The Mysticism between Sense and Nonsense in Discordianism

In this essay I discuss the exquisite and absurd teachings of the religion of Discordianism. 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. 

Cover of the Principia Discordia. No Copyright, only Copyleft.

An ambitious and humourful title.

As I claim to include Everything in my Technovedas, I cannot leave out this book, which is therefore hereby 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. A parody religion? Or is there more to the story than the appearances. Discordianism is the religion of the Godess Eris or Discordia, who had not been invited to a party of the Greek Gods. To create discord, she threw an apple with the word Kallisti (for the most beautiful one) on it between  Hera, Athena and Aphrodite.

Discordianism puts everything upside down. In fact it is the religion of perspectivism. I will quote from the Principia Discordia (which has no copyright, only copyleft): 

Quote:

“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 analysed 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.

....”

Unquote

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. The 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. Even then you can go on with a microscope and an electron microscope and at any level you will see different things: Levels of disorder and levels of order. But it is not so that one concept you see is wrong and the other right: All concepts 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, incompleteness and undecidability are different aspects of the same illusion of Mind.

The Mysticism of Sense and Nonsense

 The fun about the Principia Discordia, especially in the humourful and absurd way it is written, is that it conveys as spirit a spirit of nonsense, absurdity, confusion and chaos in its written form. But the Apple of its symbol, relates to Sense, in the sense of sensations, sentience. The way I want to connect the dots of the Principia Discordia (which may or may not be the intended way) is that its Sacred Chao Symbol with the pentagon on the left side reflects the left hand hemisphere of the brain trying to connect the dots in a logical manner and with the apple on the right side the holistic right-hemisphere, which is more about sensing, sensations: taste the apple. More basically it stands for the left hemisphere attempting to create a logic, an ordered comprehension by connecting dots versus the proto-consciousness of Sentience per se.    

As logic fails, it is in a way nonsensical. Rationality from a higher perspective is a kind of nonsense. It is also the inability to really sense, feel what something is like, the quale. The inability to become one with the object of meditation: One cannot sense the object and thus one tries to describe it. Also in that way logic fails to have sentience and is thus non-Sense-ical in that it does not have sense-ations, feeling associated with it. Tasting the apple is all about Sense, it is a wholesome experience of the apple. In that sense the apple is a symbol for Sense. Not the “logical Sense” but the Sense of Sentience, sensations. So my metaphor for the Discordian Symbol would be “Logic is non-Sense-ical, Sense is alogical” (not necessarily illogical).    

Logic with its reasoning about parts, (which are in fact not really there as every wavefunction is everywhere in space, though appearing “concentrated” in a locality) is in fact the wrong type of experiencing things. It is the dualistic way of approaching reality in terms of this and that. 

Perhaps purposefully chosen is the apple, referring to the tree of knowledge of “Good” and “Evil”. But a bite from that Apple plunged you into the material world of dualism, the descent of the snake Kundalini in the world of forms and names, logic and causality. Or is it rather the fruit of the tree of Life, the life that can be sensed. Or is it the worm in the Apple that represents the snake Kundalini, which both allows for the descent into matter but also provides the way out? So much symbolism...true, false, true and false depending on the perspective or neither true nor false depending on the perspective.  

If you liked this post, please upvote. More of this chapter can be found in my book "Transcendental Metaphysics".