# The phallic gaze behind the barred absolute We work with three different sorts of truth: the immediate, the temporary, and the timeless. These three categories most likely even have their own media, which in turn may share a joint metamedium, such as when the printing press retroactively produced both newspapers for immediate truth, books for temporary truth, and encyclopaedias that at least had the ambition to convey timeless truth. However the apprehension that truth arrives in three different variants -- based on the dialectics of accessibility and credibility -- already exists in the sociontological division between life's different epistemological phases. Thus we sociobiologically associate the child with immediate truth as well as with unconditional love ([[Matrix]]), the adult with temporary truth and conditional love ([[Mamilla]]), and the priest with timeless truth and the absolute love of reality itself ([[Phallus]]). And timeless truth is in this context both inaccessible and hard to fathom, not to say unattainable. Literally. Because it hides behind the syntheological concept [[The Barred Absolute]], the world of the lesser gods beneath the realm of the higher gods, out of reach for ordinary, mortal humans. Or rather: the tantric world where one only is welcome if one is ready to understand and handle the setting in question, where *the initiation* to the sacred realm, which thus is found behind the barred absolute, is *the event Itself*. Historian of religion Mircea Eliade composes a history of the shaman as *homo religiosus* and the ecstatic experience as *hierophany.* He argues that these drive religion as the sacred moment at the sacred place. It is this [[Adytonology]] (after *adyton* in ancient Greek, the name for the most sacred place) that is the core of religion. Theologian Rudolf Otto also delves into the history of adytonology with his central concept *numen* (a place where God is present, for instance when Moses stands before the burning bush), a place over which there is an element of mystery, a mystery that balances between *tremendum* and *fascinans*, that is: the most ecstatic variant of the ambivalence, *The Infinite Now*, that governs all human phenomenology (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). Adytonology is thus the membranics of religion itself, and it is thereby radically decisive for all the other hierarchical distinctions that humans make. It is precisely because one creates a tantric inside and a sutric outside for the priests and the lesser gods within the sociont itself, that it becomes possible to define an inside and an outside for the sociont as a whole. The phallic setting of membranes is the central role of religion in all cultures. Without firmly set boundaries, both anarchy and nihilism follow. Every nightclub line throughout history is more or less built on adytonological principles. Furthest within the night club's secluded VIP lounge, always behind the barred absolute, hides the phallic gaze, or *the Godfather*. The night club's doormen are nothing other than the local ambassadors and diplomats of the phallic gaze, in constant contact with the Godfather himself via earpieces and surveillance cameras. The dream of the informationalist sensocracy is thus nothing other than the dream of the world as one big night club from which one senses and plays on people's desires and obsessions. One can of course opine that this state of things has a dark flip side, but will then be wise to remember that without adytonology nothing other than bloody chaos awaits. The actual division between *tantra* and *sutra* within one and the same relation recurs in whodunits by for instance Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Here Sherlock Holmes floats around in the tantric condition while his sidekick Dr Watson balances the story as the protagonist's sutric counterpart. While Agatha Christie's master detective Hercule Poirot finds himself in the same tantric condition, while the role as sutric counterpart is played by his friend and armor-bearer Arthur Hastings. By virtue of their positions behind the barred absolute, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot become the near-supernatural shamans who see and know everything. They are assigned [[The Phallic Gaze]] that no one can evade and which -- when it is appropriate and the time is ripe -- reveals the truth about everything and everyone. However the narrative thus requires another clearly defined subordinate character who represents the sutric perspective and whose task it is to communicate the miracle of sharp-wittedness and penetration that just has taken place in a way that becomes comprehensible to ordinary mortals, that is: the great majority within the sociont. Where the pliable assistant himself is the first to iconologically submit to the tantric master behind the curtain. This mediating function between tantric or esoteric inside and sutric or exoteric outside is necessary; all contact surfaces are highly provisional and temporary. Man outside can only piously hope for, but never count on being met by an extended hand from the other side. The tantric phallus, filled with unpredictable pathos, is never able to create security and/or be reliable, and is therefore in essence distinct from the sutric mamilla. In the original sociont the shamans are surrounded by *the shamanic caste*, which consists of all the *outcasts* that lack a foundation in either the outer or the inner circuit (but who become *incasts* within the shamanic caste itself). Typical examples of members in the shamanic caste are on the one hand the executioner and on the other hand the whore -- archetypes within the cleaning crew that carry out the sanitary work that the sociont tasks them with, and that no one else either wants to or can carry out. The social-psychological term for these archetypes is *shamanoids.* In daylight one keeps one's distance to the shamanoids, but in the darkness of night they take over the social arena and move unimpededly into and out of the sociont. The shamanoids need not care about the nightclub line which they glide past expressionlessly. Their profession is of course being boundless compared with all other archetypes within the sociont. They therefore handle both horizontal communication with the surrounding world's strangers and vertical communication with the higher world's gods and the lower world's demons. When the sociont is transformed as a result of written language and permanent settlement arriving in history, these shamanoids begin to don special garments and document their dialogues with gods and demons in writing; ever since we call them priests. Thus new knowledge arises about a world that previously has been closed. We can now know something of what the inner world of the priests looks like, and thereby also something about adytonology as the core of religion inside the barred absolute. The priests' own religion is of course central within nationalist Judaism with its rabbinic rule. In the deepest sense, this concerns a space called the holy of holies, inside the merely holy space in the temple, as Judaism's own adytonology. The priests' own religion within imperial Zoroastrianism correspondingly concerns *Zurvan* as the divine and transgendered [[Hypertime]] that is concealed beneath all other dimensions of time, gods and narratives. Zurvanism is a religion without text, a religion without a public narrative, a religion that is not proclaimed publicly and that therefore is not missionized -- an inaccessible, barred religion enfolded by the membrane of religion itself, a religion that is nothing but *intention*, *ceremony* and *integration*, without turning outward with any form of public gestures. Therefore Zurvanism is the perfect adytonology as the religion of religion itself. Here the priests themselves are *the chosen ones* and any idea of someone else being able to establish a direct contact with God does not even allow itself to be formulated. Anyone who wishes to follow the priests along the path toward the promised land is forced to mobilize near-blind trust. That is: an authentic *faith*. Within Zoroastrianism, the barred absolute is described as a bridge called *chinavat*. A faithful Zoroastrian (called *behdin*) can only pass the chinavat bridge on one single occasion, namely when he or she faces death and thereby also the Zoroastrian *Enlightenment*. It is thus an Enlightenment that lies out of reach of all other humans while life goes on and which they cannot even make a meaningful image of. Therefore Zoroastrianism takes great care to maintain *haurvatat* (completion) as an ideal for mortal humans at the same time as one proclaims *ameretat* (transcendence) as a higher value beyond death. This does not prevent the Zoroastrian