Attn: Cram

[Pæs]

Dear Cram,

The package you sent me arrived today.
I must admit, it wasn't what I was expecting it would be.
I thought I was waiting for the delivery of a new Correct Answer Machine from you, so I could replace my current one and become a Discordian, as you are. I'm not sure that this is what I wanted at all. For one thing, it doesn't look anything like the others I've used. In the past when I have changed mine, the new one came in a box with foam packaging, wrapped tightly in plastic. Once unpacked, you pull the tab out to connect the temporary batteries and it springs to life. It's a small mechanical spider, with slender metallic legs. They usually have a port on the back for updates and a needle on the front. The little thing sits neatly on the palm of your hand for a few moments before running up your arm, shoulder, around to the back of your neck and resting there. The old Answer Machine falls to the floor, its legs curling in towards its body, disconnected from its power source. You have to give the new Correct Answer Machine up to two weeks to work, depending on how dramatically it differs from the previous one and how effectively the previous one was working before being replaced. When they get old, they stop being able to answer questions as quickly and its easier for a new machine to take over.

Your machine, though, was something different entirely. It doesn't look anything like a spider, but I thought perhaps that was just a modification you made for its case. It looked like an apple, painted gold. There was a little circular window in it, showing that in the center was a dice with pentagonal faces, suspended in a dark liquid. It reminded me of a magic eight ball, so I shook it and looked through the window. The words on the dice slowly became clear. "Eat me."

I didn't think I had any reason to doubt it. I just took a bite without thinking. I only took a small bite, but the liquid inside must have been pressurised because it all burst through into my mouth and I had to swallow it. It tasted like cough syrup. I thought it must have worked, because the old version fell off the back of my head and died. I was worried, so I used one of the calibration kits that came with the previous machine. I knew it would work fast because, like I told you earlier, I'm quite random, so it didn't have too much to change, but I didn't actually think it would be that quick. One of the questions is "What do you think about child labour."

Now here's the part that has me worried. And I'm starting to wonder if this package came from you at all. Previously I would have been supplied with an immediate answer. Something binary and easy to understand. "Child labour is bad" or "child labour is good". This new thing didn't do that, but it already over-wrote the answer from the old one. Instead of an answer, this Discordian Answer Machine repeated the question, over and over again, getting louder and louder. "What do you think of child labour?" It stressed different words each time.
"What do YOU think of child labour?"
"What do you think of CHILD labour?"
"what do you THINK of child labour?"
And it interrupted itself, and spoke over itself, until all that I could pick up was "what do you think what do you think what do you think" and it hasn't stopped, even as I am writing this, chanting away in the back of my mind. And the sweet liquid from the apple has unsettled my stomach, so it feels as if I am going to vomit.
And I want to scream and I want to cry and all the while there's a tickle at the back of my head where the Correct Answer Machine used to be and it makes me want to giggle all the while and what do you think what do you think what do you think?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ooooh I like this!

[Triple Zero]

[LMNO]

Farka comes out swinging!

[Cramulus]

WARNING - LONG POST AHEAD


Dearest Farka Zarka,

I might have mailed you one of those things.

I don't know. It's been such a blur. And I'm sorry if this letter doesn't address your confusion, but it's important that I get this stuff down on paper.

I've been on this gnostic kick. It all started when everything turned to bullshit. Let me give you the order of events, maybe it'll help me sort things out.


-First there was Moosemas, which was great. We had like 30 people at my house. One of them was Cainad. As a Moosemas gift, he gave me a pair of diabetic socks. This was a joke because we all know DIABETICS ARE ASSHOLES.
-Then there was Christmas, which was bullshit.
-Then, a few days before New Years, I tried on these wretched socks. This was a mistake. Within 48 hours:
-My girlfriend dumped me. One of the ferrets died. My grandpa went into critical condition. My childhood cat died. 5 gigantic tumors were found on the other ferrets body. My best friend's relationship is in the shitter too.

This should have been a horrible week. But something odd happened, it WASN'T a horrible week. I kept going on adventures and laughing. Instead of falling to the ground in a worthless heap, I bounced really hard.

