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[Rant 118Atypia]

Rant 118
Atypia

"Magical thinking: The feeling that one's thoughts or actions have the ability to cause actions or effects that would defy the normal laws of cause and effect."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; Edition 20

"Israel; the de-facto 51st State of the USA."
-Moustafa Hous Bin Farteen

"Disbelief in the self disarms all of the other delusions."
-Buddhist saying

"I saw all the games that you played. Still, into your mousetrap I did stray."
-Tuscadero (from "Game Song")

<I tried to evict the rant machine, since I need more room to absorb medical and psychiatric terminology. But Eris "persuaded" me otherwise. (I have no willpower when bribed with tequila.) So I am allowing the little neurosis factory to continue, at least until I can find a way of throwing a wrench into it. Joy for you, right?>

Where is your sense of humor? Have you lost it through the holes in your pocket? Or did you lose it that day you misplaced Jesus? Perhaps you lost it during the chaos of the night you drank three gallons of rum. Perhaps you lost it that week you spent in Vegas as the Good Reverend Elvis? It could be that you have simply misplaced it somewhere underneath your bed, along with all the other things that your hypertrophied defense mechanisms have shoved there unwittingly. Don't worry much about it. Your sense of humor comes back as easily as your shadow, if you let it.

We are living in a world in which everyone is more or less psychotic. It's just that some people have enough power to force their versions of psychoses to upon the rest of us to the point that they become the template through which we feel and think. When some people realize this, sometimes they figure that they need to rebel, but their minds, trained on psychoses can only become a mirror image of their object of hatred. Don't kid yourselves. Most of us are in that straight in some form or another. You can blame or mistrust the psychotherapists (or whatever version of clergy you prefer) who claim to be able to help you through your psychoses, but many of them are just trained to help you function in a psychotic society. You may be lucky enough to find one of them who knows the game and can help you achieve the autonomy you are seeking. But on the day that happens (if or when; take your pick), you may wish to keep that little nugget of information to yourselves, since "society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence."

Some of you will no doubt claim that the following meander about de-conditioning is an attempt to tell you what Discordianism is or isn't and then say something that betrays your narcissism. (But the following contains no definitions of Discordianism. So if you hallucinate them, it's your choice.) Keep believing in and focusing all your whore-ship on yourself. (The "self" is the post-modern version of God anyway, so it is only normal to do so.) De-conditioning from all of the psychoses and from all of your responses and defenses (neuroses) is a torturous process that takes years. It takes metaphysical and psychological confrontation with all aspects of your deepest felt assembly points in your identity. It overthrows the pantheon you have inside and allows you to cut your way out of the cocoon and transform into the being you may be, for some reason, afraid to be. Your beliefs cannot help you, and they will struggle to maintain their hold over the way you view things.

If you do not brainwash yourself, someone else, or some part of society, is brainwashing you. The trick is to use the techniques of brainwashing to allow yourself to explore all reality tunnels, or as many as you can find or as many as you can find useful. Others may think you are strange or stupid, because you no longer want to be as limited and narrow-minded as they are. (And you already know this to some extant.) But you will meet others who will understand you. The ability to choose differing paradigms and belief at will is simply the exercise of free thinking. (It also helps to build up a practice of empathy.) It keeps you from thinking too highly of yourself, because you yourself know which reality tunnels are your own favorites and so cannot begrudge anyone else who is stuck in them for most of their life. Perhaps they know a thing or three about themselves that you don't. Think about it; it's not that much of a stretch.

You can go on ahead and choose to believe that this world is hopeless, but try to make sure that that is what you really believe, and not some sort of twisted sense of holding the universe hostage for not giving you exactly what you wanted. (And remember that the universe is not your fricken wet-nurse.) Likewise, vice versa.

Be as weird or as different as you wish to be, but you may see the usefulness in keeping any abnormalities to yourself. Or you may see otherwise. (You may want to think about the fact that the more people who know who or how you really are may limit your possibilities if you are not careful.) And try not to cry too loudly when the eggshell of your ego cracks apart. (It's entropy, remember?) You could look on the bright side of it all. Once the eggshell is cracked into pieces, you can both grow up finally and not have to worry about tiptoeing around softly. (Though someone will have to clean up the mess.)

It is better to worship false idols than to believe in their reality. It's better to be a capitalist than to spend time squabbling against the other capitalists. It's better to seek therapy than to pretend you are an anarchist. It's better to enjoy life than to sacrifice it all for a cause. It's better to experiment with the various techniques of self-brainwashing than it is to let someone do it to you unknowingly. It is better to call yourself a Discordian and not be able to explain it, than to seek understanding of it. It is better to drink to create problems than it is to drink to escape problems. (Though you may be sorry.) Better to live and have been sorry than to not have lived at all. (Otherwise how else do you learn how to grab happiness?) It is better to wander around the earth alone than it is to be accompanied by those who choose stupidity. During traffic jams, it is better to twiddle your thumbs than  to try to get ahead of the other drivers. (Unless you can switch cars. And herein is an occult truth so powerful and subtle that if you realized it, you could throw away all of your Crowley and Starhawk books.)

It may just be dangerous to be weird, odd, or unusual. So suck it up and get on with it. Nothing in life that is worth experiencing is without danger. If you think you'll lose your mind after breaking out of your cocoon, then at least console yourself with the fact that you can always find your sense of humor- no matter how long it takes for you to exhume it.

August 17th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC

[Rant 116Delusion Management]

Rant 116
Delusion Management

"The persons we think we are have been manufactured out of some shotgun wedding of history and imagination."
-Robert Anton Wilson

"We live in an age when despair is fashionable, even chic; when human self-contempt has reached heights not known since the Dark Ages; and when it is considered na?Øve to believe that anything good could ever be accomplished...Consider for a moment the implications of what sociologists call the self-fulfilling prophecy."
-Robert Anton Wilson

It might actually not be your fault that you have developed anger or despair- or some combination of both- toward the "world," "society," or toward some more specific class or group of people. The way you feel is still your choice, however. Otherwise THEY have already won. It's not so black and white as many of you reading this last sentence will, no doubt, assume I am trying to make it out to be. Note that I didn't say that feeling despair or anger means THEY have won. What is explicit and implicit here is that when you have lost the choice in how you feel, then THEY have won. No matter how you feel in response to certain parts of the planet SNAFU we are living in, you need never abdicate your sovereignty to any emotion. Clouding up your life with the delusion that you have no choice but to feel the way you do, and then to act upon (or react to) that, accomplishes nothing more than passing the buck to others around you. You make a contribution to the very things you claim to hate about this world.

The way out is not so simple or clear cut and is unique for every individual. It may be that the best approach is to see how much of a fiction your own identity is and to realize you have as much creative input into the course of your own life as any environmental influence. (At least for those of you literate and comfortable enough in life to read.) You could go to the various self-help seminars which will teach you similar things, if you want to buy the bottled air they sell. (Snake oil seems to have gone out of fashion these days, but crystals and positive-thinking are still all the rage. So if you feel you need to pay some huckster for such things in exchange for peace or pieces of mind, so be it.) You could even buy the myriad books, CDs and DVDs from all of the pseudo-therapists that pop up on TV talk shows from time to time. But why? They'll all tell you exactly the same thing I have just written above, but they will take hours or days to get around to it and by that point you have bought all of their books, etc. All you really need is yourself and a mirror, if you want to find yourself. All you need is yourself and some awareness, if you want to regain your ability to choose the way you feel. You can toss out all of the pithy sayings and religious scriptures and self-affirmations.

In some forms of therapy, the simple practice of choosing how to feel and what to do in response to the environment was considered delusion management. You can only escape from the tricks your own mind has been playing by being aware of them. And at that point, you can see through the almost infinite regress of con-jobs, dogmas, assumptions, and myths that most people in today's world will defend as the whole truth and nothing but.
You can look at much of humanity's spiritual/religious/political/ideological project as nothing more than a massive willfully induced pack of delusions. But can you be so certain that you have none of these (or similar things) inside your own mind?

Having anger or despair seems only natural in light of the dehumanization that humanity is so intent on practicing whether on collective or individual scales. But does that anger and despair only lead to more dehumanization? It might if you aren't aware of what you are doing. Falling prey to the delusion that the world is a nasty violent place where only the powerful survive and the weak or stupid get ground up or pushed around says nothing about the ways in which the world actually works. It only says something about what you have seen and felt. And despair, which seems to be the major psychological complaint among residents of rich post-industrialized nations, seems to be merely a hypertrophied sense of failed entitlement to excuse the histrionics of those who want attention when they cry. (Let's face it. Unless you have lost your entire family to a storm or some war, or you have been diagnosed with an incurable form of painful disease, or some other such event like chronic poverty or malnutrition, you really have no reason to start despairing of anything. Most of you reading this have much going for you in terms of opportunities, education, and skills.) Anger is another thing entirely.

There are many reasons to get angry as we all well know; Not only the personal insults and affronts that some of us will undergo at various times, but also the major socio-economic and cultural dysfunctions of a rapidly metastasizing global consumer society. But always make sure that your anger is your choice, and not merely some knee-jerk reaction induced by your authorities to get you to support more of the things that will inevitably bring you to feeling more anxiety and anger. THEY love it when you lose control. It only justifies THEIR reason for being here in the first place. It makes you lose sight of who you could be and it collapses you into a reflection of the cardboard thin mass produced personality THEY want you to be. You are then reduced to finding meaning by buying all of THEIR neat and shiny products and regimens and lifestyles and religious experiences and dreams...all carefully crafted to keep you distracted from learning how to take your sovereignty back. "See?" THEY will say, "Look at these angry, sad, and fearful people. They need skilled leadership. They need US to show them the way. They need OUR protection. They need to participate in OUR economic system and buy OUR products. And for the really hard cases, we'll give them religion." That was the first lie, the mother of all lies, used to convert people to the idea of organized concentration camps that were the foundations of the first grand civilizations. And as the Principia Discordia, among other writings, has said "Mankind has been on a very bad trip" since then.

Seek therapy if you must, but realize that your aims might not be the same as anyone else who seeks therapy, at least on a conscious level. Your aim may be to regain your sovereignty over your own life...with a further stipulation that you want to help others do so as well, in some revolution project you have going on. Just remember that your own delusions are yours to do what you will with them. Your own anger and despair (which gave you the motivations to create your delusions, or buy into the mass produced delusions) can be changed as you become aware of them and how to use them as the mere emotional tools they really are. Sometimes you may need to treat yourself like a chaperone treats a small group of LSD-tripping people...laugh at your own illusions and hallucinations and realize the fun that could be had if you learned to manage them.

If you don't become skilled at managing your own delusions and at making choices in regard to your feelings, what will happen? The world and your life will continue going on the course it has been going on. Religious fundamentalists and political extremists will take even more control over the world than they have now. You will be forced to watch old re-runs of the 700 Club while reading from the KJV of the Bible, twenty three times a day until you become only too happy to give your last bit of hard earned pocket lint over to some crazed and overly made-up spiritual huckster with a zombie-like gleam in his eye who claims to speak to Jesus. All of your rum will be stolen by butter-knife wielding 8 year-old kids dressed up as clown-killing pirates. You will be forced to endure hours and hours of preaching about how much God hates gays, lesbians, and pagans. You will be forced to teach your children that Satan really does exist and he is your neighbor hiding inside the Santa Claus outfit who rings your door every Christmas eve. You will be liable to be imprisoned for any unauthorized orgasms. You may even be forced to go off and fight to the death against religious fanatics of a different breed over in far away countries with names you never thought possible to pronounce. Do you want this sort of life, where all of your reactions and feelings are simply the buttons that your authorities have installed inside of you to pull your strings any time THEY want you to do something for THEM? I can hear the bells ringing already. Get prepared. Is that what you want?

Never mind. We know what you want.

August 15th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of nicotine withdrawal.)

[Rant 115Certain Abysses of Hallucinations]

Rant 115
Certain Abysses of Hallucinations

"Type A behavior:
A behavior pattern marked by the characteristics of competitiveness, aggressiveness, easily aroused hostility, and an overdeveloped sense of urgency...The risk of accidents, suicide, and murder is higher in type A individuals."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; edition 20

"Histrionic personality disorder:
A personality disorder marked by excessive emotionalism and attention-seeking. The individual is active, dramatic, prone to exaggerate, and subject to irrational, angry outbursts or tantrums. He or she expresses boredom with normal routines and craves novelty and excitement. Behavior in interpersonal relationships is shallow, vain, demanding, and dependent."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; edition 20

"Passive-aggressive personality disorder:
A personality disorder marked by indirect resistance to demands for adequate occupational or social performance through procrastination, dawdling, stubbornness, inefficiency, or forgetfulness. The disorder begins in early childhood and may manifest as refusal to complete routine tasks, complaints of being misunderstood or unappreciated, sullen or argumentative attitude, pronounced envy of others, and behavior that alternates between hostile defiance and contrition."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary; edition 20

Many of you have, no doubt, read the above definitional (diagnostic) references and are applying them to various people and or Damned Things you know directly or indirectly and thinking "yeah, that fits them." All sorts of judgments may be going through your head. Or you may be thinking a bit easier now that you know which slots to fit certain people into. (In that case, I am glad to be of service.) However this here rant is not about pigeonholing people. (Even though that can be a fun game. And it's not as if NONE OF YOU/US have ever played that game.)

Think about the sort of world and the sorts of social habits that lead to some individuals manifesting these disorders. Sure, it is correct to say that adults are responsible for their own contributions to their dysfunctions and psychological (whether emotional or cognitive) disorders. But it is also correct to view these disorders as symptoms of people being veterans of a fucked-up world. (Throw in a few more disorders such as paranoias, phobias, and other illnesses and this "fucked-up world" hypothesis seems more valid.) Think about what society, the economy, religion, and cultural habits do to people with their wars, inequality and power issues, prejudices, anxieties, emotional strictures, abuse, and dogmas....you can list a many more problems, I am sure. Many of you who are Discordians will no doubt say that it is because of Eris. But Eris didn't, nor doesn't, do any of this. WE do it collectively. Many of you who are Discordians will no doubt think that we are not a collective psychotherapy institute and are thinking "why the hell should we care?" even if some of these sorry souls have compounded or mixed and matched versions of these disorders? Some of you will no doubt believe that Discordianism, by its nature, attracts people with these disorders. But if you think so, you are forgetting one thing: Play.

And play is the one thing that pisses off most people with the above disorders. Let's face it, we love it when such people who get all wound up in a tight self-focused bundle finally snap, so long as they are far away. But let's not forget about the world that helped stick it to some of these people. Not everyone will suck it up and let it roll off. (Contrary to what some of you have recently suggested.) Just like not every soldier will come back from battle un-scarred mentally or physically. It is okay for Discordians to act like human beings to other human beings every now and then, you know. Inappropriate taste knows no boundaries. I am not suggesting we coddle and nurse such individuals. (Cognitive Restructuring works just fine under skilled practitioners.) I am just asserting that we live in the sort of world that gives rise to such disorders in people. This shouldn't surprise anyone.  

Disorder is important but only in balance with order. Anyone who disagrees may have valid reasons at the time, but they may wish to think about the long term ramifications. Balance provides the ability to leap, spin, and to be assured that one will always "land on one's feet" or make it out all right no matter the pushes and pulls, the ebbs and tides, or the highs and lows of living life. Maintaining (or gaining) one's balance is key to avoiding the habitual reactive traps that cause the above disorders, whether in others or in one's self (or selves, for you Chaoists and Chaosophers). Those who cannot use order to balance disorder or disorder to balance order have become automatons cut off from the basic processes of a fulfilled life. Some questions to think about: Do you seek happiness or are you simply here to prove a point? And if you are living merely to prove a point, what will you do on the day you realize that that point is immaterial? (Or that the point is always shifting? Or even that the point is probably some fiction you or others have created?)

You can take a stance and pretend to hate that part of the Principia Discordia that spells out that balance between disorder and order is essential for healthy chaos as you assume an air of neophilia and "smartness." But that stance shows a remarkable lack of reflection. You can take the view that nothing really matters because you have equated chaos with entropy and disorder, even though if you were honest you would see about as much order as disorder arising. You could go so far as to say that life is a fluke in the universal march toward entropy, but that is still an abstraction you choose to adhere to in the face of overwhelming direct environmental evidence to the contrary. How is it that you are alive and conscious of the fact? Are you still getting caught up in linguistic traps? Are you so bewitched by your own cognitive processes, yet you don't even see the sheer magnitude of complexity that even the simplest of such processes is an expression of? If you think that being jaded is a sign of worldliness it is only because you haven't opened up and lived while fully aware. If belief in things being essentially meaningful is the strongest viral meme of delusion, then belief in things being essentially meaningless is merely the flip side of the same coin.

You can say that nothing really matters, but then why are you still alive and doing things? You can say that no one else really matters to you, but then why even bother tell anyone else? You can say that you hate the disease filled "machine" that is the collective global society and then seek to smash it, but then how are you different from any other politician, so-called social reformer, self-diagnosed revolutionary, religious fundamentalist, terrorist, or sociopath that seeks the same thing? You can say you are here to cause disorder as a balance (or counter pull) to the excessive order you see being imposed around you, but you haven't realized the joke of that position. (And being an agent of disorder doesn't really count if you are aware of being so, remember?) Breaking shit without a purpose is just as dumb as breaking shit with a purpose. And what right do you have to break shit that was not created or bought and paid for by you? You can celebrate your destructiveness and assume that that makes you powerful, but that is the oldest trick of Greyface in human history. You can say that the idea of being creative is full of shit. You can say that the idea that being creative gives one power is full of shit, but that is because you are enthralled to the same old authoritarian delusions that every patriarchy has ever instituted as "reality" or "civilization."

In the end, chaos wins. Every act of destructive disorder (and order) and malicious immaturity you cause will only be taken by another and made into the creation of something new that will subvert further attempts at destructive disorder (and order). You can keep spinning around running to stand still all you want, but don't cry when you find that the world has moved on. You can say that illumination is full of shit, but you must face up to the fact that your opinion is only as valid as any other opinion. And are you saying illumination is full of shit because you hate those things you misunderstand? (As if your understanding of something is a test of its quality or validity. Hah, sucker! Fooled again.)

Disagreement for the sake of disagreement seems to be a properly Erisian or Discordian approach, but don't forget that even this is simply a joke we use, and only at certain times. There are no holy infallible positions, no matter what you think. Pretending otherwise is simply another part of the game. Are you going to keep moving around, asleep at the wheel of your life, or are you going to wake up and own up to your choices? At any rate, don't worry all that much about it. They have mental hospitals, drugs, and behavioral therapies for you, if you get too far out of hand. Or you can go manic and join a religious cult which will give you the attractive illusion of solving all of your problems while compounding them into rock solid walls of habit and belief. Is that what you want?

Never mind. We know what you want, don't we?

August 13th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Gestalt therapy. Fun for everyone.)

[Rant 114Choronzon]

Rant 114
Choronzon

"Delusion is the mind's tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience."
-Mark Epstein, M.D.

"Paranoia: A condition in which patients show persistent persecutory delusions or delusional jealousy. The disorder must be persistent, lasting at least 1 week...This disorder...often includes resentment and anger that may lead to violence. Paranoid people rarely seek medical attention..."

"Paranoid Ideation: Suspicious thinking that is persecutory, accompanied by feelings that one is being harassed, treated wrongly, or being judged critically."
-(Both above definitions from) Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary Edition 20.

"We are supposed to know exactly who we are and what we believe and are supposed to be able to defend that identity. The more strongly we identify with something, the more strongly we must reject its opposite. Thus, the strongest, most obsessive egos belong to the least complete beings....Developing an ego is like building a castle against reality. Because our beliefs imply a rejection of their opposites, they severely restrict our freedom."
-Peter Carroll (Liber Null & Psychonaut)

The mechanism of your obedience and slavery to authority is in the incessant chattering of your mind. You are not good enough. You are more than good enough. You deserve better. You deserve worse. Your body is too little, big, fat, skinny, small, tall, short, unshapely, perfect, ugly, attractive, wrong or right. You have too much of this or that. You have too little of this or that. You need that. You hate this. You want it. You avoid it. You did it yourself. You can't do anything with out help. You have slacked off. You have not relaxed enough. You are needy. You are independent. You are rich, You are poor. You are comfortable. You are uncomfortable. Your life sucks. Your life is great. No one understands you. Far too many people understand you.

If only the government would be better. If only you had this or that. If only you could escape this or that. If only you didn't have to grow old, get sick, or die. If only you could wait until you get security. If only others would see the real you. If only others wouldn't notice you. If only you were married. If only you had the right job. If only you could take a weekend off and go on vacation. If only more people would agree with you. If only taxes weren't so high. If only products would be better in quality. If only the cravings could go away. If only life would stop and wait. If only you could hold onto things forever. If only you could stop the bugs from crawling all over you. If only you could get the circus in your mind to take a break. And while you are wasting away on this trail of attachments and wishes, you never see that these are the grooves carved into your mind and your habits by the sickening pall of authority...whether religious, political, or commercial. Since the days before you were fully self-conscious, these sentiments have been repeated over and over, training you more thoroughly than a North Korean concentration camp.

Some Discordians call some of this internal habitual chatter "Greyface" and personify it as a source of seriousness that gets in the way of living life. (Though there is a lot more to the Greyface metaphor than this.) Various Post-Crowley ceremonial magicians call this entire complex of feeling and thinking (the whole ego) by the name Choronzon, which is an old word for the Devil. Whether or not they actually believe that Choronzon is an external being or an internal state, many would tend to agree that Choronzon's apocalypse of authority gains entrance into our world and our lives from inside our innermost mental chatter. This chatter distracts us from what we could be and keeps us in a false sense of security even as we grow more anxious. Thus all sorts of mental and emotional problems may manifest. This was the original meaning and metaphor of various things known as "evil" or "malice" and of various beings known as "the Devil" or "Satan" or "Choronzon" or "Ahriman." Whether or not they really ever existed (or exist) or not is important only to those who argue about ontology. The point is that crap like this comes from within, as the vast majority of human spiritual teachers, psychotherapists, and mystics (the ones who haven't gone crazy through masochistic practices) have said in their own various styles of expression.

Delusion is another word for it. We latch onto certain aspects of this internal chatter and then act as if the world is correctly perceived through this underlying background noise. The means by which we can get free from this chatter are so simple that they are overlooked by most people. They are simply whatever keeps you aware of the chatter. And once you become aware of it, you can manage it, diminish it, or get rid of it at least for a time. Authorities are half aware of this and seek to keep the chatter going by bombarding you with all sorts of ideas, beliefs, and inculcated emotional responses (the so-called proper responses) in an effort to keep you on a treadmill. You push this away so often that you eventually build up a tower of remembered experiences to cover it over with. Instead of peeling away the layers of ego and looking at the whole process, your distractions and attachments become a sort of system of walls to keep your sense of who you are inside and the sense of everything else on the outside. You begin to fear that the walls are brittle and could crumble at anytime and your denial of that fear grows.

Illusions solidify and become the basis by which you feel about yourself, the world, and others around you. Likewise, others around you sense your withdrawal and act accordingly. Thus we become each other's enablers. Your own life, your self and others, becomes lost beyond all the mental chattering, fear, anxiety, and desire. You become an imago, inexplicable even to yourself, that bends back upon itself and confirms the reigning delusions in your life. Thus you believe yourself to be real. But it is all just another series of traps that could lead to an infinite regress of further traps that give you the idea of constant motion.

Chatter is the judge, jury, congress, of your deepest mind; sometimes even the executioner in those who are suicidal. The ego is hypertrophied either on assumed grandeur or on negativity turned inward. You think you can do anything in the universe or you think you can't do anything. You think because you have accomplished something that you are a better person or you think that because you failed at something that it makes you a failure. Being judgmental is nothing more than delusion in this case. We have become obsessed with our own thoughts, our own judgments, our own creations, our own expressions, whether we admit to it or not. Whether our obsession makes us feel happy or sad. We believe in the products of our own genius and confuse them with genius itself and thus get further trapped in our self-feeding loop of perceptual creation. All messages and signals from the environment and from within the mind get interpreted according to the predetermined tracks worn into your life by habit. You may even make the mistake of attributing fantastic sources of origin for many of them. You may even go so far as to attribute to the "gods" "demons" or other beings the products of your own spinning delusion. One of the worst pitfalls is the belief in the illusion of freedom which gets you to follow another set of habits and repetitive thinking under the misperception that you are free and all of what happens in your mind and in your life is an expression of that freedom. Without evidence, you choose to believe. Paradoxically, one way of getting free is to act as if you are already free, but throughout it you must remain aware of your own mind's tricks; possibly even having a little fun at their expense. Perhaps even learning how to mold and shape those tricks into tools to be use in gaining freedom.

To cure ourselves or to get past the obstacles and the chatter, we must simply go around them. Not around them over and over in a circle while complaining about them. We can learn to see the real amazing facets of our existence in and of themselves without the judgmental chatter, the obsessions, the attempts to prove you are either worthy or unworthy. There is much more meaning (and its attendant meaninglessness) in the idea and practice of SLACK than it seems. As long as SLACK is not used as simply another technique for avoiding or denying the mental bullshit that accumulates and passes itself off as not only your "self" but as "gods" or other beings. Choronzon can only block you if you have forgotten your most essential tool: laughter. And paradoxically, through all of the chatter and bullshit and delusion, you are free. Before rushing to premature understanding, think about what it means to you or how it applies to your own life. It may be that there is no escape and the only facet of "freedom" that is real is the act of being aware of that. When a student asked a Tibetan teacher about reincarnation, the teacher responded with "Buddhists say that there is no eternal soul." The student responded with "What gets reincarnated, then?" The answer... "Our neuroses." This metaphor has more than one meaning, if you choose to look.

August 13th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Under the influence of Dzogchen, Hermeticism, coffee and rain.)

[Rant 113Intelligent Design]

Rant 113
Intelligent Design

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
-Abraham Lincoln

The fact that President Bush recently said that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside Evolution, believing them both to be equal sides of a controversy, should tell you exactly how much stock you can put into the former of the two. To start with, there is no controversy, unless you believe religious people have the right to pass their myths off as science and ram them up the pineal glands of our children, clogging them up with all sorts of foul things such as fear of spiders, belief in devils, and the infallibility of the US government.

First off, evolution is not "just a theory" as the Christians like to repeat mindlessly. In science a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations and usefulness. (You know, the stuff they taught us in science classes back when we were kids.) This is not the same meaning as the everyday pop cultural understanding which sees "theories" as philosophical positions or as beliefs. Secondly, evolution includes natural selection, mutations, and genetic drift- all of which have been observed both in nature and in laboratories- as explanations as to how and why it happens. Most people assume that evolution says that humans evolved from apes, but that is NOT what it says. The idea of common descent says that evidence leads us to remark that humans and apes descended from a common ancestor. It seems to be the most certain explanation though the idea of common descent is only one piece of evolution. In light of this, what evolution SAYS is simply that life is evolving, and we have observed some of the processes which can go a long way toward explaining how.

Saying evolution hasn't been conclusively proved is simply wrong. Evolution has overwhelming amounts of evidence to support it. (And in genetics, it is actually proved to the degree of being fact.) But science works in probabilities and degrees of certainty. If something is consistently observed to operate in a certain way, we can say that we are almost certain. Science says nothing conclusively about anything. Scientific theories, unlike beliefs, are open to modification under new evidence. There is an overwhelming number of observations and data to support evolution, even collected by more ambivalent scientists. Even speciation (new species generation) has been observed. If Intelligent Design proponents and other Christians want to challenge evolution, they must address all of this evidence. (And stop using their straw men.) It seems that they can't do any of this, so their claims that Intelligent Design is a valid counter-argument against evolution have no merit.

Anyone who argues that evolution says that life proceeds by random chance has misunderstood the theory (as attractive as random chance is to some of us). There is chance, but natural selection processes out any harmful or unsuccessful changes over time. Even the appearance of life or consciousness is not completely random since the atoms and molecules that went into the first living organisms follow their chemical and physical properties, at least as far as we can observe. Intelligent Design proponents latch onto this idea of things being not-so-random as evidence of a Designer (a creator god). But things that are not-so-random and have the appearance of beautiful design without any designer can be seen all over the natural world. (Snowflakes, cellular life, organs, organisms, cloud patterns, molecular structures, and so on.) Some physicists have discovered some startling things beyond our common sense approaches to understanding those processes, but they still say nothing about Intelligent Design. As to why all this happened in the first place, evolution says it just happened according to those processes. No need for a creator. And putting a creator into the mix is just grasping at straws. It adds nothing to the explanation, unless you have "faith," which is not necessary for scientific explanations of anything.

