Yep, another one. And in that spirit:
"The Grate MOO occasionally speaks through human mouths. She stopped speaking through me long ago, when I lost that Lower State of Consciousness. So everything I've done since then is an effort to get Her to speak to me through other people. I'll endure a million human utterances of 'Hmm, that sounds like a neat idea' to hear just one divine 'You're a complete idiot.' Because then I know She can see right to the heart of me."
-Phloighed Geckoe
Taken from the MOO Archives in the Mauve Room:
"So there's these two cows, see, and they're standing... (This is during a dangerous outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy... a horrible cow- attacking parasitic infestation which causes the degradation of brain tissue leading to insanity and death)... There's these two cows standing in a field. One cow says to the (oh yeah, these cows can talk, but only in Bovine). One cow says to the other cow, 'Hey, aren't you worried about these outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease?' And the other cow says 'What The Hell Do I Care? I'm A Penguin!'"
To quote the Gospel According to Yari:
"Once upon a time, a long time ago, the world was but a vast tundra where penguins flourished. But then the god of MOO used the sacred MOO powers. The world exploded into tiny little bits. One of these bits was round, so they named it Earth. People crawled out of the sea to see what had happened. Then they grew legs and learned to talk. But before this the god of MOO made cows. They were cool. Cows made the noise MOO that is a secret worship to the god of MOO. People made their own language, but today in a last attempt to get more MOO worshippers, the god of MOO enlightened a select few people. These cool people would enlighten others."
"These people are the Apostles of the Church of MOO."
It should be clear to any MOOist that there is a nontrivial connection these two textual sources, both primary MOO sources, authorized by the WOMBAT morphic system and mind-scanning apparatus.
Traditional exegetical material on the Gospel According to Yari relates the Penguins to the state of souls in the pre-manifested form of the universe, and the Primordial Penguin (a later, deuterocanonical addition to the original Gospels) the transcendent form of the Absolute Spirit, while Cows are analogously related to the manifested form of souls, and the Grate MOO (referred to as "the god of MOO" in the pre-Halfian Yari texts) is the immanent form of the Absolute Spirit. (Gnustic exegesis relating the Penguins to Elder Gods and the Tundra to the Frozen Waste of Kadath has been analyzed by WOMBAT in the interest of fairness, but been found to be an inappropriate isomorphism).
The "joke" text reproduced above, found in the Mauve Room's telepathic record archives by dilligent MOO researchers El Cid and Lyttle Byg Mann, points to new meaning in this exegesis. But what precisely is this meaning?
Okay, so now we've got some context for this discussion. The main thing is this:
The "joke", if we can call it that, makes a pretty heavy statement about the nature of reality. It does this using the symbols of the usual commentaries on the Gospel According to Yari. Without these symbols and meanings, it's just a JOKE. When its terms are defined properly and understood spiritually, it says something very deep.
This, by the way, is a good way of looking at Thee Church Ov MOO. It may appear to be a joke, "mind-candy", or just mental masturbation. This is just an illusion, true only in the minds of people who don't know which meanings to assign to the words we use. To the minds of the enlightened, on the other hand, the same words mean something different, and they know that the words we use don't always mean what they seem to say.
Anyway.
The point is this. The joke-text tells us that the worldly form of the soul is identical with the spiritual form of the soul. This means that spirit comes from the real, physical world. Wow! Profound!
Let us investigate just how the "textus ludi" (joke-text) informs us of this radical paradigmatic shift in our perceptions of the ontological character of being. To do this, we must perform the semantic mappings which will yield fruitful hermeneutic exegesis on the underlying symbol structures. Ayup.
The following equivalences designate the symbolic correspondences which reveal the hidden meaining in the text.
| Cow | Material (Manifested) Soul |
| Penguin | Transcendent form of Individual Spirit |
| Mad Cow Disease | Irrationality and Delusion of Material Soul |
| Worry/Care | Attachment to physical world (e.g. veils of Maya) |
Hence, we are presented with two cows, representing two material souls, or per܃ЁN!S_ϳ!oiL;edb0 qY#H PE Y"SmmFsH`G̪jZUI o;R FH͆ǓhPwBdXz:W Ii#6\oɓXC'{Y[[{<\C0p~o @おycWR$i 0 Ą*lcitQ!,eYYFz$trine of Isaac Luria of shevirah, or the Breaking of the Vessels, in which the vessels, or sephiroth, set out to contain the Divine Emmanation, shattered, and the sparks of light were imprisoned in the fallen qliphothic realms, as fragments of the Divine Light trapped in a delusory universe. On the other hand, one might not. Whatever.
