In case some of you didn’t get a copy of this, there were some public-spirited citizens outside who apparently have been reading some of my books, which is not something I recommend to public-spirited citizens. Public-spirited citizens should only read things that are easy for them to understand. Warning! The Bible warns against false teachers and false prophets. There shall not be found among you anyone who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and they shall be smitten.

Now, the Spirit expressly says that, in latter time, some will depart from the faith giving up, giving heeds, deceiving spirits, and doctrines of demons, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, and they shall be smitten. The coming of the lawless one is according to the works of Satan, with all power signs and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish because they did not receive the love of the truth. And they shall put Hawaiian music in elevators, and they shall be smitten! And they will not put ketchup in a decent bottle, but in a silly piece of plastic, and they shall be smitten! For this you know that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words. Therefore, do not be partakers with them. They shall be smitten also.

The Bible also tells us there is hope, and then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. That’s hope? Oh well. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many, and because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. [???], that was [???] magical name. I shall endure to the end. Jesus answered and said to them, “Most assuredly I say to you: unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” No instructions on how to get back into the womb. Oh well.

Then, if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And if you can’t believe that, you can believe in Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk. Everybody can believe in something. You decide, it says. Okay, that’s the warning. Close the doors before they all escape.

I’m really very flattered. It’s not often that a writer of philosophical comedy manages to arouse that kind of reaction. I personally, I never try to reason with fundamentalists. There’s an old Irish proverb: “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It will just waste your time and annoy the pig.” The Ayatollah Khomeini says—he’s written a commentary on the Koran which is required reading in the schools in Iran now. And he says that if a man sodomizes camels habitually, this is regrettable, but it is not legitimate grounds for divorce, because Allah does not approve of divorce. However, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s God does have his limits. His tolerance is not infinite. You can fornicate with all the camels you want, but the Ayatollah Khomeini’s God does not approve of sodomizing your brother-in-law. According to the Ayatollah Khomeini, if you habitually sodomize your brother-in-law, that does give your wife grounds for divorce under Islamic law. And so if you’re planning to move to Iran, keep that in mind: camels are okay, but keep your hands off your brother-in-law or your wife can divorce you. I don’t know how the Ayatollah Khomeini got this insight into what God is thinking, but the people who wrote this obviously also know what God is thinking, and God has a hard-on for me, obviously.

I can’t imagine why. I’ve got nothing against God myself. Of course, if I had been around at the creation, I would have had a lot of helpful suggestions. I would have put the testicles inside the body. Yeah, I mean, any man in the audience who got through high school will tell you they’re in a hell of a place. Any practical joker can get at them, right? Ah, gotcha! You know? Aaah! You can’t get through high school. I would have put them inside the body; protect us from all that kind of stuff. I would also have them protected by a layer of bone as thick as a Presbyterian’s skull. One can’t be too safe. I would have arranged for all males to be born with vasectomies, and acquire fertility only at the point at which they and some women think it’s a good idea. Yeah, wouldn’t that be a great idea? Well, science might do that. We’re getting to the point of reversible vasectomy. There’s a lot of research going on. But I don’t know if the Ayatollah would approve of that.

By the way, do you think the Ayatollah is a crazy old man, or that he’s really in contact with God, anybody out there? As usual, a disagreement of opinion. Let me point out that the Pope also claims to be in touch with God, and he says there is no legitimate grounds for divorce whatsoever. According to the Catholic Church, the Pope is infallible, and the Pope says: no divorce on any grounds. So it doesn’t matter how many camels a man sodomizes, his wife can’t divorce him. She might catch something even worse than AIDS. I mean, God knows what camels have. I don’t even like to think about it. I’m pretty weird, but as far as my fantasy life goes is chickens. Camels? Jesus! But apparently they have a lot of guys sodomizing camels in Iran, or the Ayatollah wouldn’t have had to write that commentary. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how many camels. You can bugger all the camels you want, because Allah does not approve of divorce. Your wife is stuck with you. The Pope says she’s stuck with you even if you sodomize your brother-in-law.

