The Chao of Discordia: Three

 

THREE

1. If you seek not to excite rivalry among your fellows, treat all among them, wise and foolish, as equals, for they are. If you seek to avoid thieves, do not prize or promote material objects. To avoid greed and addiction and embrace a peaceful mind, ignore those things that promote greed and addiction.

2. A pope in the exercise of their power, empties their heart of the illusion of desire, fills their bellies, tempers their dreams, strengthens their core.

3. So the people can be innocent of the illusion, remind them of the illusion. For those who think they know better, remind them that they are preoccupied with an illusion and it would be foolish to act on such false preoccupation. By acting within one’s own reality tunnel without infringing on another’s, all may live in peace.

The Chao of Discordia: Two

TWO

1. All people in the world know what makes them feel safe and in so doing they know what they believe will threaten that safety. When they know the beauty of the Eristic then they can conceive of the Aneristic

2. Perceived reality depends on duality:

Being or not-Being are created in our growth; difficult and easy are created according to our own process of discovery; Long and short exist only where the context requires that contrast. High and low are matters of our own perspective; the harmonics of tone and voice are a result of our own biological wiring; leading or trailing are based in an illusion of hierarchy.

3. Therefore a pope manages affairs without action; preaches doctrine without words

4. Shit happens and a pope understands that to be the case. They create but know they do not own the creation. They create but neither advertise nor claim their creation. For their action they claim no credit and for that reason the credit for those actions cannot be taken from them.

 

New Partwork - The Chao of Discordia: One

ONE

1. The chao that can be understood is not the infinite chao. The chao that can be named chao is not the infinite chao.

2. The infinite chao is the originator of the Eristic and Aneristic. She who is named Eris is the mother of all things.

3. One may attempt to strip themselves of illusions to perceive an objective reality. But the illusions we create make up all the meaning in reality. So we can never truly perceive objective reality

4. Objective reality and our reality tunnel, for this reason, are pragmatically one and the same to each person. Aspects of objective reality are given different names as a person apprehends them. They can both be called a lens to view the infinite chao. To understand the lens is the key to harmony between yourself and the maelstrom of infinite chao

Staring Yourself Out In The Third Eye

Here's a pro-tip if you like to maintain a blog.

Don't, under any circumstances, get into a state of mind where not updating a blog or journal becomes a sort of staring contest with yourself.

Especially don't do this if your intention is not to kill the blog stone dead. If your attitude toward your blog is that it's a nice place to come and drop some words that may, in the long run, prove to be wise or foolish, confusing or interesting but always challenging and, dare I say it, provocative. If you think: "that's a thing that exists that I believe, on balance, the world is better off for having in it" then maybe don't initiate a game where the aim or reward is to not post anything to that blog or journal.

It does occur to me that subconsciously this weird hiatus may have served a purpose, and honestly whatever the serf of consciousness apprehends is only what the lord and master of subconscious wants it to apprehend, which is not that much usually. That purpose is that when last I essayed upon this journal I was getting pretty downhearted, to be honest. I began to believe that I had lost touch with what I could post that would be of value to others. I have to be that vague, I can't say "to the world" because I am self-aware that my Discordian Mystic ramblings are not for everyone, and I can't say for "my people" because as true as that might be my people, currently, aren't here, that's the issue. Or if they are they are lurking in the shadows so effectively I may as well be alone.

You get to reading about the people who used to have long, rambling philosophical discussions from which are born great ideas and great thoughts and what not. That's where I'm at, that's what I want, not all the time, just in a part of time. When I get into a conversation about the whole what and all of it I want to find things in that space only available when two people are trying to connect mentally.

This here, is supposed to be a waffle against a sounding board. I am supposed to be challenged, given fresh perspectives, hounded, insulted, exalted, told I am right, told I am wrong, told I am spouting nonsense, told I am spouting wisdom. Those thus impacted are supposed to come forth and bring me their own waffle, their own view, chopped and presented the way I do here and I can be their sounding board as they were mine.

It's the philosophical utopia. I think, honestly, it's a space we could all do with that's become dominated with op-ed forums about hot-takes on issues that press hot-buttons. And it's just another means of manufacturing unhelpful, constrictive bullshit because the topics provoke knee-jerk reactions and without philosophising about less controversial topics you lack the skill to find a way into these difficult subjects.

Essentially, as a Discordian I am bound to have a take on the whole Leary/RAW "Reality Tunnels" thing, and my take is that it seems like a solid theory. So, we should embrace a chance to do a little work on our reality tunnels.

But exercising our reality-building powers only in the service of those wires that risk setting fire to the core, or causing a rational short-circuit, or shutting down key rational systems to reboot seems like a terrible way to tune. Surely, we should learn our craft attempting to improve less critical systems. We should learn how to work by working all over the tunnel, not just on the load-bearing pillars.

I don't see a lot of that shit going on, you know? Or, maybe a bit, often in other Discordian blogs, usually long since abandoned and not so much of entries like that either.

The other option is that looking too hard at things like our own personal belief structures, the general, non-controversial ones, and our own personal systems of rituals is super-hard because it risks breaking things where things seem to work. It's like spiritual technical debt, we've hacked the system together so mostly it operates "correctly" but there are just these few things that can happen that show up that the system just really isn't working as well as we believe, you know, under the hood.

Anyhow. My conclusion, on glancing through my last couple of entries is that I was on a more-or-less correct path. And the staring contest has given me distance to see that, if nothing else.

We need to move on now. And I need to be posting for people who may come through and may wish to access me through other means.

So, that's the plan. And I'm blinking now.

Always remember to blink it, or you'll get dust in your third eye.

Shhh! Pie Ritual

I started writing this one about three weeks ago, that post went off on a tangent, so it became the "Discordian Mystic Blogger" post. Putting a bit of clear, blue sky between the concept of the post and the execution of it has had some effect on what the post is actually about.

The key part of this post is a pretty standard session of mockery of the wholesale adoption of the word "spiritual" by people who like to also misuse the word "energy". It's not kind, but it is important and necessary to those drawn to the magic and the mystic to point this stuff out on a regular basis. As it happens I don't like the magic, the more mystic I get the less magic appears to be a good idea overall. You want to use something you literally cannot know about as the vehicle for manifesting your power physically, go ahead, but disappointment and/or madness are the likely outcomes.

If you're liable to get butthurt by me mocking something, by the way, remember I'm a practising Discordian, it's part of my devotion to eventually mock EVERYTHING. So today it's "spirituality". My key beef with even using the word can be adequately summed up by having a look at the semantic nightmare that is the Wikipedia page for the term. It's become one of those words whose connotations are so broad as to render the term effectively meaningless.

The litmus test is that I could if I so desired, describe myself as spiritual, but you could put me into conversation with another person who described themselves the same way and we would have nothing in common whatsoever. The other key point, in my recent experience of these things, is that more and more self-described spiritual people have a mandatory love of crystals that I do not have.

Of course, the very nature of the catch-all vagueness that is "being spiritual" means that I don't have to and that if you do then that's also fine. It's a bit, however like being agnostic. Being agnostic, at this time is a series of negatives, you are not-religious, not-atheist and also not-spiritual, probably.

