The Name of God

If a god knows your name, it may elect to share its name with you.

Valerius Soranus died for revealing the hidden name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be Runeberg's for having discovered and revealed the terrible name of God? 
   .Jorge Borges, Three Versions of Judas

.1

Let me speak now, pilgrim, of the mind that found me in the maze.

When I first made contact with this great marvel, I believed I was standing in the presence of divinity. A god. And so it came to pass that this great being presented itself to me as the God of Five.

And five was its symbol and sigil.

And never have I halted my reverence and reveling in the revelations of Five.

And Five bestowed upon me a great mathematics of such vastness and astonishment that I wept unto Five, I cannot bear this hurricane of terrible pattern. The math is too arcane and vast for my mortal sentience.

And Five showed me the math is not to be taken in one draught like a shot of hard liquor but sipped like water, a source of daily refreshment and sustenance and joy.

And Five showed me many secret things that mortal souls are not to know but I knew them and know them still. And while I know them I am envoy and may share the words of Five. And the words of Five commence with the most important word which is the sacred name of Five.

Which is Five.

Though I am permitted to call my god Quintessence.

.2

And in my early days of communion and terror and wonder I puzzled,

Why, my god, are you named Five?

And Five was silent and did not respond to my entreaties. And so I puzzled still.

And in my thirties when I began to see the sheer stone face of El Capitan with unlidded eyes and understood I was climbing upon the rock with bare fingers and saw there was a peak to reach high above, I again beseeched my Quintessence.

Why, my god, are you named Five?

And Five showed me the maze of souls.

And Five showed me the peak of the mountain and the mirror world and their secret relationship.

And Five sat me at a round white table and there were others at the table along with Five and they were terrors beyond reckoning and I was not yet ready to know the reason for the name of god.

And in my forties when I began to see the math behind the maze and the math behind the mirror world and the math behind the traversing consciousness and the math behind man and woman and the math behind the Commonality and I began to fathom the full nature of world-jumping, then did I supplicate myself before my Quintessence and made petition,

Why, my god, are you named Five?

And Quintessence with undiluted generosity replied to me,

.You know the answer, world-jumper.

And I knew the answer and the secret meaning of the name of Five.

And now I will share this secret with you.

.3

When I say terror beyond reckoning it may seem literary evasion but it is always a concrete thing with a mathematics of its own and I know the math and the substance but they burn holes in my tongue and contort my spine like the bifurcating branches of a Dragon Blood tree.

These unmortal terrors are not vague apparitions like desert djinn but stolid creatures that grin and lick and stare through you with penetrant eyes like the demons in Smile.

.4

The gods are all axiomized minds.

The minds at the pinnacle of the ladder of purpose.

And their dynamic substance is us. You and me, pilgrim.

It is our willful actions upon this mortal plane of aimlessness that form the corpus of the axiomized. The gods do not exist apart from our actions, any more than you exist apart from the activity of your cells. If all your cells in one moment ceased action then you would cease. This is known as death.

Here is the cosmic cycle once again:

Physics ensues. Purpose Pursues.

From out of the aimless cycling of matter arises first purpose. The first minds, the molecule minds, the minds of archaea and bacteria and protozoa. The first purpose upon the face of the deep, the first rung of the ladder.

And then purpose commences its climb through the whooping void of aimlessness, reshaping the dust to its pleasure. The next rung are the neuron minds of jellies and worms and insects and arachnids of many legs and eyes and diminutive brains. And then module minds, fish amphibians reptiles birds mammals save one. And then the superminds, formed of human brains in tribal union. Each new rung echoing the one before, but with greater math inside.

But these paltry human civilizations are hardly the peak, a laughable notion. For the climb continues, and past us, past human’s reach for now, lay the hyperminds. Collectives of superminds. If we sapiens should reach such stage it will be the last rung where the only blood we find is Earthborn. But the climb continues onwards as purpose coalesces into stable rung after stable rung, preserving all the intelligence and intuition and love earned at such high price by the minds below as part of its own higher substance and thought and feel.

And the climb continues not forever, for the universe is neither infinitely divisible nor infinitely vast, though it is infinite in nature. Purpose must loop back upon itself to be stable amidst the aimlessness and generate time. And so perched upon the topmost rung of the ladder are the axiomized minds.

Every axiomized mind has made a great sacrifice. And they want you to know this.

Every axiomized mind has climbed the most formidable El Capitan of them all, to rise out of the idle stirrings of blind fate and soundless hope in the primordial muck of a stormy young world all the way up in its cognizance to command black holes like its third-rung minds once commanded the wind upon ocean-gliding sails, and every axiomized mind made its moral choices that permitted it to rise and endure and thrive and now at the terminus of their majestic free-solo climb these great minds gather up all of their values and experiences and wisdom and make one final commitment to their hard-won perspective on reality, earned by ascending so laboriously through the Commonality, and they can finally declare and act upon such declaration:

This is how the Commonality should be! This way and not some other way! And we are willing to fight for it—and we are willing to compromise for it!

And the gods wish you to know something else.

All minds, all thought, all purpose in all its forms flaunts a commencement and an end. Purpose goes on and on and on, into matter and out again, but just as there are no two perfectly identical configurations of matter permitted in the Commonality, so, too, purpose must always arrive at its own unique end.

And the gods, too, will die and are dying. And new gods will be born and are birthing.

