Alchemy, Gnosticism, Noteboom...

In Alchemy it was thought that purification through heat could turn base metals to gold. Some of the ancients also thought heavy metals like mercury could purify the body. Now we know they cause insanity. But there are still things we can learn from these ancient poetic expresions of truth. Though they are not always acurate representations of the world in a scientific sense, they are expressions of human thought, and metaphors for spiritual journey.

ever noticed when you salvage a bunch of pallets for a bonfire that the only thing recognizable from its original shape are the nails? The strongest, heartiest thing? Maybe our souls are like that, maybe they are as Plato says, indestructable, immutably pure and unhindered by the physical constraints the gnostics believed to be the cause of all our suffering, distraction etc. So should we all jump into a blazing inferno to dwell with the gods? No. Such a simplification is necesary in dualistic thought perhaps, but not in the modern world and not in Noteboom.
Noteboom knows the theories of transmutation and migration of the soul but will not leave off without giving us a modern interpretation of them. He denies an everlasting soul, claiming rather that his body will merge with all things, his illusory barriers seperating self from other will come down. He will nourish soil. He will feed crops with his cropse corpse.
Zach has an awesome blog in which he speaks on the pain of living, and compares the world to the matrix but is the point of alchemy really 'self knowledge', as in knowledge of the seeker, as apart form the world? Or is it harmonization with the world soul, all existence, including the physical parts, though the gnostics saw this as the part to be transcended, it is after all, the only part we pretend to be sure of, and likely the part that these spirit worlds are mirroring. And hey, wouldn't this kind of thinking transform the painful, changing world of birth and death into something beautiful, like turning lead to gold?

So, as relates to dualism in Nihlism, do we really need to condemn the physical world in which we live in order to reach a higher state of conciousness? Noteboom says no. In The Folowing Story we see that the alchemical purification is not a redemption that hates life (as is necesary under the tennents of dualism), but a union of life's ever changing forms under the recognition of it as a totality: the One God who, in gnosticism, was formed of 'profundity' and 'silence.' like the disapearance of the boat passenger's bodies (all but the eyes).
Ha!, speaking on the original God being silence: Word, according to wiki's article on gnosticism and aeons, dosn't even exist until its partner, man. So if you are looking for the language of the gods, and wish to eschew that of the demotic look no further, just shut the fuck up.
Fade like Noteboom.
And in twenty minutes, when doctor Sexton comes in with a gun, and asks you what you used your last moments on earth for, tell him you put your shoes away...
This acceptance of death is unltimately an acceptance of the conditions of life, of life itself. And I think that this is a spiritual version of the adaptations found in nature. These adaptations, Zach says: "allows for the perfect pattern of overlapping web of self-fulfillment. Everywhere in the world is found beautiful harmony, where one plant or animal has learned to live with and thrive off of the achievements of another species through a perfect expressive dance of love and sex and birth and death."
That being said, I will now be silent as the God, follow my own advice, shut up, crawl into bed and join the realm where all things are one because all of our language is, yes, I'm saying it, some six hundred pages of demotic drible... are dream interpreters and Joycean scholars alchemists?