Rant # 9: The Aftermath

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant # 9: The Aftermath; fecal odors?

?¨Ladies, gentlemen, monkeys, and squirrels,
We are crawling in fecal matter up to our ears.?Æ
--The White Mouse

Lately, at least in the latter part of the Season of Bureaucracy, I was growing more despondent and discordant in my speech and thought patterns. I even allowed myself to indulge in a violent description of our society and its values.(Constipated symptoms of the paper shortages, no doubt.) That has passed because I have had an important, startling, elementary, and silly realization that what the White Mouse says is true. We are the Aftermath of fecal matter?ñeverything alive now is the aftermath of fecal matter. Without feces and decay we would have no dirt?ñwithout the dirt, no plants could thrive?ñwithout the plants thriving?ñnothing to eat and thus, we wouldn??t be able to be here.

It takes shit to make a garden. It takes a copious amount of mental bullshit to grow a mental garden of creativity. Anyone who does not recognize this fact is ignorant of the basic processes of life and creation. We need decay and destruction. We need the dissolution of concoctions, compositions and conditions in order to have the arising of new concoctions, compositions and conditions. In fact, my categorizations of such impermanence are only just mental concepts to separate and explain that impermanence. There is no real difference between creation and destruction. Everything is co-dependently arising from and within everything else. All is chaos, including order.

This is not the first time this realization has been reached by me, but it is probably the first time I have decided to let the truth of it sink in. And I share it with you all so that you may too let it sink in. We are crawling in shit. Our minds are streaming in shit. We are dirty, dusty, and fecal. We are the impressions or the ashes of all that has come before us and we in turn will make up impressions or the ashes of those who will come after us.

Erisians like to proclaim themselves free. Free from who, what and where? Free to do what, who, and how? The first steps involve taking the shit you currently find yourselves surrounded by and use it to fertilize your imaginations. Turn that pineal gland on. (It helps to sometimes turn off the TVs.) Don??t worry about using all the shit. There is always a plentiful supply. It is nature??s way.

Mentally, the majority of ego is really just the shit left over from previous experiences and memories that we have organized into a nice little story we call personality and lifespan. But existence is really much more than that. Growing a mental garden out of the shit we have in our minds is really a process of getting ourselves dirty and recognizing that without the shit we could have no hope of illumination, enlightenment, freedom, creativity, nirvana, or what-have-you.  Instead of just trying to cover up the shit with some cool academic sounding erudition, we need to accept it and knead it into the ground of our existence so that we can grow all the nice little things of brilliance we wish to have. There is no escape from who we are. But there is much more to who we are than any of us could ever think or imagine. We can come to this realization only by accepting the fact that there is shit. We have shit. And that all of our shit smells?ñand not like roses, my friends. True toilet training for the mind does not involve just trying to flush out the shit like some sort of New Age enema.

True toilet training of the mind involves the art of gardening?ñ composting the shit and the garbage, whether self-generated or inflicted upon us by others, and making a decent fertile soil upon which to grow ourselves. The fluffy bunny New Age types will tell you that what is needed is a cleansing, but then proceed to say that our shit does not, in fact, stink. However, take a good mental whiff. It does stink. And it stinks for a reason. That reason is to let us know that it is shit. Simple, huh? Cleansing means nothing really, at least not in the New Age context. Cleansing is what you do with your body in a shower or bath. You don??t cleanse your mind. Why would you want to do such a thing? Isn??t that called ?´brain-washing?? in common parlance? What you do with your mind is compost the shit. If you try to fling away the shit, it will only come back to you in some more disgusting form at a later date, probably most inconvenient to you. And flinging away mental shit is about as absurd as eating your own physical shit. Put the shit in the ground and grow up. Realize where you are at this moment.

My friends, today is Pungenday and the first day of the Season of Aftermath. Let us reflect on what it means.




Originally written on Pungenday, Aftermath 1st, 3169 (Monday, October 20th, 2003?ñfor you sillies)

[Trollax]

Hugh,
The mind is a prison for the heart, thatt relies on (as you say) shit. The logogram coats the biogram and stifles it... unless we use our real minds... our ordinary mind (not the septic tank of self-aggrandizement that we call mind) to garden.
The heart is not fragile, and it is not delicate, it is real and robust and unstoppable. But the mind is delicate and fragile, it demands to be coddled and protected and isolated from others because it cannot grasp the idea of real synthesis, where 2+2=5. This involves the formation of a new self... a self that consists of two people moving around in a space defined as 'us.' Not "you," "me," and "me and you" but a personal space where there is enough space for people to move around in as individuals and together. That's called sharing, something we don't get because we're drowning in shit instead of swimming in it... but it's us who's deliberately choking and swallowing.

[Slarti]

Rant # 9: The Aftermath; fecal odors?

Erisians like to proclaim themselves free. Free from who, what and where? Free to do what, who, and how? The first steps involve taking the shit you currently find yourselves surrounded by and use it to fertilize your imaginations. Turn that pineal gland on. (It helps to sometimes turn off the TVs.) Don??t worry about using all the shit. There is always a plentiful supply. It is nature??s way.

I never thought of it like that- i was always just thinking 'block out the bullshit, block out the bullshit....' , i had always assumed that the only bullshit that would 'make the flowers grow' was from discordian sources. it hadn't occured to me to use the nondiscordian bullshit...

cool perspective, and nice rant!

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Thank you!
We can claim all shit as bullshit fodder stuff to be used in our lovely Discordian gardens.
The heart/mind is the same, if we really admit it. And neither aspect is fragile, except for the parts we choose to make fragile.

[B23.77]

People tend to end up as compost.  Maybe, as Hugh said, the mind, heart/soul, and body are no different... immortally.  The mind, will, soul, and body are one entity.  I liked Hugh's rant.

[B23.77]

And what do we grow out of the shiznit?  I'm growing myself immortally, and maybe some mortal fruits and veggies so that I don't get bored with eternity.

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Don't forget to grow flowers for giving to sexual partners. And there has to be a way of making gunpowder out of methane, right?