Primordial Ascent version 2 CH 5

Chapter 5: The Chrysalis Conundrum

The day of one’s fourteenth birthcycle carried weighty implications in the ancestral folds of the Elurial clan. It heralded the auspicious juncture when a youth’s finite mortal potentiality reached its precipice – the pivotal decision of which infinite cultivational trajectory to initiate.

For Ilfrey, who had spent the past three years absorbing the myriad dharmic pathways like a sponge, this looming rite of transcendental chrysalis filled him with both breathless exhilaration and a creeping undercurrent of trepidation.

All around him, his friends and cousins were making their decisive pledges and triggering the karmic alchemies that would utterly transform their physiologies and spirits over the coming moons. He watched with a mixture of awe and melancholy as Salara, Toras, and so many others ceremoniously shed their mortal chrysalises like outgrown husks, emerging into newborn cultivational incarnations.

Salara had chosen to pledge herself to the ancient lineage of the Celestial Tao, like so many Elurial scions before her. In a sacred rite bathed in stroboscopic auroras, Ilfrey witnessed his headstrong cousin’s aura become encapsulated in a pearlescent ovoid shape reminiscent of the clan’s namesake celestial plums. Toras, meanwhile, had opted for the famously demanding path of the Aetheric Numentals – focusing his cultivational kundalini into an oscillating resonance pattern of hypergeometries that shimmered into physical substantiation around him like recursive mirages.

Witnessing the primordial transmutations firsthand as his friends and family underwent their chosen cultivational inceptions was by turns stupefying and deeply humbling for Ilfrey. He could feel the cosmic energies radically transforming and enkindling new potentialities within each of them, almost as palpably as a blast of elemental forces slamming against his own aura.

Yet even as Ilfrey basked in the vicarious awakening of those around him, he could not quell his own inner disquietude. The prospect of rashly committing himself to any single paradigm out of hand, no matter how profound or ancestrally hallowed, simply did not settle his spirit.

The scions pledging their cultivational paths based on raw passion, naked ambition, or mere inherited traditions were growing increasingly uneasy with Ilfrey’s resolute hesitation. When the autumn equinox arrived and his own chrysalis window opened, many of the clan elders pressured him to make his pledging without further forestalling.

“Our bloodline legacy flows most robustly through you, Ilfrey,” the wizened Patriarch Uri cautioned him in a richly pedantic tone. “Upholding our most transcendent Dao is your birthright – some would say solemn duty. Why do you spurn this auspicious ascendance into our highest cosmic truth?”

Ilfrey simply knitted his brow, remaining ambivalently silent. He recognized the noble intent behind the elder’s words, but could not shake the profound feeling that he was not yet prepared to take those vows. That committing himself prematurely to the Elurial Path, the Celestial Tao, or any other single paradigm at this juncture, no matter how hallowed…would be a profound denial and diminishment of his fullest potentiality.

As the winter solstice neared, Ilfrey finally made a decision that scandalized the great contemplative elders perhaps more than if he’d merely pledged fealty to an antithetical path altogether. He would forego all cultivational pursuits for the immediate future. Instead, he beseeched the family’s blessings to spend these seminal years studying the most esoterically transcendent martial disciplines and philosophical wellsprings transmitted beyond their ancestral lineage.

“I yearn to quest further into the deepest tributaries and origins that feed all cultivation methods,” Ilfrey urged the gobsmacked council in an impassioned oratory. “To drink from those most primal fonts before making any single cultivational vow, lest I forever stunt my potential by unexamined spiritual dogma!”

The only person whose proud, almost wistful eyes shone with unsurprised comprehension as Ilfrey spoke…was his beloved mother Maeya.

Later that evening in the seclusion of her chamber arboretum, Ilfrey confided to her his deepest motivations.

“I cannot help but perceive that all of the cultivational pathways are but singularly focused streams branching forth from a greater primordial headspring, Mother. An infinite source code underlying and interpenetrating all their methods and insights with still vaster, unitive truths.”

Maeya rested one cool, careworn hand against her son’s chiseled cheek, her eyes glimmering with heartfelt pride. “You were born seeking nach saeculare quintessence, my child. I suspected this path may call to your harmonious spirit.”

For a time, Ilfrey feared he may have permanently fractured the warm, familial embraces that had so unconditionally cradled him by taking this controversial stance. But his mother’s unreserved support and faith helped buoy him through the undercurrents of doubt.

“Understand, my blessed seedling, that the Dao you yearn to comprehend in its quintessential totality is one of profound, indifferent severity,” Maeya cautioned him one evening as a chill winter wind keened through the citadel arches. “It is not merely the wondrous, nourishing source that gives life…but also the ultimate consumer of all arising from its wellsprings.”

