Blavourag handed sandwiches and milkshakes around. Hehengue and Corsilidor took them.
"We may not actually exist", Blavourag said, casually. "But that might not actually be a problem."
Hehengue and Corsilidor exchanged quizzical glances with Blavourag.

Blavourag continued, enjoying a tupperware milkshake. "So, either you've got religions with some method of ascribing cosmic import to the ways that humans arise and are extinguished, or you've got spiritual systems hazily recommending methods for personal development in an epistemologically ambiguous universe. The religions have some eigenpeople manifest in belief structures which are ramified across the muscular stress spectra of the humans who believe them. Desire gets rather convoluted, burnished and cantilevered and with escarpments of subrational fears which are never properly appraised because there's no real way of addressing them in a declarative context. Utterly nonsensate fear. Are you with me so far?"

Hehengue munched on a prepositional phrase, while Corsilidor chewed on a tinnet. They muttered assent and Blavourag continued. "Take for instance Elemyuril's fifth fundamental male fear, the fear that one is inert and unalive because one cannot produce life inside oneself, you two know that one, right?"

Hehengue nodded. Corsilidor looked puzzled, did a data chirp, then nodded. "That's a terrifying one, but at least it's nameable and one can palpate it with reason", sez Corsilidor, digesting the data chirp.

Blavourag: "Because fundamental fears do weird things to life topologies, people confuse death with birth. It really relates a lot to how changeable the self is, or how changeable the self feels. If someone is so rigid and there aren't processes extant to flush a lot of tension in the stress muscularome away in a relatively ordered fashion to reduce the energy level, then there are going to be a lot of rather chaotic jumps down. A lot of phony intellectual systems get created and people lose track of things."

Corsilidor looked through the chirp again. "Palarqai's fourteenth fundamental fear is somewhat hilarious"

Blavourag nodded. "The fear of dying illogically -- yeah, some things are actually impossible, and unfortunately people's imaginations are not architected to work logically, and the more knowledge and creativity that's around, the more ornate these fears get. Corso, look at Pellemongis's eighteenth fundamental fear"

Corsilidor laughed. "The fear of brain material, or the fear that one is only brain material, or the fear of shriveling brains, or shriveled and hardened flesh, and also of folds of glutinous fluid condensing. I don't suppose they know how the development of the neural tube gets encoded in one's fear set  do they?"

Blavourag winced: "Actually we know exactly how that encoding process takes shape. Eiurhel Lyrismue did the work some five nahambes ago. The takeaway is that all of these fears are usually nameless because people don't think about them intensely, and that's not surprising, because people don't want to think of them. They grow, accrete, and higher order fears with more declarative reason get layered on top of them, with calls from the higher order fears to the lower order fears."

Hehengue asks "so what next?"

Blavourag replies: "We know much about the bioanatomy of religious gestalts, the model of the perfect human and the comparison of that model against other living people. Arumele produced very precise microanatomies of some religious gestalts. They're abysmal things, really. But spiritual systems are on the whole worse, because they don't really have a focal depth, and there are a lot of intellectually inconsistent and unverifiable propositions they make about arbitraries, which gives them an inauthentic feel to them. People get stuck philosophizing and it's like quicksand, not really a very effective approach. "

Hehengue interjects: "Mysticism without mystification?"

Blavourag nods vigorously: "Exactly: the notion that there's a type of information that would be useful to you but cannot be communicated in a declarative format. Mhunaro's old joke about the dudes with a classical and quantum computers works. Do you know it?"

Hehengue shrugs. Corsilidor again looks puzzled. Blavourag tells it:

"Aitaraung: Hey, Mjohotu, I hear you have some information for me. I've got some free storage space.
Mjohotu: I do. About two hundred gigaqubytes. Do you have the ability to recieve and store quantum data?
Aitaraung: No, all I have is about four terabytes of classical storage space.
Mjohotu: That will not be a problem. Though you're going to find the data a bit weird.
Aitaraung: I don't understand. What do you mean, a bit weird?
Mjohutu: Well, there *is* something I can do that will give you all two hundred gigaqubytes, but you're going to be overwhelmed by it.
Aitaraung: what do you mea.... oh holy phong shading. What did you do..."

Blavourag continues: "The real question here, is not how to eradicate fears and defix the self, those should be trivial to you now. The real question is in fact, how to produce an intellectually flexible and correct schema for mystical experience that addresses the religious and scientific fallacies precisely and unambiguously. Both of them are too viscous and rigidifying for anyone's own good.

Religions produce the /Everyone-All-Alike/ which slows evolution down and creates a template for the human conditon. This is terrifying, but it's illusory, so to speak. Science produces the notion of an epistemology that champions a very normative epistemological view about the world, taken to its limits it produces atheism. Both views have rather serious flaws. Seeing past those flaws requires not the suspension of disbelief or the suspension of belief, but very precise analysis of one's epistemological bulwarks. Spiritual systems suffer from incoherence. What else am I missing?"

Hehengue sez: "transquilateralization. You said we may not exist?"

Blavourag replies: "But it doesn't matter if we don't, because we're neither here nor there. And if you try to explain our, um, ontological position to the humans, you're going to get very confused looks by anyone. There are some consistent imaginaries which are complete and inaccessible to them because that's not the way their universe works. As elegant and effervescent as we are, because of the way that the humans relate to the world, we are forever in the kernel of ethereal nothingness to them, always mapped to zero because the sensory qualia our coruscations belie does not riff on their home context in a way which is extant to them: we do not consign this to the limitations of their data storage methods or memories or sensory qualia."

Hehengue sez: "Okay, let me get this crooked: whatever epistemological dance we're doing, and/or whatever ontological dance we're doing, it doesn't actually get mapped onto any explicit human categorization or ontological class. The moment we get the slightest bit of information to them, they don't know what to make of it, so they clad it in their fears, most of the time. And, if I'm not mistaken, we do occasionally have some successes."

Blavourag grins: "Exactly. If our signal is correctly interpreted they realize why we're broadcasting a hard Epimenides paradox, and the resolution of that paradox alliterates over them. How else do you transmit across the boundary of a one sided interimaginary(1), anyway? The hopes and fears are signals into the imaginary, and imagined things is the signal in return. If you transmit to things like you, you are going to get signals from things like you. If you transmit to things that are different than you, or that do not exist and perhaps explicitly know it, maybe you're going to get better data? Not all nonexistent things are that pleasant. "

Corsilidor looked at the green dendrous toroids circling the sun-dragon, five imaginaries orange of Ohio.