Principia Discordia

Also known as BIP dumpster diving. 

ARCHITECTURE.

DJRubberducky:  From what I can tell, the exterior walls of the BIP are put in place by our existence as humans.  As it has been said before in other treatises, our perceptions are limited by the relatively narrow ranges of our physical senses, and by the fact that our brains can only process so much information at a given time.  Even when we try to expand our sensory ranges by building and using mechanical devices, it's very difficult for us to observe both those expanded ranges and our "natural" ranges - we have to focus our attention on what's under the microscope and can't necessarily notice the fire that just caught in the far corner of the laboratory.  This is why we can never fully escape the Black Iron Prison - we either don't have the sensory perception, or we don't have the mental processing power, and if we try to expand both at once, we end up frying our brains with data overload.  None can look upon the face of God and live.

However, the BIP is chock full of interior walls, and we can smash those to our heart's content because we're the ones who put them there, or who allowed them to be put there (which is almost the same thing).  Smashing those walls doesn't change the fact that we're in prison, but it gives us a little more wiggle room.

One of the troubles in wall-smashing, though, is that many of us knock down a wall, then take those bricks and use them to build a new and different wall.  I actually had that revelation back in high school, but only in a very specific sense - I was complaining about how so many guitarists wanted to sound like Jimi Hendrix because "he was so innovative".  That idea just totally boggled my mind.  They admired Hendrix for being innovative, so they were going to very diligently copy everything he had already done, and think they were somehow better for it.  Hendrix had smashed a wall, and these kids were very meticulously picking up the bricks and building a new one - but it was okay because this was a Hendrix wall and therefore cooler than the other walls out there!

On the other hand, is it bad to rebuild walls in new and different places?  If you knock down too many walls without rebuilding at least one or two somewhere else, do you risk collapsing the ceiling on yourself and going completely mad?  (If you want to argue whether or not going mad is a bad thing, let's do that elsewhere.)  And is it somehow less offensive to live with walls that you have built, since you chose to have them there and you will probably remain aware of their existence?  I tend to think it is - if a girl who grows up reaping all the benefits of gender equality who *chooses* to be a stay-at-home mom when she grows up is (in my opinion) better off than a girl who grew up never knowing that she didn't have to do that if she didn't want to.

SillyCybin:  Awareness of what you're doing is liberation. The truth will set you free. Walls are just a metaphor. You don't knock them down as much as you knock down your own preconceived notions of what power these walls have to contain you.

LHX:  You can rip down walls and use the material to help solidify your foundation.  The grass is never greener in other places, but there is some benefit to be had from viewing things from a different perspective.  Perhaps part of the trick is also to become a expert at putting them up and tearing them down, painting on them then cleaning them up.  Variety.

Nurbldoff:  Maybe the trick is to realize that breaking the walls doesn't necessarily mean you have to escape through them afterwards; the important thing is knowing that you can if you want or need to.  Of course this might lead to laziness if you just convince yourself there is no wall but never actually investigate. Then in a sense you might as well still be locked up.

Jenne:  About the "knocking down a wall just to build another with the bricks of the now-destroyed wall" thing...I think there's also a problem with people WANTING there to be walls.  They are not comfortable with the knowledge and subsequent actions of freedom.  When you've lived in a prison all your life, and you are shown said-prison, you miss the prison when you're able to remove it, even if you've worked hard to break it down.  For some people, anyway.

I mean, whatcha gonna blame everything on now you're free?  Yourself?  Nah.  You've been told over and over that it's your parents, your schooling, your president that have you under their thumbs.  When you remove those thumbs...what's next?

So you run to another thumb, because without that pressure, you're not sure what to do anymore.  Living and breathing on your own, like a newborn babe, is a scary venture, esp for the self-aware.

LMNO:  But what about this:  Order and Disorder balance, right?  The structured order of words inside the poetry of ee cummings, et al.  So, when you break down all walls, you've removed all structures you can control.  So, what do you do?  Where do you go?  You've essentially obliterated all internal aspects of reality.  In order to function in the external reality, you need to rebuild.  Only this time, you can draw up the blueprints.

Jenne:  In other words, drawing up that blueprint is rather a process, isn't it?  And it's not easily taught, because it's different for every person.  So, if you suggest to people that they tear down that security wall (remember, the prison protects you even as it protects others from you), you have to give them the CAD to draw other blueprints,Ķ Well, you do if you want your impression to last and not be discarded for just another mf.

You accuse people of being jailed (rightly so), but in showing them how to destroy said cell, you leave out the part of what to do next?  That will create as many problems as it does solutions.

WHAT IS ANERISTIC STRIFE?  13 ANSWERS:


Faust:  Strife caused by fearing disorder? Would that not be every fear and strife ever?

SillyCybin :  I was thinking the complete opposite - rigid order leads to strife, chaos cannot be contained.

Faust:  But it can be ignored, and is by almost every living person, that,Äôs why I assumed it would be people worried about losing their bubble, people are happy when there,Äôs no negative surprises.

LHX:  It,Äôs a struggle to contain discord.  That,Äôs why some people beat their kids.

Kaou Suu:  It,Äôs an internal subconscious conflict in which the orderly (left) side of the mind is conflicting with the desire or need of use of the chaotic (right) side of the mind.

Hangero:  I read it as general disorder which comes about from the appearance of order.
Like the cracks in a vase or something.  It could be a word for entropy.  It could be a word for the conflict riddled attempts of people to maintain their Aneristic illusion.  Maybe it is strife between those caught up in the aneristic illusion, and can be seen symbolically as some sort of absurdist argument where both sides are equally as wrong and still ready to kill each other over it.

East Coast Hustle:  I think Aneristic Strife would be a condition caused by an undue imposition of order on the consensual paradigm.  And it wouldn't be a sudden flash.  More like a long slow chafing. The worst Indian burn of all time.  For how long is something like that tolerable?

Cain:  I'm with ECH.  It would be the friction between the real and perceived condition of reality.  For example, Communism.  Or any totalitarian system, which claims to have all the answers.  But in reality it would be the same as the Imposition of Order = escalation of Chaos.  You set up a view of the world as it should be and enforce it by making bits that don't think vanish (instead of considering why if something was real already it would need to be enforced).  But you can't eliminate everything that doesn't fit, sometimes you cannot even perceive it.  And eventually this builds up and up over time until some flash point makes it overturn the current paradigm.

LMNO:  Cain, the reason I started this thread was because "Aneristic Strife" sounded like a contradiction.  Since "Aneristic" is the illusion that everything is ordered, and "strife" is one of Eris' gambits, putting them together sounded like "Ordered Disorder".  Now, while the New Chart I developed does indeed handle this, it hasn't really been kicked around too much.  My interpretation of it would probably be the most kafka-esque beurocracy.  So much is ordered, that the Disorder naturally takes over, since there are too many rules to process.


What's-His-Name?:  I would think of Aneristic Strife similar to how LHX did.  Or, at least, that's what I think of is how we contain kids.  Because, kids start out "pure".  That is, they are a blank slate with no pre-conceived notions of order, disorder, right, wrong, bad, good, etc., etc., etc.  Of course, through playing with their environment, they learn things.  Hot water = ouchie hand.  Pulling kitties tail = ouchie face.  Crayons on wall = great entertainment.  But then, they start to learn other things.  It may be direct, a father and/or mother sit their kids down and say.  "Now to be a good child you must do x, y, and z.  If you ever, ever to a, b, and/or c, you are a bad child."  Perhaps x, y, and z are things like praying every night, using a napkin after EVERY bite, saying thank you all of the time, tucking in your sheets, etc.  Perhaps a, b, and c are things like boys not playing with dolls, or girls not playing with trains and rocket ships.  Things that are not "social norms", or "socially acceptable."  Then the whole farce of "society" gets introduced.  You have to be a "good member of society" if you want to get anywhere.  If you want to be happy.  If you want to be successful.  And so this is where it begins, and it doesn't stop.  It gets reinforced in school, in college, in the workplace, and on, and on, and on.  And so....you have a bunch of apathetic, over-stressed, cattle too scared to deviate from the path or line they are in for fear of the "cattle-prod" that is disorder.

LMNO:  RWHN, Let's not forget the sponge-like nature of children, in that they observe everything around them, and adopt those behaviors.  So if the parents have a "typical" (read: stereotyped) gender-based relationship, like the mother cooks and cleans, and the father takes out the garbage & watches sports, the child will "learn" these behaviors as how things are "supposed" to be. But I repeat, once a person is able to meta-think and self-criticize, these learned behaviors are no longer mandatory.

