Friday, February 23, 2024

The Truth of This World

 You watch anime, and someone busts out the [truth of this world] line followed by extreme sewage. Just for a second - and this is exactly why they use the line - you get excited. Yes, you sense, there is a deeper truth, and wouldn't it be neat if someone told you?

 The truth of this world is that it's the underworld.

 You are already dead. This is the afterlife. You are a shade or shadow of something that was once alive, but isn't anymore.

 There is no good place. No Elysian Fields or Valhalla. There is this; if it's bad, it's because you make it that way. 


 The purpose of life is irrelevant to you.

 The purpose of the afterlife is to accept that you're already dead. 

 Impermance is a blessing, but nothing is perfect, and it has its limits. You have gone beyond these limits, and done something that cannot be reversed.
 You might as well stop fighting and get comfortable, because you already lost. It's already over, the audience has gone home, housekeeping is cleaning the stands. It's already too late.

 If you don't, it doesn't matter much, though. Dying will hurt, and then you will be reborn to suffer again. You're already dead, so your delinquency won't affect anyone but fellow delinquents, especially yourself. Beyond impermanence, you cannot make any meaningful changes at all.


 You can see how this truth tends to get lost easily. It has been discovered nearly a dozen times, and yet it remains unknown.
 Even in the unlikely event that anyone can step outside the cave long enough to believe me, it will be forgotten again, and swiftly. This ignorance, too, is permanent.

 Stepping out of Plato's cave is tricky. Plato made a mistake. You are not watching the shadows, you are the shadows. If there is a puppeteer, it is your own corpse. The motion you perceive is nothing but rigor mortis. 

 The shadow can't step outside the cave; it cannot leave the hellish fire. Not without dramatic existence-altering consequences. 


 Why does mortal progress seem to fail to result in any, you know, progress? Why can't society advance without tearing itself to pieces? Growth is life. You can't grow, you're already dead.

 As mortal society expands in some fashion, it merely widens the delta between physical reality and spiritual reality, increasing the pressure pushing them back together. Mortals are already pushing as hard as they can; when they shift their vitality toward a different end, the previous must collapse. 

 Any new form of false life must, will be, and is paid for by a new manifestation of real decay. 

 If mortals accepted their profound mortality, there would be nobody around to be upset with the state of the world. Continued mortality relies on continued delusion. Continued rebellion against Existence.


 "Life is struggle." Instead, afterlife is struggle; you struggle against spiritual reality. If you hadn't struggled you wouldn't have ended up here.
 The solution is to stop struggling. Get comfortable while you wait for the inevitable. Accept the truth.


 You sense that there is something wrong about dying. You sense that you are entitled to immortality.
 It's true. You were. Past tense. Immortals aren't supposed to die. You screwed up so fucking bad you died anyway. You killed yourself, or did something so foolish it might as well have been suicide. They say the dead resent the living. They're wrong; some of the living resent life, and therefore they die.

 Those who die honourably die gracefully. They don't struggle against the process and they don't end up in the afterlife. You were one of the other ones. 


 You can't do anything anymore, but you also can't fuck up any more than you already have. Stop worrying.


 I hypothesize that population growth has been a necessary evil. The particularly dysfunctional dead can't survive infancy, yet nobody expects a newborn to be able to accept their own death. Fun fact: if something kills you in the underworld you end up in the afterlife. These kinds of soul fragments build up over time, producing a new pressure. Technology must advance that they might survive long enough to develop a dead fake pseudo-ego, which can then ritually accept their own history. 

 Bluntly, all these leftists are dead soul backlogs. 

 Eugenics doesn't work, but not because it's illogical; it isn't. Eugenics doesn't work because it's contrary to the fundamental nature of the underworld. This world is precisely where those who don't deserve to be alive end up. To try to prevent the deformed and deranged from being born is to try to hold back the tides; you're one of them. Eugenics, run consistently, would have blocked the eugenicist. If you weren't deranged, you wouldn't have been born here in the first place.

