The Sacred Chao Te Ching

[Requia ☣]

71 I really like as it is.  That makes it a bit hard to do better.

for 81 I'm looking through the other 80 chapters for anything that wasn't covered.

[LMNO]

71 is fine for me. 78, however, seems a mess.

[Cramulus]

71 is fine for me. 78, however, seems a mess.

I will concede on 71 - basically my feeling was that we were saying the same thing that the Tao Te Ching says in 71, but I felt the TTC said it better.


LMNO, you said you liked 78 on the last page - was it the other two lines I added?


and now we have like 3 or 4 versions of 79! ahhh what to do? 

[LMNO]

Ah, fuck.  I can't remember back that far.


Right now, I'm proofing the thing.  I'll get back into creative mode when I'm done there.

[LMNO]

Can someone talk me through the last two lines of chapter 70?

[Cramulus]

Can someone talk me through the last two lines of chapter 70?

Code Select Expand

Chapter 70

There’s nothing to understand
so don’t bother trying.
The mind looks for order,
the body understands the disorder.

These teachings are bullshit,
no meaning at all.

If you want to know any little thing,
try breaking your heart first.

no, I actually have no idea what that means 
that couplet is leftover from honey.

I think it's been left in because it's evocative, though I haven't really thought about it too hard.


the more I look at this chapter, the more I think it needs improvement. I'm not following the mind=order body=disorder thing?

and "nothing has meaning" isn't very chaolike.

[LMNO]

Here are the points I get out of it.

The mind is the pattern-maker, but the body just is.  Yeah, that's cartesian duality, but this could be a "pragmatic v idealistic" thing here.

"these teachings are bullshit" is nice and self-deprecating.

Breaking your heart can be a way of seeing things from a new perspective.

[Cramulus]

Hmm, I had only thought about the heart break in terms of a romantic relationship - But I do like the image of a heartbreak as losing something that you were attached to. But must there be sadness? Very interesting.

as for the "pragmatic v idealistic" bit - I think we lose the message in the metaphor

"these teachings are bullshit" - I just have a bit of an allergy to this motion because of some pineal discordians I've been hanging around. They're all obsessed with destroying meaning, and I'm trying to tell them, that's just one half of the coin, man!


so I like the heartbreak image, but if we keep it, I think we need to define it a little better. I don't think the rest of the chapter says anything useful we haven't said elsewhere.



Unrelated ---- posting this for posterity:

LMNO and I had a mini-safari to a Taoist forum where we tried to get some CTC feedback. What resulted was five pages of . So far the only comment which seems to actually be ABOUT the Chao Te Ching is this one, from fivenoteplusseven:

Thinking about my recent exposure to Discordian thought, it seems as though it could use brasher satire, and more reverse psychology. I haven't read that much though. The Chao De Ching could use more absurdity instead of trying to mirror the original TTC and I think it would be a better read.

Just my thoughts on it, as you asked originally. It did make me think, so that is a good thing.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I think the commenter made some good points. I've stopped work on the Erisesiastes because I felt it just read like a slight variation of the original :-/ I think some reverse psychology might help my block there a lot

[LMNO]

Uh oh.  We've tried to be funny about this kind of stuff in the past.

I know that I don't have that skill, at all.

[Cramulus]

There are a few places where we've done okay.

Personally, I think chapter 6 is pretty funny



chapters 6 and 9 both reference hip hop wisdom, which seems pretty absurd if this book is in the spirit of the TTC


I do agree that some more humor would probably help this resonate with people emotionally.

We talk about humor a lot (see chapter 51 for example), but we don't actually use a lot of it.


and man - we talk about Order and Disorder a lot. That's fine, because it's kind of important to the Chao, but it does start to repeat itself quite a bit.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Uh oh.  We've tried to be funny about this kind of stuff in the past.

I know that I don't have that skill, at all.

You sell yourself short. You don't tend to produce pineal funny... but I've seen the funny get squeezed out of your fingertips in the past.

Also, 'absurd' isn't always 'HA HA'. You're one of the masters of horrormirth.

[LMNO]

Well, if you guys want to add some absurdity, that's cool.  It's all (k), so do what you got to do.

But if it's ok, I may save a copy of this current version and go my own way for a bit.

It's not that I don't like humor, I'm just no good at it when it's non-situational.

Also, I'm a SERIOUS GUY.  SRSLY.

[Cramulus]

Well, if you guys want to add some absurdity, that's cool.  It's all (k), so do what you got to do.

But if it's ok, I may save a copy of this current version and go my own way for a bit.

It's not that I don't like humor, I'm just no good at it when it's non-situational.

Also, I'm a SERIOUS GUY.  SRSLY.

can I ask why you want to go your own way? is it that you don't think you can write humor, you don't think the CTC needs humor? I know you're iffy on the Tupac line

I do think we should hold off and make sure we have 81 chapters we like before we go through and start adding chuckles to it.


I wonder what editorial process we should adapt for endgame. In some ways, we're very close to finished. But in the end, we have 81 small things we've been working on very closely, and haven't spent a lot of time looking at this project broadly--- identifying where we get redundant, what we're missing, whatever. In the beginning I kind of assumed that if we absorbed the spirit of a TTC chapter and adapted it to our purposes, we'd cover all the bases. But as we've learned, Discordia has some different teachings than Taoism, and there are probably holes.

[LMNO]

I don't mean this as a flounce, first of all.

I feel that stand-alone humor (i.e. humor out of context) is extremely difficult, and I suck at it.  In addition, humor is extremely subjective, and what one person finds amusing, another person doesn't.  I never thought the CTC could cover all of the bases, but I am starting to grasp that the one-to-one retellings might get repetitive.  It may need to branch out in new ways, and we may need to re-brainstorm.

I'm just saying that if you guys feel the need to insert a bunch of jokes into this, I'm not your man, and I may come up with chapters that cover other Discordian aspects, instead.