Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: I’m going to be very direct here. It’s an excerpt about Neoplatonism and the often asked question of what is and what isn’t real, as well as what’s more or less real than anything else. Neoplatonism is just one of things things that come up again and again across philosophy and video games, so it was only a matter of time it popped up here as well.
Don’t you find it quaint that despite everything we know, humans still place themselves as the centre of the Cosmos around which everything rotates? To us everything is connected, like with the spokes of some grand wheel. But we should know better.
Humans are real, right? It’s our assumption that we exist here in the waking world, and this is reality, the Mask of true reality, even. There are maybe things that are more real; some might argue, the hyperreal existences above us. But we are most certainly more real than our dreams, than all the things that emerge from the Deep. It’s only rational to see dreams as less real than the awakened world. And even we have fought with this notion only nominally.
What if we have everything backwards, though?
Let’s assume that there’s an actual singularity at the Atzmut point. What if that singularity is the most real thing that could ever conceivably exist? The one truth of the omniverse.
And then, what are we?
Perhaps we are just distorted images of that singularity. Not in the sense that we are minds, but in the sense that every universe, every galaxy, every god, every nightmare, every living thing, every grain of sand… everything is just a distorted image of this one ultimate existence. That which simply is, that which is what it is.
There were myths among our elder brethren; they would say that אהיה אשר אהיה first needed to allow nothingness to exist, before anything to exist. That it was all-encompassing before it allowed anything else to exist alongside it, and that into the void, it projected itself. And the projection changed.
So perhaps we emanate from a singularity: you and everything around you, all within and without.
Perhaps from the singularity came the Demiurges we call the Elder Gods, and as they come from the singularity, so do our bodies come from them. And the inanimate matter under our feet and the boundless void above.
Thus, perhaps think of your soul as the true self, just like we once did. The real you, which is closer to this one, unifying reality. And think of the body as the one cast further from the source. Perhaps that is why the body bears such flaws that do not mark the soul.
A Neoplatonic thought, to be sure. And is it now curious that we always return to that man and what he had said so long ago?
Who knows.
I do not; I only muse to you, my reader, of possibilities we should not discount to maintain our comfortable position at the centre of the spokes which draw the cupola of stars around our world.
Esoteric Musings... 