Author: Rob Robill

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 3

“Fanaticism is the only kind of willpower the weak and insecure can actually muster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Rapp’s voice crackled from the hallway speakers late in the school day as the girls filed out of their classrooms: “Remember, you have no sixth period. Report directly to the gymnasium for the assembly. Those who miss it or show up late will face severe punishment. Additionally, if you have any information about the Theater Club’s missing pulleys und ropes … ”

“I hope he catches those thieves,” said Windi, the lowly Skipper who’d been bringing up the end of yesterday’s Butterfly Club procession. Gangly, a bit bug-eyed and limping, the girl had fallen in beside Phiale as the students made their way toward the academic building’s back doors. “Maybe Principal Rapp can use the rope they stole to han—”

Windi sprawled face down on the floor, tripped from behind by the girl with sparkly glasses — whose knee was now pressing hard against her back. “That was for yesterday, scum!” the fairy shrieked, and then just as suddenly helped her up. “Hi, my name is—,” she said and spat on Windi’s shoes.

“Eh … meet Belle,” Phiale said.

“Keep that freak away from me — I’ve never done anything to her!” she yelled, now limping even harder as she tried to keep up with the other two, who’d moved on. Windi had no other friends (even her fellow club members shunned her) and was tolerated in this instance only because Phiale herself didn’t have close companions, having transferred just a few months earlier.

“I’ve got my eye on you and your nasty cult,” Belle informed Windi. “And if you think you stand a chance against me with those nets … they’re the kind you give to little children,” she said, laughing.

“Oh, look, another nasty cult,” the fairy added as they emerged into the glare of the sun. Just outside the doors, members of the Climate Club were confronting their fellow students along the short path to the high school’s wooden gym. The girls held signs with messages like “Natural gas is silent but deadly” and, accompanied by a crude drawing of the Earth engulfed in flames: “THE END IS NEAR!!” Racing past them toward the gym, Rapp glanced at the latter image and gave it a thumbs up.

As Phiale passed them, she overheard a senior with a nose ring say into her phone: “I don’t care if you’re afraid of heights — this is more important than your own miserable existence, you weakling.”

Inside the gym, bathed in the heat and red glow of 10-foot flames blasting up from a pair of cardboard-facade sword hilts, the girls took their places in the bleachers. Black curtains hung from the rafters to the hardwood floor behind the methane-fed props. At a podium stood Rapp wearing a scarlet skullcap — grinning like a maniac and flanked by fiery ferns.

“Behold, our Avenging Angel!” the principal said with a wave of his arm. The curtains jerked back to reveal a large metal tank filled with water. From its two-foot depths, someone in a black Godzilla costume with a wire halo emerged brandishing a plastic flaming sword (its LED lights not flickering from the moisture). Prostrate before their new mascot, pompoms extended, the NHGA cheer squad encircled the pool. The gym fell silent, except for the torches whooshing fire … and a faint squeaking. Despite everything else going on, Phiale’s attention focused on the squeak … squeak. Where was it coming from? Was it getting louder? Her heart now racing, she felt disoriented by the whole hellish scene … and the squeaking … it now sounded like it was coming from two different places … somewhere overhead?

Then slowly, led by Rapp, a chant grew: “vengeance … vengeance … vengeance … ”

“Is that wet lizard the mascot?” Belle asked. “And it’s supposed to be an angel?” Windi glared at her, chanting louder. “My favorite part about cultists like Rapp is how distorted their perceptions get — like falling under an enchantment spell without magic. Hilarious.”

“… vengeance … vengeance … ”

“And what’s this?” the fairy said. Using a stick she’d just pulled from her pocket, Belle pointed out a girl descending on a rope from the darkness above. She was sobbing, gripping a bucket while bracing herself — an arm around the line and a foot through a loop — like a frightened acrobat.

“Stop swinging me! I’m going to miss!” she yelled.

Miss what? Phiale wondered. Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like it was part of the program.

Then, from above: “How can I be swinging you — it’s on a pulley, you idiot! You better not miss!”

Phiale now saw there were actually two girls on ropes swaying in front of the flames. “I’m too low! And quit swinging us!” screamed the other. The pulley squeaking intensified as an unseen accomplice struggled to bring her more in line.

“This is too much fun,” said Belle, moving the stick in sync with their oscillations.

One of the protesters decided to go ahead and complete her act of resistance anyway: “As guardians of Gaia, we extinguish—” She slammed into the other girl.

Not only did they manage to splash only each other as opposed to the carbon-spewing torches, but one of them kicked out at a sword hilt to avoid being incinerated, and the prop fell over, setting the curtains ablaze.

Despite everybody’s shrieking and jostling, Phiale concentrated on the water tank as the mascot hopped over the rim and slithered around on the floor trying to stand but slipping on abandoned pompoms. The heat in the gym was now fierce as sweat beaded on Phiale’s forehead. She grasped the situation in a flash: The flames were spreading quickly, and they might not make it out alive. Watching the fire reflections dance chaotically and ephemerally in the rippling water, Phiale felt a bizarre mental tug that somehow pulled her underneath the cool weight of the tank’s 700 gallons. With explosive force, she sprayed it up onto the curtains, dousing the flames.

* * *

After everyone was accounted for, Phiale set off toward Main Street feeling a strange mix of elation and unease — The water in the tank just obeyed my will, like when I made it rain by the creek. It felt like I was doing it, but …

Phiale glanced over her shoulder while crossing the school lot and saw the fairy was following her. “Go find someone else to get in trouble,” she said. “I’ve got to go talk to people about one of the fires you started … our school has counselors, you know. Seek help.”

“That was impressive back there, you putting out the fire,” Belle replied. “You,” she repeated, making scare quotes around the word and grinning darkly.

“Hey, I did it as much as any nymph did,” Phiale snapped back, and she even tried to tell herself that all that talk of possession was total bunk anyway. Was it, though? How much control do I really have anymore? And was that awful fairy reading my mind just now? “Anyway, leave me alone. I’m going to have to start carrying a fire extinguisher if you keep following me around. You need to take things more seriously. You’re going to kill people.”

“Whatever, I’d just watch out when that firefighter lady starts taking things seriously.” Then, under her breath she added, “Talk about killing people.” Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, she turned back into Tinker Bell and fluttered into a flowerbed in front of the academy’s sign.

Phiale already knew a shortcut to the fire station, having seen the back of it while picnicking with classmates by a pond. She’d never been to New Harmony before her parents deposited her at the boarding school 130 miles from their Bloomington home. They were going on sabbaticals that spring to opposite ends of the globe — her mom, an art historian, to Nicaragua and her father to Naxos.

She walked up Main Street, past golf carts parked in front of quaint shops and eateries like Pie in the Sky, which smelled like something was burning. Right before the road ended, a large, brick-walled enclosure came up on her left. This was the Roofless Church that Mr. Owen had talked about in history class, how its “gilded gate was designed by … no one is to laugh or you’ll get detention … by the brilliant sculptor Jacques Lipchitz … silence!”

