Part 5 — Paddling the polar torrent
A subterranean current flows from Heraclitus to Nietzsche to Heidegger, feeding insights into reality’s flux. These thinkers explain how all forms are raging polarities — where concealment nourishes revelation and opposites clash in strife.
Will to power serves as the fundamental being-as-becoming metaphysic grounding all other polarities like physis and our mind — any conditioned formation, or saṅkhāra in ancient Pali.
This isn’t just airy philosophical chatter — the hidden metaphysics of lethe helps explain the revealed realm of aletheia and adds depth to life. So we’re making a grave civilizational error when we ignore reality’s existential fountainhead.
When we’re unaware of the polar nature of physis, we mistake aletheia for all there is. Since we can control and understand what appears to us, we think we are masters of nature — that the apparent is everything. But we’re ultimately the ones being controlled by this arrangement, which squanders our life energy as we chase and cling to illusory forms. The glare of the golden calves blinds us to the shadows. So how can we get in touch with lethe, the other pole of physis?
We need to let go, embrace creative destruction. Our intention (cetanā) points the way by secreting a generative nothingness between the present and past, breaking the solid chain of cause and effect and opening our ability to act toward new possibilities through kamma. Far from ending this continual renewal as the Buddhists urge, we need to embrace the freedom, propelling becoming (kamma-bhava) to blaze our best path. The trick is to not forget we’ve cleared a space for us to make a choice. Because if we do, a stronger force will organize us within its form of dominion — and even make us feel like we enjoy it sometimes.
This reflects the being-becoming poles of will to power. We fight to maintain our stable being as an individual or collective form, which gives us at least the illusion of having leveled up. Or we decide in an inventive, destructive act where we’re headed toward a better future and turn into a cosmic Chad.
Let’s delve into saṅkhāras not just as general conditioned formations, but specifically the one where we’re able to act — a volitional construct polarized at its core. Each phenomenon arising in our mind bears a revealed stability (an illusory anchor of dogma or a self-reifying narrative) and a concealed dynamism (the fountainhead of citta, a roiling of impermanence devoid of self). Both poles are necessary for us to survive and thrive.
While these ideas were simmering in the East, Heraclitus came up with his logos as a unity of opposites, harmonized in strife (polemos). This is birth and decay in a bow’s tension: The arrow of becoming launches only when it has the tension of a bow to push off from.
We need to strike a balance between these two metaphysical phases: becoming (our true nature) and being (which we’d like to be our true nature). Being enchants us with promises of timeless unity — but without becoming’s polemos, existence declines into the seemingly safe rigidity of idol worship. Becoming brings forth the blast of justice (dikē) to shatter being’s illusion. But introduce too much chaos and you get scorched by the fire that is the metaphorical and metaphysical core of all beings.
Nietzsche’s will to power, a ceaseless drive toward self-overcoming, embraces both poles. On the one hand, it imposes (conjures) an order in flux, making it bend to its will and forging values in aletheia’s totalizing, nihilistic glare. But then Fritz tosses in a stick of dynamite to unleash lethe’s nourishing torrent — a non-clinging flow that washes away idols.
Unlike the will-decay of religious nihilism or the explosion of cult nihilism across the Zero Meridian, Nietzsche’s saṅkhāra streams through the heart of the void affirming eternal recurrence as amor fati. The nothingness it secretes clears a space for new values and meaning, but the process is closer to water than Jünger’s detonation into our true, fiery nature (WWII was a sign of this metaphysic as it appears in the realm of history and scientific-materialism). This downshift in elements from lit to wet is more amenable to life, a key to weathering our present transition from being to becoming. (I dive deep into metaphysics on this “elemental” level in my serial novel The Flame of Heraclitus.)
We must realize that unresolved strife generates social, existential and cultural becoming — in the way that Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Apollonian polarity is the saṅkhāra feeding artistic creation. The primal torrent of Dionysus clashes with Apollo’s ordered illusions (beauty, form), birthing works of deep meaning, but without resolution.
Challenges are our existential nutriment. Nietzsche’s “What does not kill me makes me stronger” means you grow through resistance. Yet, as our lives become easier — with AI thinking for us and robots waiting on us — our civilization will continue sliding into nihilistic decay. It’s an injustice in the sense of going too far to the pole of being. When we escape to a more perfect world, we’re blinded to the polar interplay — we feed on cult illusion but starve existentially. John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment shows us that unlimited resources without strife lead to decadence — social collapse, withdrawal, extinction. Resolving opposites into harmony atrophies life, depriving it of the generative tension that nourishes becoming. Strife propels the arrow of existence. Utopias breed decline.
Around 500 BC, this wisdom stretched across Eurasia. Humanity was tuned into the torrent of physis — and then Plato came along a short while later and dammed it up with his Forms. He elevated static essence and false dualisms above the older knowing.
By embracing both sides of polarities large and small, we accept flux not as chaos to tame, but a hidden harmony attuning us to real meaning and authentic becoming.
In the Existential Firestorm, non-clinging isn’t retreat, but propulsion — water’s flow sparkles with fire’s heat as it dances across the illusion of earth, which it uses only for support.
Embrace the absurdity and read Part 6 — “Pounding sand in the labyrinth.” (Originally shared on X)
Rob Robill 