clergy (initially shamanic *zaotars*, later priestly *mobeds*) from moving freely back and forth across the *chinavat* membrane when necessary. A clearer image of the barred absolute is hard to imagine. Consequently it is only the zaotars that have permission to ingest the sacred beverage *haoma*, whose content is potently psychedelic -- a tantric practice that one does not even know of, and even less carries out, anywhere but behind the barred absolute. Tantric religion rests on a geometric dialectics that we refer to as *the tantric quadrant*. One axis, the vertical one, stretches between the opposite poles of power versus submission, while the other, horizontal axis runs between the opposite poles of exhibitionism versus voyeurism. The most extreme form of power is tyranny, the most extreme form of submission is slavery. The most extreme form of exhibitionism is the arrival of the Saoshyant, and the most extreme form of voyeurism is [[The Phallic Gaze]] -- a phenomenon which we may refer to as *The Wizard of Oz syndrome*, as humans constantly fantasize about being observed by a godlike, sensocratic eye in the sky. All the while it is striking how the barred absolute time and time again returns within popular religion. The classic confession booth is an excellent example where the one who confesses is on one side -- the outside -- of the membrane that encloses the barred absolute, while the priest that receives the sinner's confession is behind the barred absolute, on the other side of the membrane through which it is impossible to see. The membrane of the confession booth makes the reception of the confession invisible and thereby also illustrates that the congregation member who confesses his or her sin and the priest himself cannot be located in the same environment nor obey the same laws and rules simultaneously. They literally live and act in different realms. The barred absolute must exist as a distinct membrane between the actors. It is only when this membrane is in place that the encounter of the two agents receives its ritual form and they can act against and with each other with full credibility. And this separating function becomes more important than ever in conjunction with informationalism establishing itself. If the upper class during previous paradigms like peacocks have enjoyed showing off and flaunting their material abundance and then has used the underclass as an audience for their exhibitionism, the roles are suddenly reversed when [[Attentionalism]] increasingly dictates the terms and a netocratic caste system emerges (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*). Since the Internet provides billions of humans with cameras and microphones -- which transform all these people from forcibly commandeered recipients of mass media impulses to admittedly amateurish yet still mass producers of the same -- we create a gigantic, unmanageable surplus of exhibitionist theater and a corresponding deficit of voyeurist audience. The mass audience as a phenomenon has completely played out its historical role; it is simply no longer important how many are watching the one or the other variant of accessible spectacles, but everything concerns who is watching. What everyone yearns for, but precious few succeed in attracting, is the phallic gaze. And the reason why the phallic gaze is so difficult to access -- in practice inaccessible -- is that it hides behind the barred absolute, wherefore it only is accessible to a narrowly delimited, netocratic elite. This is the shamanoid elite within the governing netocracy that we call *the protopians*. What ultimately drives these networks is what Hegel calls *the negation of the negation* and from this arises a kind of new middle ages that we call *the dark renaissance*. In the mid 20th century, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan picks up Hegel's insight of the human subject as *the night of the world* and reformulates the concept with a Freudian twist as *the barred subject*. No matter how deeply Man digs and searches, he never attains any foundation or limitation for his subjectivity. The subject is to itself, as Lacan's willful successor Slavoj Žižek points out, exactly the catastrophe that it fears the most. The subject's own barring *vis-à-vis* itself is cursed with what we call *poetic infinity*. It is here important to note that Hegel's predecessor and countryman Immanuel Kant is the last philosopher to seriously attach a soul and a substance to the subject, before Hegel grinds the Kantian pomposities down to one big negation. But the Hegelian subject is at the same time more than that. That the subject is, so to speak, highly subjective and moreover insatiable, is due to how inaccessible it is and how barred it is to itself. Precisely this inaccessibility in the subject is subjectivity in itself. Within these innate boundary settings the subject can explode in creative thoughts and eventually even witness the birth of the Hegelian phallus. And the Hegelian phallus then steps forward, after long having hidden precisely behind the phallic gaze that the subject thirsts for. In the modernist era, psychoanalysis assumes the role of the living religion, especially as it reconquers the priest's role as analyst *vis-à-vis* the congregation member as analysand. And psychoanalysis, with its Jewish roots, has no illusions of the believer having any direct contact with God. Rather the reverse. Psychoanalysis entails a radical attack on the Christian and Islamic dream of a direct contact with God, and does this through severing the phantasmally projecting transference from analysand to analyst during the psychoanalytical process. To the great fury and frustration of the analysand, the psychoanalyst refuses to play the role of the almighty God. There is no [[The Great Other|Great Other]] within psychoanalysis. Both Freud and Jung as well as Lacan are in complete agreement on this. With this maneuver the subject is split between *the implicate self* -- what the old Zoroastrians call *urvan*, the fundamental soul or will-to-intelligence -- and *the explicate self* -- what the Zoroastrians call *fravashi*, the creative soul or will-to-transcendence. These are the two complementing variants of subjectivity within both the Zoroastrian Saoshyant and the Jewish Messiah figure, as well as the Nietzschean Übermensch. Out of the implicate self the explicate self rises as its emergent consciousness. And it knows its own existential closure. It is the implicate self that returns as *Ahura* and it is the explicate self that returns as *Mazda* within Zoroastrian theology. Spinoza and Kant thus -- as so many pillar-saints before them -- become mired in a kind of Western, nomadological *Ahurayasna* rather than an eventological *Mazdayasna*; Spinoza with his body worship becomes the first heretic monist, and Kant with his soul worship becomes the last and nostalgic dualist after Christianity. But none of them seem capable of seeing the entirety that comprises the implicate self as [[Root-Of-The-Phallus|the root-of-the-phallus]] and the explicate self as *phallus in itself*. This dialectical opposition between Spinoza and Kant is broken up by the synthesis that is spelled Hegel. What has been lacking after the Hegelian phallic synthesis is not the Hegelian revolution in itself -- it has kept philosophers occupied ever since -- but the discovery of the correct root-of-the-phallus that makes *the Hegelian phallus* both strong and credible. ## In what sense does Hegel take the issue forward compared to Spinoza? Well, if Spinoza initiates the monist renaissance in the Western world -- through disproving Christianity and Cartesianism and their Gnostic dualisms with a single brilliant chess move -- it is Hegel who sets the Spinozist renaissance in motion and generates the Hegelian revolution as the birth of Western process philosophy proper. Substance is set in motion. The project produces the subject. The eventological sky-god is, thanks to Hegel, back in good old form. And this is thus only the reverse movement compared to the decay that is constituted by the development from the dialectical monism of Zoroastrianism to the dualisms of Egypt, Greece and Rome that are launched during antiquity. That is: Spinoza rediscovers and reawakens the Jewish ideological heritage, with its nationalist and spatial monism, and injects it into the Western bloodstream. Freud then shrinks the Jewish national religion to comprise the size of the sociont, while Marx on his part expands the Jewish national religion to comprise the size of the empire. But as Jews all three of them -- Spinoza, Marx and Freud -- are exodologists, and the heritage from them is administered in the 20th century by the German-Jewish Frankfurt School, which for understandable