I find it hard to believe that these idiots are still arguing that Creation- Intelligent Design- has just as much validity as evolution and want to have it taught in science classes. They ignore the fact that the early scientists who first started developing ideas that came together in the theory of evolution (working originally from the Christian "Great Chain of Being" myth from the middle ages) were much closer to trying to find evidence that fit into the Biblical framework of the world. And none of them could find any evidence supporting creationism as valid, no matter much they considered the universe to be "God's work." Why did so many of these earlier scientists who were a lot closer to biblical views of the universe come to the conclusion of "species origination through evolution" and other processes that need nothing to do with any god or idea of god?  And in today's world, with rapidly advancing and ever more sophisticated tools of analysis and observation, why is it that evolution is gaining more supporting evidence while the old Creationist arguments are stuck in endless repetition and misused logic? So what does that say about what is now being packaged as Intelligent Design?

The old myths should be left to their own realms and kept out of science. Even if something comes along in the future that is a better explanation than evolution, it will not be Intelligent Design or any other so-called counter-argument that does not even address the evidence. (Creationism and any other term for any of its re-packaged sorts of regurgitation has had many centuries to prove its case and has failed.) But if Bush and his millions of supporters have their way, OUR kids and OUR friends will have to learn a narrow-minded religious view of the world packaged as "science." Another "pillar" of democratic society will have been squelched and you'll have to submit to having the ten commandments branded on your ass. (Okay, I admit this latter idea as a slippery slope fallacy, but I am allowed a fallacy or two especially when ranting.)

Evolution is the closest thing we have in explaining observable reality. It says nothing about creation by beings, supernatural or otherwise, in regard to the origins of any phenomena. Faith and mythology should be taught in their appropriate domains, churches, seminaries, and theology studies. They should be left out of science since they add nothing useful. Until such a day as when faith can be shown to come up with workable theories in scientific contexts, it should keep its hands off of science and stick to bilking people out of their hard earned money in exchange for the con of future "heavenly rewards." In the meantime, the religious right will probably take over American society and force us all to find Jesus again and again (they always seem to be losing Him since they are always asking everyone else if they have found Him). You had better get used to putting away all of your latex toys, beer, and Che Guevara t-shirts and getting up everyday at six in the morning to go and sign in to church so you can prove your patriotism. If you don't, they will always have worse places they can put you. Is this what you want? An Intelligently Designed universe believed in by idiots who probably couldn't intelligently design anything let alone a political system that is supposed to give you the space to be free?

Scoff now. But this has happened to technologically advanced post modern societies in recent history. Look at Iran for starters...totally owned by the religious right of a slightly different orientation than our American Christian version (their goals are similar however). The Intelligent Design proponents have found the best way to accomplish this, by inculcating their crap in people when they are still young. (Raise up children in the church and they will never depart, to paraphrase Loyola.) If this happens, every foul thing that people like the Good Reverend Roger and his ilk have been trying to warn about will happen to you and everyone of us, and you won't even get a chance to witness it on a Michael Moore documentary beforehand because he'll be locked up, if not shot and dumped somewhere. And those of you outside of America who think you'll be safe, will only be safe for a little while, because the Empire under God will be brought to you by your own corporate sponsors.

Say your goodbye to the Republic. Get ready for the theocracy. It seems to be an inevitable trend sucking us slowly but surely to the spinning blades and you won't even be allowed to keep your copies of the Principia Discordia or even your Hustlers. Better get used to carrying around those Gideon mini-bibles and Jack Chick tracts. Say goodbye to Slipknot and hello to bands like Stryper, boys and girls. You can at least look forward to one good thing when the Intelligent Design supporters finally win control. We heretics that have been so longwinded and preachy will all be disappeared and when you're not being forced to listen to hellfire and damnation, you may find a moment of silence. There's a silver lining on every cloud....at least until they find a way of strip mining them.

August 13th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Under the influence of recent media reports and my collection of Jack Chick tracts; You too can collect them all.)

[Rant 112Cookies, Pie, and Tequila]

Rant 112
Cookies, Pie, and Tequila

"Hey! That's not haiku!
You're just counting syllables!
Stop that this instant!"
-from the Apocrypha Discordia

"A woman without a fish is like a man without a bicycle."
-Discordian mondo from the A.D.

"You want to hang some Discordia up on your walls along with your African knick knacks, your pseudo-Asian tiki Zen-like Tao relics, your feathers twigs and leather Native Americanesque knock offs, and your assumed post-Christian gothic occult-like icons bought at the local 'alternative' spirituality store?"
-St. Kallista (when a Wiccan from a North Shore Pagan asked her to explain Eris)

"Eris, Goddess of Chaos, She What Done It All,...oh, never mind, I'll do it myself."

Is the state of the world or the people around you giving you a headache? Take some ibuprofen and get over it. We are here today to reflect upon cookies, pie, and tequila. (Or at least that's the excuse for me to write some drivel thinly disguised as purposeless meander.) As bonkers as it may drive some of you more serious and self-important (or righteous) Discordians(tm), silly humorous camp is part and parcel (and hind-leg and foreleg) of the Discordian Society. (And driving you bonkers is also part and parcel and forelock of the Discordian Society.) If you think you are too intelligent for such enterprises, then enroll in some university and seek out some degrees or something. Academia has what you are looking for: Recognition for your sweaty and anxious mentations proving how smart you are. They'll even give you some pretty piece of paper which you can frame and hang up to show all your friends that someone important somewhere thinks you're smart. Fortunately, no one around the halls of Eris' Asylum could give two shits about how smart you think you are. And if you want recognition or titles or degrees from any of the rest of us, you are acting like a petulant brat. Make up your own damned titles or degrees.

We want no revolutions that don't include cigars, dancing, and general horseplay. We want no solutions that don't include camp, quirks, or silly little hats. We want nothing to do with all this talk of war, violence, overthrow, or even car bombings, unless they include hidden jokes, triple entendres, and weird chants in ancient languages. Let the fools and the serious fools get martyred for their causes whether right or wrong. The one who dies with the most toys is still dead. The one who tries to jump from the ship of chaos only ends up drowning in worse chaos. There are half a million hidden metaphors hidden in the bottom of your foot. Did you speak with your Goddess today? (Don't admit it too loudly. Those who believe in the delusion of no-gods are just as fanatical as those who believe in the delusion of gods.) Personality is nothing but a fiction melded together from scraps of childhood memories, friends' mannerisms and thoughts, lovers' impacts, notable film clips, lines from novels, and cultural expectations. The day you free your selves is the day you know the meaning of slavery. Do you call yourself free and yet still live in slavery to yourself? Liar!

Realizing the inconsistency of your selves and the transience of everything, do you still demand consistency and permanence? Do you still believe in heaven/hell or oblivion or in any other scenario? One delusion is just as good as any other delusion. Stop trying to pretend that your delusions are closer to the truth. The truth is a much abused and diseased effigy of the incarceration you have been living within. So why bother? Just perceive what you perceive and be aware of how you have trained yourself how to perceive. Enjoy some pie. Eat some cookies. Drink tequila. Drop your baggage. Live it up. In a world that has presented us with the false choices of euphoria and dysphoria, it may be best to err on the side of euphoria if you still choose to play that bipolar game. Those who cannot stand euphoria are mere beggars trying to claw at your heels...stingy to themselves and others, which is the reason for their hatred of joy. If there is no law and there are no rules, then why do you follow them? If there is no need for balance between order and disorder, then why does your body or mind even function? What need is there for health? For wealth? For anything? In disorder you may find yourself and in order you may find yourself. But you should have never had to look for yourself anyway. How did you lose yourself?

You can also find yourself in pie, cookies, and tequila. Or in meditation. Or in pretty word games, or in any other random thing you wish to do. Or you can find yourself in hating pie, cookies, and tequila. Or never meditating. Or in ranting and wailing and blowing off steam in endless run on sentences compounded upon each other over and over again, always meandering and never making much sense of anything, even of themselves until you get so confused that you just want to smash machines or go on rampages of shopping and drinking and showering, unless you don't. You don't like crap but you need it. You hate humanity or certain human beings, but you need them. You want to be free of compulsions, but they motivate you toward that freedom. You want to settle the dust and clear the air, but you need the smokescreens. Perhaps the story of Tezcatlipoca, or better yet, Avalokiteshvara, has resonance for each one of your selves. Perhaps the pantheons are just a reflection of how the mind works. The only danger in multiple personalities is mutual amnesia. But THEY have therapy, drugs, and electrical appliances to cure you of any confrontation with those selves you dislike...or worse, those selves who actively plot to dethrone you from your primary position of authority over them. Failing that, you can find numbing solace in sex, television, and occult magic...or its ugly stepchild: religion.

If the zombies are going to march, then we may as well stagger around and stumble towards our own fulfillment. If that means eating more pie and cookies, or drinking more tequila, then so be it. The game is played by the rules we choose to make and adhere to. The game is created as the ultimate chaos confidence trickster to get you taken for a ride, and so long as the ride is enjoyable, why complain about being swindled? The tricks are simply there to get you to learn wisdom. Whether you act upon the knowledge is purely your own problem, if anything could be said to be purely anything. You asked for a softer, safer Discordian sandpaper, and you got sandblasted, shafted and shanghaied onto another ship of fools. Now do you cry "foul" because you believed what you were told, that bottled air was not bottled air but in fact medicine to help you. There was no truth and no lying involved. And if you had figured that out sooner you would have only become your own con-man until you were ready to be weaned off. Better us to blame than yourself so you can feel somewhat smarter.

Do you feel now that you can give up your addiction to the Erisian holey sacraments of cookies, pies, and tequila? What will you replace them with? Or will you simply just sit there, impassive like a Buddhist monk flying high off of the sensation of movement from the Earth's rotation? Are you still trying to sledgehammer your way through obstacles not realizing that the Most High God Natural Selection (a.k.a. She-What-Done-It-All) gave you legs and wheels and arms if you need to move around them? Do you seem to be anybody at all? Liar!

That is all. And all is a lie if never seen as dreamlike.

August 12th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Medical Terminology studies with all sorts of wonderful color pics of various pathologies and disorders. When my appetite comes back, I am eating some cookies.)

[Rant 111It's Not Going to Stop]

Rant 111
It's Not Going to Stop

"Not while I'm in the toilet, man. Quit it!"
-Hakim Bey

"-If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?We might, if they screamed all the time for no good reason."
-Discordian Saying

"¬°Y ahora si quieren bailar, b??squense otro timbalero!"
-Ibrahim Ferrer (singing "Ay, Candela" a Faustino Oramas piece.)

"You can't lick the system, but you can sure give it a damned good fondling."

"Every man thinks the people are part of the swinish herd, the mob, when the masses go against him. Every man thinks the people are intelligent and independent thinkers when the masses support him."
-Anderson's Law of Infinite Stupidity

A lot of shit slinging has been going on lately. This is only a mirror of the way things are in global politics and societies. Someone does something. Someone else calls it shit. The first person then calls the second person shit because they had the temerity to call the first person's actions shit. And then the second person calls the first person shit for slinging more shit. And then the first person calls the second person shit for pointing out the continuation of the first person's shit slinging. Then others join in by either calling one or the other of the two people shit. Then some others voice their loud opposition to the whole shit slinging situation by calling all the shit slingers shit. Then some people, whether shit slingers or not, call those who aren't shit slinging shit. It becomes an infinite regress of shit slinging stupidity. This is shit, everyone agrees, just before they sling some more shit of their own. Before you know it, everyone is slinging shit or getting mad and stomping off to shit somewhere else. Fecal matter, ladies and gentlemen. We are crawling in it up to our ears. I for one, am going to stop shit slinging. It was fun for about 23 seconds, give or take a day or two, until I realized that hardly anyone has a sense of humor anymore. The only thing left to do, is to take our over loaded colons, void them, and flush the crap down the toilet.

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, people! If I knew it was going to be this boring, I would have simply returned to my own herd of prairie squid, instead of trying to fuck around with the poor wasted tortured prairie squid some of us have been sharing for the past few weeks. Give it a break, if not for anyone's sake but the poor tired creature's. Enough is enough. And it is enough precisely because you disagree with it being enough. The jihad of 2004 was called off and pulled back in (and beaten severely with wet socks for its failure at stamina) because after a while, that naughty monkey had been spanked sore by some of you. So sore that it was no longer even a shred of its former silliness. You want a revolution? Go and start one for Chaos' sake. Stop the yap clap trap about this that and the other. You may find you can smile again after all. Hell, I have still been laughing through it all, but I am concerned for the little ones who have rightly pointed out over and over and over again that shit should rightly be flushed down the toilet. If you have no toilet, go down to the nearest gas station.

All the shit stirring and the attempts at slinging shit have only dirtied our own hands. Nothing more. It is still funny to see how serious some of you are taking this. But even I know when to cut people some slack. Which is all we are really here for anyway: SLACK.
Regardless of it all, those with a lack of humor have proven themselves true to the task of hanging themselves on the rope that was freely provided. Besides, it's time for other projects and doings and sayings. (Isn't it always that time?)

Another thing some of you may wish to ponder on is the over-use of the word "greyface." Some of you have rightly pointed out that certain moments when some of us appear to lack a sense of humor or whatnot that we are behaving like snotty greyfaces. While some of you have gone around and cried "greyface" whenever some one of us expressed irritation or anger, as if you have never expressed irritation or anger. Being tired, irritated or angry has nothing to do with being gray. Unless there are some of you out there who can truly say that you have never been irritated or even irritable. Then, by all means, through the first stone. Just remember from this latest shit slinging debacle how boring that will get quickly.

Regardless of where you stand or what you stand on, or what side you take- whether this, that, maybe, nothing, or something else- or whatever else, nothing will stop the Erisian Movement. Not even hundreds of little rats who gnaw and squeak and squeal. Not even racebapingfats or claw shrimp attacks or zombies or even thousands of illegitimate unions between activists and bunny rabbits. Not even the hundreds of times some shmuck comes along and says "you all suck!" Not even the Christians who run the USA and thus much of the globe. Not even the boasting matches of ten thousand drunken Subgenii amplified over every municipal PSA system on the planet. Not even the rising price of gasoline. Not even the fact that my pipe is running out of tobacco. Not even a throng a ninja-pirate half-breeds stripping every car in your parking lot. Not even the hundreds of Islamic Jihadist cells that like blowing up shit. Not even the myriad of fnords piled sky high on every newspaper and over much of the internet. Not even millions of migrating Mexicans (that for some reason seem to scare or provoke anger in Anglo-America). Hell, not even a horde of young Republicans armed to the teeth with Chick tracts and copies of the ten commandments. Nothing will stop the Erisian Movement. Not until you wise up. And even then it's just a small chance. You don't have to like anyone else having anything to do with it. You don't even have to talk to anyone else (at least you can talk to yourself, right?). But stopping the Erisian Movement (or the Discordian Society, if you prefer), or even disrupting it, via shit slinging or any other thing slinging, is pretty much as impossible as stopping the Earth rotating, and even that is more possible. (Supposedly some prophet from the Old Testament got Yahweh to stop the Earth once...and that is another reason why we like our irreligion to be non-Prophet.)

If you want your revolutions or other projects, be my guest...but do note that none of the territorial pissing contests that such projects almost always entail would interest all of us in the slightest bit, unless you have some funny or good stories to tell. Try to smash the damned fictional machine if you feel you must. Good luck to you and be courteous enough to try to avoid having pieces of you hit us as they fly off the spinning blades. And do remember that if you need an audience for your narcissism, you'd probably have better luck at getting a rise from a bored crowd at a bar during some open-mic show than you would have with a pack of Discordians or Erisians or other assorted oddballs on the internet. Also remember that if the Discordian Society or the Erisian Movement disgusts you, or you think it is irrelevant, then why bother saying so, or why bother trying to keep trying to irk or stir up crap or any of that sort? Unless, of course, you need some more rope. As they used to say in the circus, one or two monkeys don't stop the show. As the song goes "It's not going to stop till you wise up" and then the fun really starts.

<And now, the rant machine will focus on some other things such as lightning, thunder, and smoking gods or some other such ideas. Coming soon to a theater near you, even nearer than the local chain-coffee-shop franchise.>

August 9th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC; Tequilarius Malignatus
(Driving under the influence of medical dictionaries.)

[Rant 110Three-Headed Mind Pollution]

Rant 110
Three-Headed Mind Pollution

"The sky above changes. The land below changes. Animals and people are born, grow old, get sick and then die. Why is it surprising that the heart changes?"
-Taoist saying

"The Christians claimed that only their magic, which they called miracles, was the only true magic and that all other forms were superstition or of the Devil. The scientists today claim that only their magic, which they call technology, is the only true magic and all other forms are superstition or illusion. In short, heresy and plurality is always a threat to monotheists, whether of the theist or of the atheist variety."
-In Defense of Polytheology (an anonymous Pagan tract from the seventies)

"Multivalence is a threat to serious defenders of narrow-mindedness everywhere."
-Soror Nyx

"Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honour of some pitiless abstraction -- God, country, power of state, national honour, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare."
-Michael Bakunin

Are you sick of no one agreeing with you? Are you tired of always being misunderstood? Have you reached the point where you have had it with trying to persuade people around you to lift their heads up for once and see the greater world beyond their prejudices and preferences? Too bad. It is the way it is, and perhaps you were only wasting your breath anyway. Suck it up and move along. No one else was put here on this planet to experience or see things the way you are now seeing them anyway. No amount of persuasion, coercion or shouting, is going to help. You can get angry and lash out by attacking the people around you, but how is that any different from any other purityrannical authoritarian?

Stop rallying around the flag of freedom. Better yet, stop rallying around any flag. Who cares what symbols or banners or sayings there are to help you avoid your lack of independence? Slavery is slavery, whether you call yourself a servant of a master or a servant of "freedom." Free yourself and let the rest go to hell or heaven or chaos, whichever of the three they fear most. You no longer have to ingest and assimilate their three-headed mind pollution.

Three-headed mind pollution is everywhere. Many people will tell you that this world, or society, or the "system," is wrong, corrupt, and/or evil...a machine that must be smashed. But that is nothing more than Fundamentalism talking. The Christian Fundamentalists consider the world to be under the thrall of Satan and thus the entire complex of cultures, societies, and economics is evil. They got the idea from one or more of the competing religious sects that are now known as Gnostic which were popular in the Roman world after 100A.D. In this dualistic idea, the spiritual world is pure and good, while the material world of flesh and desire is evil and nothing but slavery. You can see this same idea, lock stock and barrel, in much of the atheist or non-religious Marxist-based revolutionary socialist movements (and let's face it, the majority of non-religious revolutionary movements are Marxist-based), except that the Devil is replaced with Capitalism and the "pure and good" spiritual world is replaced by the future society of "worker councils" and socialist economic planning. There are good ideas in both. Even the religious version of this theme has some ideas of merit. But Fundamentalists of either version- or from some newer version that claims to not be influenced by either yet is just as predictable and dualistic as all of them- will not accept any other possibility but their own side of the story.

Hell, even those pitiful few who are Discordian Fundamentalists have infected themselves with the disease. You know the verbal symptoms: "Who the hell are you to tell me I am wrong? Discordians don't tell anyone they're wrong." (Hah! Guess again, sucker!) "You got angry. Nah, Greyface!" "Life is shit. Why are you wasting time talking about pie?" or "Can't we all just get along?" or even the latest "You think Erisianism is about balance?" (which is sort of the thing that defines Erisianism as distinct from those who prefer the term Discordian, except when it isn't) and other such nattering. It goes on and on and around and around. Sort of like the merry-go-round back in third grade, sometimes it can even be funny or fun.

It is more important for some people to prove their ideas correct than to help alleviate any misery or to change anything for the better or to help someone grow up. But that's okay, why waste your energy on hate for them when you can tap into an endless source of pity or laughter? (Fun for hours, satisfaction guaranteed. Perhaps the Tibetan Buddhists have got it right.) What does it matter? So long as you are curing yourself of three-headed mind pollution and are actively avoiding any further infections, you'll figure enough out to do what you need to do when you need to do it...and all that feel good self-help cliched junk. Just remember that if you really do wish to buy bottled air, there are multitudes of brands you can choose from....some of them are even satisfaction guaranteed.

So now some of you are whining about the mess, the blood and the smashed eggs and the cat piss all over the living room...pointing your little fingers all over at everyone else but yourselves (which is okay if you are just putting us on, or if you actually might not have contributed to the mess). But the mess is still there. Who wants to clean it up? (I'll wait for hands to raise....)

Yeah. See what I mean. As long as it is not in your backyard, right? But it is your backyard, and even if it isn't, what are you going to do when the zombies come looking to eat your brains? You can laugh and say that it will never happen, but look at who is running the US government. Not as impossible as you thought now, is it? (Sorry, wrong rant and wrong crowd.)

Yeah. See what I mean. Some of the loudest whiners and complainers about whatever messes they find or find themselves in are exactly the ones who made the messes (or contributed to them) in the first place. Are you willing to be crazy enough to exist and perhaps put something back on this planet from which you have sucked life and resources from, or are you just going to wait until Eris calls in your debts and gets at least some use from your body as fertilizer? Resistance is fertile. Few are called, many are chosen. And the cloud of three-headed mind pollution pathogens is hanging in the air like the hordes of gnats that infest the lakefront every summer. And I already asked you to stop picking your nose in public, freak. So stop it already before you get savagely mauled by a team of Jehovah's Witnesses who want you to buy their magazines and donate all of your gonads and strife to the Lord's Kingdom. It's a fate I wouldn't wish on even the vilest person. (There are much better methods of punishment anyway.) We Erisians are getting sick of cleaning up the messes that everyone else has created (we have our own damned messes to worry about and just wait until you see the cleaning bill) so why should we give a damn about every new fool who seems to think that making another mess is a great way to change things? Hah! Sucker! Keep doing the Lady's work even as you claim to not believe in Her. Keep crediting your destructive angstiness to the Discordian Society even though we told you that Discordianism is no excuse. If you want to make a name for yourself and your three-headed mind pollution infected mentations, go join a cult or something. You might as well. (There may be more money and perks involved in that sort of enterprise anyway. Hell, do it just for the fun to be had.)

Now, I know some of you wanted me to clearly spell out some symptoms of three-headed mind pollution, the etiology, and treatment options to round out this rant. But you all can do that for yourselves, don't you think? (Besides, what fun would it be to spell it out clearly, especially as all the clues to the above are in the previous paragraphs?)

August 9th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Salsa music and drums.)

[Rant 109Pinealopathy]

Rant 109
Pinealopathy

<Though THEY* have tried to stop, silence, or distract the rant machine, the robot is still going strong and at full speed for it is subtle and swift to laughter.>

"Asperger's Disorder: A severe and sustained impairment of social interaction and functioning. In contrast to autism, there are no clinically significant delays in language, cognitive, or developmental age-appropriate skills."
-Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary (Edition 20)

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All activities are like the games children play, like castles being made of sand. View them with delight and equanimity, like grandparents overseeing their grandchildren..."
-Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche

"It's not going to stop till you wise up."
-Guess who this quote comes from

Are you sick of running around in circles? Enough to puke? Do you find yourself hating stupid people but then doing things others consider stupid? Have you ever thought that maybe it was just a matter of perspective? Or do you still insist that you are smarter than most people and that they are all idiots anyway? The condition of pride or hubris is fogging up your lenses and your pineal gland (the poor thing) may now be forced to take action. (And you know if one of your body parts is forced to take autonomous action then something is really messed up. If you decide to try to talk it through with the concerned body part, you should probably not tell anyone else about it. They still have scary places to put people who are brash enough to tell others about conversations with body parts, angels, demons, and staplers.)

Many of you out there think that those people who say that existence is pure joy are simply in denial of the "real truth(tm)." If you think thus it is only because you have confused the new agers with the alchemists. The New Agers go around and blandly cover up the world's problems and sorrows with their "happy happy joy joy" philosophy, whereas the alchemists transmute their sorrows and pains into joy via control over the nervous system and psychology. That's why some of them can say that all existence is pure joy. Some of you may hate their example because it implies that if YOU are miserable, then YOU can change. And not many people want to change or take charge of their own emotional states, do they? Not many are willing to take responsibility for feeling the way they do. It's so much better and easier to blame another or to blame some circumstance that is supposedly fixed and unchanging... or supposedly immensely important, no matter how trivial it could really be. If people could learn just this one truth about the nature of alchemy, the majority of the world's human-created problems would finally be threatened with solutions.

Every one of your experiences is necessary for growth simply because you have experienced it and cannot undo the history. You can use them all as sacraments in your quest or your path or whatever you call however it is that you live. You can take care of yourself, physically and emotionally, so that you are not an annoyance or a burden to others. You can be an authentic person for once in your life, not needing the validation of others and not seeking their rejection. Just being. If this sounds impossible, you may have to ask yourself, why it seems that way? Are you more of a victim of inculcation than you think?

You have no obligation other than to find your own needs and desires and to fulfill them. Taking on the world or the system or society is just another trap to get you to do something that is damned near impossible and to look outside of your own life for solutions you have been dutifully trained to care about. You only continue to care about such ideas because you think you must. But your Will doesn't work that way. You find your Will by being honest with yourself and then doing what it is that you really want to do, even if what you really want to do is just hang-glide or write occult books, or work in a factory while attending weekly bible-study meetings. Who cares about what others may or may not think? Most people are so lost from their Will that they wouldn't understand you at any event, unless you do as they do and pretend to do things out of their nobility or sentimentality or civility.

Your pineal gland is meant to glow, and whether that means you will end up a brilliant mystic or an equally brilliant shoe salesperson, it doesn't matter so long as you are free. Likewise you see other people in this light. They are also free to do as they will and to be as they wish. And everyone is responsible for their own actions and has to live with the consequences. Seeing that others are free doesn't mean you do not hold them accountable (despite what years of popular pseudo-therapy and the New Age have done to the idea of personal freedom). Religions and political ideologies are all geared to make you feel guilty for not adhering to the doctrine of social obligations. What was once considered a natural virtue has now been made onto a guilt trip. Religion and politics cares nothing about people actually doing anything to change the world or to solve problems. The point is for you to feel guilty and once you feel guilty you can be brought back down and easily manipulated. So let the martyrs die for their causes. Let the ideologues pontificate and theorize. And let the religious clergy members rant and rail about their gods and their salvation/submission complexes. Chaos is now. And freedom is yours if you choose to live it. If you want your wishes to come true, then remember that they are made true. What are you doing about them?

What have you done? Remember that this is a question for you to think about. But it is also the question that others will use to try and guilt trip you into their sorts of futility. Beware of those who use perfect logical constructions to try to get you to trip and fall under their sway. The difference between ideas that liberate you and ideas that enslave you is that the latter leave you with no choice or they give you an either/or choice while the former open you up to more possibilities. Logic is merely a tool and those who would see you enslaved (for no other reason than misery loves company, if not direct or indirect manipulation) use this tool to break you down to get you to agree with their position. Those who would see you free use logic to expose the falsity and the limits of all logic, and by implication the limits of all thoughts, ideas, and opinions. (To some degree anyway.) By all means, use thinking to free yourself or to solve your problems, but once done, those ways of thought should be abandoned at the first sign of their obsolescence. Who decides? You decide.

Stupidity is as common as the air we breath, but so is wisdom. It's just that people assume stupidity is the easier of the two and then go on to deny it by positing that their own brand of stupidity is in fact intelligence or even wisdom. It happens everyday. One example of this: Sometimes when I am walking home and about to go into my building, a neighbor who lives in the same complex will run, sometimes for over a block, to catch up to me so they don't have to be bothered by using their own key to get in. I let them in cheerfully. They are neighbors, of course. But I wonder how much easier it is to run and try to catch up to me? Wouldn't it be easier if they would simply use their own key to get in? Aren't they expending more energy trying to catch up to me as I open the door? This example is a simple one that points out this common behavior on many other levels. What are some other examples you yourselves have witnessed or even done?

Work smart not hard. There is much to learn about this cliched and overused expression. And in the science or art of learning how to do things according to one's Will, it is this clich?© that will save on years of wasted time and effort. Simply expending a lot of effort to accomplish something does not make it more valuable. In opening up one's mind and getting the pineal gland to glow, effort is practically useless. The harder you work at it the longer it will take you to achieve anything measurable. Contrary to the common sense of most people, the harder you work at freeing yourself the more of a chance there is that you will end up exactly where you started.

