Okay. This is clearly another MOO-Cow. But this one is secret-like. This release is for members of Thee Church Ov MOU ranking Cardinal Richelieu or higher. So if you all ain't one o' them guys, stop a readin' right now, likee. Okay?
Hey, every religion needs secret teachings. Why even the Temple Ov Psychick Youth, which claims to be mainly interested in "demystifying" the occult, regularly conceals until the 23rd year of membership the fact that all sexual Sigils performed for TOPY have the additional effect of channelling True Money into the Mystic Bank Account of Azathoth, a secret numbered account in the 1nterweb Bank 0f the Pr1mord1al Pengu1n. And hey, if YOU were working in secret to bring about the transformation of the human race into the body-form of an ancient pre-evolution egregore, wouldn't YOU keep it a secret?
Anyway, MOOism has lots of secret teachings. One of the more popular hidden knowledges ov MOO is the nature of CCMV, the MOOist reality altering drug. This teaching, which can only be revealed to MOOists of rank 10=! (those who have sent Floyd Gecko $20), is centrally related to those hidden teachings discussed here. Most, however, are hidden where one would least expect them: in plain view. Most hidden teachings are those to be found in Confuse-Ing Inter-Raptures. This MOO-Cow reveals some of the others.
The thing about secret teachings is, they're secret. On account of how we don't tell them to anyone. Why not?
Well, the fact is this: certain things just can't be TOLD to you. Certain things, and certain kinds of truth, are perversely paradoxical. If you tell these things to people, they're actually LESS likely to understand them than if you don't. Because these truths can't be told in words. The really BIG truths are all like this, because all the really important issues are beyond human language. You see, the most important factor in receiving new information is the readiness to accomodate it. Most of the population isn't ready to receive the truth about MOOism. Receiving it now would be self-defeating because, in the absence of understanding, mental antibodies would be created, bolstering their cognifive immune systems against the Truth, which will then never be able to attack, invade, and take over their minds.
So rather than delude you into wrongly thinking that you know what the fuck's going on around here, we keep certain things a secret, and try to steer you into a position where you get to understand these things yourself, by figuring them out. Even if we were to explain them, they'd be misunderstood, and stop you from looking for the answer. Which would do more harm than good.
That being said, I'll now explain them.
Well, some of them.
Some of the secret teachings can be told in public, because, well, human beings are funny that way. You tell them something really important, the key to the question that's bugging them, but they just don't have the perspective to realize it's the answer. Most of life's problems are really simple once you have the answer, but even when people tell you the answer, you assume it can't possibly be right... Because it's too simple!
Once told the answer, the secret, it will eventually fade from memory, burrowing its way into the center of your subconscious, where eventually it will hatch out when the time is right, at the time when you would naturally have figured the secret out for yourself. When this happens, you suddenly realize that you knew the answer all along, but you'd simply forgotten it.
I don't know how many times I've had this happen to me. I'll be working on some problem, or thinking about some question, and when, after a great deal of work, I finally arrive at the answer, I discover either that I knew it all along, or that a much simpler path to the answer, which should have been obvious from the beginning, was there for me all along.
MOOist esoteric secrets are like this.
So now, for the first time ever, they will be revealed, and you will read them, say to yourself "Huh. That's not much of a secret..." and gradually forget you ever heard them. Then, when the profound revelation finally arrives...
So what are these elusive MOOist secrets?
The ones that can be revealed here have been specially chosen to be the forgettable type described above. The mind-blowing, sternum-cracking, ear-twisting secrets of the Inner Circle of MOO remain hidden, known only to a select 104... Until the Final Day of the Carrot, when what is hidden shall be made visible, and what is visible shall be hidden once again, as it was in the Ante-Time of the Otra.
Anyway. The secrets we have to tell you today deal with the long and mysterious history of our great religion-thingy, and its subtle nature.
It is generally believed that MOOism is a new movement, begun in 1991 by Yari, Leper Messiah, and the Hellhound >101<. Despite frequent MOOist claims to date back to Atlantis, to late stone-age North Africa, to medieval Mongolia, or to any number of other, equally ridiculous, places and times of origin, most people are able to discern the somewhat disappointing truth.
Or are they?
The truth, which has been hidden in the open for so long, is that MOOism is an ancient disorganization, hiding now under a new name. For you see, MOOism is a participator-dependent religion. What it is is just what you make of it. Those who encounter MOOism are MOOists, by definition. Those who have yet to encounter MOOism are also MOOists. It is the pure, undefiled nature of that which transcends both existence and nonexistence that is what we are. So if you don't like it, go fuck yourself.
Anyway. Those who are MOOists have complete control over the religion itself. There are as many sects of MOO as there are members - probably more! Anyone is free to create their own religion calling itself MOOism, but which is completely different in many ways. This leads to the great contradictions in the Book. On the other hand, if you like what we do, but don't want to be associated with this obvious drivel, you can create your own religion which is like MOOism, but calls itself by a different name. This has led to Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and other, less obvious, organizations like the IOT, TOPY, and others, all of which share the MOOist philosophy. This is regarded as superior to simply mutating the structures WITHIN MOOism.
And then, for the truly inspired, it is possible to create branches of MOOism which, created entirely from an original mind, is divorced from BOTH MOO's name and its beliefs. These forms of MOOism, which carry on our work in secret, include diverse organizations, disorganizations, and transcendences such as the Catholic Church, Bolivia, the Eli Lilly corporation, the CIA, the 7-11 convenience store franchise, Ethel Merman, and high-nitrogen fertilizer.
