Friday, May 13, 2016
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Non-attachment
Nature and reason reveal more than all
the poets and prophets sent to man over all of time. Nature shows us
ceaseless struggle, existence bounded by a yearning simply to
survive; the seeking of all things for the next struggle; the
avoidance of predators by prey, the endless increase of the single
organisms power which in turn increases and redefines the species and
the bounding of these highest predators by only the grandest dictates
of ecology.
Such as in nature is in man.
Nature knows no pity. Nature cares
nothing for cares. There in her bosom stirs all the atoms that once
were; neither created nor destroyed- as soon as one instantaneous
configuration can be said to have occurred it is then condemned to
change.
Nature shows us fate. Here is no
will that can be appealed to, no loving father to protect the broken
spirit. Fate is the outcome of all things ventured. Nature passed
her crown to the lion as the highest of predators. Reason passed its
crown to man, the only organism able to clutch it, even in a limited
capacity. Courage means to love this openness. Amor fati, or love of
fate and uncertainty, is the quickest path to calming the inner ocean
of nature which may overcome the ratio.
Nature shows us truth in the
depths; skepticism as the prerequisite for knowing her deep secrets.
It shows us many layers to everything; its truth is like a
double-faced Janus whose different sides can be considered the only
side. Perspective is key. To learn to shift ones perspective is to
transcend and become the highest element that man can become, the
thinking thing, the reasoning man.
The reasoning human is the most
powerful being we know of. Only his mind could conceive of the idea
of god, then have used it for centuries to mold and control the herd,
only to see his creation go laughing to his death, having cast aside
his hellish love of man.
Nature shows us all things in strife.
Strife shows the survival of the weak and the strong in mutual
parasitism. Society was a compact between weak and strong for the
purpose of domination of another. It is will to power. It is the
sacrifice of the individual to lust, greed and violence. This is why
it is evil. It is organized crime.
Nature knows no good and evil. But
only edification and its inverse- death. The only standard of the
good- that which strengthens is the good, that which weakens is the
evil.
Nature enshrines cruelty and
blood-letting; of giving and taking of wounds, and of a constant
striving for a precarious dominance.
Nature always rewards cowardice
with destruction; courage and tenacity with survival. "The
prayers of cowards Fortune spurns..."
Nature disciplines with suffering
like the Pauline god; and molds its mightiest with high tasks. Nature
loves cunning.
And Nature simply is. The cosmos
has no beginning nor end in time. It has no beginning nor end in
space.
A is A. Nothing could refute this,
or nothing could exist. What is is and what is not is not. Any
avoidance of this leads to death. Any cowardice toward reality leads
to death. Any avoidance of this is in turn a wish for a weakened
life, which for the greatest would be a kind of death, or a genuine
wish to see oneself die. Hence the legends of the Apocalypse.
Nature doesn't delight in rest,
indeed as Marcus Aurelius tells us delights only in change.
All that is is all that will be,
and all that will be is all that is.
To condemn the all is the condemn the
one, to condemn the one is to condemn the all.
The man is by his nature a
reasoning thing. To abandon reason is to abandon nature.
A man can choose to live by force alone
and abandon reason. Sic Semper tyrannis- all who live without it will
die without it. Observe all iron empires that are given to rust and
all of god's supposedly immutable laws that are rewritten and
reinterpreted, ad infinitum.
Reason must accept infinity as the
first principle of all things.
To see brutality alone view the 20th
century. Indeed, this past century was the greatest of all evils
hoisted on man. For here, in a sea of great intellectual
accomplishment, human politics and actions went over to brutality.
War as politics by other means became commonplace, followed by
politics as war enshrined in the ideas of universal brotherhood and
socialism. Growing out of the weakness of the 19th-century ideals so
gleefully killed but never replaced, the orgy of destruction spent
all positive energies, and left the end of the century to a cold
death.
Passions are not shirked, but
instead reason is a tyrant of them, enshrined as a Caesar, a dictator
for life and the purpose of edifying life. This dictator knows that
without rage there is no fuel for the charge. This tyrant of reason
knows that all things must be in balance, but that this is not
stasis. Life inevitably involves suffering. At the root of suffering
is desire. Expectation can be a synonym. Do not expect clear or right
speech nor expect sensibility.
