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TESTEMONAIL:  Right and Discordianism allows room for personal interpretation. You have your theories and I have mine. Unlike Christianity, Discordia allows room for ideas and opinions, and mine is well-informed and based on ancient philosophy and theology, so, my neo-Discordian friends, open your minds to my interpretation and I will open my mind to yours. That's fair enough, right? Just claiming to be discordian should mean that your mind is open and willing to learn and share ideas. You guys are fucking bashing me and your laughing at my theologies and my friends know what's up and are laughing at you and honestly this is my last shot at putting a label on my belief structure and your making me lose all hope of ever finding a ideological group I can relate to because you don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about and everything I have said is based on the founding principals of real Discordianism. Expand your mind.

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ITT: Confess your WOO!

Started by Chelagoras The Boulder, June 26, 2017, 05:00:45 AM

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Chelagoras The Boulder

One thing i've always loved about Discordianism is the ability to be your own cult leader. To define what one believes for oneself without some ass with a funny hat and a book tell you whats right and wrong. Given this freedom of course, why wouldnt one dabble in the weirder, spicier, more adventurous entrees of the philosophical buffet? i know i always have and i'm betting i'm not alone. So i've been thinking what we need here is a place to bring out our weirdest beliefs, the irrational, the superstitious, the absolute bugfuck, and talk about them without judging mocking or deciding who's imaginary friends are the best. I'll go first.

-in addition to being a Pope, I am also a Dudeist priest, because apparently one joke religion wasn't enough for me
-In addition to that, I am also a Unitarian Universalist, because it's nice to have a community of people around me who, as far as i can tell, worship The Idea of Not Being An Asshole.
-I dabble in Chaos magic and such and the reason i'm not more into it is I'm a little afraid it might a actually work.
-I also dabble in a bit of Zen buddhism, specifically listening to Alan Watts whenever i'm bored.
-I have listened to Grant Morrison describe the universe as a giant life form (like a Space baby or a giant egg) and decided fuck it, i like it, makes sense to me.
-I am you and you are me and we are all together. koo koo ka choo
"It isn't who you know, it's who you know, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do."

The Good Reverend Roger

I am a Discordian and a Subgenius, and I have Last Thursdayist leanings.

But mostly I'm a Subgenius, I think.  They understand doom.  They are no less prone to infighting and toxicity, of course, but they are less self-righteous about it.  There's no posing behind ideological bullshit, Legume hates Stutler, Nenslo hates everyone, and nobody claims to have the "moral high ground".  It's refreshing, in a way.

I frequently assume that educated people are by definition better people. 

I have become emotionally-fatigued about justice, and the fate of the world, and all of God's horrible little children.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

The Good Reverend Roger

Also

- I spent 15 years trying to be something I'm not.  I don't recommend that to anyone.
- I spent 6 years allowing myself to be destructively conditioned by an abusive person.  I also do not recommend that to anyone.
- I tried kicking monkeys into the future, which was stupid.  If you want them to accept it, you have to sell it to them.
- I haven't been to Boston for like four and a half years.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Ben Shapiro

The only constant in the multiverse is Texas.
Rock n Roll isn't for the weak that's why there's Yoga.

tyrannosaurus vex

There is a law, like a law of physics but worse, that says the universe and everything that happens inside it must take the most tedious path possible. For any given number of equally plausible explanations for any phenomenon, the most boring one will always turn out to be the correct one.

The path that leads to enlightenment also leads to sneaking around in the dark in your own house at 3 AM trying to evade phantom cops and stubbing your toe on the fucking coffee table again, and that's why nobody's interested.

