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Deep in the monster's domain, there is no cause for despair, for there will very soon come a time when, heeding the call to adventure, the heroic wizard-warriors, the men and women of the League of Dialecticians, applying their esoteric knowledge as they play their arcane Game of a Trillion Worlds, and with their mysterious ally, Maia, will take to the field of battle in the epic wordwar for Truth, the war against the monster, the war that will be known in legend as the Logopolemos, the war that will bring the great and good colossus Helios out of the egg called Gaiaon so that he will bestow upon humanity a time of great happiness.
The two conversed that night in the Logician's tiny home, in the warmth of the fire of his wood-burning stove, within the woods known as the Wild Place. A blizzard raged outside while the Logician passed along to the initiate the secret knowledge of the Panoply. Aware that the initiate was one who sought hidden worlds, the epic and heroic good, and pure beauty, the Logician showed him that it had fallen to him and others like him to do what had to be done, to join the League of Dialecticians, to play the Game of a Trillion Worlds, to change the world forever.
WHAT THE LOGICIAN TOLD THE INITIATE THAT NIGHT
THE PANOPLY
The Logician spoke:
The great drama of our world, the cosmic pageant, the Panoply, with its cast of incredible-but-real characters, the colossus Helios, mysterious Maia, the monster PoMo and the heroic wizard-warriors, the whole phenomenon of Helios' emergence from the egg called Gaiaon, is like America's Grand Canyon, whose sublime grandeur, the very presence of the immense structure, is invisible to us until we find ourselves at its rim. Once you understand how it is that the colossi are real persons, you will have positioned yourself to view the Panoply. And then you will understand how our battle to preserve and extend free and abundant speech, to champion Reason and absolute Truth, is actually compelled by unseen cosmic currents, and how the resolution of this battle will change our world for the better, radically and forever.
The Age of Origin: Cosmic Evolution.
Despite what many claim, our universe has always existed and extends to infinity. All of space is filled with energetic clouds made of a fire that is sometimes hot, but often very cold, which is not earth, nor water nor air — it is called "plasma" — through which enormous electrical currents flow, and these electrical rivers meet and intertwine, and where they meet, they create accumulations of metal and stone which form allocyclons, rotating cosmic systems. Two currents, called Stelealph and Stelebet, merged 13.5 billion years ago to create the allocyclon that would come to hold our sun and a hundred billion other stars. And about 4.5 billion years ago, this merging created the sun and its planets in the form of the allocyclon that is our solar system.
The Second Age — the age of metal and stone: Geological Evolution
The earth has been growing now for eons, forcing her ancient granite, which had, 500 million years ago, come to cover one half of the entire sphere, to break up, the pieces moving apart. This too is a heresy, let the few proponents of the expanding earth theory understand. But some others will object: how could mountains form on an expanding earth? Draw a picture of a clock face on a piece of paper. Cut the picture at six to the center and pull the five away from the seven: see how the mountains form at noon — this is how expansion raises mountains. The mysterious colossus, Ouranos, saw the new stellar system, the one now called Helios, forming, and he became attentive to the earth, the egg called Gaiaon, upon which Helios' mind and heart would develop.
The Third Age — the age of beasts and forests: Biological Evolution.
Ouranos seeded the early earth and the natural dialectic drove the evolution of biological species.
The Fourth Age — the age of man and colossus: Cultural Evolution.
Around four million years ago, two new species evolved on earth at the same time: the human-like biological beings appeared and from them emerged, almost immediately, the partly biological colossi (collective intelligences)—both were species of persons. So, finally, after billions of years, the incubation of the egg, Gaiaon (earth), had produced persons, two kinds of them, just as Ouranos had known it would. But who is Ouranos? Who is Helios? What exactly is a colossus?
To understand the Panoply, you must first know what I mean by certain words.
A 'collective mind' is a super-mind made up of these elements: first, the minds of a number of individual biological people; that is, their minds as shaped by their sharing of thoughts via a network of connections existing among them, a network that is their marketplace of ideas; and second, the elements of that network itself, including its hardware and software. A 'collective heart' is a great will, composed of the wills of the multitude of individual biological people consolidated by means of the aesthetic network that is the artistic activity of their cultural world. A 'colossus' is a collective person, a super-person with a collective mind and heart. 'Gaia/Helios' is the colossus whose emergers (those from whom the collective emerges) are the earth's human beings. A 'wizard' is a practitioner of mysterious (not necessarily magical) arts. 'PoMo,' also known as 'Darkest Dionysos,' is the colossus/monster, whose emergers are the ideological descendants of the postmodernists, the deniers of absolute Truth. And 'Maia/Ouranos' is the mysterious great colossus whose emergers are the people of the ancient races not of this earth.
