Thicc First Post (special)
Thicc First Post (special)
God and I play a fateful board game. I explore uncertainty in faith, and discuss Buddhist causality. Justonky ditches Adobe for Affinity, and Sunrise Oath tells a parable. CN✘LS Zine, Issue 01.
UPDATE: After some consideration, we have changed the content distribution method. We will no longer do a zine format of collected articles, but will post long form stories as their own posts. We will continue to collect short form content as compilations.
It is currently [Bhadrakalpa/ Cenozoic/ Quaternary/ Holocene/ Common-Era/ 2024/]. Scanning for NULLSPACE DEMON activity in this kalpa. No demons detected. Sentient Being detected. Cognitive energy detected. Cognitive activity meets threshold requirement. Unlocking Knowledge Vault. Downloading to squishy meat brain…
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
This extra thicc premiere issue of Cybernull ✘ Liber Syncretic collects and updates some of my most iconic essays and fictions (and all new content!), along with special articles by Guest Writers, Justonky (artist and writer), and Sunrise Oath (writer and musician).
We hope you enjoy this weighty newsletter, in a more classic Zine format. I intend to collect some of these for a physical over-produced artsy fartsy Zine at some point.
We don’t know how successful this whole “thicc zine format” would work out. Maybe people prefer individual articles and more frequent emails. We will pivot and adapt as needed. For now, enjoy.
If you’re receiving this via email, check for truncated areas hidden by your email provider. Or read this article on the main site. This is a long article.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Predestination Game (flash fiction)
by Syn_[C]pnk
Certainty is the death of spirituality (essay)
by Syn_[C]pnk
Trying Affinity for the First Time (art progress)
by Justonky
$120,000 art!? (art)
by JustonkySelect Quotes from Marx & Engels on AI Art
By Justonky
Buddhist Causality: Myth and Reality (essay)
by Syn_[C]pnk
Parable of the Eternal Home (prose)
by Sunrise Oath
God is dead. But we must live on (spotify playlist)
by Syn_[C]pnk
Heavenly Thunder Tarot & Oracle, a Biblical Mythology Card Set (promo)
Designed by Justonky X Syn_[C]pnk
The Predestination Game (fiction)
By
God: Before you incarnate into the world below, these are the starting conditions I have set up on my side of the board. What will you do, what move will you play under these conditions?
Me: Just to be clear, Jesus, this game is deterministic?
God: Yes. And call me God, that's the character I am roleplaying right now. Jesus is the nice character who gives handicaps. I am the strict and fair game-master role.
Me: Er, can I play the game with Jesus instead?
God: Not yet. Anyway, the initial starting conditions determined by your opening moves will drastically narrow down all possible futures.
Me: How can I possibly calculate what is the optimal move? The decision tree is too vast even for my spiritual brain.
God: Think carefully. You have 1 million years to consider. Tick tock.
Me: *makes 1 move*
God: According to my Game Engine (Holy Ghost™), that move dramatically increased your chance of burning in hell forever by 76%.
Me: *sweats bullet* But I can still make it to eternal salvation, yes?
God: Yes. You still have a chance. But now the rest of the game must be played in the other world, as a human being. I'd say good luck, but this is pretty deterministic.
Me: I might make a different choice on the ground. I might make optimal choices.
God: You would have to make three unlikely optimal moves in a row, at the critical junctures of the age of 11, age of 37, and age of 56. However, you might die before 56 if another player makes an optimal move to save themselves, thus condemning you forever to Hell.
Me: This is not a fun game.
God: This is the best game. Totally deterministic. No randomness. Takes true skill to win.
Me: This is not fair.
God: I am very fair. You just need to memorize all the optimal opening moves. I wrote them down in strategy guides known as "scriptures." This is what pros do. They memorize the best opening moves.
Me: I would like more RNGs in games. Luck mitigation and chaos seems far more fair and manageable than having to memorize optimal opening move sets.
God: Git gud, noob. I'll give you a hint: start a meme page. It sets up easier conditions for you down the road.
Certainty is the death of spirituality (essay)
By
True faith is probably knowing that God doesn't exist and knowing it's okay that He doesn't exist.
It's not that life has no meaning, nor even that there isn't greater powers in the cosmos....but that whatever we think of it has always been wrong, or mostly wrong.
Maybe our views of life gets more accurate as time passes, as we refine, debate, and argue, and make mistakes as a species. Some people come close, not necessarily because of their ideas, but because of their experiences, of coming to reconcile the absurdity of their existence with the love of life. Knowing it is meaningless, but knowing that compassion and love does have meaning nonetheless.
Some people approach religion through logic and reason (Nagarjuna for example), and yet others through mystical visions. There isn't a real way to say what is right or wrong.
From all angles, we achieve a better understanding of our place in this world, and find meaning. We grow in wisdom to build a better world, not because we must, but because we can. Not because God predestined it, but because we choose to.
It is not a purpose, but it is a possibility. One without a sure end. And isn't life better for it?
The divine mystery is that it is unknowable, and can never be known. But we strive on nonetheless. In not knowing, we find infinite possibilities.
There are perennialists and people who have seen gremlins on a drug trip looking down on me in judgement right now, absolutely convinced of their true faith conferred by God on high, disgusted with my nihilism. Well, I'm not you. I don't have that kind of certainty and as a rule, I distrust my senses and my thoughts, and any potential visions I may have.
