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Infinite now
The most sacred, most transforming and most ecstatic experience in syntheist religious practice; the infinite now is in itself immanent but is experienced as transcendental. As the condition is impossible to maintain over time without transitioning from ecstasy to agony, it is not the experience in itself but the memory of the experience that is the driving force existentially and ethically. The ecstasy thereby gets its true value as an eternalisation, which explains its paradoxical name. The infinite now can be executed for example as a mutual act of baptism or as a psychedelic ritual.
With the arrival of the law, mankind is separated from her internal compass, the oscillation between desire and the libidinal drive, and is subordinated to an external set of regulations which immediately attack desire and the libidinal drive in particular and denigrate these as the vanguard for the Fall of man. What then happens is that desire moves up in consciousness and internalises the law, making it into its own obsession, its own propulsion engine. Desire becomes a desire to either follow or oppose the law, but primarily a desire to constantly keep the law alive in order to cultivate one’s own obsession with it. Thanks to this coalescence with the law, desire receives what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls an extimate structure. The drive is instead displaced into the subconscious, where it churns away and constantly triggers disturbing eruptions of reality in consciousness. It is the drive that incessantly reminds the human being that she will never be able to get inside the law, that there is always a residual part of her that shuns the law, that the law is a trespassing alien in her mind. It is this restless residue of the naked drive that constitutes the core of mankind’s subjectivity, which drives her longing for a utopian freedom beyond her existential predicament. From a syntheological perspective, we argue that this obscure core of the subject is located in Entheos. It is only in the most intense religious experience, in the infinite now, that man confronts his innermost being, the coalescence of desire and the libidinal drive in their naked forms.
All of these four concepts relate to the search for the sublime as equivalent to the deepest pursuit of religion. The quest for the religious experience is the quest for a life intensity which is so strong that it bridges the gap from the moment to eternity – what syntheology calls the infinite now. Atheos motivates and drives the religious impulse, Entheos is the impulse in itself, Pantheos is its horizon and Syntheos is the moment when the impulse reaches its target and religion is realised as pure religion. Metaphors borrowed from the diachronic world of quantum physics shed light on the process: Atheos is the wave and Pantheos is the particle. Entheos is the relation between them, the movement between; on the one hand the perfect wave where no particle exists any longer, and on the other hand the perfect particle where no wave exists any longer. Syntheos is this entire complex seen as a cohesive unit, as a single phenomenon. It is through the presence and realisation of Syntheos that the phenomenon becomes an active agent.
Secondly, Brassier confuses quantity with quality. Even if quantitatively speaking pain were more prevalent than pleasure in existence – which definitely can be questioned: pain and pleasure are, to start with, often each other’s complements in various multidimensional experiences rather than each other’s opposites – it does not mean that the pain is qualitatively more important and thereby more identity-generating than pleasure. Here syntheism contributes something that Brassier overlooks in his philosophy, namely the spiritual experience. What characterises the spiritual experience is above all its production of infinity in the present, which means that it transcends the quantitative, places quality before quantity, and thereby enables the existential and thereby ethical prioritisation of life and pleasure over death and pain. The infinite now defeats drawn-out and maybe even life-long suffering, not just in the moment when it is experienced concretely, but even more as the identity-producing memory which generates ethical substance; something that arises only afterwards in the processing and integration of the event into the life fantasy, where it lives on as a constantly identity-generating abstraction.
The correlationists do not seem to understand that stability as a property is independent of all requirements for necessity. Oddly enough Zoroaster realises this difference already in ancient Iran about 1,700 years B.C. when he formulates the concept of haurvatat, a state that contains a kind of sacred perfection and at the same time is constantly in motion and dynamic; haurvatat may well be regarded as a synonym for the syntheist idea of the infinite now. Zoroaster’s genius lies in that he places holiness in the mutable and not in the immutable, which is in total contrast to Platonism and the Abrahamic religions. What brings Zoroaster and the relationalist physicists together is that they all maintain that relatively stable states can arise more or less regularly in an otherwise completely contingent universe. The symmetry that is so passionately desired – from Kant to Einstein, both within philosophy and within physics – is actually the opposite of contingency. Symmetry is eternalist and contingency is mobilist.