DJRubberducky:  I figure strife is strife, and whether it's eristic or aneristic depends on why you're struggling.  If the police are called in to break up a riot, strife will ensue.  For the rioters, it's eristic strife because their goal was to help bring about change.  For the police, it's aneristic strife because their goal was to maintain the status quo.  Authority's struggle to maintain its authority is probably always aneristic strife.  And that's why sticking apart is so important.  Organizations gain strength from their organization (see the roots of the word "fascism"), but then they have to put energy into maintaining that strength rather than actually going out and achieving the goal they had in mind.  The trouble with organized religion is that it became less about religion and more about the being organized.

Triple Zero:  Aneristic strife = what happens when order just doesn't work, even when you think you've pinned down ever possible case (oblivious of the fact that it is just this pinning down why it doesn,Äôt work).  It's what happens when people start fixing things in a very short-sighted way. Like whack-a-mole. Like hunting bugs or exploits in software. You,Äôve got everything strapped down so tightly that NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG ... Aneristic strife is that gnawing feeling in the back of their head that it might just possibly (but nah it couldn't really) be the straps themselves causing the trouble.

Hangero:

You wake up in the morning, for yourself
You drink your morning coffee, for yourself.
You half interestingly read the newspaper, for yourself.
And you kiss your wife good bye, for yourself.

On your way to work, you listen to the radio and drive in your car, for yourself,
And even if you didn,Äôt, it would only be for yourself.
Even if you all of the sudden started giving a fuck about what those dirty hippies thought,
It would only be, for yourself.
Even if you walked to work, it would be for yourself,
And even if in doing that, you gave some spare change to a homeless man,
It would be entirely for yourself.
So you wouldn,Äôt feel bad, about, yourself.

And eventually, maybe this starts to feel like a prison?  Maybe this routine starts to get under your skin, starts to make you itch, and make you scratch, but it only makes it worse, because you are still scratching for yourself.

And then maybe, you start to realize that this is a fixture of your reality. 

That the world revolves around you, unless you would be happier thinking otherwise.  But the world ALWAYS revolves around you. 

Maybe it starts to feel like a prison, with no walls, and yet not way to escape.  A prison of reality, an inescapable foolproof cell, designed to be the perfect container.  One that, if you wish to leave, it is only for yourself, and your own interests, and paradoxically in feeling that way, you lay another brick in that dark cell.

Or kill yourself?
If it suits you, fine, but it,Äôs no release.
You kill yourself, for yourself.

And wouldn,Äôt a happy ending be swell?
I,Äôm sure it would make you feel better about yourself.

SillyCybin:

I want to ask you a question. Ever feel like you're a cog in a machine? If the answer is yes then congratulations - you've worked it out. This changes nothing. You're still a cog in a machine. Let me ask you another question. Would you like to know what the machine is? Would you like to know what it does? Would you like to know more about the machine? Read on I'll tell you all about it. After you're finished reading you'll still be a cog in the machine.

I am the machine. I made you. I put you here. I made the place you work. I made the country you live in and the people who live in it with you. I made the governments and the unions, the laws, the taxes, the religions, the wars... This is the machine and I exist for one purpose and one purpose only. My purpose is to keep you in the dark. My purpose is not to keep humanity in the dark. Just you, my favourite cog, grinding away in the pitch black hell of my almighty machinery.

Day in day out you churn and turn with all the other cogs I put there to keep you company. I produce your food and put a roof over your head. I give you dreams of utopia when you sleep at night, and nightmares fuelled by conscience to keep you turning as the sun comes around and you wake up, put on your clothes and take the trip to work, same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Be a good cog and I'll reward you with all manner of pretty things from widescreen color tv's to holidays in the sun to satisy your every desire and whim, Be a bad cog and I'll make your daily grind a living hell and take away the things and the people you cling to. I am the machine and this is what I do.

You may be my favourite cog but know this. Your are utterly irrelevent in my eyes. Whether you play good cog or bad cog the situation remains unchanged. You're trapped here, by me, simply because it amuses me. It amuses me to see you succeed and it amuses me to see you suffer. You may be wondering who built a machine like me. You may be surprised to learn that you did. Now, for both of our sakes, please endeavour to forget you ever read this. Ignorance is bliss.

man

looking at it in this format is fuckin swote


like hearing somebody cock the hammer back and then letting it rip

More to come.

:pax:

hell yeah

Is this on the wiki?

If not, I'll get to doing so.

it might be

yes it is - at least some of it

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Architecture

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Hangero

Just put that one up. Correct me if that one wasn't actually written by LMNO.

hangero is a username

mmkay

how do I delete an article?

good question...

Quote from: LMNO on March 08, 2007, 06:08:23 PM
Hangero:

What was this originally titled?

LMNO found it in his dig - im not sure what thread it was in

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Yourself

And now it's here.

(edit: and now I have to erase that one too, because cramulus already got to it.)

damn

too much efficiency ITT

It was called "as thou wilt", which is kind of a sucky name.  So I didn't use it.

Title: Family

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  I want to discuss the topic of family. 
How do you reconcile family and BIP. 

I'll use myself as an example.

I grew up in a fairly conservative Baptist family.  The rest of my kin are all pretty religious and devout.  Additionally, we all grew up in a fairly isolated part of the world.  It really is a "Cleaver" mentality up there. Or, at least it was.

And now, I'm raising a family of my own.  I love this new family and I very much love my parents and the family up north.  And I feel, I could never, ever, share with them my thoughts and feelings and ideology as I've expressed them here.  I think the ideas we've bantered about here and in other parts would absolutely scare them.  Not so much the ideas themselves, but that I have those ideas and think about them, with others.  I really think my family would view this as some weirdo cult like Jonestown. 

So, is it a matter of going it alone in a sense?  Trying to advance change, in a minimalist way, but leaving my family out of it?  Do I risk freaking them out by trying to get them hip to what is "really" going on?  Does anyone else struggle with this?

LMNO:  No one in my family understands my ways of thinking, including my wife.  But I can get through to my dad sometimes, if I use almost purely scientific language.  Mostly, I keep my thoughts to myself, but I do speak quite often about where my thoughts lead me.  Last night, I realized that my use of the meme "barstool" is just about equivalent to my Scientologist brother's use of the meme "reactive mind".  Both are metaphors for some other phenomenon, and no one knows what the fuck it means, outside of a small social circle.

I'm not sure if this has any relevance to this thread, but it's early and I don't want to do any work.

East Coast Hustle:  I'll go a step further. I don't really have much in the way of family (my dad was an orphan, and I only like two people on my mom's side of the family - her and my cousin who lives with her), so I've always considered my close friends to be my "real" family. Now, it has never occurred to me to pick my friends based on their ideology or their politics, so I've got a pretty diverse collection of "family". These are the people I have chosen to be that close to, people I have always been able to talk to about anything and who have always been able to talk to me without fear of judgment...

...and they would probably hang me from a streetlight if they knew what I really thought about the world.

Now, most of these people think of themselves as being very liberal/progressive/open-minded/etc. (though oddly enough, the ones that fall more towards the conservative end of the spectrum seem to be more open to my way of thinking - I think they just like the conspiracy theory stuff and don't recognize it for the mental exercise I take it to be.) Most of them think they "get it". And yet, even these people (who are more like me than 99% of the rest of the world) recoil in absolute terror any time I attempt to make even the tiniest chink in their mental armor, even though I've always been relatively good at chipping through those shells without doing too much damage.

I don't know if I have a point here, but it strikes me as odd (and borderline tragic) that even the people who should be most sympathetic to our ideas and most likely to understand what the fuck it is I'm on about would probably rather choke me to death with their own hand than actually allow themselves to start dropping filters.

So what do we do about this? or can we do anything at all?

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  I think if I were to start talking barstools with my wife she'd just stare at me in wonder.  Like, "I wonder what the hell is wrong with him."  And the thing is, I think, strike that, I know she has some of the same thoughts, she just doesn't piece them together the same way I do. 

I think part of it is a Parental Instinct.  Consciously, or subconsciously, she couldn't afford to think subversively.  She has to be "normal" for our daughter.  I wrestle with that too.  My wife accepts me as, "Weird" or "Strange."  Hell, if I had been a normal shmoe I don't think she would have ever gone out with me. 

And I also accept that I have to give in to certain societal constructs if I want my daughter to co-exist in the society into which she is growing.  Like, I can't leave BIP pamphlets at the Christian Daycare that she attends. 

But then, when it comes to my biological family, my parents and siblings, it's another bowl of wax just because they grew up in bumfuck, Maine where all "Weirds" are somehow blasphemous. 

LMNO:  I have a feeling that, since breaking the filters and chains is such a traumatic experience, that it really can only be done to strangers.  Maybe.

East Coast Hustle:  Heh. I knew I'd found the girl I wanted to marry when I utterly shattered her filters one day (mostly by accident - I lost my temper in an argument and shouted out the horrible truth before I realized it).

