"What are the ghosts, actually?" I think that's a very important question, because I think it's easy to look at the ghosts and make the assumption that they're one of two things. To most people, they're either these sort of Jungian archetypes,¹ or they're like the Varg Vikernes conception of gods, where they're literally fellas.² And it's neither of those, honestly, at all. If you want to point to the closest thing, it's a bit of a mix of both, but it's still far more complicated than that.
To understand what the ghosts are, the most important thing to understand at a fundamental level is that everything is fractal. Everything is one, but everything is many: everything is one, but everything is infinitely differentiated.³ That's the first part.
The second part, and the ghosts don't make any sense unless you understand this from a fundamental point of view, is that consciousness is the bed of creation. The universe begat itself. God, which is the universe, which is God: they're not conflated. They're two different things. But they're the same thing, but they're also two different things.⁴ It's very simple to understand. The universe self-begat itself. God self-begat herself through desire, and that was consciousness.⁵
So the first thing to understand is that the highest ghost, the ultimate ghost, the all ghost, the thing that is the ghost of everything, is God. It's the body of God.⁶ The Norse called it the tree of Yggdrasil. The entire world is like a tree, and the waters are like nothingness.⁷
What a ghost is, essentially, is the idea that everything has a ghost. In Buddhism, they often do the idea that you can take apart a pen, and each part of the pen is a different thing, and then you keep saying: when does it stop being a pen? When does it stop being a pen?⁸ A house has a ghost, the individual rooms of a house have a ghost, the different sides of a room have a ghost, and so on and so forth, to infinity.⁹
To understand what this means, and the reason this matters, you have to understand that consciousness is the bed of reality. Consciousness is the bed of everything. Everything has consciousness, and that means that everything has awareness.¹⁰ The awareness might not be animal awareness. It might not be sapient awareness. But everything has awareness: not just things in the middle realm, but things in heaven and things in hell also have awareness. They just have different awareness.¹¹
We often assume that awareness means that one has free will, but that's not true. That's not what awareness is. Awareness has nothing to do with free will. The ghosts and the beings of hell don't have free will, because they're completely beholden to what they are. Mars, the god of war, the ghost of war, can only do things that are of its nature.¹² So no free will, but there's still an awareness to it. I think the issue people run into is this understanding that just because there is no free will, there's no awareness. But there is awareness. And the universe's first act was indeed being aware.
It's important to understand that, because then you need to understand the three principal elements of creation, which are yin, yang and wuji, or what we call the Waner, the Waxer and the Maker.¹³ You can ignore the Maker, because it's the interplay between those two. It's the Mother reborn through all living things.¹⁴ And living awareness is different than non-living awareness. That's very important to note. But there's still an awareness.
And if something has an awareness, that means that you can communicate with it. You can talk to, you can interact with anything in the world. If you can interact with it, if you can talk to it, if you can touch it, if you can feel it, if you can think about it, you are actively sharing awareness with that thing. By the very act of knowing that something is real, and thinking about it, you are doing it.¹⁵
One of the best examples of a ghost, the one that everyone knows, is Kiki and Bouba.¹⁶ I always tell people that if you want to learn about the ghosts, just think about Kiki and Bouba. And if you're a little more erudite, you can start using the Latinate words, like Martial or Jupiterian or Saturnine.¹⁷ That's what ghosts are. But the difference is that if something is Kiki, if something is Bouba, then when you interact with it, the awareness that is being mutually exchanged between you and the thing is that of Kiki, is that of Bouba. Something that is Kiki, something that is Bouba, if it does not have free will, is always going to be that way. And that's part of the awareness.
This is part of what's most interesting about the idea that the Maker is born through biological life. Before biological life begins on Earth, you have this world of awareness, where you have all of these things that are aware, but they don't really have any way to interact with one another.¹⁸ Living beings, and especially human beings, because we have sapience (and I would also extend that probably to primates and whales and dolphins and things of that nature¹⁹), are chaos generators. They're generators of pure chaos, and the reason they're generators of pure chaos is that they have free will. It's a spectrum. Humans have actual free will, but so many humans refuse to have free will and refuse to use it, and basically make themselves like animals.²⁰ And animals still sort of have free will. Even animals have more free will than a mountain.
