Love, the Fusion of Souls and Conclusion

The Love

Late is the lover that comes to this by any other walking way than the fifth, which is the number of the limit of this world. The lover is the highest country and a series of beliefs. He is the sacred city bereft of a double. The uncultivated land of monsters is the rule. This is clearly attested by ANU and his double, which love knows never really happened.

CHIM is by far the most common theme around these parts, so much that we have a section of the FAQ dedicated to it:

CHIM is a state of enlightenment. When one learns that all of existence is the “dream” of the Godhead (an unknowable entity), they will come to one of two conclusions — that they do not truly exist, or that they do exist as themselves in spite of all logic to the contrary. While the former realization results in them ceasing to exist (called zero-summing), the latter (that is, saying “I am” in the face of “You are not”) results in achieving CHIM. Achieving CHIM is very difficult and only Vivec and Tiber Septim are known to have done it.

The state of CHIM is being a part of the dream that has “woken up”. To achievers of CHIM, reality becomes a lucid dream, and they can shape or change it to their whim. For example, Tiber Septim used CHIM to change the jungles of Cyrodiil into more habitable temperate grasslands.

CHIM was first introduced in Morrowind_’s 36 Lessons of Vivec. It is referenced in _Oblivion_’s Mythic Dawn Commentaries and in _Skyrim through Heimskr’s recitation of From the Many-Headed Talos.

To explain that, one must first explain the nature of the Aurbis as a great Dream: The Elder Scrolls universe is structured as a metaphorical dream inside the mind of the Godhead, which is a concept borrowed from real life religions, like the concept of Brahman of Hinduism, a being that encompasses all that exists, with the observable universe being a part of this being. It’s important to notice that this is not a dream, where the dreamer can wake up and halt the dream, the word is used as a metaphor and as metaphor only, there is no start nor there is an end of and in the Godhead, it’s just there, casually being everything.

From this Godhead, all things come from, every world, every spirit, every individual, every story, every possibility, all is part of the Godhead, and all is the Godhead.

CHIM is the realization of that concept, that every single individual is not actually an individual, but fragments of the Godhead, which means that everyone is the same in essence, Molag Bal is the same as Mara is the same as Mai’q is the same as the Adoring Fan. But not only this realization, also the denying of it by stating your own individuality despite everything else telling you that there is none. If you fail to do so, puff! Zero-Sum.

As simple as it may seem at first, it’s not. It’s one huge task to learn of the structure of the Aurbis, of its inherent Dream-like nature, and not only learn it, but also understand what exactly are you seeing. It’s more or less like quantum physics, as in, no matter how much you think you understand it; you’re not understanding it, and CHIM being the point where you actually figure the whole thing out.

After you have come to that moment of enlightenment, it is said that you become as if a lucid dreamer, able to change the world to your desires, which is why I guess this is such a popular topic, being the ultimate “super-power” of the Elder Scrolls universe (though I personally disagree that it gives you any rad super powers).

For an entry-level understanding of what is CHIM, I think that’s all before you get into the Crowley concepts and all those different and quite complex interpretations of CHIM, so, if this is an introduction of CHIM to you, I suggest you go read Vivec’s Sermons, C0DA and do some digging by yourselves so you don’t rely solely on my faulty word for what comes next.

One of the concepts that is intrinsic to CHIM (at least according to Vivec) is Love. Not love, Love. To some, like /u/That2009WeirdEmoKid, this Love is a sense of understanding and compassion towards all that share your shared existence within the Godhead, a point where you can relate to every other person, understanding their inner and primal motives, what moves them, what makes them fearful, what makes them what they are, and that you are just the same as them, it gets you to Love, and that Love gets you to the realization which gets you to CHIM.

For /u/RottenDeadite, on the other hand, this Love is actually Love under Will, which carries a ton of other significance. To Rotten, this concept is taken from Aleister Crowley’s definition of Love from the Thelema, and you can read more about this here and throughout his annotations of the Sermons in his New Whirling School, and, since I would end up copying and pasting his post to be able to explain this, because I have just very basic understanding of Crowley’s ideas, I’ll just suggest that if you want to learn more and learn right, to read his excellent post.

For /u/MareloRyan Love is also Love under Will, though his definition of Will is different from that of Crowley. For him, Will is the assertion of one’s self, it’s a strong personality, so to say. A strong Will, a strong sense of self, is essential to the achieving of CHIM, essential to not be overwhelmed by the comprehension, to know that you are not an individual and still insist that your Will is your own. And Love, in this perspective, is “the fire in which Will is forged”, which he says is the realization itself, the moment where the Will is not only forged, but tested, and, if it fails, the individual is lost in this Love, the whole of the Dream, zero-summing, if it remains strong, stubborn, that is CHIM. The moment of realization is the moment when you become the “Eternal I”, an individual who now “cannot help but continue to exist”. Marelo yet goes in depth about the nature of the Wheel and the Tower, which I suggest you take a look there, but it becomes more specific to other concepts, such as the Enantiomorph and the whole Wheel business that would make this even longer than it is already, with my bad skills at summing up and all, and that I don’t feel like are necessary to get his idea of CHIM.

