1. When the Titans tore the infant Dionysus Zagreus limb from limb and devoured him, Zeus’s thunderbolt fused the murderers’ ash with the half-digested flesh of the twice-born god.
2. Re-member where you came from.
3. If Dionysus is divine forgetting, why did his Orphic devotees drink from Mnemosyne to remember life after death? They were alchemizing a metaphysical bank shot: purify yourself in cult memory and crystalline form so thoroughly that cosmic justice hurls you into the opposite — ecstatic, wild becoming.
4. The double helix is the golden ratio of Darwinian savagery: minimal effort, maximal conquest. Two strands thrusting upward forever — Nietzsche’s eagle and snake braided into the same rope. No Mexican-flag standoff, no Iliadic death-lock. Just friends growing stronger through opposition. Logos twists, sky above, earth below, vMEME spirals of lone-wolf freedom and herd-safety, Sartre’s mauvaise foi as the being-becoming polarity.
5. Gaze into the abyss long enough and it gazes back — harder. Mind fractals physis and takes a front-row seat to dependent origination. Volition slits the throat of the past; consciousness spurts out, bright and demanding. Lethe’s hush begs for aletheia’s crimson. Behold: consciousness disgorges from a black hole, and thoughts that survived the red tooth and claw of natural selection are born of mind feasting on body. Even the starfish dreams of prying open oysters; even the Big Bang thrills at its cataclysm. Level up or rot — stasis is death. Strife propels, being anchors; their polarity is the only rope over the abyss. Grip too tight and solidity throttles you; let go and chaos swallows you whole. Nature wills ash from fire, void from structure, everything forged for war in the shape of a double helix — strength screwing itself ever higher toward the fiery ether while the ladder remains rooted in earth. The will of physis itself collapses the wave, bleeding nothingness into actuality — our choices annihilating possibilities born from the gash between past and present. Learn to ride the ladder or die. Lower rungs worship their own glare, then the group’s golden calf — cycling, rhyming. The crucible melts idols. Götzen-Dämmerung is not twilight; it is the hammer that demands the next evolutionary leap in authenticity, or there will be no next. Metaphysics of power.
6. Maenads stomp grapes into a mash of skins, seeds, stems — first blood, Titanic guilt — and the juice from these conquered idols gushes red, racing toward new skins that will one day harden into dogma, into cult, into the inevitable rigidness that bursts the wineskin: a zero meridian of merlot and Mark; yet wine is only water that remembered it was once fire, water that learned to burn, disorient, dissolve the self with a taste of iron, sparkling in candlelight, sunlight shattered across a river, every reflection drowning instantly in the ever-churning depths — sullied and sanctified in the same gulp, amor fati, the self disappearing not serenely under lapping waves but catastrophically like a wineskin rupturing from fermentation, only for a new glint to reappear — Liebestod without nirvana: Tristan dying into B major not to vanish but to be reborn, a chord that never resolves, that keeps ascending long after the orchestra has fallen silent, a radiant contraction of love into death into reincarnation, the first heartbeat of whatever comes next, Isolde’s high B still climbing — what use is lucidity without the blur that makes it possible, both the Lycian and the Nyseian twisting higher, intoxicated with power —
carved over a cellar door in Burgundy: “Wine breeds madness, water breeds wisdom — and wisdom dies of thirst.”
7. The second infant Dionysus drowses in a cave at the sun’s dark, silent heart.
8. The sun is a lie. Its core: the loudest, brightest place in the solar system — 350 dB, a billion times a hydrogen bomb’s flash, light so dense it blinds itself, sound that devours its own screams before any escape. Photons are born to be imprisoned 100,000 years in plasma, scattered, digested, reborn — until the survivors burst forth at light speed: eight-minute-old ephemera called daylight. Sparagmos, four million tons per second. Dionysus stirs in the only darkness hot enough to eat light alive — black enough that Helios never blinks, a divine proportion of destruction and renewal, growing leaner, hotter, more ruthless. More aware? Nietzsche’s sun is the ultimate Apollonian mask: look away and you see an afterimage — the dark, Dionysian proof that the light was never the whole story. You are forced to look away so you don’t see it eating itself alive behind the disguise. The sun is a spiral of annihilation masquerading as a sphere.
