michael-dean-k/

Check out "the odyssey" tag (at the bottom) for more posts on my idea to rewrite an alternate version of epic.

The story opens with a modified tale of the cyclops—probably the most memory-scaring monster experience of the whole Odyssey. This typically doesn't come until book 9, which means the framing of the 8 prior chapters changes the significance of this event; the traditional opening sets a frame of a disordered home that can only be restored by Odysseus's return; this opening highlights the protagonist's Faustian curiosity. Venturing onto the cyclops island is his original act of wanderlust; throughout the whole epic, he ventures into forbidden lands, but this is the inciting event that gets him cursed.

But how did he arrive in the land of cyclopses in the first place? The Gods were aggravated with the Greeks—because of how they looted the city, disrespected temples, and pillaged nearby villages—so Poseidon scattered all home-bound fleets in arbitrary directions (while Agamemnon stayed on shore to apologize and make sacrifices). So Poseidon is already pissed, but the cyclops ordeal is what brings the personal vendetta against Odysseus, who is riding the high from victory. He personally conceived the trick to win, the Trojan Horse, and there is nothing his cunningness can't overcome.

The opening line of the original describes Odysseus as being a "polytropic man," but we don't fully see this in action until the cyclops scene... Polytropic is traditionally understood as "many turned," making him a trickster, but he is also multi-desired. He loves the stability of being a king at home, and earnestly wants to return to Penelope and Telemachus, but also harbors an unsatiable thirst for all kinds of knowledge. He thinks he's cunning enough to have both, to venture into forbidden lands, to learn and see what no human has ever experienced, but without sacrificing his normal life. (This is a relatable, timeless tension—the desire to be both ordinary and extraordinary). IMO, the only proper conclusion of the story is to show him failing this juggle. As in the Bible, one cannot eat from the tree of knowledge without consequence.

The whole odyssey stems from his curiosity of the uncanny. He was not forced onto the island. He chose this side quest. Odysseus has never seen a cyclops, only heard of them in lore. How big are they? Are they as rude as they say? He could have easily returned home if he had allowed these questions to remain unanswered. Instead, he thinks he can use his cunningness to form a pact with them, to receive gifts. The larger crew is scared to explore, but a small group wanders out and into the cave of Polyphemus, not knowing it is Poseidon's only surviving son at this point—his other died at Troy. It is not just a normal cyclops (10 feet tall), but being the God of Poseidon and a sea nymph, he’s a 30-footer. They quickly find out that the cyclops is a savage; he ignores Odysseus's request for xenia around guest treatment, and casually eats two members of their crews (to be fair thought, the cyclops did walk in to them raiding his food supply). They get trapped in the cave, blocked in by a massive boulder they can't lift.

As Polyphemus wanders the fields on day 2, they try to plot their escape. The pressure mounts, and some of the crew startw mocking Odysseus, the man who got them in this pickle, the man who conceived of the great Trojan Horse, now fumbling for an escape scheme. Another man notes that no one will believe the fantastical story of Trojan Horse, nor will they believe their story of the 30' cyclops, if they survive. How could they? One jokes to capture the cyclops, hang him from the mast, and return home with the mythic beast (King Kong-style). Another jokes that he's too big to carry, but his penis is only the size of a man. Carryable/draggable. Odysseus insults them and their ideas, suggesting they're drunk, suggesting they might as well take the loose rope around the cave and hang themselves—which hatches his new plan: to get the cyclops drunk, tie him with rope, and castrate him.

This is the founding deviation from the original, and way more extreme, but the mechanics work on many levels. First, the logistical level: After Polyphemus comes back and eats two more men, Odysseus offers him Apollo's wine, 20x the strength, fit to get a cyclops wasted. Polyphemus thanks him, and promises to eat him last (his idea of a gift). He is out cold, vomiting in his sleep, and so the crew takes the opportunity to gather the rope (Polyphemus is a builder/shepherd). They tie down each limb, and most importantly, tie his dominant hand to a rope that is connected to the boulder. One man grabs a rope attached to the cyclops's phallus to hold it in tension, odysseus grabs his sickle, and the others wait by the boulder. In one blow, the cyclops gets dismembered, which shocks him awake. The natural reaction for the cyclops is to cover his groin to stop the bleeding, and this thrust of his arm shimmies the boulder just enough so the men can escape. In the scramble, Odysseus, sees the phallus on a rope, and decides to drags it out, wanting a souvenir to prove their ordeal, a tangible symbol for his cunningness.

On the way out, he reveals his name, "Odysseus," to be known in the land of cyclopes (all soldiers, like Achilles, care most for the immortality of their name). This hubristic act gives away his cover and lets Polyphemus connect the dots: he was warned about this in a prophecy, and so now he pleads to Poseidon to curse him (to either kill him, to kill his crew, or to have him return to unfixable chaos).