And that in itself sort of disconcerted me, because when it becomes total bullshit, it's supposed to fuck you up. Everybody was giving me all this sympathy, and I appreciated it, but I wasn't miserable. Maybe I'm misaligned? Maybe my hilarious metabelief system has insulated me from real emotions and I'm on some far plane, disconnected from reality. My grandpa kicked it two days ago and I AM sad about it, but not as sad as people think I should be I guess. There is a note of guilt about it.

It's like somebody pulled a Death card on my house. But the Death card, it really means CHANGE, see?

So I started digging. I started searching again for ways to ignite myself. Started trying to knock over some of the pillars I've built. Time to build myself a new Black Iron Prison.


I happened upon the Gospel of Thomas. I never would have guessed that inspiration would come from a Christian text, but this one is apocryphal, buried and hidden by the church. It's really kind of amazing. It was only rediscovered in the 40s. It's written by Doubting Thomas, the guy who couldn't believe that Jesus came back from the dead. In his Gospel, Jesus is just a regular dude with no super powers. Thomas thinks that Jesus was a human who had this personal, internal experience and it changed him into a divine being. And he thinks Jesus wasn't even that special, we can all have that experience. In Thomas, Jesus warns that religion and orthodoxy actually DISTRACT you from the epiphany. They make you think religion is something specific - something that it was never meant to be.

The Gnostic tradition is a quesadilla of different religious practices from Pythagoras to Buddha to Jesus. One of the things I've never liked about them is that they have this distinction between matter and spirit. They think that the world we live in is bullshit, it's just a distraction from the spiritual world. It wasn't created by somebody who is omnibenevolent, it was created by a regular flawed creature like you and me. The architect of our world has the breath of god, but he's not perfect. In fact, in certain ways he's totally incompetent. What actually makes him dangerous is that he THINKS he is benevolent. He THINKS he's creating a perfect world, but the truth is that we all have to live in bullshit.

The gnostics posit these things called Archons, these custodians of reality. They think that certain parts of the universe are guarded by these beings. And I never liked the idea of reality being generated from the top down, I usually think it gets generated from the bottom up, but as I was watching the Powers that Be perform a holy rite which transubstantiates Julian Assange from a journalist into a terrorist, something clicked. The Gnostics don't think the Archons are perfect either, they are also petty, flawed, territorial fucks, just like human beings. They operate in a world above ours. And what clicked is that Archons DO exist, it's just that they're not spiritual beings, they're made of flesh and matter like you and me. Right now they have names like Tim Geitner, Julian Assange, Rush Limbaugh. I'm not talking about silly little pundits, I'm talking about the keystone players who affect ALL of our lives in some small way.

So let's accept for a second that there are these Higher Powers who generate the meaning of our universe. And like us, they have the breath of god, but they're trapped in these bodies which have their own drives and desires and motivations, and that compromises the spirit. The meaning in our universe is generated by regular fucking humans, assholes who are worried about their retirement homes in the Keys and not at all connected to what it's like when you take $20 out of the ATM and it feels like you just lost another few millimeters off your penis.

Aristotle posited a world of Forms, a heaven hidden behind this world where ideas exist before they appear in the material world. He told us that in this heaven, there are only Perfect Forms, the Absolute, there are no gray areas or flaws, everything is as it should be. If you go there and see an apple, it is not just an apple. It is the Idea-of-an-Apple-Which-is-present-in-All-Apples. You are looking at THE Apple. I always hated that shit because I want to believe the world is how it should be. We haven't fallen from grace, this IS nature, we ARE natural.  This Is It. Fuck It. It Is What It Is.

But the way these ideas came through the filter in early January 2011 -- actually Mungday of 3177 -- the gnostics spoke to me. Jesus spoke to me. He spoke through this painting:



and the thing is ----- this isn't a painting of Jesus. It's a painting of Cesare Borgia. Borgia was an egomaniac in the high renaissance. It's possible that our image of Jesus is actually based off of him. There were images of Jesus before Cesare, but due to his influence, Jesus' Cesare-like features became accented over time. Today, we think it's Jesus but it might just be this power mad ruler of rome. He sits in heaven now, one of the Archons I talked about earlier.

