Can the DO be permanently defeated?

[AlwaysLurking]

I am relatively new here, and have not read all the possible posts, but one of the common themes in many posts concerning the nature of the Wheel and the repetitiveness of the ages is that this conflict with the DO has occurred in every age, and he can never be permanently defeated.

 

I have to ask myself why?

 

Is this a logical position to hold based on the information that we have on the Wheel/Pattern and how it works?

 

From a philosophical standpoint, according to the Nature of the Creator as described, he is a hands off deity. He made the Wheel and the Pattern for an unknown purpose, started everything in motion and walked away. Maybe he watches what is going on, maybe he doesn’t, we have no way of knowing.

 

Enter the DO. All we know about the DO is that he is outside the Wheel/Pattern and is somehow imprisoned close enough metaphysically that it was possible to connect said prison with the “inside” of the Pattern and allow him to influence events. Ohh, and he wants to destroy it all, maybe....

 

We really don’t know much else outside of this. We can assume since the DO was put in prison by the Creator that the DO is weaker than the Creator, or can we? Is the DO even in prison at all? Maybe the DO has already put the smack down on the Creator and is trying to figure out how to close down the last of his creations. Maybe the Wheel is nothing more than a self-contained system that has defied the DO’s efforts at direct penetration, and the DO has had to resort to subterfuge to gain access to the world and corrupt it from within.

 

Regardless of all we don’t know, there are things about the Wheel/Pattern we do know and from that some basic assumptions can be made:

 

1) The Creator made the Wheel and Pattern self contained, and it did NOT include the DO (or did it?).

2) As the Wheel rotates, ages are forgotten and disappear from all memory before coming back again to be repeated.

3) The Pattern is responsible for maintaining this flow of events, spinning out souls as required to maintain its purpose (as defined by the Creator)

4) The Pattern has a built in system of protections to keep its purpose on track

5) The eternal conflict between the male and female half’s of the One Power drives the wheel.

6) The Creator is not necessary to and does not interfere with the daily function of anything happening within the self-contained system of the Wheel/Pattern (as far as we know)

 

It really all comes down to this, what is the nature of the Creator?

 

Is he a benevolent being that created a perfect world free from suffering and pain that got corrupted by a being with similar power and an opposing nature?

 

Maybe he is running a grand experiment and is having sport with those in the Wheel and created the DO to drive the experiment.

 

And again, maybe the Creator already got his butt kicked by the DO, and the DO is just trying to clean up the last of the Creators toys.

 

And maybe the Creator is none of these things.

 

The answer to these questions determines the ultimate answer to the question “can the DO ever be truly defeated?”.

 

For the sake of argument, lets say that the Creator is benevolent, how does that answer the question “can the DO ever be truly defeated?”

 

I say the answer to this is yes and no. If we assume that when the Wheel/Pattern was created, there was never any intention that the intrusion of the DO would occur in any age of the turning of the wheel. Then what we see going on now is the Pattern protecting itself and trying to get back to its original intent. The original intrusion of the DO may not have even been instigated by Lanfear at all, the Bore that we see now could have been nothing more than the removal of whatever solution the Pattern was able to enact in the previous turning. We know from descriptions in the book that not every conflict between the Dragon and the DO has ended up the same, so the solution at the end of each Turning was also not the same. I am not saying that it wasn’t, just that we don’t have any evidence to say that every Turning happens the same way and ample evidence to say it doesn’t. The Wheel/Pattern is simply doing what it can to try and stick to the original purpose it was created to do using the resources the Creator gave it to deal with breakdowns in the Pattern. Truly defeating the DO means restoring the Pattern to its created state, nothing more. My Answer of yes and no means that while the DO can be truly defeated, there is nothing so say that what happened the first time to allow the DO to have access is not again possible. We really don’t have any idea of how long the wheel turned before all of this happened. Maybe there were 1 million rotations before the DO got access for the first time, and the Pattern has been trying to fix it since then.

 

Now lets look at the second condition, where the DO really IS a part of the Pattern.

 

In this scenario, the answer is no, the DO can never be defeated as he is part of the system. Those in the world may think he is outside the Pattern, but they are wrong, it only appears to be that way, they are guinea pigs being studied, and it will happened again(with small variations) and again.

 

In the last scenario, the answer is I have no idea, but probably not. Even if they survive this time, the DO has already proven he can kick the Creator’s butt and it is just a matter of time before he finishes off his creations.

 

The answer to the question really boils down to do you think the world as created included the DO or not. In order for a final defeat of the DO to not be possible, then the Pattern had to be Created to include the DO from the beginning, or something has changed since it was created that was not foreseen by the Creator.

[FarShainMael]

AIUI, the Dark One is the Creator's counterpart, and has the same kind of existence - It is not an artefact made by the Creator. We are told that the Creator created the Wheel of Time, which is time itself. The Creator imprisoned the Dark One outside of the Pattern at the moment of creation.

 

So I seriously doubt whether it is within Mankind's power to destroy It. It may not be within the Creator's power either (and likewise I doubt whether the Dark One could destroy the Creator). Balance seems to be a theme in WoT; the Creator and the DO balance each other, saidin balances saidar, and so on.

 

I also doubt the DO's ability to stop or destroy the Wheel. We are again told that it has existed for an infinity of time*, and this means that everything that can happen, already has, an infinite number of times, and will happen again in the future, again an infinite number of times. The Wheel hasn't stopped in all that infinity of time; therefore stopping it is not one of those possible events. The DO must know this, surely; so why does It keep trying?

 

I note that the DO does not have the same kind of overview of the Wheel as the Creator does. It is time-limited, by balefire for example; when a human is balefired, their thread in the pattern is burned back in time, so they are dead before they are killed, and the DO doesn't notice their death until it's too late to grab the soul for transmigration. (Unless, just possibly, Its whole attention is already focussed on a soul It wishes to grab, but that's a personal theory.) Possibly Its vision is limited by Its prison.

 

 

*at least, from mankind's PoV; the Creator made time, so He is aware of all of it. Think of a reel of cinefilm, with the Creator as the film producer, and all of manking as actors in the film. The Creator sees the whole film at once; we the actors have to progress along the film strip, frame by frame.