Sauwelios wrote:I posted this on a philosophy forum on 5 November 2005. As the original article (by anarchy), to which there was a link in the Links section of this group, is no longer available, I will post this here.
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When I was looking for fellow believers in the madness of God, I searched for the phrase "God is mad", and came across a lot of Christian sites on which the phrase "God is mad at..." was used ("mad" in the sense of "angry"). That was not what I meant. So today I searched for the phrase "God is insane", and I happened upon a true kindred soul:
"First, I think the reason God exists is because it's impossible for Him/Her/It not to exist. Or if you're an atheist, it's impossible for a Universe not to exist, whatever form it may take, be it a three-dimensional universe, a one dimensional-universe, a universe in which PI=8.2, a universe in which gravity is stronger than the electromagnetic force, whatever. SOMETHING has to exist. There can't just be nothingness.
"I hear people ask questions like 'What if God didn't exist?' or 'What if there was never a Big Bang? What if there was just nothingness?'
"Well, what would 'nothing' look like? Is nothing an empty void that stretches to infinity? Is it a colorless theoretical solid that cannot be divided into smaller fundamental particles (aka a TRUE solid) of infinite size which fills all the space in which 'something' could possibly exist? What is nothing? Precisely that. Nothing. It has no characteristic by which it could be described or understood. It is impossible for NOTHING to EXIST. If it did, you wouldn't call it nothing.
"So by process of elimination, SOMETHING has to exist. There is no alternative. I believe consciousness IS existence. Without consciousness there truly would be nothing. And it would be impossible to describe because there would be no consciousness to comprehend and describe it. Everything exists within the mind of one consciousness which pretends to be many.
"Why does It pretend to be many? Because the fact that It is alone terrifies it. It is all that exists, trapped in oblivion with no Other it save It. It is truly alone in ways that cannot be described. And so it screams a scream that can't be heard, that does not rattle a voice box or an eardrum, does not stop with the emptying of lungs, but goes on for eternity. The terror rips its mind apart into a trillion trillion personalities, each one screaming at birth but then forgets what it is screaming about as it is wrapped in a blanket and placed in its mother's arms.
"But it goes even further than that. Humans are in a process of evolution. There are life-forms in the astral planes undergoing a process of involution. These are the multiple personalities that are still ripping apart from the momentum of the raw terror of God's aloneness, breaking up into smaller personalities, electrons, neutrinos, quarks until at some unknown point of miniscule scale the momentum dies and the process of evolution begins.
"Lifeforms evolve as they realize their oneness with each other, joining to form atoms, joining to form chemicals, cells, organic tissue, organisms, people who join together metaphorically by mutual understanding, physically by sex, psychically by telepathy, in joining together there is joy as they realize their oneness. Trillions of tiny bubbles in a shaken up bottle of soda press against each other, spontaneously clumping together into larger bubbles. The larger bubbles have more surface area and therefore press against more bubbles, absorbing them more rapidly. Individuals are not lost. They never really existed. They are the imagination of the same mind. Just as the bubbles fizz from the same root beer and nothing is lost when they rejoin. There is ever increasing joy until all is one and ascends to Godhood, realizing once again its aloneness.
"Only this time the terror is worse. This time there is something to contrast with the fear. All the hope, all the love, all the unity and joy of embracing other souls and becoming one suddenly seems so empty and hollow. It was all for nothing. It was a joke. A dream. A cheap and cruel illusion. All that ever was considered sacred and pure and holy was just an illusion. The reality is the stark terror of aloneness. So the mind rips apart again with even more terror, breaking up into even more personalities, more souls than before, hiding itself ever further into the illusion of there being 'many' instead of one. But the love intensifies as well. There is so much more rejoining of souls, so many more perspectives from which God sees Itself, so much more God learns about Itself, so many different parts of God that come together, forming whole new concepts of what God is.
"Both of these are real, the love and the fear, both feeding off of and intensifying each other for all eternity. Anyway, that's my take on existence." (anarchy, "I think God is insane (no, really), terror, the engine that drives creation".)
This fellow also agrees with me as to what "nothing" is. But the main thing is, of course, that God is insane.
The reason I post this here, however, the "feature of interest", to speak with Holmes, is in our disagreement. The passage I disagree with is the following:
"There is ever increasing joy until all is one and ascends to Godhood, realizing once again its aloneness.
"Only this time the terror is worse."
I agree with the former, but not with the latter. Because, according to the theory of the eternal recurrence, there is no first time God realises his aloneness. As Gilles Deleuze says, "it is not the same that returns, it is the return that is the same of that which becomes"...
God's moment of self-realisation, his joyful moment (or rather, short period...) of realising that he is God, is "the flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita [life]", to speak with Nietzsche,--of the serpent which bites itself in the tail. And just after that comes the bite itself: the terrible realisation that, as God, he is absolutely alone. From there, the poison spreads, until it dissolves, even as God dissolves "into a trillion trillion personalities" again. That is the serpent's tail, whereas the gold flash flashes from the serpents head--from the top, I think.
" 'God' as the moment of culmination: existence an eternal deifying and un-deifying. But in that not a high point of value, but a high point of power." (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 712.)
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