The Blood Moon

Continuing our exploration into inquiry and existence, from coitus to conflict. Sublation, Evolution, and the Overman are mature now. They await us in the sanctum.

Under the blood moon, we are sanguine, but it will offer only a few moments of insight. We have been shown sublation, and we cannot go back to seeing only painted moonlight.

There is the moonlight, which we once thought tugged the tides. There is the umbra, which challenges the moonlight. And there is the penumbra, in which something novel is revealed, offering an omen for our becoming. But we would never have gained the gift of insight if the shadow had not challenged the light and spilled penumbral blood.

This is conflictual inquiry, which differs from coital inquiry.

With coital inquiry, questions and answers beget questions and answers. With conflictual inquiry, a proposition and its negation are at war, but the war’s resolution reveals a greater unity.

An answer awaits in superposition.

This process, too, is open-ended, unfolding within The Fractal of Unanswerable Questions.

The Empiricist and the Rationalist

One day, the Empiricist and the Rationalist found each other at the Inn, drunk and belligerent. The Empiricist cried: “There is only that which we observe, and we are locked within our observations.” The Rationalist cried: “Reason is the architecture of abstraction, and we are free to reveal the world’s design.” They met with their pistols on the dueling field and took ten steps before turning to fire.

Each one’s bullet struck the other, and both were dead.

Three boys standing by shook their heads. They never forgot the dead men who had dueled as they grew up.

One spoke of progress’s grand narrative, asserting that reality unfolds through a sequence of contradictions and resolutions. He had seen the blood moon and told the world that freedom and self-consciousness were both means and ends and that art, religion, and philosophy were a sublime trinity.

One sailed to the remotest shores and saw finches with hooked beaks. He gave us a universal acid, an idea that eats through almost every traditional category and transforms it, sometimes inverting our logic. He told us of our ur-fathers and ur-mothers. He saw the blood moon, and it guided his ship into the future.

One climbed the highest mountains and gazed into the abyss. He challenged us, free-thinking few, to transcend destructive values and find our strength. He invited us, even through bouts of syphilitic madness, to smash idols, divine inner greatness, and rise above the timid herds. He reminded us of the libido that draws us to mastery. He permitted us to fall in love with our fates.

Sublation, Evolution, and the Overman are grown now. They await us in the sanctum.

Geist versus Egrigore

We can click in and out orders of magnitude upon the Fractal of Unanswerable Questions, telescoping with our minds. The Fractal, the sum of all questions and answers, grows as long as there is curiosity.

But once we are situated squarely within the inquiry—where considerations become beliefs and our beliefs turn us to our future prospects—the process reveals an endless succession of adjacent possibles, like rooms that open to other rooms that open to other rooms, ad infinitum.

These adjacent possibles make up an Ever-Unfolding Geist, which animates the Fractal of Unanswerable Questions. We create that Geist with our shared conceptions, theories, and commitments. But like us, the Ever-Unfolding Geist can be racked with inner tumult and struggles for dominance.

But be warned: not all beliefs are virtuous or true.

The All-Devouring Egregore looms. It thrives on contradiction, confusion, and falsehood. For what is it ravenous? Coherence, predictiveness, and explanatory power.

Strangely, those who animate the Egregore believe it is a Geist, and those who animate the Geist believe it is an Egregore. Our Geist, who is good, and their Egregore, who is not, must face off under the blood-red moon. One might be victorious. One might be vanquished. But sometimes, through such struggle, an entirely new entity rises.

History remains the depository of time, which can act like a loop and a line.