Pike's ghost

David Stockhoff · 30 Nov 2011, 00:06 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:06:04 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <1322608901.75810.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <1322608901.75810.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4ED5736C.4020907 at verizon.net>

On 11/29/2011 6:21 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
>
> --- On Tue, 11/29/11, James Wynn<crushtv at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Because the text says so.  But --guess what?-- that's
>> NOT the only theory. Marc has posited that the whole event
>> and Silk's communication with the Outsider was engineered by
>> Pas and Kypris. I can bring up technical refutations ("Pas
>> is dead.") but I fully know that I would like the story less
>> if the enlightenment were a ruse.
> I'm just going to barge in here, because I feel like this lack of "true" enlightenment is being a bit ... not misconstrued, but used in a secular anti-spiritual way I don't think is necessarily conducive to Gene's point of view.  I DO think that the voices Silk hears can be physically explained to some degree in that they were preprogrammed by his parents, Pas/Kypris, and I do find it ironic that these voices would lead him to reject the religion established by Pas to a great degree in something outside it [the Outsider Pas imitates), but I also find it wonderfully ironic that a false elightenment can be a true enlightenment, too, and serve a greater purpose.  Pas was calling him to his function as son and savior, but the words of Pas the demiurge helped create something much more spiritual than was originally intended.  So ultimately it doesn't matter at all whether there is a physical mechanism for those voices (I think there is) - it still has a
>   mysterious impact.  Silks is a good man in a misguided religion, but enlightenment, whether related to a physical 1-2-3 type cause and effect or not explainable by the reality, is still enlightenment. That's all.

I agree. That is the only way any enlightenment could be "true": all 
enlightenment must be true. All the various mechanics of enlightenment 
are too easy to explain away, after Dr Crane's fashion. But it's the 
result that matters, not the cause. It's what the subject does next that 
matters. If that were not the case, Silk may as well be a robot 
receiving instructions radioed to the fillings in his teeth.

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