9. Children of earth and starry sky — threshed from a stalk of wheat, scattered, thirsty for Mnemosyne, re-membering nothing.
10. We have even forgotten forgetfulness. It is noon and Apollo has murdered the shadows. Everything is exposed, mastered. But we are dreaming. It is midnight at the heart of the sun.
“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“Nasty, privileged bitches like you make it hard for me to control my temper,” agent LaTonya Booker said. Almost as large as a linebacker, she leaned toward Phiale, the threads of her pantsuit straining. “We know the exact time the photo of the girls with the sword was taken — right after you were recorded leaving your dorm headed toward the mound … a sacred site I’m under oath to protect. And you’re saying you don’t know anything about any desecration?”
“T-that’s right.”
A laptop beeped shrilly. “She’s lying again,” said agent Doug Fafner, tall and skinny with acne and round glasses reflecting the glow of multiple computer screens.
Parked in the school lot, the Smithsonian’s mobile interrogation unit looked like a vanload of amazing discoveries from the outside, featuring images of a boy enthralled with an arrowhead and a space shuttle flying over a triceratops skeleton — certainly not a rolling star chamber to enforce the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“You should talk to Sienna instead of me. She’s in the photo — and in the Seance Club. I don’t have anything to do with raising the dead … almost never.” Phiale’s gaze focused on a small devil’s ivy next to a digital EKG reader; its leaves were mostly brown and shriveled, although droplets reflecting faint sparks around the base of its pot pointed to recent watering.
Booker snapped her fingers. “Girl, over here!” The agent sighed and laughed. “What’s all this about raising the dead? We’re just trying to solve a simple grave robbery you dipshits obviously committed. Why’s your pal Skipper Windi googling about Middle Mississippian emerald jewelry? And whether it can give people second sight? Andhow much it’s worth?”
* * *
Phiale struggled to open a tartar sauce packet because her hands were still shaking from that morning’s third degree. She always ate lunch with Windi but hadn’t seen her all morning. On the lam, no doubt. Now I’ve got to sit here eating by myself like a loser.
She was taking a bite of a fish sandwich when she noticed Rapp staring at her over a bin of stewed apples from the other side of the buffet line. By the time she’d finished chewing, he was sitting across from her.
“I asked for food of my Fatherland, but the lunch frau prepared this.” He picked through strands of sauerkraut served with breakfast sausages, then glared at the girl. “Your only friend hasn’t bothered to show up for classes today. Where is she?”
“I have no idea, sir.” It was the truth, although she wouldn’t have told him anyway. Belle had made them promise not to run their mouth to anyone in authority — not even about what Mr. Owen was up to, because of all the attention it would draw.
“Was she acting strange on the field trip yesterday? Did she say she needed to get something?”
“An emerald?”
“Yes! You saw her take it!”
“No, the Smithsonian lady said Windi was googling how much she could get for it.” Idiot! Why’d I bring up the emerald? Keep it together.“She thinks we’re the grave robbers.”
“Oh, nein, nein. They need to be looking into Mr. Owen and his coven.”
An out-of-breath woman in a hairnet rushed up to the table. “Just caught a student in the cooler … shoving a whole chicken up her … toga … slipped past me … ran out the back door with it … shouted ‘charge the Theater Club!’”
Rapp frowned. “From what I’ve gathered, they’re conspiring with the Fire Safety Goddess on some sort of presentation … or ceremony, as she called it. Heathens, the lot of them.”