And doesn't that just sum it up? Jesus, the major touchstone for most people in America, has gotten wrapped up into this European power trip. He generates the universe's meaning for so many people, but he himself is not perfect. He is not a part of Aristotle's world of Forms and Perfection. He is a flawed human being like all of us. He covets, he masturbates, he doubts himself, he acts out of fear, and he's running the whole fucking show!

SLAY the fucking Archons, man. The Gospel of Thomas suggests that we can ALL be those goddamn archons. We can't be the archons for everybody, but at least we can be the archons of our own world. Meaning -- whatever it is -- is inherently flawed because it's generated by both the perfect breath of god, and disgusting flesh, ruled by moment-to-moment impulses and the tragic human condition.

What I like about this worldview I've concocted is that it offers a direction for us. It suggests that the higher tiers of heaven, the platforms upon which reality is built, are accessible to us. But in order to ascend, we have to get beyond the bullshit meaning generated by the people we want to replace. There are people having conversations like you and me, and those conversations are steering the economy, politics, they are FORMING THE FUTURE. In memetic talk, we're referring to a network of communication nodes which most of us don't have access to, and those nodes influence how other nodes communicate.

They're outside of our world. Do you think Barack Obama and George Bush really believe in good or evil? Those words are for us plebs, us sad flesh at the bottom tier. They use an entirely different currency on their plane. Their world is dictated by the rules of influence and flexibility, not morality. The meaning in our day to day lives is nothing more than one of their toys.

I've only been able to access two or three planes so far. The first is the material world, the chair I'm sitting in right now. The second is the world of ideas and impressions. It is the domain of the limbic system and the monkey brain. I can access only a little bit of it at a time, I do it through posters and word of mouth. And I've gotten a glimpse of the plane two planes above that, the one where Eris sits and pulls me towards the strangeness. Her ideas filter down into the material world and become the shit we talk about here on the board. But they have to get mangled by reality filters first, they have to get spun by the Archons of our world.


That's why I didn't send you the Correct Idea Machine, Zarca. Don't get me wrong, I want you to agree with me, but I want you to find the divine spark yourself, and if I tell you where to find it, it'll distract you. It won't be the breath of God, it'll be MY breath, the second hand smoke of God. Siddhartha had say fuck off to his teachers, he had to go walk the Path of Paths himself. And when he got back, he was Jesus and he trashed the temples, flipping over tables and starting fires that would last a thousand years.





I'm going to stay in this headspace for another few weeks before I return to my brand of militant subjectivity.


Yours in me,

Cramulus

[LMNO]

Whoa.


Pretty good field report, Cram.  Keep us posted.


Hey, did you get my PMs?

[Cramulus]

Hey, did you get my PMs?

yes, sorry for not getting back to you

I am still sans computer

which means the Chao te Ching is still sans layout

[LMNO]

ITT, Cramulous makes posts with mind bullets.

[Cramulus]

as long as I'm yammering about the Gospel of Thomas, I'd like to share a few relevant Jesus quotes



and before I do that, can I just say that I have completely disoriented myself by coming here to post Jesus quotes?



Here's my favorite lines from the Gospel of Thomas:


2. Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed."


6. His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?"

Jesus said, "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate."


14. "...What goes into your mouth will not defile you; rather, it's what comes out of your mouth that will defile you."


16. Jesus said, "Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war.

For there will be five in a house: there'll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone."

[Cramulus]

Gnostic Discordianism
(early draft, feedback welcome)
also partially a riff on the Tripartate Tractate

this needs a lot of work, I'm posting it before it's ready, I'm aware of that.




We live in a material universe. Everything we think, say, do, experience, is a product of a physical process that can be known and understood.

"Life" is a relationship between different forms of information. ((in this way, individuals, religions, corporations, groups of friends, ideologies, are all very much living beings, just at different scales of magnification))

A long time ago, in the primordial sea, matter happened to collide** in a way which initiated a "self perpetuating" physical process. Primeval DNA. Over the course of millions of years, this process has perpetuated its survival through reproduction and mutation. The well adapted forms survived, producing more mutant offspring. The material universe plays the destructive role, culling creations that aren't adapted to it.

In this way, the primordial entity, that first strand of DNA, is present in all of us. It has developed sensory and cognitive apparatus so it can better understand the world. It is still trying to figure out the universe. Each expression of this common spirit believes itself to be distinct, an individual, perhaps an ego. It accomplishes the macrocosmic goals by pursuing microcosmic needs. Things like writing and architecture are advanced DNA, they are ways of passing information and relationships from one generation to the next. Our drive to survive, to reproduce, to create something lasting, is an expression of the overmind, the common spirit which unites all of us.


The Tripartate Nature of Humanity

The individual expression of the common spirit is called the soul. Souls are part of the common spirit in the same way that cells are part of the body. They are all united, acting towards the same end, even if they perceive themselves to be distinct.

The body is just meat. Unknowing. A machine. A vessel. A collection of cells and tissue.

The soul (or mind) pilots the body, generally unaware of the spirit sleeping in all of us. A collection of ideas and beliefs. The soul (or mind) and the ego (or self) are one and the same.

The spirit (or overmind) pilots the soul, guiding it towards the light, out of illusion and into truth.


This is the tricky part.

The material world is blind and unknowing, an idiot god that we live inside. The idiot god thinks that he is the only god. The shadow thinks it is the light. The lie thinks it is the truth. And this material world is arranged based on material assumptions like territory and ego. It is curated by archons, creatures of policy and media which form consensus from a high level. Their goal is to divide us and distract us from the spiritual truth of unity.

The idea of survival through disruption and mutation, through creativity, through a transcendence of the mortal world, is personified in a being we call Eris. She is the substance from which our scientists and musicians weave patterns.





The soul forgets about the spirit. The soul thinks it is all there is. This is the ego trap.

Eris inadvertently created Jehovah, the god of the material world who champions the false conflict of good and evil, a distraction from the real conflict of unity and isolation.

The material world is full of pleasures that the soul wants. Pleasure keeps us in our egos, in our bodies, in our tiny little microscopic ideas of what life is. The whole heaven myth that the Abrahamic religions lay out is a trap - it tells us that if we attend the soul, the soul will be rewarded. It tells us the soul is all there is. It tells us that there is an evil shadow in the universe which opposes the soul, which we must defeat. It does not tell us the shadow is merely the part of the spirit which is furthest away from the source, because it does not know this. The material world is real, but it is a distraction.

Beyond pleasure there is ecstacy. Ecstacy is the soul's experience of the spirit. This is the true source, true pleasure, death of ego, transcendence of self and other. Material pleasures are just trying to simulate ecstacy, they're a bad copy of it. Some of them have paths to ecstacy, but those paths are tricky, fraught with other traps and distractions that will keep the soul anchored in the material world.






ahhh wait I have to stop telling you the truth, I'm at work. Fuck it, gotta go make the benjamins. Back into the distraction. More iterations on this concept later

[DumbShit]

I apologise in advance for the wad of text. I also would like to say that I will almost certainly have been unable to articulate what I mean and misrepresented myself. Unfortunately the only way I can learn is by wasting other peoples precious time after saying a bunch of shit I didn't mean.

Cramulus, not sure if this is my place or not, but a lot of what you are speaking about I have been grappling with for quite some time and in many respects you have been able to articulate some concepts far better than I. I just thought I would take the time to outline some of my personal theology here to interested or uninterested ears as it overlaps in some crucial aspects with yours, but at the same differs in some core areas.

Tl;dr An attempt to outline some poorly formulated, unoriginal ideas because I cannot make sense of them in my own god damned head and hope to make sense of them here.

