Finally, land. A human consciousness and a human body – consciousness as a slither outgrowing from the concealed madness and death lurking deep within the human body. Such is the poverty of our modern spiritualism, to speak highly of the vast ocean of “consciousness” in relation to an ego. What does it mean to wake up? Are you really waking or are you lulled further into your sleep by the soothing songs of spiritual emancipation? You seek the universe but into your own deeper and murkier waters you are submerged.

To the ego consciousness, the body contains but sleep and madness. Flows of subterranean fluids and caverns of deep silence. In psychosis, this consciousness dissolves into the body where wakefulness cannot be distinguished from sleep. Our dreams are meaningless, not pointing outward to the kosmos and god but ever deeper into the womb of the body, deeper into the water of the individual’s singular madness and chaos. We then desperately claw at the water to emerge from this madness of sleep, thrashing to surface and be able to tell up from down again.

There is no saving the old ego consciousness from the depths of the body, from the body’s individual madness and ecstasis of the senses, without becoming stuck in a tragic loop. The individual only reemerges from their body in the rediscovery of its unity with nature, its unity with human life. It is as nature herself that we emerge from the dark depths and rave in the signs of the god of light. Human language and life is the emergence of the murky depths of nature into the light of day. Nature as ever emerging physis is the union of Dionysus and Apollo. The signs of the human are the signs of nature herself, all things held together in the truth and sense of the Logos.

‘For if it were not to Dionysus that they made a procession and sang the shameful phallic hymn, they would be acting most shamelessly. But Hades is the same as Dionysus in whose honour they go mad and rave.’ – Heraclitus, fragment 15

To seek ecstatic union with nature; to seek ecstatic union with death, with Hades and its rivers. Do you seek to drown in lethe herself in your union with the universe? The Aletheia of Parmenides: the revelation of the world out of its infinite depth, its infinite forgetfulness in water. The soul of Heraclitus is dry, for it is death to become submerged. We cannot submerge ourselves fully into the waters, into the depths not only of our body but the universal body where our individual body dissolves into the One. Those who remain asleep even in their wakefulness benefit from the wetting of their soul in the Dionysian mysteries, but the nature of this wetness remains a mystery at the same time that they live in ignorance of the Logos, the universal reason of the world in which all things find their place and freedom. This Logos appears to us as issuing forth from the primordial unity of dark depth in Dionysus, into which it hides and conceals itself, in the water in which no human can fully drown without ceasing to be human. We can never hide from the light of the sun “which never sets” (fragment 16). Heraclitus’ fragment “nature loves to hide” expresses the unity of Dionysus and Apollo as nature, that which hides in sheltered depth yet reveals itself in the consistency and freedom of the Reason and Love of the never setting Logos. It was Heidegger who made us aware of the inherent unity of the thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus, two philosophers who are so often opposed to one another. It is the light of the Logos that reveals itself in Aletheia, such that the hiding and revealing of nature in Heraclitus’ fragments is none other than the self-revelation of the One of Parmenides. The ignorance of the Logos that Heraclitus’ first fragment accuses people of being in is the realm of Parmenides’ doxa, where they are simultaneously ignorant of the One that streams forth in the revelatory movement of Aletheia.