“Do not dig too deeply, for if you were able to conceive of what lies at the bottom, you would flee the very ground itself.” 
–Alfred Cotgrave

The Münchhausen Trilemma purports to divide causes in general and logical implications in particular into three types. 

The first is that of infinite regress: No cause has an ultimate cause, as each can be traced to a prior cause. The second—really, a special case of the first—is that of circularity: No cause has an ultimate cause, as again, each can be traced to a prior cause, but that this tracing repeats periodically ad infinitum. The third is that of the brute fact: Something is taken as absolutely true, and it is by this truth established by fiat that all other truths are affected and from which all causes originate. 

The inquisitive mind, then, is given two equally unacceptable options. Either one must accept that everything vanishes into some infinite, ultimately unplumbable series of ultimately irrelevant and abstruse ideas—a sort of idiotic and sterile emanationism—or, alternatively, one is forced to accept that certain things are simply true: They always were and must, by mere logical necessity, remain so—this despite the fact that the very creatures who insist on these fantastical surgeries of reason once were not and soon will no longer be. (What is an eternal truth, without anyone to affirm or deny it? What sort of play has no actors? Is an empty zoo still a zoo? And so forth.)

The great exciting tragedy of this, however, is not that there are only these three options. The Münchhausen Trilemma is a red herring, for there is another way to find—and even penetrate—the bedrock of being, substance, causality, logic, and knowledge, but in doing so, a singular and ineradicable seed of profound insanity is necessarily planted. 

The way Beneath the Bedrock, to find the honest and very root of all things, involves a series of meditations, the actual procedure of which cannot be given here for the safety of the reader, but the general idea is the following. 

Causality can be represented quite clearly by arrows which begin at causes and end at the associated effects. The aforementioned trilemma, then, takes the form of, in the case of some form of infinite (including cyclical) regress, as a network of arrows, the “origin” of which is always at an infinite distance from any given part of the network. In the case of the brute fact, there is a special, “root” cause at the very beginning of a network which extends therefrom. 

What these diagrams do not take into account, at least at the lowest order of approximation, is the fact that there are arrows which connect other arrows. It is easy to construct a theory—which can be shown to be identical, albeit nontrivially, to one of the options of the original trilemma—having such arrows, but the fact that this process can continue to include arrows between arrows between arrows, and so forth, makes it demonstrably distinct. As an example: Precisely what is meant by, say, the 17,923,551,004,653th “level” of “arrows between arrows between …” is impossible to determine, both in practice and in principle.

However, it is possible to conceive of the infinite “tower of metacausality” in abstracto, given proper training and guidance. The result is that the “tower” becomes inverted: Instead of a tower leading upward toward some “infinitely terrific” level of “hypercausality,” it is revealed that it leads downward into an “infinitely terrible tunnel,” through which one passes directly through the Bedrock and into the unplaces and untimes which “inhabit” that which is Beneath. 

Looking up, as it were, from one of the many barren, obsidian islands which pock the pearlescent face of the frozen, undulating Beneath, you can see how silly, how small and foolish all the previous ideas of “causality” and “being” you once had are—those notions still entertained by the funny, grunting things shambling and slithering above. So silly, in fact, that you can’t help but laugh. But this laugh is the first sign of the coming failure of mind promised at the beginning of all of this. Your laughs echo in the profound murk of all which is forever Beneath. They echo and the echoes will only grow, even if you manage occasionally to stifle your laughter. 

You will return to your everyday life, bathed in the lucid and reassuring light of day—but is that light really from the sun, now that you know what the sun really is? Whence it really comes? What is its cause? Why it is? Why there are “whys”? 

You will find yourself awake in bed at night, dreading sleep, as that is when you will finally be taken Beneath the Bedrock forever, whatever “forever” means, now that you understand time to be the punchline of the joke you were told when you were led through the eerily glowing dark, depositing you Beneath the Bedrock. 

What I can tell you without imparting too much irreversible damage is that time is the greatest lie. The infinite descent of metacausality lays bare this lie. There is no regress, neither infinite nor ending in the brute fact. There is only the discovery of the one lie which comprises all lies which lies at the very bottom of the titanic nothingscape covering the maw of whatever is and isn’t Underneath. 

If you find yourself thinking too much, too obsessively, about the connections between connections, and the causes behind these metaconnections, and the higher causes and higher connections and higher and higher “things,” beware the Blue Light and Flood of Shadows. You will know it if you see it. And you will know that you must stop.