Personal Apocalypse

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

One of the best discussions of Chapel Perilous can be found in Antero Alli's "Angel Tech".

In I3, Chapel Perilous is where Fission Chips meets St. Toad (aka Tsathoggua)

It really boils down to the idea that mosbunal people that start exploring the mythic, the magic, the psychological... the people that start breaking out of their BiP... they all run into something bizarre and unexplainable. For RAW it was the Sirius experience, for me, I think my first weird experience was an invocation of Therion and Babylon, where the ritual went way beyond anything I had thought it would.

At the point of walking in to the chapel, you have to decide if you're gonna believe the experience was REAL, or if the experience brings all other experiences into question. If you experience something as real as your daily life... but its utterly insane/incomprehensible/flies in the face of what you KNOW, you either accept it as real, or question what Real is anyway.

So you have people like David Icke, who may have had an experience similar to RAW's, RAW decided it meant he had to question every experience, Icke seems to have decided that Aliens actually exist.

Crowley's experience with AWISS may have been similar... for him it was an experience which he found useful, but never fully claimed it was REAL, on the other hand, someone like Ramtha may have been a similar experience, except the human involved decided it was REAL.

[LMNO]

I tend to broaden the usage to include not just the mystic, but the existential*, as well; that is, any great crisis of Universe sticking its big, ugly thumb up the ass of your preconceived notion of "reality".

It's the point when all definitions change; when having to include a new piece of information into your worldview substantially chages every other piece of information you know.

You find yourself lost; untethered; everything you know is wrong; nothing is true, everything is permitted; et al.

Also:

Part of me would like it to be so simple... but then part of me would be sad, that I don't have some grand adventures and revelations yet ahead.

They do say that the path is a spiral.

Revelation is best served when you think you got it all sussed out 

"A true initiation never ends."  -Uncle Al.















*"As pertaining to existence".

[Triple Zero]

okay so it has to have something to do with the occult/magic/mythical/psychological?

because i thought it was kind of like the long dark teatime of the soul, you know, this difficult period you have to cross before you get to .. somewhere else or something. or is that another thing entirely? cause then i was thinking of my 8 year struggle to figure out how my mind (and body!) works and why (but most importantly HOW) it's so different from everybody else.

but if it's specifically that one thing, i know what it is for me and i'm not telling. i touched it a few times, and i will probably get the full deal some time soon. and it's going to be awesome and fucking scary at the same time (and no it's not drugs, not in that sense anyway).

also i'm not sure if i'm going to like it when all definitions change, but hey, if they must be different, then i should not fool myself by turning away.

also it's going to be awesome

[LMNO]

okay so it has to have something to do with the occult/magic/mythical/psychological?

This is why I don't like Rat's explanation; it appears to put the model in front of the experience.

That is to say, I take CP as something that shakes your fundamental assumptions to the core.  It doesn't take reading the Zohar while stoned to have it happen to you.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Revelation is like the bit in Jacobs ladder where Jake's chiropractor is going on about angels and demons, cant find the quote but it goes along the lines of - if you're not ready, you see demons trying to kill you but if you are ready you see angels helping you loose the shit that's holding you back. Also hellraiser "Angels to some, demons to others"

Just make sure you're ready to cross the sword bridge is all I'm saying, cos the abyss is deep.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

okay so it has to have something to do with the occult/magic/mythical/psychological?

because i thought it was kind of like the long dark teatime of the soul, you know, this difficult period you have to cross before you get to .. somewhere else or something. or is that another thing entirely? cause then i was thinking of my 8 year struggle to figure out how my mind (and body!) works and why (but most importantly HOW) it's so different from everybody else.

but if it's specifically that one thing, i know what it is for me and i'm not telling. i touched it a few times, and i will probably get the full deal some time soon. and it's going to be awesome and fucking scary at the same time (and no it's not drugs, not in that sense anyway).

also i'm not sure if i'm going to like it when all definitions change, but hey, if they must be different, then i should not fool myself by turning away.

also it's going to be awesome

Well, its not specifically Occult... that particular paradigm just tends to be an easy one to describe in the context of CP.