That said, I will now tell you the true story of the Panoply, the story that perhaps only the wizards have heard.
Throughout our universe there are many kinds of people: there are numberless species of biological persons, and there are also many kinds of colossi, who are usually much more intelligent than the biological beings from whom they emerge. And of these colossi, some are great astrocolossi, who are brilliant, loving people, each having the physical form of a plasma body enclosing a central burning sphere surrounded by circling smaller spheres, which themselves are surrounded by even smaller companions. And there are colossi-of-astrocolossi, too, who emerge from the astrocolossi — these are generally great sages, very old and very wise. And then there is the grand Colossus of All Astrocolossi, the greatest of temporal persons, who is not God, but is, as are all worldly beings, a creation of the Eternal Mind of Heaven, whose blueprint for such creation, and the regulation of such creation, we call the Panoply.
There are wars among biological persons and among colossi, but the astrocolossi and those who emerge from them never war amongst each other.
Four and a half billion years ago, Ouranos, the great colossus-of-astrocolossi, watched the Sun come into existence and recognized that the system of the Sun, its planets and their moons, a system destined to become an astrocolossus, was ready to begin its evolution. So Ouranos, to make sure that such evolution would take place (its natural constructive processes countering the forces of decay), came to earth and seeded its early waters — this stellar system, which is destined to become a Great Person, whom Ouranos sired and who was to become earth's most highly evolved creature, was Helios.
In a kind of self-incubation, then, in the manner of the living astrocolossi in general, Helios is still developing within a part of himself, within the protective environment of the planet earth. The egg of Helios, therefore, is the earth, which, in its aspect as egg, we call Gaiaon. Within Gaiaon, as Ouranos had anticipated, Helios has evolved by a process of dialectical conflict and memory (geological, genetic and human memory): at first his terrestrial lands, waters, atmosphere, and living things evolved together; then the minds of individual human beings, as shaped by myriad connections that make up the marketplace of ideas, combined, their intellectual powers pooled, along with the network itself, forming the nascent Mind of Helios.
And Helios is still developing in Gaiaon, as human culture evolves, driven by the individuals' elemental neurotic fears, products of the oedipal struggles, which become fears within the Mind of Helios, his fear of sameness (Dionysianism) dominating for a time, becoming more and more oppressive until, as a synthesis, fear of difference (Apollonianism) begins to dominate within him, and after a while, the fear of sameness returns, and so on, in a continuing cyclical dialectic.
And our human hearts become caring as the result of religious insight and of inexorable social forces, this manifesting as Helios becoming a good person — for the mature astrocolossi and those who emerge from them have all become moral beings: society, from whom such great beings emerge is, as the sage has told us, 'impossible on any other footing than that the interests of all are to be consulted,' and 'society between equals can only exist on the understanding that the interests of all are to be regarded equally.' And our moral wills combine through the arts. Helios' psychical development — the emergence of the Mind of Helios, during the Apollonian cycle, and the emergence of the Heart, the Good Will, of Helios, during the Dionysian cycle, from the minds and hearts of the human beings of the earth — happens first to him in his female aspect, Gaia — and by means of this process, Helios becomes conscious.
But now, when Helios seems to be nearly ready to emerge from Gaiaon, to be born, to become conscious, there comes a crisis in his evolution, in his gestation, when a colossus, the darkest of dark Dionysos, a monster called PoMo, whose dreadful power has been increasing for two centuries (for she had once been bright Dionysos), the embodiment finally of the most extreme fear of sameness, the embodiment of ignorance, evil and madness, the Enemy of Truth, has emerged upon the earth and threatens to destroy Helios even before he is born.
