Drinking Without Meeting the Ogre (presentation)

Jātaka 13–24 as an Apophatic Path of Awakening, Critique of Power, and Desertion from Heroism

This essay begins with a minimal gesture: drinking.
Not conquering, not founding, not redeeming — drinking.

The two video accompanying Drinking Without Meeting the Ogre do not illustrate the text. They move within it. They are two visual thresholds through which the same gesture becomes visible.

First Video — The Gesture That Crosses Power

This essay explores Drinking Without Meeting the Ogre as an apophatic gesture of awakening: drinking without conquest, foundation, or victory. Through Revelation 22, the Naḷapāna-Jātaka, and Cioran, power is not defeated but made irrelevant. The video opens a threshold: life continues when it stops obeying.

 

In the first video, a river flows slowly through ruins.
It is not triumphant. Not violent. It simply continues.

A human figure, seated and non-heroic, drinks from the water.
Around them remain the residues of power: a ruined throne, a silent ogre, abandoned weapons. Nothing has been destroyed. Nothing has been resolved. And yet, nothing governs anymore.

This image embodies the core of the Naḷapāna-Jātaka:
the water is not liberated by force,
the ogre is not defeated,
the world is not refounded.

Power does not collapse — it becomes irrelevant.

Drinking without meeting the ogre means learning a gesture that no longer passes through domination. Life flows elsewhere.

Second Video — One Movement, Four Layers

Drinking Without Meeting the Ogre moves through Revelation 22, the Naḷapāna-Jātaka, and Cioran as a single apophatic gesture: drinking without conquest, foundation, or victory. Power is not defeated but made irrelevant. The throne remains, the ogre remains — life continues when it stops obeying.

 

 

 

The river remains central.
The drinking figure remains low, quiet, anonymous.
But around them appear, like apparitions, the four layers of the essay:

• the throne of Revelation, still named but emptied of command;
• the ogre of the Jātaka, present but no longer decisive;
• the ruins of history and heroism;
• the face of Cioran, preventing any consolatory closure.

There is no synthesis here, but coincidence.
Revelation 22, the Jātaka, and Cioranian thought do not accumulate — they converge into a single movement of exit.

From the center flows not law, but water.
Power remains as language, not as force.
Hope does not save.
Redemption does not found.

What remains is the gesture that disarms everything: drinking.

Final Comment

Drinking Without Meeting the Ogre does not offer a new worldview.
It offers an exit from the need to found one.

It does not promise a future kingdom.
It does not proclaim victory.
It reveals that life continues when it no longer seeks legitimation from power.

The two videos, like the essay itself, do not close Revelation.
They leave it open — like a river that keeps flowing.