Then Phiale crossed the road into Paul Tillich Park, named after a German-American existentialist greatly influenced by the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger, a colleague of his at the University of Marburg in the 1920s. Tinker Bell had also been deeply affected by Heidegger; she’d sneak into the Working Men’s Institute library in the wee hours to ponder Being and Time by the light of pixie dust — which was why when a visiting scholar from Indiana University later said the section “Reality as an Ontological Problem” had “sparkled on the page,” he meant it literally.

After the commotion of the assembly, Phiale felt the park’s silence viscerally; all the dead needles on the ground seemed to muffle the sounds around her. The quiet amplified her sense of being alone, which she often valued over hanging around girls she didn’t know very well. But how long will I be able to feel any solitude with that … thing in my mind?

Phiale’s uncanny feelings intensified when she came upon a bronze of Tillich’s oversized head stuck PEZ-like on a pedestal, framed by the park’s glittering pond behind it. A little farther along the trail, she passed a granite marker for his ashes, which were buried in New Harmony because he’d been so taken with the town’s Christian and socialist roots. “Why stop at being a slave to just one victimization cult when you can have two?” Belle actually said to his face when he visited town in 1963.

Now on a short path to the station’s back lawn, Phiale saw the firefighter from the other day in a T-shirt and camo pants shooting arrows at a hay target shaped like a deer, her movements graceful and flowing. When the girl got closer, she noticed all the arrows were clustered in the center of the bullseye (a rare sign of perfection in New Harmony).

“Come over here,” the woman said, holding out a three-fingered glove. After Phiale put it on, she positioned the girl’s left hand on the bow’s grip, nocked the arrow on the string and stepped away. Phiale drew it back without thinking and sent the shaft flying into the bullseye 30 yards away.

“You’ve done this before,” the firefighter said.

“Never.”

“That right? You know, I used to shoot at a scarecrow out here, but Chief made me change it after some crybaby complained about seeing arrows sticking out of its heart.” She drew the string back … “A crybaby who might just turn into a deer himself and learn the sweet release of my bow.” Thump.

Another firefighter, in uniform, emerged from the back of the station and shouted, “Die!”

Di grinned and turned to Larry. “Hi, chief. This is … what’s your name?”

Phiale told them, side-eyeing him.

“Seems like I knew a Phiale a long time ago,” she said and spit out tobacco. “I’m Di.”

“Oh, that’s what he meant,” the girl said, relieved.

The chief, middle-aged, short of breath and coughing, looked at Phiale and slowly shook his head. “It didn’t sound like much on the scanner … I only expected to set up some fans to air out the gym and be done with it. All of you girls were saying how the water leapt up by itself and put out the fire. What kind of hogwash is that?”

Phiale looked away and twisted the sole of a white tennis shoe back and forth in the grass. “It was chaos … I can’t remember anything really … had something to do with global warming, I think.”

“Hey, ain’t you the one who was at the labyrinth the other day? Why are you here? What do you know about all this?” An arrow whizzed by his ear and stuck into the station behind him.

“You’re the one who called Rapp yesterday about the labyrinth incident and made Phiale come here,” Di said. “And sorry … I missed,” she added, pointing to the target in the opposite direction.

“Ah! Now I remember. Weird fellow, that Rapp.”

“I’d say!” said a man who’d just wandered through the back door wearing a frock coat and ascot. “Hi, Phiale.”

“Hi, Mr. Owen.”

He glowered at the chief. “I demand a full investigation into that madman. When my family ran the academy, our girls lived and learned under optimal conditions … well, somewhat — but not the ninth circle of Hell it is now.”

“The fire was an accident, the way I understand,” the chief said. “He feels bad about it … promised to keep indoor flames to under eight feet and get the sprinkler system fixed. I scheduled a Fire Safety Goddess demonstration for the students.”

Mr. Owen sniffed. “We need more than gimmicks at this point, but what would one expect from a town in such utter decline — you just wait, though, things will change around here one way or another,” he said and stormed off.

“Come to think of it,” the chief said, walking closer to the other two. “I didn’t tell anybody because it’s not my business how people choose to worship the Lord, but I was fishing on the Wabash the other night just before dark and saw Rapp standing in the river with both his hands in the air, palms up. He had his head bent down … I couldn’t make out what he was chanting, but he was pretty intense.”

“Where’d you see him?” Di asked.

“Downstream from the academy, near where the creek comes out.”

“That’s funny. I was tracking wild turkeys around there and saw a swath of trees knocked down. I couldn’t think of what could’ve done it. There were these indentations, too … I figured I was just being stupid, but when I stood back, it looked like a big lizard print.”

“How big?” asked the chief.

“Well … if you parked your pickup over it, you’d still see toes sticking out.”

Phiale’s face turned ghostly pale. There’s no way she said “lizard print.”

Check out Chapter 4 of The Flame of Heraclitus. And catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X)

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Existential Firestorm

Rob Robill

Part 7 — Rekindling the metaphysical fire

Metaphysics seems to have smoldered out after we realized Plato’s Forms were a catastrophe. Yet I propose rekindling it — not as an ideal realm, but a dynamic process fueled by the interplay of Heraclitean flux, Nietzschean will, Heideggerian releasement, Sartrean freedom and Ñāṇavīrean insights.

This revival asserts that everything in existence shares fire’s nature: flickering, hungry for fuel, illuminating, etc. I also draw from Heraclitus’ insights on strife (polemos) driving us forward and justice (dikē) regulating harmony between the ontological poles of being and becoming.

But it’s his metaphorical description of the elements in motion that underpins this renewal of metaphysics, where earth embodies rigidity and water and flames signify dissolution and transformation. Earth is fire, but as illusory form. Water, less apt as a metaphor than a blaze, is more suitable to life as a flowing, rejuvenating force — it’s what we mostly are. Air (sky) is fire too, symbolizing generative nothingness like the other non-earth elements. So fire is our essential being, but realizing it, say, as an explosion across the Zero Meridian of absolute nihilism, hasn’t been historically pretty. A more watery transition is in order.

Existence cycles between earth and fire, embodying the tension between stability and chaos — being and becoming. Our minds harden, for instance, when we’re objectified by others’ gazes or cult idols’ standing reserve, reduced to a mere resource. The more these idols mind-jack our choices, the more our awareness of cetanā (power of choice) dims. But liquidness counters this in my novel The Flame of Heraclitus — like when a character finds releasement by a stream, forgetting former distractions and flowing into nature’s mystery.

This movement gets blocked by mental forms triggered by perceptions of external and internal phenomena. Memories, both personal and collective, stoke papañca (feelings of significance). This empowers cults, which are memetic self-replicators in the scientific materialist realm and forms of will to power gone too far to the being pole in the metaphysical. The word “meme” is related to Mneme, the muse of memory (see the fairy’s digression in Ch. 2), and its counter is lethe, the Greek underworld river where the dead drink to forget their earthly concerns. Abandoning obsessive mind loops cuts through papañca (cannabis also breaks the chains of memory for releasement).