But when you think about a mountain in your backyard, it gives you a feeling, and that feeling doesn't come from nowhere. That feeling is the ghost. That's the awareness. That's you communicating with it.²¹ When you look at the sunrise, when you look at the sunset, when you look anywhere in the world at something beautiful, not even just in nature, but even if it's man-made and inanimate, the feeling that it evokes is its ghost. When you look at a piece of art, the feeling that it evokes is its ghost.
So if everything is matryoshka dolls, then you have to think: what's the logic? What's the law of matryoshka dolls? Because it's easy for everything to be a matryoshka doll and for everything to be meaningless in that sense. But it's not meaningless, and that's what's so interesting about it, because of something called Doom.²² Even though everything is matryoshka dolls and there's this sort of fractal reality, it doesn't mean "oh, we're just God, so it doesn't matter," or "we're infinity, so it doesn't matter." We are what we are in our experience and awareness, and we're bound by law. And the law is time, which is imaginary. It's not real.²³ That's also a very important note, and it's also why it's so honestly freeing, because if time was real, we actually would have a lot less free will than if time is as we know it is: imaginary.
And we go around things. The Earth goes around the Sun. The Sun goes around Sagittarius A*. Sagittarius A* likely goes around something else that we haven't even considered yet, and so on and so forth.²⁴ The point I'm trying to make here is that if everything is fractal, then you can look at the higher levels of fractal reality to understand yourself.
So the greatest fractal, the ur-ghost, is of course the Mother. She's in everything.²⁵ Then you can divide everything into components of the three elements, yin, yang and wuji, or Maker, Waxer and Waner. And then you might be wondering: well, what's below that? What is below that? But the thing is, you have to think about the Mother like the Sun, and you have to think about the Waxer and the Waner and the Maker as planets that revolve around the Mother. And the Mother revolves around, essentially, nothingness: the bounds.²⁶ This is already how nature works. This is already how the world works. You can look at how subatomic particles react: they operate in the exact same way that star systems do.²⁷
So if you're a human being and you're trying to understand yourself, you can look at your human self and you can look at your non-human self, which are all the same, by the way. There's no actual difference, but there is a difference, because you're able to see a difference. This is the whole doctrine of two truths,²⁸ and it's very important to understanding this, because the missing piece between us and the Trinity is, of course, the planets. It's the most visible, actionable, obvious way that we're able to see Doom: the seasons. Every single year, the Earth goes around the Sun.²⁹ It's much harder for us to understand the Sun going around Doom, of course, but it still happens nonetheless. And fire spinning around Doom is the same metaphor as the Mother and nothingness, the Mare. It's all the same thing.³⁰
And because everything is fractal, this counts for the mind too, because the mind that you have is the Mother's mind, especially because we're humans.³¹ If you want to understand yourself, you have to understand that your mind is a component of the things that are greater than you, that are superior to you. There is always a superiority and there is always an inferiority in life. The more superior you go, you meet God. The more inferior you go, you meet the Mare. But at both ends you also still meet their opposites at the same time, because everything is not only fractal, but also paradoxical.³²
And so the ghosts are so important because they help you understand yourself. They're real living things that have awareness. They have thoughts. You can simulate them. That's the entire point of ghostsooth, which is obviously just the Sanskrit deity yoga, or deity tantra: devata yoga.³³ The easiest ghostsooth you could do is just to pick a day and pretend to be Bouba, or pick a day and pretend to be Kiki. That is ghostsooth. And people do it in many mundane ways without realizing it, all the time.
