Here, phenomena think and feel, just as organisms do — the roiling wave is the spoken word of the ocean, the pyroclastic flow the seething anger of the mountain, the ponderous cirrus cloud the tangible thought of the sky. All is one and one is all. The world pulses with a breath of life that courses through and metamorphoses everything.

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal. — George Gordon Byron

The universe you have summoned is changeful. It is a World Butterfly, darting out from under your modern pins, which are fixated on… well, fixating. Its paramount property is panta rhei — Everything flows, like an endless river.

This is the low-resolution world of the ancients.

You have conjured the blurry far-away and long-ago where thingness doesn’t exist, because every one thing is every other thing. Here, making meaningful distinctions between things becomes unthinkable, and serious doubt is cast on the possibility of knowing anything at all.

Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers — Heraclitus

In a changing world, pixels bleed into each other. Terms take on many meanings. Compare the terms Life and Spirit. The first is precisely defined as “a characteristic distinguishing physical entities having biological processes… from those that do not”.¹ This leaves little room for error. The second has multiple connotations — soul, psyche, breath of life, ghost, demon, each of which has additional meanings. The blurring of a pixel’s boundaries leaves the door wide open for novel metaphors to form, but makes it very difficult for knowledge to be gained. Pixel blur is used to its full advantage in both poetry and philosophy. But science is another ballgame entirely: Precision is everything.

Forbidden Fire

The idea of a changing universe originates with Heraclitus. Its paradox is as follows: Change and Persistence are opposites: The river’s water is constantly changing yet the river itself persists. The famed Ship of Theseus upon the winedark sea recycles all its planks yet it is still the same ship. All the cells in your body constantly divide (Bütschli — Mitosis) and die off (Vogt— Apoptosis), such that materially speaking, every quarter century or so most of you is replaced — yet the pattern of You stubbornly persists. And that’s the key: The more things change, the more they stay the same: “All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things… flows like a stream.”² — Our matter changes. Our pattern persists.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. — The Mad Hatter, Lewis Carroll

But how can we both change and persist, how can we not exist and yet exist? How is something a fact while at the same time also not a fact? There is, after all, no bargaining with the Truth, right? Enter Aristotle who, horrified by the supposed impossibility of knowing anything in Heraclitus’ universe in flux, insisted instead that the world could in fact be known through the categorical study of the changeless essence of things — this epistemic position is known as Essentialism.

The gods of this ancient universe are the only ones who truly know what’s going on. In the myth of Prometheus, the demigod steals fire from the gods to give to humanity; But what if a permanent way of knowing could be stolen from the gods — The True Forbidden Fire... This is what Aristotle, the greatest of thought-thieves, stole.

In his book The God Problem, Howard Bloom recounts the visceral discord between the two philosophers,