" The Logos. The Logos. The Logos . . . He was a hollow filled by echoes bereft of any authoring voice, each phrase a flawless reiteration of the preceding. He was a wayfarer through the abyssal gallery of mirror set against mirror, his every step as illusory as the last. Only sun and night marked his passage, and only then by narrowing the gap between mirrors to the impossible place where vanishing point threatened to kiss vanishing point—to the place where the soul fell utterly still. When the sun reared yet again, his thoughts receded to a single word: The. The. The. The . . . And it seemed at once an absurd stutter and the most profound of thoughts, as though only in the absence of “Logos” could it settle into the rhythm of his heart muscling through moment after moment. Thought thinned and daylight swept through, over, and behind the shrine, until night pierced the shroud of the sky, until the heavens revolved like an infinite chariot wheel. The. The . . . A moving soul chained to the brink, to the exquisite moment before something, anything. The tree, the heart, the everything transformed into nothing by repetition, by the endless accumulation of the same refusal to name. A corona of gold across the high slopes of the glacier. . . . and then nothing. No thought.

No thought. The boy extinguished. Only a place. This place. Motionless, the Pragma sat facing him, the bare soles of his feet flat against each other, his dark frock scored by the shadows of deep folds, his eyes as empty as the child they watched. A place without breath or sound. A place of sight alone. A place without before or after . . . almost. For the first lances of sunlight careered over the glacier, as ponderous as great tree limbs in the wind. Shadows hardened and light gleamed across the Pragma’s ancient skull. The old man’s left hand forsook his right sleeve, bearing a watery knife. And like a rope in water, his arm pitched outward, fingertips trailing across the blade as the knife swung languidly into the air, the sun skating and the dark shrine plunging across its mirror back . . . And the place where Kellhus had once existed extended an open hand—the blond hairs like luminous filaments against tanned skin—and grasped the knife from stunned space. The slap of pommel against palm triggered the collapse of place into little boy. The pale stench of his body. Breath, sound, and lurching thoughts. I have been legion . . . In his periphery, he could see the spike of the sun ease from the mountain. He felt drunk with exhaustion. In the recoil of his trance, it seemed all he could hear were the twigs arching and bobbing in the wind, pulled by leaves like a million sails no bigger than his hand. Cause everywhere, but amid countless minute happenings—diffuse, useless. Now I understand." -The Darkness The Comes Before, Chapter 17

Quote from: Kalbear

Another thought, based on the pragma idea above:

The probability trance that Kellhus goes into for the first time makes him lose his sense of self and become nothing and everything. For the Dunyain they believe this allows them to catalog all causes and see likely effects. They can see everything that comes before and see how to manipulate that.

But let's turn that on its head. Start with the assumption that everything has already happened. If everything has happened, there is no cause or effect any more than what happened on page 110 changes what happens on page 341. In that case, Kellhus and the other Dunyain aren't tapping into probability - they're tapping into the same thing that guides the White-Luck Warrior. They can see what is going to happen and already has happened, and they can see it from the same point of view that the Judging Eye does - the Place, the Zero-God. When they become disassociated and blind (they use the phrase " A corona of gold across the high slopes of the glacier. . . . and then nothing. No thought. " they are able to see everything clearly.

They just have an incredibly wrong idea of why.

Excellent point.  That would somewhat explain why I had the feeling that the Voice was telling Kellhus things from the future and why I thought that The Thousandfold Thought itself was cast backward in time, the explanation of why was in the future, not in the past.  In reality it doesn't have to be Kellhus from the future, but rather, Kellhus dissociated from time, atemporal, or some such, in the Outside.  In other words, perhaps Kellhus himself already at the Zero-point?  Or Koringhus?  Or Kellhus as the Solitary God?

It can also answer how and why odd things like Kellhus being saved by Leweth, arriving at the mound of Cnaiur's father, and other seemingly improbable things that seem to keep happening to him.  White-Luck beyond even the White-Luck.

I like this a lot.  There are a couple of places in TGO that suggest time doesn't exist in the Outside the way it does in the World. 

In the World, at any given moment (an infinitely small slice of continuous time), one's viewpoint is limited to a single snapshot of three-dimensional space.

As an analogy, imagine a single frame of a video clip -- it's a 2D snapshot of a series of snapshots in time.  Similarly, the World consists of 3D snapshots in time.  These snapshots are "played back" at a continuous rate, and hence, we perceive time.

In the Outside, by contrast, there's no concept of "playback".  All moments/snapshots are perceivable simultaneously.  Thus, time isn't really a thing.

The questions I have are:

1. Does this mean that viewing the World from the Outside would allow one to glimpse any given moment? 

2. Does this mean that from the Outside, one can affect the World at any given moment?

When they grimaced, their blank and beautiful faces were clenched like crumpled silk, becoming the expressions of ancient and inbred men.

I decided Death Grips - Hot Head was The Consult's theme song (specifically, the line "I just told 'em hell's existence")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQm8qpexnjo

Since TDTCB Kellhus's theme to me has been Fever Ray - If I had A Heart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBAzlNJonO8