Brick Through the Window of the Dollhouse

[Edward Longpork]

Q: Were the discordians like Robert Aton Wilson Illuminati?

    Yes, they were good Illuminati, but they were a confused group.

    Their situation was similar to that of Aleister Crowley and the other occultists of his generation.

    Discordianism and other chaos-oriented philosophies is often a step one takes shortly after their intuition activates and they begin receiving Illumination. A person in this stage is acutely aware of how material reality is an illusion, but they have yet to understand what is behind that illusion.

    In terms of the Plato's cave analogy, they have freed themselves of the shackles and they have looked to the sunlight coming from outside the cave, but it is so powerful that it has left them in a state of existential shock. All the order they knew, all the things they thought were real, they now realize are mere shadows on the wall.

    This leads them to a state of mistrust and with it the adoption of the idea that there is no order in the cosmos at all. That behind the illusions is not intelligence but chaos.

    Chaos is indeed an aspect of nature, but it is not the sole ruling force behind all things as the discordians believe. Eventually the discordian will awaken to this fact, usually this awakening occurs once this individual begins to reconsider the ideas of trust and faith, and gives them another shot.

    When this happens, the circling and nonsense will cease and the initiate will take another step toward the light.

    As a teacher once said:
    "Its only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

    I want to pipe up from the Zen Lunatic branch of Discordia...

    Discordians have hard nips for disorder because we live in ordered times, and ordered times call for disobedient measures. But like order, it's just another tool in the bag. That's why the Chao has the golden apple of strife, but also the pentagon of keeping shit together; order is just another part of the carousel ride.

    There's a season of Bureaucracy coming. It's like an ice age, of a sort. It might have already begun, and when it comes, it's going to swallow us all. And you'll pay a processing fee.

    Discordians handle this in two different ways: Some of them are trying to prolong the current age of creativity (delaying the inevitable as long as possible). Others think that the only escape through prison planet is the path to Aftermath – they think we have to shake the rickety bridge, intensify the shitty parts of the order (memetic escalation, see the works of known and noted Discordian Stephen Colbert) until everybody gets sick of it and we replace it with something else. That's what we call Aftermath, the redemption from Bureaucracy, and that's where we're headed.

    As for Chaos - it's not disorder. It's the unknown. It's the untapped. The Ancient Greeks said "First there was Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss. Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild." FIRST, there was chaos. That's the base layer, this raw formless potential, the world as it exists before it gets felt up by thoughts and language. The parts of it we "get" we call order, and the parts of it we don't "get" we call disorder.

    Your brain builds this model, this little dollhouse of what you think the world is and how you think it works. And everything that comes in through your senses gets passed through this sorting engine that labels it and associates it and creates a model of it in your head and sits it down in the dollhouse. And for a lot of your life, you're in the dollhouse. It's a black iron prison of your own automatic reactions and choices and associations.

    So the zen-Discordian obsession with Chaos is not like a defiant brick through a window (not any more than disillusionment or ecstasy is a brick through the windows of the dollhouse). It's aimed at something kind of like satori, kind of like an a-hah, but feels like you are pissing yourself laughing.

[LMNO]

Good essay. Thanks!