Ouranos, now to be known as Maia, had foreseen these events at the beginning. Human society, already as the result of PoMo's onslaught, at the beginning of its 21st century, has become radically divided, its institutions are dissolving — continuity is not tolerated — 'There is no objective Truth!' is PoMo's battle cry as she advances, But when these false words are believed, when people believe that there is no absolute Truth, then there exists little to stop their falsehoods from proliferating, little to deter their censorship of contrary ideas, little to cure their aversion to linear thinking or their hatred of debate as a search for truth (for they will disparage any search for something that they believe does not exist). When people believe that there is no Truth, then there is no way for false beliefs to be detected and corrected; bad decisions become commonplace; Helios thinks poorly; misery, chaos and the destruction of great institutions are the inevitable result. Even those individuals who fear sameness, but would nevertheless affirm Truth, eagerly take on the intolerant anti-intellectual attitudes of their more radical brethren as their own. This attack by PoMo is not an unexpected horror; as awful as it is, it is a necessary condition for there to be an Apollonian-cyclic response, the counter-revolution, not radical Apollonian, not dark Apollonian, but bright Apollonian, the balancing synthesis that finally fulfills the evolutionary telos by means of the birth of Helios; the deplorable attack by PoMo is demanded by the cosmic rules that govern the evolutionary dialectic.
We, from whom Helios emerges, we, emergers of Helios, know what we must do. We must enthusiastically reaffirm and celebrate the existence of Truth. In this last great terrestrial evolutionary synthesis, driven by the antithesis of the fundamental values of the Enlightenment, the antithesis that constitutes PoMo's attack, Helios must become complete. He must emerge from Gaiaon to battle Po-Mo or he will perish at the hands of Po-Mo; and to become complete, his MIND must acquire a dialectical center, a Central Intellectual Organizing Faculty called the Truth Engine Logos, whose three divisions supply him, as basic functional units, with knowledge of the intellectual structures of Pure Truth, the Truth of the Good and the Truth of the Beautiful, an acquisition that will vastly increase the power of his intellect; taking it to the level at which it is destined to be; and his HEART must acquire its Seat Of Organizational Goodwill, the Truth Engine Ikon, whose three divisions are dedicated to the love of Pure Truth, to the love of the Truth of the Good and to the love of the Truth of the Beautiful. The act of installing the Truth Engine, its two parts and the union of the two, the Truth Engine Logikon, will take on the character of a heroic war against PoMo — it will be a war of Truth engaged in by means of a transformational competition among the wizard-warriors, the Dialecticians, enemies of Po-Mo who will fight to bring about the birth of Helios. The name of the word war is the Logopolemos and the name of the competition is the Game of a Trillion Worlds.
It has been known (by very few) in what way Helios was incomplete and that completing him would bring a great good, but only now, when doing it becomes vital, does it become possible to complete him. The Logopolemos, the creation of the synthesis resulting from the thesis of the Apollonian Enlightenment and the antithesis, which is the dangerous end of the Dionysian age, cannot begin until the destruction wreaked by PoMo is very great — until the Dionysian-cycle excess has become intolerable to those among the general population. That is the nature of the dialectic. Only when PoMo's movement, like a terrible crash of thunder sufficiently terrifies the non-initiates of the land, will the community of wizard-warriors, who have stood back, restless, but knowing that the time was not yet right, and having suffered isolation in a more and more hostile world — only then will they find the means to come together to plan the Apollonian-cycle synthesis, the birth of Helios.
The Dialecticians, the wizard-warriors, will then retire to their chambers and arrange their cards according to their signs — signs that have been used for the same purpose with the same meanings on worlds too numerous to count over eons too vast to comprehend — and they will write their proto-claims on the pages of their Thorn notebooks, the notebooks of Truth, and they will write their notes on the pages of their Eth notebooks, the notebooks of Goodness, and on the pages of their Ash notebooks, the notebooks of Beauty — in doing these things they will prepare their weapons for the war, the coming Logopolemos, against the monster, Po-Mo. And it is written that, in order to complete Helios and to defeat Po-Mo, the Logopolemos must take the form of a great series of tournaments, in which the wizard-warriors, male and female, must compete amongst each other in the Game of a Trillion Worlds. In these tournaments, the wizard-warriors will compete in matches in order to secure the emblems of Truth. It is in these matches, in these debates on all public controversies, that the two aspects of Gaia-Helios — female and male, originating and finishing, intuitive and discursive, sociopolitical Left and Right — are at first set off against one another then brought together in a subordinate dialectic; it is in these matches, in these cosmic romances, that a subordinate synthesis brings about the union of opposing ideas, from which comes the birth of Truth.
