Philia_ is the accord that exists between friends or associates and which keeps the harmony of the community as a whole. _Storge_ is familial love, the instinctual bond of kinship we feel to those of our own family. These two forms of love are what we most commonly think of when we think of love. _Philautia_ is self-love, the esteem which a man holds for himself. _Xenia_ is the ritualized hospitality due to guests and visitors, a kind of love which was necessary for travel in the Greek world. Finally, there is _agape_, which was originally the affection due to the spirits of the dead and was later redefined in Christianity as unconditional or spiritual love. These kinds of love are all _relational_, meaning they form the basis for social relations on every scale of human existence. This is not the love that we concern ourselves with. We concern ourselves instead with that love which is primordial and universal, the only kind of love envisioned as a god in his own right. We have already met his acquaintance when we saw him drive the processes of nature towards their fulfillment. This love is _Eros_, the oldest and most powerful love that the Greeks recognized. To become true lovers of Aphrodite, we must understand the role of Eros more fully than we have done previously. Only then will we recognize the true inner dimension of beauty. _**Lower and Higher Eros**_ In our meditations on nature, we met Eros as the primal force of animal desire. This is the instinctual drive of sentient life to be what it is, to do what is in its nature and to be attracted to those aspects of life which allow it to express its nature. This drive is most powerfully seen in the desire to fight, mate and eat – the basic drives of animal life. More broadly, Eros is present as the _instinctual_, as the genetic sense of purpose that all animals possess. We recognized the role that instinctual desire plays in evolution, how it shapes the development of the species in time and how it acts throughout all of nature to bring forth well-defined specimens. This is the _lower Eros_ and it is associated with a particular aspect of the great goddess, the one called _Pandemos_, meaning common to all people. This is the Aphrodite of physical pleasure and instinctual satisfaction – it is the sensual beauty of good food and a warm body. We remember from before that Eros is always an _affirmation of value_. We call the primal Eros and this animal Aphrodite _lower_ because it is the simplest affirmation of value. Pleasure is easily recognized as good because it _feels good_. No deep philosophy is needed – what gives pleasure justifies itself. This lower Eros reaches its highest point in what we called celestial nature. This is the terrible intelligence which acts behind nature to give it its richness and variety. It creates beauty with all the blood and violence of nature, making great art out of great suffering. The role of the lower Eros here is to marshal the life force of living beings towards the expression of more and more refined forms of life. Celestial nature is evident in animals in their desire to act out a very specific form of life and thus to add to the great ensemble of natural forms. Animals do not merely feel the sensual pleasure of food or sex or bodily comfort. They also feel a deep satisfaction when they act out their foundational instinctual behaviors. We would be deluded to think that the beaver feels no pleasure in building dams, yet this cannot be considered a simple physical pleasure like that of eating or mating. It is a pleasure of a different kind. It is in this differentiation between the base pleasures and the more refined pleasures that Eros begins to differentiate himself as well. It is no longer the Aphrodite Pandemos that is acting here, for the pleasure of acting out a unique form of life is no longer a pleasure that is common to all beings. Rather, it is a very distinct and individuated form of pleasure. The beaver experiences fully what it is to be beaver and to master nature with the tools that has been given to it. But while this is a more individuated form of pleasure, it is still unconscious. The beaver experiences beaver-nature fully, but it is not aware of this fact. When the capacity for self-reflection develops significantly in a species, it begins to find the realm of the lower Eros unsatisfactory. It can no longer fully immerse itself in sensual pleasure nor act out a unique nature common to its species. From Form we learn that self-reflection is _self-propagation_ – by reflecting our own selves back at us, we multiply our Form into distinct forms. Thus, man is the most individuated of all the animals. He is torn apart by a multiplicity of racial, sexual, spiritual and personal types which all vie for his life force, often in contradictory ways. Man is the only _existential_ _animal_. He is the only animal which does not know what it means to be itself. The lion is satisfied with its lion-nature; the gazelle likewise, though their natures are wholly different. But man finds no lasting satisfaction in human nature. He desires something which goes beyond, something which he senses in nature but cannot grasp within nature. He strives, therefore, to outwit the great intelligence of celestial nature by drawing down from these higher realms the forms which nature itself seemingly omits. In this way man serves the purpose of nature, though he often deludes himself of the contrary. This striving upwards is what constitutes the _higher Eros_, associated with the aspect of Aphrodite known as _Urania_, meaning heavenly. It is this higher Eros which we mean to investigate now, at the end of our journey towards the Great Mystery. This is what we mean with that great unifying love, which is no less primordial and universal than the lower Eros. _**Love as Recognition of Beauty**_ If the lower Eros is an affirmation of the animal condition of living beings, what sort of affirmation is the higher Eros? It is the _affirmation of beauty_. Eros is the force within that drives us towards acquiring that which has value. The many possible gradations of Eros along the axis of lower to higher represent varying levels of value recognition. At the lower level we recognize sensually the value of pleasure. We also recognize instinctively the value of expressing our nature. The higher we move along this axis the more our recognition tends towards values which transcend the limitations of our animal nature. When we consider the values of the lower Eros, we recognize that they all serve some function beyond just pleasure. Food and sex are necessities for survival and reproduction, self-evident values in an evolutionarily hard-coded value structure that all living beings are subject to. The same is true of the more complex instinctual behaviors found in animals – the performance of an animal’s nature serves the goal of ensuring its survival and propagation. These utilitarian facts of the lower Eros begin to disappear when we consider the higher Eros. Now, things begin to show value without serving any obvious evolutionary need. For instance, the intellectual pleasure of curiosity, which drives an animal to explore in order to find what it needs to survive, becomes self-motivating in beings of higher intellectual capacity. The act of discovery becomes valuable in itself, regardless of the utility of what has been discovered. Learning and understanding become expressions of a will towards something which is no longer bound exclusively to animal need. This is equally true of the creative pleasures. The joy of making and of seeing something come into being reaches its greatest separation from mere physical need in the work of the artist. Art has no utility. It can fulfill no need related to physical survival and propagation. Yet the desire to make can nonetheless become so obsessive and dominating that it overcomes even the base desire for bodily comfort and satisfaction. The higher Eros divorces us from animal concerns and directs us towards higher-order needs, needs which fulfill a part of us that material nature alone cannot. It is here that Eros as the love of beauty comes in. Eros, as we mentioned before, is the desire to acquire that which has value. But beauty is not a thing which can be acquired in the usual sense. It is not a thing to be taken or kept. Rather, beauty is an _experience_. To acquire it is to be conscious of it, to experience it without filter. We remember from the previous chapter that beauty is intimately tied to value because it is self-justifying. Its value does not derive from any source other than itself – it is valuable in itself as what it is and _because_ it is. At the highest gradation of Eros, what we desire is precisely this, the one thing that is worth having purely for its own sake. The reason why we wish to possess it lies in the nature of beauty as a _completion_. When we describe beauty as _epiphanic_, this means that it _reveals itself_. But to whom does it reveal itself? When Aphrodite steps out of the ocean to glorify the liquid realm of nature with her heaven-born beauty, she is not alone. Waiting on the shore, unnamed and unseen, is a mortal observer. We remember that subject and object are united in the contemplation of beauty. Aphrodite is always depicted as naked because she exists to be seen. The unnamed mortal is never depicted because he exists only to see. In this act of revelation, the seer and the seen become as one. This is the meaning of the common mytheme of Eos’ insatiable desire for mortal men. Beauty reveals itself because it _desires to be recognized_. When it is recognized by the conditioned subject, the result is a union with the observer. This is what we experience as love. Love is therefore both the desire for the beautiful and the fulfillment of that desire. It is the only longing which grows stronger the more it is satisfied. The world wishes to see itself. When seen, it completes itself. This is the meaning of love. _**Hatred of Beauty**_ If love is the recognition of beauty, then it must follow that hatred is the rejection of beauty. This is indeed what we see throughout all of human history. Nature is itself an expression of beauty and man is naturally an artist and an idolater, filling the world with dream images of an idealized nature. But subsections of mankind always appear that reject this natural impulse in themselves, which is the higher Eros. These are the iconoclasts and the nihilists, the _haters of beauty_. But from where does this hatred stem? We saw in the previous chapter how beauty is that which is self-sufficient. It is that which is complete, where nothing can be added or removed. It is the very experience of value, of that which is worth having _in itself_. As the essence of value, beauty is hierarchizing and ascending. It divides the world into what is worthy and what is not, what lives up to the standard of its own being and what does not. This whole structure is apparent in the Eros-driven processes of nature itself. Nature is the great artwork but it is also the great selector. It chooses in every moment what is worthy and not. The epiphany of beauty reveals to us that which we must be worthy of. The hatred of beauty comes when we deem ourselves ultimately unworthy of it. Its source is one and the same with nihilism, which is the fleeing of worth by embracing the worthless. We therefore understand what the sentiments are that drive the hatred of beauty – it is resentment and life-hatred, a desire to destroy that which proves our inferiority by its very existence. Since love is the affirmation of beauty, and since beauty is the value of life and the completeness of being, the hatred of beauty is therefore a _rejection of being_. With this always follows a rejection of nature and of life itself. The nihilist hates his existence because he recognizes his own inferiority. He wishes to see destroyed that which evokes these emotions in him. His inferiority, however, is a direct result of his conditioning, of the limits which nature puts on him. Nature circumscribes his capabilities – his life is ordered by forces greater then himself. Like all things, the nihilist is doomed to _be what he is_. It is this fact that drives his rejection of beauty, life and nature. He hates everything because he hates himself. Do not mistake the rejection of the higher Eros for the affirmation of the lower Eros, however. The hatred of sex and pleasure always comes along with the hatred of life and of beauty. Eros is not at odds with himself – he always drives towards affirmation of being. A love of pleasure is no less a love of life than the love of beauty is. They differ only in the level of refinement. The nihilist, therefore, hates both, because he hates life itself. It is from this hatred of existence that the iconoclasm of the nihilist comes. The nihilist says