Time is a measure of decay, or our
passing into the abyss. All living things are so defined by their
finite nature. Time then necessitates decisiveness. To declare one's
path in life in crucial. "To find one's unique avocation is the
individuals highest good." Not all facts can be brought to what
many consider due to deliberation, to what people commonly call good
sense. Every man is in a sense a desperado; that is why we love the
myth of them so much. Everyone is living on borrowed time, chased by
some oppressor from which only temporary relief may be found. All
things must be done. Reason necessitates action, movement, and deed.
Reason is not the logos spoken of by the philosophers of old.
Instead, it is that which drives one movement, the fuel for attaining
the purpose, the individuals highest good.
Purpose is made. It is not given.
Reason is cultivated to bring forth purpose. Once found purpose is to
be chased, nature is to be finally cowed, and all is won by the
struggle revealed by nature.
The genius is a curse to the
stupid. His power is deeply resented. He comes to a problem mulled
over for many centuries and shreds it into its parts, solving each
one and leaving the tatters for future generations, shredding the
hopes of the lesser men whose entire existence was based upon the
endless mediocrity of the status quo. Hence the resistance to new
theories in science. The lame respond to failures and disasters with
spittle and incomprehension.
Hence socialism, government
interference and the death of the
Statesmen in modern politics. Reason is
hated and hated it recoils like an oppressed race under the apartheid
of the stupid. Here where the genius comes, those who have learned to
hate him will cry stupidities, and make appeals to degrees,
moralities, and other scraps of paper which have nothing to do with
what is ahead of them. In love with precedents, they will never see
the way out. This is how the majority of the so-called intractable
issues of human experience and history arise- the reasoning man is
shouted down. For his reasons sound cold and sharp. But the herd
animal is less intelligent that his undomesticated cousin.
Irrationality itself is subject to
reason. For reason lords over all, and in human affairs often
consists in means rather than ends. As a casual chain, irrationality
is a path on the rational. Thus the conquest of an irrational people
by a rational may take place, and itself be rational, though it will
have seemingly irrational ends, and may require irrationality such as
variations upon the truth. Reason sometimes demands lies, sometimes
demands a different morality from the mighty than it would for the
many.
Aphorisms
What is time, asked Saint Augustine in
an honest fear of the fear of the answer. Time indeed would ravish
the mind of a Platonist- for time itself is impermanent. Plato seeks
first to stand in the river, then to declare its waters still by
denying the fact that they roll by- by denying change he is denying
time, inventing eternity, which does not exist, except in that which
does not exist. Time is a simple rate of decay- even as a term it is
limited. Time may not even apply, when properly understood, to the
non-existent(s) in the cosmos.
First we must view the entire field of
cosmology with innate but unprejudiced suspicion. It was born in the
provincial mind of an Immanuel Kant, less a villain than a bland man.
It posits many things. It depends wholly upon the western, now global
language of mathematics. The root issue with it is the nature of the
physical universe. Thus, with pen an equation it has thrust out the
beauty of an Aristotle,
'Men by all nature desire to know' and
instead postulated,
E=Mc^2.
Cosmology deduces more that it induces.
Better it induces, then we could be surer. But deduction has its
place, has its uses, and has its conflict and ultimate unity with
induction. Reality is all that is. Simply speaking mathematics is a
function of the outreach of the human mind. The Sanskrit numbers, the
Euclidean geometry, the Al-Jabr are all forms with which we seek to
parse and make a sensible reality. It postulates and searches with
the art of its numbers. Thus, it gives us a series of theories with
which we can parse out the whole of physical reality. But little has
been done since the major insights of the 20th century to view this
cosmological thinking beyond a scant humanistic interpretation or a
creeping nihilism. We cannot prove anything. Nothing proven for sure-
this is the first truth of our metaphysics.
Time is a fourth dimension, intricately
tied to the other two. Anything with two dimensions ultimately has
three. Only in our perceptions do we reduce three dimension objects
to two by eliminating stimuli. Only by repeating this process do we
think of time as an overarching entity, a Father Time, rather than a
fourth dimension without existence independent of the other three.
Time then is a trick of the consciousness of a given subject.
Among the writings, of the Upanishads
the concept of Brahma becomes fully developed. All is one. Physical
reality is mere illusion. Among all the devas, the veil of Maya is
indeed powerful.