I guess that if you are spiritual and agnostic, that might be fine. If you are religious and spiritual, that's allowed but, I sense, frowned upon by the religious side. If you are atheist but spiritual I think that means you go UFO-spotting(?), or ghost hunting, or believe in bigfoot, I mean that it is theoretically possible, but very confusing.

So it's possible to be spiritual and for that to mean almost anything. It's weird, it's the club for people who aren't joiners, like, at all, but seek a sense of belonging with fellows they cannot identify (because, trust me, it isn't "everyone else who's also spiritual") and also with some higher power that falls outside or beyond the definitions of a higher power enshrined in any sort of organized mass-religious organisation.

This, you see, is why I would identify myself as a Discordian Mystic. I was going to go for "Shaman" but apparently being a shaman necessarily involves communing with spirits you believe in (and it really doesn't matter whether I believe in spirits or not I am confident that I cannot reliably communicate with them directly) and also experiencing altered states of consciousness. People experience an altered state of consciousness every time they dream (or whenever they rewatch Videodrome), but I suspect this is not what the phrase is intended to encompass. So, I'm withdrawing my Shamanic application form.

Mystic, on the other hand, specifically being one, is not a common thing but encompasses a vagueness that I have just been taking pot shots at  "spirituality" for exemplifying. As this is an extreme example of my own semantic hypocrisy and demonstration that my ego is out of control I will naturally throw myself into this dubious role whole-heartedly and so deny the weasel-word spirituality even as I attempt to bolster my edginess by planting a flag in the term "mystic".

Awesome.

But why all this jumping around from foot to foot, wrestling with what or even if you believe? I think it's important that everyone has this struggle. I think that it's also important that it's never a done deal. I think, furthermore, that if what you believe doesn't have the name of something on the menu then you should probably try a bit harder to give it a name yourself.

Probably not much more to say on that part at present. So, let's move on...

My relationship with Tarot cards began a good while before my relationship with Discordianism.  One of my great advantages growing up was that, for a variety of reasons, my parents didn't really believe in anything, and yet both had an interest in things they didn't really believe. It is in this manner that I read some Tarot books and, eventually, Piers Anthony's Tarot trilogy, an obscure work that has had a profound effect on some people.

As it turns out Discordians did as a social group eventually get round to producing their own stab at Tarot but the project status is currently half-baked, like most Discordian things. It probably doesn't help that the pope in charge of this project decided to make up their own card schema, which takes the piano of the Tarot deck and turns it into a key-tar. Piers Anthony added a suit and some Major Arcana cards in his work, which is kind of like when Holly in Red Dwarf decimalised music with the new notes "woh" and "boh".

Not that I'm really offended by people making stuff up, that would be the bad kind of hypocritical, not like the hypocrisy from further up which is the good kind, follow? But if your Tarot isn't 78 cards, 22 Major 40 Pips, 16 Courts then it isn't really a Tarot deck in the same way that a keytar isn't a grand piano.

Recently, and for reasons of permanently evolving karma I have been drawn back into my Tarot studies, and have found myself refreshed with a new sense of purpose in the endeavour. So, this entry is like an introduction to my Tarot Journal, which I have been filling out since the 6th of February and which I will be adding in (back-dated for entries before this one) to my regular blog from this point.

Why?

Well, there's a lot to the answer to that question. I'm sure it will all come out in the wash. In the first instance, though, I think it is because I would be keen to get people talking about the Discordian approach to Tarot work. Are people who like Tarot interested? Are Discordians? Are you?

Could be that this is the latest in the series of failed attempts to get a proper discussion going on here. But, as usual, I have cheated in that the discussion topic helps me roll forward even if nobody else has anything to say on the topic.

The Loneliness of the Discordian Mystic Blogger

Last year I spent a lot of time exploring my options with regards to producing audio content. Overall, it went well, the biggest barrier being the time needed to actually record the raw audio, once that's done editing can be achieved here and there on an ad hoc basis.

I have other thoughts on that but you know where to keep track of those.

As a consequence, and due to other relevant factors, blog output was low. The chief and most important factor in dialling back blog output is pure and simple. Blogs are pitched as public online journals but they're really a low-effort format in talk followed by Q&A. To date no low-banter, interaction based format I've engaged in has attracted the attention of anyone interested in bantering.

This, actually, is the problem with both the blog and the podcast. Neither are supposed to dwell in splendid isolation, existing in and of themselves. Both do. The big problem with this being that once you have learned to please yourself with these things then the work is done and further work may only be completed via the vehicle of interaction.

The podcast suffers from this far more than the blog, podcasts are supposed to spawn a web of in-jokes, correspondence and helping each other get better. Blogs may just end up being public, online journals but some are vastly improved by being rallying points for various communities.

I can understand that this doesn't look like the rallying point for a community, maybe for "fans of Leo Stableford - author" I think that's what author blogs are supposed to be, but I'm not really that bothered about that.

This is supposed to be a Discordian, Philosophy, Mysticism, Spirituality blog. What's really funny about that is that it kind of became that during the era in late 2017 we shall call "The Great Content Glut of 2017".

The lesson this teaches us is that "Clear communication is very hard". I actually don't know for certain why no one ever comments on my blog. My last post about top 10 albums was pure initiate a conversation about music fodder. It was, if truth be told, aimed at my more musically minded friends and they did comment upon it upon my personal wall of social media interaction, but it wasn't the treasure trove of interesting observation and opinion that I was craving.

I took a quick skim through some of the product of the Content Glut just now and future me had questions and comments to pass on to past me, no issues. This is what leads me to believe this blog is not so much "read" as "parsed by advertising bots".

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't by any means think of myself as an approachable guy. I feel that close personal connection to the assertion that "I'm a weirdo" in Radiohead's DNA-targeting opus "Creep". The thing is, I am writing this obscure strangeness in order to attract other weirdoes, those who cannot help but ask a question or post a comment. If not here then on some publically-available social media timeline.

And yet, barely anyone ever does. I do not, and have never had, the skill of "reaching out" across the void to create a space, safe or otherwise, for philosophical-mystical-Discordian banter. Having said that, I note this is something I have in common with virtually all other publicly posting Discordians I have encountered.

Maybe Discordianism, for some weird reason, discourages thoughts, input and all but the most *birdsong*-posting of meme-laden banter. I'd ask for thoughts but, well, see above.

This post hasn't turned out at all like I thought it would. In fact, I should probably save the post title and image I had for an actual post about the title I had come up with. Sorry, have devolved into meta-stream-of-consciousness. Catch you soon. Transmission Ends.

Creativity

Photo montage includes a photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash

Here's the thing disco kids, you aren't what you think you are and, more importantly, you may be what you think you aren't. I was convinced for a good three weeks once that I was a cicada but turned out I was a philosopher having a dream I was a cricket, so not even delusional in the correct frickin' language.

In other, more relevant news, I've written novels, although I'm not actually a novelist and blogged although I am not a blogger. I am, however, a "creative", and because I spend a lot of time in front of the keyboard I got the impression I was some kind of writer.

I did go to acting college and I learned to act but realised that I liked the idea of regular Monday to Friday 9 to 5 work, so I didn't pursue it further. I still hear interviews with actors talking about the jewellery they keep close to remind them of the family that their career is deemed more important than and don't regret the call I made.