The Pope goes even further than that. He says if you love your wife too much, that’s as bad as adultery. Remember that? That was in the papers a short while ago; the Pope made that announcement. He knows all about marriage, because he has lived in an all-male society all his life and he wears skirts. I don’t quite understand men who like to wear skirts. I’ve got nothing against it. I’m a broad-minded man myself. As W. C. Fields said, “I don’t mind seven aces in the deck, but when I’ve only dealt three of them to you, I like to know how the hell you got four.” But I don’t mind guys who are going out in drag. The guys who habitually go out in drag and live in an all-male society, and then make laws about how husbands and wives should relate to each other, I think they’re going outside the area of their competence. If they made rules for the Castro in San Francisco, I’d say, okay, maybe they know what they’re talking about.

On the other hand, there’s Andrea Dworkin. She, for years, has been proclaiming that sexual intercourse is terrible because it represents an exploitation of the woman by the man. You’ve heard that, haven’t you? Andrea Dworkin? She’s one of the leading spokes-entities. I can’t say spokesperson because that’s human chauvinism, so I say spokes-entity. She’s one of the leading spokes-entities for radical feminism, which has very little in common with mainstream feminism or common sense or anything like that. She has recently softened her position, so to speak. She’s getting almost as liberal as the pope. She says that sexual intercourse between men and women is not necessarily exploitative of the woman, as long as the man doesn’t have an erection at the time.

You think I’m making this up? I assure you, the Ayatollah exists. Andrea Dworkin exists. The pope exists. And the people who wrote this exist. The world is full of people who know what’s right for you and me. I don’t know how they do it. I find it very hard to decide what’s right for me, myself. I’m confused all the time. And yet, there are these people who know what’s right for every one of you. I don’t know how they do it.

But this is supposed to be a philosophical entertainment, or a transformational entertainment, or something like that. So it’s time I got serious. Do you know that juries have the right to nullify the law? Very few people know that. Actually, that was what the Magna Carta was all about. The barons did not drag King John to Runnymede and put him on starvation rations and hold him prisoner, and force him to sign that document just so that juries could ratify what the government has decided to do. The whole idea of Magna Carta was that juries could make up their own mind what laws they were willing to have imposed upon the English population. And this has been upheld repeatedly, as in the trial of William Penn in 1690, where William Penn was technically guilty of speaking in public. That was against the law at that time—if you had unpopular religious opinions, you couldn’t speak in public. The jury refused to convict him, and the judge ordered the jury locked up until they would convict him. And the jury kept coming, being brought back to court every day from the Tower of London where they were locked up, and they said, “We still find the defendant innocent,” until it became the biggest controversy in London, and finally the judge admitted the jury did have that right. The United States Supreme Court upheld that right, too, in the 1890s in a celebrated case. They ruled that the jury has the right to nullify the law; that the purpose of the jury system is that twelve people, selected at random, can speak for the whole community about what laws they want imposed on them. The Supreme Court also ruled that the judge doesn’t have to tell that to the jury. Well, they’re judges themselves.

You know what a judge is? A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers. Just like the Pope is a theology student who marks his own examination papers. The Pope was declared infallible by the Council of Cardinals. There’s not one Catholic in a million who can tell you when the Council of Cardinals became infallible. If the Council of Cardinals is not infallible, they might have been wrong when they said the Pope was infallible. So to prove the Pope is infallible, you’ve got to prove the Council of Cardinals is infallible. And to prove the Council of Cardinals is infallible, you’ve got to prove the people who select the people who get on the Council of Cardinals is infallible, or you turn into one infinite regress that way. It’s the same thing with judges. Judges are not infallible. Infallible human beings have not been found yet. And you have the right to your own conscience. If you have a called up for jury duty, you can decide for yourself. You don’t have to follow the judge’s instructions.