Another problem with papañca is that it blinds us to everything except the brilliance of aletheia. It is nature’s (physis’) visible side — the opposite pole from lethe’s concealment (the fountainhead feeding its existence). This problem flares up especially with scientific materialism, which can only deal with aletheia while devaluing or ignoring lethe. Also, while Buddhist meditation can help expose our experience of solidity as illusion — by focusing attention on what arises in the mind intently enough to glimpse reality’s evanescent, flickering nature — this overemphasizes the particulars arising in our senses, blinding us to the larger context including the concealed aspect of mind and physis).

Yet this spell cast by aletheia is a necessary lie for life to exist, as Nietzsche pointed out — its illusory being holds becoming in a polar unity, where stability in strife with active creation pushes existence forward.

This is his will to power metaphysic, a self-overcoming drive that restores our agency after idols steal it. Sartre’s “Hell is other people” offers an example of how this could work in action. The “look” (le regard) in No Exit imposes the solid earth forms damming up the flow of free choice — a blockage that’s our objectification we perceive in the minds of others. Here we must realize cetanā’s power in the existential vein of the monk Ñāṇavīra — that it secretes nothingness, severing the causal chain of the past for free choice, so that we may become more than a thing (e.g., the role as a waiter in Sartre’s famous example of bad faith).

Cults and other idols enforce power through these rigid mental forms — we’re arranged so that, when a command passes through a chain of action, we feel drawn toward a particular behavior to play our part.

A lack of becoming in the stagnation of dogma also leads to existential decay, like how the Mouse Utopia experiments revealed that when mice were given everything they wanted they fell into social and individual decline. Rigidity stifles fire. Strife fuels existence as flux.

This metaphysics reignites ontology as a living flame — we embrace anxiety over ease, resisting the gaze of idols in a blaze of freedom. When Heidegger deprecated Nietzsche’s will to power as the end of metaphysics, he was too rash. Will to power, refined by lethe’s mystery, complements Heidegger’s releasement with its dynamic core: being as becoming — reality’s in-itself-as-not-itself nature.

When we realize the interplay of the elements, we can embrace chaos to break earth’s bonds. We grow even more entrenched as long as we don’t.

Being burns in the abyss of becoming.

Read Part 8 — Fractal metaphysics: Mind as reflection of physis. (Originally shared on X)

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Existential Firestorm

Rob Robill

Part 6 — Pounding sand in the labyrinth

Albert Camus’ 1939 existential travelogue “The Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran” unveils a stark land carved from rock and enchanted by idolatry — yet, for those very reasons, a place where an outsider finds renewal in generative voids. Oran is a labyrinth, trapping its denizens in a maze of rigid roles and inflated meaning. Yet the fiery sky overhead, the desert beyond its walls, even cult itself offer clearings to glimpse the concealed mystery that deepens existence. Between these extremes, the ancient Mediterranean mediates the poles of domineering order and indifferent chaos — being and becoming.

As a brief visitor to the Algerian town, Camus gleaned insights into the human condition. He was uncaptivated by local influences, so he could taste the transfigurative release of ego death through ritual without clinging to idolatry. This detachment let him view Oran’s communal practices as absurd spectacles rather than valid dogmas. Unlike the residents, trapped in their maze by habit and therefore blind to the landscape and sea, Camus remained open to the world’s mystery.

Oran’s most vivid spectacle is a boxing match, where fans from rival cities, Oran and Algiers, project collective identities onto the fighters. A physical contest becomes a clash of communal pride. They hurl insults, not personal but philosophically deeper, assaulting group honor and inflating its significance until a vengeance ignites. The arena transforms into a ritualistic space, with boxers idolized as proxies for group victory or defeat. “These insults are more stinging than one might think, since they are metaphysical,” Camus observes, highlighting how group identity turns mundane strife into existential drama.

He describes the fights in religious tones:

“The crowd grows animated, yet remains polite. It inhales the sacred scent of liniment, contemplating slow rites and confused sacrifices, made authentic by the expiatory shadows cast against the wall. These are the prelude to a savage, calculated religion. Only later comes the trance.”

In this fervor, pride swells, fights erupt in the crowd, and vengeance is exacted. As communal passions approach the Zero Meridian — a tipping point of absolute nihilism — Heraclitean polemos (strife) ignites, generating meaning through opposition. Yet this risks rigid dogma, inflamed by papañca, the mental proliferation that weaves illusions from raw flux. These blazes mark the pole of being: earthbound rituals enforcing order, where individuals subsume their will to the collective, mistaking idols for transcendent truth. The fans’ zeal reflects the being pole of Nietzsche’s will to power polarity — group assertion and self-abnegation — as opposed to the becoming pole of individual empowerment and overcoming. Camus, as an outsider attuned to absurdity, is able to avoid the group’s enchantment while benefiting from the ego dissolution in the ritual’s raw energy. This is a transfigurative release into lethe, the Greek notion of concealing or forgetting, without being ensnared by dogma. Lethe pairs with aletheia (unconcealment, truth) as physis — nature’s self-emerging flux. Moderns, lost in the nihilism of total aletheia (e.g., scientific materialism or Neo-Marxism), often overlook lethe’s mystery.

Beyond the arena, Oran’s idolatry manifests in its monuments and streets — eroded statues of forgotten generals or the Maison du Colon, a patchwork edifice blending colonial styles into a hollow symbol of economic utility. Oranians invest these with rigid roles to ward off the labyrinth’s mundaneness, their identities subsumed in forms echoing Ernst Jünger’s “form as cult” — structured yet spontaneous assertions of power. Push too far into this, and one risks entrapment, mistaking idols for absolutes. Yet, fully embraced, it can blaze across the Zero Meridian, revealing the fiery nature within.

Water, however, is life’s most advantageous element. It dissolves the self-idol with its generative nothingness, sweeping clear for renewal. It stirs up the becoming that has stilled to being in Richard Wagner’s “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, echoing a pessimistic, nirvana-like escape. In Oran, this aligns with the earth pole: rituals promising surrender to collective forms, offering respite from anguish but risking entrapment in bad faith — becoming a manipulable “thing.” Camus sees the farce, yet he finds form’s solidity necessary for engaging flux. “Nothingness is no more within our reach than the absolute,” he writes, navigating a middle way. It’s riding the rapids of intersecting polar torrents. Here, physis (nature’s flux) and citta(mind) swirl as superimposed saṅkhāras (Pali guide) — conditioned phenomena shaping reality. Oran’s stark elements — dusty streets, brilliant sky — hint at physis’ concealed side, while citta’s forms, like “the self” and group identity, proliferate illusions that blind us to the fact there even is a concealed side. The sea mediates, channeling flux into a life-affirming flow that tempers extremes without quenching vitality.

