The Path of Immobility was created to solve the problem that the choice between the Paths of Transcendence and Descendence is too black-and-white - that if there's a "good" path and "bad" path, even if they don't correspond exactly with our usual notions of morality, there should also be a finitely large space of ways to live your lives that put you in the "middle" path.
I would like to argue that not only did the problem not really exist before the introduction of the Path of Immobility, and that even in a universe where the problem had existed, the Path would only have made it *worse*. I also propose an interesting solution to a related problem I discovered while investigating this issue.
The universe of Cedrism is approximately based on a threefold symmetry: There's the Divine Realm, there's the Mortal Realm, and there's Balgurd. The Divine Realm and Balgurd are both populated with immortal souls AFAIK, it's only the Mortal realm that contains, well, mortals. In general, the immortals don't have to travel between the realms if they don't specifically want to - it's only the mortals who keep discovering themselves through reincarnation, until either they move on to one of the other realms or the End Times roll around.
It's that last clause that I'd like to point your attention to. Read up on what happens at the end, folks - there's still mortals around, in fact it seems the mortals will be the real soldiers (and real heroes?) in the final fight, with the Gods and Transcendi being around mostly to just provide support and leadership.
Consider these poor souls still within mortal bodies at the end. I'm going to presume that the universe keeps working approximately as it always did all the way until not less than ten years or so before the end - in other words, there's still going to be souls around that might be walking the Path of Transcendence or the Path of Descendence, but which had simply been too indecisive or come in too late to get to the end before time ran out.
With this in mind, consider the problem of black-and-whiteness again: It's not really there, is it? Even if *everyone* walked one of the Paths - and where does it even say you have to do that? - there would still be people around who never get to the end of their Path, because they only have a limited amount of time to get there. The Path of Immobility is unnecessary.
What happens to those who die in the final fight and have neither anywhere to reincarnate to nor enough good or bad karma to move out of the Web of Life? Since it's unknown to us what comes after the End Times I don't have the full answer, but I think I might have a part of the answer in the solution to another problem:
Consider Buridan's principle. The eponymous story tells of the hungry ass that, placed equidistant between two bales of hay, could not decide which one to eat and starved to death. The somewhat mathematical way to describe the actual principle is that it is not possible to make a discrete decision based on continuous input in bounded time.
What happens when you die and it is time to decide what happens in your next life? In most cases it's going to be obvious - if you've been really wicked, you'll drop out of the Web of Life, etc... but occasionally you're going to get a strange soul that remembers just enough about how to hold on to the Web to keep dodging the demon fish for perhaps a very long time - and similarly, while a soul will usually either transcend or not transcend at death, some fellow who's only so good and no more will end up having his application on the fourteenth round through the Committee for Acceptance of Beings as Transcended because they just can't arrive at a decision.
(again ignoring the boundedness of time - the mistake that was made when the Immoti were first conceived - realise that adding a "middle way" between Transcendence and Descendence wouldn't help. Oh, it would remove one boundary, true - thing is, it would create two more: one between the Transcendi and the Immoti, and another one between the Immoti and the Descendi. That is, it only makes the problem worse.)
What state is a soul in after it has given up its body but before it has reincarnated or found its way to one of the non-Mortal realms? To provide a name and inspiration for what this state could be like, I offer a quote of extraordinary insight about Unix:
While we don't know what really happens between lives, I think "sleeping on an event" (or, in less Unixy terms, "existing but not actively doing anything, instead just waiting for a certain event") is a suitable description - that is, souls that haven't yet been able to reach a decision on where to go are fhtagn. What kind of an existence this is I can only guess - but it seems oddly appropriate to think of it as some kind of a twisted space following a set of rules not entirely like the Euclidean ones we're used to, populated with fell creatures - spiders on the Web of Life, perhaps, or Daemon Fish swimming around in the distance (assuming distance means the same thing for those fhtagn than it does to us!). Most souls prefer to avoid this state and forget it existed once they're reborn - conveniently, we could still have the Birthsight with this space, only instead of being "granted" to people who are really neutral about everything, it'd instead be given to those souls who decide and are able to remember what they saw before reincarnating.Most people aren't aware of the fact that UNIX actually dates back to the Cthulhuvian epoch, and was widely used in R'lyeh. The R'lyehish word fhtagn is actually a technical term, and literally means "sleeps on an event". Thus, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn literally means "in his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits blocked on I/O".
What say you? Is it time for a good ol' reformation? Or will I have to expect to be burned at the stake?
