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Bakker's TGO Excerpts II: Mining our Merest Fraction [Spoilers]s


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34 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Okay - so answer me this, then. What is the central 'it' of the metaphysical whodunnit that Bakker has said this is? We might not have enough information, and that's cool (though seriously after 5 books not knowing kinda sucks) - but if it isn't the breaking of the God into the gods, what was it? 

`And if it was, the 'who' part of the 'whodunit' kind of implies figuring out that mystery as an actor, no?

 

29 minutes ago, Baztek said:

No, it's the breaking of the gods, it's just that if you have an actor, some kind of villain twirling his metaphysical moustache who is responsible for the breaking of the gods, things are no longer One, you kind of have to explain what this guy is doing existing in the One all by his lonesome. I mean I'm sure Bakker could sell if it he really wanted to, but I don't see it. I think the answer will be a philosophical one, not necessarily a historical event or person. 

Yeah I don't take "whodunnit" as a term to necessarily be interpreted literally. Or at the least I don't think it has to do with the breaking of the God, I think that's just a condition on which the Bakkerverse has to come from. I could see the God being okay until the evolution of the first self-aware species, so perhaps in that sense there's a "who" that is "responsible" and maybe that first species was on Earwa (the Nonmen?).

But like Baztek I think the "whodunnit" concerns the question of why there is damnation and how does one escape this damnation.

If there is a villain it's the Hundred who've set up the metaphysics to ensure damnation is the norm, in the same way the Archons are the villains of Gnosticism. The Consult and Dunyain are lesser evils that arguably, inevitably arise from the conditions the Hundred have imposed on ensouled life. 

Since every ensouled being seems to possess self-aware consciousness it seems to me that the God would be broken way before the development of Inchies/Nonmen/etc. 

32 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

You're assuming what came before starts what came after. You're assuming the break was caused by something before it happened. You are Dunyain. 

I feel like introducing a lot of bizarre time loops leading back to the God breaking really contradicts the traditions Bakker has drawn from...and it feels indefensible philosophically IMO...but maybe the Inchies corrupted the Hundred in some way. I mean it does seem we have - based on Kellhus' lectures about Here-ness & the God - a reality where Buddhist/Hindu/Neoplatonist ideas apply...but the lesser gods who should be maintaining creation instead went bonkers...

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I feel like introducing a lot of bizarre time loops leading back to the God breaking really contradicts the traditions Bakker has drawn from...and it feels indefensible philosophically IMO...but maybe the Inchies corrupted the Hundred in some way. I mean it does seem we have - based on Kellhus' lectures about Here-ness & the God - a reality where Buddhist/Hindu/Neoplatonist ideas apply...but the lesser gods who should be maintaining creation instead went bonkers...

Philosophically, maybe. Then again, the idea that philosophy here is just wrong is kind of a big deal, no? The Logos is without beginning or end...is wrong. There is a clear beginning. There is a clear end. There is an entire causal light cone here. 

Another way to think of it is not as bizarre time loops, but as something akin to Dune and Leto. With future sight the world became entirely deterministic. Everything had to happen in the way that it did, and everything happened precisely as thought. The goal was to destroy determinism and to stop the watcher that saw the world and collapsed its wave function - and that watcher saw time at all points along its light cone. 

So the breaking of the Gods happens at the point of the creation of the God. And it happens because it must happen, because if it doesn't the God doesn't come about. It is White Luck taken to its ultimate extreme. It is the Eschaton of the Stross world, where everything in its past is deterministic because it exists in the future.

This also explains the view of the Gods and why they cannot perceive the No-God. The Gods see everything that was created in their causal frame, up until the eschatological end of the world. All of it happens and will happen and does happen, and it has to because if it didn't, there wouldn't be the causal frame. There is no chance, only history. The No-God was created outside that causal frame. They are entirely blind to its existence because they can only perceive things that are part of their own existence. 

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If there is a villain it's the Hundred who've set up the metaphysics to ensure damnation is the norm, in the same way the Archons are the villains of Gnosticism. The Consult and Dunyain are lesser evils that arguably, inevitably arise from the conditions the Hundred have imposed on ensouled life. 

Since every ensouled being seems to possess self-aware consciousness it seems to me that the God would be broken way before the development of Inchies/Nonmen/etc. 

 

On the villain part, the Hundred didn't set up the metaphysics as far as we can tell. They aren't the instigators. They're just as much victim as anyone else. And they're as blind to the No-God as anyone else. Meppa thinks the gods weak, needing tools of men to act on the Worldborn. That doesn't sound like something that can change the conditions - only that they can profit from the conditions.

