The analogy of the cave has served as the fundamental figure of liberation for all of western history: I tear myself from the illusions and reflected light inside the cave and travel upward to the true world illuminated by the sun itself: God.
Today the human race requires a new analogy. Rather than trapped in a cave, I stand on the peak of an arctic mountain staring at the Hyperborean sun itself as it circles around the sky, a perfect circle of eternal recurrence, never setting, never rising. There is no night, only a blistering day that never ends. The fire above me and the ice below me are meaningless, unbearable, unchanging in their pure contingency which is indistinguishable from complete determination.
Here the illusion is not reflection but the truth of matter itself, the very sky, the very forces that seems to drive and constitute my entirety without remainder.
Where can one go from here ? How can I transcend this peak that was so enticing, so mysterious from afar, but which, now that I have arrived, scathes and freezes me with its radiating ice?
All I can do is die - die to the sun, to the snow - lie down and die, and in this way to kill the sun. I die and discover that the sun needs me more than I need it. I am more than the sun, I can think and act without it, I can reconstitute myself on a plane altogether orthogonal to that of nature itself as I understand it. This is the passage from the Hyperborean to the Transcendental: the transcendence not of a false reflection but the very light source that fed all the reflections I have transcended so far