Let me begin by saying that my beliefs are based on the irrational assumption that there is a God. If there is no God I would be a nihilist or at the very least an existentialist. So, the first question is clearly who is God? Well God is a limitless, infinite being, totally inconceivable. As God is limitless, God can of course become limited if He so wills or unwills. Now that we have this God guy figured out, the next question is who are we? Now unfortunately I haven't quite figured that out. If we have God's divine spark within us, we are essentially God and this proposition I think is far too arrogant. On the other hand, if we are separate or different to God, then there exists in existence at least two beings, one of whom is infinite and limitless, the others who are limited and finite, and then the question is why we should give a fuck about this God guy anyway? If we are separate to God, then there is no reason to suggest we give two shits about him other than the fact He is clearly a bad ass mother fucker. So I somehow suggest that we exist not as God, and not separate from God but somewhere in between. Two possibilities I like to think of are that either we are the potential creation of God which He has not actually acted upon yet (i.e. We do not actually exist in the true sense of the word but are rather a potential like an electron particle) or we are the product of God's unwilled creation (how this avoids my previous protests about God becoming irrelevant I have no idea).

For the sake of ease let's assume that the latter is what occurred, that is, we are the unwilled creation of God. Now this is what the Gnostics would call the demiurge. The demiurge, now separate from God, blindly convinces itself that it is in fact God. The demiurge is every aspect of the material and immaterial, the demiurge is everything that is not God.

Cramulus, we come to now the first point in which we disagree. I do not believe that we need worry about Archons, or that there is in fact a hierarchy of planes. The demiurge is monistic, it is the Shiva of the Aghora monks, it is the philosophy spoken of in the Principia. It does not matter whether or not we are fed on other peoples bullshit or eat our own, this is only a matter of personal preference. We are all already archons, we are all already Shiva.

Now as for the triple nature of humanity I 2/3rds completely agree. The desires of the material are no less disastrous than the desires of the ego as both of these are simply Shiva. The only aspect which I am uncertain about is whether or not we actually have a spirit. Perhaps we do, perhaps we are hollow.

To elaborate on the desires of the ego: they of course manifest themselves as morality. As Cramulus pointed out good and evil are irrelevant concepts. The way I like to think about is that both good and evil are idols which have diverted out minds from God. Being compassionate will not lead you closer to God because all you are doing is participating in idol worship, you are either worshipping compassion, worshipping the person you are being compassionate to, or secretly worshipping yourself. As such all forms of duality are diversions from God, as well as being in many respects illusions.

Now we come to the big point of disagreement. I do not believe we can lead ourselves to Theosis. I strongly believe that this requires divine grace. For to unite with God would require an ability to look outside of the demiurge, in a sense to somehow escape from ourselves. We cannot however see our own eye balls, we cannot outrun our legs, even if someone gave us a mirror to look at our own eyes with, we would be looking at them through lying eyes. We can however reach the conclusion that we have eyes, that we have legs, or in theological terms, we can realise the monistic nature of the blind idiot God Azathoth in which we live, for this is simply a recognition of what is. The ways of such enlightenment are numerous, Eris herself posits a method. At least with Eris' all you need to do is laugh instead of smear your naked body with cremated ashes.  From this perspective? Who knows where to go, I haven't got there yet.

Also, I believe non-orthodox and sacrilege to be equally as distracting as orthodoxy and religiosity. I believe that this was the core component of Jesus' love thy enemy shit, as long as we do not love, or laugh at every single aspect of creation, we perpetuate duality and divert our attention from the Divine. The 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' message? Well I didn't think we were to love ourselves at all, in fact I could have sworn that bordered on pride...Don't love each other or thyself, love god, and laugh at everything else (lets forget 1 John for the moment...). 

PS Siddhartha is dope. Herman's Hermits most certainly had a hole in his head.

[minuspace]

I like Trimorphic instead of Tripartite, the latter is too masculine.  (posting here because clearly Ennoia wants me to remember tomorrow, how I found this today)

[it's tomorrow now]

So far it looks like the basic categories are body/soul/spirit.

Do you (directly) associate the soul with mind?

If so, is it the faculty that runs through experience, keeping it all together, rather like transcendental apperception, the subjective synthesis of perception such that THIS particular manifold becomes something that, against all reason, concerns me?

[now it's the FUTURE'S future]

Given how the Soul can recollect itself, what do you reckon it can contemplate to "remember" the ecstasy of Spirit?