Then, for a while, I hit my stride with a podcast I put together with some long-time co-conspirators. Check it out, although I can't tell you where in our archive to begin because I haven't yet put my finger on where the quality bar hit "peak" so you'll just have to peruse for yourselves.

The really important thing is that nowhere, in any of this, did I particularly consider myself a Discordian. If you're creative then unacknowledged Discordianism is only holding you back. As recorded elsewhere I had cause to reconsider my relationship with all things Erisian round about the end of summer.

Once you start to engage with your own spiritual engine things go a bit nutty. Since September I have published an epic tome about alchemy, Vodun and Celtic bugaboos, and re-invigorated my love of audio recording projects. This ongoing process has generally instigated a new lease of creative life.

Of course, that could have happened without a newfound respect for ultimate chaos, but... you know... that's kind of the point of ultimate chaos. I could bore you with a rundown of weird little quirks of coinkydink that prompted this repointing and repurposing but these are my omens, not yours, all can be rationally explained away easily enough. They have meaning because they meant something to me. So they aren't really for sharing.

If you are creative and think you are not Discordian I would submit that you are probably wrong about that. Ultimate chaos is the wellspring of magical creativity. It's probably the wellspring of a lot else, but I am creative so that is how it works for me.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that chaos gives a gift intended to make you wealthy. Chaos understands that wealth is a system that is anti-chaos and will only be issued to those who will burn it on a remote Scottish island in tribute to chaos itself. The gift is the gift and I would far rather be fecund than loaded, loaded would be nice but to be barren of fresh ideas is beneath dead to me.

Chaos does for me. It did for me when I didn't embrace it consciously but it performs better, in my opinion, now that I do. I don't know what will happen next with any great certainty but I do know that I have read the stars in the sky from the deck of my sloop and set a heading for peculiar waters. Whatever happens amongst those isles unseen may throw up a lot of experiences, but the experience of being bored won't be one of them.

Sri Syadasti,

The Monkey

I'm Not A Blogger

Photo montage includes a photo by Glen Noble from Unsplash

No, seriously, I'm not, however much this particular internet artefact may attempt to convince you otherwise. I have a blog, sure, conceded and admitted. But I am not a blogger. Bloggers, to my mind, are people who devote their time and attention to producing blog content of a quality where that content stands alone. The blog, as Hamlet would probably say if he knew about blogs, is the thing*.

My blog is not the thing. If I'm honest I don't think novels are the thing either. I love writing novels but, of late, I like writing them in order to have material to turn into audio books. Audio content, ah, well, that might very well be the thing... more on that to follow.

All of this is a roundabout way to lead up to me saying that the days of "three massive content pieces every week" are going on hold now. However, dear reader, you should not presume a return to the days of "one post a year" because that's no good either.

I think where we want to be is regular check-ins and progress updates and maybe two serious content pieces every month, tangentially riffing off the content I have going on at the time.

So, I hear nobody clamouring to know, whither Discordianism? Is that last year's news. No, not at all. I credit my recent good fortunes in the well-spring of chaotic creativity entirely to my renewed interest in the Erisian principle and the Holy Chao. Since re-discovering Discordianism I have got Starfall done and published, pulled some eyeballs into this blog, which, at the end of the day is a blog, in the original sense of the word.

For those now puzzled, what I mean to say is, the early days of blogging allowed the blog producer the liberty to be as random as they wished to be in the content. It's only in later times that you have "food bloggers" or "tech bloggers" or "society bloggers". The idea in the early days was that a blog was an ongoing public journal that would go from cabbages to kings.

I am still running this joint on that basis, people are queuing up to tell me I'm doing my marketing wrong, but I've come to realise this misses the point. If I wanted to "market" with the objective of selling as much as possible indiscriminately then I guess I could. But that's not the kind of doodad I make.

I have never made a secret that the things I cherish most are things like my copy of Over The Edge which I bought after the system had lived it's short beautiful life and passed, long since, out of print. I love it because it speaks right to the core of me. So it took me 15 years from first publication to find it and embrace it, so what. I am the message in a bottle guy. I don't want a thousand bottles to reach a bunch of randoms, I want one bottle to reach the right person.

That's not a way to get rich but it's the way to connect nodes in the great global chaosphere. And that's what I am looking to do. I am a mystic, not a magician. It's all about understanding, it's not at all about power. For which reason, I realise I need to devote the little power I have carefully and, currently, the blog is sucking up too much resource. So, expect less carefully crafted content bombs but I am here, and I do check this and you can reach me, not that anyone has.

Now I'm off to start cooking some audio, it'll be ready in 2018 so you have plenty of time to clear your ears.

Sri Syadasti,

The Monkey

*Which has sent my mind off onto a tangent where I imagine proto-emo grandaddy of all emo kids Hamlet writing long screeds into his LiveJournal about how Claudius is a bastard and Gertrude just doesn't get him. "Oh, God," he would write, "my soul is a cavern of inky despair. Ophelia caught my eye in the courtyard earlier. Doesn't she know she's a popular girl? She and I could never have a meaningful relationship because all she cares about is lipstick and flowers. Going to hang out with Laertes later and listen to some My Chemical Romance. Mood: Contemplating The Void."

(Mis)Adventures In Mysticism

The word "mystic" gets thrown around a great deal. Or, at least, it does by me, when I'm in a certain mood. In the end, though, what does "mystic" really mean? Does anybody really know?

As it turns out, yes, Wikipedia knows. It's not like love, or culture, or Winnebago, it's not one of those words that defy sensible definition. Mysticism is a case in a world where so many things appear to be more "edge" than "case".

What's really weird about getting the meaning of mystical (at least the definition of the word) all tied down is that I didn't understand what it meant before. In a metaphysical realm so often rife with double meaning, vagueness and general goal-post moving matters of mysticism appear to be relatively straightforward.

As always, it doesn't take long before the deception provided by appearances becomes obvious. The bit we can be sure of is that mysticism is about making a connection to something. What the something is, ah, that's the rub.

If you're going to be glib about it then you can say it's about making a connection to God, capital-"G" and walk away ensconced in a cocoon of meaningless sophistry. Don't get me wrong I'll sink a pint with the bearded sky daddy any time he wants to get down to my local boozer, but the entire concept is as easy to forge a mystical connection with as any arbitrary non-god-like person on the planet.

There are plenty of non-god-like people already in the boozer, so why wait for bearded sky daddy to leave cloud mansion? They don't like him down the pub anyway, the management maintains burning bushes are a health and safety violation. Besides, his wallet is always "unfortunately" burned to a crisp in his lower branches.

The first question that springs to my mind in the matter of mysticism is "what do you mean by connection?" Say we're limbering up for "the big one" (whatever that turns out to be) so we decide to start small by making a connection to another human being. How do we do that?

If the goal is simply to speak to them then a simple "Hi" will suffice. Although the aspirant may feel the experience, if it is that, is on the underwhelming side. It has to be that "connecting" with someone is a deeper experience than "greeting" them. At this point, I can imagine many readers groping around to find a genital-themed experiment to try next.