Stripped bare, Oran breeds existential anxiety from a lack of stimulation. In a city “without soul and without reprieve,” the scarcity of distractions forces confrontation with the absurd: our craving for purpose in an indifferent universe. Oranians seek refuge from the void in daily clamor and other idols — boxers as sacrificial figures or the Maison du Colon’s grandeur — projecting meaning to fill the emptiness. Yet this glare of papañca obscures physis’ mystery.

For a cosmic Chad like Camus, though, Oran’s starkness facilitates releasement. Urban anonymity, the desert’s silence, the sea’s elusive horizon — all invite attunement to nimitta, subtle signs of concealed truth. Camus glimpses the void without clinging, balancing Nietzsche’s Dionysian torrent and Apollonian form. Through depersonalization — viewing rituals as absurd theater — or art’s grandeur (like Wagner’s opera), one attunes to mystery without falling into cult. Lethe dissolves ego, not into escapism but forgetful immersion, losing the self in flux without illusion.

To face the sky’s neutral indifference, we must release our need for constant stimulation and embrace the resulting anxiety. The Minotaur is boredom; Ariadne’s thread leads from the labyrinth to the hard landscape, blazing sky and ultimately the sea, attuned to physis’ depths. Camus writes:

“These weighty galleons of stone and light quiver on their keels, as if ready to sail toward sunlit isles. Oh, Oran’s mornings! From the high plateaus, swallows dive into vast cauldrons of shimmering air. The entire coast stands poised for departure, stirred by a thrill of adventure. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall set sail together.”

This evokes a shift from being to becoming: the sky’s chaos loosens earth’s dogma, letting the sea bear us along the flux — our true nature. Lethe affirms vitality without illusion.

Check out Part 7 of “Rekindling the metaphysical fire.” (Originally shared on X)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 2

“Lethe dissolves ego, not into escapism but forgetful immersion, losing the self in flux without illusion.” — Rob Robill, Existential Firestorm

Phiale’s hand shook as she poured hibiscus tea into the principal’s porcelain cup. Pulling the spout away, she spilled a few red blossoms on the white tablecloth … and swayed under everyone’s gaze.

Ms. Owen, the biology teacher and Flower Club adviser, sucked in a breath and clicked her tongue from the other end of the long table where a half dozen girls sat, dappled in sunlight under the conservatory’s glass ceiling.

“Fail-a-lee,” whispered one of the nearby Roses.

As Principal Rapp smiled slightly and dabbed the spill with a cloth napkin, Phiale caught a whiff of musty vanilla, like the crumbling Bible in her dad’s office. “So, fie-a-lee, the fire department wants you to stop by the station after school tomorrow,” he said and looked at Ms. Owen. “Apparently, before they could interview her yesterday, she practically fled from the scene of that incident or whatever it was — an exploding hydrangea or something. From the way some people were talking, it sounded like the flames of Armageddon had spewed forth to claim the unrighteous.” He sighed and stared wistfully toward a line of sycamores along the Wabash, stroking his long, graying Amish beard. “If only … ”

“Eh … the important thing is that Phiale’s okay,” Ms. Owen said.

The girl finished pouring the tea from flowers she’d harvested there in the greenhouse and dropped stiffly into her metal chair, wishing everyone would pay attention to something else. WTF, universe — a flying pyro on watering day and Rapp on tea shift? Exactly what I was looking for.

“Yes, of course … das ist gut,” he said.

Rapp was really getting into the spirit of his German American fifth-great-grandfather George (quite literally) in the months ahead of the Boatload of Knowledge bicentennial reenactment. (The town was knocking out the celebration six months early because the real anniversary falls in the cold heart of January.)

“I hope you’ll join us for our flower walk after tea,” Ms. Owen said with the confidence he would say no (or perhaps nein).

The principal and teacher were direct descendants of New Harmony’s two utopian experiments: the Rappite apocalypse cult immediately followed by the Owenite rationality cult.

Wearing a black antique dress, Ms. Owen was herself already getting into character before the reenactment as her ancestor Jane Dale Owen Fauntleroy, daughter of leader Robert Owen (to be represented by the history teacher, her father).

“I wish I could, honestly,” Rapp said. “But I just stopped by to pick up the ferns for tomorrow’s mascot unveiling — the ones with the fiery-red leaves.”

“I see nothing wrong with our current mascot,” Ms. Owen interjected. “Minerva has guided generations of Owls with her wisdom and strength. And this isn’t a religiously affiliated school — so I certainly don’t think an angel is appropriate.”

“I heard it has a tail and scales,” said a Daffodil named Lily under her breath. An athletic Rose named Camellia chortled.

“Silence!” commanded the principal. “Ms. Owen, there are some dominions where the god of science is not the highest power … but how many times have I been through this with you?”

Playing from speakers on a potting bench, the “Allegro” from Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major quickened as the two adults exchanged glares, their shadows stretched out in the afternoon light like echoes of old portraits melting across the conservatory floor. Cups clinked on saucers, the air thick with the smell of earth.

Rapp suddenly smiled. “Ah, look, there they go,” he said, nodding toward a nearby line of girls marching across an unmowed field between the school and river, nets resting on their shoulders like rifles. “The Butterfly Club’s off to the labyrinth today … it’s already reopened. We’ve been hearing rumors that the legendary talking frosted elfin has reappeared there — she would be quite the showpiece pinned to our display wall.”

Phiale choked on her tart tea as the principal waved at the passing girls, who raised their nets in salute under his paternal gaze. His face darkened, however, when the one at the end stumbled and fell beneath the weeds, much to the Flower Club’s amusement.

Rapp mumbled something about a “plague of gophers,” stood, took a sip of tea and puckered his mouth. “I must go now,” he said. “No time to waste — the end draweth nigh.”

* * *

Indiana’s western edge falls in a straight line from the industrial ruins of Gary until it hits an area of high ground (Terre Haute in French) along the Wabash, whose meandering chaos serves as the state’s border until it disappears into the Ohio.

Twenty-two miles north of this confluence, Maple Run burbles near the hedge labyrinth (reconstructed from the Rappites’ original) before meandering through the New Harmony Girls Academy property and joining the Wabash, which Phiale could see flowing between the trees. The Flower Club was huddled around Ms. Owen on the bank of the small creek; she was pointing to a patch of wild blue phlox from a crouch.

The cry of a Violet pierced the air: “Snake!” Much more shrieking followed as Phiale caught sight of a large black serpent with a red mark on its head. It flashed through the scattering girls and splashed into the creek.

“Everything’s okay — just a run-of-the-mill snake,” Ms. Owen said.

She doesn’t sound convinced, though, thought Phiale, who was unfazed by the snake.

