What is a flickering flame? Hericlitus says that our world is a perpetual state of fire. One both steps into a river, and does not step into the same river twice.

In a way he was right, matter is in a perpetual state of entropy. It’s part of the beauty of the duality of our universe, that it is both deterministic, and chaotic and entropic.

But what else is a flickering flame? A flickering flame is a transfixing, dancing spectacle, it’s a consuming destroyer, it’s the thing which brings life through light, and creates fertile ground through what it reduces to ash. Never the same flame twice, just as Hericlitus’s river.

Could it also be the flame of the lighter, lighting an herb? It could perhaps be the light which lights and herb, although some prefer a vaporizer.

The flame is also like the essential self giving way to constantly emerging patterns of thought, transducing the agony of fixating on a changing, ungraspable world, which slips through the fingers like sand.

A flickering flame, dancing, passionate, destructive, life giving, the way of the world. Entropy in its purest form. The evaporated self giving way to continual emergence and becoming.

yes, the universe is both three of those things

both of them