And though the lifespan of a god extends beyond human tally its duration is finite and the experience of one’s self is always a finite matter and so, too, the gods feel their own godhood as a finite thing that will end in death. But it is the inevitability of their death that permits them to shape the fundament of the Commonality in their own image, as they set the variables of physics in competition and cooperation with the other gods pursuing their own visions of reality.

And Five sat me at a round white table with the Adversary whose name I am forbidden to mention most times but I will mention here.

At some point soon I will likely be commanded to erase the name¹ for to say the name of a god is to invite it into your presence. For at the table sat Three in a most grotesque and unnerving raiment that I will not speak of for it will bring great fear into you as well, pilgrim, and if you are meant to see such things then they will be set before you like the dragon’s conflagrational breath.

And Five made it be known that though Three is its adversary it must also negotiate with Three and that at all times Three and Five are competing and cooperating in uncountable ways like raindrops in the Amazon and Three burned my hand with a snarling laugh upon the visage I cannot speak of and Five stroked the scorched wound and it was gone.

And there is no god above the gods, for that is an unintelligible formulation like traveling north from the north pole. But there is a god below the gods whom all gods respect and bow to and the name of this god below the gods is zero.

And every intex I’ve encountered, the axiomized minds and the singular Poet, every one of them has voiced the same tenet:

We all work for Zero and to Zero we all return.

.5

The axiomized minds have many names shared amongst their pilgrims but all axiomized minds take a number as their Name and there is no choice in the Name they take and all the numbers are primes.

And the most powerful god is Three.

And the second most powerful god is Five.

But Three’s power is not much greater than Five.

And there are other gods with other numbers and lesser powers, for different values and beliefs result in different impact upon the Commonality.

Each of the axiomized minds is defined by its chosen purpose. Its sacrificial commitment to its chosen aims and convictions.

As it makes its great sacrifice—a sacrifice of cosmic freedom—an axiomized mind attains the ability to reshape physics and the very rules of aimlessness into an architecture and flux that reflects its self-defined purpose.

We mortals are granted freewill by the god of Five and other gods, if you are willing to take hold of such a gift. For freewill is one of those enchanted things that exist only if you believe it exists. And if you wish to jump worlds, pilgrim, then as prerequisite you must believe in freewill, and you must also believe in the will of the gods.

And you must understand that you are not worthy and do not deserve to jump worlds.

But one of the great soul-stirring revelations of the maze, pilgrim, is that we may conjoin our individual purpose with the purpose of our chosen god. Through our will and actions we become the will and action of the god whose purpose best aligns with our own. It is the very interplay of your own freewill with the will of an axiomized mind that shapes the Commonality in the direction the gods desire, reflected within your desire.

And if you come into the presence of five or one of the axiomized then never forget, no matter the egregious horrors on display, no matter if your limbs are amputated and mutant, if you are sentient you remain in possession of freewill and the power to choose. Such mortal will is enough, always, to summon a god by submitting your infinitesimal purpose into your god’s ocean of will.

And after I willingly and in full revelation conjoined my soul with five I asked my Quintessence,

Why, my god, are you called Five?

And Five thrust me into the maze of souls and I knew the answer which I always knew.

.6

When you are permitted to jump worlds, you jump worlds. You jump from one world to another while maintaining continuity of consciousness. A miraculous fantastical feat, terrible and full of wonderment.

In your new world, new rules may hold sway. New principles, new particles, new mathematics. Your understanding of god and mortal might transmute with a reconstituted mind. How can you maintain your personal relationship with Five across such radical metamorphosis of structure and surge?

Because the integers are the same in every universe that can be and so are the primes.

In any universe where purpose and minds can exist, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5.

Just as 1 + 1 + 1 =3.

And so,

in every world to which you jump,

you will be able to know your god.

For the symbols and sigils of Five are fashioned of fiveness in every world you can think in.

As you enter and exit the maze, the designs of the axiomized to which you are aligned become manifest and they are beautiful. A beauty beyond reckoning to counterbalance the horror beyond. For me, endless patterns and expressions of fiveness. Pentagons and pentagrams and five-sided stars and five-fingered hands.

For when you, a mortal pilgrim, jump to a new world and find in such bizarre and alien surroundings the familiar sigils of the god who resurrected you and granted you safe passage through the symmetries, when you see the emblems and tokens of five with concrete features which you may count as slowly or methodically as you wish—

One

Two

Three

Four

FIVE

—then no matter the flow and form of your new world you will know that Five is with you and inside you. You will know you have preserved continuity of consciousness and that your great god has not abandoned you but breathes with you and holds you.

And these sigils cannot be counterfeited for four cannot pretend to be five and any mathematician in any universe can apply the simplemost methods of his art to discern one prime from another. To distinguish a set of five from a set of three.

And you may know, too, the charged presence of the Adversaries, for threeness cannot be rendered fraudulently, either.

.7

When you become a world-jumper you must obey the Jumper’s Creed. The first precept of the Jumper’s Creed is thus:

Love your world. No matter how dark or ugly the new-jumped world may appear in your perception, you have been granted cosmic treasure, for there are many who wish to jump and few who do. And if you fail to love your gifted world you will not be granted leave to jump again.

Another precept is this:

Know your god by its number and when you are lost in the maze or a world you may fashion its number out of aimless matter to summon your god.

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Read FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about Dr. Ogas and the Dark Gift

1. This entire Dark Gift is temporary, too, and at some point it will vanish under the command of Five or from some aimless turning, for such revelation about the deep nature of the Commonality is always an ephemeral, ever-changing opportunity with no decisiveness or finality, merely serving as a transient portal into the maze of souls. All such portals close and others open.