She spent about a half-hour on the floor, weeping and banging her head into the wall in mourning for her worldview, then popped right back up and demanded to know how she could help me do that to everyone else.

Jenne:  No one has ever REALLY understood me, so if I expound on things Discordian-like, it's all the same "Just Jenne Gibberish" to them, anyway.

My husband, funny enough, has lived in a sort of chaotic order himself, so he probably understood this stuff almost before I was born.  *shrug*  I'm not sure how much he believes, but he does follow along with a BIP tautology all on his own.  He himself, though, believes too much in his own powers to break out, and I think he has yet to follow the logic straight into how much of an iron prison it really is.  Though, truth be told, you come from the depths of Hell like he has, and you have some bragging rights to be sure.

Myself, I don't worry about if someone understands me or not.  I've spent so much of my life caring if I'm understood that I've realized that it's virtually impossible, so I give as much as I think others WILL understand and leave it at that.  Otherwise, people are just turned off, mostly because it's coming from me, and they'll prejudge the message based on the messenger (I'm talking about friends and family here, not strangers/acquaintances).  I haven't toed the line that I grew up behind for so long that no one really expects me to live or speak within their memes any longer.

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe:  I find that family is not who you are related to, but the people who love and care for you, support you, not what they think is you. Many times these people may be related to you, but just as often they are not. In my fortune the family that is related to me is understanding, and the family that is not are like minded. Some of whom occasionally inhabit these forums.

Cain:  I personally don't really have to worry about my family.  They are agnostic central/left wingers who have traveled a lot and done and pretty much encouraged me to do my own thing and figure out stuff for myself.  I haven't really told them about Discordianism per se, though I've frequently bought up Discordian viewpoints and talked them out.

With me, it,Äôs more my friends and in particular girlfriends.  A couple have taken an interest, but the ones I most expected to were just not interested.  The problem is, many of them are what you might call the new left, the sort of people those on the right of the political spectrum like to rant about.  And if you bring up any separate viewpoint to theirs then you are automatically wrong - just like with most ideologues.  Which has kind of strained things now and again.

Kind of like with ECH, my experience with my girlfriend was quite odd and more than just a little upsetting.  I felt a real heel for a while, because I had basically torn down her perception of how the world really worked and shown her something she had put trust in was not worthy of that.  It was necessary at the time, not only for her but me too, but that didn't exactly make me feel better about what I did.

"Family" by RWHN saved to the wiki: http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Family

(and somehow just after i saved, the wiki seems to be veeeeerryyyyyy slloooowwww)

also, what do we think is this wiki going the right way? is the first priority to get as much texts in as possible or is it maybe time to think up some kind of good structure or is this already happening?

anyone interested may probably want to google something like "wiki best practices" or something similar, i'm sure somebody has written up something about good ways to structure a wiki.

i just don't want this wiki to become like that other "thing" at poee.co.uk, no idea what it was called but it's also some huge chaotic collection of editable discordian texts that nobody wants to touch anymore with a 10foot pole. ok this is also probably due to the fact that 95% of it is dadaist fluff.

i don't want to sound alarmist or anything, maybe we're heading in the right course already.

one interesting thing to keep an eye on might be Orphaned Pages (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Family) (that are not linked anywhere) and other Special Pages (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Special:Specialpages) (the wiki software keeps all kinds of interesting lists for us)

Thanks for throwing this stuff up there, TZ.

My idea was that i could take out the fluff from the original thread, post it here, and then we could wiki the stuff down to more concise points, be it the original poster or someone else.  We could edit the redundancies, and eventually turn it into a "position", but hopefully one that contradicts itself.

Title: The Fear and Desire Loop

LHX:  Talk about Black Iron Prisons.  On the one hand people are scared of the unknown.  On the other hand people are chasing illusionary goals.  This cycle perpetuates itself as people run away from what they fear and run toward what they desire, never escaping or fulfilling except for in short-term stimulating experiences.  Meanwhile, the unknown has done nothing to warrant it being something worth fearing, and it has already been established that everything we could possibly want/need is well within reach on this planet.  The only way out of that loop is to eventually be crushed by it, or to literally bust out of it.  To bust out the loop / prison - a person needs to recognize it.

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  This perfectly explains my relationships before I met my wife.  I was running away from a fear of being alone and not having a family while running towards a desire to be with someone with whom to share intimacy and love.  So, yup, there were some short-term stimulating experiences, but the whole of the experience was leading me down a path that was destructive. 

DJRubberducky:  The real fun happens when the desire is the source of the fear.

LHX:  Bingo.  When ,Äúfear of,Äù blows to the ego, pride and reputation influence a persons decision making process.

DJRubberducky:  An example of desire producing fear:  I'm polyamorous.  Mostly polyfidelity, but I doubt that means anything to anyone here other than me.

Anyway, one of my lovers isn't currently in any sort of primary relationship.  He's okay with how things are between him and me, and the understanding is that if he gets himself into a "real" relationship with someone not into sharing, then he and I aren't an item anymore.

Absolutely reasonable, yes?  But it puts me into one of these loops: Because I love him, I want to spend that kind of time with him because I enjoy it, and we enjoy each other.  But also because I love him, I don't want to spend that kind of time with him because it means he hasn't found anybody yet, and wishing to see him again also means wishing that.

I don't guess I'm trapped in the loop yet (anymore?), because I can make tentative plans and look forward to next times without being paralyzed by the fear (and most of the fear I experience is paralyzing - I'm that kind of unstable).  And more often than not, I can take a deep breath and remind myself that he makes his own choices, and if for some insanely stupid reason he's putting off finding his own relationship because that probably means not getting to see me anymore, that's his "fault" and not mine.  But it's been very interesting to watch my own thoughts over the last six months.

Jenne:  I think the main problem is the contingency on someone else's judgments and reactions to your own decisions and actions.  When you rely that heavily on someone else for your own happiness/progression through life in general, you've got a problem that you cannot solve on your own.

Except to break free of that contingency.

LMNO:  Except Jenne, you run into the classic:  The Fear of being rejected, and the Desire to be accepted.  Be it love, sex, or any act of creation, you run into this all the time.

Jenne:  You  just have to ignore that.  It's a conditioned response, anyway.  I won't mention the sociopathy involved getting to that stage, however.  Maybe just being aware of how tied you are to others' reactions to you, as equally fucked up as our own are, is part of the answer. 

LHX:  Lets ride that train of thought for a second here though, because that,Äôs the type of shit that crashes.  A lot of groups come together out of that desire to be accepted, but over the past months (/years) we have determined on these forums that there is another reason for people to come together:  They come together when they are in the process of getting something done.  Because there is some people here (and in some other places) that do not express any fear of being rejected or desire to be accepted.


Rev. What's-His-Name?:   What about the fear of being rejected by this collective?  Or the desire to be accepted by it?  And is one ever totally rid of these fears and desires in general?  I will honestly answer for myself the answer is no.  I like to think I'm a macho, I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks of me kind of person.  But......I have to admit, I do have some level of desire, in this example, for the rest of you to not think I'm a total dunder-head.  I don't lose sleep on it or anything, but there is some level of it there. 

DJRubberducky:  Also, just because the fear/desire hasn't been expressed doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  In fact, I would venture that those among us who *do* express it tend to get dismissed as "attention whores".  And simply witnessing that act would prompt somebody in that loop to keep quiet on the topic, since they've then seen that expressing the fear/desire will realize the fear.

Quote from: LMNO on March 12, 2007, 04:06:56 PMMy idea was that i could take out the fluff from the original thread, post it here, and then we could wiki the stuff down to more concise points, be it the original poster or someone else.  We could edit the redundancies, and eventually turn it into a "position", but hopefully one that contradicts itself.

sorry i don't quite follow you? (it's late in the afternoon, maybe because i'm hungry)

"the original thread" = which one?

i was just thinking of getting some sort of plan together, what needs to be done
1) get as much BIP related text up there as possible (this is the obvious one)
2) but maybe someone should go over these texts and make them a littlebit more pretty with markup, subheadings, tables of contents, etc. for all this stuff there exists wiki markup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_edit)
3) also any relevant diagrams and images can be put on a wiki page did you know that (so LHX that is an even more safe place to store the diagrams than photobucket)
4) should there be some sort of index pages? like "all rants written by RHWN"?, "pages about the Machine"
5) also very important, where possible, pages should have internal links to eachother (even when they didn't appear in the original text)

on the other hand, as i said, maybe it's too early for these kinds of structural ideas. and maybe the wiki-concept is good enough that it'll grow organic-like into something useful by itself (i dunno, but wikis seem to be pretty robust against this).

also, i dug up some wiki best practices for the editors:

http://dowire.org/wiki/Wiki_best_practice

QuoteMake sure to edit anything as soon as possible. This is a wiki best practice. We don't want you just reading. We want to know what you think, and what you're interested in, and so on. And be bold in editing.