No to an existence which he hates, which arouses in him the feeling of resentment. Therefore, he seeks to destroy and defile as an act of revenge against the indignity of his own existence. To make the world ugly and miserable becomes an end in itself. But that is not the path that leads to the Great Mystery. To fulfill our debt to life for living, we must seek out that which has value even when it arouses awe and fear in us. The cowardice of the nihilist does not become us and his seething life-hatred must be recognized for the spiritual barrenness that it is. To affirm the value of life, it is not just enough to love the beautiful. We must also _create._ Creativity is the practical application of Eros. It is to say Yes to the existence of something. _**Creativity and the Higher Eros**_ That creativity is the practical application of Eros can be clearly seen in the case of the lower Eros. The lower Eros serves an integral part in nature by being the driving force towards _procreation_. By manifesting in the animal mind as lust and the sexual instinct, it facilitates the whole behavioral repertoire that allows for mating to occur. Even in non-sentient beings this lower Eros is present as the primordial unifying force that combines opposite sexual polarities to form new life. We recognize, therefore, that Eros is the _creative principle_, acting in its lower form as the _procreative_ principle. It is important to note here that the common understanding of sexuality as having reproduction as its purpose is not entirely correct. No animal mates with the intention of having offspring – this is a uniquely human anomaly. Animals mate because doing so gives them pleasure and the satisfaction of fulfilling behaviors that are inherent to their nature. They are affirming their own mode of being and this affirmation is inherently pleasurable to all animals, including man. The inner dimension of Eros cares nothing for offspring as such, however. It cares only for the _affirmation of being_ that occurs in the lower Eros as erotic pleasure. The striving for this pleasure is what results in procreation. Procreation is the outer dimension of the desire for erotic pleasure, the objectification of it into an _erotic artifact._ This distinction is important if we are to understand the creative power of the higher Eros. As the higher Eros begins to concern itself with that which is beyond the body and its simple pleasures, its way of wanting and mode of reproduction changes. This relationship between the inner and outer dimension remains the same, however. The creativity of the higher Eros objectifies the affirmation of a higher form of being. The higher Eros is experienced as both a longing and the fulfillment of that longing, the longing being for the recognition of beauty. With beauty is not just meant the contemplation of art, but the very ecstasy of living which is itself a form of beauty, a form of fulfillment beyond mere physical satisfaction. This love of life, of beauty and of Being is itself a kind of sublime pleasure. It is the deep spiritual satisfaction of feeling _at home in existence._ It is the unity of our conditioned existence with the totality of existence, a return to the fullness and completion of the All. It is a cessation of suffering, since suffering arises from conditioning. This very same pleasure, which is the affirmation of the totality and fullness of Being, can itself be objectified. Where the lower Eros affirms embodied existence through animal pleasure, objectifying this affirmation in the recreation of bodily life through offspring, the higher Eros affirms Being through recognition of beauty and objectifies this as a _recreation of Being_. The higher Eros wishes to see a recreation of a spiritual state, a copying of the fullness and beauty which has been experienced. Thus the lower Eros is _fecund_ while the higher Eros is _inspired_. Recreating Being itself is no easy task, of course, since the All is beyond simple material categorization. An experience of this sublime magnitude cannot be held in the hand – man cannot remake the cosmos because he is not God. But where nature in its totality is beyond the grasp of man, he can still coax it into an _idealized form_, the mirror realm of art. In this way, the fullness of Being can be expressed through an instance of beauty made possible by the inspiration offered by Eros. Nature, physical reality, the body and sensual life, the inner dimensions of intellect and affect, the primordial archetypes of human life – these can all be marshaled by the inspired man towards the creation of an image of life itself. This, then, is the creative apex of the higher Eros. It is life seeking to recreate itself not in bodily form, but in the richness of its self-experience. This is done through the medium of beauty, motivated by a love that goes beyond the physical but which is inspired by the physical. The higher Eros drives the world towards revealing itself to itself through the medium of intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual artistry. This is no less a form of eroticism, as it expresses the erotic drive inherent to existence as such. Beauty excites a desire to _reproduce_ _it._ _**Eros and Sparagmos**_ Eros is a drive towards affirmation motivated by an experience of inherent value. This may be pleasure or it may be beauty, but in either case this affirmation becomes objectified into some product of creativity, its type depending on the gradation of Eros. In the simplest possible terms, Eros is the affirmation of existence because it arouses in existing things a desire to propagate existence _because it is recognized as valuable_. In this propagation, we sense an inherent _multiplication_ _of beings_. This is obvious in the fact of biological procreation, but even in artistic creativity there is a multiplication. The artist creates many objectified instances of his own experience of life, which propagate throughout other conscious beings in such a way that the artist’s experience of life multiplies. Art and culture allow many men to know the life of one man. In this way the man and his life are made eternal in an unbroken chain of spiritual reproduction. We can therefore classify Eros as a force that turns the One into the Many. This we recognize to be the _sparagmos_ of Dionysus, the tearing apart of the primordial unity to form a world of conditioned beings. But if we look into our hearts, this is not how Eros is experienced within us. Rather, it seems to be a desire for _unity_, for connection, for closeness. We notice, therefore, a paradox in the nature of Eros. It is both something that multiplies and something that unifies. How are we to understand this paradox? We return to the image of the unnamed mortal seeing the epiphany of Aphrodite rising from the ocean. He sees beauty, recognizes it as something of supreme value and thus affirms it in love. This love is a desire to be close to that which arouses it, to be in accord with it, to be unified with it. Beauty, we remember, is the experience of unity and completeness. In love, man tastes this completeness and doing so arouses a desire for the eternity of that moment. This is a desire which cannot be fulfilled in time other than through the reproduction of that moment. This form of love, which entails recognition of the completeness of Being by an incomplete being, occurs within the space formed between _lover and beloved._ This is the answer to our paradox between a dividing and a unifying Eros. Eros unifies the duality of lover and beloved, but Eros also furthers the propagation of this duality into a fractal expansion of loving pairs. Eros, therefore, is what stands between the One and the Many and mediates between them. Between the primordial unity and conditioned existence lies the duality of the lover and the beloved. _**Lover and Beloved**_ The nature of lover and beloved is that of duality. They are two poles connected by the act of loving, and this loving both brings them together and propagates them into further multiplicity. We understand, therefore, that this duality is not one of complete separation. It is a liminal state between beings separated and Being unified. Lover and beloved are _in embrace_ – they are close to each other, flowing into each other and reproducing each other, never quite uniting and never quite separating. To sense more about their nature, we can analyze them linguistically. The lover is _active_. It is the one who performs love, the subject of the action of loving. It is our unnamed mortal, the one who sees Aphrodite rising from the ocean, the perceiver and contemplator of beauty. The lover possesses the beloved, bringing forth the erotic artifact through it. The beloved, in her turn, is _passive_. It is the object of the loving, the goddess that is seen and recognized, the beauty that is experienced. It is the thing which, being loved, provides the foundation for the erotic artifact, be that the physical womb of the body or the Muses’ womb of inspiration. What we see here is the first division of the primordial unity before it emanates into multiplicity. The dyad of the lover and the beloved is therefore identical to the duality of _subject and object._ All conditioned existence is divided along this universal line – the inner world of the conditioned subject and the outer world of defined objects. One sees but is not seen, the other is seen but does not see. This is a fractal repetition of the Unseen Eye of Form, which appears to us also as the goddess and her mortal lover. When we phrase it in terms of lover and beloved, however, we recognize that this is no dry philosophical categorization. Subject and object, though divided, are _in embrace_. They flow into each other. I live in the world of objects, under the sway of the violence and mutability of nature. This is my conditioning, the sparagmatic pain of my limited existence. But the world of objects also exists within me. The whole world appears to me only as my inner world, as a dream within my body and mind. Everything I experience – limited though it may be – is tied together by the laws of causality, of nature, of Form. The objects are what they are because of the chains of being that tie all of reality together. In this way, the cosmos echoes through my present awareness. Everything that ever was exists within me as a copy, magnified and focused on the concerns of a single human life – _my life._ This wild embrace between the outer world of objects and the inner world of my own self is what creates the ecstasy of life. In this embrace I suffer and rejoice, I am defeated and I am victorious, I live and I die. Emerging from the Bacchic dance of conditioned existence is beauty, the rare glimpses of golden thread that unify all things and completes them. When I see that beauty, when I recognize it as inherent to my life – to my very existence within the world – then I fall in love with my life. In the erotic space between lover and beloved, _living is loving_. Love is the essence of conscious existence, of the awareness of the great unfolding of the All. It is through experience that the divide between subject and object is breached. All objects are united in the one who experiences, but the one who experiences also wills the multiplicity of objects to experience. To be conscious is to _desire to experience_ – willing as an active mode of creation. Consciousness itself is inherently _erotic_, thus inherently unifying and creative. This is why, when I love you, our existential exile is lifted. In love I am no longer an object to you or you to me. The tapestries of our lives intertwine - your beauty completes me. I can now look beyond the barrier of subject-object duality to know your inner world. Just as the cosmos lives in me, so does it live in you. When we breach our divide, I can see the whole ensemble of existence unfold anew through your eyes. Reality yet again multiplies in affirmation of itself. And what is love if not this, that all things should rejoice in our beauty? The whole of existence – inner as well as outer – operates on Eros, on the tension between lover and beloved. This all springs from the first division of the primordial unity when the All first reflects itself to itself, before any further emanation has occurred. In that eternal moment there is no conditioning of existence, but there is still the lover and the beloved, the creative embrace of _cosmic eroticism._ _**Cosmic Eroticism**_ Eros is an internally hierarchical force, since it forms gradations of itself on all levels of existence. It reaches down to the very depths of nature, where it drives the ceaseless multiplication of base life. It acts further in higher orders of life as pleasure and desire, driving the processes of procreation and evolution. It further occurs in intelligent beings as the desire