If we conceive of space as infinite,
and consisting of one universe, as we must, then we must come to the
belief that non-existence makes up the majority of the universe.
This non-existent space, this void as
proposed by Democritus and Narajuna will eventually comprise all of
the known universe. Or on the other hand, if 99% of matter manages to
have mass-properties that are unknown to current science, it will
collapse all in on itself. The Big Crunch will begin followed by
another big bang. Will all time then reoccur? Blow for blow? Fodder
for metaphysician
The
fleeting images of what man believes as the past and future is a
function of his mind rather than physical reality. The past exists
only in his thoughts. In truth, all that was the past has passed into
its current configuration and is destined to move forward, in
constant flux.
The future exists first as an idea in the mind; it is to be made in
the now. The past is only a fleeting visage of what we once sensed;
often only vapors in the mind. Emotions exist only in the mind.
Emotional states, once understood as transitory reactions of the
psyche to objective events, are like the rattling rails of a passing
train of thought- jarring, but temporary though many make the mistake
of elevating these states to objective reality regarding one's life,
instead of allowing them to process as natural reactions. To not have
these reactions is to be a sociopath, that is, something that appears
to be human but is not. To have these reactions and to give them as
permanent states is immature, that is if one makes them primary, then
there can be no evolution of the self beyond an adolescent state.
Just as extinction is necessary for the evolution of life past its
failed forms, so pain is necessary for the evolution of what humans
call the soul past its common variety into the rarefied form capable
of great things.
What is justice to the universe? A
human concept that must go the way of the moral world order.
Morality, as perceived by religions, does not exist. All that is
moral in religion depends in every way upon an afterlife. No
afterlife, no morals. And morals, as traditionally understood, are
understood in contradictory fashion.
Original sin dies with god. With this
dies his son: Eli Eli lama sabachthani!
Good and evil can only be understood in
the anthropological sense, and perhaps then, once again respected.
There exists no overarching categorical imperative, nothing hanging
about the longest horizon of the cosmos.
Cosmology itself has wielded a powerful
hammer against the misconceptions of a race long to infatuated with
myth. Man was grandiose- narcissistic- before Copernicus and
eventually even Hawking reduced him to the life of a particle. The
earth is but a simple dust in the cosmic wind.
Life not only seems to lose meaning,
but it seems to have no meaning, leaving only nihilism in its wake.
Are there not a thousand ways in which
the earth could perish? So wherefore dogmatism and demands of peace
and utopia, of foolish self-preservation at the expense of the
superior man and his ideals?
What is love to the Universe? Another
chemical imbalance among its higher amino acids.
What is Alexander to the Biochemist? A
collection of advanced amino acids- his passion for a Hellenistic
world a simply rapid firing sequence of synapses.
Thus, the individual stands abandoned
in the face of the abyss. He can turn away, chose to cross into it,
or die of fear.
Existence is still existence; the
fundamental questions of ethics still resound. A human being must
still live. Living is enough- it is a condition- it seems even an
ailment requiring various cures. The ultimate cure is still more
terrible than the disease as long as one retains the will to live.
Among the creatures of nature one can
see an interplay of the will to live and the will to power- predatory
creatures retain a will to power; prey retains only a will to live.
In the original Sanskrit, karma is
action, movement or deed.
All unwholesome action sets in motion a
course of events that will reciprocate. All wholesome action does the
same. All actions resound outward without regard to good or evil; god
or devil. Action produces a reaction. Thus, the East was the first to
see man as one with his cosmos in a unique sense. Action, not
punished by some deity, would instead carry intrinsic weight. The
Brahmanic mind with its negations of objective reality would seek to
quantify the void with a Zero. With this zero the void entered the so
far reasonable world of mathematics. Agni it seems borne not a
heavenly ray but a torch.
It is no coincidence that the artist is
the first to dare his body towards death with copious intoxicants.
For he has transcended himself, and he feels the world as it is. He
is harmony with energy. Long-term destruction of the body must be
sacrificed for the fleeting heights of the moment. Better a death by
bits of exalted Hemlock than dying of hypothermia after a thousand
dreary days. Thus is the common death.