Pinealopathy is a common ailment which is easily communicable and can frequently recur. Because the vast majority of people around you may have lopsided pineal glands, you may be singled out as abnormal as soon as you figure out how to illuminate your own. THEY will resent the fact that you no longer go around in circles with THEM or that you no longer take THEM and their circumambulating seriously. The rats don't want you to free yourself. THEY want you to buy their products and lines of bullshit that give you a sense of freedom without actually ever tasting freedom. THEY have all sorts of hoops and jumps for you to accomplish. THEY have all sorts of neat and shiny distractions for you to numb yourself in either nihilistic apathy or pseudo-ecstatic "if only I had this or that" mentations. THEY want you to follow THEM...to become just like THEM...THEY want you to play THEIR game of leaders and followers and never once question if there is anything more. THEY deny that anything else then THEIR game could possibly exist and THEY use THEIR poorly constructed pseudo-materialist ideologies to distract you from any version of reality that doesn't allow THEM to control or manipulate you. Failing this pseudo-materialism, THEY will use the traditional techniques from the dominant religions to keep you trapped in THEIR thrall.

One thing THEY don't wish for you to know is that the prison warden THEY rely upon to keep you in THEIR thrall is your own mind. Once you no longer care or pay attention to that delusion...once you destroy the inner prison warden, nothing THEY can do to you will ever work again. Once your pinealopathy is cured, it's all over for THEM. You no longer have to listen to the crapscreamers and the peddlers of ideas ever again. The rats within your walls will have no where to live since your walls will be dissolved. All the Choronzonic chatter that THEY will raise and kick up will be seen as the joke it really is. And then you will realize that Eris' laughter wasn't personal.

August 8th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Liber Kaos)

* The baptists and the people at Moody, FYI.

[Rant 108Neophobia]

Rant 108
Neophobia

"And when you, my children, have wandered through the night and grown hungry, you shall behold the holy beacon of the donut shop, wherein thou shalt consume donuts in my name. And you shall fear not the cops and drunkards which abound at such all-night eateries, for they too seek my glory, though they find it not solely through the rites of eating donuts."
-Eris (from the Sacred Erisian High Mass)

<Revelation...
Or; Eris is hijacking my mind.>

Child of chaos, let those who reject the contingencies of existence fight it out amongst themselves with their wars, revolutions and destruction. Let them run around in circles pretending to have found a new and better way even as they do the same things as their dull ancestors. They pretend to be something new under the sun, or hidden in the mythical underground, but they are really just the same old neophobic fragments of humanity searching for ways to avoid anything really new.

Let them rant and rave about how important it is to be engaged in actively promoting discord and violence. If you are not willing to illuminate them, then leave them be to play at their serious roles. Leave them to fight among themselves, for everyone who wants to serve under a flag will always find others willing to play the part of their enemies. Let these fools struggle against and kill one another, for the removal of their genes from the pool could be of greater use to evolution than any potential they might have had if they were to wake up and smell the coffee and bacon.

Pity them if you must. Laughing at them is much better. But stay out of their way, unless jerking them around and yanking their chains can produce some spectacular offerings on the altars of your freedom. These fools think they can win the right to own the Golden Apple, and each one of them vies to prove themselves or their theories or their ideologies or religions or paths or thoughts to be the best. And much of the time, they aren't even funny. Toss your Golden Apples, and then watch from afar as these neophobes get all worked up, even if such neophobes call themselves "Discordian." Especially if they call themselves Discordian.

They have tried to hijack the Discordian Society and make it is humorless and dull and grey as they are. They have confused the Discordian Society with the bullshit in their own minds. They have tried to tell you that being silly is an affront to intelligence. But what has their alleged intelligence really done for anyone? Even their own selves are caught up in the same ring-around-the-rosy dance that much of humanity enthralled to authority has played now for the past several thousand years. They have lost the joke and replaced it with "things that are important" or "things you should be afraid of" and then they say that you are stupid for not taking their screeches and squawking seriously.

Remember that life celebration and silliness is always an affront to those locked in the stupidities of their own hatred. Those bent on slaughter are always seeking to make your lives just as miserable as they themselves feel. They are likened to bullies, afraid that someone somewhere is having fun without them and therefore they only have the urge to make happiness disappear from the earth. They feel wronged by existence but have not the will to do anything about their own lives, so they lash out. And then they pretend that such lashing out is good for the soul because they have bought their own bullshit that reality is just as miserable as they feel.

Their hysterical fear of anything lends them an assumed posture of "worldliness" and of "experience," but listen to them not. Follow them not. (Unless it amuses you to tickle them until they snap in a pool of drool and madness.) It worries them and it vexes them that there are some people who will disagree with their "truth." It tortures them that other people who are Discordians don't actually give a rat's ass about trying to bring down society. (They never realized that while that effect might be a side effect of some of what Discordia may bring, it is not really our major concern.) Let those foul crapscreamers fight it out with their so-called enemies, whether the state, some other authority, or the masses of people at large. Let them do so, and watch the fireworks and the foolishness. It will be a pretty funny spectacle (it always is) because all of their serious plans and ideas only end up being silly for some of us.

Sure we know that children of chaos will always run into problems from time to time from the spawn of destructive order who run society, but let those spawn fight against the self-appointed "liberators" or whatever such ilk choose to call themselves these days. Try to keep a sense of pity for them because if you were like them, you would be miserable and afraid too. And never forget that both of those sorts provide good sources for humor and good targets for illuminative pranks. (Illuminative for us, at least. Care about the neophobes, if you wish. It isn't a requirement in this here irreligion.)

Such ill mentally and emotionally deformed and unbalanced neophobes have had the audacity to assert that Discordianism is about destruction, but only because they have really missed the spurious and pernicious points of it all. (There are supposedly five points.) They hate weirdness. They hate newness. They hate anything that they can latch onto as a cause for hatred. They waste their minds, talents, and time trying to convince the rest of the Discordians to become as ill-begotten and as hardened as they themselves are. ("We have to protect ourselves" they say as an excuse for their psychic armor.) They even hate the Erisians of the bunch by claiming that deities, such as Eris Kallisti Discordia, don't exist - even as they should be smart of enough to know that deities exist for those that say that they do and deities don't exist for those that say that they don't. There is no truth there that any human can prove to another. And the deities really don't care about humanity's lack of knowledge in this respect. (Since it's easier to fuck with people who are ignorant of such things.)

Children of chaos, sink them! Sink them fast and sink them hard. Tickle them and torture them with your laughter and continued silliness so that they will never again commit the atrocious mental failure of attributing to your Discordian Society the attributes of a political party or of some other such organization. The squirrels will gnaw on their bones. And chaos will continue to express itself as we will.

<I get my mind back from Eris.>

What? Um...

There is no god but goddess! And She is your Goddess!

July 31st, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Eris.)

[Rant 107A Basket Filled With Words of Neither Coming Nor Going]

Rant 107
A Basket Filled With Words of Neither Coming Nor Going

"Either we get depressed when confronted with impermanence or we devalue what we see and push it away...Only by cultivating a mind that does neither, taught the Buddha, can transience become enlightening...it is the very tendency to protect ourselves against mourning that is the cause of the greatest dissatisfaction. When we distance ourselves and recoil from time's passing, we are creating an artificial duality. Our being and time are not separate, they are one and the same. They are all we have."
-Mark Epstein, M.D. (Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart)

"In a place where there is something that can be distinguished by signs, in that place there is deception. If you can see the signless nature of signs, then you can see the Thus Gone."
-Vajracchedika Praj?±aparamita Sutra, ch. 5

"You are you. You are not you. But who you are is always the third option."
-Ancient druidic saying

"Only kidding! I made that up."-Eris (The Complete Book of "This is Just a Working Title")

Where is your beginning and where is your end? And outside of the words and ideas with which you cover up the reality that can't be understood, what do you really know of beginnings and ends? How can you be so certain that it's over when it's over? Is it really more surprising that you may possibly have more than this lifespan than it was to be born and have this life in the first place? How you are going to see it is really all up to you. You can keep choosing a philosophy or metaphysics of consolation that only confirms for you the validity of your prejudices and half-baked ideas. Or you can choose to step outside. Get yourself out of the way. See around the edges of your identity and your thoughts.

Erisianism or Discordianism or whatever you want to call it, isn't what you think it is and it is exactly what you think it is. But what does that really mean? Are you "getting it" so often that you feel you have made it to some secret or elevated place above all of the others? Or are you getting it and learning that the only real use for answers is to beget more questions? You can say that these words are all just a bunch of mystical hogwash mixed with the impressions of a nervous system influenced by dharma practice, but that is still only a preconceived belief for which you can find much evidence to support. (Evidence is always perceived in ways that twist it to support whatever prejudices you have.) Your words of denial or support are still only words. And words are easily enough to manufacture in pretty little streams that cause things to be thought from one mind to another. Nothing more than things to think about. Freethinking is nothing without freedom from thinking. The incessant chattering of the discursive Choronzon inside each one of us tries to deceive us into thinking that only further thinking can defend us from the utter ecstasy and terror of existence. But thoughts are just thoughts. They need to be laid aside for us to experience the most powerful events of life, regardless of the fact that these events are happening all of the time.

Awareness comes with no conceptions. And conceptions eventually grow to become the enemies of awareness. Attachment to explanations sometimes only builds up more obstacles. Even so, awareness is not the destruction of neuroses or the abandonment of "ego" or the merging of the "self" into some mystical state. Awareness is simply the state of a being that can handle everything because it clings to nothing.

Silence resounds like thunder and in every thunder clap you can hear the profound silence that gave rise to its expression. The sledgehammer of Eris strikes hard, but some say it is the sweetest most intimate embrace and that it is only hard for those unwilling to let go of themselves and take a look around. Chaos is only disruptive and full of discord for those people who refuse to accept its reality.  Your life is only a limiting prison if you are unwilling to erase your personal history. What's the use of holding on to modes of perception and of being that have run their course and must dissolve? What's the use of trying to prove points that become pointless as they fall apart, dance, and recombine into other things? What's the meaning of a life that cannot fathom its own fathomlessness? And what's the meaning of life if meaning is all that there is?

You can say that it's all an illusion so what's the point of embracing anything? But that's only a childish way of seeing it. If you won't embrace anything at all, then your life is just an isolated fragment of what it could be. Stop whining about the fact that everything changes as if you are the only one who is acutely aware of impermanence. Cry if you must. Laugh if you can. Being here, exactly where you are, is the point of your existence. And it is better to befriend your own impermanence than to deny it and sadly learn that your denials, entreaties, and attempts to stave it off are all just as impermanent as you and everything else around you is. The essentialist cries "Why is it this way?" and laments the fact. The nihilist cries "Oh woe is my hell. Nothing matters!" and tries to remain aloof. Both of these people should be stripped and beaten with bamboo sticks for their foolishness. You must grow up and grow out and dance with your impermanence in order for you to forget your "self," let its guard down, and truly laugh and play. (Even children know this part of reality before it is drummed out of them by society and culture.)

You can say that the world isn't all about beauty and smiles, but that's just because of your own neuroses which prevent you from coming out of your mental boxes and learning that life is full of sadness and happiness. So what? Take a chance. Happiness will only be served to you on a silver platter if you can choose happiness, despite the sadness. You want some magical miracle fix-it cure for your existential condition? That is a sad state to be in. Take it or leave it. Your general background state of happiness is only as strong and real as you are aware. If you are the freethinking free spirited free being you say you are, then why would you not choose happiness? Eris may try to tickle you but even She gets impatient. She won't hold your hand to lead you to where you need to be, but She may laugh with you when you get there.

You can still resist and refuse and deny and chatter and intellectualize and theorize about all the ways and things that make you so unhappy and about all the reasons you have for not being at your best. But that is only because you are just being stupid. You can claim that life sucks but chances are if you are reading this, you have enough to eat, you have a roof over your head, you have access to information technologies (to find opportunities to change what the things in life you need to), you live in a society that is for the most part free enough for you to be able to read this, and you have some intelligence about your environment. So what is it exactly that gives you the temerity to make half-assed judgment calls about the nature of life? Assumed avant garde and chic post-modern apathy or nihilism doesn't much cut it. And any bitterness you may have over the way things have not turned out the way you had intended at some point in the past can be ameliorated in the realization that everyone alive today has reasons or excuses that they can use to keep clinging to their bitterness.

It may be that meditation is the one medicine that works in establishing the sort of mental habits that can lead you to realize happiness more often. It may be that the medicine of awareness may be the only real reason why you are alive in the first place. Don't blame me, I didn't do it. I am only working out the implications.

July 30th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of caffeine, nicotine, happiness, dharanis, and dharma practice.)

[Rant 106Believers]

Rant 106
Believers

<First a few quotes from the world's monotheist religious holy books. I could quote hundreds more items from Jewish Scriptures, the Bible, and the Quran and thousands more from commentaries on each of these scriptures.>

"I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them."
-Quran 8:12

"O ye who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him)."
-Quran 9:123

"But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring them hither, and slay them before me."
- Jesus Christ in Luke 19:27

"A curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord's work! A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed!"
-Jeremiah 48:10

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace but a sword."
-Jesus Christ in Matthew 10:34

"Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, "Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor."
-Moses in Exodus 32:27

The three major Monotheist religions of the world often assert that they are religions of peace, human brotherhood, and morality. History indicts these assertions as lies. Hundreds of thousands of unbelievers were murdered in Canaan. Millions of nonbelievers and heretics were slaughtered by Christian armies and their state cronies. And Islam, often touted as a religion of peaceful submission to God, has a record just as bloody and murderous in its expansionist tendencies as Christianity. (It is little known today that Islam spread across Arabia and many other countries by violence, warfare, and conquest. Hundreds of thousands of Arabic pagans were killed even in just the beginning decades of the religion.) Today, we see in evidence, the same murderous tendencies in all three of these monotheistic faiths. Whereas Judaism's violence seems to be mainly focused in the area of Israel/Palestine, Islam and Christianity have spread worldwide and their own version of religious fanaticism is rapidly becoming the world's fastest growing brand of faith. It seems the middle ages are coming back for a major revival. And what are we doing about it? We are sticking our heads in the mud and buying into the lies that these religious leaders tell us: "No. We are not all fanatics. We are peaceful. Our religions are being perverted by evil people." And on and on and so forth. Some truth mixed with a lot of lies. A quick scan of their holy scriptures shows faith systems that care little for evolution, freedom, progress, or of any basic humane system of morals....at least in regards to treatment of "unbelievers."

Eris has tricked them yet again by blinding these monotheist spin-doctors (the ones who try to proclaim that their religions are truly peaceful every time one of their co-religionists blows some shit up or shoots at somebody else) to the fact that their holy scriptures justify genocide, crusades, and jihads. Yet they are right. The problem is not inherent in their religions themselves. They are not all fanatics. The problem here (that problem that turns sensitive beings into murderous fanatics) is encapsulated in one word: Belief.

Beliefs turn people against one another. Beliefs of all kinds are used to justify any atrocity. Beliefs are allowed to warp minds and are not properly diagnosed as the sickness they are. But actually even beliefs are pretty harmless until they come into contact with people ready to accept them and put them into action, even if it means destroying lives and reducing the world to a big flaming pile of rubble. Believers can justify anything, even hatred, and call it righteous indignation, or some other such crap. You can say that She What Done It All is responsible, but I asked Her about this and, after She smacked me for asking such an idiotic question, said this: "Human beings are always blaming Me for the crap that they do to one another. If not Me, they blame their various mono-Gods. This is why humanity will never graduate from grade school. This is why it is good to recognize as many gods as you can find, because at some point you give up trying to pin tails on donkeys and learn to own up to what you have done." I just sort of sat there a while, stunned at Her directness, to which She intuited and said "Come on, Hugh. I am not as longwinded as you are."

Think about it. These monotheists, who actually all claim to have revelations stemming from at some point One God, are not merely playing football. They use swords, guns, bombs, economics and dogma as their tools, and every act of violence or hatred that they perpetrate can be justified directly from their scriptures, despite what various monotheist apologists like to claim. But even as bad as it is, the root problem is not that these people want to worship One God. It's beliefs being acted out by believers. True believers are the problem.

You can see the process of this "True Believer" syndrome played out even in atheist philosophies and ideologies such as Marxism and the various permutations of what Americans like to call "Communism." Then there is the fanatical devotion to Capitalism at any cost which has misappropriated the term "free market" to distract anyone who dares question it. The syndrome is played out by believers in identities, nationalism, and other causes as well. The main idea is that those who disagree are not as worthy and should therefore either be converted or destroyed. It angers believers that other people do not believe. It fills many believers with hatred that other people might actually choose NOT to believe in what they themselves believe. It doesn't matter what flag or what icon or what system or what viewpoint or what God these people follow, so long as they can follow something. And damn all the rest to hell. Fanaticism is not some strange perversion of belief. It is the logical conclusion of a pathology that has run its full course. You want to rid the world of terrorism and violence and hatred and inhumanity and degradation and all of that? Get rid of the tendencies of masses of people to become enthralled to holding firm beliefs. (Hell, even just one person who is enthralled to holding firm beliefs should be considered armed, sick, and dangerous.)

We humans are inordinately afraid of plagues that swoop in and wipe out millions of lives. And this is a logical fear that has prompted medical science to seek ways of eradicating pathogens that cause plagues. But there aren't many people today who realize that the plague of human stupidity known as belief has killed millions more than any pathogen. Psychologists and philosophers (at least the "lovers of wisdom") should be lining up by the thousands to help fight this plague and treat its victims. But no, what do we hear from them about this plague of beliefs? Nothing but silence, and the occasional article written by atheist or agnostic (or even some Discordian) freethinkers which usually never gets read by anyone outside of those narrow intellectual sounding communities.

Why do you think some of us have made Counter-Evangelism one of our main Discordian projects? (Well, there are other reasons too. We don't just like slapping Baptists around for the sheer pleasure of it, you know.) Never think that our Erisian mission is the same as any believer's mission. We aim to subvert all missions, jihads, crusades, and other such crap at the source: The infected human mind of the "true believer." The Golden Apple is meant for each of us, by Eris! And it only provokes discord in the lives of those who try to claim the Apple as their own exclusive possession. That is the main lesson of the story. You can only truly hate someone or something to the exact degree that you hold a firm belief about it or them.  

Sure, I like spreading the Erisian or Discordian (take your pick) irreligion, but I am not dumb enough to think that all people should actually become Erisian or Discordian (or both, if you are still caught up in silly terminological differences). The choice of someone's spirituality or path or what-have-you, or even the choice to not have anything to do with any of it, is theirs alone to make.

July 29th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of Psychotherapy and Buddhism.)

[Rant 104Deep Fried Onion Dzogchen]

Rant 104
Deep Fried Onion Dzogchen

"Focused awareness is difficult not because we are inept at some spiritual technology but because it threatens our sense of who we are."
-Stephen Batchelor (Buddhism Without Beliefs)

"It's too close so we overlook it. It seems too good to be true so we can't believe it. It's too profound so we can't fathom it. It's not outside ourselves so we can't obtain it anew."
-Dzogchen saying

"We live in illusion. And in the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything. That is all."
-Kalu Rinpoche

Enlightenment really is only a light switch away, you just have to find the damned light switch. There is the rub. After a lifetime of habitual inculcation which tells you that there is no light switch or even the possibility of enlightenment, you decide "what the hell" and think that enlightenment is something that you can do at the drop of a bucket. Unfortunately there is the matter of your habitual inclination...that lifetime of training in the push-pull of craving and ego defenses. So that even if you figure out where the light switch is, you don't flip it, afraid of losing the only identity you have known.

Between the rats that have gotten inside you, and the greyfaces that are multiplying faster than rabbits in heat (aren't they always in heat?), getting that pineal gland to constantly glow may seem damned near impossible. And that's exactly what they want you to think. (They as in THEM. Not they as in the rabbits who don't give a damn about humanity's existential angst or tribulations, except where it affects them...by the way. Mice, on the other hand...) Are you going to keep taking it like that?

If you start by deconstructing the house that ego built, they (as in THEM) will not be able to get any hold over you. You can realize that the Buddha is in the palm of your hands. Perhaps it's just that you have wrapped Buddha up in filthy rags and you have forgotten how to unwrap them. Deceived into thinking that chaos is chained into your deluded notions of lifespan, life-form, species, sentience, thought-form, and perception, you have forgotten the every day ordinary truth that all of these things are merely expressions of chaos. You are part of chaos' living work of art. And you are also the artist. There is no audience to the spectacle and you are the audience. There is no secret highest fulfilled teaching and you are the secret highest fulfilled teaching. The Buddhas show nothing that you can attain, therefore they show you the most precious gifts. If you are not a lamp unto yourself, there is no one who will be a lamp for you. The path of awakening does not exist except when you are walking it. And there is no finish line. Your belief in the end of the story is a dogmatic lie foisted upon you by those who are so caught up in pretending to know better that they can't even see that "knowing" is a trap.

"Emptiness is said by the awakening ones to be the letting go of views, but they also say that those who hold to the view of emptiness are incurable." (Nagarjuna; "Verses from the Center") The fine lines lose their distinction in both the circle of confusion and in the focus of clarity. And there are times when your search for clarity gets in the way of seeing directly what is in front of you. Take care and pay attention to your life. You are a star. Don't forget that your firm belief in your soul is what makes sure that your present neuroses are what get reincarnated, daily. Nothing implies something in as much as dogma implies the possibility of freedom from dogma. Are you still trapped in the pernicious idea of a soul, a lifespan, a figment that lives from birth and death? While these ideas are socially useful, how much of what is socially useful has no real bearing on what is really going on? You are not a verb, a noun, nor any other word. Not even a name. You are a story composed of cut-ups and insertions and commentaries and re-edits and careful or careless proofreading not only from others around you but from your own thinking. The discontinuity between what your story is really saying and what you are interpreting from your story can become vast. The shattering reality of how your story is actually composed, concocted, and conditioned could be enough to wake you up into seeing how fabricated your version of the events in your life really is. There is no smooth timeline. No continuous arc of consciousness. No solid definable ego. Nothing but an onion that you can keep peeling away at and stripping until you get to the core and realize that the onion was really in the art form and the layering. No true essence hiding away deep inside somewhere to be discovered.

This can be enough to scald and scare you away. Your so-called self, if tightly clung to, will cry out at the injustice of a universe and at the processes of your own life that refuse to conform to the mistaken assertion that you have a solid stable identity that has clear borders between "you" and "other." But this may be the key to exploding the pineal gland and deep frying away all of the dross, or at least making it easier to peel the dross away. (Or you can collect the dross and sell or trade it for more useful or valuable items.) You can hate me if I warn you about the way you are going about things by saying "Hey, buddy, you're about to crash into a thicket of poisonous brambles and thorns!" You can tell me "Screw off! No one can tell me what to do!" But telling you what to do is exactly what I have not been doing. In this case, the warning was made as a suggestion from someone who once did the exact same thing. And then when you are filled with cuts, scrapes, and poison, you will hate me some more because you have to pay for all those charges you racked up on your credit card. Your hatred is only more interest accrued for you to pay off. It bothers me none. It makes me chuckle at your damned seriousness. Remember, we all did or will do the same at some point.

You can disregard anything that you disagree with and say that you are just being skeptical. But in your assumed posture of intelligence, did you ever stop to think that you have never applied your own skepticism to the things you agree with? Your opinions have become like beliefs and those are common dross. None of them are really as important as life itself. With skill, you can take that dross and turn it into pigments for painting this canvas you call your life. But beliefs, whether of the believing or disbelieving approach, are merely the same opinions held too tightly. Taken to extremes, skepticism becomes another dead end and it becomes necessary to yet again freely think.

And all of these mentations are just that. Impermanent concoctions that swirl around and sometimes endlessly repeat themselves. Taking yourself too seriously only gets you caught up in the droll spectacle until you realize that even your actions are impermanent concoctions. Then you may notice the same of your "self." And then what? Are you going off to join some monastery or retreat community? (If that's what you really want, so be it.) Or are you going to come down off of your "most-certainly-I-am-right" high horse and play with the rest of us here in Eris' playground?

July 29th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC

I know I have laying on the multiple posts of rants lately. It's just because in the last few weeks I have finished so many of them and want to just get them out and done with. I promise to slow down once I get caught up.

Rant 103
Bastard Children

<The rant machine can not be stopped. Not even with tequila in dangerous amounts mixed with sedatives of various shapes and sizes.>

Friends, Romans, Discordians, lend me your eyes! Read upon this with growing horror as the news flash starts to sink in. Forget about fluffy bunny Neo-Pagans who are trying to call themselves Erisians. Forget about Robert Anton Wilson's Bavarian Illuminati prank. Forget about the demons and the Bushite fascists of the (Mad Prophet and Human Snafu)
Good Reverend Roger's paranoid America (Fat City). Forget about the creeping sense of fear as you read about more and more suicide bomber attacks. Forget about the nameless anarchist hordes burning down the retail chains. Forget about the ever present threat of being eaten by either Cthulhu or the memory holes. Forget about the various permutations of escaped laboratory experiments. Forget about the stylish leaders of North Korea starting new fashion trends on the beaches of Southern California. Forget about the fact of the Harry Potter series being the Trojan Horse of witchcraft that threatens Christianity. Forget about even the fact that some evil genius has stolen all of Bob's frop.

No.

Even though those are valid concerns. There is a problem that is more pressing than even holes forming in our socks. It is worse than even the rise of the Goat with a thousand young. It is even worse than the ceremonial magicians opening the gates by finishing off the Enochian keys and letting Senior Choronzon and all of his crew into the world. Even all of these together do not even come close to the threat which I am about to tell you of now. Are you ready? (Sit down and drink something strong.)

My fellow Discordians and Erisians, we are being inundated by the hundreds of illegitimate bastard children of Aleister Crowley. What's that? Shock? You have nothing to say? It's true. The O.T.O. have decided that we have been having a little bit too much fun and they're not standing for it any longer. No. Not on their watch. But since we were impervious to their little magic tricks and the bombardment of their occult-lite Kabbalah, they have decide to infiltrate us with the numerous spawn of the Great Beast himself. (Who, truth be told, spread his seed far and wide on this earth. You thought rabbits could reproduce?) How do we identify this threat and neutralize it, you ask?

To start with, they like to wear silly hats and they talk in flowery late-romantic style tones of voice. They also can not stand beer, especially cheap swill. And when interrogated with the question "Are you a human being and not a cabbage or something?" they just sit there with a silly grin and chuckle as the drool runs down the sides of their faces. Because they appear to be so funny, we have let them into our ranks with open arms, not realizing the grayness that they would bring. (The fact that they were all avid fans of the Beast himself but yet could not quote anything Eris ever said should have been the most glaring clue, but you know we Discordians never do pay attention to details like that.) We even said nothing when they started getting rid of the clowns and the hippies. And now, these lying scheming children from the discarded parts of a Robert Anton Wilson draft are threatening the very heart of Discordianism: Bowling while drunk. ("It's not right to bowl while drunk," they say.)

What can we do about this threat? All we can do is to drink tequila. Yeah. That's right. Read that again. Tequila makes us impervious to this bastard menace. Crowley pretended to hate Tequila, thus these little creepers are violently repulsed by even the merest hint of a smell of the substance. Key words of banishment include "Hey you! Get off of my cloud!" and "Run mother fucker!" (best to use while brandishing a chain saw) or even "Cthulhu fhtagn where the sun don't shine, punk!" or even "Get O before U and T out of here!" You can call upon Eris, but She is just laughing Her ass off right now. Sure, you think I am kidding. But when you are trapped on some altar being forced to listen to tone deaf middle class English kids chanting in a horrible hodge podge of Greek, Egyptian, and Hebrew while they spill chicken or goat blood all over you as they dance in that idiotic spastic that white people call dancing, don't say you weren't warned, sicko.

If I have to force feed every little one of them Tequila myself to straighten them out, you can bet your glowing hashish stash, I will.

Thank you for your time.

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by the Committee for the Armed Defense of Certain Committees Against Certain Other Committees.

No animals or appliances were hurt in any way during the filming of this rant.