The castration is a not a random or lewd replacement for blindness; it deepens the escape on several levels: (1) they are both "one-eyed" (he took the one-eyed monster from the one-eyed monster); (2) this is more painful for Poseidon, since it neuters his only son alive and threatens his bloodline; (3) it is more embarrassing, since cyclopses are uncivilized and unclothed, the others will notice; (4) it is less threatening; Polyphemus would be unable to hunt or survive from blindness, and so castration is actually more humane; and (5) a castration is the foundational act of Greek cosmology; it has an uncanny similarity, fusing Homeric lore with Hesiod's universe.

The myth goes something like this: Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (sky) fuse together and have monstrous/mythical children, which include three cyclopses. But Uranus was so disgusted by them, he banished them to live in caves inside the Earth. This upset Gaia, so she arranged to have the cyclops's father castrated by one of the kids (Saturn, the Titan). Out of the blood of that castration poured many more monsters, nymphs, and goddesses, and the previously caved beings were free to roam. So the castration is symbolic in two ways: (1) it lets the trapped children (Odysseus and his crew) leave the cave, but really (2) it unleashes the wave of monsters, the same ones Odysseus is about to encounter; the origin myth includes nymphs, giants, multi-headed sea monsters, and Aphrodite (a sex goddess who spawns from the blood and foam of the severed penis in the ocean... to jump ahead briefly, after his ship sinks, the cyclops penis sinks with it, and his next encounter is Calypso, strikingly similar to Aphrodite, a sex goddess of the ocean who deceives with desire).

The chapter ends with the six-foot cyclops phallus skewered onto the bowsprit of a ship (the already phallic spike at the front). It sets the whole sexual/subconscious angle of the story: they are following their genitals, which isn't limited to sex, but the Faustian impulse to go beyond convention to know what should remain unknown.

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

I find “do you believe in God?” to be an impossibly vague question. Which god? The Christian God? Old Testament God? One or all of the Hindu Gods? Chris Farley God? I guess the question I find more interesting is asking “what is God?” and even better, “What is your most specific conception of God, what is required of you in your relationship to ‘it,’ and how does your life change because of that relationship?”

An atheist is one who just ignores this line of questioning. They’d say, “There is no supernatural, I can use logic to disprove it, so I can dunk on superstitious believers.” And if that’s all God is, then you’re missing out on a whole dimension of existence. As if you’ve never had sex. Or tried a mind-altering drug. Or whatever. SYK, I am an understudied heretical Greek Orthodox Christian. Being understudied and heretical is a bad combination, because I am likely refuting points I don’t understand, but alas, that is what I am, and I hope to each year become more studied and more heretical.

My intuition is that the Christian notion of God and Christ is misguided, malformed, not living up to its potential, with a whole bunch of categorial mistakes. SYK, again (so you know), I don’t dismiss it, and would even say that “becoming Christ like” is the most important thing you can do, and that can all be true without him literally having a virgin mother or resurrecting from the dead. We can respect and worship mythology without demanding it to be physically real. The metaphysics matter more!

But metaphysically, here’s what’s wrong with God. In my model, God does not have consciousness, meaning it’s not a real-time entity, looking down on each of us, listening to our prayers. God is also not the admin of a shared server where we all go when we die; there can be an afterlife Odyssey more beautiful and supernatural than anything we can conceive, but maybe it is single player and lives in our head and stretches our 3-minute death into 3,000 years experiential years in dream-space. Who knows. I think the main point I want to debate is that God isn’t conscious.

“Divine intelligence” makes more sense to me, and is a different thing than consciousness. Humans and animals and maybe even machines, can have consciousness, but God is greater than all of that. God is more akin to the arena, the thing that all agents live within. God is not the whole arena though, more like a property within it. If we’re talking about “divine intelligence,” this veers into “intelligent design,” which IIC is something like, “the structures in nature are so elegant and unlikely that someone external must have designed this!” This taps into “God’s plan” territory. Again, this sees God as an omnipotent architect, with great intention between all decisions. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is the theodicy question: why does suffering exist? Why serial killers and avalanches and Hitler and the vast nothingness? Why is that part of the design? There are all sorts of rationalizations (“to develop our character”). More likely, I think it’s more of a spray-and-pray design, a chaos generator.

The universe is a cumshot. Consider how many billions of sperm are needed in order for one of them to find the egg, for conception to happen, the miracle of life. This seems to happen at all scales of nature. Redundancies matter! If we are cosmicaly inside one tier of a fabrege egg, black holes burrowing into new space-time pockets, exploding matter endlessly inward, then there really is a raging, uncontrollable, chaotic force at the root of everything, and it doesn't have a plan! That is terrifying. Yet, from all the noise, two particles come into proximity, orbit, fuse, bind, transcend themselves into a higher order of novelty, harmony. This is God, I think, and it happens at every scale. You need a blind, idiotic chaos generator to create a supermassive variety of things, and God is the rare and unlikely event when two things come into contact to form something beautiful, to make a third. Love.