reasons temporarily migrates to North America during the Second World War. The work of the Frankfurt School largely aims to create an alternative narratology, incompatible with the hysterical pseudo-nationalism that goes by the name of *fascism*. However the philosopher who rediscovers and reawakens the Zoroastrian ideological legacy -- with its imperialist and temporal monism -- and brings it forward to a Western context, that is Hegel. If we view this entire enterprise as a dialectical process, we can see how David Hume splits the phallic brain of Western civilization into two parts: *logos* and *pathos*, Kant responds by building a triad that comprises sense, sensibility and understanding entirely on a logical foundation, whereupon Hegel responds by pushing pathos back into the Kantian triad to make a complete narratology possible, whereafter Nietzsche on top of the Hegelian narratology expresses the feminine *mythos* that offers the fervently longed-for, creative dissolution of the conflict between logos and pathos. Or to use metaphors borrowed from Nietzsche's own narratology: between the *camel* called Kant and the *lion* called Hegel, a *child* called Nietzsche is stirred to life. It is therefore entirely logical (pun intended) that when the computer makes its entrance on the historical scene, it is the logician Kant that it mimics, which entails that it leaves it up to Man to produce a complementing pathos and an interconnecting mythos, something that no machine that operates after a binary code ever either can understand or handle. For philosophy this entails that Western existentialism places itself between Hegel and Nietzsche -- between a Hegelian *absolute knowledge* (personified by Slavoj Žižek among contemporary thinkers) and a Nietzschean *absolute creativity* (personified by Gilles Deleuze among contemporary thinkers). What is most important is thus not that Hegel and Spinoza represent two coordinated alternatives, but that Hegel alone represents the Western alternative *vis-à-vis* the Eastern in the history of ideas, in exactly the same way that Zoroaster solely reforms the nomadological ideological legacy which thinking in Persia, China and India has built upon. The Western world rests considerably more on the Persian-Hebrew axis (including the entire Islamic world) than on any Greek-Hebrew axis, as invented by European romantics in the early 19th century. *Persia is the name of the blind spot in the Western history of itself.* As long as the Western world relies on a false root-of-the-phallus it can never hope to awaken a vital phallus to life. A new paradigm calls out once again for a new, paradigmatic narratology that gives Islam and Christianity a common primordial father that unites them and that they both can submit to and be absorbed by, and there is no reason to look for anything other than the Zoroastrian-Jewish axis. Alexander the Great, schooled by Aristotle, was history's greatest thief and not its greatest creator. Hellenism is built on a Persian and not on a Greek clergy. But if we rewrite and correct the history of Hellenism, there immediately arises an extremely useful basis for the dark renaissance during informationalism. If the Western world once and for all actually shall succeed in having it out with all its pillar-saints and boy-pharaohs -- just as with the banal and vulgar dualism that they without exception represent -- it is necessary to return to the Zoroastrian high priest Kartir and his hunt first for the Manichaeans and later the Mazdakites in the Persian Sassanid Empire during late antiquity. ## And what does Kartir do there and then if not act precisely as the Jews who, before him, had Christ executed? On this issue of capital punishment one could of course have various views, but what remains is the following truth: we must really kill dualism ourselves and submit to monism if we are to have the least bit of hope to create a serious and functioning global world order during informationalism. Truth always begins with the recognition of a monist universe where everything that exists is one and the same and influences everything else, without exception. Bodies without souls and souls without bodies have no value for a holistic society. The bodies exist and think forth souls that only exist in the fairy tales we tell each other in order to bring a minimum of stability to a chaotic surrounding world. And the fairy tales exist. ## If we cannot heal our own bodies, souls, sexes and archetypes within ourselves, if we cannot get ourselves and our sociont to cohere, how shall we then even be able to hope to get any social units that are larger than ourselves to actually cohere? Cosmopolitanism begins and ends with Hellenism. It is Kartir who is the priest and it is Alexander the Great who is the chieftain that we long for today. What we have no use at all for are banal and mendacious pop prophets such as Christ and Muhammad, proclaimers of a sterile dualism. Hellenism was the golden period that united East and West. But the designation is misleading, the dominant culture was in all essential respects Persian with a thin layer of Greek veneer atop. Precisely herein lay Alexander the Great's messianic qualities -- in the mimicry and the cultural appropriation. ## So what then did the Western world do with the Hellenistic ideological legacy? Well, the Christian lynch mob did of course burn down what remained of the Library in Alexandria in 391 AD, and we can today only vaguely sense the greatness of the Bronze Age from the few fragments that the Christian ravages left behind. However -- and this is, if possible, even more unpalatable -- Persia is also the name of the great blind spot in the history of the Eastern world. It is perfectly possible to imagine a Buddhist Spinoza in China, just as a Taoist Kant in India, if one is inclined to play that game. But what on the other hand is impossible to imagine is that China or India -- where one forcefully and aggressively opposes the Persian belief in [[Saoshyant|the Saoshyant]] -- could ever pursue the idea that phallus can imagine itself as a negation of the negation. This is because nomadology is spread out as a heavy, wet blanket over every approach toward eventological innovation. Everything shall ultimately always be returned to the point of departure, to then be set in motion anew along the same old track. Neither Buddhism nor Taoism succeeds in breaking with pagan nomadology in the manner that Zoroastrianism does, with its eventological phallus worship. Where the genius lies in the concept of [[The Two-Headed Phallus]]: Mazda becomes Mazda by worshipping Ahura as if Ahura were Mazda. Ahura becomes Ahura by worshipping Mazda as if Mazda were Ahura. The divine subject itself is a *project* before it becomes a subject. Project yourself onto the other, and you finally get a chance to see yourself through the gaze of the other. Zoroaster simply, and uniquely, breaks the code to the phallic gaze itself. Not even the most Nietzschean of all Indian Nietzscheans, the otherwise lovely Sri Aurobindo, manages to accept the paradigmatic greatness of the *Übermensch* in his work *The Life Divine* (1940). No, absolutely not: without a matrichal, unconditional love within itself, the Nietzschean Übermensch becomes impossible to accept as saoshyant for a completely uncomprehending Aurobindo, who (this said within parenthesis) lives his entire life with a female guide, Mirra Alfassa, as his highest authority in all issues always. As for India, the event must thus ultimately be bent back inward toward, and be absorbed by the process, even in a devoted pseudo-Nietzschean such as Sri Aurobindo. The matriarch must be allowed the last word even when it concerns such a markedly phallic project as creating a Nietzschean Übermensch. The call from the Hegelian phallus for an exodus across the oceans of the world to conquer new territories with new ideas as events, is therefore conspicuous by its absence in Eastern thinking, where one instead relies on the process only. Sri Aurobindo too ends his days as a Platonist Peter Pan, obsessed with endless hierarchic ladders up to his dreamed pillar-saint perfection. Then there inevitably arises confusion. An Indian pillar-saint of this caliber can of course only accuse the Nietzschean Übermensch of being loveless, as if it now were unlimited love of the matrichal kind that actually defines an authentic phallus. It should thus not surprise anyone that Hegel lambasts both Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, as well as Spinozist monism, since they all worship *the spontaneous emergence out of nothing at all* as a kind of one-off pseudoevent in world history. *As though phallus arises out of nothing and lacks the root-of-the-phallus.