Syntheist ethics is based on this state of affairs. At the same time that the syntheist agent understands the terror of eternal life, right up until the moment of death she still seeks the continued dividuation in survival as desire’s conscious response to the drive’s subconscious longing for dissolution in constantly new phenomena. Therefore – as the syntheist philosopher Martin Hägglund shows in his book atheism.html">Radical Atheism – survival is the cornerstone in syntheist ethics, while immortality, because of its infantile premises, does not belong in the syntheist utopia at all. There is a logic in wanting to live longer, deeper and more intensely. But there is no logic whatsoever in trying to prolong something forever, since immortality robs that which is to be prolonged of all its meaning. To wish for immortality is the same as wishing away desire, and without desire the whole point of wanting to exist as a human being disappears. And then there is not either any reason to survive. We express this as the drive.html">death drive being the compulsion to return to the inorganic – which expresses itself as a constant striving to minimise, avoid and defer life’s intensity – while desire is the will to prolong and maximise the expression of the organic in the infinite now.
The sudden synchronisation between the subjects in the temporary utopia is strengthened rather than weakened over time, since the memory of the infinite now in the loving meeting between strangers in an environment from which instrumentality has been removed just grows and grows. And it is precisely in this memory of an ecstasy directly linked to the religious belonging that the syntheist intersubject is born and grows. When all other social factors are eliminated, it is in this, the most random of all meetings – without any other binding connections between people than the syntheist faith – that the manifestation of Syntheos shines the brightest. So what are our age’s local eco-villages and global participatory festivals (Burning Man, Going Nowhere, The Borderland, etc.) if not in fact experimental, temporary utopias that point forward towards and provide a tangible notion of the permanent utopia?
Syntheism embraces an ethics of survival as a counterweight to immortality’s moralism, which is characteristic of the dualist philosophies’ outlooks on life. The Platonist obsession with immortality and perfection attests to its hostility vis-à-vis existence and life, a phobia of change that at its deepest level is a death worship. From syntheism’s Nietzschean perspective, Plato and his dualist heirs therefore stand out as the prophets of the death wish. Syntheism instead celebrates the eternalisation of the decisive moment, the manifestation of the One in the irreducible multiplicity, as the infinite now. All values and valuations must then be based on the infinite now as the event horizon. Eternity in time and infinity in space are not extensions of some kind in Platonist space–time of some kind, but poetically titled compact concentrations of passionate presence, as Heideggerian-inspired nodes in Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. Eternity in time and infinity in space can only meet in the infinite now, in temporality’s minimised freezing, rather than in some kind of maximised extension. We are thus not eternal creatures because we are immortal, but because we can think and experience eternity as a logical as well as an emotional representation of the infinite, focused to the current moment. Which in turn means that the syntheist transcendence is localised inside rather than outside the immanence.
Love and mysticism in the infinite now constitute the very nucleus of the ethics of survival. Here, an alternative to all forms of moralism based on the preconceived state of things appears. That valuations that are loosely founded in the state of things being able to motivate a kind of “the future should be more of the same as now” as an ethical beacon, is not something that has any logical robustness. That nature appears to act in a certain way in a certain given situation of course does not mean that Man must have nature’s mechanisms as an ethical beacon. While amor fati is a dutiful love to the closed past, the imperative does not include the open future; rather, it implies a contradictory encouragement to break with everything that has been, that is, to expand rather than minimise the spatio-temporal multiplicity, as the arch-Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. Thus to act ethically is at least as often about violating nature, participating in and driving the cultural and civilisational process, as it is about following it. Nature is not any kind of Abrahamic god and neither is truth an ethical guiding principle.
Instead of Brassier’s organon of extinction, syntheist ethics is based on Zoroaster’s classic axiom: Man’s ethical substance is his thoughts, his words and his actions, and in precisely that order. It is only on the basis of a radical identity creation that ethics finds its mark. And what is this ethical principle founded on if not self-love’s being or non-being? Only the creature who loves herself as she is, from a crassly logical and ethical acceptance of herself, rather than based on any kind of sentimental and unreliable emotional passion, can act in an ethically correct way. And then survival is the ethical beacon, based on the principle of maximisation of existential pleasure – most clearly manifested in the religious ecstatic state that syntheologists call the infinite now – rather than any kind of premature mimicking of an alleged future universal annihilation.
So what then is the fundamental event – the event through which all other events are reflected – if not death? A longing for immortality – even if it is highly present in both Badiou and Meillassoux – is initially nothing other than a longing for death as death, in contrast to the will to survival as a longing for life as life. Only from its finality can anything at all gain a meaning, only through its transience can life be worth living. Without mortality, life and existence lose all intensity. The will to survival therefore oscillates between three poles: first a seeking of existential intensity, thereafter a desire for the prolongation of life in order to maximise this seeking. However, this seeking and this desire can only take place by virtue of the third pole’s guarantee of life’s indisputable finiteness. This guarantee of obliteration is thus in itself the third pole. In its full extent, eternity in the Abrahamic sense is namely an idea as unbearable as Hell itself, while life in its strongest intensity of the experience of here and now, seen against the backdrop of its transience as the infinite now – the syntheist event par excellence – is the holiest thing that exists. Thus consciousness always operates on the basis of death as the ultimate guarantor of the very will to life. To live is to die. But not at precisely this moment. Later.
