ÚÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ¿ ³ MOO-COW è-3 ³ ÀÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÙ Released By The Office Of The High Preest Of MOO Floyd Gecko Number Three in a series of confusing and/or enlightening releases of one thing or another from that High Preest guy, who co-ordinates this carp. Special thanks to the Ministry Of Fish. IN THIS ISSUE: MOOish MystiSchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lloyd Taco PART ONE In MOOism, there is no such thing as Misty-Sizzle in the ordinary sense of the unword. You know, KOäMOâENEäIä and éEOèANH and all the other miscellaneous accoutrements that give religion meaning. MOOism is a Metagnostic Agnostic Anti-Church, in a sense (of which we all have five, this being only one). As Metagnostics,we believe in whatever comes to mind. As Agnostics, we don't even trust that. As an Anti-Church (see MOO-COW â-6) we don't so much believe in things as suspend our disbelief. Willing suspension of disbelief is the key to MOOist MystiSchism. In fact, this is the basic reason we renamed it such: the whole point of what we're doing here is to break the mental world apart into its component parts and shuffle them around. Without this kind of shuffling in the head, successful combinations can't be found. By the Holy Rite of Schism, we promote divergence, and then later on, Conjugation, of Sects. In terms of the evolution of mind, MOOism the the first Sectually Reproducing Organism in history. And that's the trick... Before this century, we were in the middle of intellectual Dead Airedale: the process which happens when the mind decomposes from a functioning complex entity into a whole bunch of undifferentiated cells. Old Churches, with monolithic Dogma (the Dead Airedale I mentioned) were like fungi: undifferentiated cells. In a mushroom, all the cells are the same,except for the spores. In a mush-brained Church, all the believers have the same beliefs, except for the clergy, so the transmission of new ideas drops to zero (Dead Air). Now there are certain things that seem obvious to me, Mystically Speaking , but they may not seem obvious to other people. Like the fact that it's inevitable that self-expansive patterns like intelligence and life will eventually reach a point at which that information can be stored in "DreamTime", the pre-dimensional, non-local part of spacetime that's everywhere and everywhen at once. That's a thing that sort of leaps out at me. But maybe not so to you, and even though I'm right, and you're wrong, that doesn't make your concepts any less valid. That's the Metagnostic Influence... We all live in every possible reality that accounts for what's going on vis-a-vis our inputs, like the senses, what happens in the mind. Now, since you're reading something that I've written (that's a good bet, anyway), you must have some overlap with where YOUR mind lives and where MY mind lives. With pretty-damn-close certainty, some of where you live must follow my beliefs, but then,a whole heap of it probably doesn't. Whatever you believe is partly true. By willing suspension of disbelief, Anti-Doubt, you allow yourself to explore bits of where you are that you hadn't thought of before. Since part of your reality lives there, those ideas will almost certainly be useful, and they definitely can't hurt. So run with it. Whatever occurs to you that MIGHT be true, certainly IS true in some reality, linked to the one you think you're in by the mere fact that it LOOKS the same. Of course, you don't have to believe this. You can believe whatever you want, and MOOism will sit there and nod its fool head,grin its fool grin, and make stupid comments about it. PART SIX So let's do an exercise in MOOish MystiSchism. For the moment, let's discard the MOOist attitude, and masquerade it as "Legitimate" Mysticism, like, as in, Cosmogeny instead of Cosmopolitan, Eschatology instead of S-Scatology, and so forth. Dumping the dumb-fool sarcasm that we keep up just to remind you that we're Metagnostic Agnostics. Here she lies: Part Q: The Book Of Nothing In Particular 1) Before the beginning there wasn't nothing. Without comparison,there could be no nothing. The non-nothing was everything and nothing at the same time, because nobody was there to tell it what it couldn't do. But everything without distinction is just more nothing. And so there wasn't nothing, but everything was. 2) After the end, there won't be nothing, for just the same reasons. 3) Between the middle, there remains no nothing, because the gaps have all been filled in by emptiness, which is Something, even if not very much. And so as it was in the beginning, and as it will be after the end, so it is now, between the middle and itself. 4) Everything is held back only by its overwhelming tendency not to exist HERE, and NOW, because of the inconceivable smallness of HERE and NOW when compared with everything. And the everything was separated into Information, which was the pattern of the non-nothing. 5) With the discrimination of Information, there became division,and separation, and this is why not Everything exists for us,because Information separates the True from the False. 6) Inside the non-nothing which is Everything, True and False were separated from each other in Every possible way, because it was Everything, and so things came to be, as we see around us today,and also as we don't, but not HERE and NOW. 7) So finally there was Something, which came from Information,which came from Everything, and Everything was not-Nothing. 8) But where there was Something to compare it with, the not-Nothing was less than Something, and was called Nothing. So from the not-nothing which was Everything comes Something and Nothing,created together everywhere, at all times. 9) Something and Nothing exist Sometimes in Balance and Sometimes Not-In-Balance, but almost always there is more Nothing than Something, because almost always there is only One Thing HERE and NOW. And the One Things are separated by Information which is a great deal of Nothing. 10) So it is that Nothing separates us from each other, since it is here in great abundance, and the only Something that exists exists in the form of One Things or Sometimes Nothing at all. 11) But Information is the Nothing that separates us, and also what makes us what we are, and so at Some HEREs and NOWs, we are not, but at others we are, and in Some of those HEREs and NOWs the Information that we are, in other places, exists. 12) So it is that after we die, we are dead, but remembered, and in some places, we are known, but aren't standing, because there is less Nothing separating us from those Somewheres than from the others, and we are closer to them. PART FIVE As you can see, this makes almost no sense at all. This is,in many ways, a lot like Real Life, and MOOism in general. Of course, it has a lot more explanations than Real Life, and it doesn't seem to contradict itself as much as MOOism in general, but that's what makes it MystiSchism. Obviously, MOOism is everywhere, sort of like the not-Nothing in the Book of Nothing In Particular. Because everyone believes what they do, or else they don't, and everyone follows their beliefs, or else they don't, which is the credo of any Metagnostic Agnostic Anti-Church: Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of The Law, Unless Thou Wilt Not Follow The Law. Everyone is a Pope of their own Sect of Metagnostic Agnotisc MystiSchism: they do what they like, unless they don't want to. They choose to behave the way they do, unless someone or something else chooses for them. Whatever they do, it's the Holy Dogma of MOO that they MUST do it, unless they feel like breaking Holy Dogma, which is also okay. So don't worry about converting them to your own Sect of MOO,