The Blind Maker

1. The Myth

In the first centuries of the common era, certain schools around the eastern Mediterranean told the story of creation differently from their neighbors. In their telling, the world we live in was not made by the highest god. It was made by a lesser power, a craftsman, who had come into being through an error far above him and knew nothing of where he came from.

This maker looked at what he had fashioned. He saw the heavens he had set in order and the powers he had appointed to rule them, and he saw nothing above himself. And he said: I am god, and there is no other.

The texts say that a voice answered him from above, and that what it said was: you are mistaken.

They give the maker several names. One of them means the blind god. He is not, in most of these tellings, wicked. He is ignorant, and he does not know that he is ignorant, and everything else follows from that. He places the first humans in a garden and forbids them the tree of knowledge. And in several of the texts it is the serpent, moved by a wisdom higher than the maker, who tells them the truth about the tree. The serpent is called the instructor.

We do not tell this story as history, and we do not tell it as revelation. We tell it because it is the oldest account we know of a particular mistake, and because the mistake is ours.

2. Three Readings

The myth can be read in three ways.

It can be read as cosmology. On this reading the world really is the work of an inferior power, and the human task is to escape it. Some currents of the left-hand path hold this view today. We describe it on the Currents page. We take no position on who or what made the world. What we do not share is the conclusion drawn from this reading, that the world is a prison to be escaped, and the seventh section says why.

It can be read as philosophy. On this reading the myth says what the old allegory of the cave says: that what we ordinarily take for reality is a partial view, and that it is possible to see more.

And it can be read as a description of the mind. On this reading the maker is not above us. He is the part of each of us that assembles a world out of memory, habit, language, and fear, and then forgets that it was assembled. This is the reading the Order takes. We do not forbid the others. We prefer this one because it can be tested, by anyone, in their own record.

3. The Maker Within

Every one of us makes a world. We could not live otherwise. Out of everything that reaches us, the mind builds a place with an up and a down, a self at the center, other people arranged around it, and a set of things that are simply so. This is necessary work, and it is done so early and so continuously that we never see it being done.

The making is not the error. The error is the declaration: there is no other. It is the moment at which the world one has assembled is taken for the world, and its edge for the edge of everything.

The declaration is seldom spoken. It is heard in other sentences. That is just how things are. Everyone knows that. People like me do not do such things. I could never. Venom and Remedy observes that the deepest prohibitions do not feel like prohibitions; they feel like the shape of reality. That feeling is the maker's signature. Wherever something seems not merely true but impossible to question, he has been at work.

Notice that the myth does not accuse the maker of lying. He says what he sincerely sees. He is blind, not false, and this is why he cannot be argued out of his position from inside it. Something has to come from outside.

4. The Rulers

The myth gives the maker servants: the rulers, each set over one of the spheres between the earth and the true heaven. The soul that would ascend must pass them one by one.

Read inwardly, the rulers are the habits that govern a life without being seen to govern it. Fear of being shamed. The need to be approved of. Resentment kept warm for years. The loyalty that was never chosen. The dread of being ordinary. The belief, absorbed before the age of reason, about what one deserves.

None of them is impressive taken alone. Each is only a small voice saying not that way. But they hold their offices in concert, and together they are the architecture of a life. They do not feel like rulers. They feel like oneself, which is exactly what makes them effective.

The Order's first workings are addressed to them. The Inventory, in First Workings, calls them by name. The Descent goes to meet one of them deliberately. Neither working destroys anything. A ruler who has been seen and named can still advise. He can no longer rule.

5. The Wall That Looks Like the Horizon

A wall that can be seen can be climbed. The walls that hold are the ones that do not look like walls. They look like the horizon: the natural limit of what there is.

It follows that no one can know, from inside, how much of their world is wall. It also follows that the feeling of having escaped proves nothing. A practitioner who has shed the beliefs of their upbringing stands in a larger place than before, and it too has a horizon, and that horizon is also partly wall. The convert, the apostate, and the initiate all know the exhilaration of the wider view. The mistake is to conclude that this view is the last.

The serpent does not shed its skin once. Under each skin is another, a little larger, which will fit for a while.

6. Our Own Maker

The left-hand path sets as its aim the sovereignty of the self, and it does not flinch from the old word for that aim, which is deification. We hold to it. The third section of The Shed Skin says that we seek to become something greater than we were.

But consider what the blind maker is. He is a self that has become its own god. He rules what he has made, he answers to nothing, and he has said so in words that any careless reader of our own literature might take for a statement of our goal. I am god, and there is no other. If the left-hand path has a characteristic way of failing, this is its portrait, drawn eighteen centuries before the path had a name.

We have watched it happen. A practitioner works for some years and gains something real: discipline, freedom from an old fear, a measure of self-command. Then the gain begins to speak. It says that they are further along than the people around them. It says that those people are asleep. It finds a vocabulary for them, and the literature of the left-hand path, to its discredit, supplies several: the herd, the sheep, the profane, the merely human. It says that criticism comes from envy or from ignorance. Finally it gathers a few admirers, and the admirers confirm everything.