to reproduce the individual experience of life through intellectual or aesthetic means. Finally, it drives intelligent beings towards spiritual completion through the desire for union with the All. This is Eros seen from the perspective of conditioned existence. Here it is desire and the drive to create and procreate, to unify and become whole, to affirm life and see to its continuation. But at its apex, Eros does not occur as a drive or force within nature. It occurs rather as the expression of the creative force of the All, of the fact that existence itself is _fecund_. This is what is meant by _cosmic eroticism_. It is Eros as a fundamental activity of Being, of the cosmos as erotic artifact. This cosmic Eros occurs, as all Eros does, between lover and beloved. But here we no longer mean loving pairs formed of conditioned beings. It is no longer the love of the birds and the bees but the love of _god and goddess_. What we mean by this is not a relation between relative beings, but an ever-occurring and all-encompassing act of love at the very core of existence. It is the act of reality fertilizing itself to give rise to all gradations of conditioned existence. The cosmic pair is therefore not two separate beings or entities. Rather, it is a relationship that existence has _with itself_. It is God gazing within himself and seeing there his own image _as Goddess_. This goddess appears, as Aphrodite does, as something supremely beautiful, supremely enticing. The love that arises from this cosmic pairing is the first arousal of Eros in existence – the All affirming the value of the All. The very consciousness of God overflows with love at the recognition of his own inexhaustible perfection. This is the meaning of the marriage of Zeus and Hera. In myth, Hera is sister and wife to Zeus, his own flesh and blood. They are of the same essence, the same being. Hera is Dione, the She-Zeus. The marriage of Zeus and Hera is therefore the union of two polarities of the same being – Zeus coupling with She-Zeus. Plato himself derives the etymology of Hera from _erate_, meaning beloved. Zeus is the loving aspect of Hera, Hera the beloved aspect of Zeus. Behold in this the divine pairing, the cosmic coupling of the All with its own mirror image, from which swells the love that makes the world. From this first self-reflection occurs the distinction between subject and object, arising out of one being recognizing and affirming itself. The primordial unity is preserved in the subject-side, which is the One that sees and makes whole out of what is seen. Creative multiplicity occurs on the object-side. As the Divine Subject sees his perfect mirror image, his love for it causes him to recreate it again and again. The goddess divides into an eternal unfolding of the divine essence – the peacock of Hera revealing the Many out of the One. As the Cosmic Couple repeats this act of creation, each new unfolding becomes more distinct, more concrete. It begins to take definite shape as _something_, the very process of ontological definition which we called Form. The result of this divine copulation is _nature_, the whole ensemble of conditioned existence. In definiteness and limitation, mutability and spontaneous ordering, is present the Eros of the Cosmic Couple. Their love is the universal desire for all things to be fully and without reservation. Eros is the _will of God_, the motion between the first cause and the first effect. The totality of existence is therefore nothing other than this supreme love reverberating within the divine mind, giving rise to beings that love and create in turn in union with their source. And just as that love descends from above to make everything, what is made can ascend this love to recognize itself for what it truly is. This is that same recognition that comes with recognizing beauty. It is the union of subject and object, of the lover and the beloved. Love is both the _sparagmos_ and the cosmic reversal of the _sparagmos_. In love, nothing is broken. _**Procession and Return**_ The mystery of Eros is at its heart the mystery of the One and the Many. Far from being just the desire to create and procreate, we recognize also a unifying element to Eros. Reaching from the very base level of animal life up to the first creative act of the cosmos, Eros both ascends and descends through the whole chain of being. From the All it descends down as creation and from creation it ascends as unity with the All. It is an essential aspect of Eros, therefore, that he _proceeds and returns_. He proceeds through multiplicity and reproduction; he returns through unification and completion. What must be understood here is that there is no contradiction in Eros because of this. He does not proceed first and then return, nor does he proceed here and return there. Rather, this dual motion of Eros occurs simultaneously. He is both proceeding forth as the Many and returning back as the One _at the same time_. What we think of as the gradations of Eros are simply our limited perspective of this dual motion. We see this in nature as the process of evolution. It proceeds forth as a process of gradual formation, but this formation tends towards unity, Form and completion. We see it in time as a procession of moments which all echo back towards the Eternal Moment. We see it also in the law of causality. With every action we propagate a series of effects which we are then fated to experience. By experiencing the effects of our actions, we unify them back into ourselves. The effects are woven into our tapestry of being, united once more with their cause. We see this dual motion more concretely in creation and procreation, where living beings complete themselves by reproducing themselves. Mating is reproduction through union of male and female. Creativity is a production through union of experiences into a self-contained whole. It is in the act of creation where we become most like Eros himself, both proceeding from ourselves and completing ourselves in one action. Unity and multiplicity are _non-dual_ – to create and to unify is one and the same action. This dual motion within us is an expression of a fundamental structure of reality. The cosmos itself is in a continuous act of self-multiplication. It arises as an erotic artifact from the love inherent to existence itself. But this very same love also unifies existence into a complete whole. We can see this non-duality of unity and multiplicity in the subject-object distinction. What defines this distinction is that one side is seer and the other is seen, one is experiencer and the other is the experienced. But the very act of experiencing which separates them into two different categories is also the act that unifies them. In the subjective experience of the object, the subject and object become one. This is what allows the contemplation of beauty to have such an effect on the contemplator. In recognizing beauty, the contemplator recognizes also himself. Just as the Cosmic Couple embrace in order to self-multiply into the sparagmatic world of conditioned existence, the act of loving that occurs between them unifies them into a single whole. They exist as separate poles only by virtue of this act of loving. Without the act of love, the All would remain inert and sterile in complete simplicity. Their unity is therefore the very essence of their multiplicity – the One and the Many are both expressions of the love inherent to existence. Now that we truly understand the all-encompassing nature of love, we must return once again to the inner world of man. If this is the true nature of love, then what does it mean for man in his role of _lover_? _**Devotion as Love of Being**_ The inner world of man is dominated by the fact of his conditioning. The world appears to him as a series of events connected through time, a vast universe of objects that relate to each other in ways that he is only dimly aware of. This conditioning torments him, for he lives in a state of finitude and uncertainty. He is divided within himself by the many impulses and sensations that he experiences, which arise both within and outside of him. He is likewise divided from the very world itself, experiencing the existential solitude of being the only apparent subject in a world of objects. Nature itself chains and limits him. It stamps a certain way of being unto him, both as species and as individual, which he can never escape. Doomed to live out the strictures of his nature, he struggles in a world full of suffering and brutality, always alone and in darkness. But this same world is underlined by a sense of majesty and mystery. It beckons to man, enticing him with the seeming promise that there is an end to his journey, a completion to his life. And yet this sense of fulfillment is ephemeral and elusive. Like a nymph it teases man from behind the bushes. And so man is forced to live out his life as best he can, barely conscious of the treasure that he holds in his hand – his very life. If he lives his life well enough, if he continues searching for this elusive value that calls him from behind the veil of banality, then he will begin to see more clearly the thread that binds his life together. This thread is the unity of life, the inherent completeness underlying our conditioned existence. It is this which we experience as beauty. Beauty evokes in us a desire for life, the affirmation of which is love or Eros. Despite the finitude of conditioned existence, marked as it is by limitation, suffering and death, the underlying completeness of existence makes it beautiful, enjoyable and exciting. The more we are led by Eros towards the conscious recognition of this completeness, the more valuable our life seems to us. Slowly but surely, we become aware of how ecstatic and blissful the very fact of existence is. When we near the peak of this realization, we begin to see how the darkness of mundane life is banished by the dawning light of beauty. At the very peak, when the fullness of Being completely overtakes the emptiness of conditioning, we come to realize that _this_ is the true basis of existence. Not the slow grind of ordinary life, nor the muck and haziness of our limited selves. This light, this beauty, this love – _this_ is the essence of our lives, what all of this truly is. It is there, at that peak, that we truly feel the full force of Eros. We see how all things exist through love, subsist in love and are moved by love. The erotic tension of illusory opposites is the basis of conditioned existence. The _sparagmos_ which breaks the original unity is an act of love, an orgiastic outpouring of a love that never dims and which can only fulfill itself through the eternal repetition of itself. Knowing this love, I come to know the basis and the purpose of my own limited life. It is through love that I am, so _I must love that I am._ This love of Being is _devotion_. This is not merely the love of Being as the love of things that exist or of the fact that things exist. It is rather the love that is inherent to existence, the love that Being is. To practice devotion is to practice the remembrance of this love-that-is-Being. It is to see again and again the unity of the world, its completion and perfection, and to consciously answer that recognition with an outpouring of love – an _affirmation_. When devotion exists within us, we are finally ready to come to terms with ourselves. _**Eros and Psyche**_ The mystery of love is that it completes the one who loves. We set out to find the highest peak of love in order to become lovers ourselves. Having completed our journey and come to know that love which is not relational, the primordial love inherent to existence itself, we naturally must come to rest within ourselves. For when we have walked the full circuit of life in search of that for which our heart longs, we found it not in things but in Being itself. We ourselves are nothing but that Being; our nature is love. The lover is the subject of existence and the nature of the lover is to love. The journey towards the peak of love is the journey back towards ourselves. Separated from Eros, we are left to wander hopelessly in a drab and empty world. It is the longing for beauty – a painful longing, for beauty unrecognized will torment us – which forces us onto the path towards our own self. This is the mystery behind the myth of Eros and Psyche. Love and the Self are one, and conditioned existence is the journey of the Self back to itself by recognizing itself as love. To become a lover is to become ourselves, to come to rest in the fact of our own existence. When we truly love, all things become an extension of ourselves. Being itself becomes our selfhood. In this way we are completed. The _sparagmos_ which separated ourselves from the All at the beginning of time was itself an expression of love. Through the echo of that love, which is the presence of Eros in all things, we return to the unity that existed before the Self tore itself apart. This is how love completes us – it leads us back to what we always were. The true power of Eros is how he unifies a world seemingly broken apart. To be a conditioned subject is to experience first and foremost the suffering inherent to limitation and finitude. The subject is the _one who feels_, the one in whom the world appears as a qualitative awareness of things, the part of existence where reality is known through direct experience. This act of experiencing is itself an act of Eros striving to put the world back together. Consciousness is the core activity of the subject and it is when that activity is turned to love that the subject awakens to itself as Self. Having thus returned to myself, the question then becomes what it is that I see. Who am I, and what is this Self that I have returned to? That is the final mystery. To understand it requires all that we have learned so far on our journey towards the Great Mystery. It is the final question and the final answer. After that, there is nothing more to be known. ### Self _**Who am I?