Bakker LIV - Soul Sphincter

[Lord Patrek]

This has nothing to do with the ongoing discussions.

But this just might be the best thread title yet!

[Sci-2]

The AMA wasn't that bad to me?

I'm ok with there not being any definitive foreshadowing past TUC, it removes *conscious* authorial intent from any predictions we might make going forward but takes us into the realm of the Hundred/Outside, of unconscious symbolism.

Maybe it's me getting into James Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld but we can now speculate on where Bakker's subconscious will take him and us on What Has Come Before. In a weird way we are now at a kind of Year Zero with Bakker, in that the predictions we make are both about the characters but also the author's psyche.

Where the ending left us had aspects of the comic book stories where all of continuity is up for grabs. Think Flash Point in the DC Universe, and The Infinity Gauntlet in Marvel (or don't if you haven't seen Infinity War).

It seems stopping Damnation rewrites Reality so Damnation never existed? The Gods have now always been blind?

The No God using some kind of Code makes me recall something Warren Ellis once said, that magic was the "cheat codes for universe". It also recalls something Phillip K Dick said in If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others (apologies for length/quantity of quotes, but any less wouldn't do it the meager justice I'm giving to PKD's ideas):

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What does this mean, to say that an idea or a thought is literally alive? And that it seizes on men here and there and makes use of them to actualize itself into the stream of human history? Perhaps the pre-Socratic philosophers were correct; the cosmos is one vast entity that thinks. It may in fact do nothing BUT think. In that case either what we call the universe is merely a form of disguise that it takes, or it somehow is the universe - some variation on this pantheistic view, my favorite being that it cunningly mimics the world that we experience daily, and we remain none the wiser. This is the view of the oldest religion of India, and to some extent it was the view of Spinoza and Alfred North Whitehead, the concept of an immanent God, God within the universe... The Sufi saying [by Rumi] 'The workman is invisible within the workshop' applies here, with workshop as universe and workman as God. But this still expresses the theistic notion that the universe is something the God created; whereas I am saying, perhaps God created nothing but merely IS. And we spend our lives within him or her or it, wondering constantly where he or she or it can be found.

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inked to each other, if in fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if they overlap, then such problems as 'Where do they exist?' and 'How do you get from one to the next' admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this. ...It may be that some of these superimposed worlds are passing out of existence, along the lateral time line I spoke of, and some are in the process of moving toward greater, rather than lesser, actualization. These processes would occur simultaneously and not at all in linear time. The kind of process we are talking about here is a transformation, a kind of metamorphosis, invisibly achieved. But very real. And very important.

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Contemplating this possibility of a lateral arrangement of worlds, a plurality of overlapping Earths along whose linking axis a person can somehow move - can travel in mysterious way from worst to fair to good to excellent - contemplating this in theological terms, perhaps we could say that herewith we suddenly decipher the elliptical utterances that Christ expressed regarding the Kingdom of God, specifically where it is located. 'My Kingdom is not of this world,' he is reported to have said. 'The Kingdom is within you.' Or possibly, 'It is among you.' I put before you now the notion, which I personally find exciting, that he may have had in mind that which I speak of as the lateral axis of overlapping realms that contain among them a spectrum of aspects ranging from the unspeakably malignant to the beautiful. And Christ was saying over and over again that there really are many objective realms, somehow related, and somehow bridgeable by living - not dead- men, and that the most wondrous of these worlds was a just kingdom in which either He himself or God himself or both of them ruled. And he did not merely speak of a variety of ways of subjectively viewing one world; the Kingdom was and is an actual different place, at the opposite end of continua starting with slavery and utter pain. It was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along the orthogonal path. He did not merely report what lay there; he taught the method of getting there. But, the secret was lost, the Roman authority crushed it. And so we do not have it. But perhaps we can refind it, since we know that such a secret exists.

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Since at the resolution of every encounter of thesis and antithesis between the Dark Counterplayer and the divine Programmer, a new synthesis is struck off, and since it is possible that each time this happens a lateral world may be generated, and since I conceive that each synthesis or resolution is to some degree a victory by the Programmer, each struck-off world, in sequence, must be an improvement upon - not just the prior one - but an improvement over all the latent or merely possible outcomes. It is better, but in no sense perfect - i.e. final. It is merely an improved stage within a process. What I envision clearly is that the Programmer is perpetually using the antecedent universe as a gigantic stockpile for each new synthesis, the antecedent universe then possessing the aspect of chaos or anomie in relation to an emerging new cosmos. Therefore the endless process of sequential struck-off alternate worlds, emerging and being infused with actualization, is negentropic in some way that we cannot see.

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If I consider the term by which I designate him - the Programmer and Reprogrammer - perhaps I can extract from that a partial answer. I call him what I call him because that was what I witnessed him doing: He had previously programmed the lives here but now was altering one or more crucial factors - this in the service of completing a structure or plan. I reason along these lines: A human scientist who operates a computer does not bias nor warp, does not prejudice, the outcome of his calculations. A human ethnologist does not allow himslef to contaminate his own findings by participating in the culture he studies. Which is to say, in certain kinds of endeavors it is essential that the observer remain occluded off from that which he observes. There is nothing malign in this, no sinister deception. It is merely necessary. if indeed we are, collectively, being moved along desired paths toward a desired outcome, the entity that sets us in motion along those lines, that entity which not only desires the particular outcome but that wills that outcome - he must not enter into it palpably or the outcome will be aborted. What, then, we must return our attention to is - not the Programmer - but the events programmed. Concealed though the form is, the latter will confront us; we are involved in it - in fact, we are instruments by which it is accomplished.

