Tag: Heraclitus

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 1 — Heraclitus: Flux is lit … and wet

When Heraclitus said all is fire, he wasn’t just flicking his Bic.

Metaphorically, the universe has the nature of flames. Everything — including us — is born and consumed in an eternal dance of creation and destruction.

That all existents share the quality of impermanence, or anicca in ancient Pali, is glaringly obvious. But here’s the lit part: Everything is hungry for metaphysical fuel to not only keep blazing — but grow as strong as possible as a form of dominion.

Heraclitus also compares existence to water in a river. Far from dampening the main metaphor, he points out how you can never step in the same river twice because you’re not the same person and it’s not the same river. This cosmic watercourse is continually replenished by two types of what I will call existential fountainheads, hidden springs from the underworld.

One is fed by lethe, a Heideggerian term resonant of the mythical river where the dead drink to forget their earthly concerns before reincarnation. Lethe is the concealed aspect of physis — nature’s self-welling forth as a being-as-becoming polarity providing the “contingent ground” of everything as not-itself. It’s the existential fountainhead providing refreshment to aletheia, which is the other part of physis — the one revealing itself to us. Lethe is Nietzsche’s mysterious Dionysian force complementing aletheia, the realm of visible Apollonian forms tempting our gaze.

Superimposed existentially upon this is another polarity of dependent, contingent existence — called a saṅkhāra in Pali. This is mind, or citta, which is an existential fountainhead for your thoughts, feelings, intention (cetanā) and consciousness.

Both saṅkhāras — citta and physis — are concealing-revealing contingent polarities as opposed to complete things in themselves. Citta secretes nothingness, allowing phenomena to appear in consciousness (among other profound effects making us feel uneasy from a lack of being) — and Plato was mistaken to think the wellspring of physis is a world of absolute form instead of a raging underground river.

While we can’t see the fountainheads directly, we can intuit their nature via their dependently arisen signs. Called nimitta in Pali, these revealed aspects of physis and citta can be either dangerous illusions or keys to liberation. The trick is to not let aletheia — lethe-nimitta — blind us to the more mysterious flux of existence on the one hand, while, on the other, keeping the forms that are appearing in our mind — citta-nimitta — from being hijacked by idols. These false gods include your self-idol, which is composed of Darwinian (and parasitic) cultural memes making you think you are being — as opposed to your true nature of becoming.

Do we have the freedom to pull out of this honeytrap, or are we just kamma’s cuck?

Read Part 2: “Burned by Bad Faith.” (Originally shared on X)