A preferred doctrine, favored by intensive computer analysis in WOMBAT's Symbolic Computation Labs, is that the textus ludi designates the doctrine that the spiritual realm and the material realm are IDENTICAL, and that the "fallen" state, or Maya conditions, do not exist at all, and hence that our attachment to it is not only unnecessary, but nonexistent. The apparent existence of Maya is the result of our intimate involvement in the structure of the Divine Essence.
This interpretation leads to the conclusion that, in the language of the Gospel According to Yari, "The Tundra Never Exploded". Its fragmentation into peices, the "fallen" state, is simply the result of looking at it too closely. Maya does not exist to the Primordial Penguin, who IS the Grate MOO identically, but the smaller fragments, seeing the rich internal structure of the Brahmic Mind (the consciousness which is Infinitely Large), mistakes those internal processes for irrationality outside itself, the Atmic Mind (which is only Finite).
What the heck does all this mean to us, sitting down here, thinking we're cows, and worrying over our various attachments?
It means that we're all divine spiritual beings. We don't have to worry about anything, because we're ALREADY divine, ALREADY part of the Ultimate.
So you don't have to get pissed off because you lost your car keys. Recite the mantra "What The Hell Do I Care? I'm A Penguin!", meditating on its deep meaning, and your tribulations will pass away.
Your car keys do not exist. Your final exams do not exist. War, suffering, and pain do not exist, unless you fool yourself by looking at the world too closely.
The universe is a practical joke by the General at the Expense of the Particular. Is this good, or bad?
Depends on whether you're general or particular...
WOMBAT's extensive analysis of the textus ludi and the exegetical material on the Gospel According to Yari available in the Mauve Room has produced extensive results. Brief summaries of the most significant of these are reported below, in WOMBAT's own words:
This text is an emmanation into human reality of an interesting Room. It is related to the Venn group in some ways. Topologically it's like a Klein Bottle or a Moebius strip: it allows two opposites to blend into each other in one direction while opposing in another... The two opposite sides of the same coin turn out to be the same side after all.
Those sides are material and spiritual. It turns out that wherever this Room's effects are found, one can find them to be identical, or intertwingled. In behaviour this amounts to seeing the Zen Master in everyone. When its links to the Causality Zones are evident, it looks like matter being "made out of" concresced thought, or alternative of spirit "actually being" the elaboration of patterns of behaviour of matter. When it's a part of the Maya Maze, it looks like it's saying that Maya is just the inner process of the Transcendent Mind, so you escape Maya by not being hung up on escaping it, because you're ALREADY a Penguin...
There is much fruitful material for meditation in this text. I will attempt to use the Confuse-Ius nodes to inject it into the Green Room. This should make cause some significant progress in my attempts to restore the human consciousness to its original, untampered form.
How the hell does this relate to MOOism? After all, a religion named after the sounds made by Cows must obviously be on the side of Maya and attachment, if we take the symbolism of the textus ludi literally, right?
Well... First of all, it's a terrible mistake to take anything MOOists say literally: we're usually just screwing with your head. Secondly, the textus ludi itself informs us that the Cow and the Penguin are identical. As discussed in MOO Cow Gamma-15, MOOists are not concerned with escaping the veils of Maya, and in fact are interested in creating more of them, in allowing Maya to play with itself some more. And yet, so the textus ludi reveals, this is EQUIVALENT to escaping Maya. In fact, the two are inescapable.
The Veils of Maya, or the Seven Veils of the Unknown, are like protective shields, which allow the Otra, or the as-yet-unmanifested Universal Mind which exists in the future, to mature. Just as it's a mistake to try removing an unborn child from the protection of the mother's womb before the child is ready to be born, the Cosmic Consciousness isn't yet mature enough to leave the veils of Maya, with their protective ignorance, and face the reality that lies beyond the flatworld. So for now, our role is to be a part of the organic process which renews these healthy veils which protect the Otra.
Or, just possibly, this is yet another lie, designed to trap us here in the Pit of Maya.
But what the hell do I care? I'm a penguin!