Man seeks after chaos; for in chaos he
finds nature. The stars are born of flame. The woman wrenches forth a
child in terrible pain. Many people prefer aggressive sex. Violence
then, a component and an aesthetic quality of all things, and not an
end. All that is matter is subjected to reconfiguration, unseen
courses, uncertainty at the highest level. To be is to be uncertain.
What am I then? A thing that is uncertain. To be certain is to cease
to be, to never bring forth, and to be void. In opposition to the
explosions of death and the flaming forth of new stars is the void.
One is always becoming.
When a star perishes, it does so with
an explosion. The increasingly metallic core of the most giant of the
stars lets off its gas. Out of control, the star is eradicated in a
blast. Planets near are burned to cinders. Planets far are pelted
with Gamma Rays. All life follows this basic nature: it begins amid
great suffering, passes its days in perpetual struggle and then dies
to bring forth something greater. As winter passes, there will always
come a spring.
Superstring theory postulates that all
matter is a mere vibration of energy. That we are all music to
contrast the cosmic background noise that only seems to hiss.
Do ends matter so much? All is limited,
all is short, all that is will cease to be.
Society as we know it, with laws,
institutions, and the like, stands in direct opposition to the nature
of things. Society is artificial. It seeks to place us in our proper
orbits without reference to our gravity. Indeed to have gravity at
all it an old habit that died too easily among the great.
Proto-people is always those who burn the brightest: first among
these have to be considered the Arya, who took the walled cities of
Mojeno-daro. These came, merciless and full of energy to consume the
people there. From high on horseback; terrifyingly clad Ksatriyas,
full of the power of Soma, unleashed arrows upon their foes. But they
too settled, only in turn to be flooded by further invasions. Like
the British, who may have invented the Aryan invasion hypothesis in
the first place. Proto-people have no governing authority. Mongols,
Huns, Goths, Sioux. They are the illegitimate parents of authority.
Their task is to bring forth. But for those of us in this last stage
of all societies, in this twilight of all things- the task may be to
learn to live according to our innate energies.
But in all things there is opposition
and collision that makes up the whole. In all interactions, there is
a period of both decay and union. In all struggles, there is a period
of peace. But peace is to be seen not as a cessation of struggle, but
as a period of recharging for the final overcoming.
In cosmology, there is much bantered
about the theory of everything, a quest that is platonic silliness.
Pythagoras and Plato have returned, without god and form and have
taken up again the equation.
What is time? A dimension. And what are
dimensions? Aspects of human understanding. What is the particular
understanding of man to universal infinity? If infinity had a sense
of humor, perhaps it would invent man's metaphysical yearning and
inborn tendency to unfounded certainty. Time began with matter. There
exists no time before time, nothing that exists is above its
non-existence. Thus in all ontology nothing escapes entropy, or a
state preceding it in which it did not exist. None that claims to
eternity shall be allowed into one's pantheon. The soul; a figment,
the spirit, it dies with one's body. The spirit demands nothing more
than the body, tan what the body sees than what the body may desire.
The soul desires the higher realms. It desires forms and strings. It
desires nonsense. The soul; not a stupidity, but a psychological
error? How simple then the cure for god.
All in life is uncertain. The position
of a subatomic electron is unknown and shall be forever. What of the
man, made of untold electrons?
Everything better in Latin: Dues est
mortatum! God is dead! Make him in the image of the pale Latins,
reeling before barbarians, and kill him so.
All faiths see man as part god. But yet
the truth, the lower dirtier truth, is that god is but a part man.
Man exists with many impulses, but few become gods. The impulses of
god are denied the many so that the few may keep their secret: the
volition of self-creation that is god.
Friday, May 6, 2016
Beginning and Ends
The Beginning and Ends of the Cosmos
The universe, it has been reckoned
by many of the best minds, began in a single instant. Time and space
were infinitely suppressed so that in essence they curved infinitely
and were one. There existed a singularity. In this singularity, the
form that is said only to exist in reality at the center of a black
hole, time and space did not exist. There was true void. The
singularity was the beginning, after it; all time marched forward in
innumerable instants. But what of before? All faiths claim that some
act of creation took place, in which a volitional transcendental mind
existed which could will reality into existence. The Higher power is
said to have existed without the lower. This religious explanation
was a noble attempt to explain existence. But it is a failure. The
Jains alone conceived that the universe is completely infinite. The
universe has no beginning in time and no end in space.