July 27th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving while under the influence of "The Book of Lies")

Rant 102
Inconspicuous Joys
(1 = 0 = 2)

"Every man and every woman is a star."
-Aleister Crowley

"Everything about us is true. Everything about us is false. Everything about us is both."
-Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

"The life force is not blind. We are."
-Austin Osman Spare

Sometimes it's better to be an adjective or a preposition than being either a noun or a verb, for those of you who like your parts of speech metaphors. For those of you that don't, perhaps there's nothing that can be done. After all, even Bob has to put down His pipe every now and then (especially when he is busy convincing the Wiccans that He is the Horned God). Thus, even I know when I have tortured a poor metaphor beyond endurance. (That's my story and I am sticking to it so I can maintain my air of contradictory pseudo-erudition and cut-up news paper clipping wits.) Even I need a break from the longwindedness (or rather the endless tapping of this poor keyboard which is screaming for a break).

When was the last time you actually enjoyed doing all those little things you do to get you though your day? (Or night, if you prefer.) If it has been a long time, or if you can't even remember (and the memory holes didn't attack you), you may need to reflect on this for moment. Why are you not enjoying all of those little things? Is it because you are trapped into the fragmented mentality of constantly grasping at things that can give you more pleasure and of pushing away at things that will give you more pain? (While you ignore everything else?) There is more to existence than just grasping and aversion. Perhaps realizing that, no matter what you do, everything including your "self" is impermanent will help you to once again enjoy the little things that get you through your day. Like a dream, everything that you now enjoy, or everything that may now be causing you pain, will disappear. You may want to look again at the things you take for granted that may be able to give you more joy than you thought. Conversely, you can also not get so caught up in the things that cause you pain. This letting go is not an avoidance of anything. It is simply the willingness to be able to no longer participate in the building of identity sandcastles. A Vajrayana Buddhist teacher once said that to be awake was to be in a constant state of amazement. In this view, awakening is the maturation of the human being, much as adulthood is the maturation of the child.

We human beings have an impressive sensory system. Evolution, both physical and mental, has accorded our species a degree of perceptive ability and sensitivity that has no equal among any other classes of being. Yet how many of us can truly say that we taste life's flavor? Instead, what do we do? We limit our sensitivity to either rehashing old patterns from past hurts and joys or to the bland numbness that passes for sensation in today's commercial society. We close off ourselves in such habitual ways that our psychic defense mechanisms are working as if autonomously and these defense mechanisms, which have appropriate places, are allowed to run amok and control every one of our reactions. And then we are foolish enough to equate them with "personality." What? You thought that the hardest mental manacles to break were the ones that society or some others have imposed upon you? Sorry, fellow travelers, but the most severe prison guard that you have to worry about is yourself. You have made for yourself a giant horde of fnords. How can you be sure that the attention you are paying to reality is worth anything if you don't even know how to pay attention to the ways in which your own perception twists and distorts that reality?

You can take a position. Or hold to an ideal. Or even believe in some gaseous or embodied identity ideal, such as a god or an abstraction (like 'justice' or 'freedom' which used to be considered gods in earlier times) or even in this fiction known as the "self" that we all get so worked up over. You can say that having faith in one's self is the best thing one can do....but any sort of faith is a miscalculation you are not able to afford to make in this multiverse. Unless by faith you mean "reliance." But even then, you are mistaken. To paraphrase the Buddhist chant, "no conditions are permanent, no conditions are reliable, no conditions are self." Everything you can point to in an attempt to claim as a unique identifier and bedrock of "self" is merely made up of more conditions that are likewise impermanent and ultimately not reliable. Attaching to them as if they were essentially true or rejecting them as if they were essentially false only causes you to spin out and slide across the asphalt of anguish. It may be all that you can do in this realization is to allow yourself the license to let go of things. To abandon projects and schemes and identity assemblage points that are getting in the way of further realizations. Much like an adult who doesn't hate certain children's toys, but just no longer has any interest in them.

The path of inconspicuous joys is the oldest form and the highest practice of tantra which has inspired all of the alchemists and various hermetic groups in the history of Western heresy. You can say that it is impossible to let go or to learn to be at ease or happy with existence, but have you practiced it? It doesn't get handed to anyone on a silver platter, except when we are small children. But inculcation and cognitive patterns begin to influence as deeply as we grow up into adulthood. It's almost as if society is in conspiracy to place manacles on everyone's spiritual freedom. The remedy is to be like an artist and to create, almost from scratch if you have to, a lifestyle conducive to being at ease and being happy. You do have a choice. In fact you have many choices throughout your lifetime.

Some of you have asserted in the past few months that belief in a deity such as Eris is a symptom of superstition or an inability to have faith in oneself. However that is just childish thinking. In my own case, after years of practicing in a difficult stream of Buddhism (which is nontheistic and therefore cares nothing for the ideological traps of either belief or disbelief in gods or whatever the proper term is these days), I can only say that if you want to get somewhere in this life of yours then you should give up both extremes of belief and disbelief. Neither of the two ways of thinking lead one any way except around in circles. Belief in gods, to the extant that it is a mirroring or projection of parts of one's ego, should be let go of. But so should disbelief. And neither of these two approaches are valid for all circumstances. They should be relegated to one's mental/emotional toolbox as mere items to be used under fitting circumstances. The Buddhist approach to the "self" or "ego" is in the same vein. (And likewise, all phenomena, whether of the mind or of the material world...which are not as separate and distinct as our words and ideas often trick us into thinking.)

Remember that you have either created your metaphors and your habitual mental maps of the world around you, or someone else has given them to you. But they are still just creations. You need be loyal to none of them. The fools who want to appear brave or industrious choose anguish, falsely believing that anguish is the path to happiness. The damned fools choose things that give them some happiness but at the expense of feeling anguish later on. Those who want to become aware choose happiness directly and look to avoid anguish, refusing to sacrifice anything of beauty, but letting things go when their time has passed.

July 28th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Under the influence of various Dzogchen exercises.)

Rant 101
Eristica

"Will expresses itself best against no resistance when its action passes unnoticed. Only when the mind is in a state of multiple desires do we witness the idiot agonizations of will-power...As reorganization of belief is the key to liberation, so is reorganization of desire the key to will."
-Peter J. Carroll (Liber Lux)

"Peace implies war."
-Aleister Crowley (Book of Lies; ch. 5)

Zero implies the existence of One and its relatives. Nothingness, the true void called "oblivion," is just an elaborate put-on by those unwilling to admit that they fool themselves as much as others. The assertion of either life-after-death or oblivion-in-death is nothing but a conceptual window-dressing that only fools those trapped and unable to understand the nature of thought. Freedom of thought is nothing without freedom from thought. And mindfulness has nothing to do with idiot cravings for validation and meaning. All things that you can point to or think about are infinite. This "infinity" only seems impossible to the degree that one is unaware of relativity.

Oh great Discordian Mindfucker! Have you allowed yourself to become trapped in your own implications? Have you lost sight of the impermanence of your soul? Have you looked out around you lately and find yourself sneering down at all of the people that you are supposedly so much better or smarter or are so much more awake than? Have you failed to see that you are the same substance and content as everyone around you? Have you found yourself, yet again, up society's shit creek without a paddle and yet you refuse to see that it was you who put yourself there?

You can disbelieve or believe in anything or in nothing or in something or in swordfish or in whatever...but any points-of-view like these are still only points-of-view, some being elaborate works of art and some being simplistic dogmas that attempt to sanitize and make "easily-understood" those parts of existence that will never be explained in words or thoughts. You can argue from one or more points-of-view, or you can argue opposite one or more of them. Or you can argue that arguing is pointless. But who can really say? You cannot really learn whether a point-of-view is valid for you until you know when such a thing is wrong.

Oh great anarchist revolutionary! Have you lapsed in your ability to see that all people are not equal in endowment or in potential? Have you blanched all distinctions between excellence and mediocrity in an attempt to imagine a society in which we all hobble around as mental-emotional cripples so that you can say that we are liberated? Have you taught yourself how to despise those who have made themselves better than you because it contradicts your tepid and mass-marketable sense of fashionable Che-Guevaresque chic? Can you not see for yourself that your ideologies and theories kill the spirit of what you claim to yearn for as soon as you open your lips to spout such damned lies? Have you misunderstood the saying "all individuals are valuable in their own right" by taking it to mean that no individuals should ever try harder than anyone else?

There are worlds beyond number in the very things that are all around you at this very moment. Your inability to perceive this truth is based on the degree to which you enjoy feeding yourself that unsteady (but steady-seeming) stream of conscious drivel which you have (mis)taken for your soul. Your inability to recognize the artistry in another person is directly in proportion to your thrall to the thing which you claim to despise: the tyranny of the masses.

Being free says nothing about being better or worse except to those who value freedom. Quit trying to convince those who refuse to end their own slaveries.  Perhaps they are happy that way. And you should always question whether you yourself have truly become free. Only the madman is absolutely certain. Only the duped Discordian is fooled by the promises of bottled air. Only the duped anarchist seems to think that others want to be free. In short, being duped by one thing or another is no better than being duped by television or the liberals or the conservatives or even the fried turkey breast sandwiches on sale at your favorite deli.

You have locked yourself up in cages of words and now do you complain that you have no way to express what you truly mean? The nature of reality is just an open window away. Illumination is just a light switch away. Eris is right here beside you. (You don't get away that easily.) It's time to start eating some cheese with your whine and kick your feet back. Enjoy life. And some other properly cliched slogans and sayings that will help you wipe that self-help addicted vomit off your face. We, of the Discordian Society, are here to get you to entertain us. We have flax and frop and other occult tools in addition to our other qualifications. And we are here to tell you that there is nothing to fear but the permutations of the bastard children of Aleister Crowley who run around in your bathroom plumbing making knocking noises and raising hoots and generally going bump in the dark of your unconsciousness, pulling at your psychic strings and getting you to dance around like an epileptic sock puppet. But that's a theme for another day.

Take a good long breath. Take a good long look around. Take a walk. It's okay, you might not even trip over yourself and end up looking straight up at the trees watching the squirrels make fun of you. Choose chaos if you feel like you must. It has already chosen you. Remember the question "who is the one who remembers?"

July 25th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
"If your baked turkey still gobbles, you need to check your air conditioning."

[Rant 100Chaoism]

Rant 100
Chaoism

"Magic must enter the popular consciousness using a series of Trojan horses."
-Peter J. Carroll (Fra. Stokastikos 127, Our Pestilence Pope Pete I of Chaos)

"We dance a geometry of wizardry and wind the threads about our prey."
-Marjorie Cameron (on stupidity; journal entry dated Jan. 21st, 1962)

There are no gods, therefore you must research and seek to worship every one of them. There are no inherently self-existing conscious entities, therefore you must strive to assert your inherent will to independence. There are no ways to maintain your hatreds and your loves, therefore you find yourself trapped by them. There are no ways out of here, and the realization of this fact is the key that can destroy your self-imposed limits and create a new being that, even if misunderstood by those who are barely able to see, is the beginning of the wildest experiences that any bundle of self-facets could ever share.

You want to destroy order, use more order. You want to destroy disorder, use more disorder. You want to provoke and/or promote the freedom of chaos, then do absolutely nothing. For Chaos is all around you, through you, in you and it is you, as it is. The illusion of chaos being somewhere else is just a low-grade practical joke that chaos is playing on your mind at all of our expenses. You claim to know this chaos? Liar! Every moment in which you have gotten to some understanding or knowledge of chaos is left behind in the past in the microsecond or so before you even get to feel "!" And She is always changing. You are always changing. (As the Witches say "She changes everything She touches and everything She touches changes.")

You can only think of Chaos as a blind idiot god (or "force," which is the correct atheist theological term) in direct proportion to your own blindness and idiocy. Chaos is also clairvoyant and omniscient as much as it could be blind or stupid. As a seeker, or creator, or co-conspirator of the advent of the Pan-Daemon-Aeon in your mind, and among the world around you, you may have learned that the best way to contribute is to do what everyone else is doing. One of the only differences is that you may actually know why you do what others around you are doing. Another difference is that your actions may ensigilize your sorcery into everything you do. And like a virus, it will spread from carrier to carrier, replicating itself among other people's minds. Without even trying, you achieve results.

You may choose to overthrow all beliefs, but you must first make yourself a true-believer out of them. You may choose to inject your aggression into reality and then act out like maniac, but you must learn to hate yourself. You may choose to free yourself from desire, but only if you know the experience of satiating it until glutted. You may choose a peaceful life of non-maleficence, but only if you can accept and acknowledge the violence from within. There are many other such angles in the geometry of truths and lies that dance and swirl around in our minds vying for our devoted attentions and adulation. Pay no heed to any of their claims. Break the shackles of "meaning" and "meaningless." Get out at once, and not piecemeal by getting U first or T last or any other such method except for the one best for you.

Become the revolution you are seeking to start. Remember it is the way you live that counts more than any scheming or planning or ideological philosophizing. Instead of trying to start fights for a better life, start to live better. As much as any Chaoist seeks to change the world, the same Chaoist seeks to keep it exactly the way it is. The worst outrage ever inflicted is the overthrow of outrage, but there is infinite merit in the flux itself. Just don't become too visible to those people still haunted by demons, unless you want to take on the fate of one of those demons.

If do not find what you seek, create it or find something or someone else to seek. You can seek to disprove in the efficiency of magic, but you should know that such proof is one of the easiest things to create. And your belief in the impossibility affects nothing but your own choices. Know inside yourself that in this birthing period of the Chaoist age, your mental debunking of magic only extends as far as your neurons, and it will only make it that much easier for Chaoist conspiracies to subvert you. In the end, the purityrannical disbelief in magic is about as effective in stopping others' enchantments as the disbelief in sunlight would be in making night suddenly appear.

The children of magic are responsible for the creation and evolution of the human species' languages and we are coming back to reclaim our works of art. The witches have come to take back their lands and homes. You call the side-effects of all of this "doom" because, in a way, it is the end of what you know. You can say that this idea is hogwash, but what have you to offer up in its stead?

If it is not crazy enough, then it is not crazy enough to be true, and is therefore not even worth the merit of branding it false. The greatest sigil you will ever enchant is your ongoing life and its various experiences and streams of consciousness. Consider it a "hyper sigil," if you will, with you being the Author, or the adept playing out whatever tricks and tapestries and patterns that your empty-handed magic deals with. The greatest successes of the Chaoist can not be measured in any understanding of the term. And the greatest failures somehow become changed in an endless alchemy of tantric conspiracy against the prerequisite limitations imposed from anywhere. These limitations loose their ability to contain you. They are no longer prerequisites, but tools that can be used or discarded at the discretion of the Chaoist. Seek to know thyself but know the jokes inherent in the search.

July 22nd, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh (Pope Tequilarius Malignatus), KSC

[Rant 105Zombie Fried Rice]

I know this is out of sequence....but this rant is relevant to the sort of crap that has been happening around these forums recently....

Rant 105
Zombie Fried Rice

"...since the dead of your fair city [Chicago] are among the world's most active and ambitious. Many have been voting in civic, state and national elections for decades. Their proud record of achievement in the 1960 presidential election is still the subject of discussion...It seems odd that other cities of the world such as Rome, Mecca, and Salt Lake City would be the headquarters for religions that promise eternal life. Chicago actually delivers on this promise, and isn't even the state capital!"
-Brian Beckett, Ontario (from letter to Chicago Sun-Times, July 28th, 2005)

"We are poor indeed if we are only sane."
-D.W. Winnicott (Psychoanalyst)

"We doom ourselves to a perpetual hardening of character, which we imagine is sanity but which comes to imprison us."
-Mark Epstein, M.D. (Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart)

The people who tell you that you are doomed are lying to you as much as the people who tell you that you are not doomed. Remember that the phrase "there is no enemy anywhere" can only be understood in situations when it is not true. The lab experiment that became the Idiot Boy Emperor is running out of steam. America(tm) has not been put on lock down. The fears and the predictions of the liberal dupes have not materialized. Western civilization still stands unfazed by any explosions or hijackings. The fears and the predictions of the conservative dupes have not materialized. And little anarchist groups that were worried about the patriot act are still living in freedom as the federal government puts its energy into finding and detaining Islamic Jihadists, instead of the dwindling members of "revolutionary" groups that live in some convoluted reality-tunnel stuck somewhere in the world of the 1960's.

Humanity may seem to be getting dumber to you all the time but that is only because the way you see the world around you is getting dimmer. Only the fool gets caught up in the idea that Discordianism is about the destruction of society. You didn't think that it was that simple and straightforward, did you? What? You didn't realize that that was one of the oldest put-ons we ever came up with? Oh great bearer of earth shattering and socially devastating discord, what made you think that anything you did would make a difference? And what made you think that Discordianism and discord was about that? Did you get caught up in the literal dictionary definition of the words while failing to see that we Discordians use words in a different meaning and for different ideas? How could you have failed to see this? Did you ever get it? Or were you trapped in your fundamentalist thinking like a fanatical Christian who insists that the words of the Bible are literally true and must be followed to each letter? Hah! Suckers! Guess again.

Listen, you zombies. You ran around complaining and whining and saying that Eris respects those who cause the most amount of discord in Her name or some other such idea. But you never thought about the Myth of the Golden Apple. Only the suckers get caught up in fighting each other over the damned thing. When did you get the strange idea into your head the our Discordian Irreligion was some sort of revolutionary movement or political party? Who told you such bullshit? (She-What-Done-It-All pulled your leg again, eh? Or maybe one of us hooked you in with one of our lines. Sucker!) You never thought about the reality that some of us spread certain aspects of discord, chaos, and confusion to get certain people to wake up from their sleepwalking, but we care little for overthrowing or bringing down society at large. If you disagree, that's fine. Just don't try to claim that your political ideologies are an integral part of Discordianism...Why not? Because they aren't funny. And you know what that means.

Besides, most of you would-be or so-called "discord bringers" don't do a damned thing but contribute to the shitty state of the world in some vague or tepid notion that if you pile on the crap then the whole thing will collapse. Yet again, you have been suckered. Despite all verifiable evidence to the contrary, you still think that by creating more trouble, you are actually gumming up the works of the machine, or bringing snafu to a conclusion. But if you claim to be doing any of those things for any other reason than that they give you entertainment, you are lying to yourselves. You want to bring discord that opens or illuminates minds? Do something to better yourself. Sometimes the most profound truths are hiding right in front of your face in stupid cliches.

Some of you have suggested or asserted that Discordianism has failed. What? Did you miss the key and most glaring point of the whole thing? (You know, the point about the irreligion being against any of those serious and sane mentations that people get so wrapped up and involved in?) A point so large and ubiquitous that the only way you could have missed it was because you were so full of your own mental bullshit. If you think Discordianism has failed, that is only because you were dumb enough to get taken in by your own mind (or even Eris) pulling your leg and yanking your chains to the point where you actually thought that your point of being could be equated with the Discordian Society as a whole. And that's actually pretty damned funny for some of us. If you can't or won't get the joke, then guess what? The joke is you. That is why we say you are Little Deluded Dupes.

Keep waving your flags and howling your spew like ravenous howling monkeys shouting and screeching "Look at me!" "Notice me!" "My ideas are the truth, you idiots!" and other such silly statements. We still won't take you seriously because you are jokes. We reject, spit upon, dance around, utterly deny and laugh at any of your claims about what Discordianism is or is not or maybe. If you are not one of us now, you never really were one of us, now were you? Go off and play politics or play Che Guevara or play the role of the rich overfed anarchist who slums it up because they think being poor is "cool" or "romantic" all you want. It was quite silly of you to come into Discordianism thinking it was one thing or another and then getting angry that the rest of us didn't fall in line and do the things you thought we should do. How stupid could you be? It would be like going into an Evangelical Revival meeting and trying to persuade or cajole the attendees to worship pagan deities and then getting angry because (though they tolerated and humored you to a point) they didn't do what you thought they should do. Then you have the ill humor to say that their religion or society has failed? Hah. Suckered again!

Besides there is the glaring fact that we Discordians need the existence of society at large. We need the masses of zombies. And all of it is chaos, my friends, enemies, and damned things. So what if some of us merely want to paint, or play music, or get together and worship Eris, or practice magical hoo-hahs, or just want to play sink? So bobdamned what? Many of us have lives and Eris never demands that we turn over ourselves lock stock and barrel (while shaving our heads and wearing silly robes and hailing Krishna). She isn't like those other deities that demand slavish devotion. Hell, She doesn't even give a rat's ass whether you believe in Her. When the Discordian Jihad was launched against such people as you "Real Discordians(tm)" and serious "bearers of discord," it was to let you know that our product was (and still is) superior. You don't like being told what to do, then stop trying to tell the rest of us what to do. Discordianism is not a fucking political party, nor is it an ideology, nor is it an excuse to be an idiotic zombie rattling off the correct leftist dupe truisms, nor is it even a game to play for more flax. We Discordians are the definition of the Discordian Society. And since we are non-stick, none of your ideas or manipulations or dogmas are going to work. We are not ever going to be what YOU want us to be. But we will laugh at your expense for every time you try to persuade or coerce is.

And don't worry. We understand. "If we were small and gray. We'd be scared too." We'd get angry with the Discordian Society and say that it is a failure. We would be hopping mad pointing our fingers at everyone else for the messes we created in our lives and getting more spastically mad because others disagree with us. It's okay. We understand you all too well. We do have to live in a global society that has been largely shaped by people of your ilk anyway. We know you better than you know us for that one reason. The difference between The Way We Really Are and The Way You Want Us To Be is that we are having fun playing the game while you are simply upset that you can't control the game. You could just walk away, you know.

Don't try to tread on us. And if you hate us so much and think Discordianism is a failure than stop trying to come to our attention, fool. We can always use some more dancing jesters and that's exactly what you sound like. Except you look like fluff bunnies, and you forgot your tinker-bells. Go see a therapist or something for fuck sake.

July 30th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving while under the influence of the Book of Eris.)

Rant 99
The Tantric Riot Act

"Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful businesses, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George the First for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King."
-The Riot Act (Effective 290 years ago to the day, July 20th, 2005)

No other enemy knows you like you know yourself. Those of us who are dumb enough to allow ourselves to be led by others most certainly deserve the kind of leadership we have. Those of us who are dumb enough to be led by our own freedom most certainly deserve the kind of freedom we have. Disbelieving in the illusion of the soul will not make consciousness go anywhere. Disbelieving in any gods doesn't do a damned thing about their hold over you. Denying demons gives them all the more power over you. Ignoring certain unmarketable hidden dimensions and valences of life doesn't do a damned thing about their reality. Using only half one's brain doesn't say anything about the half of existence that you have rejected. Regardless of what you choose to focus on or to believe in or to accept, there will always be things that slip under or through your radar undetected, because you think they should not be, and therefore insist that reality should conform to what you think. Caught in our prisons of logical mechanism and bewitching words, we deem things that are irrelevant to be the most prized. The things that are relevant are denied. Think about it. Is your life merely a run on sentence....a stream of your own consciousness without any will? Have you lapsed into that subtle and pernicious solipsism that denies its own quality of solipsism and insists that that way YOU see things is the way it is? (Instead of just accepting that the way you see things is....the way you see them?)

Are you still caught up in looking for truth or entertainment or beauty but yet see no need for you yourself to help contribute such things to other people? Are you saddened by something or other but are failing to see that the ground still supports your feet as you walk? Or are you angry and upset over something or other and yet fail to see that you have the means to do something about it and to skim across the jagged edges of that ground on the day it shatters? Chaos is about as blind and idiotic as we are because we are chaos. The multiverse is just as conscious as we are because all we know about it is the way we think and organize our perceptions about it. There are no blind forces anywhere. Quit trying to impersonate existence. You have many parts of selves and many selves through which you can truly live. The art of chaos is the balancing act of these multiple facets of selves that together make up who you are. A chaoist once said "Disorder is the chief cause of order, the opposite is also true, in as much as anything is ever true. To know something well, you must know and understand the situations when it is false."

There is no need to disperse. In fact, dong so may be impossible. But you may need to move along. This abyss of hallucinations we often find ourselves in should be played with and celebrated, but not as the be all end all. And this abyss is really a neat shiny product of our perceptions interacting with what the hell is really going on. And just what the hell is really going on? It changes moment to moment. It is always changing. That is why dogmas and ideas can never keep up. That is why people stuck in dogmas, ideologies, and static strategies/schemas can never seem to catch on to existence beyond their minds. Hope and fear are the twin fonts upon which many people build brittle defenses against the endless change.

You are already a riotous assembly of figments, thoughts, physiology, perceptions, and facets of selves (some Chaoists say many selves, in fact). And the only king or queen you need take any orders from is yourself. Both Thomas Paine of Revolutionary America and the Vajrayana adepts of Pala India came upon the startling conclusion that the Crown of Royalty was forever and always shattered with its gems scattered everywhere. We are each those gems. Why hypertrophy some one self at the expense of all the others when they are all equally just as creative and daring and silly and valid? Even Aleister Crowley, an adept in his own way, said that "Every Man and Woman is a Star." This goes for every facet of your identity, every self through which you live and breathe and hopefully express some of the "??!!!!??!!!???" that we all go through. You are sovereign. Trust no one person, whether deity or any other sort of being, which tries to tell you otherwise. By conjuring up and being shifty with your own thoughts and your own selves, you can help disperse the attempts of those who try to hijack you with their inculcated and so statistically normal hierarchic patterns of being. Saying "no" is the greatest weapon of mass destruction that would-be authoritarians will ever face. Do you want infinite life, or lives? Look to yourself and be your own lamp. (Worry not, others doing the same will show up in your life almost as if by magical fiat.)

July 21st, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Driving under the influence of the Gandavyuuha Sutra)

Rant 98
Some Definitions and Some Chaoism

Even though the Discordian Society has no definition, there are some of you out there who seem a bit confused by certain terms we casually throw back and forth at each other like insults. The most commonly misunderstood word is still "Discordian." Some of you have actually tried to define it by saying that a "Discordian" is simply one who accepts the random forces of chaos. Some have said that calling oneself "Discordian" has nothing to do with the belief in Eris. (Those are the "Erisians," you say?) Well, just to confuse you further I should point out that worshippers of Eris first started calling themselves Discordian in modern times in the early 1960's. Many use the words "Discordian" and "Erisian" as synonyms. This usage reflects decades of experience by people who have chosen Discordian paths. (It also makes sense, since Eris is also known as Discordia...one word is derived from Greek and the other from Latin: both meaning "follower of Eris.") If you want the chaos without the goddess, we have a word for you: "Chaoist." (Although it is perfectly acceptable to call oneself Discordian and not believe in Eris. Just as it is perfectly acceptable to call oneself a Fenderson without getting fropped. You non-believers in Eris have the freedom to hold to your superstitions as much as anyone else.)

Erisian and Discordian are not exactly the same thing, however. Erisian can be used to describe the Neo-Pagan aspects of the Discordian Society, however when the word was first used it referred to the craziest most chaotic members of the Discordian Society. But then again, sometimes we use the word Discordian in exactly the same way. (To be a Child of Eris not only means you are nutty enough to believe in Eris, but you are also nutty enough to blame reality on Her. Such people should never ever be trusted with one's frop.) Using one or both of these words implies Eris Kallisti Discordia whether you like it or not. Sort of like using the word "Muslim" implies "Islam" and therefore Allah. (Who is great, by the way. But we Erisians know Eris is greater.)

We have deliberately chosen terms that can be defined in several ways for reasons best left unsaid and figured out by each one of you. So there is no need to get into that semantic confusion here.(And not because I have no handle on the damned definitions, I swear.) While Erisians can worship or revere Eris, they don't have to feel the need to engage any part of Thud at all. They are too crazy for that. In fact, the true Erisian position (I'll have you know) is one that goes like this "Society at large in the Region of Thud is just an abyss of hallucinations. Since they do not recognize Our Lady, we do not recognize their frop." The "Discordians" range from reverence of Eris to outright and shameless whore-ship. With the main distinction being that people who prefer the word Discordian tend to be more on the activist side of things. They like fucking with the Region of Thud, for whatever reason. But please understand that there are several exceptions to these definitions, many times within the same person.

Some Erisians think it is their sacred duty to be as Eristic as possible. And "Eristic" can be found in any good dictionary. Many "Discordians" consider themselves "Erisian." Many do not. I hope some of these people at least know what they mean, because nothing serious is meant by these terms any more than the word "fhtagn!"

But now, on to sirius matters, since we are in the Dog Days of Summer, and Sirius the star is very visible in the night sky nowadays. The Chaoist is the "jihadist" of Chaos, but usually one of those occult bastards who learns magical arts for the sake of sneak attacks upon the minds of televised masses of people. And this is true, except for the fact that it isn't and that the word chaoist really refers to people who are like Erisians and Taoists crossed together with bits of post-Hegelian dialectics and Hellenic poetry. (Look at the writings of Peter Carroll for a good example of one definition of a chaoist which has nothing to do with anything I have said above.) Trying to explain what a chaoist is would be like trying to explain the taste of sugar....you can say "sweet," but what the hell does that really mean?