* As though the negation ultimately still must be bent in toward itself and fail to sever the umbilical cord, so that it never shall be able to negate itself into an entirely new paradigm. And as though the "nothing" from which the universe actually arises really is what we in everyday parlance mean by "nothing" -- a completely empty vacuum -- when it is a cosmological mystery, a nothing that to the greatest extent contains something, enigmatic energies and particles that never can decide whether they exist or not, but that like lightning gleam briefly, only to immediately vanish. In that case the Hegelian phallus would be doomed in advance to fail with every conceivable exodus regardless of what objective it may concern. However Hegel writes benevolently of Zoroaster, whom he sees as the father of civilization, without fully understanding that he thereby establishes his own root-of-the-phallus. The result, in any event, is a line of authentic eventology that runs from Zoroaster in Persia, via Aristotle in Greece, to Hegel in a Germany that does not yet exist: the proudest and above all most useful ideological legacy so far from Western philosophy. The point here is that Plato is completely wrong, but that he is wrong in an interesting way. Plato imagines a world of ideas with spatial extension, eternal and thereby timeless, never subject to any change; he consistently follows this thought all the way through and arrives at *the Platonist forms* -- perfect, exemplary. The problem for the Platonist, however, is that it is the very reverse which is true in the sole world we have and about which we can say anything intelligent at all. If we are to take philosophy to its ultimate limit, we must imagine time without space, that time precedes space, and it is exactly this that the process philosophy we take an interest in does. To say "first process, then event" is exactly the same as saying "first time, then space". We must thus turn Plato on his head: time is the process and space is the event *vis-à-vis* time and the process respectively as primary functions. In precisely our universe, what we can observe and say more or less intelligent things about, the event is of course called *the Big Bang*. Hypertime already subsisted subphysically, but after *the Big Bang* (or if we so wish *the Big Bounce*) spacetime also had physical existence. We know something, but we do not know everything. It is, for example, quite possible that our universe, if one zooms out sufficiently, turns out to be a gigantic black hole in an even larger metaverse (a theory originally launched by the Indian physicist Raj Kumar Pathria). It is a theory that is strengthened rather than weakened by our metaphysical starting point. What we on the other hand cannot imagine, even outside our most feverish fantasies, are immutably perfect forms in a space without time. Space obeys the laws of time, but time does not have to obey any laws of space. Even a space where nothing occurs is forever fettered to and transported along the time axis. And all forms we find are developed by and adapted to *evolution* and not created in advance to last forever. There are simply no values of value outside paradigmatics. It thus appears reasonable to describe Hegel as a phallic prophet for the Western world -- he awakens its full potential -- but only as a phallic reformer in terms of world history as a whole. And his radical idea, borrowed via the Greeks from Zoroaster's Mazdaism, is this: *The spirit precedes the event*. It is quite possible to rely on the phallic pathos and its intuition (*Vernunft* trumps *Verstand* in Hegel) and thereby both subconsciously (the chieftain) and consciously (the priest) change the world radically. Nothing prevents one from thinking and adjusting for the paradigm before the paradigm shift occurs. Theology precedes philosophy once more, and what Zoroaster does for religion Hegel succeeds in doing for the more sluggish philosophy 3,500 years later. And thereby what in Hegel is history's spirit has carried out the shift from nomadology to eventology, which applies to both East and West in a digitalized and globalized world. If the world actually shall be changed, it is not sufficient to passively sit and wait for a change that shall arise by itself, through magic, from below. No, an event worthy of the name requires that the world goes through an active change, set off by technology from above. And this technology must be governed by a god, and this god must be hidden behind a barred absolute. After Hegel has acted as a philosophical removal man, we call this god *the Hegelian phallus*. The development follows Hegel's predictions about the path to *the absolute*. The Hegelian *Zeitgeist* is expressed as the Hegelian event. For Hegel human subjectivity is namely the event that attaches and actualizes existence and that gives it its substance. Hegel calls this event *the negation of the negation* and it corresponds with Nietzsche's realization of will-to-intelligence as *ironic nihilism* and will-to-transcendence as *affirmative nihilism*. The Hegelian Zeitgeist during informationalism is [[Attentionalism]], which leads us to the Hegelian event being the exodus from the old capitalist to the new attentionalist paradigm. And this event will not take place before all of humanity, and it will not be experienced by all of humanity as some kind of media-friendly spectacular apocalypse. Quite the contrary. It suffices that the Hegelian *Zeitgeist* is manifested by [[Saoshyant|the Saoshyant]] -- the particular personifies the universal -- and that the Hegelian event takes place when the Saoshyant is manifested before the phallic gaze; the event has then already occurred. Here there is neither a need for angels in heaven, a mass audience before a cinema screen, nor high viewership ratings for a TV channel, for the event to be accorded complete credibility. The valuable scarce commodity this time is namely the phallic gaze itself with its qualitative demands, while the mass and its quantitative contentment is completely irrelevant. It is only this phallic gaze that gives the Hegelian event its exceptional value. ## So for what reason would then this event take place before the temple before everyone and everything, when that sort of public event no longer has any value in the age of the pornoflated spectacle? Rather, it is exactly the opposite. The attentional value is maximized in the barred room before the chosen and interactive audience. No one has and no one longer pretends to have any interest in saving humanity as a whole, no one takes an interest in universal salvation any longer. The old power is tired of its power and the new power exercises its power in an entirely new way. What arises, on the other hand, is a burning interest in convening one's own sociont, one's own tribe or subculture, in raising awareness in this intimate fellowship of all the obstacles it is surrounded by, to then methodically embark on the exodus to the new paradigm. This only requires a sutric turnaround within culture, which is actually driven by a tantric turnaround behind the barred absolute. Thus, here we must admit that Kant is correct in that behind attentionalism's takeover from capitalism, it is only the Kantian phenomenon in its purest form that can constitute the event that takes out the spectacle as the highest value from which all other values emanate. Tantric quality finally defeats sutric quantity. The name of this project is *the netocratic community* and its ideology is consequently called *communism*, since it is a case of a conscious and radical restoration of the nomadological sociont as a digital, rather than a physical phenomenon. What is historically new and unique this time is that the exodus to the digital occurs inside the barred absolute -- where the protopians build intention, ceremony and integration around *The Infinite Now* as the event of all events, protected behind the powerful wall of sensocracy against the outside world. What then remains in the form of cultural contact surface for all others to interact with are odd fragments of expressions of what we call the dark renaissance, fragments that incidentally and randomly happen to seep out through a minimal crack in the curtain that otherwise is painstakingly closed. The Infinite Now is the logical ecstasy that constitutes the ideal where *electricity*, as literature and media theorist Marshall McLuhan observes, has extinguished all distances and has placed Man in a world and a culture where the expression literally speaking moves at the speed of light. Global electrification -- from the first telegraph in the 19th century and onward -- explains why informationalism no longer is tied to the mechanical conveyor belt as a metaphor for cause and effect. The immediacy of electricity instead compels