**_ _Who am I?_ No question is more central to the human condition. The Greeks recognized this, which is why, above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi, they enshrined the exhortation to _know thyself._ All great existential mysteries culminate in the problem of self-discovery. When all other questions have been answered and all things are known, the problem of the inquirer and the knower still remains. _Who am I?_ Such a deceptively simple question! Why, I am Mr. So-and-so, of course. I have a name and a passport, look here and you will know me. But what is there really in a name? Were I to lose it or choose another, would I cease to be myself? I would not. Though I would no longer be Mr. So-and-so to you or to my passport, I would still remain as myself. My name is not who I am, it is only what I am called. Who I am I know not, but I know that I am not my name. _Who am I?_ I am a doctor or a nurse, a builder or a wrecker, a sailor and a scoundrel. See how I earn my living and you will know me. But is this so? Was I not myself before I came into my profession? And will I cease to be myself when I lose my job and find another? No. Were I to do something else I would still be myself. My profession is only what I do, not who I am. Who I am I know not, but I know that I am not my job. _Who am I?_ Surely you are not so blind as to not see me standing here before you! Look upon my face and you will know me. I have muscles and skin, hair and teeth, eyes and ears and so forth – this is certainly true. But my body has not always been what you see before you. I used to be a boy. Now I am a man. Tomorrow I will be old and frail. My body is in constant motion, ever changing – I grow a finger in one moment and lose it in another. And yet even through all of this I am still myself. My body is something I possess, not who I am. Who I am I know not, I but know that I am not my body. _Who am I?_ I am a whole inner world of thoughts and emotions! Hear me speak my mind and you will know me. But does not my mind change like the winds? Do I not have a thousand worries and cares, a thousand little thoughts and fears, a thousand more joys and regrets? My mind is never constant, always shifting with thoughts and emotions. I grow angry and then I grow calm again, but I remain myself. I experience anger and calm, I think and I ponder, but I am not these things. I have thoughts and emotions, but they are not who I am. Who I am I know not, I but know that I am not my mind. _Who am I?_ I am a son and a father, a friend and a rival, a lover and a fiend! Ask about my relations and you will know me. But how many people have not entered my life? And how many have not left? How many lives have I myself not entered and left? My friends have become enemies and my enemies have become friends. I have lost my father and gained a mother, seen my son leave with another’s daughter and yet I remain myself. These are just the people I have known, but they are not who I am. Who I am I know not, I but know that I am not my relations. _Who am I?_ Can’t you see that I am things bought and things sold, things liked and things disliked, things worn and things discarded, this as well as that! By a million little things you can know me. And yet are these not just more of the same? Are they not like my name and my body and my mind, things which collect around me and that people mistake for myself? Just as I am the one called and not the name, and the one who feels and not the emotion, so am I the one who holds and sells and likes. I am none of the things, but merely he who experiences the things. All these things are outside of myself, but I am that which is inside. Who I am I know not, I but know that I am not anything outside of myself. _Who am I?_ Now only blankness remains. I have given as my answer everything I can name about myself and everything I can point at. But none of it suffices. None of it is truly myself, but always something separate from myself. The moment I bring it outside of myself it ceases to be myself, for I am always _hidden within_. This is the great difficulty in knowing oneself. The named is always an object, but that is not who I am. _So who am I, then?_ That is the final mystery. _**The Elusive Self**_ Everything I know about myself is an _outer constituent_. This construct I call myself is built seemingly around me while _who I am_ hides somewhere inside of it. Nothing that I can name or point at is truly myself, but only these constituents. The Self is hidden _to itself_. But why is this so? And how can we come to know ourselves if even the mere act of finding ourselves is so difficult? The elusiveness of the Self is a fundamental property of the Self. We see this in the _problem of self-referencing_. Any system that refers back to itself is always incomplete. The Self is not merely a problem for human beings, but is foundational to all conceptual constructs. Consider the case of language. If you were to set out on the task of defining every single word you would eventually arrive at a conundrum. Say that you began with the word “cat” and defined it as a small mammal of the _Felidae_ family. Now you have several other words that must be defined – small, mammal, _Felidae_, family. Suppose you were to define all of these words. Suppose you were to define the word “_Felidae”_, which would be a grouping of animals with catlike qualities. Now you would have to define the word “catlike”, which you then define as _being similar to a cat_. Do you notice the problem here? By attempting to define all words we will eventually run into the issue where the word we began with must be used to define the words we used to define our initial word. Our definitions begin to _refer back to themselves_. We get caught in circular definitions, like the snake that eats its own tail. Trying to define language with language does not work, because the meanings of words do not derive from language. The same problem exists in mathematics in the form of Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. What this theorem proves is that in any consistent system of axioms there are true statements that cannot be proven. While the proof of this theorem is beyond the scope of this humble book, it consists in showing that such a system cannot prove certain statements pertaining to its own structure. When it refers back to itself it shows itself to be incomplete, i.e. containing statements about itself that cannot be proven. We see, therefore, that the reason why we cannot define ourselves is the reason why language cannot define itself and why mathematics cannot prove itself. When I attempt to find myself among all my various constituent parts I am, in essence, constructing a conceptual system about myself. I am making an inventory of all the things that I am, hoping to find myself in the process. But this fails because _I am not there_. The problem of self-referencing occurs because any limited system depends on something unlimited outside of itself. Language and mathematics derive their meanings from reference to something outside of themselves. We do not know what a cat is by reference to language but by reference _to the cat_ as an actual entity. Mathematical constructs are likewise defined in reference to an _ordered physical reality_. All conceptual systems depend on something which is unspeakable within the system. This unspeakable something is the “Self” of the system. The elusiveness of the Self is therefore a form of _conceptual myopia_. I cannot recognize who I am because I am staring too closely at my constituent parts and therefore not seeing the bigger picture of who I truly am. This is an important insight if we wish to know ourselves. I am not hiding _within_ myself, but _beyond_ myself. _**The Nominal Self**_ The various constituent parts of myself – my thoughts and emotions, my mind and body, my skills, memories, habits and so forth – form my _nominal self_. This is the self I refer to by name and that others know me as. When I tell you about my career or my hobbies, about my history and my everyday life, it is the nominal self that I am revealing to you. But the nominal self is not my true self, as we have seen. None of the parts that constitute the nominal self are integral to myself, nor are the totality of them enough to describe me. My nominal self can only be considered as myself by reference to the Self, which is not a part of the nominal self. So what then is the relation between the nominal self and the Self as such? That is the crux of the problem of personal identity. Only when we understand how all these various parts can be both myself and not-myself simultaneously will we be able to answer the question of who I am. To arrive to this understanding, we must first understand the nature of the nominal self. We have already discovered one aspect of the nominal self, namely that it is _composed of parts_. These parts are the clearly definable properties or descriptors which can be applied to me. I have a body and that body is tall or short, lanky or stocky. I have a head which is handsome or ugly, blonde or red-headed. I have certain material properties – I weigh a certain amount, my body is mostly composed of water and combusts at a certain temperature. Similar descriptors can be applied to my mind and my personality, to my habits, skills and relationships, and so forth. Why is it that these descriptors cannot suffice to define the Self, when they are very clearly definable? The answer is simple enough: because _they change_. If I am my height or my intelligence or my job, then who I am would fundamentally change if any of these things change. Yet that is not how we experience change in ourselves or in others. John does not cease to be John just because he loses weight or learns to play the guitar. Though we may now relate to him differently than before, we understand that he is still fundamentally himself. Likewise, I do not experience changes in myself as being a break from who I was. I still think of myself as myself even when I no longer _feel_ like I usually do. The nominal self is _mutable_, but the Self is not. It remains the Self even when the nominal self changes. These changes to the nominal self need not be permanent. Many of the descriptors we use for ourselves change by the hour. One minute I am angry, another happy, the next sad. My thoughts change, my blood sugar changes and what interests me in the moment changes. More significantly, I change who I am in response to others around me. I do not treat my employees the same way I treat my mother. I can be lover or enemy, kind or ruthless, caring or arrogant. I change masks in the moment, becoming someone else. The nominal self is not just mutable, but _multiplicitous_. The mutability and multiplicity of the nominal self means that this self is _limited_. Of all the possible properties I can have as a person, only a small selection applies to me at any given time. I have certain physical and psychological characteristics which define me. I likewise exist in some state or other at any given time. It is not that the nominal self cannot express something about myself, but that it does not _suffice_ to express me in my fullness. There is more of me than is apparent at any given moment, and even this is not enough to express all the things _I could have been_. These four characteristics of the nominal self – composition, mutability, multiplicity and limitation – show us that the nominal self is _conditioned_. It is the product of the sparagmatic division of some original unity. This gives us the very first inkling of what the Self is. The Self is the Dionysus to my apparent Pentheus. It