Have You Ever Had an Epiphany of the Absurd?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

So yeah...I looked into the  Chapel Perilous thing a bit more and I agree, it's very similar to what I'm talking about. But ,not surprisingly, I'm still more fond of my own terminology. But maybe that's because the experience isn't over yet. Wilson mentioned that one leaves Chapel Perilous with the help of some sort of "ally" and "then after that for the rest of your life you've got this question: Was that ally a supernatural helper, or was it just part of my own mind trying to save me from going totally bonkers with this stuff?"

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For Wilson that was true. For others, the experience differs. There are a number of ways to exit Chapel Perilous... and OFTEN it includes something which the person experiencing it experiences as an external 'helper'. But this isn't always the case... in fact, Wilson argues that the 'helper' aspect is probably heavily based on the archetypes and symbols most recognizable to the individual experiencing it. In our modern almost wholly materialistic world, that 'help' may establish itself as something completely different than it has in the past, since we've done a bang up job of knocking down all of our idols and all of our supernatural stories (Joesph Campbell would be so disappointed).

The most important aspect of Chapel Perilous is that it changes your worldview completely... whatever that worldview is.

Either we get the wide-eyed "But then we can't know nothin no way!!!" ( the poor pseudo skeptic who did not successfully escape Chapel Perilous and instead was eaten by St. Toad);
or the "That way was wrong, this way must be 100% right" (the poor fool who ran back out the front door convinced he found THE TRUTH rather than just exposing the lie in his own worldview);
or the "I have no idea what is going on anymore" response (those people are still wandering around inside the chapel and haven't found their way out);
or "But MY PREACHER SAYS!!!!" (which are the poor sods that are standing at the front door of the chapel and simply fail to realize it);
or those few that come out skeptical, agnostic and are able to cope with it "I may not know what's going on, but I have some ideas and if they get proven wrong, I'll go get  some more" (the people that actually get the fuck out of the chapel in one piece).

[dontblameyoko]

Absurdism, to me, is a huge relief. Every single hour of the day, people are trying to cram narratives and meaning down our throats with a funnel. Christ, you can't even buy coffee without someone force feeding you some eco-green story about how your actions as an individual are relevant to the world theater. Fuck that noise! I make up my own holidays, and I vote by die roll.

PD is full of absurdists, they're just pragmatic about it. Sometimes you have to pick up some meaning and run with it. Fully embracing absurdism is kind of like throwing away all your goals. Sure, you'll never be disappointed, you'll never fail at anything, but you'll also never "get anywhere". We wouldn't be able to communicate if we weren't willing to take each other somewhat seriously.


Anyway, I had an event like what you're talking about, I think. It was in 2005 or 2006. I was living in the OBNOXIOUS JERK CABAL cabalhouse, which was like a year long experiment in how to become as insane as possible. I did meet eris, I badly embarrassed myself, and I lost about three weeks of memory. (other guests at the party would recount a story about me emerging from a closet naked, covered in strange glyphs, shouting stuff like "Avert thine eyes! Your plebeian eyes are unfit to view this body of Adonis!") In the end, I did not successfully cast off all meaning and reinvent myself as some kind of psychic superhero. Well I did, but only as long as I stayed inside my apartment. Even after I came down, it was difficult to make reality checks. So I think there are dangers to absurdism - discarding other people's realities can be really disorienting!

In the end, I've found pragmatism to be a bit more effective way to crowbar reality.

What Cram said.

Also there are big-A Absurdists and little-a absurdists.

I had a shared epiphany of absurdity with my friend Pete (who is my permanent fiance... we have plans to run away to Mexico and start an emu farm someday) about eleven years ago. We basically lost our minds together over the course of several weeks (possibly months), had a bunch of shared hallucinations, and were permanently changed. She called me up one day in the middle of doing her calculus homework and informed me that the formula for calculating the volume of a cone proves the absurd nature of the universe, explained why, and then explained why :cone: is actually the fundamental formula for the universe itself. I wish I still had that message because it all made perfect sense.

Yet, like all religious experiences, is completely meaningless and even ridiculous to anyone who did not have that experience.

Is that why your avatar is a traffic cone?