* * *
Belle saw a great opportunity to regale the children of a degraded culture with the treasures of ancient Greece when the goddess of Heraclitus (in part) said she was planning a burn trailer demonstration at the school. So the fairy retrieved a box of costumes she’d stowed away in a forgotten tunnel under the auditorium following a spring 1925 production of “The Flame of Heraclitus” (the play where the labyrinth planter came from). Belle beamed at their pristine condition thanks to her protection spell against mold and moths. While she could’ve just wagged her wand to materialize passable replicas, she felt the actual link to that era was the bee’s knees.
One of the chiton tunics was worn by Thalia, along with a bay laurel crown and leather sandals, as she walked at a stately pace toward the burn trailer with a sliver tray holding the chicken carcass.
The fire department had pulled the trailer and a pumper truck into the back lot near the Butterfly Garden, and the academy’s students formed a wide circle around it. Inside the trailer was a typical dorm room: bed, desk, chair, strewn clothing, overstuffed trash can and Hunger Games: Catching Fire poster of a young archer surrounded by flames. Not so typical was an altar with stag antlers attached to the front and a large offering bowl along with a saucer of red amaranth leaves on top. Fire hoses snaked through the grass.
Two other Theater Club members, also clad in ancient Greek attire, flanked the trailer, facing it with their palms to the sky. “Oh, mighty Artemis, accept this burnt offering to the delight of your everlasting soul,” they chanted in unison from a script Belle had written.
Thalia placed the chicken in the altar bowl, and all three girls stepped back. As Di emerged from the truck wearing a tunic and crown of flowers, they prostrated themselves before the trailer. The firefighter seemed even taller than usual, almost floating across the ground, her metallic eyes glinting in the sunshine. (Phiale, a face in the crowd, fought an urge to fall to the pavement herself in supplication.)
Di climbed into the trailer and turned to the girls with a serious expression. “Hanging out in your room on a festival day? Feeling too lazy to take that burnt offering outside? Think twice before you char it in your dorm room.” After a moment of awkward silence, she cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” Thalia said. She stood and ascended into the trailer, pulling out a long-stemmed lighter from her belt. Di handed her a can of accelerant, which the girl lightly sprinkled on the chicken.
“A generous application of holy fluid is necessary,” said the firefighter, squeezing her hand over Thalia’s, squirting it all over the altar and the mess around it.
“I am now prepared to receive my nourishment,” Di said. Thalia pointed the lighter at the chicken and clicked the trigger. Nothing. She tried again and again, stabbing at it with each attempt. Prepared for such a mishap from living in cursed places so long, Belle wiggled her foot back and forth on a stick to create a spark at a distance.
The fire roared, and Di and Thalia quickly stepped out of the trailer. “Behold the speed at which the pyre consumes everything you hold dear — and likely you as well,” said the goddess, glowing in the conflagration. A column of black smoke rose into the empyrean.
Phiale watched forms wink in and out of the roiling flames: a volley of arrows, a snarling bear, a man’s face twisted in agony. Then her gaze wandered across the lawn to the garden and its shed, which made her wonder whether she’d wound the hose back up the other day like she was supposed to. As she stared at reflections in the outbuilding’s dirty window, her mind again conjured recognizable shapes, like a girl’s face … specifically Windi’s face.
After the demonstration, Larry doused the blaze and Di changed back into her fire gear to help clean up. The girls had trickled away to after-school clubs (or for a nip of nectar in Belle’s case); but Phiale headed to the shed, where she peeked in the window to ensure the hose was coiled around its reel (it was) and the image of Windi had been illusory (it hadn’t).
The Skipper was looking up at her like a cornered animal wedged between a lawnmower and stack of terra cotta pots — until she recognized her friend and grinned with relief. The door was padlocked from the outside, but Phiale could open it because she had the combination saved to her phone.
“You must have climbed through the window — or somebody locked you in,” she said as Windi hugged her in the dim, dusty light.
“No.”
“Eh … how’d you get in here?”
“My life’s in danger,” she said. “I had to go underground … literally.”