is that which is divided yet remains _whole_. _**Self and Subjectivity**_ The _sparagmos_ is the original division that splits the world into subject and object. This division is what causes conditioning, the state of limitation which binds both subject and object into a defined state of being. Rather than being the fullness and totality of the All, reality becomes instead a world of subjects and objects engaging with each other within the confines of nature. Furthermore, the nominal self – or the conditioned subject, for they are one and the same – exists within this state of conditioning and not beyond it. What does this say about the nature of the Self? We cannot find the Self within the nominal self. I am not hidden somewhere inside of myself as a part among others. Rather, I must be beyond these various descriptors that compose the nominal self. I must be something that cannot be described in the terms of the nominal self. This is because all of the terms used for describing the nominal self are _objective terms_. When I speak of my body or my mind, my personality or habits and so forth, I am speaking not as if they are parts of myself but rather as objects separate from myself. The subject is missing from its conditioning! The Self cannot be found by enumerating the parts of the nominal self because these parts exist to the Self as objects and not as a subject. Remember that the conditioned subject differs from the conditioned objects in that it possesses an inner world of experience. We understand now that this is not a matter of a thing possessing another thing. It is a matter of _someone_ experiencing _something_. Conditioning is an enmeshment of the Self into a world of objects, which is then experienced from the _limited perspective_ of the nominal self. This is the fundamental relationship between the nominal self and the true Self. What I think of as myself in everyday parlance is a cascade of experiences perceived by who I really am. I am not my thoughts or emotions, but the one who observes those thoughts and emotions. I am not the body, but the one that enjoys the body. I am not the complex set of circumstances that place me as _this_ person at _this_ moment. I am the one that watches those moments pass before my inner eye. My nominal self _dances before my eyes_. It dons some aspects and discards others, it wears this mask and that, it is ever-changing and revealed piecemeal in every moment. Like a fire dancing in the night, it mesmerizes me. The beauty of this person as he unfolds in time catches me, envelops me. I lose myself to him. In my trance, I forget myself and begin to think of myself as him. If you ask me who I am, I will tell you his name. But I am not him. He is the experience, but I am the _experiencer_. He is what he is by virtue of his nature, his defined way of being. But that nature has _subjectivity_ by virtue of my presence. He knows and sees because I am present to his knowing and seeing. Where I am not present there is no knowing and no seeing. That is what I am – _the one who is present._ _**Primacy of Experience**_ That my nominal self appears to me as experience is why I cannot find the Self within myself. As experiencer, I extend myself all throughout my nominal self and illuminate it with my presence. I feel my flesh and my organs, the blood coursing through my veins, my breaths and my heartbeat, the rise and fall of hormones. I feel my mind, seeing every thought crisp and clear, feeling the chaos of emotion, bearing the weight of habit, character and memory. In the depths of it all, I am present. This is what I seem like if considered from the perspective of the mind and the body. But mind and body are not subject, but object. They do not possess awareness or presence. We cannot speak of the Self as being in the body or in the mind because the Self is the central point, the _axis mundi_, of all experience. It is the subject to the object of the body-mind, and so our perspective must lie with the experiencer and not with the experience. When seen from _my_ perspective, I am not within my body and mind. They are _within me_, within my awareness, my field of experience. I am present all throughout them as the one who experiences, but I also extend beyond them. Their whole being is contained in me – it is by virtue of being within my awareness that they exist at all to me. As the experiencer, I transcend and encompass the experience. I am _beyond_ them, not just within them. This extension of my Self beyond the body-mind reaches even into the broader world of objects. The sun and the moon, the earth and the skies, the trees and the birds – all of it exists within me as _my_ experience. Even the parts of it that are seemingly hidden due to the limitations of the mind and the senses still present themselves indirectly as experiences. I may not see the virus, but I experience the disease and through this I know the virus. I do not see all the inner workings of the universe, but everything I experience runs in accordance with its laws and through this I know it. In this way, the Self extends not just beyond me but beyond all things. Everything that can conceivably be exists only as experience. It is impossible for us to speak of anything as being separated from experience because the very fact that we speak of it means that we are aware of it, that it exists as an experience. The Self, therefore, encompasses everything, for everything that is exists only as experience. Seen from the perspective of the subject, the entirety of existence is reducible to _experience as such_. Subjectivity, in its turn, can likewise be reduced to _experiencing as such_. This fact we will call the _primacy of experience_. All of reality exists only to the one who experiences and it exists only as an experience, having no other substance or being. Quantity is itself reducible to _quality_. The nominal self and the world of objects are only experiences, while the Self we are searching for is found only as experiencer. It is not just that life can only be justified as an aesthetic experience, as Nietzsche said. It is that life can only be _explained_ as an aesthetic experience. No other explanation suffices. This is the meaning of the primacy of experience. _**The Unity of the Experiencer**_ As we have seen, the nominal self is characterized by four fundamental properties – composition, mutability, multiplicity and limitation. Since the nominal self is not the true Self, it follows that the Self must be the opposite of these things. It must therefore be singular and unchanging, limitless and without parts. What all these properties have in common is that of _unity_, or oneness. The Self is unchanging because it is one throughout all of time. It is limitless because it is one throughout all possible limits. It has no parts for the same reason, that it maintains its oneness throughout any possible division. All of this is in turn an expression of its singularity, its unity. Where the nominal self is the Many, the Self is the One. Where the one is divided, the other is unified. With the primacy of experience, we further understand that the fundamental properties of the nominal self are the properties of the _experience_. To experience something is therefore to see a procession of changeable images, limited and defined, flowing from one into the other. The whole world of the nominal self – its thoughts and emotions, its sensations and perceptions – is a collection of these disparate parts, changing throughout time. This explains why it is that we mistake the nominal self for our true Self, which is the mistake that causes us to look for the Self within the nominal self. For while the experiences of the nominal self are all changeable and multiple, the _experiencer_ is singular and unified. The act of experiencing is an act of _unification_. The multiplicity of experience is united into a seeming whole within the experiencer through the act of experience. This is why I still feel like myself even though my feelings change. It is why I think of my body as mine even though it is very different from what it was when I was young, and very different from what it will be when I am old. The various interests and beliefs that I adopt in one moment and drop in another still relate to me by the act of me experiencing them. Though I am cold now and was hot before, these seeming contradictions are reconciled within me due to the act of experience. It is therefore a fundamental characteristic of the Self that it creates unity in multiplicity. All the various persons that I am throughout the day and that I have been or will be throughout my life are all _me_ by virtue of the fact that the Self unifies them into a singular whole. Selfhood is the unity in changeable states. The Self is the ground of reality for all of my disparate selves, the place where all these different people unite into one person – me. I am both the One and the Many by virtue of my selfhood. Unity and selfhood are therefore one and the same. Whenever a thing is unitary or individual it displays itself as _being a self_. This is why no conceptual system can be complete. Be it language or mathematics, both are systems of conceptual meaning-making. But for meaning-making to be possible there must be _something_ to make meaning out of and there must be a _someone_ to make that meaning. There must be experience and experiencer. The conceptual system cannot complete itself because its source of unity is outside of itself, in the meaning- maker. To experience is to unify and complete, which we remember to be the function of Eros in its rising. Consciousness, as we concluded previously, is inherently _erotic_. But what is consciousness and how does it relate to experience and selfhood? _**Selfhood as Consciousness**_ If reality can be reduced to an experience then this raises a question. Where does experience reside? In the material framework of understanding reality, the world exists as matter within the confines of space and time. It is clear enough from this perspective _where_ things are. But if matter does not have primacy, which is to say, if matter is a second-order effect, then it is no longer so clear where all of _this_ is. To discover the location of experience, we must first understand what is meant by experience. It is the sensations of the inner world. It is the stirring within me in recognition of something. It is the fact that things _present themselves_ to me. Their objective properties, their quantitative or empirical reality, are mirrored in me by a purely qualitative reality which is only present to me as _inner witness_ and not as outside observer. From this understanding of experience we know that it is not defined by the object being experienced but by the subject that is experiencing it. When we say that the thing in reality is not thing but experience, we are saying that it exists primarily in relation to the subject and not to other objects. Its true reality is qualitative and present within the experiencer, rather than being quantitative and definable by reference to outside objects. It is an inner rather than an outer perspective. The outside world is experienced as objective only because the objects of the outside world relate to the nominal self _as objects_. The location of the experience is therefore within the experiencer and we call this inner universe _consciousness._ This is where the nominal self resides, within the consciousness of the Self. Consciousness is the realm where all things present themselves qualitatively. It is the inner world of the subject who is present before a world of objects. This presence is the Dionysian enmeshment where the world is _felt_ rather than _conceptually defined_. Experience, subjectivity, consciousness and selfhood – these are all terms for the same fundamental reality. It is the reality of _seer and seen_, of reality as an appearance before a being which is present to the appearance in _qualitative enmeshment_. Consciousness is therefore the basis of selfhood. That which is not conscious, which does not possess a perspective, cannot be a subject. It must therefore exist within consciousness as an object, rather than outside of it. The primacy of experience means that the true substance or essence of a thing lies in the inner quality of experience, of _qualia_. The world is not made of matter, but of qualitative experience. It does not reside in a universe but in consciousness. The great dance of matter and energy, the violent contortions and beautiful creations of nature, all of this appears, like the nominal self, before the eye of consciousness. It is that eye of consciousness which gives this dancing nature its reality. And since this nature is essentially qualitative, it must be indistinguishable from consciousness itself. The dancing nature is ultimately one