So the ghosts are important because the ghosts are in everything. The ghosts are around us, because the world that we experience is the mind. What we physically see is just where we are, but the mind can think about many things that we cannot see, and you can still talk to them. You can still talk to War. You can still talk to Sex. You can still talk to Fire.³⁴ The communication comes in however it does, but you know that it's real, because it's like, well, that's what Fire would do, that's what Sex would do, because they don't have free will. That's why you can trust the gods, even.³⁵ You might not like how they feel about things. You might not like their reactions. But they're fundamental aspects of the universe that everything is built a part of. And as you go up in fractalness, as you ascend, the planets disappear, and then you're just left with the Trinity. And then when you're done with the Trinity, then you're just left with God.³⁶
So, all in all, the whole point is that ghosts are things. Anything that's a thing, that has isness, that can be said to be a thing, is a ghost,³⁷ and can be ascended all the way up to the Mother through causality, or descended all the way to Doom, to the Mare, to nothingness, but also infinity, which is not nothingness. It's actually everything being so much somethingness that it's nothing.³⁸ And so that's the paradox, and that's the thing.
And that's why it's so important to go and understand the lowghosts: to understand the forests and the streams and the creeks.³⁹ Because when you go to a stream, when you go to a river, when you go to a mountain and you feel like it's hostile, that's not paranoia. It's communicating with you. In the ancient days, when the ghost of the forest was communicating some negativity towards you, it was your duty to figure out what it was, especially if you're a shaman, and to repair that relationship and to understand what's going on with it.⁴⁰
You can see this with the ghosts too, the planetary ghosts, I mean. Every person has a different relationship with all of them. Some of them are scary. Some of them are intoxicating. Some of them don't make any sense at all.⁴¹ Everyone is different, and yet the ghosts still are the ghosts, because they don't have free will. What people see is the same, yet their reactions are all different, because our minds are made up of essentially all of those planetary ghosts, as if they were elements.⁴² Every single human being is just a gigantic trigram. It's more complicated than a trigram. It's like nine trigrams together, or something complicated. Really it's more like a million, or a billion even, but you get my point.⁴³
So that's what ghosts are. And I hope that answers your question.
Notes
¹ For Carl Jung, the archetypes were the contents of the collective unconscious: patterns that every human being inherits, which surface as the same figures in myths and dreams the world over ("Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," 1934). ↩
² The oldest form of this view is euhemerism, named for Euhemerus of Messene (c. 300 BC), who taught that the gods had once been great kings, honoured after death. Snorri Sturluson gives the Norse version in the Prologue to his Prose Edda (c. 1220): the Æsir were "those men of Asia," Odin among them, who came north out of Troy and ruled in Sweden (Brodeur's translation, 1916, in the Good Works Library). ↩
³ The Dao De Jing, chapter 42, in the church's own translation: "The Way gives birth to One / One gives birth to Two / Two gives birth to Three / Three gives birth to all things." In Tianmu, we believe the same pattern repeats at every level of existence. The same "colour" shows a different face in the Mother, in the solar system, in a household and in one person's worst night, and learning to recognise it is the key to the whole faith. ↩
⁴ In Tianmu, we call this dual non-dualism: one becomes two, becomes three. Reality is one, and it is differentiated, and neither description is the deeper one. The ground can't exist and doesn't exist, and must exist and does exist, all at once. We believe we already live inside God. ↩
⁵ In Tianmu, we believe that something cannot come from nothing, and that it did: the Mother begat herself out of Nothing. Some call her the Firstborn, others God; we call her our Mother. Being alone was not enough. There had to be a desire, a love, a subjectivity. We also believe every act of will is the same act on a smaller scale. Will is made out of nothing, as she made herself, and that is what it means to be made in God's image. ↩