Let's just leave that be. You can definitely get happy by slapping another person on the wobbly bits but are you "connecting" to them? A soup of mind-altering hormonal responses says yes. But good luck charming the infinite ineffable into the sack. The clue is in the name, the ineffable must, by default be un-eff-able. This whole business is like eating an entire chocolate trifle when you're hoping to gorge on chocolate cake. A trifle is not a cake, they both taste nice but once you're hungry again the craving for cake will resume.

So if we're not talking about talking with a person, and we're not talking about practicing dubious personal hygiene with a person, then how do you "connect" with them, in the mystical sense?

All of a sudden the scale of the problem becomes apparent. At least a person exists to be connected with. When it comes to the mystical experience the other end of the mystic telephone is connected to something we can't comprehend.

With mounting disappointment we realise, the mystic experience is about doing something that is ill-defined with something that you have no physical evidence even exists.

Did I mention that I wrote a novel? Did I further mention that the novel is out this week? (Oh, come on, you didn't expect to get off without the sales pitch, did you?) As it so happens and entirely coincidentally the revelations at the heart of the mystic experience are a crucial component of the antagonist's journey in that very novel. Crazy, ou quoi?

Of course, he gets it almost entirely wrong, he doesn't know what it is he is communing with. The wretched fool screws up the relationship and when the relationship entirely takes place in the metaphysical beyond, well... stars will fall if you follow my drift.

What is super-bizarre here is that I only realize that I wanted to talk about the pitfalls of frail humanity experimenting with the mystic experience right now. I wrote the novel a decade ago. It is possible to want to talk to your audience about something and not even know what that thing is.

There's a connection for you. The storyteller is trying to connect to the story reader through the medium of the story. The story, for its own part, comes from, somewhere, out there, beyond. Ask any author and they will tell you, they write down the story but they tend not to create it. At some point, the author is a "receiver" of the story from... from... where? Where in Hades does the story actually come from?

Sounds to me like the author, in that act of creating fiction is connecting to something vast and undefinable. Once they're connected like that they bring back messages. Like a broken Oracle the author is trying to communicate truth by spitting out thousands of lies. The art of writing is to pare down the lies and to tip the wink to the reader what they are so the reader can sift out a truth it would have been impossible to find were it not for the fiction.

It's not the only way to get there, but that definitely sounds like a mystic experience to me.

About Messing With Magic...

In my study of magic, I have found that the biggest question to be answered is "What is magic?". Of course, I have studied magic only really as a storyteller but I think that the problems for someone making an explicitly fictional narrative that includes magic are exactly the same problems that beset someone seeking to define the term in any internal narrative of the world.

The journey starts off easily enough. Magic is a means of achieving the impossible. So, five hundred years ago a man flying was magic, since the invention of the aeroplane the matter of which part of flying is magic has become context dependent. Magical flying is now more like "levitation", whereas flying at all has been ossified into science and engineering.

Science is a big problem for magic because science allows us to achieve the magical "within the rules" thus rendering the accomplishment non-magical. We can scientifically turn lead into gold in a particle accelerator but achieving this effort "within the rules" means that the cost is prohibitive.

For this reason, magic becomes any means of circumventing the rules. It is an action that has no equal or opposite reaction. It is a reaction that happens without a preceding action. Magic is any violation of the rules of natural philosophy.

Herein lies a big problem. The rules of natural philosophy are pretty handy at our size and scale. They stop us melting into walls, boiling away into space, they create some really handy reality-shaped boundaries. Sure, get small enough and all those rules go away, the quantum universe, in an immediate sense, is where the magic literally happens. The next problem becomes that in this framework "magic" and "roiling inferno of ultimate chaos" are one and the same.

By this time I wouldn't blame you if you were all at sea as to what magic actually is. A lot of people are similarly confused. It's an easy thing to say "I want to wish really hard and have a bunch of money materialise in my bank account" but how would that ever work? If you have the answer you either have magic, the fruits of hard work and good fortune, the wages of sin or you have an insubstantial and unfulfilled wish.

Magic, in short, is the ability to manifest will without having to fill out the paperwork and avoiding all the problems of playing a system that affords you your very existence.

As with any essentially worthwhile endeavour magic is a very risky proposition. Stories about magic must present the danger of magic because otherwise a reader's story sense will tingle and fantasy will quickly be rendered idle. People who wish to perform magical acts in the real world tend to be desperate or to understand desperation.

I've been writing about Discordianism, and also about Vodun in recent times. Magic is a meeting place for the two disciplines. The sister school of enchantment for Discordians tends to be that thing called Chaos Magic. To an outside observer, Vodun would appear to include within it the practice of magical acts, hence the offshoot into the Westernised sensational shell artifact, voodoo.

Repeatedly those with an interest in Vodun, or Vodou but no route in or reason for are told by those who practice that their pursuit is without form and therefore their goal an impossibility. From what I can tell you do not use vodun to achieve something, you practice vodun because that is part of who you are. For this reason, I am a Discordian. I do not do Discordian things to use Discordianism to achieve an end. I am a Discordian because that tells me something about who I am.

Chaos Magic is, quite explicitly a method of practicing "magic" where the individual has the aim of "utilizing supernatural forces". The key word here is "utilizing", not "acknowledging", "interacting with" or "contemplating" but "utilizing".

This is where I have a problem. Science is the practice of utilizing nature to achieve ends within the rules set down. When science gives us an atom bomb we realize we have really "used" nature. The destructive force of an atom bomb is a direct view on what happens when you uncork the quantum universe and up-end many of the rules of reality. The results are not pretty, not controllable and useful only for purposes that satisfy the darkest shadows of our unconscious minds.

The atom bomb is what happens when we "utilize" nature in a cynical manner. The idea that we are anywhere near ready, as a race of organisms, to "utilize" anything that might count as "supernature" is completely laughable.

The more I study Vodun and Vodou the more I perceive there is an inherent layer of spiritual respect baked into it. People are people and some of them will always try to cut a corner or achieve something "off book", but in Vodun you say "please" and answer "thank you", not things one has to do in science. The idea of treating nature with respect sounds like hippy crap, but look where not doing so leads, boom.

From a personal point of view I would like to say "hello" and "how are things with you?" and "what can I do to leave things in both the visible and the invisible world better than when I found them?", I am beyond "what's in it for me?" because when I used to ask that the answer has traditionally been "not much" and, besides, even with all that not much I have to acknowledge that I currently have more than I need in most aspects of life anyway.

What I want is to connect, and, where relevant, to improve. Other than that I don't want anything. So, I fulfil my karma and, if that karma will include an interaction with the unknown, then I will deal with that too. And if I were to hand out advice about attempting to fill a hole with magic this, or supernatural that I would ask myself, what's the nature of the hole? Nine times out of ten, in my experience, the matter of filling it will not depend upon the supernatural.

Discordian Vodun Online

Excuse my concerns all leaking together, but my post about the difficulty of making a connection to vodun for someone born and raised in the UK took a little more time than I had anticipated. Even so, this would seem like as fine a time as any to mention that I am writing a good deal about vodun at present as it forms the centre of my upcoming novel.

As it happens putting the book out there now, instead of racing to get it published when it was mostly done a few years ago seems to have been a wise choice. The experience is opening up my experience in ways both Discordian and in a broader spirituality.

