Conciliation Pathway

On falling and standing.

The attachment to perdurability is not a bookkeeping error. It is tied to mortality, to meaning, and to legacy. We look for systems that last in order to compensate for a finite and absurd existence. To be replaced feels like meaninglessness; to be forgotten, like an empty legacy. The intellect can grant the brevity of an insect, and the extinction of a species. It still cannot let go of this particular stay in the world. The small and the large may perish, yet I must endure.

The answer to that imperdurability dilemma is a scalability problem.

Take a single cell in a body. The cell exists as part of a functional tissue: it forms, develops, contributes, decays, and dies. Another cell takes its place. The first is gone; the tissue remains. That process serves an organ, which serves a body, and — in intelligent species — a mind on top of that hierarchy. Nothing in the stack lasts by refusing to be succeeded.

Consciousness, housed in an imperdurable body, resists this and wants perdurable bliss. We distract ourselves. We put on masks colored with noble ideas and identify with the eternal. If we lose ourselves in that, we take up dysfunction through power and corruption. Fear and emptiness do not vanish. They can be given a healthier path.

• CONCILIATION PATHWAY: Iterated Imperdurable Functionality.

Imperdurability is compensated by scale. Each cell iterates its participation so the tissue can keep working. When that iteration is disrupted — when cells live longer than they should — the tissue sickens. The shift is from seeking perdurability to developing iterated imperdurability.

A release that is allowed to end, so the next release can work, is the same shape. Meaning and legacy may remain. They cannot be a demand that this form never die.

The rejection of imperdurability still has to be faced. The alternative to facing it is not a secret third pole. It is, eventually, a dysfunctional system that was built to last. The intellect’s work is to build systems that take iteration as a requirement, and to accept being iterated ourselves — purpose found in contributing to the larger function, while honoring that the function is imperdurable.

A mixed system may persevere this way, even past the decay of purely organic or instrumental things. Only if it consents to its imperdurability. The next section is how that interstitial choice shows up in ordinary names.