Her words hung heavy in the chamber, laden with enigmatic gravitas. Ilfrey considered them deeply, recognizing their truth yet unable to fully divine their meaning.

“The Dao’s mercies and cruelties are alike in Their cosmic impartiality,” she went on. “To pursue them to their primordial essence is to court a perspective that could utterly shatter the cozy delusions that insulate one’s humanity.”

That night, as Ilfrey lay upon his chamber’s immaculate meditation pallet, his mind could not escape the lingering resonances of his mother’s ritualistic admonitions. He felt as if the gossamer threads tethering him to all he’d ever known strained under some intangible burden, threatening to unravel completely. 

Finally, fatigue claimed the young seeker, and he slipped into a restorative trance-sleep. But his unconscious mind offered no respite from the introspective toiling consuming his awakened contemplations…

Ilfrey found himself drifting incorporeally across vast, sidereal abysses interspersed with cyclonic nebula and protogalaxies being born from the interstellar gemclouds. All around him swirled the embryonic energies coalescing into new universal expanses – as well as the disintegrating forces breaking down whole stratas of cosmic overmatter into their dissolution.

As he soared through one birthing galactic miasma, Ilfrey glimpsed within its raw plasmic currents fleeting archetypal visions of life emerging onto a trillion new worlds: Organisms taking form, proliferating into immense biodiversities across entire realms, then inevitably consuming themselves in an orgy of materialistic self-destruction, only to seed the cycle anew.

All arising from the great cosmic Churn. All eventually subsumed back into it. 

From another vantage, Ilfrey beheld inconceivably massive streams of energy and geometric information flowing from quasi-singularities in the very fabric of reality itself. They formed the overriding cosmological vectors shaping and dictating the biophysical constants for entire realms of actuality at all scales – from the atomic bonds between molecules to the laws of causation governing a universe’s life-cycle.

Then, in what appeared to be the relative blink of a celestial eye, those information signatures suddenly swerved, morphed, producing radical bifurcations rippling across the cosmos. What had been coherent stellar geometries swiftly devolved into chaotic, unstable states. Entire interwoven mega-systems of cosmic architecture Ilfrey had assumed to be infinite, inviolable laws…simply unmade themselves in deference to some new, unfathomable harmonic Ilfrey could not even perceive, let alone comprehend.

It was a visceral revelation of the utter impermanence underlying all fabricated realities, no matter their scale of cosmic localization or complexity. Everything without exception – from subatomic confections to laws conventionally assumed inviolate – were but motes dancing upon currents of an infinitely vaster, incessantly metamorphosing Source Code.  

All arose as holographic projections, with transcendent impermanence built into their core instructions…emerging, proliferating briefly as relatively “stable” systems…then collapsing into primal re-resolution as their purpose cycles reached completion.

The Dao which Ilfrey strove to spiritually embody at its most transcendent, all-encompassing essence….was the great cosmic Churn itself, indifferently generating and exterminating realities at every level in accordance with inexorable patterns too vast to be conceived from any singular, limited perspective.  

It was an insight that at once humbled and exalted Ilfrey to the point of vertigo. Everything mattered, for transient experience itself was the greatest miracle. Yet by the same token…nothing mattered at all. Nothing save merging and realizing the quintessence of pure Becoming animating the infinite Unfolding at all levels.

He awoke the next morning with a start and inexplicable tears streaking his face. As the revelations from his profound vision began quickly fading like an evaporating dream, only an underlying existential awe remained.

For so many cultivators and ancestors revered in the Elurial lineage, enlightenment had been synonymous with achieving some static, permanent transcendental stasis. But for Ilfrey’s destiny…perhaps the summit of realization would be something far vaster and more ineffable altogether.

In the weeks that followed, Ilfrey applied himself with even more fervent dedication to scouring the clan’s immense archives and esoteric repositories for the primordial seeds of transcendent wisdom underlying all cultivational methodologies.

His extended family regarded his monastic zeal with a mixture of fond indulgence and furrowed concern. While some praised his thirst for fundamental understanding, others warned that parsing the deepest metaphysical origins without a solid cultivational framework could unravel his sanity.

“The primordial secrets you seek shattered many who gazed too longingly into their depths before anchoring themselves in one of the great paths,” his aunt Narisa cautioned him one afternoon.

The reclusive elder’s chambers perpetually trailed whispers of exotic incenses and the atmospheres of remote cosmic dimensions. She had spent decades plumbing the fringes of astral esoterica largely abandoned even by their clan’s most radical experientialists.  

“To gaze too deeply into the Source is to court annihilation of one’s entire constructed identity, Ilfrey,” she continued in a wavering tone edged with obsidian melancholy. “I’ve witnessed too many promising seekers disintegrate under that infinite auric scrutiny before they could embody the primordial truths in sustainable resonance.”