the emergence of a system theory and a complexity theory that constitute starting points for anyone who wants to and can understand the world as direct and immediate in all its enormous diversity. Please note how much this development is dependent on the principal irreductionism within the emergence vector theory. Neither the actualization nor the subjectification can be reduced to what precedes them. Precisely this is what constitutes emergence, and in turn explains why [[Transcendental Emergentism]] is needed as an underlying metaphysics for paradigm theory. So if space indeed has imploded, focus and vision for the coming exodus -- which thus does not occur in space but in time -- is also moved. New media (and metamedia) create a new information-technological paradigm where humans' relations to the surrounding world and other humans go through a radical change, which requires an entirely new paradigmatics. This in turn generates new ideals, where precisely the ambivalence inside the ecstatic moment -- a moment that freely borrows qualities from the most beautiful of eternities -- emerges. The Infinite Now is quite simply the paradigmatic event during informationalism, this since it plays with the idea that time can implode in the same way as space, only to then explode in one big poetic infinity. The management is straight and simple: Stay in The Infinite Now as long as you can, but be fully aware that it would be hell to be forced to stay there forever, and thereafter draw the conclusion that it is time to come down when the entire experience has been memorized to a sufficiently high degree for it to be able to remain a stable memory inside the membrane, a memory that gives everything else inside the membrane new life and new meaning. *The syntheist subject* is in this way a distanced subject. It is the distance that generates subjectivity, not the other way around. It is the distance that saves us from both neurotic fixation and psychotic dissolution. We relate dialectically to both eternalism and mobilism. And it is thanks to the fact that a new emergence or a new paradigm cannot be reduced to the components in the previous epoch that the sacralization of the higher state within the hierarchy is possible. The child looks up to the adults. The adults look up to the priests, chieftains and matriarchs. The leaders look up to the lesser gods. The lesser gods look up to the higher gods. The people look up to the barred absolute behind which one never has access. Every level in the hierarchy is emergent and therefore irreducible, and it is precisely this that gives the prestige and sacred status of minions and aspirationists. This basically Hegelian understanding of the sacral promotes freedom and creativity. If a conception is spread about the hierarchy deserving to be spat on and ridiculed -- which the mass media's and even the Internet's omnicentrism has tricked people into believing -- it can only lead to the hierarchy secluding itself and withdrawing to later return with bigger muscles and authoritarian ambitions. The alternative is chaos. Order can only emanate out of hierarchization, nothing else. Order is hierarchy and Man is a hierarchizing animal. Exactly this pattern emerges all the more clearly during informationalism, where late capitalism's more or less temporary customs during the paradigm shift are transformed into the inexorable laws of attentionalism. There are no longer any alternative routes around *the Internet Protocol* as the universal constitution. The Internet can never be switched off or shut down -- not even if humanity becomes extinct. This is the core of attentionalism, and humanity's only reasonable response to this development is, in order to ensure its own survival, to practice *the communist renaissance* among the exodologically chosen. The world's academies are developed under the new conditions that prevail to a logos without pathos and slowly suffocate from bad health; the mass media are developed into a pathos without logos and die in a senseless delirium. And the task to supply the only effective protection against tyranny, anarchy and idiocy in general falls to the protopian clergy, whereby the paradigm shift is a fact. This priestly practice can only be exercised behind the barred absolute, and the theory that prompts the said practice is adytonology. And here the most important of all netocratic principles comes into play. Since technology is global but humanity is local, all human activities must be submitted to *the principle of contestability*. Regardless of the pipe dreams of the Chinese communist party in the early 21th century, there is no hope that a netocratic autocracy would guarantee growth and stability, or even that it would manage to endure over time. The fact is that all attempts to control and manipulate the netocracy behind the barred absolute only lead to new migration since nomadology in itself is the ultimate democracy. The optimal sensocracy must remain open and plural, something that is clearly reflected in the protopian values, where [[Antagony]] is the propelling principle for intellectual and creative expansion. Without antagony, no creativity, but only a dramatically escalating *brain drain*. The barred absolute is thus anything but a temporary matrix for escapism. This means that adytonology returns in history as *the doctrine of how the protopian challenges himself* to adulthood's absolute and therefore also divine boundary. There often arise misunderstandings around the barred absolute, since the sacral space is a condition for one being able to distinguish esoteric knowledge (tantra) from exoteric information (sutra), but where information nonetheless will be read as though it were knowledge, the phenomenon that we call *epistemological delusion*. The reason is that the sacral always is understood as the source of the relations that are at hand, and not as the result of or reward for the carried-out effort. The sacral is unattainable precisely through literal originality. This in turn explains why precisely that which is classed as criminal and regarded as inconceivable before the barred absolute, often is to be regarded as purely commonplace behind the barred absolute. The shamans and the lesser gods have their freedom to explore and experiment with things that are inconceivable for ordinary mortals. It is part and parcel of the matter that *the adults of the adults* can devote themselves to activities that other adults do not understand or covet, in the same way as children live under another set of regulations than adults in all cultures. Everywhere we find a hierarchy that is highly functional and not at all merely ceremonial. Of course it is precisely these recurring and rather expected transgressions that accord the lesser gods their iconological status among numerous throngs of admirers. At the same time it is this principle, and the flexible surveillance of it, that enables the law book to remain a living document, making sure the law is never set in stone and fixed for all eternity, which would be tantamount to death. Thus there is a continuous activity behind the barred absolute, an activity that never can be observed directly from the outside but that makes distinct impressions. During informationalism we call these activities *the dark renaissance*. The effect is that the masses then can project their inextinguishable needs of The Great Other onto the barred absolute in itself, instead of confusedly and desperately seeking The Great Other precisely everywhere and in everything they happen to get hold of. And in light of this, the psychoanalytical ambition to live a life without worrying about or seeking The Great Other does of course appear the perhaps greatest delusion of all. Every program of that kind infallibly leads to frenetic sectarianism and strife between different psychoanalytical cults, which at best subconsciously and hysterically construct new barred absolutes in which to reflect one's frustrated subjects. The solution to the problem lies, as so often, in the two-headed phallus, which positions itself so that one head is inside the barred absolute and one head is outside. Information is in itself only a question of accessibility, but not of understanding and even less of an authentic innovation of any kind. It is the barred absolute that transforms information to knowledge and then takes the knowledge further to protopian creativity. The pathical priest behind the barred absolute is namely *the curator* both between Man and the Machine and between the elite and the mass. He is the sentry who sits guarding the gate to the membrane. Behind the barred absolute the masters in the meantime are slaves in order to be able to be masters of the masses that constantly try to evade time through