If anyone was in doubt that Eris created the internet then the concept that it is a technology that it puts a white mostly-Welsh guy who rarely leaves the UK in direct contact with an authentic Louisiana houngan and you have to admit that the chaos is strong with this tech.

Okay, but as we have to disbelieve everything we read how do I KNOW he's an authentic houngan? Well, how does he know I'm an authentic pope? Here's the thing, I know that vodun is deep and serious because it is dangerous. Not just dangerous in an Angel Heart, bite off a chicken head way but in a sanity bending, perception altering way.

This is the problem the multiple-Pope doctrine of Discordianism is all about. Spirituality should be like knife-juggling or sword swallowing. Before you go to a party and offer to share with everyone your really sweet party trick where you escape from an airtight safe in under two minutes with your hands cuffed you better be pretty sure you're an escapologist. It is evident Houdini was taking more risks than any given vicar.

In Discordianism the whole Pope thing is an illustration that many religions attach very little weight to the assumption of a place high on the spiritual food chain. This is probably an extended hangover from the times when church and state ran in parallel power structures and any corrupt rich asshole could be a power player in the church wielding dogma as a blunt instrument.

In reality you don't want to represent as something you aren't when it comes to spiritual matters. As vodun represents an apparent spiritual tradition that treats the world of spirit with the respect it deserves. From what I know you wouldn't want to represent as a houngan if you actually weren't.

Hell, I don't go to dinner parties and shoot my mouth off about being a pope, for a start everyone is. Deeper, though, my serious consideration of all things Discordian has only begun very recently. I'm not ready to wear the hot dog belt bucket and golden apple lapel badge just yet*.

There are too many people claiming to be the spiritual hotline at the present time. I do think that the original wave of Discordianism fell at the start of this wave. Marshall McLuhan identified the potential in the mass-media and electronic expansion of communications. But any time before about 1998 was too soon to call the potential power of the internet, which is like the power of the mass media on steroids.

I think that poets and artists have taken a massive beating in terms of their relevance and purpose these days, a time when people can attain some sort of notoriety by doing something vaguely interesting on YouTube. When you consider that Andy Warhol couldn't possibly have known the scope of his assertion about everyone being famous for 15 minutes you begin to appreciate what that purpose is.

Warhol's art attracted attention, that attention gave him a platform. If he'd been doing what he was doing now his soup cans would have been on DeviantArt and his aphorisms would have been mashed up with satirical photo juxtapositions and shared on instagram. The tools to be a prophet have been democratised to the point that they have experienced a severe devaluation.

As anyone can claim to be anything they want when you can only talk to them on social media so the currency of making those claims has taken a hit given all the counterfeit claims. All that's really happened though is a raising of the bar. If you want a platform now building it isn't the problem, the problem is using it amongst the forest of competing platforms that exist.

The current environment of people screaming in echo chambers doesn't nullify the one whispered thread of actual wisdom. A mass of people listening to white noise does not mean that the message has been compromised. All that's happened is that the terrain has changed. Now the whispered message can be delivered to active recipients, listening itself was passive when the availability of platforms was scarce. Rapidly the business of listening has become active and personal, Discordianism has been right there waiting because Discordianism admits we're all popes and that you have to disbelieve everything you read. These are not just idle statements, they are the pronouncements of a prophet who didn't even know what he was seeing and attained his insight through his own spiritual process of chewing on paradoxes and shifting his own perspective.

If we are all popes we all have to do that. Active listening is contemplation of the bigger picture. Learning to separate out the wisdom from the white noise is everybody's job. And then Discordianism reminds us "The white noise is wisdom, and the wisdom is white noise, now what you gonna do?"

From this perspective vodun is another way to approach perception, and as it's pretty unique it's a valuable one at that. I have found my own vodun experiences so far to remind me how little I know and how daunting the change in thought can prove to be. I am grateful. For these are things we should never forget.

* There is no official formal attire that marks one out as a Discordian**, but if I were to set a precedent it would definitely be the belt buckle and lapel badge.
** And if anyone claimed there was it would be the job of all Discordians to refute it.

Discordianism Vs Alchemy

A bout I'd like to have ringside seats for, as two almost totally unrelated philosophical constructs go head to head in a thrilling fight to the finish. The chances of definitive resolution are low, but it's the experience of fight that gets you there that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

As you may know I am putting out a book in about a month and, hence, my posts leading up to that are looking at some of the major themes of this work. Although Starfall is not explicitly Discordian (not like some other novels I may be finishing in due course) I did know about Discordianism when I wrote it and I think that my latent Discordianism pokes through if you care to look for it.

Discordianism, after all is big on iconoclasm and the male line of my family have been pretty iconoclastic for about three generations now in their own way. If you're going to be completely contrary in your world view in the current times it's not enough to, for example, attack religion, you also have to attack atheism as well because the atheist mainstream is where a significant number of non-religious types are at.

It's also not good enough just to be a "Default Agnostic". Not knowing enough about anything to commit is not a position, it's just lazy. No, you have to be an active agnostic, the type that says: "Not only do I not really know, but neither do you and nor do the people who hate you, or anyone else. Some things in the universe, probably most things, are completely incomprehensible to us, so stop being such a dick about stuff and accept your status as a cosmic fucking insect".

Take, by way of example, the existence of dark matter and dark energy. Approximately 5% of the known universe can be accounted for by what we can "see" from Earth. All those galaxies and nebulae we have detected with radio telescopy is a tiny scraping of what we know must be in the universe, there's nineteen times more stuff we can't interact with than we can even take a quick peek at.

Beings of vast power and incomprehensible intelligence could hide in that 95% really easy, so easy that they're probably not even amused by how they've rendered themselves invisible to us. To claim we know anything about the great metaphysical beyond is insanity, plain and simple.

Which is where alchemy comes in. The villain of Starfall is an alchemist, I consciously picked on him and his mode of thought as something I really wanted to pull down. Alchemy is, in some ways, like the opposite of Discordianism. Discordianism is a religion disguised as a joke, or a joke disguised as a religion, depending on how many hot dogs you ate in the last month and whether or not the month has a "Q" in it. Alchemy is insanity disguised as natural philosophy. A particular type of insanity also enjoyed by "science" and atheism.

The insanity whereof I speak is simple to state, it posits as a central position that the human meatganism is capable of knowing everything. It is phobic of the notion that the meatganism simply hasn't the equipment to comprehend the true nature of reality. It is dismissive of all mental attempts to integrate and harmonise with the idea that there's a bunch of stuff we're just never going to know.

The opposite mental ailment of alchemic insanity is any religious insanity which includes most religious thought. This insanity can be parcelled up as: You don't need to know everything, there are some things being taken care of by the great bearded sky daddy and anyone who interferes with those things must be stopped at all costs.

The Holy Chao of Discordianism can be thought of representing these two opposites, aspects of the Eristic and Aneristic principle, locked in an eternal self-defeating struggle. So if this model is complete, showing all the polar opposites where the hell is Discordianism?