Okay, that’s the end of the serious part of the night. But just remember that, if you’re on a jury and somebody is charged with possession of some consciousness-altering substance, if you’re in favor of people changing their consciousness, you don’t have to believe it when the judge says, “He committed a crime, therefore you must find him guilty.” You can judge by your own conscience.

Another great part of the American legal tradition is the First Amendment, which says that Congress shall make no laws establishing a religion. This is known as the iron wall of separation between church and state, and it has been interpreted consistently to mean that the government can’t interfere in religion—which means that everybody in this country has the right to practice whatever religion they like, or not to practice any religion at all. And, as a matter of fact, that was so clearly understood at the birth of the Republic—am I getting serious again?—that, in the treaty with Tripoli in 1796, the treaty with Tripoli contained the words, “Since the United States is in no sense of the words a Christian nation.” That actually appears in the treaty with Tripoli. That was written by John Adams, who was vice president. It was passed by the Senate, and it was signed by George Washington, who was president with no dissenting voice. They all understood that the United States was not a Christian country. So when you hear people like Jerry Falwell or Ronald Reagan telling you this is a Christian country, they are not only insulting and denigrating all the Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and other non-Christian Americans, but they are denying the whole constitutional tradition. This is not a Christian country. You have the right to your own religion.

On a more solemn note, I would like to add a P.S. to that. Jerry Falwell can kiss my dick. The real meaning of the First Amendment didn’t become evident until God sent down an angel to this planet, who took the name of Kirby Hensley. Kirby Hensley is an illiterate—or so he claims; I sometimes think he’s just a joker. He claims to be an illiterate, but he got a degree from a theological seminary, he claims, by having his daughter answer the questions on the examinations for him. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. He could just be a joker. But he’s a legitimate doctor of divinity and minister of the gospel, and he got his own revelation, which is that every person has the right, every entity has the right—I almost slipped into humanism again, didn’t I? Every entity has the right to be a minister of a gospel. One can’t say the gospel, because that’s a rather bigoted and narrow-minded point of view. Every entity has the right to be a minister of a gospel. So Kirby Hensley will ordain anybody. He founded the Universal Life Church with the express purpose of ordaining everybody who wants to be a minister of the gospel.

Have you all heard of the Universal Life Church? It’s in Pasadena, and they don’t charge. All you got to do is send in a letter and say you want to be ordained, and they’ll make you a clergy entity. He has not only ordained hundreds of thousands of people. He has ordained dogs, cats, parrots, chimpanzees. If you want—whatever your house pet is, even if it’s only a goldfish, you can get your goldfish ordained. Just write to Kirby Hensley, Universal Life Church, Pasadena, and your goldfish will be a minister of a gospel. I think this is the greatest step forward in human liberty practically since Magna Carta itself.

One of the people who got ordained by Kirby Hensley was the Archdruid of the Reformed Druids of North America. The reformed druids was formed at a college in Illinois back in the fifties. They had a requirement that every student had to attend some kind of religious service once a week. A lot of colleges used to have requirements like that. Some still do, I think. And so a group of students who objected to this rule announced that they were druids, and announced they held their religious services in the woods. So they all went out into the woods once a week. And then they got interested in druidism, and they started doing research, and they gradually established the Reformed Druids of North America. They accepted as their sacrament the waters of life, which in Gaelic is uisge beatha, or something like that. I don’t quite speak Gaelic very well. And the waters of life is Irish mist mixed with water. And it is a very groovy sacrament—especially in the more reformed of the reformed groves, because they’re supplementing it with cannabis these days, which makes for an even higher sacrament.

After a while, some of the archdruids really became important Gaelic scholars after they got their degrees. One of the archdruids wrote a book called Real Magic. He was—Isaac Bonewits, I’m referring to. He was the first—Bonewits fans? He was the first entity ever to graduate from the University of California with a degree in magic. And he is archdruid of his own druidic grove, and he’s ordained by Kirby Hensley, too.

