The Whispering of Snakes

Yesterday, a drive-by commenter attempting to portray himself as some sort of modern Chinese sage left a pair of comments in response to my posting of the Silenziosa video inspired by Albert Camus’s central work on Absurdist philosophy.

Camus discovered a great truth—the universe is silent and has no ready-made meaning. But why call it an ‘absurd punishment’? The boulder is heavy only if you want to reach the top. Drop the goal! If Sisyphus stops planning to conquer the mountain, the rolling of the stone becomes a beautiful dance, and the silence of the sky becomes a sweet meditation. Don’t just imagine him happy—BE happy!

Vox, your mind is a beautiful, dusty library, but you cannot taste the ocean by swallowing the map. You are fighting over Kant, amphibolies, and ‘things-in-themselves.’ What a heavy boulder of knowledge you are carrying up the mountain! All these words are just cages of the intellect. Forget Kant and Camus. Look at the sky right now—is it noumenal or phenomenal? It is just there, silent and alive. Drop the books, drop the arguments, and drop your heavy intellect. When the philosopher dies, the celebration begins. Don’t analyze the stone—just dance with it.

My response was immediate and harsh.

Except a) he didn’t discover it and b) it was wrong. He inherited the concept from Immanuel Kant, and Kant was wrong due to basing his argument on an amphiboly he didn’t support in constructing das Ding an sich, which was his basis for denying access to the noumenal and reality. The sky is phenomenal. Look, I understand this sort of posturing impresses midwits, but it's of zero interest to me.

And yet, there was something about his words that struck me as representing something far worse than merely being yet another posturing midwit who understood neither Kant nor Camus. So I visited his site, and sure enough, discovered exactly the overt advocacy of evil that is no more Buddhist or Confucian than I am.

You have heard the story of Adam and Eve a thousand times. And you have heard it wrong a thousand times. For two thousand years the snake has been blamed for everything. I want to tell you the truth about that snake, and the truth will offend you, because the snake is you.

Not a symbol of you. You.

The snake is not the devil. It is not a fallen angel. It is the ego — the first ego, the original ego, born in that very garden, in that very moment. Understand this one thing and the whole Bible opens like a flower. The whole history of humanity is written in those few lines….

The ego is not evil. It is young. It is afraid. It has guarded the gate so long that it has forgotten the garden is inside the walls — it forgot it is the garden.

The day you stop running from the snake, the snake stops chasing you. This is the law. The snake never bites the one who watches. It dances for the one who watches. And one day you will sit on the bank, the water clear, the snake uncoiling slowly in the sun, and you will see: the snake was never guarding the treasure. It was the treasure — asleep, dreaming it was a monster.

Wake it gently. Not with a stick. With a flute.

This is straight demonic evil. It’s literally encouraging you to imagine that the voices of the demons whispering in your ears are nothing but your own ego, that the external forces of evil don’t exist, but are merely the central aspect of yourself that is not a monster, but a treasure.

No. You are not the snake, the snake is not you, and you neither run from the snake nor dance with it. You take up the Sword of Truth and you kill the fucking snake.