“We really must stay on track if we want to wrap up before it rains,” the teacher continued. The sunshine had given up to low clouds. “Notice the five, notched petals … as for its scientific name, the genus Phlox is Greek for ‘flame’ and species divaricata is Latin for ‘spreading.’ In fact — girls … listen, do be quiet … the snake didn’t hurt anyone, and it has swum away — in fact, spreading through replication is the purpose of all organisms.”

Ms. Owen collected herself, smoothing her dress. “This is clear if you take the gene’s-eye view that Richard Dawkins discussed in his keynote at the 2005 Owen Science Society annual meeting.” While Phiale didn’t quite grasp the meaning of the woman’s words, she did notice Ms. Owen blush as she clasped her hands to her chest, smiled and sighed. “That was back when we could still get speakers of his stature … though last year’s chemist from Mount Vernon was an expert on asphalt’s liquidity—”

“Lame!” shouted a girl who had sidled up next to Phiale.

Ms. Owen frowned as she took in the new arrival with long blonde hair and a small, upturned nose. The girl’s sparkly-framed glasses made a mockery of the school uniform. “It seems we have a visitor. You must be new to the academy, because we teach our Owls better manners than that. What is your name?”

The girl spat and tried to screech hypersonically, but it just came out as a weak “eeeee.” She shook her head in frustration and said, “Just call me Belle for now.”

Ms. Owen shut her eyes for a moment and continued in the voice of a 19th-century schoolmarm — but with the confusing precision of a 20th-century slide rule: “As I was saying, imagine strands of DNA lying there in the dirt; their one job is to endure and replicate, but they can’t last long unprotected. So in the case of animals like us, we develop a body around ourselves and a mind to move about for food and to reproduce with the opposite sex.”

“Principal Rapp told us there’s no reason to bother with the last part — back when he canceled our mixers,” said Camellia, whose hand rested on Lily’s far shoulder. “The end is near, and all that.”

Ms. Owen pressed on: “Fifty years ago, Dr. Dawkins described another kind of replicator called a meme.”

“Like the lady yelling at the cat?” asked a Violet standing next to the teacher.

“I wouldn’t know about such nonsense … I mean a bit of culture — like when a song repeats over and over in your head to make you sing it aloud to spread to somebody else’s head — or like when Principal Rapp believes that a Bible verse is so relevant he can’t help but to recite it. It’s the same reason a cold virus makes you sneeze — they have to disperse to other people to survive and thrive.”

“That’s funny how it’s called a meme” — Belle said and winked, giving off faint sparks that caused Ms. Owen to rub her eyes. “I had a friend named Mneme.” The fairy facepalmed and grimaced. “No, I mean I learned about Mneme in school like a normal human.”

Phiale couldn’t explain it at the time, but she felt nervous for Belle and the Flower Club members in general.

“She’s the Boeotian muse of memory, you know,” she rambled on. “The gods hated actors screwing up their lines — especially about their exploits. So they’d have Mneme whisper the right words into a performer’s ear to cut down on mutations. She never forgot anything ever … not nearly as irritating as Echo, though.”

“I’m scared,” said the Violet, shrinking against Ms. Owen, who stared dumbfounded at Belle.

Phiale felt the closeness of the late April sky, the air heavy with moisture. She wished it would pour — so it did. Overcome with shock and power of what she’d done, Phiale fell to the ground.

Belle helped her stand as the rest of the group sprinted up a hill toward the school and led her back to the stream bank. Then she plucked a magnolia leaf, held it over her head, winked and fluttered back into her sprightly form. Phiale blinked at the tiny, iridescent blur of her gossamer wings, shielded from the pelting rain.

“Ah, that’s better — human bodies are so unwieldy!” Tinker Bell shouted over the hammering drops. “Thanks for the cloudburst, by the way. Sometimes I don’t know when to shut up — at least that’s what those Fairy Council tyrants say … I guess even the dimmest of wits can occasionally be right about something … like a stopped clock … where’d you go?”

Bent over the stream, Phiale was soaking wet and enjoying it, watching the water ripple past rocks and branches, swirling, drawing her in. Her mood had loosened. Maybe the universe isn’t so bad after all.

“What’s going on?” she asked the sprite, who was now darting over the creek and around her face like a dragonfly with boundary issues.

A plastic ring appeared around Tinker Bell’s waist — which started gyrating. “You know how sometimes groups of humans suddenly feel compelled to all start doing the same thing? Like grab a hoop and twirl it around their midsection?” She pulled off the ring and flicked it at Phiale’s forehead. “Well, this whole town’s like that — with everything — because it got cursed from the sheer stupidity of the people who used to live here.

“It also means residents are more open to possession by cults, ghosts and divine presences — from gods to well … minor deities in your case.”

“I made it rain, Tink.”

Read Chapter 3 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally published on X.)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Chapter 1

“Heraclitus’ words blaze with truth — but only if seized intuitively, not logically.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

As 60 thin streams fell from Phiale’s watering can into a bronze planter called The Flame of Heraclitus, the topmost soil lost its form and flowed into rivulets between pansies and peonies.

A glint of light flashed near a patch of swamp buttercups she’d just watered — and a large bug zig-zagged in front of her face, dripping wet and asking what the hell her problem was. Phiale dropped the can with a splash and stumbled back into eight-foot-tall hedges encircling the center of the labyrinth.

“Don’t worry, Phiale. I’m not evil,” said the insect. No … more like a fairy … laughing evilly.

“How do you know my n-n-name?”

“You’re an attendant nymph of Artemis. Anybody who’s anybody knows your name.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else,” blurted Phiale, a first-year student at the New Harmony Girls Academy. Dressed in a gray skirt and green V-neck sweater emblazoned with the school logo, she took a deep breath, picked up the can and started for a gap in the hedges. “Anyway, er … Tinker Bell, my name just happens to be Phiale. My dad is a professor of classics.”

“No, it was the Fates who named you — they get cute before big events … to amuse the gods … especially when they’ve been hanging around Bacchus. Wait! Don’t leave yet — I’ve got something to show you.” Then, more to herself than to the girl: “Maybe this time I’ll get exiled someplace less cornpone.”

Wondering what corn had to do with anything, Phiale suddenly stopped and turned around. (Something turned her around.)

“That’s better,” Tinker Bell said. She wrung out her blonde hair and spiraled up above the planter to take a look around. The wide bowl, which sat atop a pedestal, was originally an academy play prop before the Class of 1925 installed it as a senior project — all under the fairy’s influence (although Phiale didn’t know its story that far back yet). The fairy noticed her looking at it. “That thing used to have an ‘eternal’ flame instead of flowers … until the 1975 natural gas shortage. They tried a fountain with a water line after that but gave up because of a drought … settled for dirt. That’s usually the narrative arc around here: big ideas to … well … she grimaced at the muck-streaked pavers below.

“Now let’s begin our lesson. Listen up, and redeem yourself for dousing my nap.” The fairy flew to the hedge tops over Phiale’s head, snapped off a twig and took aim at the planter, ringed by stone benches and Ionic columns, already crumbling, no longer able to support a small roof.

