§ 9. 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.
Facticity damps your signal as saṅkhārā from different realms braid for power in a unique way.
Cetanā wills the void so viññāṇa 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 noise of matter and measurement decohere the upper waveband levels —
rūpa at face value.
Telescopes see far, but they can’t see the seer.
The universe of science is an arrow without aim.
4.
Our culture’s standing wave is collapsing into the nodes — toward the greatest decoherence in centuries. Our greatest art and philosophy already belong to the past. Dionysus has been scattered but not re-membered, so the pressure of injustice builds. We do not 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 receivers will drink 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 receiver can only grow a bit stronger, phase-locking with others into higher-amplitude saṅkhārā — idols — all parasites — growing strong on our happiness. Eventually the universe demands better.
6.
Quantum phenomenology: viññāṇa ↔ nāmarūpa. Our consciousness and its object depend on each other to exist. Cetanā entwines with saññā.
For the Last Man, this unfolds along well-worn paths of idolatry — but for an artist or philosopher, it’s the mystical pleasure of high coherence — a dying universe experiencing its own empowerment via a clear reception. We are forms struggling to level up against a torrent of flux.
7.
In the ancient lampadedromia, runners automatically lost 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 the cosmic will.
Our modern idols are fine with that. As with Zeus, they’re mocked when we celebrate a Titanic transgression. They want our resonance quieted, and reflected 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 cannot 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 § 10. The saṅkhāra that knows itself.
Rob Robill 