constantly mimicking and competing. The Zurvanite clergy can eventually be realized. Indian philosophy distinguishes between on the one hand these spheres as the sacred space *nirvana* where *tantra* is applied, and on the other hand the profane space *samsara* where *sutra* is applied. Please note that there is no general accessibility whatsoever in terms of *nirvana*, it is again a state behind the barred absolute, accessible only to *the chosen ones*. And during informationalism there is of course no reason whatsoever to choose at random from the population, but the sensocratic Machine sifts out precisely the pathical persons with exactly the qualities that symbiotic intelligence is requesting there and then. Which thus entails that no one in the elite can settle down and hope for a lifelong membership in the very innermost circuit; the harsh weeding-out process and finetuned new recruitment of promising talents is continuous. Welcome to the world of *absolute meritocracy*. An emergence is an extraordinary event along the time axis that gives rise to an entirely new vector with its own built-in forces, behaviors, laws and rules. Our own transdeterminist universe is in itself an example of such an emergence vector that once has arisen at a certain point along a subphysical hypertime axis. A paradigm is correspondingly an entirely new society further up on the time axis with its own built-in forces, showdowns, and eventually laws, rules and structures, all of which can be traced back to a specific historical event, for instance a comprehensive natural catastrophe or a decisive technological invention. Paradigmatics is Man's methodology for defining the different time-bound emergence vectors and paradigms and distinguishing these from each other. Archetypeology is then how the sociont defines itself and its different talents and needs within emergence vectors and paradigms. What emergence vectors, paradigms, and even archetypographies all have in common is that they are timewise clearly delimited phenomena in history, and therefore can be studied each by itself on its own conditions. Therefore all meaningful categorization and specialization on the part of Man must also always be some form of paradigmatization or archetypification. If Man takes paradigmatics, membranics and archetypeology seriously, the subcultural sociont gets all the ethical tools it needs to encounter all the short-circuits pertaining to value -- in the form of sundry variants of banal moralism -- and can instead optimize its decision-making process. Alfred North Whitehead formulates this eventology as though everything begins and ends with *experiences* and that these experiences are valued with respect to their *creativity*. This amoral ethics, which exclusively rests on the relation between paradigmatics and archetypeology, is called protopianism. The protopian religion that Whitehead advocates is therefore a religion based on technology in contrast to classic religion, which is based on magic. And it is -- of course -- this conviction that is called [[historiography/texts/Process and Event/glossary/Syntheism]] in the world of theology. Alongside Zoroaster and Hegel, Whitehead then joins in, and together they constitute syntheism's three eventological pioneers. If Zoroaster laid the foundation for the feudalist clergy, while Hegel laid the foundation for the capitalist clergy, it is Whitehead who, behind the barred absolute, lays the foundation for the informationalist clergy and hands over the cognitive tools that make it possible to proclaim and exercise a netocratic protopianism. Whitehead radically breaks with Spinoza and the idea that *rationality* constitutes the absolute principle of existence, and he instead argues that it is *creativity* that is the absolute principle. Every entity in existence has some form of [[Agency]], some kind of minimal degree of originality, in terms of how the entity in question interacts with other entities in its environment. This is an example and a consequence of existence's transdeterminist character, and thereby contingent openness toward the future (and a matching, compact closedness *vis-à-vis* the past), *the Hegelian root-of-the-phallus* -- rather than some kind of determinism with all that this entails by way of a necessary, Spinozist closure. However this requires that every entity is limited by what Whitehead calls its *social restrictions*, that is: that every entity is limited by its active relations. Freedom is namely only precisely freedom within the confines of clear limitations. An agent's uniqueness and dividuality emerges out of a self-determination with respect to how one best handles one's possibilities within the limitations that the situation provides. One can thus only play the cards one has been dealt, wishing for other and better cards is only a waste of time and energy. In this manner Whitehead breaks with Kant and a world whose fundamental building blocks consist of a few immutable things. Against this Whitehead posits a world that consists of an incalculable amount of integrated processes and events. Reality is this constant, dynamic becoming -- not a series of static being. Static being we create ourselves; it is a fiction that we use for orientation through and management of a surplus of impulses, and not reality itself. There is a terrain filled with countless biological processes and events, and there is a two-dimensional map on flat paper. Which leads us to Nietzsche's concept *the death of God*. And after the death of God also Michel Foucault's concept *the death of The Individual*, which takes the Nietzschean insight of paradigmatic temporality to the next level. Nietzsche declares the Protestant god dead; Foucault declares the Cartesian individual dead. A deconstruction of Cartesian individualism and the thereto connected Lutheran Protestantism as illusions about -- in turn -- the child's access to the adult phallus, the adult's access to the priestly phallus, the priest's access to the divine phallus, all of which create the illusion that the child is a god. This is undoubtedly a backward worldview compared with the nomadological. Through elevating the innocently ignorant child to a god, one displays one's contempt of advanced age and laboriously accumulated wisdom. One worships the child to the extent that it eventually is sexualized. The insight that is absent is that a direct access to God never can be anything other than an illusion, since the hierarchy is a reality: child-adult-priest-God. There are no short-cuts, ignorance is not miraculous knowledge. One can therefore only worship God indirectly, via the lesser, iconological gods, which applies generally -- except among the priests within their own third religion behind the barred absolute. If the opposite were to be the case, that just anyone in any manner could establish direct contact with God, the once coveted object for desire would wither and lose its allure, which is what always happens when desire attains its objective. ## Where to direct the gaze when God has lost his power of attraction? The driving force that takes the place of desire is now instead transcendence, this precisely because desire actually most deeply viewed only seeks itself -- when the objective of desire is conquered, desire has of course already restlessly moved on toward new objectives and objects. It can never get enough. Transcendence, however, is entirely oriented toward *the unattainable* behind the barred absolute. And it is precisely thanks to the barred absolute -- that is: the fact that it is barred -- that transcendence can operate without ever running the risk of actually finding what it seeks. This constructive relation is however constantly threatened by the *shaman envy* that inevitably arises when the priest goes back and forth across the *chinavat* bridge, the membrane between the living and the dead in Zoroastrian theology. Consequently it is shaman envy that constitutes a major part of the foundation both for Christianity and Islam. According to this banal proclamation for the masses, the curtain in the temple would suddenly have gone up in smoke, whereafter God and Man just as suddenly stand face to face with each other. The barred absolute has been cleared away. All the children at the party get a bag of candy and are welcomed into the VIP lounge, without any demands for any particular achievement or qualification. The difference between God and Man becomes hazy, just as the difference between adult and child. If such a culture moreover is robbed of *the authentic phallus* -- since there of course still is no discernible difference between adult and child when all shall have access to [[Mamilla]] forever without any effort of one's own -- the shamanic ideal will spread through the entire