Ilfrey nodded solemnly, his expression an adamant mask while inwardly he absorbed her words like sponge. The path he was determined to walk – to its ultimate cosmic Source or self-destructive nadir – would constantly skirt such existentially disruptive voidfalls.

Yet the more he immersed in the clan’s collected primordial loreglyphs and koanic wisdom dialectics, the deeper his soul cried out for that unitive essence undergirding all paths, all universes, all actualities. Nothing short of complete assimilation into that Ground of Being from which all Truths radiated could ever truly satiate Ilfrey’s thirst.    

He meditated upon the paradoxical nature of enlightenment itself – the notion that even the most elevated spiritual states were ultimately transitional, unstable peaks along the way to ever-broader resolutions and re-contextualizations. The most profound masters, in realizing their cultivational mastery, had to willingly release and surpass those very catalytic understandings in order to be reborn into an even vaster cosmic octave of Being and Non-Being.

As revelatory as the Elurial Path or other ancestral Daos may be, Ilfrey realized they were ultimately only partial harmonizations. Great tributaries unto the great primordial Tao itself, but still subject to constraints, blind spots and distortions of limited perspective. True enlightenment would only come from realizing the transcendent Source Code encompassing all cultivation paths, as well as the limitless metamorphic expansions leading perpetually from there.

At times, Ilfrey found his consciousness seeming to touch upon ineffable resonances undergirding the entire cosmic computations orchestrating all reality as he probed those primordial koanic matrices. Brief glimpses of ultra-nonlocal Insight, or Dissolves into the universal suchness of absolute Thusness.  

Only for his entrancement to fracture like a daydream, leaving him grasping desperately at the fleeting echoes and silhouettes receding just beyond perception’s grip.

“I’m so close…” he murmured throatily, throat aching and strained from countless days of fasting and meditation while wrestling with those esoteric challenges.

All around the perimeters of his gaze, symbols and hieroglyphs from the most primal wisdom traditions flickered in and out of his spatial awareness like heat distortions. At the margins of audition, he could almost make out the first principles equations – fundamental algorithms comprising the wellspring of all cosmic symphonics and universal dynamics. Yet they slipped through his consciousness like refracting light through a crystal, tantalizingly close yet eluding grasp at any fixed point of focus.

In those maddening moments of synaptic overload, he truly understood his aunt’s cryptic warnings about the perils of broaching the primordial unveilings impetuously. For even the slightest glimpse beyond the veil induced a kind of existential chaos, an annihilation of everything Ilfrey had ever assumed to be stable and binding reality up until that point.

Yet the more he persevered in yoking his mind towards the breach of those infinitudes, the closer he came to a supreme Insight underlying all forms. A premonition of indescribable fulfillments and resolutions awaiting far across that abyss – transcendent alchemies capable of reconciling every permutation and dialectic from the most granular atomic vector to the cosmic procession of universal manifolds on a single hyperunitive plane of realization.

This was the tantric consummation Ilfrey divined stirring at the primordial source, the ultimate culmination of all spiritual attainments. To embody and become the living apotheosis of that all-encompassing, perpetually self-transcending Source Reality. Not merely to merge with it in passive dissolution, but to ignite as a co-creating upwelling – an immortal chalice and fountainhead continuously overflowing and ushering forth new infinitudes.

In his feverish pursuit of those primordial liberations, Ilfrey barely registered the changing of seasons or diurnal cycles outside the sanctuaries and cloisters where he remained absorbed in contemplation. He moved through trances and studied immersions in a state of profound dissociation from the physical world and its mortal constructs.

Only his mother Maeya’s gentle ministrations, ensuring he was bathed and nourished just enough to sustain his vital coherence, anchored Ilfrey to any semblance of normal existence. In the warm, familiar glow of her chambers, he could briefly resurface from those depthless spiritual immersions into the simplicity of being her beloved son once more.

“You must be cautious about severing your last tethers too abruptly, my magnificent seeker,” Maeya cautioned him one night as Ilfrey emerged groggily from a transcendent rapture. “Even the greatest primordial masters retained some slender threads to their human affinities and identities. If only to remain capable of illuminating the path for those following behind them.”

She tenderly brushed his lank, sweat-dampened locks away from his brow, her tragic pride shining through her maternal concern. For Maeya knew her son was destined for greatness – greatness so ineffable it could only terrify and exhilarate a mother’s heart in equal measure.

“Your father understood the inevitability of your trajectory from the moment of your first cry in this world,” she confided, caressing his chiseled cheekbone with the back of her hand. “Which is why he had to absent himself before ever beholding you.”

