VALIS
Posted by Erik Frey Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:32:00 GMT
“48. Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper universe is derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed ‘astral determinism.’ We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are, through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until astral determinsim is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded we are. The empire never ended.”
ok.
i’ll re-iterate what you probably already know and we can go from there.
plato liked to talk some shit about forms. i’m not too familiar with how HE explains it, but i do understand it, because there’s a very strong parallel in computer science. when you’re programming and you want to design something in your code that behaves like a ball, you create a class, and you call the class ball, and you define things like saying “a ball is something that bounces” and “a ball has color, size, material…”, and you say all these THINGS about a ball, but you don’t actually have a ball, just the idea of a ball.
so THEN what you do, as a programmer, is you create instances of that ball. this ball, that ball, my ball, your ball. big balls, little balls, you get the idea.
so, the form I is sentience, abstractism. it’s the ideas and notions that we construct, and, in a sense, the ideas that govern the way the universe works (although some would argue it’s the other way around – the mechanics of the universe naturally have common fluctuations and patterns, and from those we derive rules and forms. whatever). it’s the shit that goes on when we see a black insect with pincers, and we say “oh, that’s a scorpion”, and we know that part of the definition (or idea) of a scorpion is something with a poison tail, so we stay away.
why he calls it yang is a load of crap. i think he was just trying to be clever. dork.
form II, is the notion that everything in the universe is nothing more than a series of complex chemical reactions. there are no forms. that’s not a bear, that’s just a shitload of carbon molecules swimming around in a sea of air, held together by lots of ionic and covalent bonds. there are folks who would argue that if you had a powerful enough computer, you could load the state of the universe into it as data, have it calculate where each atom would move in a slice of time. and in essence, predict the future.
which would mean that our fate is already set in stone. we are imprisoned by determinism.
the heisenberg uncertainty principle adds a curious kink into that idea, but i won’t get into it.
i don’t know what sacraments philly is talking about, but in old times “plasmate” was kinda like the soul, or our connection to god, or maybe even god itself.
the ‘empire’, is the iron-clad kingdom of deterministic reality. this is where philly gets some buddha action in on us. he thinks that there is a war between the empire (form II, yin) and the plasmate (form I, yang), and we are the prisoners, trapped in reality, in hopes that one day me might be released from reality into the abstract, the form, the (need i say it?) nirvana!
but the empire has never ended.
heaven is a release from your very existence, your implementation of class becky, a merger of your soul (or the idea of who you are) back into the abstract, immaterial consciousness that exists even outside of time.
hell is the sneaker-flavored protein bar i’m munching on right now, in my hand, as material and physical as anything else.