society, but at the cost of a radical infantilization. An ideology that promises that all your dreams will be realized if you only profess the right doctrine, cannot lead to anything other than the pillar-saint and the boy-pharaoh being elevated to and promoted as pseudo-shamanic ideals at the expense of the authentic patriarch and the authentic matriarch. Both the pillar-saint surrounded by all the world's angels and the boy-pharaoh surrounded by all the world's soldiers are divine and invincible at the center of their fairytale religions with mass commitment. Diversity is portrayed as a question concerning *how humans just look different* and not *how humans think in different ways*. Authentic diversity is killed on the altar of false diversity, and the result is absolute conformity. When existence becomes digital and our digital environment, like a stern but fair judge, knows and remembers absolutely everything about us, then we lose -- to our great sorrow -- the intimate contact with mamilla, which is brutally snatched away from us. The new transparency entails that the scope for wishful thinking shrinks and all but disappears. The process of grief we are then forced to go through in many respects resembles that which psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross divides into five steps. First there is *denial*, then there is *anger,* thereafter follows *negotiation*, then there is *depression*, and last but not least we (at best) succeed in completing the process with *acceptance*. If Man during capitalism had to handle the death of God, he is during attentionalism instead forced to wrestle with *the death of The Individual* (see *The Netocrats* and *The Body Machines*). Which makes it necessary for the social theater to once again enter into close combat with ideological nihilism, this too a match in five rounds. First there is *naive nihilism*, then follows *mortidinal nihilism*, it is in turn followed by *ironic nihilism*, thereafter *libidinal nihilism* ensues, and finally we (hopefully) attain *affirmative nihilism*, where *haurvatat* gets the possibility to land in *ameretat,* to use the Zoroastrian vocabulary. When the naive transitions into the cynical within the old paradigm with its mortido, we must return to the ironic in order to attain the affirmative and establish the new paradigm with its libido. The decisive step in terms of protopian activism occurs between the ironic and the affirmative stages in the processing of nihilism. It is the will-to-intelligence of the priests that generates ironic nihilism. But it is the will-to-transcendence of the chieftains that generates the affirmative nihilism that actually constructs the new paradigm. Ironic nihilism leads up to the root-of-the-phallus. Affirmative nihilism affirms precisely the phallic libido. During ironic nihilism *freedom* disappears as the horizon, the acknowledged insight of the nihilist state can only generate a distanced cynicism atop a transdeterminist conviction. Or to describe the situation from the principle of the two-headed phallus; ironic nihilism is the state in which the priest absorbs nihilism but lacks a chieftain on whom to apply the affirmative libido. Logos and mythos form a seemingly robust facade, but with pathos depressed. The predictable result is that pathos returns in the form of a markedly mortidinal force, and it is this force that we call *the dark renaissance*. It is in that state that the false phalluses threaten to drown out the authentic phallus with their anojective call. The *egregores* threaten to take over the public space. The dialectal exit out of this state goes via the restoration of the barred absolute, where the shamanic elite can experience and benefit from a freedom in seclusion and live out this freedom affirmatively and thereby Messianically. The masses that remain standing on the other side of the membrane can return to the denial phase, and the entire nomadological chain of cause and effect can be repeated anew. But what is decisive here is that the control over the dark renaissance exclusively is exercised behind the barred absolute, something that is clear in the different subjectivities that are involved in the social theater. From this and only from this a potential [[Saoshyant]] for the chosen people can step forward in the form of a personification of the affirmation, and let a surplus of value and meaning wash over the entire world that finds itself before the barred absolute, projected onto the promised empire. Nomadology is the standardized and horizontal exodology. Eventology, on the other hand, is the exceptional and vertical exodology. Nomadology operates according to the principle of least possible energy consumption. Its circular movement thus requires less energy than permanently sitting still. Eventology instead operates by the principle of temporary increases of energy consumption, if and when extra energy is accessible. It is, thus, only eventology that can generate the fantasy of eternally sitting still. These theological narratives find their equivalences in transcendental eternalism, realist mobilism and dialectical syntheism. And the barred absolute is the ecstatic experience of the event as the syntheist infinite now, clearly manifested as pathos during hunting, war, the orgy, birth, the ritual and death. This is to a great extent a matter of the outer circuit and the inner circuit within the sociont, and their two essentially distinct metanarratives: logos and mythos. Eventology is the story of the phallic event that changes history forever. Nomadology is the story of the constant and eternal recurrence of the same. This means that eventology is fixated on [[Event|the event]] as the foundation for existence, while nomadology is fixated on *the process* as the foundation for existence. Another name for this relation is *the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism*. The insight of absolute knowledge in the understanding of the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism is what we refer to as *Hegel's phallus*. Kant is thereby the individualist apogee of both Cartesianism and Protestantism, while Hegel opens the door to precisely the splitting of the Individual into masses of dividuals that later occurs in Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud during the 19th century. What on the other hand is missing in Hegel and Lacan is an understanding that this inaccessibility as substance in itself already exists within religion. But not in Christianity, above all not in matrichal Catholicism, which Kant and Hegel increasingly oppose. On the other hand, both in Zoroastrianism and Judaism, which precede Christianity and Islam. And above all in Vajrayana Buddhism's development of the category *tantra* as divorced from *sutra*. The barred subject must be complemented with its own origin, something that is lacking in Hegel and Lacan, namely the barred absolute. The four world religions from the Middle East must thus be understood in the following way: since Zoroastrianism worships the military phallus, Islam can never be anything other than *the imitation of the worshipping of the military phallus*. And since Judaism worships the priestly phallus, Christianity can never be anything other than *the imitation of the worshipping of the priestly phallus*. Which explains why Islam is founded by and constantly refers back to a military by the name of Muhammad, while Christianity is founded by and constantly refers back to a priest by the name of Peter. All this becomes possible through the Gnostic maneuver that consists in blowing up the door to the barred absolute, for the purpose of taming and reshaping the barred religions of the military and the priesthood into a simplified message tailored to the great masses. If eventological proptopianism shall be able to grow strong, it is necessary to reverse this maneuver and generate a development in the opposite direction. Eventology is the pathical narrative that oscillates between the two poles *ecstasy* and *trauma* as events. Therefore pathos is the foundation of the priestly monotheism or [[Eventology]], while mythos is the foundation of the polytheism of the masses or *iconology*. Out of pathos *logos* then rises as the formalized religion that organizes the necessary relation between eventology and nomadology. It is this religion that is called *the law*. This means that the priests represent a tantric religion of alterable pathos behind the barred absolute, something that then is transformed into a sutric religion of fixed logos before the barred absolute. The brutal, pathical reality behind the barred absolute is thus transformed into the organized, logical law before the barred absolute. It is not remarkable that the tantric perspective on existence