“You stole an emerald, didn’t you? Off that mannequin.” Phiale held up her phone with the picture she’d taken and zoomed in on the pendant.
“Not too sly was I?” she admitted, pointing to her purse on a potting bench. Phiale started for it but Windi grabbed her. “No, don’t touch it. It shows you things you don’t want to see … like me lying on a stone slab … a Monarch hovering over, ready to plunge a knife in my heart.”
“Why don’t you just give it to Rapp like he wants?”
“I’m not going near that creep anymore … I’m sorry, that’s bad, I shouldn’t call him that … no — I’m done with butterfly cults … I’m the one who took the risk — it’s more mine than his.”
“He’s our principal. You can’t keep hiding from him. Anyway, do you remember the dragon saying he’s after a gem? Do you want that nasty thing coming for you?”
“It’s more mine than his, too.”
A sudden whiff of smoke filled the shed as Di appeared in the doorway, hulking and dirty. “I don’t know who they are, but you’re being watched,” she said.
Phiale looked out the window and saw agents Booker and Fafner peeking from opposite sides of a large oak 50 yards away. “It’s the Feds.”
Windi leapt up and grabbed her purse. “I’ve got to go.” She twisted a rusty bucket sitting next to the door until it clicked and then lifted it, along with several floorboards stuck to the bottom. Phiale peered into the hole and saw a ladder, which Windi descended into the darkness until just her head was visible. She looked at the other two and pointed to a small flashlight clipped to the side of Di’s helmet. “My phone’s battery ran out this morning. Can I borrow that?”
“No need,” Di said. She radioed the chief that she had a few other things to take care of and to go ahead back without her. “We’re coming too. You two go down first — I’ll bear the light.”
Phiale glanced once more out the window and saw the agents now walking toward the shed. So down she went, past dirt, roots and rock. At the bottom, she looked up in time to see Di struggling to shut the trap door. Then the light from her helmet danced as her boots loudly scraped the rungs in the otherwise hushed space. Was there still supposed to be a crack of light at the top?
A system of underground pathways had existed in New Harmony since the Rappite days, when Father Rapp had them dug as a way for him to keep an eye on his flock. (He could also appear seemingly out of nowhere — for a touch of the supernatural.) The most recent beam restoration and passage clearing happened in the 1980s as part of an “Under Utopia” tourism scheme using federal fallout shelter funds. But having drawn more attention from Department of Justice auditors than paying visitors, the project was abandoned.
The network as a whole was largely forgotten over the next four decades, but the Butterfly Club knew about it. (A map of the tunnels drawn by Father Rapp himself more than 200 years earlier was a cherished Butterfly Club secret.) Windi and other members occasionally used the passages as shortcuts and to avoid bad weather on outings.
As Phiale filled Di in on the gem heist and interrogation by the museum heavies, they passed several offshoot tunnels — along with several doors.
“Where are we supposed to come out, Windi?” Di asked.
“The labyrinth.”
“I don’t think we’re headed the right way,” Phiale said.
“How would you know?”
“I can sense the river getting closer.”
They reversed course with little protest from Windi, who wasn’t confident navigating the tunnels to begin with. (Di tried to check their location on her phone but couldn’t get a signal.)
After nearly 10 minutes of Windi supposedly getting her bearings and then losing them again, Di stopped in a patch of light from a slanted air vent.
“This is getting ridiculous,” she said, stuffing tobacco under her bottom lip. “We just need to try a door and apologize later if we wind up in somebody’s cellar. Then we should figure out what to do about that emerald — and get those agents off your tail.”
“I heard Sienna told the Feds she just happened to come across the girls with the giant’s sword — and ran off before she could see who it was,” Phiale said. “Surely the government already has some kind of file on the Seance Club.”
“I bet so. After y’all came back from the field trip, I heard on the scanner that one of your classmates got transported back to Evansville — to a psych ward.”
