The Discworld
A Meta-story on the origins of Terry Pratchett's turtle and the spiritual meditations it arose from in his life as an atheist. One of my favorite series as a child
The turtle is the animal with the power of empathy. Such animal powers proceed into the red domain, and its absence leads to their lack of direct manifestation. The larger the turtle, the larger the scale of their empathetic powers - going up into monster size in the ancient past to be a center of nature in the area. Turtles can go up still further into space and cosmic size to form emotional regulators of the entire cosmos.
An EP released today.
This design which was interrupted by original sin to be sent off course is seen in earth culture through the legends of turtles who hold worlds on their backs. Atheists mocked the idea: one believer was asked what the turtle stood on, and the answer was another turtle, prompting the assessment of “turtles all the way down”. A famous exchange.
One atheist however did not take the idea so lightly and made an entire long-running series out of the myth. The Discworld involves a flat world on the back of a turtle populated by many fantasy creatures who live a satiric existence. Their lives are vividly detailed and storied, clearly distinguished from one another and proceeding throughout the history of the series. The Thirteenth book concerns a god in the body of a tortoise struggling against the absence of true faith.
Through original sin God's construction into the world, into space and finally the cosmos was disrupted. The Cosmos being where being and reality blends with non-being and non-reality such as from those Cosmic Beings God enlisted to be Gods over his design. The turtle is one of those creatures which in the cosmos merges into the Trickster's domain, attaching emotion to stories.
Man being stewards of creation, one of their duties was to be custodians of animal spirits as they progress out into the cosmos, as they do by things like shedding “shells” of prior animal forms to be born into greater forms. After original sin selfishness and other things like murder came into the world and such duties disappeared from public life. How could someone willing to murder someone who's almost his brother for material gain be trusted with a great animal spirit in its current form? There were even those willing to exterminate all animal life for personal gain, even among those associated with the red domain, for whom animals define their desires in great part.
But regardless of the Fall, there are those ethnicities and individuals who are designed to be attuned to Great animals - humans are not made for a sinful world. And in particular the absence of the great turtles provoked an absence of great empathy. And empathy is the sort of thing an atheist like Terry pratchett sought, through being a writer.
God can become unapproachable for an individual: his throne is in Heaven surrounded by his masses of angelic followers, their almighty leader. Kind of hard to relate. The empathetic powers of the turtles bridge that infinite Gap from a human to God so it's easier to see where God is coming from. That absence of the bridge of turtles - a true origin of “turtles all the way down”, through forming a bridge to God who is infinite - forms the troubles which Terry Pratchett felt: where is God in this mess, his compassion for this chaos?
His spiritual quandary similar to those of many others led him to the conception of the Discworld. Centered around an emotional center: a world turtle is one type of space or Cosmic-level turtle who is attuned to a single world. Through this thought experiment Pratchett explored the seeping rays of empathy. Seeking what was either absent or invisible for the real world, after the Fall.
Rather than accept the senselessness of the world as careerists and other groups do, he strove to make it make sense. Angry at the ceremony and conventions of various spiritual traditions that in fact serve no real purpose besides to manage people's bad behavior. Samuel Vimes as a member of the Watch presents a figure to do this who actually cares instead of the decaying superstition like circumcision.
When I was a teenager I went into the world to condemn it for its lack of empathy and the greater principles of empathy: their cartoons which abused kids, their public schools that were hell for kids, their lack of the true nature of friendship, their careerism which accepts bad products and the lack of advancement as well as interconnected things like bad friendship, their art which lacked beauty and life, their stories which lacked Transcendence and originality, their science which made a travesty of living life, their politics which was meaningless babble of elderly fossils detached from life, their selves which were stilted and all the same with some exceptions like Katie Rice, their desire to lift the self over the world rather than raise one's self into the hierarchies of the world. The shock of it led to a mass break in the consciousness of society, like the shattering of glass from a meteor strike.
They remembered that there was something important about empathy a decade later, wokes prattling on about empathy, but they did not remember who said it. Lacking faith in God, they could not believe in the message of another important figure in his heavens either. As must be learned how to do for the turtles to return and speak their messages to populations as part of their governance of empathy and emotion.
The World must reject the turtles because their empathetic power dismantles the power structures of demons who must arise the passions of the flesh to make use of humans. With beautifully transcendent emotion from the turtles, as if through a giant Ray out of the cosmos, there is no longer any need to remember what demons tempted people with.
The Trickster, as part of his joint processing with the red domain, allows access to greater turtles as one of his rewards for fine service to the arts. Graduating in one's experience of the arts to be like nothing ever felt before, both replacing one's former experiences and sending forth the important experiences in one's sensation to connect with greater appreciation.
The origin of shell shock proceeds out of the turtles, a soldier reaching a point in his experiences of war where his ability to emotionally process it is totaled. This proceeds out of 1. Satan twisting the methods and events of war to be contrary to how war should ever take place, breaking one's experiences and emotions and 2. The lack of a sufficient turtle power across the greatest turtles to literally be capable of processing the emotions of the universe at the latest points of humanity's advancement. And when they replaced shell shock with post-traumatic stress disorder from political correctness, they were hiding a sign of God's design and through the new term denying the real reason for shellshock.
The great importance of the turtles in God's design proceeds to honor the greater animals who make up some of the most important Spiritual Beings of the red domain, such as one ranked as a God. A cosmic turtle could easily reach the point of going God-level, but that had not happened at the point of creation.
