Part 12 — Cosmic lampadedromia
1.
Zarathustra loves the soul that is so full
it forgets itself.
Subject and object collapse into one.
A self-sacrifice to the gods.
A going under.
2.
The smudge on the lens is both name (nāma) and body (rūpa):
saṅkhārā from different realms braided into one word.
Cetanā wills the void so viññāna can appear —
yet locks arms with saññā, phassa, vedanā.
Idolatry is the thickest paint. Strip avijjā from the chain
and only viññāṇa ↔ nāmarūpa remains:
transparent opacity.
Thou art that.
3.
The idol Science smears matter and measurement across the lens —
like nāmarūpa taken at face value.
Their telescopes see far, but they can’t see the seer.
Their universe is an arrow without aim.
4.
Our culture’s waveform is collapsing into noise. We’re headed toward the greatest decoherence in centuries; consider our great art and philosophy — all from the past. Dionysus has been scattered but not re-membered, so the pressure of injustice builds. We don’t have strong enough standing waves to pay down the debt of cosmic entropy — not with eight-second attention spans and algorithms as shared myths. The thunderbolt strikes soon. Some lenses will open wide to usher in a new era of meaning, while others will only blink.
5.
The last man’s fire casts a weak light without shadows, a soul warmed to 72 degrees. Narrowed by facticity, its pinhole beam can only grow a bit stronger by phase-locking with others into a higher-amplitude saṅkhāra — an idol. Whether it’s a strong group or individual, the cosmos doesn’t care because dikē gets served for entropy either way. Blazing brightly is rewarded. Idols — all of them parasites — grow strong on the last man’s happiness. Eventually the universe will demand better.
6.
Quantum phenomenology: viññāṇa ↔ nāmarūpa. Our consciousness and its object depend on each other to exist. Within nāmarūpa is cetanā, entwined with saññā, collapsing a field of superposed possibilities. The last man chooses according to well-worn paths of idolatry — but an artist or philosopher has been freed for the mystical pleasure of high coherence — a dying universe experiencing its own existence through a clear lens. No mere machine for self-replication, we are form struggling to level up against a torrent of flux. Natural selection favors heightened coherence over mere persistence.
7.
Prometheia runners automatically lost the lampadedromia if their torch went out along the route from the Academy’s altar to the Acropolis. Today, the last man has forgotten he even has a flame to shield — it’s an affront to the spirit of both Prometheus and cosmic Darwinism.
Our modern idols are fine with that. As with Zeus, they’re mocked when we celebrate a Titanic transgression. They want our light to be dim — and cast only in their direction.
Prometheus, on the other hand, is an artist, a rebel for dikē. Yet torch races in his honor are now difficult to finish.
He used to be bound to a rock, liver decohered daily — for our coherence. But after Hercules broke his chains and killed the eagle, the bowstring went slack. Now we stand blinking, unable to re-member his gift.
8.
Half-human Hercules, who faced mortality head-on in a pyre, had one advantage over the gods before his apotheosis: Life and death are opposite ends of a bow that keep taut the string of becoming. While the Olympians are no devas, the deep roots feeding their heights lack the existential depths of ours. They can’t feel impermanence like we do.
Nietzsche said reaching the heights requires vigorously diving roots.
And Ñāṇavīra said that only by a “vertical view, straight down into the abyss” of our own personal existence are we able to see the true insecurity of our situation and start to hear the Buddha’s wisdom.
9.
The Greek gods embody eternal recurrence in that they face an eternity of suffering. But they don’t love the Fates.
10.
Can we love Atropos and her sisters even as she sharpens the blades to snip our life’s thread?
Can we surpass even the gods?
Read Part 1: Heraclitus: Flux is lit … and wet. (Originally published on X.)
Rob Robill 