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Hail Eris! |
In 1965 Greg Hill ( Malaclypse the Younger) with Kerry
Wendell Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst published the "Principia Discordia or How The West Was
Lost". The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger, Wherein Is Explained
Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything.
An ambitious and humourful title.
As I claim to include Everything in my Technovedas, I cannot leave out this book,
which is therefore incorporated by reference.
It is an absolutely exquisite text (here available: http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/pridisc.htm), which uses humour and absurdity as a basis to come to a religion.
Discordianism puts everything upside down. In fact it is the religion of perspectivism:
“All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and
false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.“
It is useful to get familiar with some of the concepts of
Discordianism, in order to be able to even transcend this paradigm, which is a
transcending paradigm itself.
“... HERE FOLLOWS SOME PSYCHO-METAPHYSICS.
If you are not hot for philosophy, best just to
skip it.
The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER;
the Eristic
Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts
and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction
making.
With our concept making apparatus called
"mind" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our
cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled
"reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact
that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality"
differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level
deeper that is the
level of
concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have
been drawn grids (concepts). Different
philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with
rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the
points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That
is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with
contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding
a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say
unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians
call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some
more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can
be more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed
through some particular grid. But, like
"relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an
idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or
vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is
the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The
belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong,
is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC
ILLUSION.
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of
definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that
(capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick
a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered.
Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach. (Note by me: the
Rorschach inkblot test, the Rorschach technique, or simply the inkblot
test) is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots
are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation)
Verily! So much for all that.
...
Which Is Real?
Do these 5 pebbles REALLY form a pentagon?
Those biased by the Aneristic Illusion would say yes. Those biased by the
Eristic Illusion would say no. Criss-cross them and it is a star.
An Illuminated Mind can see all of these, yet he does not insist that any
one is really true, or that none at all is true. Stars, and pentagons, and
disorder are all his creations and he may do with them as he wishes. Indeed,
even so the concept of number 5.
The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about "it" is in
your mind and yours to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU
ARE THE ARTIST.
Conviction causes convicts.
...
The words
of the Foolish and those of the Wise Are not far apart in Discordian Eyes.
(HBT; The Book of Advise, 2:1)
The PODGE of the Sacred Chao is symbolized as The
Golden Apple of Discordia,
which represents the Eristic Principle of Disorder.
The writing on it,
"KALLISTI" is Greek for "TO THE
PRETTIEST ONE" and refers to an old myth about
The Goddess. But the Greeks had only a limited
understanding of Disorder, and
thought it to be a negative principle.
The Pentagon represents the Aneristic Principle of
Order and symbolizes the HODGE. The Pentagon has several references; for one,,
it can be taken to represent geometry, one of the earliest studies of formal
order to reach elaborate development;* for another, it specifically accords
with THE LAW OF FIVES.
THE TRUTH IS FIVE BUT MEN HAVE ONLY ONE NAME FOR
IT.
-Patamunzo
Lingananda
It is also the shape of the United States Military
Headquarters, the Pentagon Building, a most pregnant manifestation of
straightjacket order resting on a firm foundation of chaos and constantly erupting
into dazzling disorder; and this building is one of our more cherished Erisian
Shrines. Also it so happens that in times of medieval magic, the pentagon was
the generic symbol for werewolves, but this reference is not particularly
intended and it should be noted that the Erisian Movement does not discriminate
against werewolves—our membership roster is open to persons of all races,
national origins and hobbies.
...
The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS
HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR
ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE
SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR
INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.
The
Law of Fives is never wrong.
....”
As you can see Discordianism denies all forms
of beliefs, including itself, which is a great way to demonstrate the fallacy
of logic and dualistic thinking.
The Principia Discordia is highly
self-contradictory from a logical perspective, or at least self-paradoxical.
E.g. If the Law of Five is True, this means everything is profoundly ORDERED, but that is known as
the Aneristic Illusion. But this is the beauty of the system: it says the same
about disorder as the Eristic illusion. From the standpoint of perspectivism,
every notion is somehow right, in some persepective and somehow wrong in another
prespective: there are no absolutes here. Parts can never be fully known.
But the Absolute, the whole , the knower is implicitly hidden in this
(anti-)philosophy, as we’ll see later.
The Symbol of the Discordian Movement are
five dots seemingly ordered in the form of a Pentagon and a Golden Apple of
Discordia with Kallisti written on it.
I share the notion of perspectivism strongly
with the Principia Discordia. Everything we name, see and try to understand by
means of our left-hemisphere is a way of logically connecting the dots, which
is not necessarily the TRUTH. It is just a perspective, there are many other
ways to connect the dots. Mind creates order out of a filtered reality. Whether
the basis of the underlying REALITY is order or chaos, is for the moment not so
important. In the phenomenal world these are but relative concepts. Just when
you are zooming in on a picture. From far away it may not have any meaning,
suddenly you start to see things in there, you start to connect dots in a
certain way, but if you look closer, you see something else etc. ad infinitum
until you arrive at pixels, but then you can go on with ma microscope and an
electron microscope and at any level you will see different things.. But it is
not so that one concept you see is wrong and the other other right: all concept
are in a sense Mind-projections depending on the granularity of observation. You
can say all notions are true in a certain way, in a certain magnification of the
lens, but they are also simultaneously false from the perspective of another
magnification level. You cannot know what is really there by Mind. Via
relations and relativism you cannot know the thing per se and in se. As Kant
would say the Noumenon. Order and
Disorder are relative concepts arising from an incomplete experience. Relativity
and incompleteness, undecideability are different aspects of the same illusion
of Mind.
....
More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.