I guess “God is Love” is the most accurate theological statement I can get behind, because it explains every scale: the cosmological one, the societal one, the interpersonal one, the creative one, the psychological one.

On my walk this morning, I had a few strange ideas, building off the white hole / black hole thing, but also around what “God” is. The universe is a chaos engine. A blackhole sucks in a particular profile of material, and it shoots it out the other end, through a “big bang.” It is mostly noise, collision, non-sense, or nothing, but a separate system is harmonizing, filtering, grouping, cohering, ascending. You might call this “God” or “intelligent design.” (Excuse me for all this imprecise folk science; perhaps one day I will properly research this and upgrade my terminology).

An important caveat is that God is not an architect, not a designer, drawing floor plans, or even a “plan” for everyone or anyone’s life. God is an emergent intelligence. From chaotic explosions, God is the unbelievability that 2 of 2 trillion things can combine or cohere, and then sustain on, and continue moving up the abstraction ladder. The fact that anything can cohere at all is a miracle, and the degree that it can move up the chain is even more so miraculous.

I think this model helps explain “why is there evil the world?” Why floods and bombs? It’s because God is not as all-controlling as we think; he spawns reality as we know it, but does not tinker or micromanage. In no way is God conscious. In some way God is the pairing of things to generate life, and so in a very literal sense, I get now the phrase, “God is Love.”

Love is the fusion of two things that produces a third thing, and that goes to parenting, art, or whatever. Worth noting that love is not absolute. There may be loveless universes, ones that never cohere, that are just noise and nothingness for trillions of years. There could also be universes with far more love.

(...A sublime lens to see your surroundings on a walk is to realize that everything around, your whole world, the history of your society, and all possible realities on Earth, are all within a single sliver of what is possible in the physical engine of the Universe...)

Now, another extension of this thought is that human beings are at a certain level up the chain of the system that they have become “like Gods” or “in the image of God” which means that they’re able to both generate a lot of noise, and also cohere into even higher and higher things; arguable the human is the next link in God’s chain, and we are not the end state (there is no end state!) but our ability to make coherent things is a continuation of God’s process. This means technology isn’t evil, but Godly, but of course, most harmony decays and wobbles, which is what is happening.

I wonder if there’s even a limit to the advances of God into harmony and complexity in the material world, and the task has now been handed over to humans, who can make things beyond the complexities of atoms and galaxies. In that sense, God has made a population of Gods. And somewhere along the line, Christ comes in.

Christ, not as the literal embodiment in Christianity, but more like the logos imbued within the the "sons of God." If our father is a human, then we as his child is human too; so if God is our father, are we not Gods ourselves? But to be Christ-like is different, because God has no morality. In some way, God is unconscious, just an intelligence engine, trying to bring harmony, and to escalate matter to higher levels. God’s counter force has to spray and pray for the hope that God can find some unlikely combination. Christ however, attempts to limit generation, be more intentful with it, and to aim it towards good. Christ is an attempt to steer the self, the other, society, towards higher levels of harmony.

I experienced something like a pseudo-insanity on the drive to the park, weird alien transmissions and mutation of language, packaged as a seriously frightening performance to myself that devolved into gentle spasms and mumbling (though to me was an experience of musical brilliance), a side of self I’d never show anyone, which eventually birthed the phrase, “from chaos we emerge into the light” an opening line to some theology, perhaps mine. 

As I walked a hundred feet into the park, I heard a woman stretching against a bar singing seriously angelic opera. I left a note to myself that said “this explains evil and suffering,” and that’s very cryptic, but it’s in response to that aesthetic rebuke of, “how can God exist if there is so much evil and suffering in the world?”

IIRC, here’s that thought: we’re lodged in a cosmic engine where matter needs to chaotically complexify to discover harmony and phase shift into higher forms of organization. Lots of noise is generated in that process; and so you actually can’t find harmony without an overwhelming amount of disharmony and chaos. Basically, good can’t exist without an overwhelming amount of nothingness and evil. So in a way, you can’t fear the evil within you; it is simply the cost of imagination, of invention, of creation. Chaos is the cost of divinity.

How can you be hopeful, but honest? I am done with dishonest and naive optimism. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m an extremely optimistic person. I just watch people use it as a shield sometimes. Any wince of negativity is branded as “doomerism.” It’s almost weaponized hope. But “honest optimism” feels like the proper way to think about it. It lets you be real about something when it’s actually a problem, while acknowledging that there’s something productive and generative we can do about it.