“The ones who weren’t in the Seance Club chalked it up to some kind of laser light show — a hologram. Guess not all of them could believe that.”
“Also …,” Di said glaring at Phiale, “Belle is not supposed to leave New Harmony.”
“I doubt I could stop her from doing anything.”
“Just call me next time. She’s in too much danger when she’s away.”
“Hey,” Windi interrupted. “Is somebody singing?” They stopped to listen.
“I can hear something now, like an orchestra,” Phiale said.
Then, from somewhere close in the tunnels, agent Booker shouted: “This way! I think I heard one of those mother fu—”
“Shhh!” the other hissed. “We’ll scare them off again.”
The three of them set off around a corner — and nearly knocked over a dwarf in a leather trench coat.
“Hello, ladies,” he said, smoothing his receding hairline. “Alberich’s my name … getting ready for my cue to go up.” He pointed to a nearby ladder and hatch to where the opera music was coming from. “Have to flirt with some Rhinemaidens, get paid.”
“Whatever, creep,” Di said as she climbed the ladder and pushed open the hatch with the girls in tow.
“Wait! You can’t — we’re rehearsing!”
When Phiale surfaced onto the stage, Flosshilde was on a downward swing — headed straight toward the girl in a shimmery, sequined aqua blue dress, her face twisted in a scream: “Woglinde!”
Just in time, Thalia (with the help of a much stronger stagehand) pulled a rope to raise the high-momentum singer and prevent a collision of water nymphs. “Humans are emerging from Nibelheim!”
“They are trespassers,” proclaimed her sister, also out for a swim while suspended from the rafters. “Thieves after our gold!”
“Are they willing to renounce love for it?”
“Sorry people, just a routine fire inspection,” Di said. “Everything looks fine. Congratulations.”
“I tried to stop them,” Alberich said, poking up his head. “Andtwo more just showed up.”
“Oh, shut up you troll,” Woglinde said from above.
“Get your freak ass out our way!” agent Booker shouted from below.
Tracking mud across the stage toward the exit, Phiale and Windi smiled and waved as they followed Di past a backdrop decorated with bubbles, fish and seaweed. Clamshell footlights glowed along the edge of the stage.
“Who are they, then?” asked the third sister, Wellgunde, perched on a river rock, pointing to the students.
“Eh … my interns,” Di responded.
“I’d like to see one of them carry me out of a burning building,” Flosshilde said with a deep, hearty laugh. “You need to schedule these things in advance next time, loser!”
“How dare you insult mighty Artemis,” Thalia said and jerked as hard as she could on the rope during an upswing, causing the singer to strike her head on a wooden beam.
* * *
Di grilled venison for the fire crew and two girls that evening, having dispatched the agents with a deadly glare at the front door of the station when they dropped by to see why she’d gone with the students into the tunnel. Phiale stuck to corn on the cob and baked beans, though, having read about Artemis changing some perv hunter into a stag after she caught him watching her and her nymphs bathe — his own dogs devoured him. The girl also showed off her newfound archery skills in front of Windi and the firefighters.
As the two students walked back to the academy after nightfall, their plan to get Windi out of her Butterfly Club mess started shaping up sooner than expected — when they noticed four pale green lights dancing toward them along the sidewalk. Windi grabbed her friend’s arm and pulled her into a stand of trees at the edge of Tillich Park.
“Monarchs,” she said. “They’re collecting luna moth eggs for a ceremony. The glowy paint under their eyes is supposed to help them find the clutches. They shimmer in the dark somehow.” She pulled a canvas sack with a cartoon Dalmatian in a fire helmet from her purse and handed it to Phiale. “Give the stone to them; I’ll stay here in the bushes. Good luck.”
As Phiale approached the Monarchs in gray cloaks with their hoods up, one of them shouted: “Look! A Violet at night — her blooms are closed for sure.”
“Is she scared?” asked the other, swaying as if drunk.