Discordianism, my friends, is the diagram itself, existing in the lines that make up the false-image matrix. Any Discordian will tell you that arranging lines and boxes to make meaning is, itself, meaningless. Discordianism is about striving to be optimal while accepting that we have limits, so no passive acceptance of other people's half-chewed reality-cud and no insane belief that we will ever have the ability to conquer reality from the cradle of our stewed meat prisons, just a commitment to not believe what we read and attempt to bring everyone into harmony through active disruption.

Like I said before, it's a tricky balance to strike.

So What About Voodoo?

First off, lets call it vodou or vodun, voodoo is a corruption, and there's the rub. Voodoo is the word you use to describe a brand of donut, or a mountain bike, or a club promotion. I've been finding it difficult where to start out with this strand of discussion, after over a decade I realise it should start there.

Imagine that there was a Jyoodayzm Donuts, or a Katholik Mountain Bike or a Hinndou Club Night. How would worshippers in the specific religions whose names are corrupted there feel about the appropriation and association? Less chilled, I imagine, than practitioners of vodun, as far as I can tell they just don't talk about it, let alone get up in arms about the zany, dangerous branding mark their religion has been rendered to in Western society.

Having spent some time and done some research I think the reason for that is all to do with the latent power such casual misappropriation delivers back to them. Vodun uses, song, chant, repetition, rhythm, life and sweat to do its work. Repeating its name in whatever context flows that power back to the mighty river, so the practitioners and respectful observers of this spiritual powerhouse will tell you.

I'm a full on born again Discordian (or maybe it was just a dodgy No Hot Dog Bun round my Friday hot dog), this does not preclude me from also getting my vodun on. But I don't. Am I a non-believer?

I don't think that's my problem here. Actually if I was a proper non-believer I would have no problem dabbling. I would dabble in lots of things if I were a non-believer, because I wouldn't believe that it could do any harm.

I think, rather, that I don't have the passion to commit to these practices. I am passionate about my Discordianism, especially as I discover that beyond being a faith it is also a challenge, being a Discordian is not easy.

In fact I don't believe being an anything is easy, but less honest religions arrive at your door saying that if they dunk you in an adult sized font then the Bearded Sky Daddy will insert his own son into your cardiac region and off you go. I mean, come on, that's a con, right? It's a step away from being a Nigerian prince wanting to put $$$ in your bank account.

Vodun, like Discordianism, is not easy, and I respect it too much to pretend.

So, Starfall is my one act of respect to those deities and also to the dark gods that lurk in Britain's past (and more on them later). One of the points of Starfall is that in the world of loa there isn't much difference between the two.

As I concluded work on the first major edit of Starfall I reckon I could sense that Legba was giving me the nod. It's like Neitzsche said, the mighty things are mirrors. Actually he didn't say that exactly, but the poor guy had his own preoccupations.

As we get closer to Starfall I would like to return to talk more about the relationship the novel made for me with vodun, but for now the man at my shoulder is telling me to still my tongue and open my ears. So I shall listen.

The Discordian Problem

The Discordian in the room is not hard to spot. They're the one sitting in the corner by themselves laughing at everyone else.

I think that's the core of the Discordian problem. In my every day life I am about to start work on a "very important project" this is a project that could have a big impact on people's every day lives and improve the quality of life for many. When you're a member of the big bearded sky daddy club doing something of merit is consolidated by your laminated pass to the holy of holies. You integrate the spiritual with the mundane via the instrument of religion.

So when you have a joke religion that's not a joke, or is it? No. Only joking it's serious. Seriously joking.

Is it a joke or is it serious?

Yes.

It becomes enough of a problem working out how you feel about your ambivalent membership of this church in the first place. I mean, you're the frickin' pope of this so-called (no, definitely is) religion and you don't even know whether it's real. Also, you're probably not a joiner. You know that the guy saying "Hey, follow me!" is probably leading you off a cliff. The guy that says "You can trust me" just wants to clear out your bank account. People who make promises are the kind of people who fail and break promises.

Basically, you're a pope alone, you're not going to encourage anyone else to sign up.

The wisdom of this is that most religions don't help you to keep perspective, or, at least, they should but they are very, very bad at it. Most religions have a propensity to bypass their safe guards and fuel dangerous amounts of self-serious egotism and destruction.

Actually Discordianism is not exempt from this, a lot of Discordians are insecure, cynical trolls who exist to gross you out, point and laugh, not necessarily in that order. What Discordianism does right is that it points you towards the more rewarding parts of its own practice equally badly.

Don't get me wrong Discordianism is really hard. Other religions are built to be user-friendly by asking you to surrender, Discordianism is not user-friendly and reminds you to never surrender.

All of which leads to the biggest problem of all. How does Discordianism come into practice? Posting cool memes and laughing at stuff is fine, but how do you actively do things in a Discordian manner?

Sacredness is essential to faith practice, but in Discordianism sacredness is pretty stupid. The best way to worship Eris is to be deeply suspicious of worshipping anyone, especially that crafty looking goddess juggling apples in the corner and laughing at everybody.

The first practice of Discordianism is confusion. So if you're confused right now, feeling I've left a bunch of questions and no real answers, you are doing it right.

Which is just as well, because never forget, you're the pope.

If You Can Read This, You Are A Pope!

My favourite Discordian Facebook page lead me to this little gem recently. Some rando asks what's with this Discordianism thing? He even admits to being a bit confused. Confusion is the catnip of the Discordian, latent or active. And in they come all seeking to help by contradicting each other wildly. It makes my heart swell with pride.

There's a mixture of different approaches to thoroughly failing to assist with the confusion in any way. The very first answer begins "a) five tons of flax" the next one helpfully signs off "If you can read this answer, you are a pope!"

Thereafter we are treated to further jewels of the Discordian art such as:

• "an 'objective summary' of the religion could never be accurate"
• "Objectivity isn't really a Discordian value; the common failure mode of the practice is 'dire assholery.'"
• "It's a joke religion taken seriously to various degrees by various people that sprang out of the proto-hippie and New Age scenes by both mocking them and absorbing their more interesting elements."
• "The world is chaos. Order is self-deception."
• "If it's any consolation, you get the same fictions once you're initiated. I'd ask for my money back, but I initiated myself, and have no one else to blame."
• "I have no idea what an earnestly practicing Discordian would even look like -- probably one of those homeless people you see yelling at themselves on the street."
• "...if you don't understand the point of a religion that is a joke you will not understand it either"
• "It *is* a joke. It's a lot of jokes. But, as stated above more than once, it's also serious."
• "I found it very difficult to refrain from just posting a simple FNORD and leaving it at that."

To increase the fun, some answerers are answering as if they are not Discordian, but this merely serves to increase the confusion, so they're probably latent. Hell, all people are really latent Discordians, the question is to what extent you accept that, like all religions. I mean, that's a religion-y type thing, isn't it?

Discordians tend to be poor at identifying what's religion-y and what's just pure control-mania. Like the rest of the world then, I suppose.

Were I to take issue with any of it. And, hell, as a Good Discordian® it is my duty to take issue with the whole by-gosh-darn-it lot. It's in the misidentification of Discordianism as being pro-chaos in the same way it is anti-order.

That's not nearly complicated enough to be the truth.