Certainty is the death of spirituality anyway.
Trying Affinity for the First Time
By
First time working with Affinity, having sworn to finally ditch the greedy Adobe megacorp and their exploitative pricing a few months back.
I am never more thankful. Affinity Publisher is so smooth, so good, and its ability to instantly change into Designer or Photo is god-tier.
I swear, unless a client or employer all but force me to use Adobe, I am sticking with Affinity forever.
Anyway, this is a sneak preview of my next Solo RPG. Name to be determined.
Other News: My Mork Borg Supplement will take longer, as my decision to stop using Adobe necessitate a rework of everything I have done on it thus far.
$120,000 art!?
By
I AM READY TO MAKE $120,000 art. This is gonna be revolutionary: TWO Bananas hot-glued to a Wall. (ᵔ́∀ᵔ̀)
Select Quotes from Marx & Engels on AI Art
By
“Not as with the instrument [ie, a brush], which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine [ie, Gen AI] which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it… The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.”
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse
"All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien."
— Karl Marx, Estranged Labour (Manuscripts of 1844)
“Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.”
— Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
Follow Justonky on his Patreon to see more of his art projects and Work-In-Progress updates.Buddhist Causality: Myth and Reality (essay)
By
Buddhism teaches that causality is not linear and that it is impossible to understand it for ordinary humans (Interdependent Origination, Five Niyamas, etc). Any "Buddhist" who has tried to sell you on the idea that your actions has predictable, deterministic consequences, and that predestination is real, is at best, presenting a deeply flawed understanding of Buddhism to you (no doubt based on the superstitions they picked up from their local culture).
Every once in awhile, I get messages or comments from people asking me how they can reconcile the new age idea that "suffering comes from our personal actions" with humanitarian notions of social justice and material conditions. That this has become a serious obstacle in their faith in Buddhism; because we are blaming people for things which they cannot control, such as their circumstance of birth, or the suffering they experience in life.
But there was never any real contradiction, at least where the actual Buddhist teachings are concerned. What the Buddha taught was immeasurably closer to Marxism and to Chaos Theory, than any kind of pseudo-spiritual pop cultural nonsense involving souls and karma.
Every serious Buddhist (and not just the mindlessly devout ones) knows this. But poor karma teachings continue to plague Buddhist cultures around the world, especially amongst the laities and in the syncretic folk religious movements that improperly incorporate Buddhism into their beliefs.
The dilution of the Buddha's teachings is a serious concern, as it gets blurred together with Hinduism, and with other religions, and with pop cultural ideas, and thus loses its unique and radical insights.
Remember, texts like The Cause and Effect Sutra (which promotes a sequential and deterministic view of causality) are not considered credible by scholars. It doesn't actually teach any kind of Buddhist metaphysics. Its purpose is to encourage ethical behaviour amongst the laity, or to serve as inspiration; but in the process, this "dumbing down" inevitably distorts the Buddha's actual philosophical teachings. Whether this constitutes "skillful means" (conventional truths which distorts the actual truth) is of course, dependent on your personal beliefs.
In general however, we cannot take the majority of teachings and notions about causality as credible. Wrong views are one of the things that must be surrendered on the path. If we do not even know what the right views are, how can we ever practice the Dharma?
Parable of the Eternal Home
By
In your possession is a whole bag of gems, more beautiful than anything you ever knew. You want to put them in a place in your life that you would never forget, that will never be taken away.
Where do you put them?
The foundation of your eternal home.
You mix concrete using all the pebbles, sand, and limestone you have on hand. You crush some shells that you had lying around, but had no other use for.
You pour the foundation, and then press your gems into this wet creation. Safely embedded, locked in one place.
Then you build the rest of your house, with whatever you want. Maybe it is time to fell some trees that are blocking the view of the sun over the sea, of the old port at the mouth of the river. Oh, there was also the lumber from other houses that toppled due to winds blowing across the sands.
Soon, you have created a new abode.
You put everything you have in this home. This all increases your attachment to the rooms, the walls, the doorways. Above all (well, below it all), you know the greatest treasure is always there, safely buried. Whenever you sleep, you know you are lying atop a pile of riches.
One day, you die. Your home is there. All that you put there will crumble, and will turn into ruins. It might be razed, if others cannot see its beauty.
Those who see the skill of the builder, the love of the creator, will look below the rubble for the root of the fruitful tree.
The foundation, once hard to penetrate, is easier to pierce with the new technologies of the future, of the world that was to come.
They find your gems, and they see the wisdom of building one's house and life above their buried treasure.
They learn. They do the same.
Check out more Sunrise Oath content on their Website.God is dead. But we must live on (spotify playlist)
By
Enjoy my curated playlist.
Heavenly Thunder Tarot & Oracle, a Biblical Mythology Card Set (promo)
Designed by X
Redefine your divinatory experience. 22 Majors + 8 Bonus Oracles. Non-foil edition.
Now available on The Game Crafter.
Very cool format, I enjoyed a lot. Can confirm the Heavenly Thunder Tarot is FLAMES. Would love to see a dedicated article on Buddhist Causality, the common misconceptions and the correct view (with plentiful examples) 🤗