As to every ensouled being possessing consciousness  I'm not sure. There's some implications that humans didn't at some point, and only gained consciousness recently. 

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9 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Philosophically, maybe. Then again, the idea that philosophy here is just wrong is kind of a big deal, no? The Logos is without beginning or end...is wrong. There is a clear beginning. There is a clear end. There is an entire causal light cone here. 

Another way to think of it is not as bizarre time loops, but as something akin to Dune and Leto. With future sight the world became entirely deterministic. Everything had to happen in the way that it did, and everything happened precisely as thought. The goal was to destroy determinism and to stop the watcher that saw the world and collapsed its wave function - and that watcher saw time at all points along its light cone. 

So the breaking of the Gods happens at the point of the creation of the God. And it happens because it must happen, because if it doesn't the God doesn't come about. It is White Luck taken to its ultimate extreme. It is the Eschaton of the Stross world, where everything in its past is deterministic because it exists in the future.

This also explains the view of the Gods and why they cannot perceive the No-God. The Gods see everything that was created in their causal frame, up until the eschatological end of the world. All of it happens and will happen and does happen, and it has to because if it didn't, there wouldn't be the causal frame. There is no chance, only history. The No-God was created outside that causal frame. They are entirely blind to its existence because they can only perceive things that are part of their own existence. 

On the villain part, the Hundred didn't set up the metaphysics as far as we can tell. They aren't the instigators. They're just as much victim as anyone else. And they're as blind to the No-God as anyone else. Meppa thinks the gods weak, needing tools of men to act on the Worldborn. That doesn't sound like something that can change the conditions - only that they can profit from the conditions.

As to every ensouled being possessing consciousness  I'm not sure. There's some implications that humans didn't at some point, and only gained consciousness recently. 

What I mean by philosophically wrong is that if you think of the God splintering as creating reality, but this splintering is due to an event in reality, you have a contradiction.

If everything is determined from Beginning to End then how is Kellhus or Mimara able to break free of the Block Universe you (and admittedly Bakker in some parts of the text) suggest?

I think the Hundred set up what happens in the Outside, though they can't affect the Inward as easily (perhaps because the God's dream is more lucid there?) and thus have to utilize servants.

On souls and consciousness...you might be right...it's admittedly confusing to try and figure out how these relate based on the text. The Weapon Races are self-aware since we get their POVs. So self-awareness isn't proof of being ensouled. And then there are animal who seem to every so often get souls.

@Baztek

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Kellhus is the hunger for the Absolute, "the desire for enlightenment", with none of the soul/the actual person behind all that thinking and calculating, to be reintegrated into the Absolute in the first place. I think with Kellhus, Bakker is saying: "thinking of God does violence to God", nevermind all the plebs who blindly following their faith, but even when one orients their whole being towards grasping the Absolute, you can still fuck up. "The path of the sage is difficult, like walking the edge of a razor" and all that. Kellhus is all letter of the law, without the spirit. 

I don't think Kellhus is necessarily learning that love is just meat but seeing that, there, in the Outside, all the talk of salvation and divine love back in Earwa turn out to just be meat for the Sons, and not Love actually being nothing but meat in the truest sense. 

In the mysteries, all operations that are conducive to experiencing the divine are performed with complete detachment and not the slightest emotional investment. Anything less pollutes the action with more relativities, with exactly the mental phenomenology one is trying to transcend and conquer in the first place. The Dunyain breed for thousands of years to grasp God, and all you get is a guy whose hyper-alert to everything. Mimara suffers a bit, loves a bit, and bam, without even trying, she sees a true Tear of God. 

Love isn't a gnostic trap - as long as it's the love of a true God, an objective, unconditional love that isn't effusive or doting. A love from a transcendent vantage and not the sickly cloying love you see down here in the trenches.

I agree with a good amount here. Though I'm not sure about:

"In the mysteries, all operations that are conducive to experiencing the divine are performed with complete detachment and not the slightest emotional investment..."

Seems to me any desire for enlightenment of the Truth is from the Divine Spark as the gnostics would call it? I think there can be a selfless love, and metaphorically Bakker is using one of the most potent symbols of this idea -> A mother's love for her children.

I think this kind of love is a kind of opportunity to reach for the God of Gods via a kind of understanding that Kellhus is perhaps incapable of having. It's knowledge of an emotional state, and thus not something than can be abstracted via mathematics nor captured in logical chains of reasoning: 

"In the same way I love my child, God - who is Us - loves Us. So through gnosis of this love I awaken to the part of me that is Divine." 

It may even come to pass that only a female Cish can truly grasp the God....Mimara's daughter maybe, or a descendant of her line?

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2 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

What I mean by philosophically wrong is that if you think of the God splintering as creating reality, but this splintering is due to an event in reality, you have a contradiction.