QuoteTo be bold when you edit a wiki page is the most basic wiki best practice next to editing itself. If you aren't bold, your wiki won't work or will be hijacked by trolls: see evil and stupid.

http://dowire.org/wiki/Wiki_conventions

also there is a lot of bullcrap on that dowire wiki (cause they got edited heh)

addition: should i coyp and mark up "The Fear and Desire Loop" or are you working on this now in the wiki?

I think we're still moving in the right direction.

It may be useful (though difficult) to break down the literature section into categories. The more stuff we add, the more difficult it's going to be to find the content you're looking for. The literature section also seems to be the fastest growing section so it should probably be featured more prominently on the main page.

Personally, I think the front page should be a bit better organized...

The "what are we doing right now" and "current projects" sections should be combined.

The "I don't trust any of this" and "why the wiki" should probably be a subpage instead of on the main page


I'm a novice at wiki formatting, but I'm going to tinker a bit on the main page. If it looks poor, feel free to revert my changes.

and this sort of discussion should in fact go on the "discussion" page of the wiki

Quote from: triple zero on March 12, 2007, 04:26:44 PM
addition: should i coyp and mark up "The Fear and Desire Loop" or are you working on this now in the wiki?

I'll grab it.

Hey, can someone link to any articles or summaries of the Barstool talk? Or is that not even BIP related? (unsure, as I didn't follow it too closely)

barstool should be in there, either way. as much possible variations on the story as well ;-)

also i think there should be a section for "discussions" which contain condensed discussions about the BIP, like GSP: the discussion and this fear & desire discussion, for example.

YOu can throw the fear and desire up there.  it's cool.

What I'm doing is thread diving, then condensing the thread into it's most relevant posts.  What I think might be nice is for it then to be wiki'd even more, to reduce the dialogue into more of a whole piece.  But if you think it should stay as dialogue, that's cool, too.


Basically, I'm pulling out old content that we haven't touched in a while, because those are generally considered "done", if not "resolved".

Title: Ideals

Jenne:  What happens to ideals in the BIP?  Are they allowed?  Are they used as a noose?

I think most of the people on this forum have them.  Are they a new rope to hang yourself with?  I often wonder how much we enslave ourselves to them when they are hidden so well within our own mindsets.  They creep out unbeknownst to even the most discerning self-aware thinker.  Anyway, I'm just wondering what folks hereabouts would think about so-called Ideals/Idealism.  It does exist here...it fairly echoes throughout the forum's halls.  For a place that decries much of the preset notions that society force-feeds us, there's a fair bit of dogma nevertheless that creates a soupcon of rigidity to what is to be known/unknown and sought/left behind...

Hangero:  I don't know if it's an ideal, because I don't know if it will ever bring me happiness (or if that even really exists), but the endless pursuit of Truth and Knowledge drive me.  It might be an ideal or not.  Ideals usually leave me bitter because so many of them are impossible, but I think sense a definite ideal behind all of this (The board, BIP, PD, and so on), even if it is as simple as waking people up.

Jenne:  I think ideals set us up for ultimate failure.  NOT in all things, but primarily in whatever premise you set out to achieve proof for.  Maybe as long as you realize and acknowledge said failure, or possibility thereof, it's ok.

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  Maybe as long as you realize and acknowledge said failure, or possibility thereof, it's ok.  I guess the key would be to have Realistic Ideals.  Be a Realistic Idealist. Like, it would be Ideal if everyone "woke up" to see some or all of what they have seemingly been blind to.  However, it's probably quite delusional to think that would ever happen.  Hell, it's probably delusional to think even 1% of 6 billion would buy into it.  But then again, is that the goal?  I don't think so.  I think it is to offer vision, or, the chance to have vision, or to be aware of the "Ideal" of vision.  Those who wish explore the "Ideal", those who don't continue on their merry way.  Perhaps some those who explore the "Ideal" of vision say, "Eh, I'm Okay" and also continue as they were. 

Jenne:  I know I keep going back to this notion of what you are socialized to do and become vs. what you are programmed through genetics (which, I believe, have been shown to have SOME aspect of environmental manipulation as well) to do.  I think idealism, in all forms, is a direct impact of your environment.  And, going back to what I said above, people usually either mostly EMBRACE their environment, or reject it outright.  However, if you're someone with a jaundiced eye toward pie-in-the-sky goal-setting, you're going to not necessarily spend much time and resources trying to set and then attain these goals, though you might unwittingly be working towards them all along.

What happens to an individual when they realize they've been reaching towards all the wrong things all along, or what they were working for is imminently unattainable but is really, really interesting.  I think this serves as a wake-up point for the BIP analogy. You take a person who is very AWARE of how reachable their set ideals were since the beginning, and they are an entirely different animal. 

So, when I say I think ideals set us up for failure, for my first example, those who are eventually disillusioned, is who I was primarily talking about.  We all know these people, hell, some of us ARE these people.  You were brought up to believe something, live a certain way, you go along with it with certain expectations in mind.  Then BAM! right between the eyes, the Hideous Troof(tm) is revealed, and you tailspin out of the path you'd preset when you were pimply-faced and jacking off in your parent's basement.

The second type of goal-setting idealist, the Realist Idealist(tm) that RWHN is talking about, had the smack between the eyes earlier on in life, and never saw the unattainable as part of his/her universe.  S/he may or may not recognize how different they may be vis a vis their own brand of idealism...generally they probably are and look with derision upon those who haven't "woken up" yet.  I think you can all recognize that this is generally a person who is drawn automatically or even naturally to a movement like this.  There is very little pulling them down into their set, societal ties, so loosing hold of them in order to accept a set of beliefs like what is here in the BIP is not so hard after all.

Hangero:  Personal Liberty, in whichever way it can be defined, seems to be the central modest ideal of all I pick up from PD, and BIP and all that stuff.  You can say you have no ideals, but by saying that you also intend that you have no purposes and wish for no changes.  Ideals are not poison, they just shouldn't have such incredible weight placed upon them.  But Personal Liberty seems to stand for me to be the principle that says people should be independent of all this bullshit that continually tries to entrap them.

And now another problematic thought occurs to me, and I think it is the main nerve of the problem overall:  What if, when man is given the ability to have control of his life, his eventual inclination is to hand over that control?  What if by fighting the enormous constructs of civilization, we are only fighting something so inherit in mankind that it can not be fully extinguished, or that we are merely existing on the fringe of some terrible wheel that arbitrarily prefers liberty or dominance, depending on the day of the week?

DJRubberducky:  It's a rare human who *doesn't* have that inclination, especially in "emergency" situations.  One of my housemates has been trained in the CERT program (FEMA's attempt to build a network of "local" first responders), and one of the things they were explicitly taught was that if you walk into an emergency situation and sound sufficiently authoritative, most folks will obey you without even realizing it.  They will assume you know what you're talking about because you *aren't* panicking, and they'll be naturally inclined to follow your directions.

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  That was one angle on The Machine(tm); that you can change parts of it.  But, realistically, you can't overcome or change the whole of it.  Some may be optimistic and think if you continuously change little parts here and there that the cumulative effect will be whole scale change.  However, it is fluid.  Just because one part changes doesn't mean it won't change back.  There are many cells in the Prison.  Nothing keeps someone from going back to the original cell they were in before their "enlightenment"

Triple Zero:  If people use their freedom to hand over the control, that would be fine, as long as they don't get in the way of others who want to hang on to it.  This is of course a paradox.  Perhaps it's the paradox of the Machine. people are inherently free, but some (a lot, in fact) want to hand over the control, and thereby deny others who in fact do want control of their life, to have it.

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  It is a paradox, and one I am familiar with.  My parents are devout Baptists and in a perfect world would want me to follow their faith.  My faith, if they were fully aware of it, would scare the ever loving Jesus out of them.  To them it would be crazy talk.  Of course I am an adult now so there is no direct pressure, but as a child I could see where they would want to keep me from following what I consider a path to freedom and they would consider a "path to hell."

SillyCybin:  Your mission - teach the masses not to just blindly accept that what someone tells them is how it is

The paradox - they shouldn't really believe you either

Cain:  Well, being the nasty little Classical Realist I sometimes am, my opinion is that ideals are highly dangerous things to have just flapping around the place.  Many criticisms within foreign policy thought about the NeoConservative ideology is that it,Äôs too idealistic and too impossible.  Practicality is overlooked in the name of idealism, even to the point that you hurt yourself.  And then, at the end of the day, when you're bloody and beaten and hated quite justly by the world, you can at least say "I was doing the right thing!"