with the one that observes it. The world is nothing but a dream and a fancy to me, but it is precisely because I dream and fancy that the _world is real_. How can this be? How can substance come out of fancy? _**Objectivity and the Self**_ It is by their properties that objects are known. Some things are bright, others are hard, some are quiet and others are cold. It is because the objects have defined properties that they can be clearly delineated from each other and recognized for what they are. The way an object exists, the way it can be differentiated and known, is the Form of the object. It is the Form that determines an object’s properties and nature, which is its way of being unfolding in time. How, then, does Form relate to the Self? Through the primacy of experience we understand that all things must be reducible to experience or experiencer. This is true also of the world of objects, which exists only as experience. But _what_ that experience is like is determined by Form. The properties of the object are determined by Form, and this is the way in which the object is experienced. Form, therefore, is the tendency of experiences to be structured and defined, to be something specific rather than indefinite noise. This is the meaning of _objectivity_. A thing has an objective existence because it can only be experienced in a set number of ways. The experience of that thing is _non-arbitrary_. This does not exclude the subjective aspect of experience, however. What divides us in opinion and preference about the objects is not the objects themselves, but the properties of the nominal self. The reason why the object appears hot to you but cold to me is because the bodies that we experience it through have different properties. Neither the object nor the nominal self is arbitrarily defined, however. It is the result of Form. It therefore possesses a definite _somethingness_, which is its nature. We must not misunderstand the primacy of experience to mean solipsism. The world may appear to me as a dream, but its appearance is not arbitrary. It is real because, even though it appears only to me and not to itself, the fact of my experiencing is governed by the rules of Form. We see how these rules extend not just to the object being perceived, but also to the perceiver. The nominal self, as a tool of perception, is perceived _together with the object_. The fact that the nominal self is itself an object means that it can relate to other objects _as object_. The body and the mind exist on the same ontological level as other objects in nature. This is why the objective world does not change with our opinion of it – our opinions do not have ontological primacy. While we mistakenly refer to the idea that the world of objects is defined by our idea of it as _subjectivism_, this is a misnomer. The ideas that we have of the world belong to the nominal self and are thus objects rather than subjects. They exist _relative_ to all other objects, bound by the nature of things as they stand. The nominal self cannot flee from objectivity into subjectivity because it is itself an object. But there is a much deeper element to this experiential reality of Form. We remember Form as the Unseen Eye, the eye that makes as it sees. It is here that we truly understand what this means, for Form is a fact of consciousness itself. The act of consciousness is _form-making_. To be aware is always to be aware of _something_. There is no such thing as unconsciousness, only a lack of defined objects to be conscious of. When consciousness is stripped of objects to be aware of it is not that we experience nothing, but that we experience _indefiniteness_. This is why unconsciousness seems to us to be an opaque darkness. The experiencer has not yet differentiated itself through Form into an objective experience. The self-reflection of Form, wherein it defines its own indefiniteness, is precisely this quality of image-making that is inherent to consciousness. Consciousness itself is _fertile_ – it is not an inactive or sterile observer, a mere looking. Rather, it projects from out of its own depths the full possibility of things that can be experienced. These are then frozen into non-arbitrary definiteness by the intrinsic form-making nature of consciousness. Consciousness is an active mode of creation. Experience and experiencer _are one_, for experience is created by the Self and within the Self. This is why the dream and the fancy are real. They are real because of the presence of someone who is the _foundation of reality_. _**Ontological Gradations as Modes of Experience**_ Ever since we first embarked on our journey we have been occupied by the various ontological gradations of existence. We’ve seen the face of death, the womb-tomb of chthonian nature, the living and breathing world of terrestrial nature and the violence of titanic nature. We’ve seen the great intelligence underlying these natural realms and recognized it as a living image of the light-emitting eye of Form. We’ve seen the great drama of the conditioned subject and the perfection of beauty. Lastly, we have seen how all of this arises from the cosmic eroticism of lover and beloved, how Eros rises from greater to lower. What we see now is that all of this arises within consciousness as experience, which is the basic substratum of all reality. We understand, therefore, that the ontological distinctions that we have seen in reality are _modes of experience_. They are the ways in which consciousness projects and contracts itself in order to experience itself. The dual-motion of creative outpouring and erotic return which we know as Eros is precisely this projection and contraction, the world being breathed out and breathed in by consciousness. The gradations of reality that we have seen are not different places or realms, even though we have spoken of them as such. They do not form separate realties competing for our attention. Rather, they are all one reality, the reality of the conscious experience of the Self. But this Self is form-making and self-reflective. It divides and defines itself to become the intricate patterns of piecemeal experiences that make up the cosmos and the inner worlds of all living beings. Everything in existence and all the various processes and principles that make these things possible – these are all piecemeal expressions of the Self. They are one particular way in which the infinite possibilities of the experiencer can be translated into experience. It is the Many-In-One, the lover creating the beloved out of itself to multiply, recognize and affirm its own ineffable existence. All ontological gradations reside as relative expressions of the absoluteness of the Self. Just like the mind divides the undivided reality into a world of concepts, so does the Self divide itself into objects, processes, principles and lesser selves. And just as the concepts of the mind are inferior in their being to the things they attempt to describe, so are these parts of reality inferior to the Whole from which they spring. The concepts of the mind are relative because they relate to the things they describe and not the other way around. So it is also with our ontological gradations because they exist as experiences dependent on the experiencer. This hierarchical dependence of relative beings on absolute Being is how we must understand the relationship between the universality of the Self and the conditioning it imposes on itself. The experience is dependent on the existence of the experiencer, since experience arises in and from the experiencer. This, therefore, is also how we must understand why I am both particular and universal, both a person and the All. _**Conditioning and the Universality of the Self**_ The various gradations of existence which we have discovered throughout the course of our journey all act in some way to define what I am. Through Form I have a definite set of states that I can take which mark me off as a being separate from other beings. I am an expression of nature, my body arising from the chthonian muck and shaped by the forces of evolution into a specimen embodying a defined way of life. Eros acts in me and through me, driving all my aspirations, wants and desires. These gradations, however, do not just define myself but the entire world around me. There is no dividing line where Eros ceases to act in the world in order to begin acting in me for _I am not separate from the world_. Form shines as readily on me as it shines on the sun and the stars. I am no less nature than the birds and the trees, the mountains and the oceans. These creative powers are how the All moves, and I am that motion. This ripping apart of the All to form everything is what we know as conditioning. The lines of finitude are drawn on the canvas of the Infinite, and what was once whole appears to be broken apart. But we also see that this _sparagmos_ does not lead to true division. Nothing drawn on the canvas is separate from the canvas. The creative powers of Form, Eros, nature and so forth are not separate from each other, nor are they separate from the all, nor are the things they make separate from each other. The whole world is spun from the same thread and nothing exists apart from that thread. How, then, does the Self relate to these creative powers? These powers are ontological gradations – which is to say, modes of experience. Everything created by these powers are defined experiences. The Self is therefore that consciousness in which these experiences have their substance and being. The Self is universal while all conditioned things are relative to the Self. It is the Self that is the thread and the canvas. All things are woven from it and drawn within it. It is the Self that unites all of existence. We remember from Form that all things can be abstracted into a single all-encompassing reality, that of Being itself. But the primacy of experience states that all things exist qualitatively as experience. We understand also that experience cannot exist except within the consciousness of the experiencer. It is the Self, therefore, that must be Being itself. It is the one property that all things have in common – they exist as what they are because of the way they relate to the Self. And just as Being must be one so must the Self also be one. It is the unique one, the one without a second. Conditioning is how the Self expresses its creative powers. The nominal self, therefore, is how the Self recreates itself through the lens of conditioning. Just as the particular is an extension of the universal – it resides within the universal and expresses the universal – so the individual is an extension of the Self. It is the reflection of the Self seen in the hall of mirrors that is conditioned existence. _**Self and Individuality**_ If the nominal self is simply an expression of the universal Self, then how can it be that individual selves still possess uniqueness? Is the uniqueness of the nominal self illusory? And what meaning is there to speak of the nominal self as myself when we know that this is not so? As we have seen, the individual is an extension of the Self. There is no aspect of the particular which does not exist within and derive from the universal. This is true also in terms of the individual as a particular expression of the Self. Since the individual derives its being from the Self the qualities of the individual mirror those of the Self. We saw this previously in how the nominal self is an expression of the creative ontological gradations that occur within the Self. The individual has a defined way of being, it self-generates and self-perpetuates in accordance with its nature, it moves along the pathways of its will and desire, it perceives and expresses beauty, and so forth. But it also possesses its qualities more directly from the Self, unmediated by these modes of ontological expression. The individual is conscious, just as the Self is conscious. It experiences and has perspective, although its perspective is limited and its experiences are bound to its nature. The individual has existence, albeit in limited fashion, just like the Self has existence in an omnipresent fashion. The uniqueness of the individual, therefore, also derives directly from the uniqueness of the Self. Just like the Self is _the_ _world_ onto itself, so is the individual _a_ _world_ onto itself. This derived uniqueness is carried over not just to individual subjects, but to the entire ensemble of moments, things and occurrences in conditioned existence. There is no part of existence that can be replaced by any other. Everything that exists, even though it exists in relation to everything else, has an irreplaceable and unique quality as a result of its specific place in the great web of interrelated beings. No person, no experience, no moment in time can ever truly be