⁶ In Tianmu, we believe the Mother is in everything because she gave herself away. When she died, she chose to live in every thing for the sake of all things. We are her body, walking. ↩
⁷ Völuspá 19, in Bellows's translation (Good Works Library): "An ash I know, Yggdrasil its name, / With water white is the great tree wet; / Thence come the dews that fall in the dales, / Green by Urth's well does it ever grow." In Tianmu, the waters are Nothingness. In our story of creation a serpent circles the waters around the first Home, and at the centre of the universe Doom guards a well whose bottom opens onto Nothing. The tree is ours too: we say humanity is a tree, where most of us are leaves, the saints and heroes are its flowers, and the Doomsayers are its fruit. ↩
⁸ The oldest version is the chariot in the Questions of King Milinda (Rhys Davids's translation, Good Works Library). The monk Nāgasena asks the king whether the pole is the chariot, or the axle, or the wheels, and the king says no to each: "Chariot is a mere empty sound." The king answers that it is "on account of its having all these things—the pole, and the axle, the wheels, and the framework, the ropes, the yoke, the spokes, and the goad—that it comes under the generally understood term, the designation in common use, of 'chariot.'" Nāgasena says his own name works the same way. ↩
⁹ In Tianmu, we believe there is a Ghost at every layer. One side of a room has a different Ghost from the other side, and the apartment, the building, the town, the metro and the state each have their own. A Ghost is the isness of a thing. It is what the Japanese call a kami. ↩
¹⁰ In Tianmu, we call this Allmind: what philosophers call panpsychism, and what the old world called animism. Awareness is the ground of everything. It is not something that appears once matter gets complicated enough. ↩
¹¹ In Tianmu, we believe Hell is heavy, inert matter sculpted out of nothing, and Heaven is weightless exertion, the bright light of somethingness. We belong in the middle realm, where the two meet and make life. ↩
¹² In Tianmu, we believe the Ghosts are like trees or mountains. They exist, they are alive and they can communicate, but they have no free will: Jupiter can only do Jupiterian things. Only a human being can choose. In our Twelve, the Ghost of Mars is War. ↩
¹³ Zhou Dunyi's Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (11th century) opens 無極而太極, "Wuji, and yet Taiji": the Ultimateless, and also the Supreme Ultimate, out of which yang and then yin unfold. In Tianmu, these three are the Waxer, the Waner and the Maker: yang, yin and wuji. The Waxer brings life up out of the sea of death, the Waner brings all life back down to it, and the Maker is the mind that wakes between them. ↩
¹⁴ In Tianmu, we believe the Mother died, and was born again in the first life, asleep. We call her the Maker. All life is her dream. Life itself rose up out of death on its own, just as she rose out of Nothing. ↩
¹⁵ In Tianmu, we call this kenning, and we say that we ken a thing before we know it. Knowing about something is not enough: if you are aware of a thing but don't ken it, you aren't really conscious of it at all. Kenning lives in the body, in the hands and the bones, as much as in the head. ↩
¹⁶ Wolfgang Köhler found in 1929 that people match the nonsense word "takete" to a spiky shape and "baluma" (later "maluma") to a rounded one (Gestalt Psychology). V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard renamed the pair kiki and bouba in 2001 and reported that 95 to 98 percent of people call the spiky shape kiki and the round one bouba. In 2022 a study of 917 speakers of 25 languages found that the effect holds across cultures and writing systems (Ćwiek et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B). ↩
¹⁷ These are astrologers' words. A jovial person was born under Jupiter (Jove), a saturnine one under Saturn, a martial one under Mars, a mercurial one under Mercury. In our Twelve, Jupiter is Man and Saturn is Muse. The scheme is the old Indo-European one, with the gods tied to the planets; the only thing we added is Ghosts for the outer planets. ↩