And that,Äôs a criticism I feel is valid.  Ideals mean you have an idea of what is right and wrong for others, without even knowing them (an impressive trick, I'm sure you'll agree).  "Let justice be done, though the world may perish" is the motto of every idealist everywhere.  When ideals and action fuse, everyone is in for a world of hurt because, as I keep saying, perception is imperfect.  You cannot know what is best for everyone and trying to force such things is going against the natural grain of things, for want of a better explanation.

Ideals can inform action, but they can never directly influence them.  To use a politics example again (excuse me, but it is my area of knowledge) the invasion to invade Iraq could have easily been made on human rights and self determination of the populace (republican) ideals.  But then you would have critically assessed the situation on the ground and in country, projecting how current actions and decisions will impinge on the future prospects of the country.  Instead, the ideals of a liberal democracy springing up overrode these critical checks on policy, to the current detriment.

So if I apply that to my own ideal, namely that of more personal freedom, I have to think about how this benefits me and everyone else around me.  For example, there would have to be certain checks involving consent in actions, and a certain amount of focus on the social contract.  But if by infringing on my freedom it shows that the same method can be used against others personal freedoms, suddenly my ideal becomes the interest of others as well.  It is not so much an ideal as a meta or foundation-ideal, a precondition for other ideals to take hold. 


On an entirely personal note, I tend to agree with this vein of though concerning self benefit with the general good.  I am not what is perceived by people as "good" because I think it is right, but because it suits my interests more than if I were to not be.  Equally, when I do not act in a way that is perceived as good by people, its because its in my own self interest to be so and that benefit outweighs any potential cost.

LHX:  The only reasonable ideal would seem to be a vague one, something along the lines of 'good is better than bad'.  Being a part of something that can endure is better than being a part of something that is self-destructive by default.

"Universal Ethical Rational Egoism is the Machine(tm)", a threadjack by Hangero.

I'll explain that now.

If there is a single overarching concept which permeates all realms of human behavior and natural phenomenon as we know it, it is the tendency for items to behave in ways which benefit themselves.  Within humans it is easiest to see and explain, and boils down to people acting in a surprisingly enlightened manner as to what actually benefits themselves. 

Some philosophers believe this is an ideal to be strived towards, but it is more so an inescapable fact of existence which limits the range of our behavior.  We are unable to actually make a real decision, because decisions don't exist.  Between Determinism, Causality, factors of environment, and Universal Ethical Rational Egoism, we are absolutely bound and held to a narrow and unbreakable set of possible behaviors.

To me, that is the very essence of the Machine.

Why I say it isn't ethical, is because anything which prohibits freedom must be unethical.  Even if it is something that prevents us from harming ourselves or others, any barrier in the way of the actual will of whichever transcendental "us" that must exist somewhere else, is unacceptable and unethical.

Aside from that, Universal Ethical Egoism boils the human soul down to a mechanical animal, cheapens all of our actions and makes them all, whether we know it or not, selfish actions.  Concepts like love, caring, kindness, humility, and friendship all become cynical specters of themselves, reminding us of the truly shallow waters of our reality.

,ÄúThere is no Escape,Äù, by Benaclypse

So, you've woken up to the wretchedness of your prison cell, and you want to get everybody to take the "red pill" and wake up to the harsh reality of the Black Iron Prison.  I agree that they should.  A happy prisoner that just doesn't get it would never think of helping the escape effort.  Or is escape even possible?  A black sheep is still a sheep. 

Say you do escape.  You spend every night digging a tunnel out of the hell hole with a spork you stole from the mandatory dinner, leave a dummy in your bed made out of toilet paper and painted with blood, then escape!  Well then, you're a free man now, right?  Wrong.  Now you must live the life of a fugitive.  There is no escape from the warden, the president, the Lord, or any of the major tyrants you despise.  They will haunt you, hunt you down, and make you pay time. 

Maybe you should have just tried getting out on good behavior instead?  Maybe you should have just coordinated a prison break a~la Natural Born Killers?  Whatever's clever, there is no escape from the Black Iron Prison, because its oppressive air is everywhere, driving us all into a black iron lung. 

There is no escape from the Black Iron Prison, but you can become its warden.  Did you just hear me say that?  Yes, I said you, the prisoner, can become your enemy: the tip top fucking warden, but who would want a shitball job like that?  You would if you could turn the Black Iron Prison into something more like the paradise you've been dreaming of to keep you from hanging yourself with the bedsheets.  How do you attain that kind of power?  How do you suddenly shift from imprisoned victim to King of the Concrete?  Perhaps you will, one of these days, wake up from the horror of the Black Iron Prison that you've woken up to, by transforming it.  You will change your fate, and fate will change you, because you must, and it must.  You can paint the prison bars white as sunshine.  You can become the president and paint the white house gold.  But there is no escape from the Black Iron Prison.

Wow, suddenly the last year of my life is flashing before my eyes. 
I need to take it easy on that scroll button. 

Wow, LMNO.  This, well, just rocks. 

I suppose the next thing to do when this thread is done is to boil it down into it's constituent parts.

datacompression, ITT

dtcmprsnITT

[size=0pt].[/size]

-

Hey, stop jacking this Very Important Thread.


[self-righteous]

RWHNs pun disease spread

im sick

im sick

Bump for AK.

Reverse Brainwashing, by BMW:


Introduction
I'm  not all that great at this stuff, so I'm not posting a piece for the PD06. Instead, I am going to expand upon what I call reverse brainwashing, and was mentioned earlier in the brainstorming stages. Reverse Brainwashing works in nearly the same manner as the garden variety, except its purpose is to free the individual from their 'Iron Bar Prison', and get them to expand their imagination to think for themselves. To wake them up to reality, essentially. Like the opposite, reverse brainwashing rewrites a persons paradigm, and there are several stages to the process.

1. Hook the Sheep
   In this stage we attract those who may be more receptive to waking up at the moment. From earlier discussions, we have found that certain things work well to attract the target population. From polls of other discordians, we have found the target age group, the age group which is most receptive to this process is late teens (16-20). So the modes of attraction are aligned towards these individuals.
   Shiny things tend to catch peoples eye, that is, things that are oddly colored when compared to surroundings. The best way to go is LOUD. Clashing colors, bright graphics, complex, interesting looking graphics, these all get peoples attention. One color font is right out. Non standard fonts are better, but make sure they are easily readable. Make each sentence or thought a different color. Use bright colors, or at least those that contrast highly with the background. Make it ATTRACTIVE to teens these days. You know they spend all day in bland 'prisons', so make it look as different from the prison as possible!
   Place the propaganda in prominent locations. If you are going to disseminate fliers, dress cleanly and properly (depending on the location, maybe suit, maybe street gear), but don't say anything, just hand them out. At this point we are just trying to get them to notice.

2. Reel them in
   So, you've caught their attention. Now, what do you TELL them off the bat? Generally, members agree to leave out as many inside jokes as possible. Leave out 'classic' rich words too, like All Hail Eris, Fn0rd, Greyface, etc. These only get in the way of keeping them interested. In fact, leave out any mention of religion in general. Use newly coined phrases, like ,ÄúThe Discordian Society cordially invites you to join us in a jailbreak...,Äù. Leave out as much classical humor as possible. Use questioning phrases.
   Most of all, intrigue them. Give them just a little meat to work with, using new buzzwords like ,ÄúIron Bar Prison,Äù. Make them want to come to you for more. Make the message short, don't draw it out. These kids have short attention spans, its got to be catchy.
   Finally, give them somewhere to go. Putting www.principiadiscordia.com at the end of the flier is good, or the address to POEE. This is very important, and it will weed out those who are truly interested; they will take the initiative and come.

3. Operation Mindfuck
   In this stage we fuck with the dogma that is stuck in circuit. We weaken the prison with weirdness. This is the realm of the PD06 now in progress, it is the most difficult job of this process, and the most important. It is here that we begin changing the paradigm.
   The document itself has little ability for variability in length. On one hand, the potential discordians have short attention spans, so it should be short enough to adjust for this. On the other hand, there is a minimum length for such documents, because of the time needed for the weakening to occur. This is important: if the PD06 is too short, it will accomplish little or nothing in this stage. This is because a sort of minor hypnosis must occur, which allows the mind to be more easily screwed with.
   The PD06 must be easily accessible; if possible, it should be the first discordian document the potential has ever come across. The less he/she has heard before this point, the better. Put it next to or, if possible, in place of the original at PD.com.
   It should look unassuming. Start out with the same sorts of things from the 'propaganda'. Give a little humor, but make it background. Use lots of buzzphrases. Use repetition. Lull them into an unassuming state, while slowly increasing the weirdness.
   When a critical point is reached, completely shatter their world view. Shock them.  Warning: this can only work if they are first lulled into that semi-hypnotic state. This is the point of turning, where the dogma that has been ingrained is broken. What they knew can't possibly be true anymore. So give them something else to know.