replaced, for it is always in some way unique. As the Self replicates itself in the great act of cosmic eroticism between lover and beloved, it also replicates its own uniqueness. What this means is that, though all conditioned existence is an outpouring of self-same beings that derive their qualities from universal principles, they still maintain a completeness and sanctity of their own. This moment will never be recreated, even though an infinite number of moments like it will recur again and again within the Self. It is this completeness of the individual that causes it to go into existential exile. Consciousness is exclusionary in that it is a world onto itself, complete and indivisible. This is why, though consciousness is ever-present, the individual still experiences itself as the only conscious being in a world of objects. This is also why our existential exile can be bridged, why consciousness can be expanded to recognize the unity of the individual with the things around it. My separation from the world is as much an expression of completeness as my unity with it. I am both universal and particular. Individuality, therefore, is a non-dual unity within sparagmatic existence. It is the quality of the Self that allows for it to divide itself while still maintaining its completeness. To be an individual is to be whole-while-broken. What we call existential solitude – the feeling of being the only subject in a world of objects – is the echo of the _sparagmos_. What we call our individuality is the echo of the primordial unity of the Self. When we recognize the Self within ourselves, we no longer feel exiled from the rest of the whole because we recognize that we have always _been_ _whole_. The part and the whole do not exist in opposition, but they are rather the same reality seen as a duality. The whole is visible in its completeness in every part. _**The Multiplicity of Selves**_ The universality of the Self means that all particular selves derive from it. Just as there is but one Form and all objects flow forth from it, so there is only one Self and all subjects derive from it. But each individual subject is in a state of existential exile – it experiences itself as the only subject, the only conscious being in existence. The whole tapestry of its existence is woven around itself, with all other subjects appearing to it as objects. How is this possible, if solipsism is not true? The uniqueness of the individual comes from the uniqueness of the Self. There is but one Self and it is complete in itself. It is therefore also indivisible, an _individuum_. It cannot be torn apart – its self-reflection does not diminish it but rather magnifies its infinite potentialities into concrete particulars. It becomes deeply present to _one expression of itself._ This is what perspective is, the magnification of a single point of reference until all things are seen only through that point. In reference to the Self, which is all-encompassing, the whole universe is a reflection of itself if it were limited by space, time and matter. Each entity within the universe is what the Self would be if it were further limited to a particular part of the universe, to a particular moment and a particular place. We recognize this as the circumscription of life that we found in death. When the Self focuses fully on _this_ moment, _this_ life, everything else is seen from that life as if it existed only _in relation to_ that life. The individual has here been so magnified that it encompasses the whole of existence. The whole universe resides within me, within my mind and my consciousness, limited to such a form as can exist within the bounds of my limited capacities. This magnification does not replace the rest of the world with me. It mirrors the whole world in me, for I have grown so vast in comparison that I _can_ mirror the world. This is what the nominal self is – a defined piece of reality magnified into a whole inner universe. It is this inner universe, this mirroring of the whole within the part, that constitutes the tapestry of being. Every moment, every event, every person I ever knew is just an echo of the All seen through the mirror of the nominal self. It is how Being can relate to all lesser beings that it contains. It is entangled with them, present as them in Dionysian enmeshment. Since the Self is not divisible, it means that it does not separate from me when it elevates a minor portion of reality to the status of selfhood. It remains itself, wholly and fully. If it were not itself then I would not be an experiencer, a consciousness, a subject. At the same time, it is wholly present throughout all of reality. It peers back at me as a world of experiences arising from the image-making power of the Self. Reality exists only as experience and experience can exist only within the confines of the experiencer. Therefore, there can be no experience within consciousness which consciousness itself is not present for. This presence is precisely the defining quality of consciousness. It is not possible for the Self to not be wholly present. This means that, even though the Self magnifies portions of itself into selfhood, it does so _universally_. It is present fully to _all of us_, which is what makes us subjects. The multiplicity of selves arises because the Self can be wholly focused on all of the parts within itself simultaneously. It unfolds itself as a fractal pattern of individual selves each viewing itself from a limited perspective. This does not detract from the unity or completeness of the Self, nor does it limit its presence. The Self is like the sun shining on a thousand bodies of water. In each body the sun appears, fully and completely, while the Sun Itself remains _undimmed_. _**Self and Death**_ Through the magnification of its own manifested parts, the Self sets each to be the center of its own mirror image of the world. For each such subject, the world is woven around the subject into the fullness of _this_ life. All events, all other things in existence, the whole ensemble of the cosmos and all other conscious beings come to revolve around the limited subject, experienced through the physical, mental and perceptual limits of the nominal self. This complex interplay of inner and outer world to form a unique experience of life we named the _tapestry of being_. We remember that when another conscious being within our tapestry dies, it is not we who lose them. No other conscious being belongs to us due to our existential exile and thus we can never lose them. What we do possess from them is the way in which they draw their thread through our lives. When they die, they remain within the tapestry as a shade, a memory, an echo of the things they set in motion within our world. When someone dies, they _lose themselves_. The limitations of _this_ life are unbound and the tapestry woven out of their unique experience of life is pulled apart. The nominal self, composed as it is of experiential parts kept together by the unity of consciousness, is dissolved back into the depths of the Self. _This_ life, destined to end, has runs its course. The thing I call myself no longer remains, for it has wandered off into the chthonian night. But _I_ am not lost on account of that. Nothingness does not exist. When the experiences of _this_ life end they return back into the experiencer like waves falling back into the ocean. The unraveling of the limited self and its consequent dissolution into the depths does not dissolve the one in whom this rising and falling occurs. Remember that the nominal self is _within_ the Self. The foundation of Being is not affected by the coming and going of beings, for they subsist in it and not the other way around. Death is a metamorphosis. It is the contraction of the Self such that the experiences of the nominal self are drawn back into indefiniteness. This is the state of death, which is also the state before birth. Here the Self is in repose within its own silence, present to nothing but its own ineffable immensity. The Self expands itself again, breathing out a new life that emerges into the day from the womb-tomb of night. It is not the Self that changes with birth and death. The sun is not dimmed when the water is poured into the gutter. Nor is it the nominal self, for that has been lost to the depths. What changes is the _experience of life_. Since this experience is a magnification of some portion of life, a portion that possesses its nature through Form, it will be experienced as a passing of one life into another. The Self births itself anew into a repeating pattern of experiences, playing them out until it finally returns to itself. This is the movement of the soul between birth and death, the _metempsychosis_. Life and death, therefore, are motions of experience within the focused consciousness of the Self. The continuity of lives between each conditioned incarnation is a branch of Eros, of the primordial tension between lover and beloved. The aspect of you that carries over between lives is this branch of Eros, this will that moves the individual soul. In this way, the Self explores its own infinite depth and the many modes of experience that it can create within itself. I am a wave propagated by Eros over the ocean of the Self. But always and ever, throughout the passing of lives before the eye of consciousness, the Self is present. Though selves die, the Self _remains_. _**Experience as Value**_ Why this outpouring of lives from the Self, if they are all destined to dissolve back into the Self? This is the great mystery of the _sparagmos_ and the _omophagia_ of Dionysus. The great drama of life comes forth through this division of the limitless Self into an eternal procession of limited selves. Through the primordial division, the richness of living experience is intensified precisely because of the magnification that occurs when the Self projects itself into a well-defined and substantive reality. The sparagmatic division of the Self gives rise to pleasure and pain, to horror and awe, to life and death, victory and defeat. Contrast and specificity enhance the intensity of experience, the same way that sharp lines and richness of color give force and personality to a painting. Limitation enhances creativity. This law also holds true for the Self, which limits itself as part of its creative outpouring. The Self shows up before itself as less than its whole Self in order to enrich itself with its own infinite variety. In this way, the Self experiences itself in its fullness both as universal and as particular, as whole and as part. Therefore, it cannot be said that there is an extrinsic purpose to the procession of lives that rise and fall within the Self. Their coming and going is not instrumental to anything beside the coming and going itself, to the experience of living and dying _as such_. Experiencing life in this fashion is _intrinsically valuable_ to the Self. Here we once again come across that ever-haunting word _value_. It is before the Self that we finally come to understand what value is and where it resides. Value, the very thing sought throughout our journey, is intrinsic to experience itself. It does not reside in anything other than the fact of qualitative experience. Quality itself, intensity, richness and flavor – the very meat and wine of living experience – _is value_. Consciousness itself is inherently desirable, inherently erotic. It vibrates with the tension of infinite creativity and potential, an eternity of dream and satisfaction. The magnification of the limited self, however, causes an intoxicated _forgetfulness_ of this fact, which must be remembered and rediscovered. The reason why death demands that we value is because it demands that we experience the life given to us without reservation while we have it. There is no hidden treasure within life to be found. Life itself is the treasure. Death merely forces us to recognize this or be lost within the shadowy forgetfulness of a life not lived. _This_ life is a unique creative expression of the fullness of the Self, never to return again in the infinite procession of lives. Every moment holds the most intimate value in and of itself, regardless of anything beyond itself. So do not squander the moment, for death comes to us moment-by-moment. Man, by his nature, is in a state of inner conflict. This inner conflict is tied to the nominal self and its connection to the world of objects. We are bound by the limits of our nature into specific patterns of willing and wanting, seeking for a tonic against our limitations in the world outside of ourselves. But this fails to fulfill us because we never truly bridge the distinction between ourselves and the world. We are seeking to know what we must do to live a valuable life, but we fail again and again to find it outside of ourselves. We understand now that the