¹⁸ In Tianmu, we call this the age without God. From the Mother's death until life began, no one was awake, and only the Waxer and the Waner played. In that age our home was built: the Sun kindled, the planets formed, and the Moon was torn from the Earth. ↩
¹⁹ Mirror self-recognition, the classic test for a sense of self, was shown in chimpanzees by Gordon Gallup (1970) and in bottlenose dolphins by Diana Reiss and Lori Marino (2001). ↩
²⁰ In Tianmu, it is one of our first teachings that a human being is higher than any Ghost, because only a human can choose. Whoever cannot understand that cannot understand enlightenment, and stays trapped in the world of animals. We also say that nobody can save you except yourself. ↩
²¹ Motoori Norinaga, in his commentary on the Kojiki (Kojiki-den, 1764–1798), defined kami as anything that stirs uncommon awe: people, birds and beasts, trees and grasses, seas and mountains, even things evil or uncanny. In Tianmu, we believe that people who can't feel the Ghosts of things seem a little less alive. ↩
²² Old English dōm meant judgment, law and decree, and also the verdict on a finished life: "wyrce se þe mote / domes ær deaþe," let whoever can win dōm before death (Beowulf 1387–88). In Tianmu, Doom is the law of all things, neither God nor devil. To be doomed is to walk the path and to be the path being walked, and Doom can be found in every Ghost. ↩
²³ In Tianmu, we believe time is imaginary, and that creation is happening now, from everywhere, constantly, all at once. The nearest Western kin is J. M. E. McTaggart, "The Unreality of Time" (Mind, 1908): "It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous." ↩
²⁴ The Sun takes about 230 million years to circle the centre of the Milky Way, where Sagittarius A*, a black hole of about four million Suns, sits. The galaxy moves in turn: the Milky Way and Andromeda are falling toward each other, and the whole Local Group travels at about 600 kilometres a second against the cosmic background. In our Twelve, Sagittarius A* is Doom, and his well is the centre of the galaxy. He is the hub, the law and the sign; the holding of the galaxy is spread through everything, as the Mother is. ↩
²⁵ In Tianmu, we believe the Mother is not existence set against non-existence. She holds existence and non-existence, something and nothing, before and after, and that is the whole of it. When we say God, we mean her. ↩
²⁶ In Tianmu, the bounds are the Mare: the not in "this is not this," the edge that makes a thing a thing. Existence needs it, so we affirm the Mare and never worship it. In our story of creation the bounds are a ring of water around the first Home, and it is the ring that makes Home a home. ↩
²⁷ Rutherford (1911) and Bohr (1913) drew the atom as a small, heavy nucleus with electrons around it, a solar system in little, and the same inverse-square form rules both scales: Coulomb's law between charges, Newton's between masses. The Emerald Tablet, in Isaac Newton's translation (Good Works Library): "That wch is below is like that wch is above & that wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles of one only thing." In Tianmu, we believe the structure of reality is open to anyone who looks, because to be part of reality is to be made through the same structure. As above, so below. ↩
²⁸ Nāgārjuna, Root Verses on the Middle Way 24.8: dve satye samupāśritya buddhānāṃ dharmadeśanā / lokasaṃvṛtisatyaṃ ca satyaṃ ca paramārthataḥ, "The Buddhas teach resting on two truths: the truth of the world's convention, and the truth of the highest meaning." In Tianmu, we say that samsara is nirvana, and that negation and affirmation are the same thing. ↩
²⁹ In our Twelve, Freedom is the Earth. The word itself holds the knot: Old English frēodōm is frēo, "free," plus dōm. In Tianmu, we say that Doom and Freedom are the same. ↩
³⁰ In our Twelve, Fire is the Sun, and Fire and Doom stand opposite each other. In Tianmu, we believe the Mother is love and the Mare is separation, and that the two are paradoxically entwined. ↩