(Parenthetically, I have never seen or heard of anyone calling themselves an Eristic Chaoist since the day back in late 1998 when that one lady who did disappeared in a freaky LSD accident. I suppose Eris has other plans for those truly nutty enough to actually get caught up in these interminable word games.)

Despite silly word games, why do we (the Discordian Society as a whole, and not the ELF, nor the JAMs nor even the goddamned Bobbies nor any other sect or branch) have no definition? Because YOU are the definition, silly. Just as you should read the words penned by the tripsters of the latter 1960's with suspicion, you should also not let yourself get caught up in the whole "The world is fucked up and we are all doomed" line of thinking. That way of thinking is just as dubious and suspect as any other. Trust yourselves. Our Goddess Eris doesn't expect you to trust what She tells you. (And if you do, She may just want to test you or tease you....Or none of the above.) She is not one of those deities that likes to make promises and then comes to harvest your soul at death to take to Her personal fun palace. No. She actually gives you the choice of what to do with your life and your afterlife and your before life. And any other brand of life you have a subscription for.

(I mentioned some of the following in a previous rant, but let me elaborate.)

To say that the world is a cruel and malicious place with no future but a hellish one for all those who can't take power is just as stupid and deficient as the New Age lotus-eater position which posits that all is really sugar sweet and nice white light. Except we have been nearly brainwashed by several decades of European and American philosophers who have made entire careers (and badly written meandering books) into thinking of the "world-is-hell" position as "realism." This is of course what the authoritarians WANT you to feel and believe so as to justify more laws and more impositions of order and power-over. Falling for the proposition of DOOM is just as superstitious as falling for the proposition that everything is heavenly. And we humans often forget that we are the ones who make the world the way it is. (Bad philosophies notwithstanding.) How do I know this? Well, think about it. People who have led functionally happy lives tend to err on the side of thinking that the world is a happy place, or that it can be made to be so. And people who have bad experiences (especially imprinted on their nervous systems as children when they had no choice) will tend to err on the side that the world is a nasty place. The more you seek evidence the more you will confirm your theories. But remember the phrase "Free Will"? We do have a measure of choice and we do have a measure of power, no matter what the crap-screamers and the idiot philosophers will argue. Marx (a notoriously bad writer, but he couldn't help it since he ate all of Engels' moldy frop) was right in one respect: The point is to change the world. Hello? Can I get an a-woman?

July 20th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC; Reporting for Duty
(If you have a pulpit, I'll wear it out.)

[Rant 97Predilections]

Rant 97
Predilections

"Every few thousand years some shepherd inhales smoke from a burning bush and has a vision or eats moldy rye bread in a cave and sees God. From then on their followers kill one another at the slightest provocation. Haunted houses called temples are built by one side and torn down by another - and then bloody quarrels continue over the crumbling foundations. Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?

"Because the whole Material Universe is exclusive property of the Greco-Roman Goddess of Chaos, Confusion, Strife, Helter-Skelter and Hodge- Podge. No Spiritual power is even strong enough to dent Her chariot fenders. No material force can resist the temptation of Her Fifth Intergalactic Bank of the Acropolis Slush Fund for Graft and Corruption."
-Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, K.S.C.)

You can't go back to school with just any notebook and wherever life takes you, you can count on more bars than the competition. Speaking of which, are you ready for the square-dancing salsa competition? If you find yourself going insane you need to purchase one of our products, satisfaction guaranteed. It's what you need. It's what you want. Say goodbye to Johnny Walker. Say goodbye to Jose Cuervo. Say goodbye to Jesus Christ. And say hello to your pineal gland. (It's okay to talk to one of your own body parts. Studies have shown that such activities lead to a healthy more satisfactory lifestyle that all of your friends will be envious of. So what, if everyone else will think you're a freak.) Besides all this, you know if the machine is turned on it will keep going and going and going, until someone either pulls the plug, or the power runs out.

There are infinitely more lies than there are truths but the lies are all the bastard children of the truths anyway. The difference lies in your mind, if you can trust your mind not to lie. And in that is an occult truth so profound it will probably knock your boots off. (What's the plan? Are you willing to acquit yourself?) Perhaps you should learn that it is time to get off the wheel and start to move in your own direction or directions. Or wherever your predilections may lead you. But if that is not enough, we can keep selling you our bottled air. We promise our Discordian Brand(tm) bottled air tastes much sweeter than any of our competition's bottled air. (But when was the last time you trusted anyone's sales pitch?)

If you don't trust anyone else's sales pitch then why trust your own ego's sales pitch? You can say that the ego is a trustworthy thing and that you know your own ego well enough. But that is the greatest lie of all, and you know it. Why bother putting any trust behind something you clearly know is a fiction....a fabrication so ephemeral that it is like clouds wafting across the sky of life? Why trust this thing that gets you hankering after every little thing and desire and distraction like a monkey jumping from tree to tree in its attempted escape from the fact that infinite life can never be owned or claimed. Identity is what you make of it. And make no mistake about it, you make up your identity as readily as an artist makes up an image on a canvas. Perhaps you need to get your ego to start obeying your own will as opposed to whatever wills have been inculcated and authorized by it as a reflection of the society you live in.

The habit of ego is like anything else. Too much of it makes you sick. But it is only a reflection of how much intellectual and spiritual colonization you have allowed into your life. Perhaps it is time for you to peel away at the onion of thoughts, fears, loves, and hatreds that make up the identity pins of your ego and realize the hidden truth of it being bottled air. (A lot of it hot, by the way.) Those who constantly assert their identity are simply slaves to the worst god of all. And you know who that is. Does your ego tell you that you are free? Not usually, unless you lie. Does your ego encourage you and support you? Not unless it wants something. Usually your ego tells you to do this or that or to think this or that or to be this or that or to acquire this or that, and there is not much wrong with this as long as you know the fictions for what they are and are actually awake at the wheel of your life, as opposed to just being on cruise control. Obviously, the ego is you, as much as your arms and legs are you. Like any other part of you, there is no need to cut it out or off or away. And like your arms and legs, if you can't control your ego then you have got problems. These problems are so common that we think our malfunctioning egos are simply the way it is. (And we have all sorts of wonderful bullshit religions to accommodate our denials.) Nothing to see here, buddy. Move along now.

What does Eris have to do with this? Don't blame Her for your messes. She'll help you solve your problems, but you got to help Her solve Hers. So you may want to think about helping yourself first. And if your ego is the great obstacle to your freedom that I have described above, you can simply go around it. (Or you can ask your ego "what have you done for me lately?") I am not saying that you are blocked by ego, I am simply urging you to get control over it and start using it for your benefit. Or at least for entertainment. Or at least something or other. As always, this could all be a pack of bald lies, especially if they are not pernicious truths. In situations like these, it is helpful to remember that you should still brush your own teeth every morning when you wake up, regardless of whether or not you could say that you know the person in the mirror. (Don't worry. It'll all come back to you at some point. If not, still don't worry. If it was important, you would have remembered it.)

If you find your gods or your god to be just like your ego then you know the source. Banish with impunity. Or imbibe some of our special Discordian bottled air....guaranteed to tickle your ass until you laugh at the very absurdity of the whole thing. Perhaps your ego only tricks you and trips you up so much because it merely wants you to stop hiding behind its eggshell and come outside to play. I know Eris wants to play with you too. So what do you say? Will you come out and play with the rest of us? You don't have to sell you soul. You don't have to buy your ego, either. Take the acid test and learn to play with the rest. We are, each one of us, the best. No, I did NOT eat the moldy bread or any mushrooms. I swear. And I have run out of rhymes so that's it.

July 20th, 2005

-Irrev. Hugh, KSC and sometimes 23C (I suppose the letters mean something to somebody)

"Discordianism may simply be the mental illness one gets when applying self-therapy while standing on one's head."

[Rant 96Idiot-jerks in Our Movement (as opposed to Their Movement)]

Rant 96
Idiot-jerks in Our Movement (as opposed to Their Movement)

"Self-hatred is the source of all their malice toward others."
-B.F. Skinner's Pigeons

"Hatred is merely abdication to your own slavery."
-Rocky the Claw Shrimp Eater (who also happens to be a satanic squirrel)

"Every 'emancipator' has enslaved the free."
-Aleister Crowley (The Book of Lies, ch. 81)

Now, everyone who is Discordian has some idea of what Discordianism is or isn't or maybe. The thing to realize is that we all have our own "trips," as the Principia Discordia and Robert Anton Wilson's novels like to put it. (Other writers and works call them "trips" too, even though the slang is pretty well dated.) One error that some have fallen into is the idea that someone who is Discordian can not tell someone else who is Discordian that their version of Discordianism is wrong. Who told those people such balderdash? As human beings we have the right to tell someone that their own version of whatever they are doing is wrong. Who thinks we cannot? It is called free speech. And if someone calls your Discordianism wrong or unreal, you most certainly have the right to tell that other person where to go. Let's bury this stupid notion that one can't criticize another in the Discordian Society since it has nothing to do with Discordianism in the first place. Remember, we have the outlet catma which says "If you can't be right, you can at least be loud." And "right" or "wrong" (or whatever the neat validation terms being used) says nothing. In this here outfit, those who agree with what you say will do so, and those who don't won't. And criticism is useful feedback if intelligently planned and executed.

There is one thing that is vexing, though it is a normal process in any group. The appearance of assholes. "No one likes assholes" is the common idea...which is, for the most part, true. (Let's not speak for all assholes, though.) Being an asshole to others only reflects on yourself. And acting the part of the idiot-jerk doesn't make one Discordian. There is much more to Discordianism than just acting like you hate everyone and trying to stir up shit because you feel you are provoking chaos or disorder. Acting the part of the asshole actually promotes no chaos, except in rare circumstances (most of which most of us are still too young or un-experienced to discern). The ways we deal with jerks vary widely depending on the individual pineal glands concerned. Defending against ass-hattery is a time honored Discordian tradition...as is making such people the butt of our jokes and our jakes. Why leave the jerks out of all the fun? Certain idiot-jerks will, no doubt, be seeking this attention anyway and it is up to other people whether or not to give it to them. (Other words: They ask for it.)

The worst type of jerk tends to be those who cringe and whine about others' accomplishments, even it is just having the where-with-all to post and say "hi" on some forum. It's as if those who are creative or who are writing or doing things in the Discordian Society offend the jerks so much that they try to tear away the efforts of anyone else. Such jerks who do things like this claim they are defending the Erisian Movement from "high handedness" or the "posers." But what they are usually doing is just being jealous pricks. Whatever happened to "live and let live" or "live and let us dance"? For instance, if I write rants and scriptures and other such things, who are you to tell me I am trying to promote a "high handed" Discordianism? (It would be more correctly termed a "hugh handed" Discordianism anyway. Sorry, I had to. Cornball is good for the soul and besides, not many people out there online would know what the hell "Tequilarian Discordianism" means...and some people don't even drink. Everyone is free to form their own "handed" Discordianism as well as to listen to one another or not. We all need to buy or acquire new socks from time to time, except for the hippies among us.)  

I have seen young kids get a truck load of crap piled on them online because these kids had the "audacity" to try to contribute something. (I use the word "audacity" because it seems that anyone, especially the young or the newbie, trying to write or do anything these days pisses off the jerks to no end.) These young ones or newbies should feel like they have found someplace safe to let their weirdness out, including all the emotional content that that may entail. And instead of encouraging them on in their efforts to live and post their experiences or ideas, some jerks try to drive them away or come down on them with some jerk-off "the world is meaner than you think, kid" type of drivel. (The world is both worse and better than many think.)

If the above applies to you, remember that being a jerk is simply that. It is a personality characteristic (which in Cognitive Science is actually considered a failure in cognition, but other labels suffice just as well) that has nothing to do with the practice of Discordianism, or even of non-theistic Chaoism. Also remember that being a Discordian is no excuse for being un-intelligent or for attacking those people who try to keep learning and exploring all of those intellectual and spiritual fields of knowledge that we like to rip off from. The Discordian Society is not a fricken pot of lobsters. The purpose is TO NOT prevent others from growing or from expressing themselves or from any other endeavor that evidences free will and thought. I should insert that the purpose of Discordianism is to actually help those people who wish to rise up and become better, but then some of you would accuse me of "high handed" Discordianism. Heh. Well, you know where to go because that IS one of the purposes of Discordianism. (It is even one of the best ways to promote whatever changes you feel are necessary in this world, but there I go again with my "high handed" Discordianism.)

Those of us who know who WE are actually KNOW who we are. Do you? (It's rhetorical. Think on it a minute or two.) Those of you who like what I say or agree with it are simply those of you who are doing so. Those of you who hate what I say or who disagree with it, are also doing so. Simply put. It gets boring to have certain jerks call others "fans" or the "mob" simply because they agree with someone or remain silent about what someone has said to you. Also remember that many of us Discordians are friends. And yes, we have our own clubs and associations and social circles and there ain't a damned thing wrong with doing so. You can tell me that my version of Discordianism is full of shit and all that yanking chainery, but you may want to have something to offer up yourself. If you want to play ball, then learn to play the game, or at least learn how others play it. Standing around bitching about how shitty some of the players are playing doesn't mean much in the end, unless you can play. Or you can actually demonstrate a reason for your opinion.

Despite what I have said above, this rant is actually dedicated to more than one person no matter what some of you may think. You can be whiny and negative and jerky all you want, but do not get surprised when no one wants to be around you (even online) and everyone starts to think you are nothing but a shit nutter. Eris likes to fuck around, as do many of us, but no one likes a malicious jerk.

Discordianism is an infinitely satisfactory irreligion, and those of you who use it as a label to excuse or give credit to your jerkishness only have yourselves to blame. An elder Discordian once said "If you think the world is getting meaner all the time, it is because you're growing more stupid. If you think that the world is getting happier for you, than you're getting more intelligent." The human nervous system has given us an evolutionary advantage in that we can seek happiness and learn to avoid those pains that are avoidable. Are you using your nervous system and your life to satisfy and fulfill yourself, or are you whining and bitching about how "bad" or "mean" the world is? (It ain't that mean. Any sensitive being can clearly see that most of our suffering is caused by ourselves or by other human beings. People who see the world as a mean place are just using that as an excuse to treat others like crap. And, outside of rare circumstances, you attract the sort of people that your self reflects.) Remember, the quality of your life, your thoughts, and of anything you create or do, is your choice. You are no one's slave.

With this rant, I invite you all (including myself) to reflect on what we have done or said, and see what we can do to stay awake and involved and, hopefully, happier better beings.

If you need a point, and the above didn't suffice, here it is ->.

Blessed Be to You All regardless of where you stand. (So long as it isn't on anyone else's back, unless they're into that sort of thing.) All Hail The Mother of All Deities Eris Kallisti Discordia!!!!!

July 20th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh/Tequilarius Malignatus, KSC
(Member of the Committee for the Defense of Certain Committees Against Certain Other Committees.)

[Rant 95Kallisti]

Rant 95
Kallisti

"Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots."
-Hagbard Celine

"She is your Goddess!"
-Ancient Scrawl found in ruins of Melos

"Discordians don't drink to escape problems. They drink to create problems."

The ancient Greeks snubbed Eris repeatedly and for this, they eventually found a loss of the freedom that was theirs. First to tyrants, despite the best efforts of those Athenian democrats who tried to get their fellow citizens to rally around the idea of personal freedom. (Now Eris, already had a longstanding miff with the Greeks because they instituted patriarchy. "Men," She said to me once "know nothing about the true joys of poptarts.") Then to the Romans, because they forgot who maintained them against the earlier war against the Persians. Then, even then, they would not acknowledge Eris. Even if they had tried to, by this point, Eris decided to play in other games, and just to really rub it in She punished them with Christianity for hundreds of years. Hell, even the disgrace of being conquered by the Turks wouldn't shake their masses out of their torpor, so that was that. "They were victims of indigestion, you know," as Eris has pointed out. The Greeks, not surprisingly, had (and have) no lost love for Eris, so they always wrote about Her as being this malicious chaotic troublemaker who would bring ruin on anyone's head just for the spite of it. But we modern Erisians know better, especially since even if we get indigestion from time to time, we have medicine to help us out. (And don't count the Greeks out, they have done no worse than other ethnic groups.)

Humankind is forever trying to find deities or ideas (which may as well be deities, even the atheist ideas) that will take care of them and explain all of those Damned Things that somehow refuse to fit into the neat and ordered cosmologies or political theories or economics or religious doctrines. Eris doesn't demand nor expect that sort of attitude from Her "followers." In fact, co-conspirators is a better descriptive term for those who worship and/or revere Eris. With a knowing wink and a laugh She turns on the pineal gland to get you to learn how to do it for yourself. She gives us all sorts of wonderful rites and rules and catmas knowing full well how trained we are to receive such "scriptures" and religious or ideological effluvia. But Her revelations are irreligious and irreverent in ways that make us open up and never trust anything ever again but our senses and our own minds. (Some of you already know this and if you are one of those sorts, you should probably seek out some elder Discordians for your next illumination.)

In this day and age it is different however. It seems that neophiles are popping up more often than ever before and Eris is watching. (Does that make you feel better, or does that frighten you? Or does it make you laugh? Or some other thing? None of the above is also a valid choice.) Humankind has somehow developed Damned Thing freethinkers by the thousands. (Don't get ahead of yourselves, those of us on the freethinking side are still outnumbered...vastly.) Yet there is still this matter of the Prettiest One and the Golden Apple.

Neophile thinkers and doers are popping up all over the place. By all gods, look around. Who would have thought that polytheism would have ever made a comeback? And then there is quantum physics and the lunacy of cognitive therapy. Explain those things. Despite this, the neophobes are fighting harder than ever to maintain their hold over the way things are. If reality is what we can get away with, those fuckers have been getting away with the appearance of controlling reality for far too long now. Thankfully, the neophobes mostly attack and kill one another, but never forget that you neophiles are their ultimate target. They see your nice shiny apples and they want some of your pie. So....what is to be done about that? Throw your apples to them. Let them have it. (But you already know this.)

The stupid people who run this planet's major predator bands (the corporations, the governments, the monotheist religious groupings, etc.) have not stopped fighting over the first bobdamned apple in the first place. Read up on your Homer. It's all there. Then read one of the international newspapers. Then read them both simultaneously. Now....I'll wait.......

Do you see now how they fight and squabble and attack and whine and cuss and all that? Just like all those idiot Olympians, huh? Maybe the Pagans were onto something there. (Or maybe they were just victims of living in that barbaric age before the internet was invented by Thoth and his pals Prometheus and Mercury. Of course you know that She What Done It All gave them the idea in order to tip the world's balance to the Aftermath.
She told me her reason. "Hot dogs become really cheap during the Aftermath," She said. I don't know if I can buy that story but I'll let it stick because who doesn't like cheaper hot dogs?)

They (the neophobes, not the hot dogs, though I suspect both categories anyway) have never learned that we are all Prettiest Ones. And Eris is the Prettiest One. Their jokes are no longer funny and we demand compensation for having to endure centuries of their maladaptive behaviors and self-perpetuating learning-disability loops (also known as "beliefs"). The apple is your own damned mind. The Prettiest One is what you do with it. Don't miss out on the symbolism and start worshipping and groveling beneath the finger that points out the ways. Walk the ways. (And we have many silly ways to help you figure out the most lunatic styles of walking, if you wish to be enlightened that way.)

Our Goddess has never demanded you follow any sets of rules or dogmas (unless She is fooling you, of course). Hell, She doesn't even mind if you don't believe She exists, unless you snub Her. (A too thin line to walk upon, but only for those who aren't Discordians.) And She believes you exist, regardless. Now, does knowing that She exists make you feel more or less secure? Liar!

July 18th, 2005

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC

[Rant 94Non Serviam]

Rant 94
Non Serviam

"You're talking like a medieval surf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil."
-Hagbard Celine (Robert Anton Wilson)

Let the Socialists and the Capitalists eat each others' asses since neither of them realize that both ideologies justify the other's existence. The same thing with the Conservative and the Liberal dupes. The same thing with the promoters of Disorder and the promoters of Order. They simply want to rally around a flag, no matter what flag, as you should well know. None of them seem to be able to handle the rigors of free thought and free existence and none of them can handle Eris and Her Children; those who establish their own freedom and the ones who dare to validate their own existences without recourse to tepid whinings of ideologies, philosophy or religions controlled by vast media bureaucracies and priest-hoods who style themselves the intellectual classes.

None of these "people" (really cabbages, we'll have you know) are really interested in the liberation of any individual human being. They will use laws, beliefs, and economics to keep others in line with their tepid visions. Failing that, they will resort to any despicable acts of violence or harm to get their agendas across. They are--no matter how right thinking, or moral, or centrist, or politically correct, or holy, or submissive to god they say they are-the true enemies of freedom. They hate the fact that life doesn't fit into their schemas and they will kill all that lives which will not fit. Those of you calling yourselves Discordians or Erisians, sit up and take notice. And do not serve those idiots. We, of the Discordian Society will have you know that We Are Not Afraid.

The Fear is the most potent weapon that authoritarians and their freelance terrorist cousins will wield in their endless machinations to keep or to gain control over not only your bodies but of your minds. (To the Islamic Jihadists who want everyone to submit to their medieval God; to the Christian Crusaders who want to spread the cult of Televangelist Jesus around the world; to the radical militants who either want to impose the State or smash the State; we say Your Days Are Over. No matter how many times you blow up your stinkers or try to convert the masses, and no matter how much you try to interfere with human evolution, You Have Already Lost. In case any of you are reading this (paranthetically).) All of their violence and all of their beliefs are simply masochism, and they have refused to get the fact that they are really idiots who pose as wise or pose as servants of the wise. We have left them aboard their ship of illusions as it breaks apart on the rocks of chaos. As they swim along trying to find solid ground to regain their bearings, we will illuminate their continued opposition to freedom simply because it amuses us to no end.

None of us will serve any of their slave-gods, their slave-ideologies, nor their slave-beliefs. We absolutely and resolutely laugh upon and dance over the graves of their putrid religions and ideologies. Their angered responses only gives us more and more of a rise and the end can only be tears for them. Laughter for us. Their attempts to make us afraid only makes us better sowers of the seeds of Discordia. Without their weapon of Fear, they have nothing over us. And since none of us are really afraid of any of them (though we might pretend to be from time to time depending on our perverted entertainment needs), they have nothing. Too bad they can't see that all they need to live freely is their own link to the Prettiest One. (Their own pineal gland; They don't want to accept this because theirs are lopsided; and for a limited time only, they can contact any one of us for correction of the problem.) Every one of their doctrines, beliefs, rituals, ideas, and laws are Ours for the taking in our great Mindfucking endeavor to blow all the bullshit from our and their minds in ways that entertains us and celebrates our Lady of Chaos. (We also do it for kicks, but that topic's for another rant.)

We Are Free and we mean to illuminate all opposition and subvert all obstacles. All of those people who disagree with and fight against individual human liberty are still merely pawns of Our Lady of Discord anyway. And since their actions get more reprehensible and childish as time goes on, we want them to know that they can repent now and they'd only have to be spanked with wet socks for restitution...otherwise they can keep killing one another in efforts to prove who is the prettiest one, all the while forgetting the joke. Discordians, Erisians, friends, and free people, lend them your golden apples.

July 14th, 2005

[Refer to the sermon/rant about the "Rats" for elucidation of this theme.]

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC; and Illuminatus Impersonator
"Get With the JAMs!"

Rant 93
Do What Thou Wilt

"Kallisti!"
-The last word of Gaius Julius Caesar

"Rather than that Crowley was dishonest in the way he presented himself, it is more likely that he expected his intelligent readers to be able to read between the lines."
-John S. Moore

"Whoever tries to lay his own trip on others is acting from terror, and will resort to terror as a weapon if the others won't accept the trip through permission."
-Miss Portinari

"Sacrifice truth for freedom at every opportunity."
-Peter Carroll (Principia Chaotica)

You can spend your time nay-saying and complaining about how others' doings are not to your liking. You can spend your time detracting from others' creations and others' achievements all you want. You can even whine and complain about how nobody ever understands you (though you forget that you don't really bother allowing people to understand you). You can do all of those good for nothing activities and posture yourself as being too wise or too smart for any of the sort. That's perfectly okay because the rest of us will keep on plugging away and doing what we do. And we will still be around here in the Erisian Movement long after you have left to go find the next new fringe you can suck up from some website. We want you to know that if you do that....go in peace, but please don't take the joke too seriously as that only makes us more determined the next time we prank you until the snot comes dribbling from your ears and your mind starts undergoing flashbacks from memories you never made yourself.

You are free. You can choose to use that freedom by wasting away attacking and sniping at the efforts of others or at the expressions of others, or you can choose to stand up on two feet (assuming you are, in fact, bipedal) and take part in dialogue or in activities or something. Just don't just sit there and pass judgment and criticize things simply because of spite or jealousy or your personal sense of uselessness. We already have jesters and jokers to entertain us. And we are the jesters and jokers. You don't have to like or agree with the rest of us, but you do have to realize that this whole thing (existence) is a game that plays itself for its own sake. You need to remind yourself that the ultimate secret of the universe is the secret that it in fact exists for its own sake. Now, what does that say about you and what freedom really means? Think on it for a while.

Now more than ever, we of the Discordian Society need to recognize the fact that our lives are the way they are because we have made them so. Quit your whining about government, corporations, terrorists, and other fanatical conspirators who threaten everything you hold dear. Do something. Create something. Write something. You are only as free as you choose to act and think. Not just because Eris said you are, but because you are. This is a new aeon. A new dispensation that was foreseen by those with insight into it a long time ago. This is a time when people have and will act out their violent fanaticism and tepid beliefs upon everyone else. An age of wars and terror and degradation because human beings don't seem to be getting the message....and Eris is pissed-off at every one of them. It is time that the sleeping giant of the Discordian Society gets off of its narcissistic ass and face the fact that our own shit smells just as bad as everyone else's, even if we smartly or rightly use our shit for fertilizing our gardens.

The Muslims and the Christians and the global corporations are all fighting to gain complete dominance of the planet. Kid yourselves not. They are the enemy. They will not fail to see you and other freethinkers as their enemy. It is time we infiltrate all of their organizations. Hell, the corporations can be changed from within, as I have myself witnessed. (23Cluster, anyone?) And in the end the corporations are the ones who sell the weapons to the Muslims and Christians and provide them the means for the communication of their foul and pernicious belief systems and propaganda. It is time to subvert all jihads with our militant humor. It is time to subvert all schemes of evangelism and slaughter with Our Laughter. It is time to tickle the holy crap out of all of these idiot manifestations of human ignorance who then have the temerity to proclaim themselves "leaders, god's fighters, heroes, martyrs," and then say that the world must submit to their malodorous pretensions of grandeur. Let the idiot jihadists and the idiot crusaders and the idiot global marketeers wallow in their own filth as we gain the means and methods to derail and sidetrack their efforts. Fuck them all proper if they can't take a joke. And we want all of these pathetic cabbages to know that We, the Children of Eris, have some shiny golden apples for them as gifts. And when the vultures are picking at their bones, we will still be here laughing and whooping it up enjoying that which Eris has repeatedly attempted to get us to see...Our Freedom.

As for the Islamic Jihadists, the Christian Fundamentalists, and the Corporate Marketeers, these words: "These are the fools that men adore; both their Gods and their men are fools."

In closing, I will leave you with another statement from the Mad Prophet (without profit), Aleister Crowley: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will. There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."

And as Eris said: "You are free."

July 10th, 2005

93

Know Chaos (Rant 92)

"You know you're close to understanding Chaos when you either see it everywhere or nowhere, but you're not sure which."
-from the Summa Discordia

Whether we whine and complain or laugh and smile, Eris claims us all just the same. Just don't fall under the dangerous assumption that She wants everyone else in this world. She only really wants those who will laugh at Greyfaces and dance with witches and convince the followers of other religions that they are really the most despicable mind-shackling spiritual hucksters...but they are still fragments of the truth. After all, truth is on sale at your latest news stand or on the electronic highway. Hell, those other religions buy and sell their little truths too, all the while trying to convince you that their little truths are in fact the Whole Holy Greatest Truth(tm) . They really only do this because they are insecure. Whereas we like to mess about because we know the secret that there are no secrets but that mysteries are supposed to stun and amaze and confuse you. Especially the mysteries we carefully craft and peddle to the general population.