If everything is determined from Beginning to End then how is Kellhus or Mimara able to break free of the Block Universe you (and admittedly Bakker in some parts of the text) suggest?

Because everything isn't determined from beginning to end. The only thing that is determined is the creation of the Eschaton - the Absolute. Everything that leads up to that being created - including the breaking of the Absolute itself - has to happen. And everything within that causal chain is determined - and visible to the Absolute. After that? We get free will. 

Where I disagree is that I don't think that the God splintering created reality. I think that reality and much of its rules exists independently of the Absolute. Souls, damnation, redemption, the Outside and the World - these are all in existence with or without the God being real or not. The story isn't the story of the universe's creation - it is the story of the God's creation. 

So how do Kellhus and Mimara break out? They break out by creating the Absolute. Or becoming it. They do that by creating a paradox, perhaps - Mimara with the Judging Eye who can see everything in the causal frame looking at the No-God which exists outside of it. Or some other philosophical wankfest - there are countless philosophies to pick here. For these purposes it doesn't end up mattering at all. 

Analogy: the causal chain of events for the World and the Absolute is the benjuka plate. It can be changed a bit by some of the people's moves, but the game exists, the players exist, and the pieces exist. What happens after the game ends? Did the game never happen? Did the players not play? Did the pieces not get moved? 

 

2 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

I think the Hundred set up what happens in the Outside, though they can't affect the Inward as easily (perhaps because the God's dream is more lucid there?) and thus have to utilize servants.

I think they can set up what they do and what happens. They can project power in the Outside, make their own subjective kingdoms and torture porn sets. But they can't dictate what causes people to be damned. They can't dictate that people even get damned. They can't dictate what the other gods do or how they behave. They can't set the rules - they can only just play with the rules as they are. That  does mean they can do things like give Psatma superpowers or invoke the White Luck, but it doesn't mean they can just declare that sorcery is no longer something that damns. 

 

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4 hours ago, Baztek said:

Or if we all have Buddha-nature, why are we ignorant of it?

Because Buddha-nature? >:)

You have to fracture the nature in order to perceive the nature(or more precisely, what's left of the nature after fracture), rather than just 'be'. 'be' does not perceive.

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I don't recall Achamian going into any more depth on the Judging Eye, correct? We are pretty far in the dark of it. He only really revealed that Mimmara would have a "blue" baby, which was wrong (she has a living child).

Quoted from Wikia (a summary):

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They camp before the entrance to the derelict Nonman Mansion, plagued with apprehensions. Then, with the coming of dawn, they descend into the heart of the mountain. For days they wander the wrecked halls, led by Incariol and his ancient memories. Deep in the Mansion, Mimara finally confesses her sporadic ability to see the morality of things, and Achamian, obviously troubled, tells her that she possesses the Judging Eye. She presses him to tell her more, but the old Wizard refuses. Before she can berate him properly, the company discovers that it is not alone in the Mansion.

However, Achamian may have more to reveal on the Judging Eye. Also relevant, that their have been others in the past with the Judging Eye. Perhaps they did not know what it meant (pertaining to the theory of Mimmara being able to "forgive").

The most telling evidence is her using a Tear of God to "close" the Tapos (well, no, she didn't close the Tapos did she, she just "sealed" the gate of the Wight in the Mountain)?

 

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Just a side note but in medical terms nothing shows Mimara as definitely carrying a child who will be a live baby. The body can be alive while on the life support the mother provides - that doesn't mean it will be a live birth/alive after life support is removed. And on a further side note : Never mind what the drugs she's using might be doing to her baby. Nonmen kings - not even once!

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@Kalbear Mimara looking at the NoGod with TJE is the trick. Recall the skin spy test. Only the ensouled can grasp paradox. So when Mimara forces God to see the NoGod, the sleeping God of Gods grasps Its first paradox, becomes ensouled and is created. 

@Sci-2 I like the parellelism of Moe going down the wrong path by becoming Cish. And Kel going down the wrong path by relying on the Logos to grasp the Absolute. The foreshadowing in TTT wasn't that Moe failed by becoming Cish, it was that Moe failed because he was Dunyain and with withered emotions. 

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These two excerpts have been excellent. All this in just two excerpts?

This book is going to be packed more like any of the previous it seems like.

Loved the reading the Akka and Mimara section, very interesting stuff. Anasurimbor Koringhus, no one saw that coming.

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Speculation on Kellhus’s Outside visit

On the mechanics of soul trapping

From the Ishuäl chapter, TGO:

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The intricacies of identity are always sheared away. Memory. Faculty. Character. These are cast into the pit.