I’m optimistic in my life, pessimistic about society; optimistic about my ability to make a dent, pessimistic about the survival of any intelligence species because it’s hard technologies probably always outpaces its civic technologies, but generally optimistic about biological matter and trans-dimensional space-time gook and all that big stuff (this exact moment will recur again? It depends on your model of cosmological evolution).

v2: Optimistic about my life,
Pessimistic about the moment,
Optimistic about design to fix the moment
Pessimistic about society’s ability to use design,
Optimistic in our metaphysical engine to spawn infinite societies,
Pessimistic that some demiurge will wreak havoc on most species,
Optimistic that some bacteria in a cousinly space-time will fart utopias,

Emerson said a divine intelligence with a simple cause leads to endless variety. We are, rightly so, locked into humanism, but you also can’t assume that man is the ideal end form of this process. For all we known mankind could be relative devils—violent ants, with only a few angels among us—compared to other potential species from past or future in the unknown nooks of spacetime. We could be the necessary chaff, an evolutionary dead end, that’s iterated through in order to let a truly divine species emerge. I’m not implying this in a post-human sense; in fact, the very possibility of man evolving into a mechanical shell of itself could be the proof that we are not a stable species. Dark, but I do mean this all in a positive, hermetic sense, that we come from a cosmic engine that makes mountains, mice, humans, and psychologies unimaginable, which is our role to evolve into.

The idea that dead relatives are "up there, looking down" is a comforting thought that enables weak virtues. I do believe “they are always with us,” but in the sense that they’ve shaped our character and they live through, not in the sense that they have a supernatural consciousness and can know and see what I do and say and think (or that they can manipulate our material reality to fulfill our egoic wishes). By assuming they could be gone, you have to be courageous and have all the conversations you want to have. You have to assume they could die not knowing how you feel. You have to assume that their waking life really shapes the DMT-hypnagogic-afterlife of theirs, and so what you do and say really matters. This life really matters. Heaven is an opiate that spawns cowardice and hides the real and urgent stakes of today. There is a deadline.

According to John Vervaeke, Gnosticism says that “the core of spirituality is not worship, but self-transcendence, healing and freeing people from existential entrapment of their suffering, and that our mythologies and practices should be in service of reuniting to who and what we are.”

There are a few key differences between Gnosticism and Christianity:

• It’s not about worship, but self-transcendence.
• It’s not centered around a single dogma, but around making stories and analogies that tap into the act of self-transcendence (and these analogies continue in movies).
• Mythology-wise, the Gods are not our superiors, but prison guards that trap us (and, like Christ, we each have a divine spark that lets us escape).

I’m fascinated with the idea of being an “atheistic Christian.” It’s a paradox, and this stance makes you ideologically homeless. A Christian would likely say, “well if you don’t believe in God, and that Christ is His son, then you’re not Christian.” They will not accept you. An atheist who scoffs at God has no respect for esoteric ritual, talks of destiny, Christ worship, etc. and so they will deem you a loon.

Mainstream religions package everything together—theology, mysticism, history, ritual, etc.—and you have to subscribe to the whole ecosystem. In that way, Christianity is like Apple. I think a person is more engaged with religious ideas if they’re skeptical and free-thinking within each branch, while still operating within and respecting a traditional faith.

I’ve heard some people say “God is whatever you want it to be, it’s your relation to Him.” I don’t find that useful. I’d say that I’m actually more a theist than atheist, but theism comes with certain assumptions—God as an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent “agent”—where as I’d say God is the entire arena and therefore not conscious, though still baked with intelligence.

My fuzzy notion: it’s not that God has a kingdom of heaven, but God is the kingdom of heaven, but also unfortunately, this kingdom isn’t some place your soul goes to; I think two things happen at death: (1) you lose your individuality and biologically merge back into the arena, fueling other evolutionary processes over millions of years, and (2) the monent of death is an experience of time dilation that, experientially, feels like a rather Christian afterlife, and also demands proper ethics in our waking life).

Of all the competing instructions of Christianity, which is most important? (a) To believe in God; (b) To read the Bible; (c) To go to church; (d) To pray; (e) To live like Christ. Arguably, a-d are just delivery methods to install (e), Christ as a “moral engine.” But what if you derive your own system to do this? If you live in the light of death, understand what you have to die for, see every moment as a moral act, and forgive everyone, but you don’t believe in God, are you really not a Christian? (Claude called this “anonymous Christianity” and “implicit faith”)

"If Christianity’s ultimate aim is human transformation toward love, justice, and forgiveness, then someone achieving that transformation might be closer to Christianity’s heart than someone who believes doctrinally but doesn’t embody these values.”