What happened to the 1960s is personified by Pink Floyd: a few people that could have threatened the establishment let their art go to their heads and turned into High Definition Showcase caricatures of themselves.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Faust

Traditional follower of Esoteric Order of Dagon here, I'm just an old fashioned guy who likes a cold beer, long strolls on moonlit beaches and living in fear of the dreamer waking and the universe ceasing to be.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

The Wizard Joseph

I'm about 90% certain that multiple versions of this world exist and that the universe is entirely electrical, that is to say that "gravity" is merely the electromagnetic force operating on an unthinkable scale because mass is in fact infinite... and we and the "universe" are just charge coming off of a hyper-particle and accelerating towards another.

Also... sometimes it would seem that God responds to my prayers. This is not always a good thing like they tell you in the churches. Maybe I need to swear and cuss less, but G don't seem to mind. If anything it's better than all the "praise" spam G usually gets. G assures me that the whole gravity thing above is nothing I need worry about.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

P3nT4gR4m

I can't shake the simulation hypothesis. I don't believe it, on account of I'm physically incapable of believing anything but it does seem statistically most likely that we're in the matrix or, more precisely, we're in a Matrix within a Matrix, within a near infinite regression of matryoshka simluations.

I prefer science and technology to religion and superstition but, that said, if you really want to properly fuck with people's heads religion and superstition has the scientific method banged to rights

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Chelagoras The Boulder

I believe transhumanism is the next logical step in human evolution and, if implemented properly, has the potential to make us MORE human not less, by bypassing certain defects leftover from being cavemen, such as the monkeysphere problem. I think that in the future they'll come up with a kind of synthetic neural pathway that allows the frontal lobe to respond to stimuli at the same time as the older lizard brain parts, thus allowing our brains to respond with logic about as quickly as it does emotion.
"It isn't who you know, it's who you know, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do."

Ben Shapiro

It's not,but it will make humanity more hilarious. Class warfare with competiting human upgrades.

Cramulus

Okay, here's a few....

I'm in a Gurdjieff cult. I'm trying on the beliefs, to see how they fell. So far so good! The big stumbling block for me right now is trying to transition from a post-modern / absurdist worldview (ie, the universe is inherently meaningless, but meaning can be created) - to a modern worldview (the universe is a living organism with needs and desires, which generate a form of intrinsic meaning). Eventually I hope they will teach me the Sacred Movements that will awaken me and raise not just my own consciousness, but the universe's consciousness.

I don't believe most people have a soul, but through hard work ("conscious labor and intentional suffering"), I think you can create something like a soul within yourself.

I don't literally believe in ghosts but I used to live in a creepy old farmhouse, and haunting (or a poltergeist or something?) is the best explanation for a few of the weird things that happened there over the years.

I'm in a gray area of belief on some of the more rigorous parapsychological experiments.

I believe that Timothy Leary was able to astrally project himself out of solitary confinement. Robert Anton Wilson's account (I think it was in Quantum Psychology?) of being visited by Spirit-Leary struck me as 'not a coincidence'.

I do not practice chaos magic anymore. I do think it works, but I only buy into Peter Carroll's "Psychological model", that is, it's all in your head ("You just have no idea how big your head is" -Lon Milo DuQuette). But a few of the tricks I picked up while I did practice Chaos Magic still work 100% well for me today. Mostly, techniques I developed for focusing and centering myself.

I've had one or two "gnostic experiences", moments when the GLARING LIGHT OF TRUTH shown through the fabric of reality and I was able to see things "how they really are", from outside of myself.  Of course, you never know if that's just the demiurge, fuckin with y'all. But like Kierkegaard says... if you start hearing voices that might be God, maybe you're crazy, but you've gotta proceed anyway.

If I want to be really straight, I'm an agnostic, but also - these days I believe in God. But only by using the word God in a very specific way.. The Alpha and Omega. By God I mean the Entire Universe At Once. The whole thing. All the matter, all the space, all the shit that happens. God is the entity which produces the sound OM. So the word God is a bit misleading, because it implies a dude. I like the word Gurdjieff uses instead, "The Absolute", the totality of existence all added up with nothing left over. So maybe that's not even woo. But when somebody talks about God, I just mentally substitute A:Ω.