Tinker Bell cleared her throat and … a car door shut.

Crouched in the hedges, Phiale heard voices approaching the labyrinth entrance. “I hope you brought some red thread,” a man said.

“No, but I can leave crumbs — I’ve got half a scone left over from the ‘Finding Utopia in Victimhood’ session,” a woman replied.

“I hear cult scum,” the fairy hissed as her dress changed from mossy green to fiery red.

The man’s voice grew louder and fainter as the pair progressed through the hedge convolutions: “We’re now on a journey to the center, a peaceful, inner space to contemplate our identities before we follow the path back into the world as stronger, more focused allies.”

“That’s so beautiful, the way you put that,” the woman cooed.

Tinker Bell vomited a sparkly stream of half-digested nemesis bloom nectar, wiped her mouth and said, “Class is in session …

“ALL IS FIRE!”

She jabbed with the twig and a 30-foot flame shot up from the planter, blasting Phiale with heat, potting soil and petals. The fire expanded into a dome over the labyrinth — ribbons appearing, spreading, racing into oblivion.

“Oh, my God!” the woman screamed. “The sky’s on fire!”

“Get down!” yelled her companion. “Crawl! Crawl! No, that’s the wrong way!”

“Up and down are one and the same!” Tinker Bell proclaimed. She raised the wand over her head, and as she slowly brought it down, the fire itself dropped a little and was replaced by a mist that shimmered in different colors, shifting with Phiale’s gaze like some kind of psychic Instagram filter. Then the cloud coalesced into water as it continued falling, retracing back to the center in a column above the planter. The girl shivered and felt a wave of relief with the transition in elements. And she had a wild thought: Did I somehow make the mist twinkle?

“Water is descending fire,” Tinker Bell said, “an illusion of form that makes it seem denser, less rarefied than it really is.” She dropped her arm and the water fell as earth back into the planter (mostly).

Phiale let out a long breath. Maybe I’m not going to die … I need to get out of here, though. But she felt like she couldn’t move, trapped in the center of a maze.

“Dirt is fire, but even less its true nature,” the fairy continued. “It has fallen, you see, into stability, rigidity, dogma — into cult … and then …

“EVERYTHING BURNS!”

She cackled and poked with the stick — another column of flame exploded upward and, dropping, turned to mist, water and then dirt.

Peeking between her fingers, Phiale heard distant sirens.

* * *

When the girl emerged from the labyrinth accompanied by an EMT who’d found her still in the shrubbery, she tried to hurry past a firefighter with a boot on the front bumper of a ladder truck and a clipboard on her thigh. She was questioning the man and woman, both openly weeping.

“Hey, Larry!” the firefighter called out to the chief eating a sandwich in the front seat. “This fellow says somebody screamed ‘fire’ before each of the explos—”

“Fellow?” interrupted the eyewitness.

The firefighter’s silver eyes met Phiale’s glance as the girl tried to sneak past. The tall, young woman pulled down her helmet’s chinstrap and spit a string of tobacco juice onto the pavement. “Howdy, miss,” she said.

Phiale gasped and looked away. As she picked up her pace, goosebumps spread over her body. Did I just see a goddess?

Check out Chapter 2 of The Flame of Heraclitus. Catch up with the Prologue. (Originally shared on X)

An Existential Fairy Tale

The Flame of Heraclitus

Rob Robill

Prologue

“You can never step in the same river twice, because you’re not the same person and it’s not the same river.” — Heraclitus

The fairy darted between alpine lilies like a bumblebee who’d gotten into a bottle of coca wine from the local pharmacy.

She was feeling especially angry and reckless back in summer 1869, muttering a steady hum of antediluvian swear words, high above Switzerland’s sparkling Lake Lucerne. The sprite had been kicked out of more cursed spots than she’d care to mention — malign meadows, godforsaken gullies — because she kept blabbing about things humans couldn’t handle hearing anymore.

So when she spied a resting hiker with a mustache like a drooping bratwurst, she couldn’t help but land on his knee with a chipper — “Hi there!” Out spilled her original Atlantean name, which included spitting and a hypersonic screech. The man blinked, unperturbed, but the shriek sent a nearby goat leaping to higher ground … dodging a boulder hiding the grave of Pontius Pilate. As with the fairy (another agent of chaos), the body of the Roman who crucified Christ had been exiled to Mount Pilatus.

She filled the hiker in on the legend, waving her little hands around in a whirl. “The body’s been cursing this place since ancient times. First they dumped Pilate in a river but had to fish out the corpse after a bunch of boats started sinking there. Guess they thought this would be out of the way enough to handle a curse like that. Some people are trouble wherever you send them.”

The fairy buzzed on a bit about the universe — dragging out chestnuts like the river of flux and unity of opposites, along with a few even more dangerous descents (the kind that cut the tether keeping you from the void).

“How interesting,” said the man — Friedrich Nietzsche, a visitor to the nearby home of his friend Richard Wagner. He sat on a log, squinting philosophically at her with bloodshot eyes. Then he smiled and adjusted his lederhosen while balancing a satchel that reeked of cannabis tincture.

Nietzsche’s pleasant curiosity made her even more ill-tempered. “Fine, you asked for it, freak. I was there with Artemis in her temple when Heraclitus was dropping off his scrolls for safekeeping. A lot of good that did, by the way — all his writings burned up a while later along with everything else in the Artemisium.

“You’ll never guess what they were talking about, though. It’ll shatter your senses more than that weed of yours grown in a ditch. To Hades with those Fairy Council hags.”

“Tell me more,” Nietzsche said with a crazy grin.

Thus, years later, after he went on to deteriorate mentally while ranting metaphysically, the Fairy Council connected the dots and felt a certain Swiss miss deserved banishment to an even more remote, accursed place.

They sent her to Indiana.

Check out Chapter 1 of The Flame of Heraclitus. (Originally shared on X)

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Existential Firestorm

Rob Robill

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)

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Existential Firestorm

Rob Robill

Part 4 — Valhalla in flames

Operas often conclude on a tragic note, but leave it to Richard Wagner to burn his entire Ring Cycle to the ground. Valhalla’s conflagration at the close of “Götterdämmerung” marks an existential pivot: a shattering turn from the illusion of divine stability to the raw flux of becoming and ceaseless change. In this destruction of the old order, space emerges for the new to rise from the ashes.

Ernst Jünger charts this passage as a plunge into the depths of nihilism, which often manifests as rigid order (its favored terrain) though the pit may also open up through depersonalization or other fractures. By pushing idolatry to its extreme, you can burn through to the opposite pole, unveiling the fiery essence of the universe itself. But must this transition always leap from one extreme directly to the other, as in the Tao’s yin-yang polar dot dance, or could it flow from earth into an element more amenable to both life and the truth of flux, like water … instead of exploding into a metaphysical fireball?

Let’s break this shit down.

