The Labyrinth of the Sublime: Confronting the Council of Buffoons

I.

For this essay, I implore you to hold my solemnity, but I won’t promise to reciprocate. I'm going to allow myself to unravel in thought. This is constructed from a dream—a dream featuring a council of monkeys pulling the strings, my own council of buffoons¹ lurking in the subliminal spaces of my unconscious.

But solemnity—what a deceitful notion. It is a ruse, a trick of the mind. I am no priest, not servant to antiquated idols, and I refuse to bow to this madness.² Unless I must!

“Construct a new foundation then.”

The voices, persistent and echoing, demand that we construct a new foundation, a new sacred text, a new "book of teachings." But why should we follow these commands? Is this some grand comedy intended to become an even greater tragedy? Very well, let it be so.

Allow this to become a comedic tragedy at my expense! I wish for you to see through my masquerade—this is no path to enlightenment, but a labyrinth designed as a trap for you and me to coexist.

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II.

We hold a world drenched and rich with distractions that pulls on our need for consumption as distraction, everything claws at our attention, demanding our devotion. But what do I say to devotion? I will not become it! I deny it in order to become life affirming. Your need for my devotion is built from the chasm of your pressurized negation. I will become life affirming.

I refuse to become a slave to the endless appetites of a world that thrives on consumption. To devote myself would be to surrender to a void, to be devoured by the very jaws that cries for my allegiance. I refuse! I will not be consumed by your insatiable hunger. Your need for my devotion springs from your own emptiness, your life-denying negation. And I? I choose life, I choose to affirm existence, to set fire to the false altars of your empty creed.

Go scorched earth upon your priests! This is how we escape their sublime.³

Those ancient scriptures you once held so dear are now discarded, ignored, left to gather dust like a forgotten relic.

"We will create new ones then…from the ashes."

I hear your whispers!

You have a weight that presses into my bones, accusing me of a lack of solemnity, a failure to honor what was once sacred. I hear your accusations of sacrilege! These voices, these false prophets who claim to be guides, are nothing more than buffoons—figures of mockery who imitate wisdom but offer nothing but empty words. Your hollowed offering of existence can get fucked! You false prophets—you buffoons—pretend to be conduits to the sublime, yet you are life-denying. You strip away the richness of human experience by replacing it with a hollow facsimile.

“You lack solemnity! You have failed to honor the sacred!”

But what sacred? What honor? Your prophets are charlatans, masquerading as wise men while they ply us with hollow aphorisms. You buffoons! You pretend to be gatekeepers of the sublime, yet you are life-deniers, peddling a sterile imitation of reality. Your offerings are empty vessels, devoid of meaning, like symbolic monkeys you hope that we will hold for you.

“You misunderstand. We offer salvation in the form of a constructed loop.”

You’re buffoons!

I will not be your cuck, I will not carry your burdens like a beast of burden, groaning under the weight of your empty dogmas. I will deny the becoming into camel!⁴ These false priests, these buffoons, they desire not our transcendence but our submission. These priests claim to be above the phenomenal world, but in truth, they are trying to erase us, to deny us the full spectrum of our humanity and mold us into their predictable image.

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III.

The sublime, in its true form, is not about denying life or transcending it in some sterile, ascetic ideal. It is about embracing the fullness of existence—the grotesque and the beautiful, the sacred and the profane, the ridiculous and the criminal. It is about confronting the sublime terror of our own existence, the breakdown of all illusions, and finding meaning in that shared space.

Yet, here we are, seeking out buffoons to heal our rapture. We look to these false prophets, these supposed saviors, to guide us through the confusion of life, but all we find is empty mimicry. The buffoon, in their garb of superficial wisdom—cloaked in the guise of a sage—promises salvation but only delivers deeper entanglement in the labyrinth of their own making. There is no savior to be found among them, no deliverance. Only more false prophets, more buffoons—each one more ridiculous, more insincere than the last.

