Any sufficiently complex book can be a Bible. A complex book is a mirror, and as you return to the same book over and over, you are glancing into a mirror, Narcissus looking at his reflection.

The same book looks different to you as years pass; your reflection changes as you grow older, and you gain more experience.

Neither Jesus, Socrates, nor Buddha wrote a single word, and yet their their thinking echoed through history. Their followers rendered their words into complex books, and now people hold those books up to themselves as mirrors, looking for spiritual meaning

I have had many bibles in my life, not least of which was the Bible itself. If you find a book you read over and over, it's because books are mirrors and you have found one that shows you a flattering reflection

If you read a book of fiction or even a textbook as if it were received spiritual wisdom, you will invent layers of interpretation. If there are inconsistencies or contradictions in a text, so much the better! Contradiction is the substrate where theology germinates

To review, the 6 components of a religious memeplex:
False Consciousness, Nemesis, Eschatology, Spiritual Ecstasy, Evangelism, Dietary Taboos https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1022156776836280320

So given all that, and using my series on the elements that compose a religion, can we fabricate new religions out of our favorite book(s)? This is purely a theoretical exercise of course. You would be crazy to take up a religion based on an esoteric reading of Borges, right?

The Cult of the Phoenix (Labyrinthism)

Ontology: the world is infinite. At the most atomic, which is to say, at the INDIVISIBLE level, the world is made of ideas, but not in the Berkeleyan sense.

Ideas exist as a vector space, where ideas that are more similar to each other are closer together. The idea level of reality has hundreds of dimensions, and every possible idea is represented in this space

Atomic reality is known as the Library of Babel. The phenomenological universe as we know it is but a tiny corner of the library of Babel, and if one could move along the lines of idea space, one would find endless and subtle variation

As we can see, labyrinthian cosmology predated and anticipated the many worlds hypothesis, and quantum physics has confirmed the truth of labyrinthism. Labyrinthists call themselves Librarians.

False Consciousness: your problems in life stem from an inability to align yourself with infinite possibility. For every zig in your life, you could have zagged. Adjacent to your unique locus in the library are all variations on your life.

Every decision you made could have been different and every seemingly chance occurrence could have been otherwise. If you let go of the idiosyncrasies of your life you’ll notice that for every idea you have, there is a refutation, and a refutation of the refutation, ad infinitum

Thus it is a mistake to be any particular way, and the labyrinthist must at all times be open to all possibilities. Life is a garden of forking paths and the labyrinthist endeavors to take all of them at all times, to explore as much of the library as possible

The glory of infinite possibility is called intertextuality, and for the labyrinthist, it is the highest state of being, in which a man simultaneously embodies all possible variations of himself

When Paul wrote in Galatians that there is neither new nor gentile, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female in Christ, he was describing intertextuality, which he had glimpsed but darkly

Nemesis: the Zahir, which is the name of Fixation, is both metaphorical and literal. The Zahir is a harmful perception, it can take any shape, it is a totem that causes you to be too focused on a particularity https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019264839422599168

When you become fixated on a singular configuration of events, that is the Zahir. When you hold too tightly to a specific goal or refuse to explore alternatives, the object of your fixation is the Zahir.

Eschatology: the world never ends, but all ideas eventually turn over. The inflection point comes when a man stumbles upon an idea from a wholly different conception of the world from the one he occupies

The gravity of orbis tertius slowly overtakes our own world. The labyrinthist calls this process Tlön. It happens over and over again, as our world meanders through the library of Babel. There have been many Tlöns, 14, an infinite number

Spiritual ecstasy: Labyrinthists engage in the practice of grapholalia, which is glossolalia but written. The art of grapholalia is halfway between free association and chaotically banging on a typewriter. As the labyrinthist writes, he reads his own words, as if in a trance

The goal of grapholalia is to create endless variation and enter a state of heightened intertextual awareness, in which all combinations of sentences are possible. Labyrinthists believe that the secrets of the universe will be revealed through their grapholaliac pen.

In contrast, labyrinthists also practice the Menardian rapture, in which one writes the entirety of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word, aware that the words have entirely different meaning when written by another person

Evangelism: Where labyrinthists congregate, they are expected to contribute money toward the construction and maintenance of a hedge maze, which is communal property. The hedge mazes are made to be beautiful and elaborate, decorated with all manner of flowers, topiaries, statues

Anyone is free to wander the maze, a fragrant garden where labyrinthists walk in quiet contemplation. If an outsider should venture into the maze, a labyrinthist will present him or her with a copy of the collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.

Dietary taboos: None, however the labyrinthists have an unusual culinary practice of seeking the most varied diet that they can manage. There is no official teaching on this in the received wisdom contained in the collected fictions of Borges.

Most Labyrinthists, however, feel it is unbecoming to eat monotonously. Somehow, to do so smacks of the Zahir.

According to the proverb, "Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind", labyrinthists own no mirrors, and disdain to even look into one