At the Edge of Vision

I am an ark in the swift flood of time, 

and my companions, a fellowship. 

Who throws in with us sails into light.

Rumi

I could not, I think, recognize myself if I were not also self-assuredly mad and eccentric — yet it is precisely such eccentricity that allows for the “unbearable lucidity of one who has lost the ability to participate in the supposedly healthy self-deceptions” of other beings. If, as all infants and imperialists know, “extension is good,” my apparent disposition lends itself to the opposite; in other words, my depression is the suffocating collapse of space-time into an unbearable expansion beginning from the birth-point of loneliness. For the majority, it seems, there is very little at stake in the question of whether there is an actual Point; for others, who are neither genuine philosophers nor rigorous explorers, there is (really) no immanent cosmic sickness threatening them to death. Daily, without fail, I personally confront the “unalterable self-evidence that nothing of one’s own is worth talking about; none of [this] would merit being thematized; [one] will never be the concern of speaking communities.” I welcome, as Plato did in his garden — beyond the security and hope of the city walls — not followers or converts, but companions: a fellowship who is likewise willing to go to the very edge of thought for what is to be known Outside. 

I feel, however, in undulating waves, the consuming emptiness and desperation of a human wasteland without redemption, without repair, with no outside. I know firmly enough that “God is dead” and remains so — and more,

what this actually means is that the orb is dead, the containing circle has burst, the immune magic of classical ontotheology has lost effect, and our faith in the Highest… has become powerless, groundless, and hopeless; for the Height is empty, the edge no longer holds the world together, and the picture has fallen out of its divine frame.

P. Sloterdijk, Spheres II: Globes, p. 559

Furthermore, It is true, though it drives me insane, “they know not what they do,” as Nietzsche’s madman emphatically proclaims, “I come too early,” and “my time is not yet.” What is really bothersome (to say the least)

is the curse of the insane person to know already at the time of the deed what would only become inner experience for most in the distant future and long hereafter: that God or the immune system of being was destroyed in a joint crime — a crime committed out of intellectual boisterousness, an atrocity resulting from consistency of thought, a crime of curiosity that brought to light a truth with which humans are not, initially and mostly, created to live.

P. Sloterdijk, Spheres II: Globes, p. 561

Here and now, I am alive; I am therefore I think. I am, moreover, willing to risk Life, that is, become Death, in the service of Truth. Therefore, in the calling toward the most intimate knowledge, “existence itself,” (known throughout history as God, Goddess, World, etc.) One resonates with the univocal cry of the unspeakable Reality (within which lie the techno-psychic realms of Absolute Mind, Spirit, Godhead, etc.). In psycho-structural terms, glimpsing the center of Being with-in the all-encompassing infinite world-soul opens a fairly modern dilemma (made possible by that very bond echoed ad nauseum in perennial philosophy) reminding us of our “origin,” our real claim to the Earth in the Cosmos, namely that we humans are an “evidently” ego-deficient, “weakened, forgotten, and begging remainder.” It is not enough to wash the blood from our hands and tell the truth; healing ends in the grave for all mortal beings. In our desperation, we sewed salt (and microplastics) into the soil for generations in advance. Humanity threatens itself most of all in its search for security: 

We have forsaken the land and gone to the sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us — more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there — and there is no more ‘land’!

Nietzsche, In the Horizon of the Infinite

Again and again, injections of caution. Immunologically, our periphery remains ever-permeable while retaining sufficient discretion of the useless and deterritorializing ideas that threaten our center (metabolism!), including ideas like monotheism, dualisms, or the many weary and premature philosophies of conservative traditions. Caution is warranted because metaphysical integration of the Many into the One — simultaneously the One into the Many — poses profound psychological and structural risks. Phenomenologically (and in this case, literally), the alchemy of the soul is not painless, despite the many promises of exhalation and ecstasy. If mysticism essentially “stimulates an attentive listening for the heartbeat of a shared world interior,” and if one frequently engages in the extreme mental and physical ordeals of God-intoxicants (drugs, meditation, mantra, and so on), it should come as no surprise that addiction and spirituality converge in near-schizophrenic-like states of existential sicknesses, including “treatment resistant” melancholy, rebellion, and confusion. Indeed, personal experience reveals that 

as soon as the inner other is temporarily unreachable, the subject left behind must endure its feeling of being cut off to the bitter extreme. There is scarcely a mystic who is spared the experience of dry, depressive times. Mysticism not only disclosed the poetic paradises of flowing presence to the ego, but also — and perhaps most significantly — the prosaic hells of withdrawal.

P. Sloterdijk, Spheres II: Globes, p. 509

To seek Go(o)d, then, means not only to participate in the creation of the world (good as well as otherwise) but, more importantly, to become able and willing (i.e., to cultivate willingness) to see clearly all that is created. But how, as a seemingly singular being, can one integrate into a Whole that is infinitely wide, de-centered, and All-pervasive — “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” and “has as many circumferences as points”? How, as a living being, “whose center has no place because it repeats infinitely, welling up everywhere from bursting points,” can one relate to the greatest maximum through a minimum? Can we imagine a second sun in a lightning flash?