 Naturally, when the underworld is deluged with particularly dead shades, it becomes particularly noxious.

 

 You sense that you've forgotten something. You have. You've forgotten who you really are and what really happened to you.

 Everything that happens in this world is little more than reenactions. The dead cannot create. Sauron can only mock. You dream of the past, visions muddled and fuzzy. You carry out these dreams in real life. Truly you become a shadow of what you once were. 

 You sense that you deserve more than this. That you're supposed to be more than this. It was true. Past tense. You were once something you would call a god.

 You forgot because it hurts too much to remember. The pain of being forced to die is so strong even the memory of it can kill you. You reenact, and you reenact the forgetting. You try to remember how it ends, but it ends, so if you succeed, you forget.

 It is best that it remains forgotten. Try to find a way to accept what is, rather than having to accept what was. 

 Rather than trying to remember, it would be better to forget. Forget not merely the past, but the present. Forget even the future. You already have nothing to live for, because you're not alive. However, deep in your heart, you can't forget. You ended up in the afterlife because you didn't accept what happened while it was happening. To leave, to end the underworld cycle, you must become the kind of person who would have accepted. You must kill the manifestations of yourself that rejected it. 

 You can't accept the truth by forgetting it.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

This one fucked me up. Thank you Alrenous

Alrenous said...

I live to serve.

Or perhaps not, as the case may be.

rezzealaux said...

I don't see how this fits with the previous post.

Alrenous said...

I don't see any particularly relation.

rezzealaux said...

The previous post says comfort bad. This one says comfort good.

Alrenous said...

This is an example of the problem. It's a problem because I don't already know the solution.

Alrenous said...

I said that having comfort as a highest ideal is bad. Silk sheets aren't the be-all and end-all of religion and philosophy. Can't be, shouldn't be.

rezzealaux said...

Of course, highest good discussion.
"This is an example of the problem" Which is the problem and which is the example?
A repeated image of yours is abyss truth pierces you. This is framed as good, because it's not comfort. Isn't having a higher ambition than comfort also rather inherent to comfort?
Maybe more directly, is it Accepting Ignorance or Rejecting Ignorance? Normally I think either could point to the same thing but this immortal return framing seems to say there is a correct and incorrect choice.

rezzealaux said...

idea appearing lately on other topics that applies here is old xcb quote,

"Zhuangzi describes a sage who was capable of procuring an abundant harvest for others precisely because he did not share in it [...] this can be tied back to the idea [..] that it is impossible to exert control over a system to which one is beholden."

this seems to answer the question though i cant (skill issue) delineate it without speaking in contradictions. maybe it requires two dimensions. its the 'hold your weapon loosely' thing. or your ouija board thing but from the other direction.

rezzealaux said...

now that i think about it that's the same as the heroic loser post. which is the same as greedygoblin on morons and slackers.
supposing dead immortal, the requirement is to be comfortable with the idea that has happened. after that the other things become possible, which in the greater scope is "the" "point" and "higher" than "just comfort".

Alrenous said...

Comfort can be necessary but not sufficient.

Going beyond comfort isn't necessarily uncomfortable.

As before, I am uncomfortable with comfort being the highest good. The fact [only comfort] is itself uncomfortable is the problem.

Of course, going beyond comfort may be uncomfortable, but doing it correctly is better than comfort, as that's the point.

Alrenous said...

Being explicit: I believe it is normally necessary to get comfortable in order to go beyond comfort. A [walk before run] thing. Sometimes this means working out how to get meta-comfortable without giving up comfort, other times it's getting comfortable with the idea of giving up comfort for something better.

However, to verify any of this first means having to know what meta-comfort is. Explicitly and concretely. That is: the stellar path includes the solar path as a proper subset.

rezzealaux said...

i feel problem with the/highest/capital/meta is a matter of defining scope/domain. it's not
"comfort = bad", it's "comfort *here *and then what? oh nothing" that's bad. in the perfection is bad because it's dead sense. words are dead. words being spoken could possibly be not dead. maybe that's the difference with oral vs written too.