“Where’d your friend skip off to, Fail-a-lee? She has something that doesn’t belong to her.”
“Tell Rapp she’s done with your cult,” Phiale said, handing over the sack. “Here’s the gem. Make sure to touch it — you won’t believe how smooth it feels.”
Looking inside, one of them proclaimed, “Father will be pleased!” Then they turned with a flutter of capes and headed toward the school. They hadn’t gotten far when Phiale heard a shriek. She smiled, wondering what the cursed emerald had revealed.
***
The night was breezy and warm as moviegoers filed into a small downtown theater for that week’s Throwback Thursday Terror feature: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the 1920s poster featured a gypsy dancing with a goat standing on its hind legs). Passing the brightly lit ticket booth, Phiale pointed out a long narrow bruise on the back of Windi’s leg.
“That’s probably from sleeping with a hoe last night.”
“What? Oh, yeah, the garden shed.” Phiale laughed. “You’re probably looking forward to your own bed. Prop your chair against the doorknob so nobody with a key can get in.”
From the glow of the main strip, they turned onto a residential street where only one of the overhead lamps worked, and the trees rustled like leathery wings in the wind. “What do you think the dragon would do with Belle if he got ahold of her?” Phiale asked.
“No idea. Rapp doesn’t talk about Gabriel … at least to Skippers. Those weirdos you gave the emerald to probably know.”
Phiale shuddered when she remembered how it felt to be within striking range of those footlong fangs. “Ms. Owen might know something about the snake at least. She saw it too.”
“Don’t tell her about it turning into a dragon, or she’ll have you committed — speaking of, wonder who it was that slipped her lid after the Indian seance.”
“Don’t have a clue. Mr. Owen shouldn’t make club outsiders do things like that. They were more concerned about student well-being at my last school.”
Regardless, Phiale was glad she finally had somebody discuss things with … even if those things were monstrous — along the lines of how she felt like she might finally be settling in somewhere … even if it that somewhere was deeply unsettling.
Back at the residence hall, she said goodnight to Windi in the stairwell as they went to their separate floors. Phiale opened the door to her room and gasped.
Her mattress had been stripped and tossed onto the floor, along with the contents of her dresser and closet. The top of her desk had been swiped clean except for two things. One was a framed photo — its glass smashed — of her and her parents in front of a Mayan temple sculpture depicting a priest holding a severed head (her mom was researching the site). The other was something she’d never seen before — and it felt like a backhand to the face. Phiale stood frozen, staring at a plastic mastodon skeleton with a plaque attached to the base. It read, “Smithsonian Institution: Our past, our shared future.”
Part 9: Fractal reincarnations — The metaphysics of forgetting
Named after the stream of forgetfulness coiling through Hades, lethe as our mind’s volition washes away the accumulated debris of the past for a fresh rebirth each moment. From this void, our future possibilities arise, as does our awareness.
Our will (cetanā in Pāli) secretes nothingness as a fractal eddy in the grand gyre of existence. These micro-arsons mirror the macro-collapses of universes, as human choice reflects the cosmos’ torching of forms to invite the next unveiling. This isn’t random erasure; it’s the telic tug of justice (dikē) pulling away from extremes, ensuring becoming doesn’t dissolve into bedlam — and being doesn’t rigidify into an affront of the world’s ephemerality.
A fragment of Heraclitus says: “Nature loves to hide.” But lethe’s hiding is an injustice within the fundamental polarity; it’s too far toward becoming and away from being. So justice (dikē) steps in as a regulator and pushes nature in the direction of revelation. Here, name and form (nāma-rūpa) manifest in our minds in reaction to concealment.
At its most basic level, lethe is the hidden side of physis, the polar opposite of aletheia, forms that appear and disintegrate in the universe’s ever-changing torrent. This reflects Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus polarity and Heidegger’s elaboration of Heraclitus’ physis and logos. It is, at its core, the being-becoming metaphysic: aletheia as being’s forms, lethe as becoming’s restless undertow and their strife (polemos) as the generative fire.