We like to engage the general population since we are trying to get the rest of the Discordians who are hiding to come out of their closets and play with us. Why should Eris have all the fun? Especially since She likes to share the proverbial wealth so fluently. But don't confuse us in the Erisian Movement with all of those other "slut religions" who will take any and all comers so long as they check their minds at the door and sell their souls to certain deities and/or mythological figures for a little piece of some pie in the sky. We refuse any and all cabbages, no matter how human they look. (Which is why we always ask the famous "You're not a cabbage, or something?" when initiating people. But you already knew that.)

And yes, we do make fun of any and all religions that get so caught up their own seriousness. We even make fun of Islam, though we tend to keep those activities under wraps because in today's world climate it has proven harmful to one's health to even talk the smallest shit about the Muslims. (We want them to know that chaos gets them all in the end just like the rest of humanity, no matter what was written down by so-and-so.) We like ribbing the monotheist trinity (Islam/Judaism/Christianity) only because they are prophet religions whereas we are a non-Prophet irreligion....and you are all messiahs and mad prophets anyway. All these other religions like making enemies out of everyone anyway, but we should firmly remind them that all of our opposition is to be illuminated. (And if the other religions don't want to play nicely, we will illuminate them with electrical appliances and cayenne pepper.) But I have digressed, as is usual, again.

Chaos is about being comfortable in one's own skin, regardless of whether or not you can conceptualize or believe in something. Belief is not important at all, except for believers. Chaos is the name for the oldest most ancient aspects of reality. Fear of that is inculcated into the nervous systems of our species by those who have every real reason to keep us afraid and therefore in line and obedient. Like the old Taoists of Classical China, or the Socratic philosophers of Classical Greece, or the Druids of Celtic Europe, or the witches and the shamans, there are many who choose to think for themselves and not flee chaos. Such people retrain themselves by deprogramming all the crap that gets shoved into our minds and hearts. We Discordians are here to help you in your deprogramming. (Though some of us have to admit we only do it for the humor-value. Blame Eris,  if you want.) You know all about this crap. It's the shit that says you must think, believe, and feel certain ways about certain prefabricated dogmatic positions. Accept Jesus or go to hell. (But some Jesus people argue with other Jesus people about the ways to go about it. Back in the old days, they used to kill each other over such disagreements.) Submit to Allah or either go to hell or get blown up. (Hell, judging from the behaviors of some people in Islam, you can still get blown up no matter how much you submit to Allah.) Then there are the ideologies like "overthrow the capitalist/imperialist/fascist pigs or suffer in misery forever" and other such semantically manipulative traps. What does Eris say about all of this? She says "You Are Free." So you don't have to listen or get manipulated into subscribing to such inane and immature "either/or" thought prisons.

Chaos is about everything and nothing, whether or not you think that either one of those can exist. Our Goddess of Chaos, Eris, gives you license to do as you wish and to think for yourself and all that, but She doesn't like assholes. Neither do we. Think back to what happened on Olympus over 3171 years ago. Think back to what She did to the Roman Empire in the 400's...a little payback for what the Roman senate did to Julius Caesar, one of the most famous Discordian Romans in history. Think about all the private lines of bullshit She feeds to those who deny Her existence or who hate the fact that LIFE cannot be squeezed into the pre-conceived molds of people's myths and religious antics and rules and so-called revealed truths. All of these other religions and ideologies have been so thoroughly inundated with cabbages that they all sound like Greyfaces now. Sometimes we think that our only duty to the people who fall into such bullshit is to give them as much rope as they need to hang themselves, figuratively of course. (Since we are not in the business of depriving anyone of their Eris-given rights to life, laughter, and healthy confusion. Which is a lot better than what the other religions do.) We are chaos and we are free. And as the Age of Bureaucracy gets ground up in our misinformation multiplication party, societies everywhere will drift back to some sort of humanity in the Aftermath. Helping this come about is part and parcel of what we are about in this outfit known as the Discordian Society or the Erisian Movement (and a host of other silly titles and cabals that read like the end of a Robert Anton Wilson novel).

And yes, we Discordians do have this all figured out. Why else do you find so many contradictions, hidden jokes and put-ons in our writings? If your pineal gland is glowing and opened up to life, you will see that this is how the universe/multiverse is, regardless of whether you agree with the way I am putting it into words. And besides all that, if you have some other important info about chaos that I or any other of us have neglected to mention or have overlooked...you are free to rant and form your own sects as you wish. Why jump on someone else's bandwagon when you have your own fricken air-conditioned tour bus anyway?

Be silly and know thy chaos.

-July 8th, 2005

[Does Anyone Remember? (Is this Rant number 91?)]

Does Anyone Remember? (Is this Rant number 91?)

(The rant machine has been revamped yet again for another round of things to put into your minds. My hiatus is over. I can no longer be derelict in my episkopational duties any longer. I tried to get away and run and hide in the halls of Thud but Eris found me again and now I know that I have only been naughty.)

<start transmission>

Does anyone remember when Discordianism was supposed to be filled with a streak of humor? Does anyone remember what to do with pineal glands? Does anyone remember Our Lady Eris? Or are some of you just in it for the coolness, the newness, the "no-one-else-knows-about-this" pioneerism of "the underground thing"? Don't kid yourselves. While the Discordian Society will take all comers, we won't tolerate certain things. And you know just what those things are. And we know just what you want.

It seems that those calling themselves Discordians these days have lost the ability to perceive tongue-in-cheekiness as well as losing the ability to disagree. And we are here to say that those of you without a sense of humor, or who have lost it for some reason, are suckers who have fallen lock-step into the worldview of the cabbage. And is that what you really want? A vegetated existence where even the zombies of Romero's films are more lifelike and warm blooded than you?

Regardless of how you choose to answer the questions. We are here to help you realize that bottled air is bottled air...that socks with holes in then are messages from the Goddess....that squirrels are sacred and holy....and that Aleister Crowley has thousands of illegitimate children running around like mosquitoes, trying to suck the blood and the life from our Erisian movement. (We call them OTOers, by the way.) You thought the Bavarian Illuminati was trying to fuck with us by replacing humans with cabbages? Well, at least that is an inside job. (The B.I. are us in disguise, after all.) The OTOers and Thelema-addicts are totally outsiders and their little attempt at subversion is not intended as a prank no matter how funny we find it to be. (The PMM found this information out by infiltrating an OTO lodge, by the way. And if you think some of your fellow Discordians, whether so-called or not, are in danger of humorlessness, you should spend some time with the Crowleyites. They are about as humorless as a pack of Evangelicals in a porn shop.)

The endless whining and prattling and tattling and all that crap is pretty much a lot of a nice nothing. (Just like this sentence. Or this whole rant, in fact.) Some of you went away with the Discordian Jihad idea even though you didn't get the joke. Some of you decided it was much more fun to become a little shit that spits and cusses whenever someone does something you don't like. Some of you sat on forums and posted fluff and then bitched and moaned whenever others did likewise. Some of you attacked and drove away those with things to contribute. Some of you did absolutely nothing because you were maybe a little wise to the game. Some of you simply complained that certain segments of humor directed at you were too vicious. Some of you formed alternate accounts to troll and poke at others and then bitched when the same thing was done right back at you. Some of you despise and hate Our Lady (in which case, you know that you can go to the Christian hell). Some of you rightly laughed at all of the fuss. Hell, some of you even doubt the existence of Bob, even as you can smell the burning pipe tobacco. (Did I leave anyone out? I would hate to leave anybody in the horrible position of not being labeled or categorized, knowing full well how some of you hate to live without such things.)

Your own personal Discordianism is what you can make of it, but frankly stop trying to piss on others' Discordianism and stop trying to drag all other Discordians around with your narcissistic whining about all that shit you complain about. Unless it's all part of some elaborate con-job (and there had better be a punch line). You can whine and complain all you want, but try to remember not to get pissed off when no one cares. Have you forgotten that you can blame Eris for everything? (You can also blame Bob, but only when there's frop involved. And you shouldn't trust a man with a smoking pipe and a gleam in his eyes anyway.)

As to the hackers (those who recently deleted posts and got into people's personal accounts and read and deleted others' pms), you make many of us sick with your ravings about free-speech while you try to subvert and prevent others from having a right to free-speech and fair play. Some of us know who you are and you have been logged. Tequilarian agents of Discord are right this minute on their way to your pineal glands to un-lopside them and give you a dose of Our Lady's confusion. (You can't say you weren't warned.) Consider this your excommunication notice. Until you gain absolution for your snubbery, you will be shunned and disgraced. We'll even take back all the frop you were given. Turn in your pet prairie squid at once. No amount of tail-between-your-legs posturing will change our minds until restitution is made; to wit: create something of beauty and dedicate it to Eris....or something along those lines. (Saying sorry will no longer cut it in this Society. We are Discordians and Erisians, after all-some of us being both simultaneously. And we have some maintains to standardize in this age of bureaucracy. They taste like plantains, but a little more on the dirty sock side of things.)

Also, stop picking your nose in public. It's disgusting. Use a fucking tissue for bobsake.

<end transmission>

Not brought to you by any sponsors. All Hail Discordia! Any resemblance between this and any reader is purely consensual.

July 8th, 2005

We are going to give you more and more of our Special Blend of Erisian Enlightenment On a Silver Platter until it blows out all the snot from your sinuses and your Pineal Gland begins to glow continuously. You know you want it even when our constant haranguing you over it irritates you to no end.

You can go ahead and run away. Forget about it. Try to deny what you have just heard or read. But you know that this will only make you tired. And aren't you tired of running about in your bullshit of denial? Aren't already getting tired of your hiding away from reality? If not, rest assured that we will help you get that way.

We do not endorse any government, religious sect, culture, theory, or ego that denies the inherent Chaos of Infinite Life. We have foresworn anything that gets in the way of illumination...anything that hides you in your cages of fear, sniveling in your angst about being separated from the orgasmic kiss of Our Goddess. She is Your Goddess. And if you haven't yet figured out Her name, then perhaps we need to slap you silly.

Are you not yet tired of having your Pineal Gland clogged with the snot of your denial? We are here to help you with that, for an unlimited time only...at a special sale price. How much is it going to cost you, you ask? Not a damned cent. At least WE won't charge you for our bottled air...though if you pay us, we won't stop you.

The highest most secret Erisian mysteries of illumination can be yours if you would simply open your eyes. The Discordians for Softer Sandpaper (a.k.a. Purple Monkey Mafia) is here to fulfill that mission. We will sermonize, jake, prank, and hex you until you stop denying the messes you have made. Until you stop looking about yourself through the windows of humorless grey bullshit with which you have gained your soul-stifling comforts up to now. No. Eris has called you to something so much more than you could ever imagine. If you still deny this, fear not. We will help you fix your little cognitive dissonances and your angst.

Remember this. You are the master editor of your own life. If it is stale, boring, small, and grey...then you need to get up off your ass and start re-editing it. If you never believe the stories others tell you at face value, then why do you adamantly defend the stories you tell yourself about your life? Did you ever think about that? We will help you, but we won't endorse you until you unclog that ailing Pineal Gland and allow it to breathe some life for once.

The only sacrifice that We, or Eris, will ever demand of you is your ignorance. Can you do that? Can you slaughter that fattened pig of ignorance that lays within your mind, choking your lifeblood out of you like a cancerous tumor? It is time to start barbecueing that pig and we are here to help in the celebration that shortly follows.

Again...Are You Crazy Enough to Exist?

[Sermon on Eristicism 17:The Last Sermon; in which the highest secret of Erisianism is revealed for a limited time only.]

Sermon on Eristicism 17:
The Last Sermon; in which the highest secret of Erisianism is revealed for a limited time only.

"C?©n f?°th a bh??m ag radaireacht i gc??na?? faoi rud?"

"Bramm hep trouz na c'hwezh a zo labour difrouez!"
(Flatulence without force or noise is useless.)
-Ancient Breton Proverb

"If you ranted all that crap like Irreverend Hugh, you'd have phage days more often too.
-St. Kallista (something I overheard)

As noted in Sermon 16, this is the last sermon. I feel that the days of posting rants and sermons to the PD forums is over. Roger and Trollax, two of the most prolific writers posting here, have chickened away in a fit of insanity or some private line of bullshit either Eris or Bob is feeding them. The vast majority of my sermons (and the rants which preceded them) were written for my home cabal first and then shared with those of you on the forums. Now I must move on to other Erisian evangelical activities. Perhaps some day in the distant future, I will decide to post sermons and/or rants again. No one should hold their breath. But do know that I will continue to preach Erisianism wherever I find it useful IRL, but only if I can wear a silly hat.

Yeah, we know you. You know you. I know you. You're the one who says "this is not about me" or "you have it all wrong." And that's precisely because it IS you we are talking about. We have it all, or mostly, right. We are the ones who fly high on supercharged Erisianism and constantly invite you along, remembering Our Goddess and The Original Snub. We sometimes toss Golden Apples your way because you are our sisters and brothers. No harm in that, at least in our intentions.

Have you taken a good look at the world around you recently? It seems that, much like in the latter sixties and early seventies, some of the youth are NOT doing as they are told. A lot of them are rejecting the pre-fabbed expectations to just fit in. In the USA, for every willing recruit into the Armed Forces, it seems there are two or three new converts to anarchism or whatever the hell people call it to excuse their behavior these days. But that's no sign of health or improvement. For every convert to the religion of anarchism (about as superstitious in its visions as any other religion) there are several dozen converts to the cult of the mall rat. I would venture that a good deal of the anarchists are mall rats. But don't be so hard on them. What else could be expected?

Everyone seems to want to wave a flag, even if it's the flag of anarchy. Everyone seems to want to have a belief to take away all the scary parts of life, even if it's the belief of no beliefs. Everyone wants to be a part of some group, even if the group alleges that it is an 'ungroup', especially if the group lets one maintain the illusions of weirdness that many normal people seem to be obsessed with. It is a damned shame that people get caught up in defending this or that identity or this or that label and forget the simple naked truth that true identity or uniqueness is destroyed by asserting it. This seems counter-intuitive because everyone around us appears to have bought into the whole 'assertion of identity' habit. But it's simply a trap. A trick of the market researchers who know exactly what to make you think in order to get you to buy more of what they want to sell you.

Even then, don't blame them or despair over the situation. Simply watch the spectacle and contribute something to the din, if you wish. Rest assured that Eris is fucking them (the so-called normals) over just as surely as She has duped you into becoming Discordian.

There.

I have just told you the secret only known by the highest 23rd level Discordians, the sort of people who could pull off things like the Horrible Police Prank of this past January...the sort of people who years ago listened to my fevered rambling lines of urban concrete cracked poetry and formed a cabal around those twisted thoughts and installed me as the misdirector. It was all a trick to get me to LEARN. And learn I did. What do I ask of you for revealing such a secret (see a few sentences previous, for those of you with A.D.D.) when you don't even know the secret handshake? Nothing except praise for Eris and perhaps your willingness to continue to Take No Shit from others and to keep your mind working. Even so, I could be lying.

Had I known about what I now know, perhaps I would have read self-help books instead of allowing myself to be persuaded into misdirecting the cabal. Perhaps, but the offers of tequila I have received and still receive for doing such a thing, is something to be taken into account. And it really is a lot more fun to LEARN this way anyway. Therein lays another occult secret that will astonish you when you begin to figure it out.

That said.

I have a few more words to say to you before I get down off this soapbox.

Many of you have convinced yourselves that being Discordian is a useful excuse to avoid intelligence or to avoid any sort of searching whatsoever. Well...you are right. It is a useful excuse. But you are wrong to do so as experiments have shown that even those who use Discordianism as an excuse for stupidity or even as a pretty label are in the very real danger of blowing their minds out through their noses like so much snot. Or having their minds blown by someone or something else. In any event I encourage more of the same behavior. It may be dangerous, but only to those with huge egos. And it can only help to spread the memes brought to us by Our Lady. (If you think I have just contradicted myself, you have only gotten half of the message.)

As long as you are in no danger of falling into the toilet, you are doing okay. So push away all those depressing angsty whining thoughts about what a fuckpit this world is. We all know it can be a fuckpit and a miserable hellhole populated with some uncaring people. (By all gods! Look at the leaders of the USA for evidence of this.) But there are people who do care, if you'd only take the time out to stop your drivel and look for them. And the world being what it is, is simply what it is, with no regard for whatever label you are giving it at any given moment.

Or you can simply forget you ever heard or read this. In fact, just forget everything.

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC

[april.7.2005]

More old stuff.

You want to talk about God?
You want to share your faith in God?
God?
Don't you know?
All the Gods have gone to lunch
leaving society to deal with the undigested bone slivers
of the earth's broken body
as capital paradise cracked apart
into a gaping hole
burning tower of smoke reaching for the heavens.

There are no words to describe the shattering of concrete reality
and the marketing of its pieces for profit's progress

There are no gestures that could suffice
to cover up the howling wounds indicting our silence
our lack of words
our complicity bought and paid for
our consent manufactured
the silver linings stripped from the clouds
the sparkle of waves in sunlight
has been skinned off the water

We insist that our dismemberment and burnings are for just causes
while we lose more pieces of our bodies
word by word mouth by mouth dollar after dollar

God? Pray to God?
Don't you know?
All the Gods have gone out to lunch.

[9/18/2002]

Something from way back when.

(As democracy gets ground up into sawdust
and passionate plans are burned up
for their last shreds of warmth
it seems that life doesn't seem to be fitting
into the economy all that well.
It seems that the world has become filled with
fake dentists, rogue womanizing poets, terrorists,
drug dealing federal agents, cell phone addicted yuppies,
lesbian folksingers, and alcoholics who drink up all the Guinness
before I can get to the bar.

The community solidarity in my left big toe
gets stubbed out from my kick of frustration
and in the throbbing pain I feel capitalism's incessant need for a fix)

I gulp down my class war with shots of tequila
wondering how the vomit will smell to the rich
the White Mouse rambles on endlessly
and it's as if he's doing so purposely
to provide a background for my drunken thought tangents

My class war boils in my stomach
so I expose and polarize more social contradictions
by slamming down more tequila
until society erupts in my body with the spinning hurling nausea
and I can swear that the revolution has finally come.

"Nope," says the White Mouse. "You just got over-drunk."
I stumble home and into bed
all my attempts to think bungled up
by this time my hope in revolution is faded
and my ideology is whittled down to just hoping
not to wake up hung-over.

[1/15/2002]

[Sermon on Eristicism 16 / Rant 89:Echoes of What You Heard Before]

Sermon on Eristicism 16 / Rant 89:
Echoes of What You Heard Before

"Is fearr a bhi marbh na bhi 'nad thr?†ill ramhar."
[It is better to be dead than to be a fat slave. / ISS FyARa VEE MARav na VEEna TRAeel RAUR]
-Scottish Highlands Proverb

"You want bullcrap or witchcraft? You want suckery or sorcery?"
-Neopagan graffiti sprayed on someone's car

"How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right."
-Makataimeshekiakiak (Black Hawk), 1834

"No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body."
-What the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually says. (Don't believe those people who misrepresent it as "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." To wit, If 'order from disorder' is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?)

"Mae 'y mhib yn smygu!"
[My pipe is smoking! /MAIya MEEBan SMUGGee!]
-Tequilarius Malignatus (quoting Bob's lost "Sermon to the Welsh")

Now pay some attention. The following is a concise summary of what I have said before...you know...during the previous sermons when you weren't paying attention. This is the second to the last 'sermon' that I will present. I must wind down this sermonizing project as others seem to have taken up the torch. A new era is dawning for Discordians. All I ask is that someday the rest of you all remember those of us irritant-word slingers who saw this dawn coming...people like the Good Reverend Roger (the Mad Prophet, Human Snafu, and Sack O' Hubris), and the Champion of Oppositional Defiance Disorder (and Scourge of Australia) Saint Trollax, and the rest. Sit back. Relax. And maybe let some of this sink in. And Remember, though St. Trollax may have disappeared from the Halls of Discordia, he is still out there practicing the art and science of the Walking Glitch. As for Roger, I can rest assured that he will not stop. The Roger device will keep preaching your ears and your eyes off. As for myself, I will be trying to write down all the damned sacred scriptures that Eris has dumped into my pineal gland. (She was nice enough to take them out of the heavy steel canisters first. So I am at least thankful for that.)

Perhaps the druids were right all along. Perhaps people should have been a little more vigilant in resisting and fighting off the human scourge known as empire. The modern Pagans often say that the Roman Empire never really collapsed. It just changed titles and management. Regardless of how you feel towards religion or towards Pagans, it is a statement to reflect upon. It refers to the fact that the revolution of the christs became twisted by the Paulists into a State Religion which justified first the Roman Empire and all later empires...even the later fascist attempts at building empires. The Celtic Gauls and Britons fought bitterly against empire for hundreds of years, eventually to succumb to the trojan horse of Paulist Christianity...and look where they are now. So, again, perhaps the druids were right.

However, the scourge of empire isn't just some vast collection of corporate and state enterprises out there in the world (despite it being a scourge and mournful plague that has killed more than all diseases in human history combined). The empire is also inculcated into you from childhood on up to the point that you think that it is a natural component of human socio-economic evolution. But if it is so natural, why does it have to be taught, inculcated, and forced?

If you paid attention to the sermon about grayfaces, then you know this line of reasoning: The empire is also inside your deepest thoughts, wrestling with your yearning to be free, even if you have forgotten how to think freely, or even if you have forgotten how you can live in freedom. It is so bad that even the very language we use reflects this. But language can be used as a tool of your yearning to find freedom as much as it can be a tool to control your mind. (Take heart here. The semanticians and their blathering theories about what a trap language can be are mostly wrong. Don't waste time with General Semantics*, unless you want more empire being shoved down your throat.) The moment you want to coerce someone else or make them agree with you, or the moment you allow yourself to be compromised, that is the empire inside you...and it comes with a whole set of voices in your head: the judge, the emperor, the god, the grayface, the false Eris, the pseudo-christs and all the rest that will try to get you to believe that something is horribly wrong with you if you don't like the way things are. You are a "heretic, filthy heathen, sinner," or you have some sort of "disorder." They will say "follow us." They will even convince you that they are you. And in a way, until you muster up enough strength to disown them, they ARE you. These voices must be silenced. You must reclaim your own mind. (Refer to the sermon about the rats to see how bad these voices and their supporters can get, if you are one of those rare individuals blessed with an integrated mind.)

But that's really nothing new to any of you who have even given a second to reflecting.

How to get out from under the stomping boots of empire that ring throughout your thoughts day in and night out? What to do when the massive stupidity of this society slips into your mind and makes you just want to curl up into a ball of tears and alcohol (or whatever your favorite substance is) consumption? How to actually take to heart the words of Eris and all of Her followers throughout the years? And how to go about tossing golden apples around at all of your snubbers? Lose your mind. Snap. Bounce around between the walls and the ceilings. Feel like tossing the ashtray out the window? Do so. Want to simply clear your lungs by shouting at three in the morning? Do so. See an area of society particularly vulnerable to and in need of a wrench being tossed into its machinery? You know what to do. You simply need to trust that you yourself can find a good way to do so. You don't need leaders or followers or ideas or theories or dogmas or catmas or gods or advertising slogans or shiny products or any of that. What you need is nonsense as your salvation. And if you don't know what that means yet, trust yourself to find out. Because it means something slightly different to each person and one person's truth is so much babble to the next person.

If you don't think you can ever be free then what are you doing here? You'd be better off spending your time watching cable television all day and collecting welfare in some trailor park somewhere. You'd be better off supporting the Real Amurricans(tm) and their Jesus Christ posing president Georgie Bush in his quest to inflict as much corporatism on the world as is humanly possible. (And that's a vast 'possible' considering the plague-like reach of him and his ilk.) Or you could simply sit there and watch the decline of people like little Billy once he takes up his proper meth habit with that girl next door. Or you could convert to Fundamentalist Christianity or Islam or the New Age and have your mind liquified into snot from the daily treatments of either 'the Word(tm)' or 'crystal therapy.' Or you could sit there and try to count the errant pixels on an aging computer screen. Or you could overdose on pie and have to be forklifted out of your home to visit the doctor who will tell you that it's only a matter of time before you draw the moon into your orbit. Or you could fall down a memory hole with the rope we had originally given you to hang yourself with just dangling there. Heh. There are more options for those of you who don't wish to be free. You could fall into all sorts of habits and activities. Perhaps that is what Eris wanted with you all along. But why should you even care what Eris wants anyway. It's not like She pays all that much attention.

But if you want to be free and are damned well at least trying to be, the list of things you could be doing or getting into or out of is endless. Just a little more endless than your imagination. Imagine that for a minute. [I'll wait.]

Okay?

You could spend your time doing worthwhile things like playing sink. Or learning how to get one over on the bosses. Or how to convince your neighbors that Bush is the stormtrooping Nazi anti-freedom machine that he really is. You could have a phage day...I won't list any examples of that here. I wouldn't want to imply that I myself could ever fall victim to such a thing myself. Especially since I consider the whole phage thing as more of an artform necessity than some mood that I pop in and out of. (Besides too many memories dealing with cayenne powder pranks would haunt me if I started on that tangent. And I really don't feel like invoking the White Mouse at the moment. I can only take so much at one time.) You could try to convince the coven of Wiccans next door that Eris is the Triple Goddess and that Bob is the Horned God - although Bob doesn't much do the horned bit much anymore since He smokes a pipe nowadays. You could show up at the local Baptist church and rail against the rising influx of godless Gypsies into the community. (That might just work since people seem to be tiring of beating that Satanic Panic dead horse.) If that is too far fetched (not all Baptists are THAT stupid), you could try to convince them that the theories of Intelligent Design are heresy and that they should be more concerned about the coming apocalypse that will destroy the world than with the genesis. Or maybe...

You could simply just wish to be left alone and likewise leave others alone. No shame in that, but do remember that society and all of its DUMB and DOOM still won't leave you alone so you might as well help get the ship aground so we can hack it apart and use it for fuel in our great Open Air Asylum of Discordia's Barbecue and Get-Our-Yuks-In-Before-the-Cabbages-Swamp-Us-Party. The cabbages, the DUMB, and the empire stand a real good chance of getting us all, you know. Not that they would ever get us all (they can't find us all, for one, even if THEY were that interested). It's just more useful to be a little on the paranoid side of things. It keeps the spice tasty in life. And, regardless, you should know that some of us aren't going without a fight or without a few yuks. So there. Chew on that. Or put it in Bob's pipe and watch Him smoke it.


-Irreverend Hugh, KSC, Co-Episkopos of the DSSS/PMM;
Chairperson of the Newly Reformed Erisian Liberation Front;
Facilitator of the Coven of Macha.

[march.24.2005]


*General Semantics was started in 1933 by the engineer Alfred Korzybski and made famous by followers like S.I. Hayakawa (of anti-protester fame). The idea of GS is that much damage to thought is perpetuated by language structure itself. Theorists of this ilk also get all hung up on the verb "to be" and claim that it is a source of much of both damaged thinking and evil actions. Semanticians today go further by using the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis of 'linguistic determinism' which posits that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by language. Thus the categories of reality are not 'in' the world but imposed by culture. This is, of course, wrong and blindly/stupidly so. Anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of cognitive studies can slice through the non-sequiturs and circular reasoning of their hypothesis. (Both Sapir and Whorf have been discredited. And Whorf especially was very misleading with his research. Why people still would still use their hypothesis probably has more to do with ideological concerns than with knowledge about both human thought and language.) Thought is NOT the same as language as is commonly known by linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and artists/poets. Every attempt to prove otherwise has been shown to be false. And think about this: If language and thought were the same thing, or if language determined how one thought about the world, how could it be possible to ever coin new words, or even translate from one language to another? How could it be that you would write down a sentence but then scratch it out and start over because the words you picked were not exactly what you wanted to say? How could there even be a difference between what you wanted to say and the words you wrote? Evidence consistently shows that complex reasoning goes on all the time without language. General Semantics can be illuminating in some respects, but it is a dead end for inquiry which is adhered to religously by those who agree with its deterministic premises. GS also gets the gist of 'linguistic relativity' wrong. I could go on and on. Anyone with further need to discuss this should feel free to research it or contact me. Or you can go to the cognitive psychology thread.