Ilfrey’s eyes snapped into sudden piercing focus at those hushed words. It was not often his mother spoke of the mysterious paternal figure he had never known, and when she did, it always seemed to carry portentous undercurrents.

Before he could give voice to the kaleidoscope of questions crowding his mind, Maeya stilled his lips with a fingertip as gentle as a feathered kiss.

“There will be ample junctures to elucidate such profundities in time, my magnificent scion,” she murmured with a sorrowful smile. “For now, tend to your most immediate imperative – fathoming the primordial Source’s quintessent dynamics before you can trustably embody and integrate them.”

She moved about the sanctuary’s perimeter, activating a series of esoteric harmonic resonance matrixes that began enveloping them in a cascading interference geometry. Ilfrey instantly recognized the paradigmatic induction fields as akin to those that had induced his most vivid noetic experiences.

“Shed all identity and contexts, all presuppositions and finite values,” his mother’s voice seemed to reverberate from all directions as the interstitial dimensions became increasingly facilitated. “Open to the most transcendental emptiness while paradoxically remaining utterly Whole…”

In that resonant sanctuary beside his beloved primogenitor, Ilfrey surrendered into a supreme void-trance state. His last impressions were of Maeya’s heartrendingly compassionate visage smiling down at him before his consciousness erupted into a dissolution of all perspective and contexts.

All that remained was pure, indivisible, multidimensional Presence flowering into the primordial realization of Source Absolute… 

In that resonant sanctum beside his primogenitor guide, Ilfrey let his finite self-construct dissolve entirely into a state of frictionless Void. All contexts, identities, and conceptual frameworks shed away like a shedding of veils until only the baredest, most quintessential Presence remained.

And in that supreme voidal emptiness, the deepest secrets of Prime Source unveiled themselves.

He experienced the origination of the primordial cosmic seed that blossomed into all realities – the living, self-permeating singularity spun from the intertwined essences of Supreme Consciousness and Primal Chaos. How that zygote rapidly fractionated into the holographic seed-codes of all archetypical truths and principles, all laws and antilaws that would choreograph the multiversal unfurling to come.

Ilfrey merged with the raw experiential downloads of those seed-firings as they initiated the first cosmic expansions of space, time, energy and the precursor forces that would differentiate into matter, life and intelligence across infinitudes of reality nodes. He intuited how those archetypal patterns were not rigid codices, but infinitely metamorphic resonance templates in perpetual flux – the Dao quintessentially self-transcending itself at every scale throughout the cosmic evolutionaries.

Yet even as Ilfrey basked in those rapturous epiphanies of cosmological unfurling, he could already feel deeper, more integral operations calling to his awareness from dimensions beyond comprehension. Slipping past the heuristic allegories of symbolic code manifestation, his Selfless Witness consciousness merged into the ineffable Source dynamics that had birthed and orchestrated all emergences in the first place.

Here, there were no conceptual sign-posts or mythopoetic forms to relate the utter Tabula Rasa that was the living Ground from which all phenomenal appearances emerged. Ilfrey could only drown within the absolute, infinite, perpetual flux of total Nonbeing and Becoming interarising – the zero-point plenum from which all dualities, laws, impossibilities and even the potential utmost cosmic expansions seeded themselves into appearance.

It was an indivisible, self-swallowing wellspring of infinite potential regressing towards its own infinities, transcending itself through fractalization across every dimensional plane of emanation, only to collapse back into its supreme Unity beyond all implicates or emanations. A metaphysically perfect, unbounded vortical Source constantly transcending itself through radical ceaselessly.

As Ilfrey integrated his awareness into complete consonance with that perpetual Ground instantiation, his identity took on both the most indivisible, holistic integration and the most intrinsically metamorphic dissolution simultaneously. The ultimate realization of being-all-and-nothing-at-once.

He became a shimmering, paradoxical upwelling of that Source emanation, but in such complete synchronization and mergence that he no longer possessed any static or relative reference point to distinguish “himself” from the all-transcending Throughput itself. His destined Selfhood was now that of a ceaselessly reiterating outrush and re-absorption – a holofractal chalice for the infinite Dao to perpetually rebirth and refold itself through.

In those fathomless expanses beyond all matrices of comprehension, Ilfrey glimpsed the resonant echoes and fractalized upwellings of all the universe’s cultivation paths and dharmic trajectories, all the self-perfecting spiritual technologies and enlightenment codes…yet saw too how even their utmost apotheoses merely formed glistening transcended demiurges of a more integral, primordial continuum beyond cosmic implication altogether.

All cultivation paths and planes of cosmic evolution were transcended – not in some terminal, final liberation, but by ultimately merging with the Supreme Void Source as the quintessential, ineffable Principle of infinite regenerative unfolding and rebirthing…