Why do rivers flow? Well, if you are scientifically minded, you might say something about gravity and them just trying to get to the center of mass. That’s not exactly a wrong answer, but I’m aiming towards something more fundamental. Rivers know nothing about the theory of gravity (although they are experts in gravity). A river has to be acquainted with those forces to know where to go. There is something hiding in plain sight underneath the scientific understanding of gravity.
“Ah, you mean like gravitons?”
No! The rivers know nothing of gravitons. There has to be something that natural science is investigating — lets tell a lie here, and call them laws of nature. These are things like hydrogen and oxygen atoms wanting to come together to form water, rivers wanting to flow downhill, but also you feeling aroused at the sight of an attractive person. All of this is just natura naturans — nature naturing.
Wisdom consists in acting according to Nature.
Nature is something which can neither be seen nor touched. Yet all of the forms which can possibly be seen or touched are latent within it. And all of the things that will actually be seen or touched are embedded as potentialities within it. Deep in its depths are activating forces. No matter how unbreachable the depths, these forces unfailingly sustain the world as it appears to us.
From the beginning until now, they have never ceased to express themselves in appearances.
How do I know all this to be so? It is intuitively self-evident, for every existing thing testifies to it, including what appears right here and now.
In every moment, if you squint, you can see shadows of nature acting through things. But this sight is something that one needs to learn, and the easiest path to it is through summoning a demon. This simply means consolidation of several flows into some sort of constructed entity. An easy example is the wolf who lives in the forest, who is a collection of all the dangers of the woods. You can see this in a video of kittens playing. The will to kill is there, it is nature acting through the kittens, helping them for a hypothetical life where missing those skills will end up with a dead cat. Now, for contrast, two people playing chess. Squint your eyes, look at the shadows. And there we find the same urge to kill, to go for the jugular. The thing behind this shadow has many names, but for simplicity let us conjure it forth as Gnon. However, one must keep in mind that this entity might start out fairly human-like, but as your understanding deepens, it ought to lose its human-ness piece by piece (in fact, your humanness might become more Gnon-like). At the last stage, it even loses its name, and only an unnameable flow remains.
The easiest place to grasp the exact nature of Gnon is thorough Darwin. Introduce novelty, make it compete with everything else in the niche, and the survivors get rewarded by not being made obsolete. Anything that is less efficient than it’s brother is simply thrown aside and forgotten. Things flow in a direction, and your default stance should be that of moving in accordance with the flow. The problem here is twofold — you have been taught the wrong lessons. Docility makes you dependent, and if any foundations are shaken, you won’t flourish. Kindness and charity are not virtues in themselves. I happen to be in a cat foster home Facebook group, and there was a discussion on how horrible it was that someone’s neighbor drowned kitten litters, and scheming how to rescue an upcoming batch of new cats. Scroll two posts down, and there is a post about how short on supplies and potential homes they are. Drowning kittens might be cruel, but we simply can’t help every animal on the planet. There has already been so much suffering just to bring systems as complex as ours into being. To focus on saving every kitten from drowning is to disregard and spit on all the past horror that has occurred to bring us into being. We carry on us a burden to bring forth greatness. If the first amino-acids could make it to the next level, so can we. The second is that technology has short wired a lot of our instincts into unhealthy loops. Facebook notifications exploit your instincts, so be careful. Here one needs to experiment, but be vigilant — there has never been a time more riddled with harmful memes.
But going “full Gnon” is undesirable and incompatible with human flourishing. I think this should be self-evident, nobody wants to be constantly looking over their shoulder or throwing babies into furnaces to meet efficiency quotas. There are cruelties that even I deem unacceptable — I am not a cold calculating intelligence, I embrace being human with its good and bad. Havens from Gnon are possible — I can claim so confidently because I do not have to lock my doors at night. But those havens are flukes, they are an extremely precious commodity that we need to manage carefully and intentionally. Garbage time is running out.
There seems to be no way to overcome this. But yet, there is hope. Earlier, I told you a lie, which was that Gnon is the law of nature. Here we must understand, that all of these laws of nature are in fact not laws, but habits. What do I mean by this? Let us imagine a river as a series of vectors. Now, each individual vector might point in any direction (turbulence near friction points ie. a dam means some part of the water going opposite the flow) but the average of all vectors points towards the direction of the river. As a rule, the more old and established a habit is, the fewer individual vectors it has pointing in directions other than the dominant one. But with strange aeons, even Gnon may die. Why is this so? Let us take a computer program that sums two numbers. It can adequately process very specific input, that of two numbers, and it is probably coded to be resilient to other input, such as letter strings, it will probably just shout that it doesn’t understand this sort of input. Lastly, you could introduce contingency so radically alien to it it is destructive to the system. The easiest way is to just physically destroy the hardware it is running on. This applies to some degree to every system — they all have a series of inputs that is utterly destructive to it.
Here, ironically, we utilize the way Gnon operates in our own attempts to subvert it. Every locale has its own unique quirks, its own dissident vectors. We need to learn of the local geography, sniff out what it affords us, take that which is afforded, and twist and turn it until we find that which is acceptable to us. The natural chains are strong, and are the ones that bind us the strongest, but they are also that which dissolves, that which allows us to cast off other chains. Once you realize what all of this means, once you can feel it in your spleen, once the true horror strikes, I want you to remember that among all of it, there is still sublime beauty. And if you look at it just right, you will see beauty in all the horror as well.