4. Reversing the cycle
   Throughout the PD06, subliminal messages should be placed. These should span around central themes such as freedom, 'jailbreak', thinking for oneself, imagination, waking up, etc. gradually increase the frequency of these and decrease the subliminality, until the critical point is reached. Then, all things should be about these central themes. At this point, we are taking their closed mind and replacing it with an open one. We broke their reality, and now supply a better one. Once you are at this point, you can say nearly anything, and a person will run with it, so be careful! Don't fall in the same traps as the original pd! Yes, some randomness, some humor, but don't make them the most important things. Otherwise you end up with more 'zomg23pinealglandlol' discordians, who are seldom well welcomed in most discordian forums, and their growth as people is also impeded.

5. Welcome the convert
   So a person is converted. What next? They most likely go to find more like them. Thus making active discordian web communities of high importance. The convert should be welcomed and guided. They still have lots to learn. Eventually they should be introduced to the full cannon of discordian literature. But for now, teach the basics. As before, keep the religious aspects low key. There is still the possibility to ostracise. Make them feel welcomed, give them praise and constructive criticism. Encourage them in their interests. In other words, be like good foster parents. They're still kids and have a long way to go!


Conclusion
One by one, we break the sheep from their Iron Bar Prisons and expand their imaginations, make them think for themselves. In turn, they break more from their prisons. Eventually, critical mass is reached. Our key word: Resolve. Evangelize with compassion and determination. And realize that there will be few in the beginning. We are hand picking our successors. They are the future of discordianism. Let us guide our future with intelligence.

                                 Yurito Sakari,

                      The Wannabe Buddhist Monk

Nice!

--tossed onto the wiki

Crowley BIP?

Mangrove

Does the following count as AC's attempt at BIP? (from his intro to Liber AL)

,ÄúTHE UNIVERSE.

,ÄúTHIS BOOK explains the Universe.

,ÄúThe elements are Nuit - Space - that is, the total of possibilities of every kind - and Hadit, any point which has experience of these possibilities. (This idea is for literary convenience symbolized by the Egyptian Goddess Nuit, a woman bending over like the Arch of the Night Sky. Hadit is symbolized as a Winged Globe at the heart of Nuit.)

,ÄúEvery event is a uniting of some monad with one of the experiences possible to it. ,ÄòEvery man and every woman is a star,Äô, that is, an aggregate of such experiences, constantly changing with each fresh event, which affects him or her either consciously or subconsciously.

,ÄúEach one of us thus has a universe of his own, but it is the same universe for each one as soon as it includes all possible experience. This implies the extension of consciousness to include all other consciousness.

,ÄúIn our present stage, the object that you see is never the same as the one that I see; we infer that it is the same because your experience tallies with mine on so many points that the actual differences of our observation are negligible. For instance, if a friend is walking between us, you only see his left side, I his right; but we agree that it is the same man, although we may differ not only as to what we may see of his body but as to what we know of his qualities. This conviction of identity grows stronger as we see him more often and get to know him better. Yet all the time neither of us can know anything of him at all beyond the total impression made on our respective minds.,Äù

The above is an extremely crude attempt to explain a system which reconciles all existing schools of philosophy.


SillyCybin:  I'd always thought of the BIP as the logical conclusion extrapolated from this model (which to all intents and purposes is accurate enough to satisfy me). Namely, the inherent human tendency not to realize it and to mistake the universe and their interaction therewith for something other than that which it is.

LMNO:  This is one of the handful of Important Ideas Crowley had.


However, I would call it only a bar, or a wall, of the BIP, because it concentrates on the observable universe that we do not see, and says nothing of the unobservable.

Mangrove:  Good point there LMNO.  Crowley said 'all possible experience'.  BIP says that there's lots of stuff in the universe that I can't experience.  Not that I want to say 'nah nah nah nah nahh' to uncle Al though. When he wrote this (1920s?), Einstein was still new & wacky and quantum insanity hadn't gotten underway.  So we're extending his idea owing to the fact that we can reference more advanced science than he could.

LMNO:  Hey, Maxwell built on Einstein who built on Newton.  I still think AC has good ideas, I think if he were alive, he'd concentrate on the "hard" Quantum physics (what we can actually say about the universe), and not the "soft" (the similes and thought experiments we try to extrapolate from Quantum physics).

SillyCybin:  I never like to say never. Sure it's highly (and I can't stress enough how highly) unlikely that you'll observe a lot of stuff but I'd never like to remove it completely from the realms of possibility. I think this was Crowley,Äôs take on the universe too. He liked to make out he could see more than he probably could, but I think he also liked to think it was possible to see more than he did. Maybe even all of it.

LMNO:  Minor point, Silly, but it is physically impossible to see some of the things that go on in the Universe.

Triple Zero:   But he wasn't specifically talking about human experiences, right? He just gave humans/friends as an example.  He was talking about these Hadits, points that experience. So one could equally well reason that a "point" of iron-fillings "experiences" a magnetic field (which a human, sort of, can't).

He says every event is the unity of such a point and an experience. Sounds like a reasonable thing to say, but a human is made up of many, many points which all experience things to each other. some of these experiences and reactions result in muscle contractions, others result in brain cells firing, firing in intricate and complex patterns that somehow happen to make up a (limited) representation of the sum of all experiences of all points, the "current subset" of Nuit.

I like the way he describes Nuit as both Space and the total of possibilities of every kind. Probably in both space and time -- this is probably the very same idea of that 10th dimension animation (if any of you remember that 98%-bullshit presentation) that has every possibility in all time in all parallel possible universes, in one point.
Whether it manifests as one point or not ,Äì it doesn't matter, that's just a matter of mapping, and you won't notice it from the inside anyway. Mathematicians and physicists call this the ,Äúphase space,Äù (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space).
I always envision a level of "enlightenment" as somehow becoming "aware" of one of the phase spaces we can represent ourselves in.

Mangrove:  Good stuff 000.

I did wonder if the idea of a monad (a hadit) was anything capable of experience, so I started to think on small scales like single cells or even atoms.

From reading this passage, I also felt that maybe the typical thelemites have overlooked the point that Crowley was saying that: Hadit & Nuit were 'literary conveniences'. Elsewhere in the same intro to liber AL, Crowley talks about 'gods' as facts of nature personified and that they were 'accretions of experience'.

What you talk about in your post fits what he was saying. He does point out that not all of our experiences are conscious ones. I mean, we're getting hit with radiation from space that I am certainly not aware of consciously. I,Äôm probably not even subconsciously experiencing it either, but it's still happening.

The Moon.

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe:  The Cold Moon, 2 nights ago.  I was out watching it.

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  Cold Moon?  Please to be educating the ignorant. 

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe: The full moons of the year, 13 in all, are sometimes given names depending on the month they occupy. The December full moon is sometimes called the Cold Moon, or the "Moon before Yule". Its nothing important. I like it because it helps me more strongly identify with lunar cycles. Whenever I go out at night I always know the phase and how far away from full and new it is.  Just something I do.

SillyCybin:  I used to organize everything according to moon phases. Worked real well for me for a while. Still aware of the buzz when she's full. It's subtle but when you're paying attention it's well noticeable.

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe:  Um.....Im just gonna pretend I didn't hear that...

LMNO:  Just consider it psychosomatic, BMW.  That should work for you.

SillyCybin: Exactly. Moon has effect on brain chemistry. Listen to the number of fire alarms being set off at your local mental hospital on a full moon as opposed to empty one. Moon pulls the ocean with enough force to lift it up 5 or six feet in places think what it's doing to your (mostly water) brain. Now if you're trying to accomplish a change in conformity etc. The best time to do it, for some reason is during this time.

LMNO: I think you need to refresh yourself on the definition of "psychosomatic", silly.

SillyCybin: The moon affects the body affects the mind

Cain: Your mind makes you think the moon affects your body, affecting your body.  H'actually.  There is no real scientific evidence to suggest the moon has any effect on the mind or body, except by those predisposed to fixate on it.

SillyCybin: Except for the glaringly obvious gravitational field effect?

Cain: Not proven to have an effect on mental processes.  Peer reviewed article or GTFO.

SillyCybin:  If you pay attention you'll feel it. No need for science. Sync your body and mind in with the ebb and flow, more active during full and new moon, quieter and more reflective during halves. Take it from a sometime 'lunatic' there is an effect. Think what spinning round really fast does to you - it makes you dizzy right? That,Äôs a result of a gravitational effect (centrifugal) on a small amount of fluid in your inner ear. But there's a slight euphoria which you might not notice because of the more obvious loss of balance. This euphoria is caused by a gravitational effect.