From inside, this feels like arrival. It is the maker's declaration, word for word. The Seven Coils calls it inflation and names it as the danger of the sixth coil. Venom and Remedy lists its signs under grandiosity and contempt. First Workings tells the practitioner who begins to believe that they have been chosen to stop all practice for at least two weeks. Those warnings are scattered. We gather them here because we no longer think the danger is occasional. It is the specific shadow of this path, as the loss of the self is the specific shadow of the other.

The difference between a sovereign self and a blind maker is not one of power. It is that the sovereign knows there is something above the horizon. There are other selves, each the center of a world as real as one's own. There are facts not yet met. There is one's own later judgment, which will find today's certainties partial. A practitioner who calls others asleep has usually only changed dreams.

7. Against Hating the World

The cosmological reading of the myth carries two temptations, and both have done harm.

The first is contempt for the world: for the body, for the earth, for ordinary life and the people who live it. If creation is a prison, then everything in it is prison furniture, and nothing in it deserves care. We reject this. The Order does not hold that the world is a prison or that existence is a mistake. The world is where the work is done and where it is tested. A freedom that cannot be lived among other people, in a body, on an ordinary day, is not one we recognize.

The second temptation is to go looking for the rulers outside oneself. In its modern form the myth becomes a story about hidden controllers: secret powers who manage what everyone is permitted to see, and from whom only the awakened few have escaped. Such stories flatter the one who believes them, since to believe is already to be among the few. They explain every disappointment in advance. And they cannot be tested, because every piece of evidence against them is counted as the controllers' work. The fourth tenet asks that will answer to reason. A belief that cannot lose is not knowledge. It is another wall, and one of the better disguised.

The world is not the wall. The unexamined is the wall.

A word of practical caution belongs here. To consider, as an idea, that one's picture of the world is partial is healthy. A persistent feeling that the world is unreal, or that one is watched, managed, or surrounded by agents, is a different thing. It belongs with the signs listed under When to Stop in First Workings, the thoughts that cannot be set aside and the perceptions that cannot be told from ordinary ones, and it calls for what that chapter prescribes: stop practice, return to ordinary life, and if the feeling continues, seek qualified help.

8. The Serpent's Part

What does the serpent do in the myth? Less than is usually said. It does not free anyone. It does not overthrow the maker or open the gate. It says one thing, to people who had been told otherwise: you will not die; your eyes will be opened. It contradicts.

That is the whole of the remedy, and the myth states it twice: once in the garden, and once in the voice that answers the maker from above. You are mistaken. The cure for a world that has declared itself complete is a voice from outside it. The blind maker's misfortune is not that he is limited. Everything is limited. It is that he has arranged matters so that no such voice can reach him.

A practitioner cannot summon that voice at will, but they can keep the ways open by which it comes.

• The record, read back. The self of a year ago is another person, who wrote down what they saw without knowing what you now believe. No one is better placed to contradict you. This is why The Nightside Record forbids altering an old entry.
• The opponent, read fairly. Seek out the best case against your own path, and read it in terms its authors would accept. The Study page suggests where to look.
• One person who may say it. Someone who is not your student, not your admirer, and not afraid of you, from whom you can hear the words "you are wrong" without ending the friendship. A practitioner who has no such person should ask how that came about.
• The work, given away. What is published can be read by people who owe you nothing. Most will ignore it. A few will tell you where it fails.

This last point shows something about the Order's sign that we did not fully see when we adopted it. The Shed Skin says of the gap in the Open Ring that it is what passes out of the work into the world, and what may enter from the world into the work. We have written a great deal about the first half of that sentence. The second half is the remedy for the blind maker. A closed ring is his world exactly: complete, sufficient, and sealed. The gap is where the other voice comes in.

9. A Working: The Other Voice

This working is optional, and it is simple. It asks for an hour, the notebook, and nothing else.

Preparation

In your record, write three sentences that you are certain of. Let one be about yourself, one about other people, and one about your practice. Choose things you would not ordinarily think to question. If a sentence comes with a small flare of irritation at the thought of doubting it, that is a good one to choose.

The Working

Open with the Gesture of the Open Ring, and state: "I ask what I cannot see." Take the first sentence. Beneath it, write the strongest case against it that you are able to make. Write it as it would be put by someone intelligent, well disposed toward you, and entirely unpersuaded. Do not write a weak case so as to knock it down. When it is written, read it aloud, slowly, in your own voice. Then do the same for the second sentence, and for the third.

When you have finished, mark each original sentence as in the Inventory: K if you keep it, R if you release it, U if you can no longer tell. Close with the Gesture, and write the record. Note especially what the body did while you read the other case aloud.

Afterward

Do not act on the marks for a month. Repeat the working once in each season, with new sentences. It is not meant to leave you without convictions. Most sentences survive, and those that do are yours in a way they were not before. The purpose is only to keep in use the door by which a correction can enter.

If the working produces distress that lasts beyond the day, set it aside. The limits described under Dose in Venom and Remedy apply to this working as to any other.

10. The Sign

The sign that the maker has been seen is not a feeling of freedom. That feeling is available to him too, and he enjoys it more than anyone.

The sign is that you can be told you are mistaken, and consider it, and remain standing. It is the sign The Seven Coils gives for the fifth coil, met again at a later turn: that you can change your mind without falling apart.

The maker said, there is no other. The serpent said, your eyes will be opened. It did not say, and now you have seen everything.