Chelagoras The Boulder

Quote from: Scott The Cuck on June 26, 2017, 05:55:47 PM
It's not,but it will make humanity more hilarious. Class warfare with competiting human upgrades.
Hey, if I can't live in GitS, I'll settle for Transmetropolitan.
"It isn't who you know, it's who you know, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do."

Ziegejunge

This is good. I think woo is important for a variety of reasons.

- When I was three years old, I asked my mom to teach me how to be weird. "Just be yourself," she told me. Truer words and all that...

- I believe in some version of Mythic Time, or Dreamtime (if I recall correctly, Gurdjieff called it "Heropass" in Beelzebub's Tales.) Basically, some non-chronological river of time that interacts with and sometimes bisects our Chronological Time, but which does not run exclusively parallel to it.

- I believe that human consciousness, and perhaps even other forms of consciousness, can by nature interact with both Mythic Time and Chronological Time. The idea that "we are the universe observing itself" perhaps fits this notion.

- My current hypothetical cosmological model resembles a yin-yang extrapolated outward into a sphere. My hunch is that this universal sphere "breathes," so that as the darkness expands in one pool, the light side contracts in the other pool, and vice-versa. I also suspect that human consciousness has some effect on this "breathing," but I am honest about the likelihood of this suspicion being due to anthropological conceit.

- I use the light and dark metaphor above, but only reluctantly. The older i get, the less charm said metaphor holds for me. If we were mole-people instead of monkey-people, for example, I expect we would focus a lot more on good and bad vibrations and less on light and dark. Whether or not those means would lead to a different end, who can say? I mostly just don't want to unduly demonize darkness nor sanctify light.

- To put it another way, I believe that Michael Ende's The Neverending Story (the book, not necessarily the cinematic adaptations) is a fairly robust metaphor for my hypothetical model of reality disguised as a children's book, hence adopting AURYN as my avatar here. In that story, the protagonist, Bastian, is literally transported from Chronological Time to Mythic Time because Mythic Time needs him to observe it and interact with it or else it will cease to exist, consumed by the Nothing.

     Once there, Bastian saves the day by naming the sovereign of the world and discovers hence that while in Fantastica he has the power to make his wishes into reality -- but realizes almost too late that with every wish, he loses a memory of his life in the real world and must quest for a way home at risk of compromising his very identity.

- I'm also very fond of the idea that humans are "a species with amnesia." That also fits The Neverending Story metaphor assuming that Earth is Fantastica: according to most mythological histories, we came here, starting naming shit, and began reworking reality according to our individual wills until we forgot where we originally "came from," at least in a spiritual sense.

- I'm currently very interested in learning more about shamanism and the role of spiritual leaders -- especially shamanistic ones -- with respect to society and history. Part of me can't help but wonder if there is some value to the role that Western Civilization has diminished to our collective detriment.

hooplala

I am a discordian. I also dabble in chaos magic, but I am super lazy about it and rarely do much... which is why I lean toward chaos magic, it's the one of the only systems where that sort of devotion is permissible.

My personal woo:

-I believe in demons. or rather, I believe in discarnate entities which have never held physical bodies - my beliefs in this subject are heavily influenced by the (admittedly rather sloppy) writings of John Keel
-I sort of believe in ghosts, but my personal belief is that they are some form of 'photography' or recording we do not yet understand
-I think its possible something like sasquatches exist, though I am not married to them being entirely physical
-I fully believe in multiple universes, and my theory is they are inside us, deeper and deeper down, and outside our universe going farther and farther up

There may be more I cannot recall at the moment.

BTW, I love this thread, Chelagoras. I haven't fully read everyone else's because I am at work, but will be devouring this evening.
"Soon all of us will have special names" — Professor Brian O'Blivion

"Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns." — Bob Dylan?

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman

Chelagoras The Boulder

Thanks. This has got to be one of the liveliest discussions I've seen around here in years.
"It isn't who you know, it's who you know, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do."