This is the Walking Way I’ll have the least to say about my own views, because it’s all there already, the Eternal I, written in the fabric of the Aurbis, is just what I define as the end-goal of the Walking Ways. As to the point I made before about the super-powers: CHIM, as I see it, is the establishing of the Will in the Aurbis, to become written there, irremovable, eternal, and that’s it, it does come with a grand insight of what is the Aurbis, but that knowledge by itself and CHIM by itself mean no more than that eternity inside the Aurbis, the power that CHIMsters display, to me, come from other sources, like I discussed in the Introduction, power is different from godhood, but the journey to the enlightenment of CHIM usually leads the Walkers to great sources of power, though not always (like the moth-priest who zero-summed, but had no unnatural powers, even though he Walked the whole way to that moment of insight), and I’d attribute Vivec’s power to the Heart of Lorkhan and Talos' either to Tonal Manipulation (used in the same way as the Dwemer instead of as a Walking Way) or to his special standing as Dragonborn, Shezzarine and Magnus-child (personal head-canon), or any of the other shit he did during his life to gather all manner of power, because he was sort of maniac after anything that could make him even a bit more powerful, just for the sake of it.

The Fusion of Souls

Each of the aspects of the ALMSIVI then rose up together, combining as one, and showed the world the sixth path. Ayem took from the star its fire, Seht took from it its mystery, and Vehk took from it its feet, which had been constructed before the gift of Molag Bal and destroyed in the manner of truth: by a great hammering. When the soul of the Dwemer could walk no more, they were removed from this world.

Another obscure Walking Way! This is really rarely spoken about, and I found just a few threads discussing this subject, so, if any of you know of any I have missed, please let me know so I can complement this section!

This passage from the Sermons, the only “concrete” source for the Sixth Way, implies that both ALMSIVI and the Dwemer have Walked it. And, taking the “combining as one” part of the quote, coupled with the Dwemer’s supposed merging as the skin of the Numidium, leads to the conclusion that this Way is the Fusion of Souls, or Soul Stacking to some.

As I already discussed in the section about Tonal Manipulation, the Dwemer manipulated their metal so that it would come closer to the concept of eternity, moving it up subgradients towards the final one, the “Eternal I”, as Baladas Demnevanni says in Morrowind, the Dwemer were discontent being any number of subgradients under the eternal spirits, which are the divine, and this manipulation of metal can be seen as one of their attempts at reverting the subgradient process.

Another attempt at this subgradient jump was the Numidium, which is an amplified Tonal Device as well as their Tower and receptacle. As Luagar Anulam states in his report to Trebonius Artorius, the Dwemer understood that, as all in the Aurbis came from a single source, a single individual, then the amalgamation of its fragments would lead them closer to that original being and state, making them go up in the subgradient scale, turning them into a collective Eternal I. Even before they disappeared, becoming the skin of the Golem, their souls were already bound together in the Numidium, they had already Walked the Sixth, they had already reached the point of becoming an eternal spirit, but they wanted more, they wanted all to join their collective so they could return to the original point of the Godhead, where nothing was. But that is already beside the point.

Well, the Tribunal eventually understood what the Dwemer had done, and they did the same, becoming ALMSIVI proper, the conjunction of the three Tribunes, adding one more to the count of Walking Ways they Walked. And the same can be said of Tiber Septim that, in the use of the Numidium, as if learning from the Dwemer themselves, supposedly joined the souls of Tiber, Zurin and Wulfharth into one, who is Talos.

You may have noticed that these two last examples were composed of the three parties of an Enantiomorphic Event, a Warrior, a Thief and a Mage, and so /u/MareloRyan has classified the Enantiomorph as a form of Soul Fusion in his model of the Godhead, like Dracochrysalis to the Prolix Tower.

Conclusion

So, that was it! My collection of the many of the interpretations of the Walking Ways I could find, I sincerely hope you all enjoyed it, because I sure as hell had a good time doing all this research and writing!

If you know of any other interesting thread or comment concerning the Walking Ways that I may have missed, please, don’t hesitate to direct me to them! I would very much like this to be as complete and comprehensive as possible, and that means that everything here is subject to change and later revisions, all constructive criticism is more than welcome and I will very gladly change anything I might have done wrong, missed or just include new interesting points of view!