At the tiniest level, the universe
seems to break into smaller and smaller pieces. Some invent other
dimensions, other worlds in which to explain this one. Worship of
numbers survives as the error of taking temporal reality and splicing
cause and effect into an infinite number of universes. Thus says
string theory, 'If I cannot unify the infinitely large and the small
I will try to go beyond them'. For centuries, men depended on an
Other to explain what their sense and their mind found at the fore.
Time is not a thing like this; it does not produce other realities.
Time is linked to matter and does not exist outside it. The fact that
A causes B does not mean that in some undefinable existence it will
somehow cause C. Time is only an aspect of reality, a movement of all
things in existence from birth to decay. It begins with matter and
ends thus.
In the realm of the very small
atomism seems wrong, for all particles seem to have smaller pieces.
For atomism was the tenet that the universe was made up of
indivisible stuff. Atomism thus seems false.
The universe is either a
self-contained reality of known reality, that is the visible universe
surrounded on its confines by an infinite and impenetrable sea of
dark matter, or it is one universe among many, each an island to
itself, separated from one another at distances so great that light
cannot reach from one to the other as long as each is maintained in
existence. You might object to this, but yes, universes are mortal,
and they perishable. They perish. This one will perish.
The end of the visible universe is
the cosmic horizon, what is beyond it decides the question. If other
universes exist beyond this horizon, we may be part of a grand cosmic
drift, in which each universe bubbles out from another. The universes
would be like ripples in a pool each ebbing out from some cosmic
epicenter, our universe drifting further and further into an abyss
with innumerable others. Or there could be nothing, the kind of void
that nature was said to abhor. Another possibility for the universe
would be that of eternal cyclical rebirth and death. Having sketched
possible beginnings of the universe, it is now proper to speak of its
end. It's death.
The demolition of creation in a
two-step, or rather two steps.
Step 1: The cosmological proof of
god's existence is shown to be illogical. Mustn't the universe have a
cause? What are cause and effect? Cause and effect simply mean
continuity from one thing to another. A famous philosopher David Hume
said that one cannot assume that cause follows effects because one
cannot view all causes and effects. Denying cause and effect is too
much, let us simply accept that science makes sense and cause are
followed by the effect, and that effect requires cause by necessity.
But cause and effect are part of reality. Reality is the cosmos. So
the thing we know as reality cannot be said to require an immediate
cause like all that is in it.
Step 2: The end of the fine-tuning
argument, by the finest tuned of all forces. Others, ignorant of the
pure chaos which produced life, ignorant of the capability of an
infinite set to produce any number of values, have raised the
argument that the universe is fine-tuned to produce life. But there
is one force, so mysterious yet so powerful, that is the finest tuned
of all forces. The rate of expansion of the cosmos in all directions,
the cosmological constant, propelled by dark energy that seems to
grow more powerful as the galaxies drift farther from one another. It
is this energy, if it continues to accelerate expansion, that will
destroy the universe, leaving nothing but a sea of subatomic
particles.
So unless god is as much a prick as
he appears to be in all scriptures, or unless he is a worse demon
than all the devils he claims to stand against, one must find
creationism totally absurd, and on some level, insane.
And of the End times.....
Any universe with laws of physics
somewhat close to ours will end in three ways. One is the Big Crunch,
whereby the universe collapses. Our current universe will probably
not suffer this. The other possibility, if the cosmological constant
slowed, is known as the big freeze. The big freeze is a slow and
painful process whereby all matter runs out of steam, where all stars
die, where light cannot reach from one galaxy to another. Darkness
would fill every sky. Beyond this, matter finally loses cohesion.
The last ending of the cosmos would
be the big rip. The acceleration of the cosmos becomes one day just
too great. Everything would fly apart, with matter itself ripped into
quarks.
But at the very end, all that will
remain in the universe men once thought to have been made for his
biological cousins, will be swirling invincible black holes, whose
massive event horizons will be the last to evaporate into
nothingness. Perhaps if this universe were indeed the child of some
long dead cosmos destroyed by the same forces, all would recur again.
Perhaps you and I, this essay, and all the joys and terrors and
trepidations of life. Perhaps...
And then there was darkness across
the face of the deep.....
On the Seeking of Wisdom
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