CHIM is to embrace the "I". You are everyone, but you are still you. A strong desire to continue your existence despite the logical conclusion to dissolve into nothingness.

And how is the ego separate from the self?

Acting in accordance with the Divine Will.


I had the impression that characters with CHIM changed greatly. No longer having earthly desires, or petty emotions like hatred towards others etc.

Vivec [censored] Azura out of revenge, and was apparently still having six with his guards (the Bouyant Armigers).

Wasn't that before he ascended?

Before he left to do other things? Yes. He already had CHIM when he did all that. In fact, he used CHIM to do that to Azura (he had already lost his connection to the Heart.)

I see...

Although that makes me wonder, why would he do that to her if he is Azura in a way?

Are there other beings assumed to have reached CHIM? aside from Vivec. I remember so far that Lorkhan (purposely?) failed to achieve it, and ended up creating Nirn.

'Cause he still has a self of identity, which means he has a self of other. That "other" had the rest of the Tribunal killed.

I'd like to see something treat zero-sum as a good thing.

I'd like to see something treat zero-sum as a good thing.

The orthodox Alessian Order does, at least in my personal view of things. Not really called or viewed as zero-sum, though.

My knowledge on them is lacking. What texts relate to this?

In official lore? Nada. It's me going off what little we know about the Alessians and mixing in a whole lot of Gnosticism and Russian Orthodoxy.

Just curious, how do they view Zero-summing?

It was first necessary that [man] should suppress his own nature of division into two sixes...He would then be in a position to reunite paradise with the rest of the Earth, for, constantly bearing paradise within himself, being in ceaseless communion with God, he would be able to transform the whole earth into paradise. After this, he must overcome spacial conditions not only in his spirit but also in the body, by reuniting the heavens and the earth, the totality of the sensible universe. Having surpassed the limits of the sensible, it would then be for him to penetrate into the intelligible universe...to unite within himself the sensible and intelligible worlds. Finally, there remaining nothing outside himself but God alone, man had only to give himself to Him in a complete abandonment of love, and thus return to him the whole created universe gathered in his own being. God Himself would then in His turn have given Himself to man, who would then, in virtue of His gift, that is to say by grace, posses all that God possesses by nature.

The individual, i.e. that assertion of self in which person is confused with nature and looses its true liberty, must be broken. This is the root of principle of asceticism: a free renunciation of one's own will, of the mere simulacrum of individual liberty, in order to receive true liberty, that of the person which is the image of God in each one.

But what makes you connect the Alessian Order to Gnosticism?