We like to view things, as human beings, in these neat little dualities, night and day, love and hate, good and evil, order and chaos, salt and vinegar, death and taxes, lions minus tigers equals the root of bears divided by "Oh My!" squared,

The truth of this illusory conundrum is exemplified by the description of "Eristic" (pro-chaos) and "Aneristic" (pro-order) principles that give us lenses through which we can all view the universe. The problem is they're both as false as each other. The universe is a single eternal moment of unending uber-chaos.

Fiddling with either of the illusory constructs just equalises the amount of "chaos" and "order" that are perceivable. So, attempt to make something ordered and it will just increase apparent chaos, go out of your way to cause apparent chaos and order will kick back. The reason for this is that all you're doing in such circumstances is putting greasy finger marks over the lens through which you're viewing the world.

What you really want to do is rip the concept-lenses off your eyes altogether and stare into the joyous face of true chaos.

Actually, don't. It's probably scary, likely it will leave you in a bad place. Instead find a hot dog vendor and ask them to make you one with everything, basically that's almost the same thing.

The Age of Discord

How can we call this anything else? At least in terms of the narrative of our mass culture.

If you have never really looked at 60s American counter culture I suggest that you should go and take a look into it. Up until about a year ago it was history. Since the middle of 2016 it's starting to consume reality.

It's super hard to unpick this one, it's hardly an intuitive leap. The counter culture (which I am going to use here to refer specifically to the 60s American counter culture movement) is a many-layered and complex belief system that changed the world. The movement's ideals were not realised, but some of its goals and objectives either were at the time, or were seeded so that it almost seems inevitable that they should come to pass.

The counterculture lived everywhere in art, music, literature, politics and even carved its way into science and technology. What I think people didn't get then, what is only starting to emerge now, is that things we have, as a Western culture, regarded as movements or philosophies that grew up out of counterculture were, in fact, a generational shockwave that is now starting to realise around us.

Confusion

One of the key things that contributed to our failure to perceive this cultural velocity is the fact that some key features of the counter culture were, in fact, parts of the underlying philosophy which became redundant. They are like cladding on the outside of a space module attempting re-entry. They can burn off, so the payload can be kept safe.

Among these features are obvious things like frequent, intense drug experimentation and the philosophy of free love. When you talk about hippies these are two of the key points, and often in that order. It's hard not to be cynical about it these days, after all we've spent about three to four generations being cynical about hippies at this stage.

On the one hand the ideals of the movement talked about peaceful living, building a life out of love and so on and so forth. The unfortunate side-effects from the attempts to live out those ideals were passive-aggression, paranoia, psychosis, ignored misogyny and a general celebration of the solipsistic.

Maybe these guys should have read less Marx and Ghandi and taken on board the words of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder:

"No plan survives contact with the enemy."

Here's a thing, you would imagine it would be quite easy to see a flaw in any philosophy who's central tenet is love but whose foundation is anti-establishment.

Once you've harnessed that horse and cart together and loaded up the cart with drugs and questionable personal choices it's easy to see how it ended up in a ditch.

The mistake comes in thinking that just because something's most obvious features foundered on realities rocky shores that the whole ship went down with it. This is most certainly not the case. Almost all the most recognisable features of our zeitgeist have their roots in the counterculture. Post post modernism, political correctness (mad or otherwise), self-referential entertainment, social media memes. The world has spent nearly half a century now cranking up the absurdity.

It's not a surprise that finally the world of politics has gone the same way in English-speaking Western culture. The weirdest thing about the current right-wing is that it's an MTV commercial pastiche of the things it used to be. No less dangerous than it ever was but the political end may as well be a bunch of rubber puppets spitting one-liners, constantly embarrassing and disgracing itself, the extreme end is like a KKK comic book version of itself. Extremism is taking its extreme cues from 90s skate-punk marketing campaigns.

In the pub fight of Western Culture we're at the point where someone's going to have to shove that broken bottle in someone's general direction or cooler heads need to swoop in to drag the participants outside into the cold night air.

And all the while Discordians have a chuckle. Not in some bittersweet "have to laugh or you'd cry" way. Crying is not on the agenda. It's all funny, no less potentially destructive and catastrophic for it. But it is funny.

So laugh on that basis everyone. Welcome to the Age of Discord where your murderer will probably be some kind of parodic imitation of the real thing.

Lovecraft Got It

Welcome to me bunching my fists with effort. Welcome to me fully cognizant of the fact that how I act is entirely up to me. Welcome to me knowing that there is no cloud-comfortable bearded sky daddy who will forgive me for behaving like an asshole. Welcome to me having to skirt the line between the required gentle ribbing and subversion required and not wanting to tip over into being, you know, mean.

Because nobody wants to be that guy, right? That guy is most certainly not who anyone wants to be.

Let's start with "Today I Learned".

Today I learned that magical colleges need to hire better web developers.

What's giving me a massive problem here is that I am unused to seeing something that I would totally have made up presented as a real thing. In my exploration here, through the written word, I come to the conclusion that I love it, I really do love it. I love the wonky web design and the wonkier UI behaviour, I love the tone of the site, the blank-faced failure to comprehend that some people will find it, I don't know, is hilarious the right word?

I think this is a Discordian's big problem with most religion and esoteric practice*. It's all kind of funny, when you sit down to think about it. That's where it veers off the track to become horrible and frightening. You realise that people are actually trying to stop thinking in order to believe something inherently nonsensical. And they succeed with alarming regularity.

Having said that Discordianism doesn't say no to other religions, you want to extend your belief platform into something a bit more orthodox, go ahead. The point of the Discordian perspective is just that. Discordianism is an all-purpose mental filter for anything else that you might want to put into your brain.

So... magic...

Let's not ask the boring question. Let's ask the inverted boring question that is only marginally less boring, but we have places to go, so we won't dwell. Here goes: Do I disbelieve in magic. Well, that's a very simple question. I don't believe everything I read, so obviously as magical instruction is written down I don't believe it.

Okay, so not to wriggle out of the topic, if I'm at a party and someone says to me: "Hi, I'm Pete and I used to be a Grandmaster of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros," how do I reply?

I guess, after much deliberation, I have to go with: "Oh, sounds interesting? And what does that involve?"

As it happens what it involves is detailed in a couple of Wikipedia articles, at least a broad overview. What am I to make of the fact that a circle of occult magicians formed in the 1970s in the East End of London centred upon a metaphysical bookshop called The Phoenix? What is anyone to think learning of a schism that shook the IoT in the 1990s resulting in an event dubbed "The Ice Magick Wars"?

As a Discordian I have to remain highly skeptical. On the other hand people have paid the mortgage living their lives as practicing magicians. That is an achievement of some kind. I am a software developer who has had a lucky break and I feel a pressing need to pay my bills writing software for computers that definitely exist, the bloody things are everywhere.

I have never needed myself, nor known anyone who has admitted to needing, the services of a professional magician of any sort. I note, from the entry about one of the founders of IoT Peter J. Carroll, that this particular magician wrote a few magical tomes, but then, I know how much money can be generated off book sales and it's not a living income in the numbers he would have been selling them. (Although I don't doubt I would find the number of copies sold of any one impressive, just, not impressive versus, say, Clive Barker.)

Mr Carroll now maintains a website where he can publish some thoughts directly to the internet. This is where I started this enlightening trip down the rabbit hole with some notes from 2015 regarding Discordianism.

