As before, transcribed (mostly) by hand (I had some help here because I found some parts that were quoted on forums)
Riding The Avalanche
Or "Embracing The Greater Gods", A Controversial article by Alphonse Domance reguarding the nature of Chaos, the Concept of "Evil" and Man's culpability in the formation of the Chaos Gods.
Forget what you have been told. Chaos is neither good nor evil. Chaos (being the very same place, state and thing as the Aethyr) is simply a mirror for the survivalist emotions of living beings within the Mortal Universe. Thus the entities of Chaos - be they gods or daemons - exist solely because living things generate emotions and thoughts.
Of all intelligent races, we humans have proven to be the most eager to pursue the path to the glories of Chaos, and our fervor and excitement in the service of Chaos is unsurpassed. This fervor grants greater power to the gods of Chaos and in return they grant us their many blandishments and blessings. We humans lust for a change and seek delight, and it is largely because of us (not the Elder Races), and out wonderful drive and ambition that the gods of Chaos have grown so magnificent and bloated with power.
Always remember, the Chaos Gods cannot and should not be called "evil". They are simply exuberant personifications of all those things that make us human. For you see, the relationship between Chaos and the Mortal Realm is entirely symbiotic - much more so than any cleric or priest of this dull Empire would ever wish to admit. Chaos absorbs our own emotions and thoughts, from our most basic drives to our most complicated and high minded ideals, and then magnifies and reflects these emotions and ideals straight back at us.
But what bearing, you no doubt wish to know, does this have on the great gods of Chaos? To put it into layman's terms: over time, and for whatever reason, all emotions (and their related concepts) converge together within the Chaos Realm. It is a case of like attracting like, with every scrap of anger or every scrap of ecstacy, slowly being drawn to one another until they create what could be described as a kind of of vortex of psychical energy within the Chaos Realm - a vortex of emotion and thought. That vortex creates such a disturbance across the Chaos Realm (and therefore our own psyche) that whatever emotions or concept the Chaos-vortex is made from, is then reflected back into the Mortal Realms once more.
This has the effect of further promoting within our mortal psyches the emotions that the vortex itself is made from. Let's take anger as an example. If a man or woman feels a lot of anger, so over time, mortals will not only have their own naturally inspired and mundane anger, but will also experience a slightly more unnatural anger that has been reflected onto them by the Chaos Realm's anger vortex. This process is cyclic and never-ending, and in time the Chaos Realm's vortices become so powerful that they cease to accidentally promote in mortal minds the emotions they embody, but actually begin to do so deliberately although perhaps subconsciously before they do so consciously.
An analogy for this might be the boiling of water in a room. If one boils a big pan of water in a room with no ventilation, quite soon one will find that all the windows in the room become covered with a fine sheen of water. The temperature in the room will get warm and humid, and things will become damp. This is not the water consciously coming back through its own decision, it's just the natural consequence of boiling water in an airless room with glass windows.
One might say that mortals are similar to bowls of boiling water, and that our emotions are like steam pouring from that bowl. This water vapor is trapped within the airless room that comprises both our individual minds and the Real of Chaos. This psychical condensation could be seen as the very beginnings of the Chaos Ream's vortices of emotion, senselessly reflecting back upon the airless room of our minds the water vapor emotions that we first generated, making us even hotter (as it were) and thereby causing us to give off more of the same emotion that started the process in the first place.
In time all this psychic condensation creates the perfect environment to grow within the Chaos Realm. Before the vortices become intelligent and self aware, they first attain basic drives and needs of such lower forms of life as plants. So now we have little shoots of consciousness growing upon the warm damp of the psychic condensation where our minds meet the Chaos Realm. Like a plant that leans towards the sun as it travels across the sky (not a conscious action, yet still the action of a living thing), these shoots of intelligence within the Chaos Realm's cortices begin to lean towards these people and emotions that best nourish them. So the vortex of anger might lean towards those people who get angry the most easily, the vortex of ecstacy and pleasure might lean more towards hedonists or more acute senses, the vortex for hope leans more towards those optimistic or ambitious people, and the Chaos Realm's vortices of fear and misery might lean more towards people who tend towards a more nervours of depressive disposition.
This natural (though metaphysical) process will then create a more specific reaction in mortals, because where before the condensation of the emotions that were reflected back from the Realm of Chaos were diffused and did not target any one person over another, the embryonic intelligences developing within the Chaos Realm's vortices actually lean towards specific mortals, feeding off their emotions, and thereby promoting more acute versions of those emotions within those mortals.
So whereas the general miasma of anger that is reflected back from the Chaos Realm's anger vortex may affect all mortals to some small degree, the burgeoning intelligence of the steadily growing anger vortex will deliberately begin to lean towards those people who are particularly angry, and to a certain degree ignore those who are not. So the process continues, with all mortal anger feeding the burgeoning intelligence of the Chaos Realm's anger vortex, while the anger vortex specifically leans towards angry people making them ever more angry, and so on and so on.
This process is never-ending, and as it continues, the Chaos Realm vortex intelligence slowly climbs the ladder of reason towards total consciousness (Perhaps similar to babes, from their mothers womb to birth and consciousness), promoting the emotions and concepts they personify more and more acutely, while becoming ever more specific in the people they target. Eventually the day comes when they reach a level of intelligence whereby they realize "I am" and become fully self-aware.
There is little or nothing that mortals can do to stop this process because, like a ball of snow rolling down a wintery slope, by the time the mortals realize that there is an entity outside of themselves leeching off their will, that entity will have already achieved intelligence and is too powerful to stop, or 'Uncreate'. A mortal could seek to stand in the way and attempt to stop the Chaos Realm's entities from growing any larger, but, to continue with the snowball allegory, the entities have already grown to the size of avalanches, and will more than likely crush anyone and anything standing in their way attempting to block their path.
In fact, because all mortals helped 'start' these avalanches, and are indeed part of them (in as much as we are all helping to provide the energy and momentum for their growth and descent we couldn't really stand in their way in the first place. Indeed, every one of us is in fact sledging behind the crest of these avalanches, most of us without ever realising we are. Those of us that do realize it, like myself, have moved forward to ride the crest of the avalanche and are making the most of the free ride, leaving those more fearful and ignorant to what until they have been sucked under by by the avalanche before they acknowledge their part in its existence, and much more importantly that their life depends upon it.
So I say now, you who have chosen to question the recieved wisdoms of tohers more ignorant than yourselves, to truly emancipate yourselves you must accept that it is impossible to know where your self-conrol ends and the control of the gods begins, ans similarily where your own emotions and ideas end the projected emotions and ideas of the Chaos Gods begin. For indeed, can there really be any difference between the two?