rests on an erotic order in the primordial chaos, while the sutric perspective on existence rests on a divine order in the primordial chaos. The two perspectives can only meet ritually, which entails that sutra submits to tantra for the purpose of creating the longed-for order. For the tantric talent, who thrives splendidly in the shamanic borderland between phallic order and matrichal chaos, that objective is, on the other hand, wholly secondary, if even that. The difference between sutra and tantra is thus of central importance. *Sutra* is information that is conveyed in front of the barred absolute, before the people, to the people. Iconology and mimicry are sutric phenomena. The sutric teacher is a paragon to mimic. *Tantra* is knowledge that is conveyed or even created behind the barred absolute within the clergy. Exodology and the creative production of the genuinely novel are examples of tantric phenomena. The tantric teacher personifies what we call *crazy wisdom*. There is no hierarchy or ranking between sutra and tantra in themselves -- it is a case of two different phenomena within two different spheres, which is the sole and decisive difference. At the same time it is thus the priest who hides behind the barred absolute while the chieftain leads the exodus in front of and outside the temple. The area where the children are not allowed to enter is *the pathical narrative*, the area where not even the adults in the sociont are allowed to enter is [[The Barred Absolute]]. In both cases an entry is possible only if the child or the adult in question first has succeeded in leaving mythos in order to enter into logos. And this is the reason why we call all personal development during a dividual's lifetime *the voyage toward phallus*, away from mamilla. This means first a voyage from mythos toward logos and then, when the dividual is mature enough, the possibly concluding voyage from logos toward pathos. The difference between logos and pathos in Eastern philosophy is called the difference between sutra and tantra, where sutra is taught via rationality and mimicry while tantra is taught via intuition and crazy wisdom. The two-headed phallus is thus also a necessary prerequisite for epistemology. The difference between *sutra* and *tantra* in the Silk Road religions is equivalent to the difference between being adult and being enlightened. One mimics the chieftain's phallus to achieve an adultification. The priest's phallus, on the other hand, only exists behind the barred absolute and therefore cannot be mimicked. However, it can always inspire the search for one's entirely own, dividual path to *Enlightenment*, a state that one best acquires a Western conception of by studying the Nietzschean *Übermensch*. The passage from logos toward pathos is not a banal voyage upward to some kind of heaven or some reward because one has been good or clever, it is no pilgrimage toward paradise akin to that which Dante depicts in *The Divine Comedy*, but instead the opposite -- an incredibly arduous trek toward the glowing root-of-the-phallus, an existential choice that is made by the one who chooses tantra over sutra as the ultimate [[Truth-As-An-Act]] (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*). It is only the priest who in this manner can live in the deepest (or highest) existential state that syntheologically is called [[The Infinite Now]], where no longer any spiritual truth is inaccessible or incomprehensible. This is a world of sex, violence and art, a state of pure and uncompromising pathos, where logos and mythos are conspicuous by their absence, which -- naturally -- makes this state extremely unwieldy. The oldest known memorials from the pathical history of religion are the brutally expressive cave paintings from the period that constitutes the apogee of the original sociont. Welcome to *the golden age of the minotaur*. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek argues that the difference between The One and diversity has its origin in the human subject. We argue that this is a much too Kantian reading of Hegel. It is rather the case that a division between the barred absolute and diversity arises in the reading of the surrounding world and in the discerning of the first object -- mamilla -- *vis-à-vis* a surrounding chaos. It is in this opposition between mamilla and the environment that the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism is developed. Mamilla then remains barred as an absolute *vis-à-vis* all other objects, up until the child begins to associate mamilla with matrix -- as it is confronted with the body of the mother as a whole -- and eventually discovers the maternal body's affection toward phallus, which then crystallizes as a competitor. It is in conjunction with this [[The Phallic Intrusion|phallic intrusion]] (see *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*) that phallus takes over mamilla's role as the barred absolute. The child's desire is stirred to life in the form of libido, since the child loses access to the desired, barred absolute. The present, intimate mamilla has of course been exchanged for the absent, extimate phallus. The first *object* receives competition from the first *project* in the life of the child. Desire is awakened as desire always is desire to that which desire cannot have. The problem for Žižek is that his barred subject is not fundamental. The barred absolute does not allow any difference or externality *vis-à-vis* itself. Like a black hole it devours all interest and all commitment. But this is not the case with subjectivity, since it occurs only later, as the negation of the maternal body. The child for the first time apprehends itself as *non-mother* the moment mamilla and its own mouth are separated from each other, if only for a short while. It is thus in opposition to the barred absolute that the barred subject arises, after and not before the barred absolute's genesis. And it is between these two barred and therefore mysterious spheres that Man continues his life. The matriarchy oscillates between matrix and mamilla, separated by nature. The patriarchy oscillates between the barred absolute and the barred subject, separated by culture. God is not and has never been accessible to Man. God does not respond to Man's message in a bottle or to any other messages at all. Both Zoroastrianism and Judaism claim that God's real name, the one that God actually answers to, remains firmly hidden behind the barred absolute. Of this the faithful are reminded when they learn to never ever pronounce the name of God, as this would be seen as narcissistic disloyalty *vis-à-vis* the sociont, and God would immediately need to punish them for the transgression. This means that adytonology is the core of religion. *In the same way that the subject is its own blind spot, the barred absolute is the sociont's blind spot*, the central object that no one can perceive and that precisely therefore unites everything else that is discernible and definable. The barred subject and the barred absolute are quite simply the neuroses that make an otherwise psychotic world cohere. *The world in itself* is nothing other than the mobilist chaos between these two fundamental eternalizations. Thus the barred subject and the barred absolute become each other's negations, and between them there is no enduring truce. It is only the high priest with his distanced, and therefore by necessity perverted gaze, who can apprehend a kind of temporarily sustainable balance between subject and absolute. Behind the barred absolute the priests have their own logos, their own mythos and their own pathos. These are gathered under the concept adytonology. The priests' propelling forces are inverted in comparison with the world before the barred absolute. In the world of the priests it is the narrative itself that sets the world in motion. Syntheologically we express this as though [[Atheos]] is the highest god for the priests themselves (see *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*). Everything is ultimately about handling the void, which Christianity and Islam in their eagerness to please the people and the power structure completely ignore, wherefore the conclusion only can be that they are nothing but infantile fantasies of what a religion is and can be. They quite simply do not carry out the task, and their recent decay into banal nihilism and desperate fundamentalism respectively, proves that these shortcomings were built-in right from the very start, as fatal systemic failures. They ignore the barred absolute as the necessary foundation for both subjectivity and objectivity and *authentic religion* as a phenomenon overall. But eventually history has caught up with them, and these are indeed different and fascinating times.