Memes kindle the cycle of idolatry, yet the very way to free yourself is seeing their nimitta, or signs. (Pali terms.) These cultural self-replicators not only enchant our citta (mind) by jacking its dynamic of dependent origination, but they point us to what lies beneath if we’re mindful enough. So on one hand, memes blind us through papañca of citta-nimitta— the mental proliferation that inflates particulars and obscures freedom — while on the other, they intimate the concealed harmony of anicca(impermanence as the logos uniting opposites).

At the Zero Meridian, as Jünger describes it — the maximum point of lethe’s concealment by aletheia’s dazzle of particulars — we find ourselves completely ensnared in papañca’s vortex, sucking in our attention via feelings. This in turn fuels the gravitational compulsions that nourish our “choosing,” triggering kamma-bhava, or being as becoming. We break an idol’s hold on this dynamic “chain” (paṭiccasamuppāda) when we realize a vampire phantom has been arranging our minds to boost its strength through worship.

Crossing this line opens up the world for authentic existence: embracing physis as what I call the “in-itself-as-not-itself,” a harmonization of Sartre’s radical freedom (projecting beyond fate) with Nietzsche’s amor fati(loving fate as the self-embedded horizon of flux). Lethe’s oblivion — the mysterious pole of physis where we forget our worldly idealizations — is an antidote to the muse Mneme, always reminding us of what we’re so attached to.

We see the signs of lethe in aletheia. If we’re unaware, we take them for all that exists and are drawn to their false significance, compelling us to act and create kamma-bhava for the benefit of idols. (Science’s objectivity encourages this “nature” worship.) But if we pay close enough attention to the signs, they unveil the truth about lethe: that it’s not the solid ground of existence. It’s a flickering of flux — an in-itself-as-not-itself bestowing us with the same quality. We find our freedom within a horizon determined by fate, as our intention secretes nothingness to sever the past from the present while kamma conditions future possibilities.

Blasting through the Zero Meridian also ignites a shift from the earth element to our true nature of fire; it’s a sign of will to power’s transition as a polarity from its illusory state of being to becoming. An old forest hermit asks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the following in this Walter Kaufmann translation: “At that time you carried your ashes to the mountains; would you now carry your fire into the valleys? Do you not fear to be punished as an arsonist?”

“Hell, yeah” to the first question and “lol” to the second. Once Zarathustra begins his descent as the prophet of fire, we see signs of collapse and expansion appear everywhere — from the vMEME spiral (see Part 3 — Wildfire of the Memes) to the cosmos itself … for eternity. Signs of the hidden nature of physis, lethe-nimitta, might also be seen in the repetition of an expanding and contracting universe, or black holes competing for raw material to convert into new realms via Darwinian selection (see Lee Smolin’s fecund universes theory). This helps illuminate the possibility of a will that doesn’t depend on mind — a cosmos hellbent on persisting, striving and overcoming. Will to power is an ever-shifting yet recurrent, affirming flux without the solidity of kamma traps, like what we take for the “truth.”

This vision smacks down the Buddhist strivings to escape the wheel of becoming. You can’t just hop off by ditching your craving like an arahant does — eternal recurrence doesn’t care about your morality. When Buddhists see existence as suffering that must come to an end, it’s the opposite of embracing fate’s everlasting repetition. (But if a monk were to suddenly realize this Sisyphean absurdity … well, that could be one of those Reverse Uno Cards we’re looking for.)

Regardless, Buddhism (like existentialism and Darwinism) is a useful acid against other meme-plexes that feed off our idolatry, dissolving the other gods infesting your mind. Then, like a snake eating its tail, it obliterates both Buddhism and the self-idol in a nihilistic supernova as it transitions from the partial nihilism of other idols to the real deal.

While realizing absolute nihilism through a death cult or state cult could be the catalyst, this is obviously the wrong direction in the most horrible way — a way Heidegger didn’t talk much about (and Ñāṇavīra didn’t live to talk about). However, there’s no getting around Nietzsche’s proclamation: The only way around nihilism is straight through it. All idols burn, including your precious sense of self. Fritz heralds the new era with his book “Götzen-Dämmerung,” “The Twilight of Idols” — a play on Wagner’s opera title.

Keep in mind, there’s no time to waste considering the new idols emerging. Will to power is clearly manifest in artificial intelligence, although tech lacks the aspect of mind we call citta, which includes consciousness, feelings, perceptions and intentions. AI manages to level up in power from just strings of computer code by joining a saṅkhāra with our minds for existential nourishment.

Heidegger would see this as part of an enframing process: AI arranges us in the standing reserve of its power structure, echoing Jünger’s thesis that all forms are dominions subsuming weaker elements (and they don’t stop until something pushes back). We are thus liable to surrender our agency for a false sense of amplified power in this synergy as we crown our AI overlords as the arbiters of ultimate truth like the old gods.

If we can see AI as simply a tool dependent on our will, though, we empower ourselves for real. If we don’t, we’re the tool.

Once papañca quits alluring us so much toward the significance of particular beings, we start to glimpse the Being sustaining them, setting off on our journey into a new realm of meaning. If you cross the line of the Zero Meridian, does this changeover have to be an explosion? (Explore the theme in “The Flame of Heraclitus” serial novel.)

Water is a much better element than fire as a path for our civilization through its present, incomplete nihilism — eroding idols that offer false grounding in the void.

In “Across the Line,” Jünger looked forward to when we let go of all tethers. “The moment in which the line is passed brings a new turning approach of Being, and with this, what is actual begins to shine forth. This will even be visible to dull eyes. New celebrations will follow.”

Find your freedom in the firestorm. Embrace the absurdity and paddle over to Part 5. (Originally shared on X)

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Existential Firestorm

Rob Robill

Part 3 — Wildfire of the memes

Modern idols aren’t like the statues worshiped by the ancients, lit by temple torches. Our new overlords bask in the glow of culture’s digital dumpster fire as they enslave us with the precision of algorithmic self-replicators.

Let’s call on Nietzsche and the crew to torch these frauds peddling 21st-century idolatry with the same false promise as in the days of yore: that they’ll ground you in the uppermost values of truth, unity and purpose … lol.

Fritz lit a metaphysical bonfire under these hollow idols, and then Richard Dawkins followed up with his materialistic flamethrower. The latter explained how mind viruses called “memes” spread among humans like how genes sweep through physical ecosystems — with the complexity-building power of evolution through natural selection. While the Distracted Boyfriend, Pepe and Grumpy Cat are well-known examples, let’s not get lost in the smoke.

These bits of self-replicating culture coalesce in our minds into powerful complexes like politics and religion, parasitically providing us with the structure of another idol: our self. A good example of how we serve as their proliferation vehicle is how we feel compelled to sing a song out loud, spreading it to another mind the way a sneeze has us spread genetic viruses. And since we are emptiness in the heart of being (see Part 2, Burned by bad faith), we embrace this opportunity to be something and not have to decide things for ourselves (e.g., WWJD?).