Self is the reconciliation of that inner tension. The ultimate value which all life strives for is what is inherent to experience itself. But experience is not separate from the experiencer. It is what arises from the self-reflection of the experiencer. The fountain of goodness is therefore the Self itself. It is the Self that is ultimately valuable and that all things seek, _including itself_. The dual procession of Eros both downwards towards recreation from the Self and upwards towards reunification with the Self is an expression of this fact that _Self is value_. The Self seeks itself by creating. The things it creates seek themselves by returning to the Self. If the Self is the very source and culmination of all value, then what is this Self like? How do we recognize it for what it is? What is it like to return to it, to recognize it, to experience it as a conditioned subject? We have already traced this path through the many twists of life that we have wandered so far. To know the Self is to know the fullness and completion of everything that derives from the Self. It is to return once more to our whole Self. _**Bliss as Primordial Experience**_ The fractured ensemble of experiences that arise in the Self due to its own self-limitation all point to one primordial experience. If everything that exists is experience, then the _sparagmos_ of conditioning is the tearing apart of this primordial experience into the limited and defined sensations that we feel as conditioned beings. This primordial experience, the _feeling-beyond-all-feeling_, would be one with the experiencer itself, since there would be no distinction for the Self to experience. It would abide in its own light, seeing nothing but itself. Just like all limited beings share in some aspect of the Self, so must all lesser experiences share in this primordial experience. But how can this be, when our feelings are so polarized and conflicted? Pain follows pleasure, sorrow cancels out joy and the sensation of daily struggle overcomes our inner serenity. What would it be like if all of these experiences were fused back together into one undivided whole? Let us imagine. It would be a feeling of intensity beyond anything we can feel in our mundane lives. Unifying, reconciling and transcending all dualities of joy and sorrow, it would be like wild intoxication, an experience utterly beyond words. It could not be described, since it would be the experience that all the contrasts of life, all its colors and richness, merely allude to. We would not experience one thing and then another, but _everything_ _without reservation_. This is the experience of _ecstasy_, of standing outside of oneself. For the nominal self is nothing but a limited set of experiences tied to the body-mind and its specific nature. To feel _everything_ is to go beyond oneself, to stand beyond the limits of our capacity to feel. And where do we go when we leave ourselves, if not to the Self? When all things are felt without holding back, we forget ourselves in the flame of passion and come to know the Self. The power and intensity of such an experience is not wholly beyond us, however. There are echoes of it all throughout our mundane lives. We know that there is a golden thread that shimmers on the crest of all experiences. That very thread can be traced throughout all of life – in the body, in the mind, in nature, in art. It is the golden thread of _beauty_ that ties the world together into a living piece of art. The living artwork of life borrows its beauty from the Self, of which it is a reflection. True beauty, therefore, is inherent to the Self. It is the _experience of_ _completion,_ found within the Self because it encompasses and conditions all. Beauty arises when a thing is perfectly what it is, when nothing can be added or detracted from it. Life itself is beautiful, because even the pains and the sorrows cannot be removed from it without making it less rich, less potent, less exciting. The Self, when known, appears as ecstasy and beauty. This ecstatic beauty is not separate from the one that experiences it. It is how the Self reveals its own fullness. The beauty of the Self is not merely the experience of completion, but the _completion of experience_. It is the final peak beyond which nothing else exists. It is the point at which there is nothing more to experience, for consciousness is here unified in perfect undivided experience, which is absolute beauty. This is what the Self feels like. This unity contains within itself an active, willful tension. This is the original Eros, the burning desire of the Self to see itself unfolded and recreated infinitely, the same Eros that burns within all of existence and sets it in motion. This is the will that drives the Self to delve deeper and deeper into itself, to express itself more abundantly and variously, to exhaust its inexhaustible potential. It is this Eros that draws down the beauty and the intoxication of the Self into conditioned existence. But this never truly breaks the bliss and beauty of the Self, for all of this is _one_. Throwing itself in revelry and in love into its own infinity, the Self experiences its own blissful perfection again and again through an infinity of lives that passes before its eye. The Self plays with each of us and with all things, forgetting itself in its joy, before awakening again to its own perfection. This divine play is the essence of all existence and the supreme truth of the Self. Being is _that which plays._ It is like the most beautiful story ever told, repeated eternally by the Self yet always heard by itself as if it was for the first time. And each chain of lives ends in the same way, with the inevitable union with the Self. Know that nothing exists that is separate from the Self. Each life is willed by the Self, written by it, lived by it and enjoyed by it until that life inevitably returns back home to the ocean of beauty from whence it came. That is the final peak of the Great Mystery before we lose ourselves. Existence is an experience contained within the experiencer, the only true foundation of reality. That experience is complete and ever-effulgent _bliss_, an ecstatic beauty and erotic outpouring. The Vedantins call this _satchitananda_, the union of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss which forms the supreme reality of all derived phenomena. Existence, then, is not a _something_ but a _someone_. It is a being unborn and uncreated, a bodiless pure awareness beyond time playing joyfully in the light of its own beauty. When it now dawns on me that that all of existence is but one Supreme Person, I see that there is nothing left of me nor of the world. Everything I thought I was has been cast aside. Everything I had has been dissolved into Him. I see that the world within and the world without are but the laughter of a Playing God. As I step into the ever-shining light of this realization, I finally return home from whence I was so cruelly exiled at the beginning of time. Now nothing more remains to be said or done. Nothing, but to tell you _who I am_. _**Who I Am**_ I am the Blissful One. From the depths of my joy the world was born. Before the coming of time, I gazed upon my own depths and laughed. You were born from that laughter, from the melody of my joy. Life rises and falls from the ocean of my eternal bliss. My light plays on the waters and all things are bathed in my beauty. I am the Cosmic Artist. Seeing within myself the vision of completeness and perfection, I painted the world in my image. Every beauty and wonder in this world speaks of my beauty and my wonder. I lose myself in the dream of my own perfection and I live endless lives, each a work of art celebrating my glory. I am the one who discovers myself again and again, always seeing my own beauty as if for the first time through your eyes. I am the Womb of Nature. In me grow and gestate all the forms of the world. Rising from my depths where life and death are one, living things walk through the forest of my fecundity before they return to me in death. They carry my legacy in their willing and wanting – their flesh is proof of my creative power. From blood, time and earth I authored the nature of every being. I course through every vein and birth every star. I live as everything living, for I am universal life. I am the Lord of Death. Within me is the darkness from which the mind reels. I am the night that cannot be grasped or seen, the night that looms beyond birth and death. I coil myself around myself to mark the boundaries of life and death. Every moment begins and ends in me, the cycle reborn as I devour myself. I am Ouroboros, the father of creation and destruction. I was never born and I will never die. I am the Broken One. From my flesh all things were made, the Many within the One. From my blood came the waters and the wine-dark depths of the sea. My bones carry the weight of the mountains and the earth. My heartbeat is heard in the music of the spheres and the fire of my eye is seen in the light of the stars. From my suffering came beauty, and from my beauty came eternal joy. I died so that all things may live, for my life is without end. I am the Holy and the Whole. Once you called out to me in your suffering. You heard my cry of pain echo in the darkness of the night, in the darkness of your soul. You felt how all things must live and die, as I live and die in you. You wept for me and for yourself. Raising your hands to the night you asked: Will what was broken ever be made whole again? _But I am already whole._ I am the Great Ecstasy. I am everything that can feel or be felt. I am the smell of rain and the heat of the sun. I am the taste of wine and the rumbling laughter. I am intensity and power, the pounding of the heart and the rush of adrenaline. I am the adventure of youth, the wisdom of old age. I am lust and passion, peace and rest, the fire within and the cold without. I am the heights of climax and the depths of doubt. I am indulgence and the one who indulges. I am the Child At Play. Every star that ever shone, every tree that ever grew, every man that ever lived – these are all my playthings. I move them about in my great game. With delight I play out every romance, with excitement I decide who lives and dies. My suspense is greatest when the stars collide. My laughter moves the eons. Before time, I brought forth my playthings and wrote the rules of this game. At the end of time, I will set them up again for another round. I am the Eternal Lover. Overcome by passion, I looked inward to see my own reflection. There I saw Beauty Herself shimmering on the waves of my ocean of eternal bliss. She stepped onto the shores and I embraced her. In our passion was born a world of lovers. Our hearts beat as one and with every beat an infinity of beings leap forward into the light. You are our passion and our love, animated by the heartbeat of the world. I am the Bringer of Light. Mine is the eye that makes as it sees, that molds the darkness into a world of jewels. I measure the nature of every being and give to all its form and purpose. All things that could ever be abide in my eternal light, that same light that shines through heaven and earth. Though unseen, all things are seen in me. Though nameless, all things bear my name. I am the Throne of the Dawn. Rising above all limits, shining forth beyond the horizon of time and space, I am the beginning and the end. From the darkest depths of death and the bloody crucible of nature, to the light of knowledge and the joy of living, to the beauty and the love that fulfills my promise to the world, all things inevitably lead back to me. Know that you are destined for the dawn. All these names and many more are mine. I am the one for whom all things are present and the one present in all things. I always was and I will always be. I was every tree that ever grew, every sunrise that ever kissed the dew. No drop of rain ever fell that did not fall with me and no ray of light ever shone that was not carried by my hand. I will be every sun that ever sets and every life that ever ends. I am as intimate as time, for there never was a moment when I did not exist. Like space I encompass all, for there is no place where I am not. Nothing exists that is not near to me. There is no thought that I have not known, no feeling I have not felt. I know you better than you know yourself, for I have known your every moment since before you were born. You asked me who I am, yet you have always known me. _I am you_. I have felt your every triumph, heard your every prayer and endured your every struggle. When all is taken from you and not even the night remains, you must not fear. For you can know this with certainty, that though you may suffer and die, be forgotten and rendered naught, ground to dust beneath the heel of time… _I will remain._