>Me> What Illumination
> > teaches is that the knowledge that what everybody says or believes
> > is wrong. Because most people say that Chaos is evil, this is
> > known by the illuminate to be wrong.
>I do not agree with this negative presentation of illumination.
>Illumination does have a negative aspect certainly, given that it is
>not mysticism.
>But illumination *certainly* doesn't teach that "what everybody says or
>believes is wrong", because this is what everyone already knows in the
>first place.
No, they do not. Everybody knows that foreigners are wrong and their own leaders and elders etc. are right. OTOH the Illuminate knows from his own insight that what his leaders and elders say is wrong just as much as the foreigners.
>The idea that "what everybody says or believes is wrong" is simply an
>expression of the Dark Side of illumination,
No, it isn't. It's an apt summary of the illuminated insight and essentially comes from the RQ-Con 2 Compendium. The Dark Side does not arise from this but from drawing the false parallel that since there is no difference between Law and Chaos, there is also no difference between their own desires and their own ethics.
>minus the idea that one is
>transcendentally right where everyone else is wrong.
Illuminates do not have a realization that they are transcendentally right. If they did, they wouldn't be illuminates any more.
>Illumination is a form of limited transcendance where previously distinct
>categories are perceived (contrary to other members of one's society) to
>be expressions of a larger transcendental concept that is unexplainable
>using the ordinary logic, words, rituals, or language of the society.
I disagree. Illuminates have no knowledge of this "larger transcendental concept" (be it God, Durapdur, the Cosmic Dragon etc). They only have the understanding that the world they experience is in some way Not True and their subsequent actions are a tragic attempt to make sense of all this and to try and find something that is True. In HW terms, they lack the mystic's ability to refute and the mystics consider them damned.
I did once play around with the Arkati being the reverse of this (having refute but no understanding of how to use it to attain truth) but it didn't fit Arkat's actions.
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