LMNO:  Centripetal force =/= gravitational force.  Please to read a physics textbook.

LHX:  Plus, you can jump higher if the moon is directly over top of you (activated foot glands).

Triple Zero:  As far as I know, the reason why the moon pulls up the ocean by that much, is that he ocean is an enormous body of water and water in oceans tends to be liquid, as opposed to the water in our bodies which is mostly restricted to the shape of our body. i dunno, but i severely doubt that tidal forces or the gravity of the moon have a real effect on the human body.

LMNO:  If our brains were as massive as the ocean, you might have a point.  However, the mass of water in our brains is so small, that any gravitational pull from the moon is cancelled by the pull of the earth.  Also, there has been no evidence that a miniscule shift of bodily fluids upward would affect personality.

SillyCybin:  They don't have much effect, but they have an effect nonetheless. Every thing gets pulled up, very slightly. As the moon is rising. If you fill in a hole during high moon the result will be a mound. If you fill it during low moon the result will be a divot. Go check. I said you have to pay attention to it. Granted the majority of this effect may be projected but it's a projection that works. Trust me on this. And what you're feeling by focusing on it is driven by the moon.

LMNO: Change, ,ÄúGranted the majority of this effect may be projected but it's a projection that works,,Äù to ,Äúall,Äù, and I think we might have an agreement.

SillyCybin:  Fair enough, the whole thing is projected. That changes no part of my argument.

LMNO:  Yeah, it does.  YOU = "The full moon acts on humans physically which makes them crazy."  US = "The full moon as observed by humans is interpreted in a certain way to have a psychosomatic (i.e. 'imagined') effect on some of them."  That,Äôs not the same thing.  In the first case, we can't control it, unless we have an anti-gravity device.  In the second, we can easily control it, because it's in our heads.

Triple Zero:  The thing is, if it's purely projected it's not gravity. 

Starship, Take Me:
                m1 m2
Fg = G --------------
                    r2

The chair I'm sitting on exerts a greater gravitational force on me than the moon.

Just sayin'

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe:  Okay, I'll humor you for a sec. Say that Luna does actually exert some "gravitational" force upon us that we can sense.  Now go back to your argument that the effect of the moon is strongest when it is "full".  See where I,Äôm going with this?  You see, the tides aren't highest at full or new moon. The ocean tides are fullest at New Moon and Full Moon, when the gravitational force of the moon in line with the sun reinforces the tidal force of the sun thus causing larger tides. Even then, this has nothing to do with the amount of light hitting the moon, and everything to do with the position of the moon in relationship to the much larger mass of the Earth, and the much, MUCH larger mass of the sun.  So, why exactly do you feel the most at Full moon again? Why not at new moon? The gravitational effect is pretty much the same.  Now, if we ignore the differential tidal force, what is happening during the phases of the moon? As Luna revolves around the Earth in a monthly cycle, one face always points in because one lunar day is equal to one lunar month, called syncronomous rotation. We see different amounts of "moonlight" because different amounts of light are reflected. This is key:  That one realizes that there is no more or less light striking the moon at any time of the month (outside of a lunar eclipse), the only difference is the amount we see here on earth. And the amount of light we see, while it does deal with the relative positions of Earth moon and sun, has nothing to do with gravitation or tidal force.  Tell me, what does a new moon feel like to you? It must be overwhelming, having the mass of the moon positioned above you all day long... 

Now, if we wanted to talk about the effect of moonlight upon biological cycles, then there,Äôs a whole lot of evidence for that. Not really any in humans, but take certain jellyfish, for example, which congregate and breed on nights of a certain phase of the moon, because they are biologically programmed to react to a certain low light intensity which was precluded by a number of nights of increasing or decreasing amounts of light intensity.  THAT I can stomach.  This stuff about tidal effect is completely bogus though. And the oceans rise because they are not only fluid (have no fixed shape) but the molecules act as a whole on the large scale.  Starship's got the right idea.

Oh, I forgot to add that the tidal force also causes the oceans to lump on the opposite side of the earth to the moon as well, and the tides on either side are about the same. This is why there are two tides in a day and not one.

And, interestingly, if astrology actually meant something, and if it was based on forces we already know to be existent (gravitational and electromagnetic), then Sol and Luna would dominate the charts, and all other bodies would be totally insignificant (Sol being the dominant source for electromagnetic force for us on earth, and Luna being the dominant extra-planetary body responsible for tidal forces; Luna exhibits 2 times more gravitational force than the sun on this planet. Its also been said that the earth may be a binary system, the masses of the earth and moon are close enough that the gravitational center of revolution is actually close to the surface of the earth, and not at the core. That has interesting implications in its own right).

Nobody seems to care about the new moon, which is why this argument is bogus. 

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  People can be "affected" by anything they want to be "affected" by.  Of course there is a huge difference between conjured and actual.  Someone who wants to blame their mood or other mental affect on a physical symbol is just being intellectually lazy and close minded to looking for the real reasons lying beneath the flesh. 

LMNO:  Maybe.  A psychosomatic effect can be unconscious, and sometimes not even recognized as even happening.  To call that lazy is to use the harshest meaning of the word.  I know it takes a hell of a lot of self-analysis to figure out all of one's psychological snafus.

Buddhist_Monk_Wannabe:  I can definitely see where the brightness of the moon at full would have psychosomatic effects. Hell, it,Äôs got that effect on me, but I don't go blaming it on gravitational forces.

LMNO:  Lately, I've been having long arguments with people about the means, rather than the ends.  Much like this thread; we can agree on the end, which seems to be evidence that the full moon has an effect on human mentality, but we cannot agree on the means.  It frustrates many of the people I talk to, because they can't separate the two things.

QuotePeer reviewed article or GTFO.

:mittens:

Best phrase ever on this forum.

Quote from: LHXPlus, you can jump higher if the moon is directly over top of you (activated foot glands).

I vote for this one.

Individualism, Freedom and the Machine

Triple Zero:  Ok, I just had a very interesting discussion with my girlfriend. I explained her about LHX's origin of the lie -- and even though I still don't know why that concept is so significant or what he was aiming for, it is one hell of a starter for interesting discussions.  She (an astronomy student) is currently following an extra-curricular course about Greek mythology (and no, Eris isn't covered in it, they can hardly treat all Greek mythology in 12 weeks time.

She told me about how the concept of human individuality is only something of the past few centuries, and I think this is a very important concept that deserves to be gone deeper into. She told me that she learned that in ancient Greece people were what other people thought of them, and no more than that; and only in the Renaissance people started actually thinking about themselves, attributing paintings and art to themselves... "I made that".

And this is where it gets back to the us/them idea. People get more and more individualistic over time, but this is a self-perpetuating circle.  The individualism is bound to make people do things other people won't like, which is when the other people group the one people into groups that roughly do the same thing they don't like, and they distance themselves from them, but those others want to be individualistic so they distance themselves from their peers, and so you get all kinds of scenes and groups splintering until we're all individuals.  Maybe this is freedom, but we're all in here together and if we care only about ourselves, we can't properly control/steer this Machine/Wheel that we're all part of and it gets out of control.  There you have it, another solution as another paradox.  Freedom is slavery

Rev. What's-His-Name?:  I can see this to a certain degree.  Perhaps the information age can be seen as a double-edged sword in this trend in individualism.  In one sense, the information age has brought together individuals who are spread out geographically but, philosophically are more in common than those in their immediate or "IRL" geography.  At the same time, some people may isolate themselves from the people in their "IRL" geography in favor of being "together" with those in their philosophical geography who are very far away, thus reinforcing the individualism in the real world.  People not talking face-to-face anymore, etc. 

LMNO:  Wait... How could they prove how people thought about themselves in ancient Greece, and why didn't they apply Aristotle,Äôs "is of identity" to themselves?

Triple Zero:  I dunno what that means, but probably because most of the people back then couldn't read and had never heard of Aristotle or his ideas?  But seriously, individuality is something people couldn't quite afford back then. It was only an option for the rich but even they didn't use it much. They also had a job to do for the community, and that was to rule them.  Also take pre-renaissance paintings as another example, they weren't signed. They were made for the Church. It was only in the renaissance that art became an expression of individuality.
SillyCybin:  I'm of the firm opinion that the very first abstract thought that anyone ever thunk was "I am" That's the dawning of consciousness right there.  By the way, ,Äúfirm opinion,Äù = ,Äúso far I've never heard an argument against,Äù. Soon as I hear a good one, I'll change it.