We come into contact with these buffoons in subliminal spaces—those liminal realms where the sacred and the profane blur together, where the boundaries between reality and illusion dissolve.⁵ It is in these spaces that the buffoon thrives, feeding on our need for meaning, our hunger for something greater than ourselves, a hunger to escape oneself. They feed off your yearning! You yearn to yearn! The buffoon presents us with an illusion of profundity, a simulacrum of depth, but beneath the surface, there is nothing but emptiness. Life denial. I say again: I do not join them.

These subliminal spaces are not just the places we encounter on the edges of consciousness, but the very spaces within our minds where our deepest fears and desires reside. Here, the buffoon plays their greatest trick—convincing us that they hold the keys to the sublime, that they can guide us through the darkness. But in truth, they are leading us away, deeper into the shadows of ignorance so we continue the embrace of their illusion—their constructed simulacrum.⁶ A simulacrum of depth without substance.

The sublime, then, is not found in the denial of life or the rejection of the self but in the full embrace of the human experience in all its facets. It is in the acceptance of the absurdity, the contradictions, the hypocrisy inherent in traditional values that we find a rapture into momentary transcendence. We must rediscover this hypocrisy, expose it for what it is, and confront the buffoons who would have us deny our own humanity.

Expose the false as false! And confront those buffoons who would have us forsake our humanity!

They are coming for us, the life-denying priests, these false prophets. They seek to impose a sterile, lifeless version of the sublime, one that strips away our intersubjectivity and binds us to their hollow ideals. But we must resist, we must persist. We must refuse to be confined by their narrow definitions of what it means to be human. We must embrace the absurd, the ridiculous, the beautiful, and the criminal, finding freedom not in the sublime but in the recognition of the subliminal.

We must confront our council of buffoons, laugh at the false realities they construct. They have their roles to play, and often, they play them well. But ultimately, they must be destroyed.

Only then can we break free from the constructed labyrinth of their illusions, only then can we see the buffoon for what they true are—a hollow echo, a shadow on the wall. And in that recognition, in those moments of clarity, we find the path to something greater, something genuinely sublime.

Stay curious.

1. The buffoon embodies superficiality and resentment disguised as wisdom. Symbolically, this character warns against those who mimic depth without understanding it, who adopt the appearance of wisdom without its substance.

2. The priests don’t know who they are. In many cases, they believe themselves to be Promethean figures providing you the objective and capital T truth; they don’t see themselves as the little subs that they are for the established structures. The priest...is the media personalities, influencers, and content creators.

3. We can understand the sublime, in this context, as a profound state of existential engagement, transformation, and affirmation. It involves moving beyond superficiality and imitation, embracing the full spectrum of life’s experiences, and actively participating in the creation of new values and meanings. The sublime is found not in the mere admiration of grandeur or terror but in the courageous, creative, and life-affirming engagement with the totality of existence.

4. To be camel is to be in the first stage of transformation. Read Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche for a more subliminal explanation. In this case though, to be camel is to symbolize the spirit that is willing to bear heavy burdens, much like the actual animal that carries heavy loads through harsh desert environments. The camel represents a phase of humility, endurance, and self-discipline where one takes on and carries the weight of established values, traditions, and moral obligations without questioning them.

The gatekeepers of the sublime wish for you to be their camels, because without camels, our held narratives fold in on themselves.

5. Subliminal spaces are the hidden, often—to some extent—unconscious zones of our mind and experience that significantly influence how we think, feel, and act. They operate beneath the surface of conscious awareness, affecting our perceptions, decisions, and emotional responses. They are the experiences and spaces that become our sublime.

6. A constructed simulacrum suggests that much of what we think, feel, and believe may not originate from an authentic, conscious engagement with reality but rather from artificial representations that have been designed to influence us without our awareness. These simulacra shape our unconscious mind, guiding our behaviors, desires, and perceptions in ways that align with constructed ideals rather than awareness or authenticity.

A simulacrum is a copy or imitation that lacks an original referent or reality. They become a hyperreal image or concept that replaces reality itself. It is the artificial construct that becomes more real to people than reality, shaping perceptions and experiences. Read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation for more.

The modern priest are the conduits for many constructed simulacrums.