Moe could have easily suspected the Mandate would get involved as soon as word spread that an Anasurimbor has shown up.  Hell, that's the first lead on anything the Mandate has had in 300 years.

Although, I'm not sure when word would have reached Atyersus had Akka not mentioned it.  Meh.

I'd put Quya above Serwa and Saccarees.  Regardless of the metagnosis, Quya have been singing for centuries, and we've seen the toll metagnosis takes on Serwa, and Cet'ingira sang for days taking down the Barricades. 

I think the true power of the metagnosis is in the sheer variety of potential cants made possible by a second inutteral.

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A man watches a river and a desert talking. He swears off the drugs!

Lol, it is a old sufi story, so drugs may be involved yes.

I think that story touches the heart of how I feel about any afterlife sort of explanation, where something of the self survives.  This idea that the self is a singular, indivisible unit and that 'you' might ascend to some other plane looks like fuckin' insanity if you see this image of unity as one of the many illusions the brain foists upon itself.  If you're angry one moment and calm a day later, is one of those selves any more accurate a representation of you than the other?  If the calm you is more accurate, where did that anger go, and why did it seem like 'you' in the moment?  I don't see 'me' as anything other than a composite.

So...which part ascends?  And how is it still 'me', if it sloughs off all those other, observably neurological bits?  Hell, memory seems pretty solidly physical from our explorations, and we all know how the nonmen turn out when they forget...

Even if there's some vaguely-defined electromagnetic field ejected from my meatship upon death and occasionally reinserted in some newborn meatship, that is surely so alien to what I consider my 'self' as to need a new word entirely to describe it.  It's certainly not the me I'm familiar with.

EDIT: also reminds me of the idea that the same man can't wade through the same river twice, as it's a different man and different river.  Is that zen?  Buddhist?  Native american?  Does this darkness come before matter, if truth shines?

The issue, as I've always seen it, is that our notions of waves and particles are simply the best approximations to what things like photons and electrons are actually like.  For instance when we talk about an electron orbit, we're actually talking about the shape of the probability distribution of that electron - which is not to say that the electron is somewhere in the cloud, but that the cloud is the electron, until it is interacted with by something else.  I mean, we just don't have anything on the macroscopic scale that behaves anything like things on the quantum scale.  Shit's crazy.

The flatland analogy fits with string theory, where you could imagine an ant crawling on the surface of a hose, thinking it's a flat two dimensional surface, but looked at from a different enough scale that hose looks more like a one dimensional object (strings in the theory would be coiled around the hose in varying arrangements which define different particles, and from a distance we see only the particle, not the arrangement).

Of course, I would suggest you take anything from the What The Bleep/Law of Attraction people with a grain of salt - they always slip something subversive in their otherwise accurate descriptions of models.

Man, had to dig deep to find this wildly-off-track thread. 

I've been wondering about the possibility of the WLW, at some point in the future, taking Sorweel's place, the way he took the assassin's place.  It's said that Yatwer is "positioning" him. I could see this as literally creating a position which the WLW could fill. 

My first minor hold up here is whether or not Sorweel will ever even see Kell again.  My theory there is that after they take Dagliash, the Niom will be fulfilled and the three will ride with the nonmen to the Ordeal.  I don't know if there's anything that necessarily precludes this.  Except for whatever crazy shit is actually going on in Ishterebinth.

My main hold up here is that Kellhus knows what Sorweel looks like, and knew this before Porsparian blessed Sorweel.  So there's no fooling him there.

He does not know what the WLW looks like, nor do we know what his and Yatwer's powers are in regards to shaping his face or creating an illusion (point against: he certainly made no effort to look like the assassin, even though his hair was radically different from those kinds of assassins and could have alerted Esmenet).  Not that Kellhus is the type to 'let down his guard', but if he were, it might be while meeting with or individually greeting the Believer Kings, perhaps after a long and arduous battle.

Am I missing anything that makes this impossible or unlikely?  Honestly I can barely even get behind the idea of someone killing Kell, surprise sword-breaking or not, but the WLW is 1 for 1 on the amazingly smooth killing of a half Dunyain at least.

Serious: I think it's going to have some profound effects on their minds and souls.  Nightmares of the No-God, uncontrollable emotional states, psychosis.

Silly: Mass priapisms and diarrhea with eyes in it.

Interesting to think of how, just as armies are considered merely the meatshields used to ferry the actually useful sorcerers, that the whole Ordeal is a meat/metaphysical (which I now dub metameatshield) vehicle to do no more than propel Kellhus to Golgotterath.

But then, why?  If he was at all interested in allying with the Consult (or simply did not care what they do one way or another so long as he gets his) he surely wouldn't need to slaughter a quarter million people and allow his empire to collapse. 

Nerdanel: Kellhus wants to use the tekne and the metagnosis to create a ship capable of entering the Outside and doing a little redecorating. 

Anyway, I'm of the mind that he truly intends to destroy the evil that is the Consult, though I am on the fence about whether this makes him insane or is a totally reasonable perspective, given the crazy magical nature of the world.  If any Dunyain survive, they probably side with the consult, as Kellhus predicted any regular ol' Dunyain would do in his conversation with Moe (unless he slaughtered them because of it).  And then he dies as the savior of the world, stepping into the Outside with the full, hand-glowy might of such a position.  If that happens it seems like others have said, that it will parallel the FA, Akka kneeling with Kell's head in his lap, etc etc.

Then he vomits up a flaming sword and puts gods to death.  Next step: The God.