What I get from this is that established theory of soul-trapping (as known to Achamian) provides mechanisms for memory and faculty to visit the Outside, while some other part of the soul remains “fastened” to the Inside. It seems plausible that Kellhus has scienced the shit out of this and understands this mechanism sufficiently well to be able to visit the Outside (i) with his agency intact and (ii) to get back.

We know from the elevator scene in the same chapter that souls can be trapped to bodies. I speculate that the head-on-a-pole in Kellhus’s flashback is such a device. In fact, we know the purpose of the head-on-a-pole:

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You refuse to drip fear like honey—because you have no fear.

Because you fear not damnation.

Because there is a head on a pole behind you.

This is consistent with the first explanation:

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Only the most base urges survive in proxies.

So: fear, a base urge, remains on the pole, trapped to somebody else’s head. Thus, agency-Kellhus does not “drip fear,” so isn’t tasty to the demons. Hence Kellhus has nothing to fear, he brings only memory, faculty, character—the tasty bits he left behind. The pole has dual purposes: it leaves the fear behind and serves as an anchor.

How to enter the Outside

I think we know: a topos. Just make a local hellhole by torturing lots of people intensely and over a long time. The Nonmen needed generations of unspeakable Gulag-like conditions. Kellhus knows what he’s doing, so he can probably set up something perfectly terrible and wait for five years or so. This would work well, plot-wise, because even Kellhus needs resources for building such a topos: time and innocent children, say. Even Kellhus can’t just enter the Outside willy-nilly. It’s a 10 year project or so. And very dangerous, of course.

Summary

So here’s what I think Kellhus did: Set aside some rooms somewhere remote, and institutionalise the most disgusting, immoral torture industry ever. So terrible are the ordeals visited on the innocent children, puppies, and baby seals, that the place becomes a topos within the (relatively short) time span of 20 years available to Kellhus. Use Sheönanra-like magic to moor your soul to the head of somebody who is at this time basically just a head on a pole, similar to the 10 wretches used in the elevator. Take a deep breath, and cross the threshold. Talk to the demons, kill a few of them. Time and space are warped, so it’s funky. But you have no fear, and you can get back, because there is a head on a pole behind you.

(Comment: I love the idea from the previous thread that the head is Serwë, but I like my explanation better. Serwë wasn’t really on a pole.)

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Great excerpts. I’m very excited. Favourite detail:

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“For all their might,” the boy continued in his monotone drawl, “the Singers were easily confused.”

Hehe. The Quya don’t pass the IQ test built into the design of the thousand thousand halls. The Dûnayin child finds this odd.

The thousand thousand halls are a great concept. Appeals a lot to me. (I’m a graph algorithms researcher, so using instances of route finding in networks as a measure of computational efficiency is close to my heart.)

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3 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

So here’s what I think Kellhus did: Set aside some rooms somewhere remote, and institutionalise the most disgusting, immoral torture industry ever. So terrible are the ordeals visited on the innocent children, puppies, and baby seals, that the place becomes a topos within the (relatively short) time span of 20 years available to Kellhus.

And Kellhus has indeed done this. TJE, chapter 3:

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Though the name was the same, the Truth Room was one of the palace chambers, subterranean or otherwise, that had been drastically expanded in the years since Kellhus's uncontested march into Momemn. The original Truth Room had been little more than the personal torture chamber of the old Ikurei Emperors, and every bit as dark and closeted as their peevish souls. The enormous chamber she now entered with her children was nothing less than an organ of state, a pit with walls tiered by walkways, some possessing cages for prisoners, others lined with various instruments of interrogation, and one, the uppermost, adorned with columns and marble veneers—a gallery for observers from the land of light. It was, the architect had told her, an inverted replica of the Great Ziggurat of Xijoser, carved so that the mighty monument on the Sempis Delta would fit if tipped into its hollow. Esmenet could remember Proyas quipping something to the effect that "sometimes Men must reach down" when seeking the Truth.

 

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4 hours ago, Calibandar said:

. Anasurimbor Koringhus, no one saw that coming.

 

On the second apocalypse forum this was postulated a few times. I said it just last week (May13th)

" Female Dunyain would be my guess, Kellhus's Daughter. " In answer to who is the new PoV Pat referenced.

But i oscillated between son and daughter. In hindsight son should have been obvious. Especially all the references to "sons"(child or son gets 20+ mentions first 2 chapters) in the first excerpt released. I hadn't read them yet though.

 

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I just want everyone to take another minuite to appreciate that EAMD is literally true. The world starts with "Let there be deceit"

 

I also really like the parallel of Kel conversing with absolutely alien beings in the outside and Proyas with Kel in his tent.

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