Maybe we could say that Chapel Perilous might be like the parole option of the BiP. Once you're in there, you have to decide if you're gonna brave the world outside of your BiP, or if the BiP is all that exists (and whatever strangeness just smacked you becomes yet another bar)...

CP seems like Crowley's view of the abyss, in that you might not make it out, you might get washed up on the shore you started from, or you might get past it and into something new. It seems unlike it, in that Crowley tended to see the Abyss as a point in the linear path, whereas Bob tended to see CP as somewhere you may visit again and again, each time coming out a different door into a different perspective of reality.

My first trip to Chapel Perilous, seems to have started with my personal apocalypse and rejection of the the BS I believed my whole life. It seems to have climaxed with the Therion Ritual and I exited the Chapel after that point with the view that really weird stuff might be going on. I think I entered my second time after a insane argument/fight at 23ae.com with a guy named Cardinal Machine, a Discordian spouting conservative views. Around that time I experienced a crazy evening wherein I saw Eris, she came into my room and talked to me and I woke up with a bunch of stuff written in my journal about our conversation.

The Eris I talked to was not a happy hippy, but kept saying that we could effect change if we "poisoned the money supply". I still don't know what the hell that meant, but it was not a nice and friendly sort of discussion. After that, I think I left the Chapel with an agnostic view of Eris as Hippy or Eris as Bitch. But after my last experience with Therion, I didn't consider Eris as Real, but rather both experiences as interesting and useful, but maybe just my own subconscious.

I may be in the chapel again now... it seems that I never realize I'm there, until I've left.

[P3nT4gR4m]

There is no 'real'

Or rather there is, but I am never going to get near it.

Just like the guys onscreen in the computer game never get near the install CD.

I might get a glimpse of it, or an inkling of what it is, but I'll never go there.

This is the conclusion that I arrived at, all the imaginary shit I'd been obsessed with collecting just melted away and I felt lighter. There was a brief feeling that resembled fear or loss but the unexplored was beckoning and that drew my attention away, almost immediately.

I lost my mind sometime shortly afterwards, just another meaningless trinket I'd clung to for so long. It came back, eventually, but it seemed to be new and somehow improved so I let it in, on the proviso that it didn't try to pull the wool over my eyes ever again.

[Requia ☣]

Ratatosk, have you ever chronicled the whole story of leaving the JWs and 'joining' with discordians?  I'd love to hear it.

[bones]

there is ONLY 'real'   

the guys onscreen are real, the install disk is real, you and i are real, 'real' as a concept is real.


I was having BS tremors for a few years.. Raised atheist, almost getting into Richard Dawkins and debating many a Christian led me to believe that absolutely any argument for/against the existence of God could be used just as well by the opposition, or by any religious group specifically. The burden of proof gets passed back and forth by whoever happens to be arguing at the time and it gets us nowhere.

I never believed in any occult/spirituality/myth but I did always think these things were really awesome. Beautiful even.

Then, I dunno, 18 months ago (?) I found an ebook of the PD, and somewhere around then I got 'Maybe Logic' and it all slotted perfectly into place. It was all true. I don't particularly remember going through the Chapel, could it be that it simply wasn't that earth-shattering for me, or so stressful/painful/frightening I erased the memory? Or perhaps I've never been? It was my vague idea that to gain a fuller understanding of discord you would have to have had those teeth kicked in.

Chapel Perilous IS the Personal Apocalypse. A metaphor, but i don't think it needs to be described in such metaphorical terms. I prefer to think of it as simply when you realize everything else is a metaphor too, even the reality in front of your eyes is just an image in your brain. You can pass through with thought alone, maybe a few debates with fundies on all sides and a few acid trips will zip you through faster, but i dont think you need to do any mahjgickque.

Or perhaps I haven't had my apocalypse yet.


I would also love to hear about any experiences with eris. eg, she said to 'poison the money supply'?.. I'll be thinking about that one for a while. My first thought is that money IS poison, but that doesn't seem to help decipher.

Ratatosk, anything from your journal about your conversation you wouldn't mind sharing?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Ratatosk, have you ever chronicled the whole story of leaving the JWs and 'joining' with discordians?  I'd love to hear it.

I haven't, but maybe I should. It might provide me with some introspective insight...