In fact, MOOism is simply a new name for the ancient cult of mutability which created these. By replacing those things which already exist by becoming them and carrying on the Secret Work in their guise, MOOism has already infiltrated almost every religion, country, corporation, human being, animal and inanimate object in the world. But in order to bring them into the fold, MOO has often taken on disguises and masks, designed to make it appealing to them. So, while they carry on our work, they are, in general oblivious to it, much as the CIA's agents in foreign countries are often told that they are in the employ of whatever group is most likely to appeal to their politics and beliefs.
It is this secret cult, founded over eleven thousand years ago in the north of Africa, which has recently begun to bubble to the surface of the pond of human consciousness, manifesting in one of its forms as the Church of MOO, that part which is aware of its many other parts, which conflict and fight with each other to maintain the illusion, all the while doing the secret work of Eris...
It is written in Thee Grate Book Ov MOO that "This book is a funhouse mirror: when a monkey looks in, an Apostle looks out". In part, this is true, meaning that only monkeys find Thee Book to be enlightening - partly because enlightenment cannot be written in words, but mostly because Thee Book is stupid. On the other hand, it is also another funhouse mindfuck, meaning the opposite of what it appears to say. When an Apostle looks in, an Apostle looks out, and when a monkey looks in, NO apostle looks out - but the monkey may THINK one does! You see in us what you bring to us, but distorted and warped, so that it is no longer recognizable. This is one Operation-Mindfuck step beyond the Discordian "This book is a mirror". In that case, those who bring anger and fear see their own anger and fear reflected back at them, and those who bring understanding see understanding. With MOO, however, whatever you bring is twisted around the Mobius strip ov reality and turned into its opposite - because opposites are really the same. Or something.
At this point, I can only release one final comment on MOOism as a mirror, and the relationship between this and MOO's attempt to subvert, infect, and distort not only all dogmatic belief systems, but all nondogmatic ones as well...
There is a mythos related by Jorge Borges in his book "The Book Of Imaginary Beings" regarding the origin of the Mirror. Originally, it is said, the world of men and the world of mirrors were not cut off as they are now, and were very different, with neither colours nor shapes the same. Then one night the mirror people invaded the Earth and were beaten back by the magick of the Yellow Emperor, who forced them to repeat, in a kind of dream, our actions. But, says Borges, "a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off."
"The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror, we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated."
In the mirror of Discordianism, MOOism is the Fish.
Now, knowing a little more than you did before about what MOOism aims at, and the ways we have infiltrated reality, you are ready to hear about Gary O'Bannon's true masterwork.
Gary O'Bannon, as you may recall from MOO-Cow Gamma 13, was the Trinidadian genius who created MOOism, in 2018. Gary, or "Yari" O'Bannon, as he preferred to be called, was an artist whose canvas was society itself, and, in the later stages of his career, the fabric of reality itself. His works were, typically, PRANKS, or tricks, designed to delude or fool the audience, and then strip away that delusion, revealing the tendency of the mind to be fooled by mere appearances. His greatest works tended to undermine the observer's confidence in everything they thought they believed about the nature of reality. O'Bannon was, in fact, sued several times by the families of those unstable personalities who lapsed into catatonia, solipsism, or schizophrenia as a result of the unsettling effects of observing an O'Bannon peice. Each peice was like a magic trick, or optical illusion, which was carefully crafted to make the objective universe seem inconsistent or impossible.
In his later works, O'Bannon began to make extensive use of some of the radical new technologies being produced as a result of the advent of nanotechnology in 2011 and the discovery of a unified theory of quantum cosmology in 2016. Although conventional uses of these technologies, such as the KronoScan Inc. time-control products, were usually unobservable from the past, O'Bannon managed to find ways of using them to play practical jokes on history without violating the Novikov-Ziemann consistency principle. O'Bannon's games with history included reverse-engineering the political movement which led to the liberation of North America in 2006, genetically engineering the bizarre creatures found in the Burgess Shale (thus causing significant controversy in 20th century biology), and finally creating the entity known as MOO.
Gary O'Bannon, by retroactively posessing the consciousness of a shaman in northern Africa some 11,000 years earlier, planted the seeds of MOOism, creating a religion based on secrecy and espionage. Members of the cult infiltrated and incorporated religions, city-states, and other organizations as they arose, keeping their own identity secret and guarding their purposes jealously. The core of this cult, which survives to this day in such widely dispersed locations as Tangier, Tibet, and Talahassee, consists of about 23 individuals who still remember the teachings O'Bannon planted so many thousands of years ago, and who manipulate, to the extent that it remains possible, the agents of their cult who have BECOME modern society. Then, planting the barest seeds of awareness of this cult on late 20th century Earth by appearing as a transient pattern of electrons in a single computer, "Yari" O'Bannon began the gradual growth of a movement towards self-reference and self-awareness in what had become human society, leading up to the revelation of the secret 23 unknown rulers in January 2018, at the very moment of the unveiling of this, his most ambitious work to that date.
It was for this innovation in "found civilization", in which O'Bannon turned an existing culture into a work of art in much the same way that Andy Warhol turned soup into art, simply by signing it, that he won the coveted Golden Apple Award at Vanuatu's celebrated Earth-Sun-Moon Conceptual-Art festival at which he unveiled this, his penultimate work.
MOOism, "Yari" O'Bannon's masterpeice, was simply the self- consciousness of the human race, awakening from its self-created slumber. It was a mirror held up to the collective unconscious, allowing us to recognize what we are... For as we all know, the mirror never lies.