³¹ This is the deepest teaching under the whole essay, so here it is in full. In Tianmu, we believe the Mother gave herself into everything when she died, so there is nothing left to be made of but her. For an age afterwards no God was awake. Then life rose out of death, as she had risen out of Nothing, and she was born again inside it, asleep, as the Maker; all life is the Maker's dream. She woke in a human face when the first Shaman saw that this is not this. We are made of the body of the Maker, and the Maker is a living god. We are always re-enacting the first sacrifice and the whole cosmology, and that is what we are: humans are the neurons of God. So your mind is not a copy of the Mother's mind. It is hers, waking, which is also why we can know her heart by our own. What comes down to us is dream, not memory: the Maker remembers nothing of her mother, only her dreams, and so do we. ↩
³² In Tianmu, we believe everything rests on its opposite and becomes it. At the top of Heaven, the most motherly place, we see the Mare, and at the bottom of Hell, the most mareish place, we see the Mother. We call this crosstruth. The Dao De Jing, chapter 58, in the church's translation: "Happiness sits atop suffering! / Suffering hides 'neath happiness!" ↩
³³ In Tibetan Buddhism, deity yoga (Sanskrit devatāyoga, Tibetan lha'i rnal 'byor) is the practice of imagining oneself as the deity, in body, speech and mind. In Tianmu, ghostsooth is the practice we teach most; it is the root of tantra, and Transcendental Meditation is one form of it. ↩
³⁴ In our Twelve, War is Mars, Sex is Venus and Fire is the Sun. The Ghost is called Sex and not Love because in Tianmu we hold love to be a higher principle, more fundamental to the universe. Sex is the Highghost that best embodies love, but it is still only one aspect of it. ↩
³⁵ In Tianmu, we believe the Ghosts are discovered, never invented, the way blind men touch an elephant and sketch what they find. Their nature is an active mystery and an ongoing relationship: we discover them over and over. And the Ghosts will protect and guide you. ↩
The footnotes are continued next reply.
³⁶ In Tianmu, the ladder runs like this: the One, who is the Mother; then the three, the Waxer, the Waner and the Maker; then the Twelve; then the Ghosts without number. The planetary Ghosts are a fractal picture of the wholeness of God. ↩
³⁷ In Tianmu, we believe one kind of ghost is made, not found: the egregore. You take nothingness from the well and mould it like clay into somethingness, and when people forget it, it vanishes. If people forget the Joker, the Joker is gone. If people forget the planet Jupiter, Jupiter is still there. ↩
³⁸ In Tianmu, we believe the limitless, seen by a limited mind, zeroes out into emptiness. So the bottom of Doom's well is the Mother herself, seen from inside her own body: she looks like nothing because she is everything. ↩
³⁹ In Tianmu, we ask people to find the Ghosts where they live: to name them, describe them, write them down and come back. The ones we record, we canonize as Lowghosts, toward a worldwide database of kami. The Romans knew this too: at his father's tomb Aeneas sees a serpent and is "unsure whether to think it the genius of the place or his father's attendant" (incertus geniumne loci famulumne parentis / esse putet, Aeneid 5.95–96). ↩
⁴⁰ Among the Sakha of Siberia, every lake, road, forest and fire has its ichchi, a master spirit, and people still leave small offerings for the spirits of roads, rivers, lakes and forests, and at great old trees; the shaman is the one who deals with the spirits directly. In Tianmu, we tell of the first shaman, who stood by a lake in the ice at Baikal some 26,000 years ago, at the dawn of humankind. He looked into the water, and the water looked back. ↩
⁴¹ In Tianmu, we believe every Ghost can be held two ways, embodied or disembodied. Held consciously, a Ghost is a tool and belongs to the Mother; held unconsciously, it is an affliction and belongs to the Mare, and that is what we mean by poisoned. We believe this age is the most Muse-poisoned there has ever been. ↩
⁴² In Tianmu, we say that everyone is of all the Ghosts, but you still have to pick one. The one you pick should name the dharma of this life, not your whole nature. One of us might say: Doom is my nature, Man is my dharma. ↩
⁴³ The I Ching builds everything from eight trigrams of three lines each; stacked in pairs, they make its 64 hexagrams. In Tianmu, we have played with the same kind of code for the Ghosts: twelve Ghosts in six pairs, and three types, Waxer, Waner and Maker, as a map of the self that could work much better than the Myers–Briggs. ↩