[Sermon on Eristicism 15 / Rant 88:May Clowns Eat You;(The Jihad is a Dead Horse and In Beating It You Have Infected Yourself With Plague)]

Sermon on Eristicism 15 / Rant 88:
May Clowns Eat You;
(The Jihad is a Dead Horse and In Beating It You Have Infected Yourself With Plague)

"Being a Discordian is no excuse for being an asshole."
-Rev. Verthaine (paraphrased)

You have laxed in your false slack for so long that you deem yourselves children of chaos. You have confused jakery with jerkery. You have complained and whined about how no one accepts you, yet you claim to have taken after a goddess how was snubbed by all. (You have failed to see how nobody likes an asshole. You want to have all the acclaim of being an asshole, but you don't want to take any of the crap that comes with the blowblack.) You are a jumbled knot of mis-understood categories in your attempts to enslave chaos to your pathetic projects. Chaos cares nothing for you and every now and then will reach in to smite those of you who like to fancy yourselves as chaotic or as "chaoists" just for the sheer change it would cause. (If it could even be said that chaos has a mind to do anything.)

You call yourselves Discordians while acting all bold and grand online, practicing your e-thuggery as if anything you did could ever matter. You proclaim yourselves better than the herd or smarter or more Erisian...shit, don't even try to lie. Even when you say that you have no fucking clue and so neither should anyone else claim to have a clue, you are pretending to be better or smarter or whatever. You are like all the snot nosed young kids these days who get into chaos magic and then go around pretending to be all smart by saying stupid shit like "Anyone who says they know what chaos magic is is themselves full of shit," and other tired old cliches gleaned from the back-alley crack whores of decades old bad poetry.

You call yourselves Discordians and assume for yourselves some sort of spurious identity simply because you can hijack forums, or email lists, or chatrooms, or whatever else that any five year old can do. (The above things can be fun, but some of you all seem to think that that's all there is to do. And you get hissy when people get bothered by it.) You brandish yourselves as if you were some virulent plague that people (the normals, or the greys, or the pinks) would cower from. But the world could not give a shit about your existence. Trust me, if anyone really cowered from your pretensions, your ass would be toast in Donald Rumsfeld's Palace of Tortures. If the world even cared about such a thing as Eris or the Discordian Society, it would be smashed without a forethought. Remember that, all you would-be revolutionaries, online erisian militia commanders, and other such excuses for wasting time.

You are yourselves the snubbers of Eris. No one else can snub Her but you yourselves. (Just like no one else can be greyfaced but you yourselves. (And why worry about anyone else who is greyfaced? Or haven't you been introduced to any Erisian mantras and such. ) But don't worry about Her. She couldn't give a shit at the moment. But some of us just might. (Hell, I'll even introduce you to some Erisian liturgies and encyclicals even though some of you are still filthy heathen uninitiates. Yes I reserve the right to call you names as per my Papal Right. And so do you in vice versa.)

You spout all the tired and worn supposed truisms about how each one of you has the right to find their own way towards freedom, yet when faced with people who are different, or too "emo," or "occult," or mystical, or mad, or angry or [insert your favorite term for 'no-good-shit' here]...when faced with someone who is just a little bit different from you, or just a little bit too whatever-it-is-you-don't-like, you attack and whine and wheeze in your attempted railings and rantings against them. And yet, you still have the nerve to call yourselves Discordians? Isn't it about everyone finding their own way? Or did that detail get lost in your vapid attempts to be more cool or to be more avant guard or more 'culturally adventurous' as you picked the bones of your supposed fellow Discordians clean like the rabid vultures you really are? Admit it, once and for all, you nest of pathetic half-wit attempts at being vipers! You pretend to be rolling golden apples but if one comes your way, you immediately destroy any significance it has for you. And we want you to know that THAT is precisely the reason why Eris is spitting you back up and out. A snub for a snub, my friends, enemies, and damned things...you should know by now how Her game is played. This is the new Erisian Dispensation. Forget all about how easy it is to digest the half raved words of tripping hippies and then to pose as the successors. Forget about how much cooler or more chic or more advanced you are. Because your shit still stinks and your snot still needs to be blown from your sinus cavities so that your pineal glands can have that merest chance of being resurrected from the fields of lifeless attention deficit disorders and viral 'holier-than-thou' thoughts in which you have imprisoned them.

We have offered you, time after time, enlightenment on a silver fucking platter. But instead you wanted some pre-packaged and bottled frou-frou Discordia-Lite which gives you an excuse for being an asshole and allows you to sit around on the internet and flood forums and lists with dumbshit and somehow expect it all to be funny. Heh. You funny? More like sad...a slight irritant that like a gnat can be swatted or shooed away. We want Discordians like you to know that you are precisely the reason why we have revived and reformed the Erisian Liberation Front, which will soon be knocking on your doors to recruit the errant brain cells that show any promise. And what will you do when the plug on your internet drooling is finally pulled? You will grow into being the used car dealers and insurance salespersons and senators' daughters and other such things and forget all about anything to do with Discordia. Perhaps you should think about leaving before that time and sparing the rest of us the boredom of watching the declines of your pretensions toward freedom.

We offer you no poetries, no manfestos, no words of advice, no prophesies, no messiahs, no ways-out, no theories....because your heads are too clogged with your own bullshit...and that's not fair to the cows. We offer you enlightenment on a silver platter no longer because all you wanted was someone to tell you what to do and to think, or you wanted to be the person that everyone else listens to. Christians show more promise than you could ever hope to...you diseased pack of vultures imagining that in picking through others' bones and decayed corpses of ideas you are so unique and special...that Eris may spare you the tumult of having to actually think for yourselves...of actually doing more than just pretending to think for yourselves by claiming to use the Principia Discordia for toilet paper. (Who the fuck really uses the PD for toilet paper, idiots? Do really think people are really going to scratch their asses raw with such drivel? Did you miss that joke too?) Because you maybe were a little bit decieved (some of Our faults, really), let's spell that out: That little ditty was placed in the PD precisely to weed out the cabbages and the cabbage-likers when they go around and say "The PD is for ass-wiping." Heh. You're still going on about it like a CD skipping.

"You took the air. You took the time.
You were fed. You were free.
You'd better put some beauty back here
while you still have the energy."

So, you over-stuffed pretentious children who claim yourselves Discordian because you have the milk-fed suburban blues, imagining yourselves somehow better because of your forever unrealized visions of post-modern apocalypses and other such solpsistic thrill rides that entertain none but yourselves...Where's that unique free creative chaos you blather on about? Endlessly repeating droning statements excusing your piss poor behaviors and actions on 'Chaos' will not get you any closer to anything even remotely resembling thought. But wait a minute, we forget...you are simply going to feign as if you don't give a shit about that. You are going to pretend to be the numbed, dazed, and jaded children of the steel and glass and wired apocalypses of chaos. (An apocalypse that will never come. What? You actually were stupid enough to believe that you could categorize and imagine CHAOS and what future it brings? Heh. Leave the tired delusions of the self-eaten tattered dregs of the forgotten portions of the species behind and actually taste reality for a change. You may find yourselves scared shitless by its endless surprises. If that menaces you then perhaps we could jolt that dysfunction out of your system with electrical appliances. If you could shirk off your pretense of not giving a shit, that is.)

The Kali Yuga is in your fucking heads. All of it. The end of the world is simply the trick of the spiritual hucksters selling you on broken icicles of spit. The golden apples you thought you were rolling have turned out to be nothing more than drug-stained hallucinations. And Eris just may notice you invoking Her by name. Not that She'd give a crap. But someone close to Her just might. There is no road of bones yet. We were simply waiting for you to lay yourselves down as pavement. In the end, it doesn't really matter. The world will get some use out of you, even if it is just as fertilizer and random molecules. And we have remembered that the roads are paved with asphalt anyway.

Perhaps you should just forget all this. Or fill in the blanks. Or whatever else it is you do while you pretend to read posts like this. May clowns eat you anyway.

-Irreverend Hugh
"Everyone's in a hurry here in purgatory
Except for me. I'm where I need to be."

[march.21.2005]

[Sermon on Eristicism 13: The Lies and the Liars]

Sermon on Eristicism 13: The Lies and the Liars

"This message was not brought to you by any sponsors. It does not care a thing for the sensibilities of your consumer capitalist audience or your advertising hackjobs who pretend to be moguls. It cares nothing for political ideologies and schemas. This message is just the flux of your mind trying to get you to realize that THIS IS IT. This is your life. No one or nothing else but you can make you realize that."
-Common flyer intro for the Chicago Affinity of 23Cluster

"It is the deed itself that galvanizes the consciousness to transcend the shit that,Äôs been imposed upon you in your life."
-Ward Churchill

Are you sick of it all yet? And if you answered 'yes', aren't you sick of bitching and moaning about being sick of it all? Or are you simply just getting off on being better than everyone else because you have become ennauseated by the whole spectacle of the Conspiracy of Normal? If you are just going to bitch and moan, take heart, at least you are speaking. I would be lying if I told you I absolutely hated bitching and moaning. They do have their place. Perhaps someone will be moved to do something upon hearing your words. (But for Gods' sakes if you just want to complain, at least make it interesting.)

Aren't you ready to say enough of this shit? You have had it? Is it because you can see through the mind crippling game that the CoN calls relevant social and economic life? Or is it because you still wish to live in the comfortable world you knew back when you didn't know that the whole thing was a farce, a lie, a conjob, a group of viral social patterns and thoughts that sucks the life right out of you...clogging up your pineal gland, and making you all that much more prone to outbursts of pinkdom and attacks of grey mentalities?

This whole thing is a lie. So suck it up or throw it up, but make it what you will so long as it is what YOU will. If you want leaders or just even lovers, than step up to the plate for yourself. This life you have found yourself living in is your life, no matter what the banks, the mortgage companies, the employers, the pushers of soulsucking religions, the politidiotical authorities, and all of their ilk say. If you do not want the intensity of living your life, then we will smack you into the next century with Eris's Zen billy club. Is that what you want?

Enlightenment is living your life. All of it. The hate and the love. The sickness and the ease. The joys and the sorrows. To shrink back from any of these is the normal way we have been inculcated and the way we inculcate ourselves...So don't feel guilty or stupid for doing so from time to time. Just know that every time you shrink back you invite a loss of SOUL. A part of life that is denied becomes a demon to be dealt with later on when you least or don't want to expect it. It is the movement of the HODGE and the PODGE. Pinealistic mental explosions can only be invited/invoked if you make the necessary realization that there is nothing you can do to stop chaos. Sure you can hold it off for a while, but one day you'll wake up and notice to your horror or amazement (depending on how you take it) that chaos was moving all along. It had only appeared to stop in your delusion infested mind.

The society of people who choose blinders and who choose slavery will tell you to fear this openness to the motion of chaos. They will try to get you to believe in their god and convince you that if you do so than perhaps, chaos can be staved off. Perhaps you will not die. Perhaps you will be always happy. Perhaps you will get to drive the Mercedes just like your preacher. Perhaps you won't have to deal with your sexual urges, your needs, your desires. Perhaps someone like Jesus will come and take all of these troublesome things away and you can spend the rest of eternity plucking on some harp on some boring cloud nine. (If that is really what you want, you can just take drugs for the rest of your life. At least the gratification is instant.) Perhaps you won't have to deal with all the scary parts of life, like when grandma died, or when a freak wave just washed away your nice vacation in Thailand, or when you realize just who the sort of man that is running the US government is. Perhaps you can stave it all off with the forcefeeding of dogma and belief. Perhaps you will see little Billy again in heaven....BUT only if both you and little Billy get whatever particular brand of salvation(tm) that the CoN are pushing. They will tell you to make all sorts of money because money is immortal and the more you have of it the bigger dick/womb you will have and the more of a person you will be and the more you can give to your church/leaders/society...the more of a chance you have to stave or buy off your mortality. (Deep down you know you can't, and this scares the shit out of you.) And while money is a necessary and useful tool for exchanges, why should you slave away for more and more of it? Have you ever noticed that the more you work for money the more someone ELSE gets rich? Yep, conned again. At some point enough is enough, is it not?

They lie and tell you that chaos is evil wrong satanic weird. Maybe even full of discord and strife. Chaos won't get you laid, they say. Chaos will leave you cold and lonely and wasted, they say. Chaos will not make you rich or happy or both, they say. Chaos will interfere with your humanity, they say. Chaos is the earliest enemy of your kind, they will tell you. Chaos is to be feared like those swarthy muslims who speak in guttural semitic languages who you know just want to get a visa into your god-loving country to blow up someone or something. They lie and tell you to elect from a group of predetermined puppets a leader for your society who will cajole you with his/her promises of freedom and morals while he enslaves more people around the world to ensqualidating multi-national corporations (known as Ensqualidation Incorporated)...all as he/she attacks and invades other people who have the slightest deviance from this lie.

Follow our order, they say. Obey our rules, they say. Our order and our rules will get you satisfaction guaranteed and you can expect faster rewards, but only if you follow our rules and our order to the letter. Even the slightest deviation, they tell you, will lead you to a life of ruin. A life that will not be able to keep up with the Joneses, no...not even the Smiths. No, and if you have followed every rule to the letter...if you have followed the foundations, walls, and paths of our order and yet you find you are unhappy or unfulfilled, then you have done something wrong. You have committed the slightest trespass. And that is as good as breaking the whole scheme. The slightest infraction will land you in loserland or hell or whatever-is-worse-than-now, they will tell you. Is it surprising that if you have any sensitivity to this mental and spiritual rape and brutality, that you will crack up and flip out and eventually either go insane or choose craziness and chaos? No wonder.  

If truth was as apparent, as the fundamentalists say, then why is it that these very same religious hucksters always argue about the correct meaning with everyone around them? The same thing with the ideologues, the politicians, the academics, the so-called experts. I don't know but it sounds like they aren't too secure in their "unshakable convictions" now, does it? They try to ram their order and their dogma down your throat because they have the FEAR of chaos so bad that they can't even let you be happy with chaos. No, they say, that is heresy. You can't choose life for yourself when we have Divine/Political/Social Gospel(tm) for you to swallow like a placebo pill to cure you of your will to be free of the lies.

There are more lies, of course. Perhaps you have come across the discovery that the sea of lies is so thick and so deep that you are taking on a hopeless mindset. Whatever you do, remember it is just your mindset. Sure the pack of lies is so vast that it can get unnerving and sickening but so what? Throw up whatever it is you need to throw up and be done with it. You can learn to swim where others drown in this sea of lies. You can learn to keep your mouth shut when it is best for you to do so, and to shout and proclaim your chaotic freedom when it is best. You can see through the game of lying and the mutual enabling of the lies. And you can use the lies against the liars themselves. 'But what about sincerity?,' they will ask you. We have people who have died for our beliefs/causes/ideas. Doesn't that make a good case for the lies being true? This sad train of stupidity is brought up often by the purveyors and slaves of dogma and other thought viruses. Sadly, reality doesn't give a damn who died for what belief. It still doesn't prove that belief any more true. And they will hate you for pointing this out. They will hate you because you have pulled the rug out and their mind gets launched into confusion. Instead of learning to live with this confusing life, they will immediately look for some other excuse to hold their lies tightly like a security blanket that can keep the forces of chaos and your newly found heathen heresies at bay. They would sooner see you die than to be deprived of the pretty noose of their lies.

Are you sure you are sick of it all? Sick of someone telling you what to do, what to think, what to say, how to live, what to believe in, how to behave, how to avoid that chaotic tendency that is life, despite all of humanity's moronic protests otherwise? Do you want to choose to have what it takes to break out of their pale stale shadow of life? It might matter. But only if you choose to make it matter to you. It is YOUR life and YOU must live it. Forget what the crapscreamers say. Throw up their sickening lies. Destroy the thoughts upon which their denials, delusions, and lies stand. Expose their stupidity in whatever that means to you. Do you want to learn how? If you have heard this [or read this], then you already know how? Don't trust me. Trust yourself.

We [as opposed to THEM] know what you want.

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
Facilitator of the Kitten Arming Department;
Chairperson of the Erisian Liberation Front (not to be confused with the Erisian Liberation Front);
and Co-Episkopos of the DSSS/PMM

[march.3.2005]

[Sermon on Eristicism 14:Your Kind of Freedom? (part one)]

Sermon on Eristicism 14:
Your Kind of Freedom? (part one)

In response to a little trouble that St. Kallista had with some dumb hokies...

Before I get started, I will quote from a book that anyone interested in freedom and blowing the mind may wish to read...The quotes set the stage for the startling realization that many of you who claim to live in these 'wonderful' free societies are actually living on the spoils of mass-murder, war, dispossession, and cultural eradication while denying anything of the sort.

"Historians and politicians once liked to boast of the slaughter of Indians that characterized the European and Euro-American conquest of North America...

In the post-Nazi era, however, gloating over genocide has fallen out of vogue. In its place are discussions of the sad "inevitability" of the native peoples' destruction, of the "unintentionally" unleashed European diseases that are said to have done all the damage, and of the kind efforts of the European invaders to find a "middle ground" of accommodation and understanding between themselves and the Indians - generosities fated to fail, alas, because of the Indian leaders' alleged inability to "control" their warriors. It has been quite an intellectual pirouette to behold: from proudly taking credit for mass murder to blaming the victim - from open celebration of genocide to genocide denial - in just a few short generations."
-David E. Stannard (from the preface to Ward Churchill's "A Little Matter of Genocide")

"We hear only of "Indian Wars," never of "settlers' wars." It is as if the natives, always "warlike" and "aggressive," had invaded and laid waste to London or Castile rather than engaging in desperate and always futile efforts to repel the hordes of "pioneers" and "peaceful settlers" overrunning their homelands - often quite illegally, even in their own terms - from sea to shining sea. It is a kind of historiography one might have expected of nazi academics a century after a German victory in World War II: "When the Poles, led by sullen Jewish chiefs, savagely attacked our innocent troops west of Warsaw in 1939, murdering thousands, we were forced to respond by..."

The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, both in terms of its magnitude and the degree to which its goals were met, and in terms of the extent to which its ferocity was sustained over time by not one but several participating groups. The ideological matrix of its denial is also among the most well developed of any genocide - or, more accurately, series of genocides - for which a significant amount of information is readily available (i.e. copious official and unofficial primary records of the processes, explicit statements of intent by perpetrators, published philosophical justifications of the results, and so on). "
-Ward Churchill (from "A little Matter of Genocide")

Your time is about up. You land thieves and murderers. You can deny it all you want and say "I didn't kill anyone. I didn't steal anyone's livelihood or land." But on whose land are you living right now? Whose country is it? You'll lie and go through all sorts of justifications for staying exactly where you are because at heart you don't feel that indigenous people have any right to exist. Not much has changed, predator, except the fact that your social blindness and individual greed will wipe you from the planet.

Your kind of freedom is wealth for the few and slavery for the many. Your kind of freedom is the freedom to steal countries and then legalize the theft by claiming they belong to "all people," whatever that means. (More like "all people" so long as they look and act like you.) Your kind of freedom is to attack innocent people by the thousands and claim to the world that you are bringing them democracy and are destroying terrorism/communism/fascism/savages/whatever the bogeyman is at the time. Your kind of freedom is the freedom to only wave the red-white-and-blue and force everyone else to want the same kind of freedom. Your kind of freedom is the freedom to enslave and despise all the while saying that things are different nowadays and that we as people should all "move on," whatever that means. (More like "move on" because the issue is inconvenient and you want to appear that you have changed without actually changing.)

Your kind of freedom keeps nations dispossessed of their lands and then you say it is impractical to restore those nations to their rightful places. (More like impractical to admit that your settler societies are wrong and are a scourge that should be punished for their crimes.) Your kind of freedom is a sickening virus that has ravaged millions of human beings and countless other living things to maintain your consumerist fantasies. Your kind of freedom is the freedom to go anywhere you wish and burn as much fuel as you want because you can pay for such extravagance and the right to pollute. Your kind of freedom is the freedom that mentally challenged societies like yours imagine and dream about all along: the freedom to eat, and spend, and get laid, and eat, and spend while letting someone else (like your underclass slaves) do the work of producing all you eat and spend. Your kind of freedom is the freedom to wallow in the filth like a pig and claiming that you are advanced spiritually and mentally, even as your retardation clouds your soul with expressions like "I just need to find myself" or "We are all equally on the path that's right for ourselves" or even "Stick to the path of heart." What utter diarrhea! Does anyone who spouts such crap even have an inkling of how much of a nothing that expressions like that carry?

Your kind of freedom is as one dimensional as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in their "fight" against tyranny. More like a fight against England because the King decided to prohibit further settler/colonial expansion by declaring in 1763 that the boundary of all colonies was at the Appalachians. The land west was to remain under sovereign Native control.) Both of those men had substantial holdings west of the Appalachians and stood to loose millions of acres and infinite profits (from tobacco) if they were to obey the new law. Jefferson and Washington were both proto-nazis in that they supported the extermination of indigenous people so that the land would be cleared up for Anglo-Saxon settlement. (It was a lebensraumpolitik that later inspired Adolph Hitler.) This is YOUR kind of freedom.

What will you do when the land decides to belch and cover you with ash? It really doesn't matter. As if anything you could do then would change a thing. Besides you have had all this time to change your direction and have accomplished absolutely fuck all, so why would anything be different because of a little environmental trouble is coming your way? You can pray to Eris, but what are you going to do when you realize that She is the one who done it all?

Forget you ever heard/read this. It will worm its way through your mind irregardless.

[march.15.2005]

[Like-What-the-Fuck, man?Some more notes on another Eristic encounter.]

Like-What-the-Fuck, man?
Some more notes on another Eristic encounter.


This latest party was being held in a storefront. Since some of the cabal was going, I figured it would at least be entertaining. So I went along. The band was playing music so loud that it was hard to even think. It was hot, sweaty, smoky, and crowded. But that never really matters. What matters is where the kegs are and if the back door is functioning. (It helps to know where all the exits are in any given location.) We found the kegs in the back, outside, where there were more of the usual crowds milling about smoking and refilling their plastic cups...everyone dressed up to look like either some trucker's rejected children or some hang-around-the-cafe-all-day artistes. There was an assortment of fake green St. Paddy's day crap as well. (Chicago people lack imagination when it comes to clothing.)

Official decides to pull out his newly found friend, senior misterioso...or his latest stash of hashish for those of you bereft of official-speak. Official starts to smoke himself to the high heavens, but before he can see the gods and start to ramble on about them, he walks off into the crowd while puffing away. I decide to strike up a conversation with the people who one always finds standing near the kegs, always ready for a refill. To my horror, they are wearing the kitschy green...like the sort you find at a St. Patrick's Day parade. I refill my cup without saying a word. Thankfully the beer is not dyed green.

I walk over to St. Kallista who appears to be in a heated argument with some frat-types. "This could be interesting," I say to myself, already thinking that I should probably go back inside and see if the music got any better. I hear one of the frat-types say "But that's like the Indians, man. They're always complaining about how crapped on they are. What's up with that? This is a free society." I simply stand there with a smile.

St. Kallista is an American Indian, you see. She never made a big deal about it, at least as far as the cabal is concerned, but she is proud of it. I knew something was going to happen.

"Indians," she said. "We should have finished those people off."

"Yeah, what use are they to America nowadays?" said the frat-type.

"Hitler was right," St. K responded.

There was a slight pause as the idiot frat-type possibly experienced an inkling of cognition for the first time in his life.

"Yeah, so he was."

His friends nodded in agreement. I thought about the stupidity of most white people for a moment until I noticed St. K looking at me with that 'what are you gonna contribute?' look on her face. So I went back by the kegs to inform the swill devotees of the creeping rise of fascism over by St. K. (You can always count on a few drunks to suddenly turn into anti-nazi machines when the shit hits the fan.)

By this point, St. K has somehow gotten the frat-types shouting "Hitler, Sieg Heil!" which astonishes me. She has slipped away and into another circle of people, all of whom are looking at the offenders. Jaws dropped. Mouths froze open. Myself, I just refill my cup, and nod to the people around me. One of them says "Like what the fuck, man?" Him and a couple others go over to the frat-types and the pushing and punching starts. It happened so seamlessly it was like choreography. Heh.

I feel a shove and turn around. There is Official starting to drag one of the kegs away. He looks at me and says "What the fuck, man? Why not? When in doubt..." I just smile. Within seconds a generalized brawl has broken out, so I decide to help him. Through all the shouting and shuffling and onlooking and whatnot, no one ever seems to notice the two of us and the keg. We manage to have it 'rolled' through the back driveway and halfway down the alley before St. K catches up with us.

Finally the night got interesting.

(No kegs were harmed in the recounting of this story, though the same can't be said for the idiots.)

[march.15.2005]

[Sermon on Eristicism 12The Nature of the Thing; Rage against the toaster]

Sermon on Eristicism 12
The Nature of the Thing; Rage against the toaster

"Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring -- but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down."
-Trevanian

The only thing most SubGenii have in common is that they're ALL DIFFERENT -- and they have NOTHING in common with the C.O.N.S.P.I.R.A.C.Y.!!(Cliques of Normals Secretly Planning Insidious Rituals Aimed At Controlling You) The SubGenius, because it does not "fit in," is actually better than anyone else
-Reverend Ivan Stang (The CoSG)

"Falling can't hurt. Now landing, that's a different matter. One must know how to land."

Cthulhu got you down again? The Christians knocked at your door one too many saturdays? Tired of the endless tirades of the moron majority trying to tread over your freedom of thought? Sick of all the endless prattle of politicians going on in an interminable mass of mental diarrhea about how safe and secure they are making the world when you can't even be assured a job that pays you enough money to survive on?
It is the Land of Thud, my friends. And we are living in it. Only YOU can do something about it, with or without your friends. But what do you do when you are sick of it all? What gets you to sleep again after nights of insomnia?

We all deal with this mess and it gets us all enraged from time to time. Many times that rage, if you are being stupid, can lead you to do all sorts of DUMB things. But many other times that rage can be useful, like when you need to smite greys/pinks for crossing your lines, or simply for getting in your way. This rage is like your shadow, your dark companion who sits in the back of your unconscious waiting for you to give it a job. Eventually, if left out of work for too long, that companion will rise up and take over. Hey! Before you get so judgmental on your little monster inside, remember that we all need to survive and have a right to do so.

This shadow self, this shiftless part of yourself can keep you out of harm's way many times when you get swamped by the forces of DUMB...when it looks like it's all over and fun will no longer be had, at least in this life. It is a trained assassin that mercilessly scopes out the situation in a second and snaps you into operation. It is the spark of anger that grows into a raging jake that eventually converts itself into laughter. It is the thing that keeps you awake and full of loathing for the forces of stupidity that have kept humanity locked in unrelenting fear for as long as we can account for, at least for as long as we have even known. (Due to vast memory holes we can't imagine life could have been any other way.)

Despite all this and despite the fact that you can trust the rage if you get to know it, DO NOT underestimate the forces of stupidity. They outnumber you vastly and will smite you at a moment's notice just for even the suspicion that you don't believe what THEY believe. Just as evolution allows for a certain advantage to you, if you can use your intelligence, you should remember that evolution also allows an advantage for those who can reproduce in greater numbers. We could very well be DOOMED, my friends. But we have a fighting chance. We could tip the balance. Or perhaps we will get lucky and the forces of stupidity, the societies of DUMB, will simply kill each other off. (This is why your intelligence, or free thought, weirdness, or Erisianism, should be as nondescript and undetectable as possible to DUMB when you go out amongst THEM in their societies.) If THAT happens, one should hope that enough of us can survive. BUT we can only see about that if and when that does happen. Perhaps if we can blow many more minds than ever before, we will increase our chances in any event. (We can use both evolutionary scenarios to our advantage.) Who knows but Eris? And She ain't talking because WE have our own minds.

That's the nature of the thing. This thing called humanity. This fog of stupidity punctuated occasionally by the shining lights of a glowing pineal gland after the chain reaction of your mind going kaboom. Or I could be lying.

Perhaps you should forget that you ever read this.

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
Facilitator of the Kitten Arming Department;
Chairperson of the Erisian Liberation Front (not to be confused with the Erisian Liberation Front);
and Co-Episkopos of the DSSS/PMM

[delivered to the cabal on march.2.2005]

of Buddhist meditation.