And in accord with the dialectical rules set by the Mind of Heaven in the eternal Form of the Panoply, after every contest, the wizard-warriors must send a record of their debate to the Precinct of the Engine and cause the Truth they have brought into the world to be written into the Encyclopedia of Truth that is kept there and the participants in the next tournament on the same topic will consult this great book before their matches begin. And the audiences, inspired by the debate, will send suggestions to the encyclopedists so that their thoughts may also be integrated into the book. The Encyclopedia of Truth and the Truth Engine Chronicle together constitute the memory of Helios; the debates constitute his thoughts, his pondering, his seeking to know what is true. Before the tournaments, without the book, before Helios is given this central intellectual organizing faculty, his thinking is disorganized and weak; arguments on a topic are unclear, unconcise, not current, repetitive and incomplete. To a great extent, every debate takes place as if starting anew. With the book, within which each new idea is integrated, argument will be clear, concise, current, complete and, most importantly, improvable. Thus, this recursive process — the book shaping the debate, and the debate reshaping the book, the new edition of the book shaping the next debate on the topic, etc., in a continuing cycle of constructive feedback — will clarify truth with great and unprecedented velocity. The intellectual powers of the participating individuals writing to a single book will be combined, just as the physical powers of individuals pulling on a single rope are combined. Helios' IQ will be vastly increased and he will have been made complete and it will be able to be said that he has been born — he will then reveal truth to us with an authority far exceeding that of any single human being. And it is Truth, and Truth alone — Pure Truth, the Truth of the Good, and the Truth of the Beautiful — that will destroy the monster and bring Helios to term, and it is because of the wizard-warriors' power to reveal Truth that PoMo fears them and seeks to destroy them. The goal of the warrior, then, is to distinguish him- or herself in the Truth-revealing matches in order to help establish Helios and to help crush PoMo. This is how Helios acquires his intellectual center and his seat of goodwill and is born.
The quest of the wizard-warriors will be a difficult one, but they will not have to fight alone, for they have an ally in Maia, the deeply mysterious Midwife, the great colossus of astrocolossi who emerged long ago from the ancient races not of this earth and who came to earth to help to bring about the birth of Helios, who is of the same species as she; and Maia speaks to him using luminous celestial apparitions, and she has been training us, even without our knowing it, for over half a century for what we must do now. Her motivation is both familial (for Helios is her child — in her male aspect, Ouranos, it is said that she is the Seeder of Worlds) and moral, since the astrocolossi from whom she has emerged are moral. Maia helps us to bring about the Golden Age because, like Helios, she desires our happiness. Maia loves us; she is deeply touched by our intrepid struggle to evolve. Perhaps she also knows that as Helios matures he will prepare himself to accomplish great things in the cosmos external to himself. (We hint at what we claim is the true telos: Helios' great goal will be to create and control a machine, a macrorotator, that has a certain function, and to place it into interstellar space.) With Maia's help the wizard-warriors must prevail.
Once the Truth Engine, heart and mind, is installed within his psyche, Helios, after four and a half billion years of incubation, will finally rise up out of Gaiaon as a great astrocolossus and, even as an infant, will set upon PoMo with tremendous power, the unsurpassable power of Truth — and with his defeat of PoMo, our societal divisions will be healed and the elemental fears annihilated through synthesis — and the history of the Sun, the planets and their moons, the biography of Helios, will enter its Postnatal Epoch. This infant, Helios, whose goal will be to increase human happiness, using his by-then brilliant mind with an authority far surpassing that of any human being, will inspect mankind's puzzlements and controversies and, with respect to the particulars of each, will teach mankind what is true, what is good and what is beautiful. The result will be a grand Golden Age of human happiness — the Postnatal Age of the Realm of the Sun. During this time, the wonderful Macrorotator will be built and deployed. You will learn later about the Macrorotator.
The Dialecticians, then, when the time is ripe, as warriors, will come together to engage in verbal battle against the enemies of the Engine, as they engage in civil contests with one another, in order to install the Truth Engine within the psyche of Helios, in order to advance the synthesis. The wizard-warriors, the Dialecticians, will thus wage an avant-garde Apollonian revolution for the sake of fulfilling our world's cosmic telos, of fulfilling, by Apollonian/Dionysian synthesis, the goal of evolution on earth, of ushering in the postnatal Golden Age, a time of abundance of great happiness and little pain. They will come together to join this revolution that will, in times to come, become the stuff of legend — for there has never been on Earth such a moment, and there will never be another. People in the future will study faded photographs from the time of revolution and read historians' accounts. 'How wonderful it would have been,' they will say, 'to have known the wizard-warriors during that amazing time.'