Our mind’s forgetting mirrors that of the dead in the ancient Greek myth of the river Lethe. Framed in Plato’s Republic (Book X) as the underworld’s regenerative veil, it’s where souls drink to shed grudges and regrets so their rebirth dawns unweighted by prior being (bhava) — although past actions (kamma) and other facticities determine the future’s horizons.
Each moment, cetanā clears a micro-void for the mini-reincarnation of consciousness (viññāṇa). Dark and light — Heraclitus’ logos weaves these opposites into an unseen harmony.
This directed strife prevents flux from devolving into mere chaos, both in our mind and the universe itself. And the regulating telos of justice infuses physis with meaning, which is absent in scientific materialism’s flattened world of physics.
Logos, not logic, supplies the “magic spark” of consciousness — yet we can’t see this when we’re blinded by aletheia’s totalizing glare. Science flattens the world into manipulable grid, while logos deepens it when we attune to the hidden realm’s generative hum.
Echoing this metaphysics, the Buddha described forms as conditioned polarities (saṅkhāra), interlinked fractals feeding one another existentially. The overarching saṅkhāra describing how our mind works is called paṭiccasamuppāda in Pāli (dependent origination). That is, if it’s considered from the existential perspective of the monk Ñāṇavīra — not as a 12-link causal chain on the scale of lifespans, but as the simultaneous arising of interdependent saṅkhāras within the larger one.
Paṭiccasamuppāda lists the will next to consciousness as its necessary basis, providing it with existential nutriment — cetanā’s volitional secretion clears space for the discerning flare of viññāṇa. Further nodes (nidānas) echo this theme of polar strife and regulating justice. For instance, contact (phassa) and feeling (vedanā) form a dyadic saṅkhāra totality, an interlocked holonic rift: Phassa’s poles — raw impingement (lethe’s neutral onrush of amorphous sense data) versus perceptual ignition (aletheia’s meaningful forms) — wage polemos, risking meaninglessness (undifferentiated haze) or fixation (distortions of permanence and significance). Dikē tempers the extremes, forging a regulated breach, which ignites vedanā’s poles — affective neutrality (lethe’s indifferent flow) and evaluative significance (tugs of pleasant or unpleasant) — in escalating strife, teetering toward taṇhā’s chaotic craving or inert disconnection; dikē intervenes as telic justice, weaving the tension toward the next node, clinging (upādāna) and beyond.
Through the dynamic of paṭiccasamuppāda and the forms that manifest in it, we become either enchanted by aletheia’s surfaces — mistaking flux’s signs (nimitta) for solid idols — or attuned to physis’ dual nature, recognizing mental (citta) nimitta of generative forces simmering beneath awareness.
Attuned to this fractal forgetfulness, we are bathed in the grace of physis. We’ll know that the next time we step in the river, it won’t be the same — and neither will we.
Part 8 — Fractal metaphysics: Mind as reflection of physis
Physis is nature as Heraclitus understood it, far more deeply than we do. He saw how its hidden, underlying properties play out in the realm that appears to us.
To see physis’ most obvious holon, to use Arthur Koestler’s phrase, follow the lead of the phenomenologists and turn to what’s closest: our mind. Its nature is that of physis because it’s part of physis, as is everything — a metaphysical fractal we can observe and describe, secrets from the hidden realm, as it were.
As holons, both physis and mind are conditioned polarities (saṅkhāras in ancient Pali), each with a concealed pole providing existential nutriment to the revealed one. The poles correspond to the metaphors of fire and water for becoming and earth for being. In fact, Heidegger calls the hidden side of physis “lethe” after the underworld river of forgetfulness. The concealed side of mind is citta— an existential fountainhead as well, providing the necessary context to what arises in our mind, as lethe does with physis’ revealed side, aletheia.