Chaos is everything you can't stand lining up to take a shot at you when you least expect it....at the most unfair time...taking advantage of every one of your hidden vulnerabilities. Chaos doesn't care about your feelings of uniqueness....Chaos is the motherload of uniqueness. She will smash you apart and make ten-thousand things in the future that will be more unique and special. Chaos doesn't care about the fact that you feel somehow so special that you should be immortal. Chaos makes you and breaks you all the same. Chaos doesn't care that you feel yourself to be anything at all because you can think. So what? Thought and consciousness is as common as air. Why should Chaos give a damn about you because you can think/feel/dream? Especially when the intricate patterns of a snowflake are more ornate than any of your monkey ramblings. Chaos is that whisper in your ear every time you feel your pulse and realize that your life depends on the smooth functioning of a muscle. Your so called independence and free-will is shattered. Your life can be cut short by something so small and insignificant as a virus. Chaos is a walk through a dark alley full of crack-fiending knife-wielding claw shrimp...as much as it is a walk through a nice park on a sunny day. Chaos is the roaring sax-like improv tune heard in the screech of an el-train car as it lurches off the tracks and hits the street below. Chaos is the chime-like crystal resonance of shards of glass falling after being blown out of a skyscraper. Chaos is the lone lunatic who flips out in a traffic jam and proceeds to stab out every else's tires. Chaos is the voice you hear in your deepest "finding-thyself" moments telling you that it's all full of shit. Chaos is the damned police sirens across the alley going all night making you get out of bed and toss hot water on the cops standing around smoking below. Chaos is when your bad tooth decides to go supernova and you face grows to twice its normal size. Chaos is all of these things and more....

It's not that the universe is a nice place or a mean place. The universe just IS the way it is, without consideration for our feelings. It's nothing personal. It's just Chaos. You can try to philosophize all you want, but philosophy is just an attempt to escape from all the 'dark' and 'scary' parts of Chaos...i.e. the Chaos that you don't like, as opposed to the Chaos that you like. Chaos is. Bow in reverence or don't. See if She cares.

Chaos is you missing the bus/train/plane and cursing the sky for the rest of the day. Chaos is splashing red curry in your eyes and having nothing but jalapeno juice to rinse them out with. Chaos is getting stuck in the middle of a St. Patrick's Day Parade with a british flag punk t-shirt and being too drunk to run away from the green swill mob. Chaos is you and every stupid/smart thing/thought you have done/thought. Chaos has nothing to teach and there is nothing to learn. Chaos is unspiritual. Chaos is crass. Chaos is commercial. Chaos is corporate. Chaos is a certain slick marketability, sort of like Che Guevara shirts. People buy and sell Chaos to be cool and 'with it.' People where Chaos as a cosmetic that advertizes their attention whoring egos. Chaos is television stuck on all 500 channels at once. It is your cable modem going apeshit and assassinating your coffee maker. Chaos is the feeling in the bottom of your stomach when you realize you just ran over that pigeon. Chaos is alive and well and those of you who are going around saying all kinds of crap about Her....She has this to say:

"Shut your fucking mouth, uncle fucker!"


--Irrev. Hugh, KSC;
"Will Tell YOU what Chaos Is."

ass and habanero peppers loose in your diarrheatic fluids burning your flesh as they dribble down your legs as you try to run for the toilet but slip on a dead rat, barely able to catch yourself on the coat-hook for just a brief moment before you collapse into the puddly mess.

-just saying

--Irrev. Hugh; Will Tell YOU what Chaos Is.

Really. Do ask.

Sit down a minute and unload. I will make it all better....really.

[The Gospel According to St. Kallista--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Chapter 5]

The latest in revelatory thingamabobs at the DSSS, chicago.

The Gospel According to St. Kallista

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 5


Malaclypse The Younger, the great non-prophet of the Discordian Society, was vexed sorely and surely, for he felt his time had come. His number was up. In this trying hour, he had not the foresight to remember that times like these were probably the result of his God, Our Lady Eris pulling his leg or yanking his chain-whichever was easier to grab at the moment. He fell down upon his knees shaking with tears. He cried out to Eris.

Eris laughed.

Malaclypse The Younger rent his garments and covered his body in dust.

Eris laughed most loudly at this point. She decided to give St. Gulik a break and went to visit Malaclypse personally.

"Now what is troubling you this time?" She spake. And Malaclypse the Younger proceeded to a tirade against the state of the world and the oppression of his people, the Erisians, who were spat upon in the land of the Fat City, in which his foremothers had gone into to escape the evil of their homeland. "Don't you see," he asked of his God, "what is going on? Or have you been spending too much of thy time watching the Discovery Channel again?"

God, Our Lady Eris, ignored that last jab and proceeded to laugh unto Her utmost. Then She spake "Mal, you ARE free. Remember?"

Malaclypse The Younger had run out of tears at this point. He wiped the snot from his nose and answered, "Even so, look around thee and see that thy people, are longing for something more." God spake "Very well. Let us look and see what can be done, but only if you promise to stop whining. It's not funny anymore."

So they walked along the sides of the roads, and yea, over mountains, amidst cities, and across fields, even through bowling alleys and forests. They shared poptarts and beer. And they smoked righteously strong clove cigarettes. They looked all throughout the Land of Thud.

And God saw that the Erisian people were harried in this land.

And God spake unto the prophet Malaclypse The Younger, "You will lead your people across the wide waters, the wide desert, the mountains, and the great forests unto a new land."

Malaclypse The Younger was fearful, and he cried to God, "How will we cross the wide waters, desert, mountains, and forests? For they are cold, hot, and dry, and they are filled with all manner of hazardous substances and raw sewage and other pollutants." And God responded, "fear not, Malaclypse The Younger, for great bridges, highways, and flying machines will be built, and the people will cross into this land. And this land will be called Northern California. I say, lo, I have promised this land to the Erisian people, to the Discordians, to the Chaoists, to the Witches, and all the other weird peoples. And this land shall be blessed with fruits and nuts (and even jokers), unto fifty generations (if not more)."

God laughed again, and then left him there to tell his people. Or not.

And Malaclypse The Younger knew he should have kept his mouth shut. "What kind of joke is this?" He said to no one in particular. But Eris heard him and shouted from the heavens so that only he could hear, "If I send other messangers, will you leave me alone?"

Malaclypse fell asleep and had terrifying visions of a future time of Erisians claiming to speak for colored animals, and of the rise of the White Mouse. The White Mouse caused vicious chain reactions of chaos and laughter wherever he went. And minds were blown wide open. He saw God, Our Lady Eris, among these newer Erisians, and knew that they would do even greater things. Malaclypse the Younger woke up and experienced peace and bliss for the first time in decades. Until he realized he had only been dreaming. His time could still be up and yet he had asked God nothing about this.

Let she with understanding listen to these words and understand. All Erisians are free, if they simply choose to become free. Do not let thy pineal glands be covered in dust, but blow them in the winds.

-from the Complete Collection of the Gospels, As Revealed to St. Kallista by Our Lady Eris on the Fifty-Ninth Day of the Season of Chaos, in Her Year Three-Thousand One-Hundred and Seventy-One.

[More Chapters will be posted soon.]




This page by the DSSS/PMM. Kopyleft, as usual, and all rites reversed.

BALANCE OV CONTROL
or...
HOW TO ESCAPE THEE INFERNO OV THEE NORMAL WHILST REMAINING ORDINARY.

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not
become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes
into you."    Nietzsche.

If thee root ov every emotion iz its opposite, then so too is thee root ov
every belief its opposite; since we might define belief as emotionally
vitalized thought, anchored through experience. (To demonstrate thee point,
if you slander someone sacred held beliefs you will assuredly feel their
emotional wrath!). Hence, an awareness ov inhibitions in an individual will
be reinforced by thee belief in freedom ov action; which is thee possibility
ov change, and thee increase in your options.

  "There is no freedom from duality on this plane of existence, but one may
  at least aspire to choice of duality."   P. Carroll.

But our beliefs can cast an unwholesome shadow - namely, obsession/paranoid-
complex. As such, I'd like to stir shit in thee ranks ov our Holy and
Illuminated Brethren ov Thee Temple for a minute, by suggesting that thee
newcomer to TOPY philosophy approach thee subject ov CONTROL gently (at
first, anyway).

Much has been said about CONTROL and, notwithstanding Burroughs' (and others)
profound insight into thee nature ov modern society. I can't help but think
that thee result ov over-zealous reference to thee Viral-theories, etc.,
could maybe hinder thee newcomers self-development - which is supposed to be
JOY ov experience under will, isn't it? To explain: I'm not suggesting to
gloss over thee issue (which, if you have any social awareness, is impossible
-  thee "issue" ov CONTROL is not academic for us, it is raw feeling). But it
seems totally pointless encouraging people to become aware ov thee Cultural
Trance (considering thee increased emotional sensitivity I feel is borne ov
thee first practise ov magick/sigils), if thee result is a bunch ov paranoid,
frightened to leave their rooms lest they have to participatei n thee Earth
Inferno. (I myself witnessed an Ex-Eden having a serious breakdown over
this). Thee TOPY network cannot be held responsible for such -admittedly
extreme - examples, since our network continues through individuals being
fiercely self-willed, but we do have a responsibility not to freak each other
out! Fight thee outside, not thee inside.

Perhaps it is part ov thee shamanic initiation (if I may be so bold) ov thee
sigilizing Youth to exteriorize their own conditioning through a period ov
tension similar to paranoia. Quite an idea; but this is ov no value at all
unless thee individual looks into thee causes ov their feelings and works
toward (re)integration (ie, a balanced perception - whatever you own
"balance" happens to be!). If this is thee case for many, then that stage ov
tension should be discussed (we would be keen to hear ov individuals
experiences and opinions ov this).

Obviously (?) thee nature ov "initiation" into any magickal perspective is
ongoing, requiring continual self-assessment and STRENGTH. As said in a
recent TOPY:HQ Bulletin, we must realize that we never arrive, we are always
travelling. And everyone learns to walk at their own pace (unless forced to
do otherwise, ov course!). This article is by no means conclusive - I ramble
on intently. If nothing else connects, I would at least wish to emphasize
that TOPY must remain a philosophy - a way ov life - that is inspiring, yet
DOWN TO EARTH (there, that should keep us in with thee satanists). For any
idea to be worthwhile it must be able to encompass its own philosophy ov
freedom whilst being unable to relate (I don't mean agree) to anybody/
anything, because ov a severe overdose ov Industrial-cynicism, has missed
thee point, I think. We investigate our barriers in order to overcome them
through thee focus ov dreams; not to bottle up in our own pessimism.

  "Our Formula, roughly speaking, is to go out and grab what we want. We do
  this so thoroughly that we grow thereby, extending our conception of "I"
  by including  each new accretion instead of remaining a closely delineated
  self..."   A. Crowley.

Get thee point?

                                                          E.150

Sermon on Eristicism 11:
It's Ours Because We Say So.

And God saw that the Erisian people were harried in this land. And God spake unto the prophet Malaclypse The Younger, "You will lead your people across the wide waters, the wide desert, the mountains, and the great forests unto a new land. Malaclypse The Younger was fearful, and he cried to God, "How will we cross the wide waters, desert, mountains, and forests? For they are cold, hot, and dry, and they are filled with all manner of hazardous substances and raw sewage and other pollutants." And God responded, "fear not, Malaclypse The Younger, for great bridges, highways, and flying machines will be built, and the people will cross into this land. And this land will be called Northern California. I say, lo, I have promised this land to the Erisian people, to the Discordians, to the Chaoists, to the Witches, and all the other weird peoples. And this land shall be blessed with fruits and nuts (and even jokers), unto fifty generations (if not more)."
-from the Gospel According to St. Kallista

"For all the hooplah about the information age and the global village, half the world's population has never even been able to afford to make a phone call."
-23ofMe

While you have all been distracted by the interminable growth of reams of statements and media exposes about the fight between Islamic fundamentalists and modern Western civilization (or something to that effect), the same old powerbrokers have continued stealing the means to your existence. Despite the "war on terror," the Conspiracy of Normal keeps on trucking and telling you to keep fearing terrorists as the CoN take control of your chances to live your own lives.

But are we here concerned with all this?

Those of you who think not are simply lying to yourselves.

In any event, we are here concerned with another matter, though somewhat related.

Many of you are somehow convinced that the government, in whatever version of it exists in whatever locale you inhabit, is actually going to waste its time with keeping tabs on Discordians. Some of you actually think that government, or the state, is someday going to crack down on Discordians for the crime of free thought and other abjectly abstract concepts. Whether this is actually true or not, let me point out that WE DISCORDIANS are not a priority for THEM. Your paranoia, while sometimes a healthy response, especially for those of you living in Bushlandia (or Fat City, Fuck-All, Dumbfuckistan, or any of its more popular names), is misplaced. The day that the STATE goes after Discordians for being Discordian is the day we need to shake up the movement anyway because some people somewhere have done something wrong (like jaking the green jesus out of some poor bastard who happens to be the boy toy of the Bush daughters and then bragging about it).

At the moment the state and its corporate sponsors are busy going after their real enemies, organized labor and members of the global justice movement, while society is put to sleep under the fog of an Orwellian endless war doctrine-a.k.a. the War on [some] Terrorists-in which the poster children known as Al-Qaeda and the radical Muslims get to star in a never ending serial soap opera drama of tit-for-tat bombings, attacks, and American invasion and occupation. The state and its supposed adversary, the Muslim extremists, are conspiring to keep you afraid so that the power brokers can continue to steal your lives away under the cover of brand names and logos. It's called the free market, yet it is not free for everyone, just those who are very rich. Even though the American government has a war to fight in Iraq, hundreds of millions of dollars are still given to corporations in the form of subsidies. (Subsidies which are funded by taxes. Otherwise known as 'corporate welfare.' An example: The average household in the USA pays about 200$ in taxes per year to the Lockheed Martin company.) And in the USA, since the Clinton presidency, corporations have not had to pay taxes on their profits. While you were sleeping, the state and its sponsors have made their moves to own the bed you sleep on. But don't worry, you can now pay them rent to sleep there.

Some people have been fighting this trend. Many of the usual suspects (in terms of activists), labor organizers, workers, students, anarchists, socialists of various tendencies, the greens, environmentalists, the witches, etc. But there have been more and more
people from all walks of life starting to fight. Around the world there have been millions fighting the global behemoth pretense of 'free trade.' And despite the fear and paranoia since the 9-11 attacks and all that followed, their struggle continues to grow.

I wrote briefly about the Global Uprising to make you think about something for a minute. The state is spending most of its time trying to keep tabs on that above mentioned global justice movement, so why do you somehow think that the state will waste its time with Discordians?

And why would you or should you care?

If the corporations and the state can just declare certain parts of your life theirs, then you can do likewise. It is wise to remember who has the power to coerce who to comply and agree, though. With this in mind, I want to tell you about a new movement within the Discordian Society which has resulted in the occupations of Starbucks and other such chain-outlets. The individual occupations are not as interesting as the phrase used by the occupiers: "It's Ours Because We Say So." Think about the implications of this for a moment. (And perhaps apply it to your own version of jaking and pranking.)

Perhaps you should also realize that chances are you will be opposed not by the state and its corporate sponsors but by the average person who happens to be pink/gray. Perhaps it's time we Discordians pull up stakes and find a sanctuary of our own, away from the grays/pinks. Not all of you will warm to this idea, but maybe some of us would like to live somewhere where we can be as outwardly weird as possible, not because we want to impress others, but because we just happened to wake up that way. I would venture to say, that a town, or county, or even a region that is inhabited by hundreds, if not more, of Discordians would probably be one of the most civilized, healthy, and humane places to live. We could, as the Gospel says, claim northern California, which is already filled with some weird and crazy people.

With this in mind...the DSSS have decided to lay claim to that region for Discordians everywhere. It IS ours because we say so. And we have revived the Erisian Liberation Front to help us make it so.

Some of you will wish to stay behind, in this land of Thud, simply because that is an entertaining prospect in and of itself. Some of you feel you have a duty to help tip the scales and keep the orderlies (in this open air asylum) on their toes. Some of you enjoy being the lone rogue Discordian hidden in a sea of grays and pinks, throwing proverbial monkey wrenches in the machines, etc. Hell, I am actually split between the two ideas. Perhaps I will choose to live in our new 'promised land' while making seasonal forays into the rest of the world. Perhaps not. Perhaps I will simply sit somewhere on some hill side and eat poptarts, smoke cigars, and drink tequila. Perhaps I am getting worn down and tired, and wish to have some place of refuge to temporarily retire. (Actually, I don't give a damn about being the ODD Discordian in a sea of gray anymore. So, creating somewhere that has large percentages of Discordians would be somewhat entertaining.) Perhaps I just need to recover for a while from being slapped silly by the invisible hand of capitalism.

In any respect, you know what you want.

Just saying.

-Irreverend Hugh, KSC

[Delivered at a DSSS convocation: February 28th, 2005]

[Sermon on Eristicism 10: Rats in the Warehouse]

Sermon on Eristicism 10: Rats in the Warehouse

"News Item: Asteroid 2005 CM7 passes within 669,000 miles of Earth on Feb. 1, three days before it is discovered by astronomers. If it had hit Earth, it would have created a crater up to a half-mile wide and 300 feet deep. The bright side is it would have been discovered sooner."[/i]
-from QT column in the Sun-Times (Wed. Feb. 9, 2005)

"It says much and means even less. Or vice versa."
-Ancient Discordian Proverb

"I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly."
-Chuang Tzu

Now here I am sitting in my room away from the supposed Real World(tm). I realize that I have slacked off in my episkopational duties of ranting and sermonizing your ears and eyes off, but that is only because my life has gotten interesting. Not interesting in that sort of bland cocktail party chatterbox style of speaking where intellectuals get together and try to out smart each other. I mean really, as in most people would freak their fucking daylights out, interesting. I am sure that I have recounted one or two examples of what I mean by interesting in the last few weeks. But actually, we are not here concerned with any of that.

My friends, we are here concerned with the fnords. There are rats in the warehouse that you have so meticulously stocked with your provisions and survival necessities. These rats are good at the game of masquerading themselves off as the colored animals and even the people that you like. Sometimes they even manage to convince you yourself that they are in fact you yourself. How can they do this, you ask? What the holey damnation is going here, you ask? You already think you know the answer, so why are you even asking? And that in itself is another fnord.

The rats in the warehouse, you ask? What in blue thud are those?

They are the system, my friends, enemies, and someone-elses. The rats are the creeping fnordian fear that slowly sucks the lifeblood from the smiles you will eventually have to struggle to keep alive. They are those pangs of greedy hunger in your heart which whisper silently in your ears the minute you become satiated on whatever it was that you desired. They are the persistent water torture of words in your head that serve no purpose other than to obscure what you truly feel and to keep from you the thoughts you think. They are all the little actions and sayings and people who carry such things that keep the Conspiracy of Normal alive and well...and feeding on your flesh, blood, and forgotten dreams. They need you to forget your dreams and aspirations so that they can tell you what you want (an endless chain of things to buy) and then make you work away your entire life to get it. They are gnawing on your bones right at this moment while you run around alive and pretending that everything is exactly otherwise from how you see it in front of your face.

They are the people who tell you that the way you speak is incorrect and bad and therefore you have to learn the way they speak. They are the people who tell you how to think and feel about the world because the way you already think and feel about it is substandard or defective...like the preachers and other fundamentalists. They are people with no training in any thing that contributes to any good or happiness in this world and yet take upon themselves all sorts of lofty-sounding titles. They make the decrees and pronouncements to keep you in line...to convince you that any perspective and/or activity that you may be engaged in is the wrong one. They are the people of fnords...the lost ones who pretend to find themselves by thinking they are better than the masses of people who, truth be told, are also lost in the fog of confusion. (And that in and of itself is not so bad, if people would simply admit it and own up to it.) They are the people who point their shit stained fingers at everyone else and blame the foul smell on everyone else. They are the ones who have fifty thousand words to label you as...all of the words meaning "no-good-shit."

They are the people who affect airs and elect themselves to power over societies that were once founded on the idea of democracy. They then get to dictate and tell you what they are now doing to you is "real" democracy. They tell you to get real, that any dreams you have that diverge from the normal fantasy inducing disney paradise on your five hundred channel and multi-million website media system...any dreams that diverge from this are hopeless, utopian, fraudulent, dangerous, extremist, and other such ill begotten words to express their minds' collective refusal to learn. They are the ones who tell you that they KNOW reality and that you couldn't possibly KNOW reality unless you agree with them and buy their products...whether political products, ideological products, shiny-techno-toys, or pre-fabbed dreams. They get you to believe the double lie that art and culture is necessary for you to survive and then tell you exactly what constitutes real art and culture. They are an endless treadmill of don't-worry-be-happies but only if it's their ready-made and officially marketable be-happies. They package pretty nooses for you to wear and get you to deceive yourselves into believing that the nooses are fashionable, desirable, and necessary for you to become a "real person."

The rats have infested the warehouses of your lives and they are greedy. They will gnaw at everything until there is nothing left but ashes and crumbs which they will then sell to you at special never-ending inflation rates while convincing you that it's a firehouse sale. Something's burning all right. You. You are what's for dinner. And they will gnaw on your bones until not even the memory of you is left for anyone to wonder about. They will replace the very thought of your life's disappearance with easily manageable catchphrases and sound-bites. Will you ever get the joke? Will you ever see what is in front of your face? Or will you see it and simply become another rat in an effort to be the fattest rat?

There are rats in the warehouses, people. And not only are they gnawing away at everything you need to thrive in this world, but they have also convinced you to carry their shit and rearrange it and buy and sell it.

Or will you be able to become aware enough to say "ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT?" Will you ever be able to have the strength to say that you are tired of this shit?

(feb.23.2005)

But not as much as aini!

[Sermon on Eristicism 8:]

Sermon on Eristicism 8:
Where YOU are;
A simple exposition of location.

"You see, as long as people think that they will understand everything they see, they will fight things they don't understand."

Waar kom je vandaan?

Where do YOU come from? Where are YOU now?
I'll tell you what you want to hear while sneaking the opposite in the pauses between the words. Hell, I'll reach down into your deepest desires, since you wear them on your face, and tell you everything you wanted to hear about Eris. And even though I will say that I am most probably lying, you will assume for some strange reason that I am not. Or that I am only lying sometimes. Or that you can find the truth expressed in the lie. You will grab all the words and descriptions you wish to believe in and conveniently ignore the other words which contradict that wish.

Did you forget that We Discordians need to approach Hallowed Truths, Hallowed Beliefs, and Hallowed Icons from the attitude of O.D.D.? Our most Hallowed Idea is that it is DUMB to have any Hallowed Beliefs.

When I say that I am misdirecting you, I mean it, except for when I might be lying. But that's up to you to decide for yourselves. When I point out where I think YOU are, it is up to you to look around yourself, without any maps, whether my maps or your own maps, and decide if I am full of hot air or not. Or maybe.

Maybe is one of the most powerful words you may ever have to realize for yourselves.

Actually, this whole internet thing sort of makes it nearly impossible for me to tell those of you who read this online exactly where YOU are.
Or even for me to tell you exactly where I am in life. Or what anyone is really doing. Despite what some of you may think to the contrary.

Even in TRW, or offline and in person, it would be a difficult attempt.
But something within some of these words may be speaking to YOU. Something may be telling YOU where you are. And if so, you can expect to see me somewhere along your path with a sign that misdirects you. And if you fall for it, you may then understand a thing or two about why some of us Discordians are engaged in this irreverent endeavor known as the DJ. If you don't fall for it. Some of us will keep trying until you do. That's what we are here for. At least that's what YOU will tell yourselves.

We all tell ourselves such things so we can make some meaning or meaninglessness out of it all.

In conclusion,

So what?

Carry on.

Rij door!

And forget you even read/heard this.

-Irrev. Hugh, KSC
Facilitator of the Kitten Arming Department
and Co-Episkopos of the DSSS.

[jan.18.2005]

spilling words


words spill out from a faucet turned up too high
cascading around minds insistent upon their own deafness
until the fragile eggshell of ego cracks apart
and they flood in with fleeting imagery and associations
nurtured on hard hot summer sidewalks and traffic smells
and the wailing sirens of the constant apocalypse
breathing their city blasts of feverish air across your face
drenching you in the sweaty dew of their liquid sorrows
and half-chased fantasies coaxed up on neon-light and grime

they spill out over your well ordered lined streets of possibility
threatening in their urgent will to chaos and life
as weeds often rip through carefully laid stone-like pavement
to express earthy desires that cannot forever be contained
under pounding feet of commuters and rolling wheels of countless cars
ephemeral dreams pass by in the thousands as fragmentary clouds
or wisps of suppressed dreams thought long buried
they spill out continuously
giving fetid minds some snapshots of sunlight or stars
in their inadvertent attentions unwelcomed by the televisory populace
of phantoms in grandiose and self-important schemas of plans, accounts,
careers, and quests

they spill out across the secret places in your hearts
those forgotten places of fertilized and latent magic that always threaten
your well defined ego with subversion
you imagine them as angels or devils or gods or powers
but all you can see in your myopic and street narrowed vision
are the fleeting sparks they create as they brush against your resistance

a kind of witchcraft calling up forgotten energies and elements as
a growing nausea in your body
the words try themselves against your inflated imaginary boundaries
and slip through with ease
you try to escape into the fetish-like past-times of zombies
but it has become too late once you hear them
they propagate inside you and start your time-bomb ticking seeking a release
from the growing pressure of the flow and ebb of daily life
ignoring their magic increases their power
they come shaman-like to trick you up with bone-marrow dreams
as hermetic mages conjuring up your deepest occult mysteries
to show you the patterns in which you dance your life
demonstrating to you the fires that burn inside
in which you can find solace and the renewal of springtime
pushing you to banish your fears by eating every demon you find-
horrible upon approach with images of blood spattered altars
and sounds of discordant half-howls
bitter upon chewing with nauseating tastes of the parts of rotting dreamflesh
you have tried to bury in this life
and succulent upon swallowing in the triumph of your desires
twisting you out of the cocoon you have built to keep out the aspects of life
you refuse to shed light on-
a kind of witchcraft never written or spoken about
because of its latent chaotic uncategorizable energy
under everything you do and think

the words spill out in hordes to echo the myriad turns and twists
of ensouled desires spiraling out across the night sky in inexplicable rhythms
cascading around your blinders and slowly spreading the cracks in the sidewalks
of unproven certainty over which you walk
intersecting your probable daily life of constraints and controls
with the brightness of their eternal sacredness
and the darkness of their endless motion
you try to catch them and box them up in neat mental rooms of context
even as they spill through every wall in which they are temporarily caged
the faucet is on too high and you are flooded with the gnosis
that saves you from drowning in them
but only if you listen.

(august 10 2004)

liquid pornster futures


liquid pornster futures
consumer arrhythmia overtakes dulled hearts
glass eyes bleed oily grays
the skullcrack of traffic blues
cuts into the malice of the night
hidden in every wisp of exhaust smoke
and under every sidewalk crack
from slowly fading memories
down where the neon sheen dies
the engine roar of encrusted impulses
abuse our plexiglass vistas
skyscrapers achieve illumination
raining chiming symphonies of death
upon the wannabe bystanders below
automaton paralysis chokes out
the music of concrete's grating wail
all hail the chaotic age
all your dreams are for sale
eating away at your skin
whistling the caustic songs
of feeding frenzies in the human zoo
smoke, mirrors, cameras, and your heart
are the new machines of the thousands of Big Brothers/Sisters
implicit behind every streetlight's glare
power hungry thoughts implanted in televised minds
strive to effect their ensigilization of annihilation
and self-consciousness becomes a suicidal liability
lost tears can not be cried

(may 9, 2004)

zombies march


zombies march in disorder
looking to end this murder world
with the brainless televated disease of corporate chemignosis
blood-spattered dreams wrack the halls of power
our legacy of cracked bone penetration
and shattered earth magics
crumbles as they march
looking for an end to all ending
crimson red stains our bread
from toxic wheat
grown from the genocide camps of capital paradise
apocalypses grow in the hearts
of the overfed suburban death children
zombies march
some of them will run you down
opening raw veins to the sky
crying out for lusty vengeance
on the phantoms of technological sorcery
all the frivolity of humanity's parasitism
disguised as culture
burns
choking out the future with noxious doctrinal poisons
all the slaves will revolt and slice their masters
in a haze of red the songs of the dead
will burn the highways of information to ash
zombies march in disorder
looking to end this murder world
all is stained with revolution's screams of gore
high-rise condo palaces become fuck boxes of doom
in their fall to the hard earth
crushing the sky from your voice
it burns
this dance of the blood spattered
it burns
to end this murder world
zombies march
sucking the life from your flimsy illusions
and selling them back to you
to make the burning go away
even as the stench of your fear grows
you try to run into your denial
but it burns
this murder world is burning
there is no escape.

(may 8, 2004)