Triple Zero:  What do you mean by "abstract thought"? Do you mean a thought that is not "about anything"? Because "I am" is definitely about something IMO.  For me, consciousness is self-reference.  If by "abstract thought" you mean self-referential thought, then I kind of follow you.  "I am" is the simplest self-referential thought, though that does not necessarily indicate it would be the first (it would be quite likely though).  It,Äôs funny that you come here, because just before she started about individuality, we were on the subject of consciousness and self-reference (that a monkey would not be smart enough to think "I caused this to happen because of a mistake in communication"), which I left out.


SillyCybin:  What I mean by abstract thought is thought for the sake of thought. Animals think but, according to psychologists, they do not do so self-consciously. Their brains merely process information then relay responses to the central nervous system. This is what I would call "non-abstract thought" i.e. a closed circuit, an automatic process. By thinking "I am" we create a layer of abstraction and the rest follows from this foundation.  I'm probably using shit words to describe this but I'm sure you'll get what I mean regardless. Point is I disagree with the OP.


LHX:  Is individualism a result of not wanting to be a part of other things?  That you develop an individual identity when you see foul shit going on as a way to separate yourself from the foulness?  "Don,Äôt get this one here confused with those ones over there".  Also, I,Äôm gonna make a few connections from this thread: What it looks like we have here is one of the foundations for the problems man faces and the individual man faces.  We have "I am", but "We aren,Äôt" what we think we are. Aka, we aren,Äôt what we have been led to believe we are.  The step from "I am" to becoming a being with illegitimate fears and unachievable desires is a huge step.  We aren,Äôt actually that, but many people have been taught to have illegitimate fears and desire things that don,Äôt exist.  This type of fear and desire has led to the development of a exaggerated sense of self importance (the tendency is for a person to believe that they are more important than they are, rather than less important than they are - tho both situations do occur)
Triple Zero:  Ok, so I,Äôve been rolling over the issue a little bit last night, and maybe I could approach it from another angle. "Think for yourself, schmuck."  Is this really such a good idea?  Because if everybody would only think for themselves, it would be kinda hard to keep this whole civilization/society/culture thing going. Since it's all rather complicated and we're reaping the benefits of structures that are much larger than ourselves, you have to have cooperation and especially some people to keep a birds-view perspective on things.  Now I know what the standard response to this is, so I,Äôm gonna cut it short here: "But if people would REALLY think for themselves, they would take that into account as well, because in the end it is in their interest as well". This approach is called Ethical Egoism in ethics-philosophy (this type of Egoism is also an important concept in Satanism, which is partly/kind of where the whole "think for yourself" line came from). Now, please don't get me wrong.   By "Egoism" I don't mean anything bad or negative, that's just the name that's given to this type of ethics. It IS in fact one of the most "free" forms of ethics that exist out there (definitely more so than utilitarianism or Kantianism).  As with most philosophical theories, there is also a whole lot wrong with it, but it may be interesting to explore that another time.  The thing I wonder about though, is can you really, really expect people in general to think for themselves in such a way? As Z3 already said it's easy to slip up. One moment you are, the other you aren't. And we are actually trying.  So is it in any way reasonable to expect people to think for themselves so thoroughly? Is this actually possible?  Isn't this "thinking for oneself" already going on more and more (as I tried to point out with individualism and history), and is it not heading in the wrong direction as well?  What is happening with humanity??? We are heading somewhere. Not sure if I,Äôm gonna see it in my lifetime, though.  On the one hand it seems we're all splintering apart, and on the other hand we're being grouped by the dozens as cogs in a huge Machine? Are we already Sticking Apart? Or the wrong way around?

LMNO:  It's not, "think of yourself," it's "think for yourself".  That is, question everything, don't rely on appeals to dubious authority, and come to your own conclusions.  Obviously, some people will come to the same conclusions, and join together.  It's not about a million people creating a million societies; it's about not being controlled, except by yourself.

Hunter S.Durden:  It's the old easier said than done. Do people realize how hard it is to just be? Let,Äôs say I want to leave behind the bullshit of my current society (I,Äôm trying). So I go to live in the woods. I'll build a shack and harvest my own food. Uh oh! Those woods are privately owned by Ted Turner, and the King doesn,Äôt want the surfs killing his deer. In the Modern Feudal system we live in it is really easier said than done.  I'd ask someone on here for advice, but since we are all using computers, I,Äôm guessing you're just as stuck as I.

SillyCybin:  Agreed. So, given that talking about it is gonna get us nowhere and action is ultimately going to accomplish much the same, where do we go from here?

LHX:  Go in as deep as we can, understanding that we are gonna get crushed.  Keep on broadcasting what we find and tactics to keep going further.  Make the knowledge available to people who are looking for it.  Go into unknown regions.  Be intelligent about it.  Figure out a way to enjoy what you have been taught to be afraid of.  Do it on your own terms.  Etc.

Hunter S. Durden:  Good Ideas.  I twisted myself in circles for years with this "unexamined life isn't worth living" business. I wasted so much time examining shit that I never had any fun. I still search for better ways, but I,Äôm in it for the laughs. All the learning I get is just a bonus. I'm having some fun and bringing people with me. Nothing to regret here.  I believe in subjective reality. If you're fine with who, what, and where you are, what,Äôs the problem?

Bhode_Sativa:  I'm having a hard time adjusting to the futility of it all.  I see people like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander The Great, Einstein, and many others who really did change the world, and I think "Why shouldn't I try to do what I can?  Maybe if I yell loud enough I could change a few minds.  If I manage to be in the right place at the right time, what's to stop me from changing something?"  I don't think I'm as smart as those guys, but I'm just not comfortable with giving up.  Why not fight until I can't anymore?  Yet I get this nagging suspicion that my energy might be better used in other directions, I just haven't figured out what.  That's why I come here, to expose my mind to other intelligent people that have a similar view of the world, even if the details differ, in the hopes that I might learn something and/or benefit someone else.

Vexaph0d:  You are told that you are your occupation, your possessions, and your reputation.  You are not your thoughts or your ideals.  You are what you do.  The Idols (Gandhi, Einstein, Buddha, Marilyn Monroe) are NOT their occupations or their possessions. They get to be defined as their ideals, their beliefs, their actions.  This way, you make yourself incapable of achieving greatness -- not because you cannot for some inherent reason be a great person, but because you must always identify yourself completely outside of the entire framework of definitions you use to identify those who are "great."  This is a forced illusion, splitting "who I can be and what I can do" from "who I am now and what I have done."  We are fed this cognitive instruction set that is essentially a complete fabrication.  In truth, no one is 'great,' but some get more media coverage for reasons that shift all the time.

I just wanted to say it's wierd reading LHX's stuff in paragraph form. 

Seconded.  I was also curious about LHX's Origin of the Lie.  Could you please link the post, or provide it?  All a search turned up is this (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=11092.0) thread; is that all there is?

It died at the old BIP forums.



dead
dead
dead.

I even did an extensive Google search, hoping a Googlebot came along and cached some of the old forums, alas no dice.  Never setup a forum on a site that gives you an option to do back-ups, but then doesn't back it up. 

Well, shit.  :sad:

psst... spent about an hour today uploading, formatting, and adding graphics to these pieces. Check 'em out!


added graphics:
http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Crowley_and_the_Black_Iron_Prison (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Crowley_and_the_Black_Iron_Prison)

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=The_Moon (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=The_Moon)

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Individualism%2C_Freedom%2C_and_the_Machine (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Individualism%2C_Freedom%2C_and_the_Machine)

http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=The_Con (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=The_Con)

no added images:
http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=So_What_Now (http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=So_What_Now)




please suggest images and whatnot for these discussions and articles. It really helps their readability if we break up the text visually.

Nicely done, PC.  The BIP is lucky to have you.

Quote from: cyberus on April 23, 2007, 07:52:51 PM
Seconded.  I was also curious about LHX's Origin of the Lie.  Could you please link the post, or provide it?  All a search turned up is this (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=11092.0) thread; is that all there is?

the idea with the Origin of the Lie is that you try to start up a conversation about it on parties and See Where It Goes.

then you come back to this forum and Post Interesting Shit About It.

See Where It Goes? S.W.I.G? What an excellent acronym for party conversation!

~~~Gimme that Glenmorangie, so I can S.W.I.G.




(sorry)

I will try this out, to make up for the post of fail, and cross my fingers for something worthy.

Bump for D Cup, and any other editors out there.

Yay! Thank you! :D

i think 'interesting shit from back in the day' would make either:

a) a great chapter in BIP 2.0
b) a booklet in its own right

it's actually a great title. has a 'recovering lost dialogues' feel to it.

Then I nominate you to put it together.

2nded and 3rded.
I'm afraid the matter is now closed to debate. 

aww crap.

typical - always picked last in sports, but immediately nominated to do actual work.


PD.com:  extending your high school trauma