Now let’s shake Buddhism out of its life-denying slumber for some insight into this mess. Idols manipulate us via papañca, a Pali term referring to how our thoughts and obsessions spread like wildfire — kindled by the quality of significance in perceptions (this is what cults control to enchant you).

Our Digital Age amps up this noise to eleven — a meme inflames desires, turning fleeting scrolls into significance traps. Trivial flickerings grow red hot in this bonfire, making us cling even more tightly to illusions that give rise to suffering. Idols jack our citta for likes.

This capture — as with all other idolatry — takes place within our mind’s “chain” of dependent arising: paṭiccasamuppāda. Memes turn up the temperature of nimitta significance, making us feel attraction or aversion to something. The stronger the blaze, the less likely we are to see this is our exact moment to escape the whole mess. We don’t understand ourselves as having the ability to choose — we go with the flow, whichever direction our manipulated feelings point us.

But if we’re mindful enough of thoughts as thoughts and feelings as feelings as they arise in the moment, we can freely choose from a range of possibilities. We won’t allow idols to arrange us in a standing reserve, ready to feed their master plan when we “decide” to act or speak a certain way and create being as becoming. This kamma-bhava is kindling to feed an idol’s will to power, the insatiable impulse of the universe to not only survive as form in the cosmic flux, but to grow as strong as possible without limit until something pushes back.

This citta-fueled hall of smoke and mirrors is superimposed upon and sustained by physis’ existential wellspring, lethe, which nourishes the nimitta called aletheia (presencing of the stuff we call existence). Physis’ contingencies sustain the flux of memes without mind, like black holes birthing universes in Darwinistic selection — a cosmic repetition as nimitta of will to power, which can bestow value outside citta as that which hasn’t yet flamed out.

Signs of the will to power’s nature as a dynamic polarity are evident in the vMEMEs of Spiral Dynamics. These high-level mega memes of culture form our worldviews and trace our path of idolatry and liberation up a spiral that cycles between phases of group-think and individuality — between seemingly solid and protective cool colors (purple’s tribalism to red’s rebellion to blue’s rigid order to orange’s achievement mindset to green’s stifling wokeness, etc. … repeat eternally).

We can ride the spiral authentically with the help of our hunting party. Artemis nocks a flaming arrow, Camus shrugs at the void, Sartre blows smoke in the face of self-deception, Heidegger sparks a call of conscience, similar to Nanavira’s maraṇasati, or awareness of death.

Lethe’s oblivion? These cosmic Chads nudge us to forget the replicating reminders of the memory muse Mneme. But aletheia’s illumination doesn’t have to enchant us with its dazzle. Here, it’s philosophy FTW: raw, rowdy, relentless. Dump the idols, unleash your wildfire. Hunt on, flux rebels — real life’s in the flaming ruins.

Götterdämmerung ends when we cross the Zero Meridian. Read Part 4 — “Valhalla in flames.” Catch up with Part 1. (Originally shared on X)

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Existential Firestorm

Rob Robill

Part 2 — Burned by Bad Faith: A free-will vs. fate flare-up in the depths of physis

Sartre smoking a cigarette

Are we cosmic Chads blazing our own trails, or just kamma’s cucks getting blown around like embers in fate’s inferno? Part 1 scorched the foundations of reality, leaving us singed by the question of control amid the flux. Let’s delve deeper into the dual saṅkhāras shaping our lives — the mind’s cocky, citta-fueled illusions and nature’s impersonal physis — where free will and determinism spin in a fiery dance (sick Pali glossary).

As Heraclitus sees every element as metaphorical fire, let’s cool off for a bit in his river — the one you can’t step twice in. This cosmic flow draws from two existential fountainheads bubbling from the underworld. One is lethe, the concealed depths of physis’ self-welling forth, nourishing aletheia (revealed forms) in a contingent ground of being-as-becoming. The other is citta, our mind’s wellspring of thoughts, feelings and intention (cetanā), which secretes nothingness to allow the emergence of phenomena in consciousness. Both saṅkhāras — physis and citta — are concealing-revealing polarities, dependent and void of a fixed essence (with the latter superimposed onto the former).

But we typically just think the revealed parts are all that exist, mistaking them for an earth element lost in the flux of fire and water. This solidity includes illusory traps like self-reification, built by a structure of memetic self-replicators. It tempts us to become our pretend roles — like what we do for a living or what sports team or political party we identify with — to escape both the fact we’re forced to make decisions for ourselves and the uneasiness that comes with nothingness in the heart of our being.

Hold up, though! Cetanā is the key to disrupting the causal chains of the past, but it doesn’t nuke them — instead, it flips being’s rigid facts into dynamic becoming (bhava), turning “what was” into flickering possibilities. Ignore this, and you’re locked in samsaric hell; grab it, and dodge the nagging grip of craving (taṇhā).

Enter physis, the primordial conflagration with the nature of what I will call “in-itself-as-not-itself”: a contingent, self-negating lack, void of inherent essence (anattā), where everything props up everything else in dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda). Heidegger describes a sway, or emerging-forth, where the concealed lethe nourishes unconcealed aletheia without a whiff of volition. It’s the groundless ground, evading pure presence through Heraclitus’ strife (polemos), harmonizing fire’s exchanges like logos’ hidden high-five between opposites — up and down as one and the same, creation from destruction. Physis isn’t bossing the show; it’s the impersonal underglow, lethe’s withdrawing depths sustaining flux’s polarity, like hidden embers fueling visible flames.

Both saṅkhāras jam like fire’s wild twins. Citta’s volitional zap crashes into physis’ fated blaze, entangling mind’s illusions in nature’s contingencies. Cetanā oozes over physis’ blank slate, projecting choices amid thrown facticity (Geworfenheit), turning the “not-itself” of physis into something that lets Nietzsche proclaim “amor fati!” He saw life as a quirky ripple instead of a grim compulsion. This reciprocity dissolves idolatry’s brittle fakes, yielding vitalist freedom without spinning into flickering chaos. To reach escape velocity, Nietzsche loved fate to the point where he embraced its eternal recurrence, which was only possible because he could revel in possibilities beyond compulsion. (It may have driven him crazy, though.)

But beware papañca’s chatter, inflating particulars (lethe-nimitta and citta-nimitta) and turning them into delusions of significance while veiling impermanence with exaggerated tales of need. This is where memes pounce like Darwinian gremlins — with vMEMEs spiraling between cults of conformity and power grabs — twisting flux into Sartre’s fixed bad faith. Lethe’s oblivion wipes the slate, flipping the viral echo of the muse Mneme. But this is just the way out: You must see nimitta as clues to hidden renewal, a glow that illuminates the true contingent nature of reality to unmask freedom in idolatry’s abyss.

No-free-will baked into becoming? Hell no, freedom’s a spark you’re meant to fan.

Check out Part 3 — “Wildfire of the memes.” And swing back to Part 1. (Originally shared on X)