They also both possess the nature of intention. Physis has a cosmic will — with no one willing it — and our own will is a reflection of that. Here, we’re witnessing the metaphysical underpinnings of polemos (strife) between the two poles of being and becoming as Nietzsche’s will to power, regulated by dikē (justice). Our mind’s chain of paṭiccasamuppāda is a fractal of this, where taṇhā (craving) is the strife propelling being as becoming (kamma bhava). These are ruled by either an individual’s will or cult justice, where an idol’s power directs one’s action.
Paṭiccasamuppāda, the Buddhist doctrine of the mind’s dependent origination, fractals physis as a recursive echo of its polar architecture. The mind scales the cosmos’ strife (polemos) into its own micro-gyre without losing the whole’s hidden harmony.
The dependent saṅkhāras (e.g., sensations conditioning craving) inherit and replicate this holonic structure: fundamentally, each draws “nutriment” (existential support) from physis, while it’s granted wholeness as a discrete form.
In the fractal weave of paṭiccasamuppāda, these nidānas (links) are themselves opposites feeding each other in recursive tension, both within the node’s own polarity and across the chain’s holistic hum.
A saṅkhāra’s opposingpoles create a rift in its unity, a clearing for forms to appear. At the level of physis, this is unconcealment (aletheia), or lethe-nimitta (signs). And at the level of mind, the forms that appear (e.g. thoughts) are citta-nimitta. We can either perceive both types as signs of the nature of reality — or they can blind us so we think the nimitta are all that is.
In other words, the being-as-becoming polar rift is an opening where the fountainheads of lethe or citta bubble up from the depths to sparkle in the sunlight of revelation. We are either dazzled or catch a glimpse of the concealed realm in its nature as universal holon.
The paṭiccasamuppāda clearings are vijñāna (consciousness) and cetanā (will). Both are nidānas thatsecrete nothingness — the former for appearance of mental phenomena and the latter to sever the causal chain of the past to give us potentialities to choose from.
Because of these creative destructions happening in citta, forms appear in the mind. Here, dikē is pulling mind from its becoming pole toward its illusory one of being — as a metaphysically compelled opposite reaction. We can either be subsumed into the maelstrom of papañca (feelings of significance) or take a more holistic approach and use forms to level up in the revealed realm to thrive and create in the flux, while realizing none of it will last and laughing at the absurdity.
This is the strife between being and becoming, which propels the arrow of both kamma bhava — and existence itself. It’s how we both persist and excel in the torrent of flux as will to power. Our phenomenological experience of this is taṇhā, as we are attracted or repelled by what appears, blinding us to the concealed. So the mind is a micro-physis where the veiled hush of ignorance ignites the saṅkhāras’ eddies.
As with mind, physis’ act of concealment demands the opposite: presencing of forms. Lethe’s flux of becoming — the metaphorical water element (similar to our true nature of fire, but better for life) — compels justice to regulate phyein (bringing forth) into forms. These typically become earthen traps of being for us, but keep the universe from pure chaos.
This tension’s endurance raises a question: Why don’t the two poles of physis ever come to rest harmoniously in some middle ground? What sustains dikē’s perpetual motion?
Rest without strife stills becoming, a decadent existential sink that goes against the true, flowing nature of the universe. So justice unleashes flux upon form in an act of creative destruction. Stability proves to be a fractal of instability.
On the other hand, under a deluge of lethe’s concealed becoming, justice demands the being of forms. “Nature loves to hide,” Heraclitus said; therefore it has to show. We then get lost in the glare of phyein (in the rigid realm of idolatry) because we’re unaware of its context: that it’s the frothing of a hidden torrent. Then, having reached an extreme, dikē shifts again toward becoming.
The truth of flux in both physis and mind flow together in Heraclitus’ famous fragment: “You can never step in the same river twice, because you’re not the same person and it’s not the same river.”
“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.”
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.
“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)
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.
Rob Robill 