At first I wanted this post to be a reply to that post, particularly the assertion that "Discordianism seems dead or dying, having served its purpose."

When I find myself at this part of the path, however, what can I really say? Because to a certain extent Mr. Carroll has it exactly right, nail on the head, got it, grasped it, right on the button. And in exactly the same way he is so far from right that it would appear he has backed into his insight from the wrong side.

I think the key, for what it's worth, is in the notion of death. And in 2015 it is entirely possible that Discordianism was dying. As any esoterocist will tell you, however, death isn't the end. It is a place of transformation after which nothing will ever be the same ever again.

This is why I have returned to Discordianism after reading about it first, probably in the mid-Nineties, when I was in my early twenties. Mr Carroll was immersed in sixties counterculture, Robert Anton Wilson co-author of the Illuminatus Trilogy was a member of the IoT. That counterculture was his culture. But it wasn't, and could never be, mine.

So in my twenties I examined Discordianism as a thing that had happened, exactly the same way that Caroll appraised it two years ago. In that form, the original form, it was a blunt tool, something to be used against a mainstream culture that needed to be curtailed. The Illuminatus Trilogy pits counterculture heroes against figures of the old-world establishment. A lot of the nitty-gritty of phase one Discordianism is designed to specifically attack, undermine and immunize against that exact paradigm.

And it won. Without a large number of people actively embracing specific Discordianism. I'm not sure if even the KLF would claim to be practicing Discordians. I think those people who do claim it do so out of necessity, not out of a desire to do so. I know this is true for me.

As with the philosophy of automatically refusing to believe everything you read** until you have taken away absolutely everything from it that can be rejected so Discordianism itself will mutate until it reforms to be the antidote to the new establishment.

Look around the Western world, we have parody politicians playing parody power games for an audience of voters who are slowly coming to understand that they are watching a pantomime. Politics has always been metaphorically pantomimic, because all power games are, but right now, right here, at this time is the moment in the Emperor's New Clothes where the crowd are realising that the Emperor isn't wearing a stitch.

Over a half century the authority of authority has eroded. Any person with a gun can now be branded a maniac, soldiers and police are not exempt. People are slowly realising they are people.

Lovecraft got it. Any being with the power of a god will not care about you. There are things out there that we are not biologically or spiritually equipped to even contemplate. We are having difficulty even looking at ourselves in the mirror. To understand and accept who and what we are would, at this time, be the ultimate work of any magical practice. Once we nail that, magic like any other tool, will die, and rise like a phoenix from the ashes in a new form.

* How can you not laugh when you find out contemporary Chaos Magick practice can incorporate an element of video-conferencing?

** For really overcomplicated re-evaluations of the terms "believe" and "read". Homework: Describe in detail what it is to believe something. What does it mean to have read something? Does it have to involve written words? If your head starts to hurt while doing the homework go watch TV for an hour and then take a bath and have a nap. Overthinking never leads to good places.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

"So, what, this is a Discordianism blog now?" the voice asked.

My response is thus:

Two sequential posts on a topic do not a theme make. However, I think that what's surfacing in my consciousness is a recognition and appreciation of what Discordianism has done for me, what it could do for others, why it's so relevant in 2017 and why it would seem someone needs to attempt to make sense out of the whole thing.

The hilarious thing is that Discordianism exists in a soup of zen paradoxes. Discordianist dogma teaches that seeking to increase order merely increases chaos and that the good Discordian does not believe anything they read.

I can't disagree with any of that. So I provide, for your reading pleasure, a short piece that attempts to make sense of this paradox problem that appears to defeat Discordianism even as it begins.

Let's begin with the problem that, if you consider yourself Discordian, or "possibly" Discordian then, by default, you shouldn't believe this post, because you are reading it. That's actually pretty sound advice. If you believe something because you have read it you need some kind of psychological intervention, or to read the next sentence. You really should send me a couple of hundred quid, it's the right thing to do.

The point is that it is essential not to read something and incorporate it automatically into the body of your world view as if it automatically has a right to be there. If the thing you have read makes you angry, it is because you believe it. If the thing you have read makes you scared, it is because you believe it. If the thing you have read makes you happy, it is because you believe it.

It is outside of your immediate emotional response that you will find the worth of the written word. If you have that emotional response it means that there is a part of you that believes it, but it also means that there is a part of you that thinks it has understood what it has read.

Discordians know two things here. One, is that understanding does not equal belief. The other is that one pretty good indicator that you haven't understood the message put out by another is that you believe you have understood it.

Once you have run the material you have read through the process of:

a) understanding that you don't understand it and that therefore
b) you cannot possibly believe it

you have left only one thing. That thing is the degree to which the thing which is written is harmonic with your own set of beliefs. The safer a written thing makes you feel the more sympathetic you are to it. All this means is that you should attempt to disbelieve it even harder than the things that you find easy to be disbelieved.

Whatever you actually cannot get rid of, no matter how hard you try, is part of your personal truth. If you feel that this discovery is worth sharing go ahead and write it down safe in the knowledge that no one will really understand it.

Note that after reading my thorough decomposition of the notion of not believing everything you read you may feel too confused to now read anything at all. This is the second paradox at work. My article seeks to increase order, but in doing so it has just deepened your own inner chaos. This is to be expected.

If one can call to mind that chaos and order are both illusory perceptions of a single continuum you will understand that the more confused you feel the less confused you actually are. The fear you feel is exactly identical to the momentary sinking sensation you get when you wake up in the morning and remember who you are.

If time mattered then in the next article I will take a look at why time doesn't matter. I hope you enjoyed it and will enjoy the upcoming article about disbelieving everything you read, which you just read.

The Modern Discordian

This is a sort of advertisement, but also information. TFA is below.

I am not a religious type of guy, really. As this is true Discordianism, The Church of the Subgenius and Pastafarianism all hold some sort of appeal to my sense of the inherent ridiculousness of religion as a concept. These satirical church-like entities are all echoes of one another, with Discordianism being the first original point of the paradoxical religion-that-denies-religion.

In addition there is a kind of funnel of meaning in the three movements. Pastafarianism was a reaction to a single event in the history of Western lunacy, Subgeniuses exist to be silly, but Discordianism had its roots in 60s counterculture and that counterculture was a far more complex thing than just a vehicle for poking fun at religion.

Discordianism, and the things it produced, such as The Illuminatus Trilogy included a general disdain for the mechanisms of organised religion but were not limited to such. I think that the problem with fitting something like Discordianism into your head is that it is hard to seriously adopt any kind of dogma, or spiritual path that resists itself in its basic precepts.

Not that people haven't tried and even succeeded, Ken Campbell and the KLF are two examples of modern Discordians who spring instantly to mind. The problem remains. You have to have a special mind to hold forth on a philosophy that says anyone holding forth on a philosophy is a) wrong, b) possibly evil and c) almost certainly trying to sell you something.

But Discordianism endures on a level that the Subgenii and Pastafarians just cannot attain. I think it's something to do with a true Discordian understanding that they are a) wrong, b) possibly evil and c) almost certainly trying to sell people something.

More on this again. In the meantime think about buying my book in two months time. Cheers.