When it comes to the syntheist agent, it is important to distinguish between the concepts dividual and subject. Informationalist Man is a dividual, but syntheism’s ambition is, based on dividuality, to develop an authentic subjectivity. In order to go from the usual reactive dividuality to unique, active subjectivity, the dividual must be isolated from the surrounding world’s constant distortions – be separated in order to be liberated from the lingering individualist ideology – which is enabled through purposeful spiritual work within the syntheist congregation’s walls. In this isolated, conscious, enlightened environment, the dividual can develop genuinely critical thinking, understand and experience herself as the syntheist agent. Through the identification with herself as an eternalised truth event, the authentic syntheist subject appears. Syntheists call this state clarification, and fidelity to the clarification is manifested through the syntheist baptism which is called the infinite now. In this state, the mind focuses on a single point in space–time where there is serenity, where all existential tensions are finally released, where the subject creates a tranquillity which makes it possible to quite simply be.
The syntheist community differs radically from the socialist idea of the collective that oppresses the dividual and forces her into submission. Here there is no talk of false consciousness. Rather, it is about the following: the less self-interest the dividual brings to the religious ceremony, the more powerful the spiritual experience. The spiritual work focuses on training the participants in a process that moves from the dissolution of the ego to a climb up the syntheological pyramid. Through this direct participation, the dividual becomes an active agent in and for the syntheist community, where the congregation is somewhat larger and more important than the separate dividual: the network of relations that gives the dividual context, meaning and existential weight in relation to herself. It is a matter of letting go of the ego fixation and allowing oneself to dissolve into the hierarchically higher collective emergence, where the community stands out as something greater than the sum of its constituent parts, as the most powerful agent. This is the infinite now, the immanent transcendence, the point where the connection to time and space disappears, where the dividual dissolves into something larger than herself, where Syntheos appears and completes the syntheological pyramid. The symbol for the infinite now is of course the lone photon, the light in eternity.
According to syntheism, self-love is truth as an act above all others. Love yourself, without involving any emotions whatsoever, because you have no choice. Just act. Out of this conscious and logically cogent self-love as truth as an act flows love to everything else that exists in an intensely pulsating, creative Universe. The opposite of alienation-enjoying self-hatred could hardly be clearer. But self-love stands firm only in this fundamental conviction: that in essence love is a constitutional act without emotions and from which all other love passions later emerge. And this act in its purest form is self-love; the love of the encounter between the self and the divine where integrity arises. The moment when one’s self-image and world view attain a harmonious reconciliation with each other is the event that the syntheists poetically call the infinite now or the immanent transcendence.
As early as during its first years of emergent self-organisation on the Internet – for example on collective web sites such as syntheism.org – the syntheist liturgy developed four different categories of rituals. The first category consists of ceremonies that support and confirm transitions in life, such as naming ceremonies, manhood rituals, baptism, confirmations of belonging, divorce rituals and burials. The second category is periodic festivals which are connected to the four seasons: Atheos is celebrated at the winter solstice and begins the Athea quarter; Entheos is celebrated at the spring equinox and begins the Enthea quarter; Pantheos is celebrated at midsummer and begins the Panthea quarter; and Syntheos is celebrated at the autumn equinox and introduces the Synthea quarter. The third category is meditative techniques, such as contemplation, meditation, yoga and contact improvisation. The fourth and last category comprises rituals focused on the infinite now, the transcendental experience, through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices.
Since syntheism is the religion of the Internet age, syntheist temples and monasteries are both physical and virtual. In its capacity as a potential manifestation of Syntheos, the Internet is an excellent environment for spiritual work. When the temporary experiments are transformed into permanent autonomous zones, they will emerge as finished temples and monasteries. In relation to the alienated, chaotic surrounding world, these oases of authentic living and sustainability will shine with the power of attraction. But they will also demand from new members an honest distancing of themselves from capitalism’s short-term and tempting superficial rewards; a distancing from bourgeois individualism and its fixation on exploitation in favour of netocratic dividualism and its quest for imploitation. This spiritual work must be carried out without the slightest instrumentality in human relations, without the least ulterior motive of any dividual gain for any single syntheist agent. Unlike the individual, the dividual is not the centre of existence, but subordinated to the network as the fundamental metaphysical idea. Dedication to the syntheist congregation is the bond to theological anarchism’s practical execution, without beating about the bush or any caveats. This dedication is confirmed before the community as a truth as an act, for example, in the syntheist act of baptism: the infinite now.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58