 

[Kalbear]

Welcome back!

[Sci-2]

27 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Welcome back!

Thanks - it seems I might have come after the Readership Apocalypse that was TUC tho ;-)

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

Thanks - it seems I might have come after the Readership Apocalypse that was TUC tho ;-)

Yeah, pretty much, though apparently it's reasonably active over at the second apocalypse forums. A lot of folks were disappointed at the lack of resolutions to major story arcs in TUC, but the AMA was much worse in sealing people's opinions. How did you like it?

[Sci-2]

29 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, pretty much, though apparently it's reasonably active over at the second apocalypse forums. A lot of folks were disappointed at the lack of resolutions to major story arcs in TUC, but the AMA was much worse in sealing people's opinions. How did you like it?

I feel somewhat neutral toward it...perhaps the one thing I'm wary about is the whole "crash space" idea. Kellhus' death felt way too sudden, and that admittedly does make me wary of the AMA  - any time Bakker veers into symbolism/allegory the plot seems to suffer for it.

[Dora Vee]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

though apparently it's reasonably active over at the second apocalypse forums.

It is. The weekly re-read has a lot to do with it.

[Darth Richard II]

2 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

I feel somewhat neutral toward it...perhaps the one thing I'm wary about is the whole "crash space" idea. Kellhus' death felt way too sudden, and that admittedly does make me wary of the AMA  - any time Bakker veers into symbolism/allegory the plot seems to suffer for it.

Yes, but how did you enjoy the MRA Dragon?

[Sci-2]

11 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yes, but how did you enjoy the MRA Dragon?

Interesting attempt refer back to dragons wanting virgins.

As to what dragons know of cunny, I think it showed the desires of the Inchoroi and Friends were stamped into their creations. Dragons can't fuck human women so they seek to devour, to possess -- which in turn is a critique, I assume, of the Incel/MRA types. Everything they want from women, from sex, is divorced from the actual act of intimacy.

It would've worked better without a lot of ALL CAPS, with more subtlety as well? An idea that had potential but suffered in its execution.

[jurble]

 

5 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

. Kellhus' death felt way too sudden, 

Don't worry, he's a baby.

[Darth Richard II]

7 hours ago, Sci-2 said:

Thanks - it seems I might have come after the Readership Apocalypse that was TUC tho ;-)

That's a nice way to put it, yeah.

[the Greenleif Stark]

I just finished the trilogy, found it slow and kinda boring, took 5 months to read which is very slow for me and I'm left feeling confused.......can someone explain the ending to me? I listened to the last half of Thousandfold Thought rather than read it and I'm like wtf happened

[Maithanet]

5 minutes ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

I just finished the trilogy, found it slow and kinda boring, took 5 months to read which is very slow for me and I'm left feeling confused.......can someone explain the ending to me? I listened to the last half of Thousandfold Thought rather than read it and I'm like wtf happened

What are you confused about? 

[the Greenleif Stark]

Is Kellhus the No-God? What happened to Cnauir? The Aspect-Emperor series is a continuation of The Prince of Nothing trilogy?

[Gronzag]

3 minutes ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

Is Kellhus the No-God? What happened to Cnauir? The Aspect-Emperor series is a continuation of The Prince of Nothing trilogy?

1: It's complicated.

2: You are supposed to think that he killed himself.

3: Yes

[Maithanet]

8 minutes ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

Is Kellhus the No-God? What happened to Cnauir? The Aspect-Emperor series is a continuation of The Prince of Nothing trilogy?

1.  Kellhus is the Aspect-Emperor.

2.  It is intentionally unclear whether Cnauir killed himself or not.  He is in great distress and decides to make a swazond on his throat. 

3.  Yes.  There's a 20 year time gap, during which time Kellhus consolidates his power, has a bunch of children and prepares an army to march on Golgotterath.

[the Greenleif Stark]

8 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

1.  Kellhus is the Aspect-Emperor.

2.  It is intentionally unclear whether Cnauir killed himself or not.  He is in great distress and decides to make a swazond on his throat. 

3.  Yes.  There's a 20 year time gap, during which time Kellhus consolidates his power, has a bunch of children and prepares an army to march on Golgotterath.

Thank you.....last one, why does Achamian leave? and does he resurface in the next set of books? 

[Maithanet]

2 minutes ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

Thank you.....last one, why does Achamian leave? and does he resurface in the next set of books? 

Achamian finally understands how monstrous the Dunyain are.  Yes, he's a POV character. 

The main POVs of the next series (I personally don't consider this a spoiler, but if you do, feel free not to click)

Spoiler

Achamian, Esmenet, Mimara (Esmenet's daughter recovered from slavery), Proyas, one of Kellhus/Esmenet's kids, two new POVs

 

[the Greenleif Stark]

12 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

Achamian finally understands how monstrous the Dunyain are.  Yes, he's a POV character. 

The main POVs of the next series (I personally don't consider this a spoiler, but if you do, feel free not to click)

  Hide contents

Achamian, Esmenet, Mimara (Esmenet's daughter recovered from slavery), Proyas, one of Kellhus/Esmenet's kids, two new POVs

 

Ok, thanks, greatly appreciate all the clarity

[Rhom]

Eh?  We got a new one on the slog?!!?

Whats that @Triskele?  No weeping on the slog!

Its the slog of slogs!!!!  To the coffers boys!!