Turtles make natural Ninja and other such warriors as they can use emotional sight to leap around their target and strike while spiritually aiming at emotional weakpoints. Turtles also have a natural connection to the Renaissance, being capable of prompting a Renaissance as part of the process of leveling up, showering the people whose emotions it maintains with gifts. Within the body of a turtle is the swirling expanse of its emotions, and it can create an emotional shockwave for defense and use other such abilities where they are in space. The shell of a turtle rather than being protection from predators as science says indicates the importance of protecting the emotions and is also a paranormal tool of their anatomy to protect them.
The turtles are key to the revitalization of childhood beyond such things as bullies, schools as Americans know them, and lives built around consumption of corporate products, driving consumerism for their parents. And so my opponents seek to keep them at Bay indirectly, through the normal methods in which humans resist the influence of the heavens. In Stephen King's It, pennywise represents a cosmic horror of childhood who is opposed to the turtle, literally called Maturin. On this perspective of the clown he is a high-level evil spirit fighting off the approaching forces of the trickster at the edge of the universe. The end of sex, and with it marriage of this world, is one of the greatest dangers for such evil beings, as once more humans participate freely in God's design and are no longer tethered to the flesh. In response the children end up ironically defiling the creature into the first defeat by “running a train” on Beverly. Through this mechanism of their fleshly bodies they expand beyond the connection of marriage for the purposes of a ritual, unifying each member of the Losers Club into a level of human connection beyond what the evil spirit can handle. This is one of the origins for the, from my perspective insanely stupid, insult for conservatives like myself of “chud”, as we seek to overcome the evil spirits which progressives love to serve for their “boons” like gay sex.
Meanwhile the second movie for Stephen King's It, the first was quite good, insults the endings of the series at length to allow these evil spirits to speak through corporations. I have seen in my spiritual visions that when we reach the next level of the Earth Stephen King will make a third part of the epic narrative involving all of these related things I discuss on my substack. Another bit of irony that we haven't even seen the real ending yet
With the discworld's Death, Terry Pratchett presented a charismatic figure exhibiting a level of friendliness despite his inability to truly relate to the living. This Death is not willing to accept the endings of stories like the Little Match Girl, sweeping in with the powers of the Hogfather, Santa, for a better ending. The story proceeded out of Christian culture which decayed into the world of the Protestants, liberals and others who took comfort in such stories as leaving people cast astray to die in the margins of society as they enjoyed the fruits of their work, to be consoled by arriving in their imaginary auditorium of Heaven or in the case of atheists, simply being euthanized. A world with no charity or authentic human connection. When I was a teenager I told Disney and others that such stories were insufficient, there was a need for better ones like my Underrealm, where the dead have their stories told. The obligatory crying scene in Disney*Pixar and others was a perverse ritual of acceptance of meaningless suffering because life is enjoyable or something - but the enjoyment proceeds into the heavens where its true meaning lies, whether good or bad as in the case of sinners. One of my least favorite things back then was the episode of Futurama with Fry's dog, such a thing refuses to participate in the meaning of works like All Dogs go to Heaven, existing only from obstinacy to the heavens that has swelled up into a cancer in the present animation industry, a tumor bigger than anything else.
Wokes who came from 2012 Tumblr fantasize that Terry Pratchett would be on their side but people are born in a certain time for a reason, and they participate in the progression since the Beginning, and if people are born among wokes instead of among good families or at least much more functional people, we can assume this is meant by God to be a lesson: this isn't even a timeline which proceeded correctly. It is only a manifestation of the disaster of the World reacting to my teenage self.
People out of 2012 Tumblr pretend like those days are over for good as they proceed into their careers and distorted relationships and such things, leaving behind a chaos of mutual storytelling and much suffering and devastation to people's existences without the slightest note, in the midst of it all myself, taking on all of that meaning, all of that emotion through the leveling up of my body of personal powers.
As my teenage efforts were crumbling I presented myself as a Squirtle, back in 2010 representing the responsibility I had accepted for the animation communities I had inspired: the duties of a turtle. The squirtle adds the symbol of “Michael's special stuff” which is just water - gifting artistic power to those who do well in the online art worlds. This is where they gained the idea to speak of me having “an astronomical ego”. It also provided motivation to destroy me before I leveled up into a “Blastoise”, whose shell water cannons can do things like destroy bad artwork completely, as I did to Homestuck through my pre-initiative.
As things proceed towards the end times, the arising of greatness of the turtles presents one of the dangers of Hell: people currently and in Terry pratchett's day lacked the ability to properly feel the ramifications of their sins, and so when hell is formed for the Damned who reject God, the power of turtles will create the emotions of that experience both during entry and for eternity. This is one of the factors that shows that hell is truly a choice, because people were always choosing to feel very bad experiences by choosing to sin, but they were simply not capable of feeling them yet, and all feelings must eventually be felt. This also relates to purgatory.
In addition to representing the myths of the peoples, the flat discworld can also represent the world of the arts and the flatness of things like paintings. Thereby presenting a supreme authority for the arts, so as to ensure the empathetic power of fairy tales and other artwork to impact the lives of people such as children.
And so the conception and careful craftsmanship of this long series displays the faith of Terry Pratchett: the faith in a world greater than the one we knew on the surface, which can be a greater faith than the one of an individual who simply accepts what he hears in the pews. It is possible that he was himself accepting the duty of raising up a turtle into the cosmos, after such stewardship duties went into the shadows.