I split off from the—I was a member of the Reformed Druids for a while, but I decided I couldn’t accept their basic teaching, which is: nature is good. So I formed the Reformed Non-Aristotelian Druids of North America (RNA-DNA), and our teaching is: nature seems good. Now that’s because, as non-Aristotelians, we don’t like the Aristotelian is-s of identity. I don’t know what anything is, I only know how things seem to me. When I hear people arguing about whether Beethoven is better than Mozart, or is Van Gogh a better painter than Picasso, or is Thomas Wolfe a better novelist than William Faulkner? I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. All I can talk about is how Beethoven and Mozart seemed to me, how Van Gogh and Picasso seemed to me, how Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner seemed to me. I don’t know any is-s.

And so I formed the the Reformed Non-Aristotelian Druids of North America, with the doctrine: nature seems good to us—which is a non-Aristotelian position. And we started out with only three members, and in only fifteen years we have more than tripled our membership. I never got ordained by Kirby Hensley, because there was a group in Chicago that were doing ordinations too, called the Missionaries of the New Truth, and I knew their address, and I didn’t know Kirby Hensley. So I had them ordain me, and I’m still an ordained missionary of the New Truth. Although I don’t often brag about it, because the bishop got busted shortly thereafter for manufacturing acid in his bathroom. But I think he was led by a holy spirit. Why else would he ordain me?

Tome people say Mormonism is the first church based on a science fiction novel. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. There seems that Joseph Smith was working at a printing house where a science fiction novel was set up, and then he disappeared with the plates. And then later he showed up with these plates he claimed he got from an angel called Moroni. And these plates seem to be identical with the missing plates from the science fiction novel. Although there’s a lot of debate about that. Right now, people are getting blown up in Salt Lake City every couple of weeks over that debate. That’s what’s known as the odium theologicum, or the hatred theologians have for one another. I don’t claim to know the truth. The evidence isn’t all in yet. Maybe there really is an angel whose name sounds like it’s based on “moron,” or maybe Joseph Smith was a great practical joker. Maybe he stole the pages of the science fiction novel, and said, “I’ll claim it came from an angel whose name sounds like ‘moron,’ and see how many morons will believe that line of crap.” I don’t know.

But the first religion definitely, unambiguously, and admittedly based on a science-fiction novel is the Church of All Worlds. Any members here? Ah, good. We’ve got a nest in Boulder, too. The Church of All Worlds was formed in St. Louis in the early sixties, and was based on Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It was started by a psychiatric social worker named Tim Zell, who decided that even though this religion came from a science fiction novel, it was worth having a church based on it, because it made as much sense—no, not as much sense. He felt it made more sense than any religion he had ever heard of before. So if people are willing to base their religion on the legends of the ancient Jews, or on what the people on hallucinogenic mushrooms in India were thinking 3,000 years ago, why not base a religion on a science fiction novel? And, matter of fact, it’s a damn good science fiction novel. And so they formed the Church of All Worlds, which is the only religion on this planet based on a Martian framework.

Heinlein, in the novel, tried to imagine what kind of religions the Martians would invent. And of course, since water is very scarce on Mars, the major ritual of this religion is sharing water. And the members of the Church of All Worlds are called water brothers and water sisters. The basic teaching is “Thou art God,” which sounds vaguely like something I seem to have heard elsewhere. Later they changed it to “Thou art God, Thou art Goddess,” after the influence of feminism was felt in the Church of All Worlds. You know, the campus crusade for Christ has those bumpers stickers that say “I found it?” The Church of All Worlds has counter bumpers stickers that say “Thou art it,” which happens to be the basic teaching of Buddhism: tat tvam asi—thou art it. So somehow, out of science fiction and a sense of humor, they get back to the foundations of Buddhism. I think it’s a very interesting sociological development.

The Church of All Worlds has nests in most large American cities now. The Reformed Druids of North America have groves in most cities in California and one in New York. The founder of the Church of All Worlds, Timothy Zell, recently bred a unicorn. You must have heard about that. They’ve got a lot of publicity after he went to the unicorn, to Bonham and Bailey’s, Ringling Brothers Circus, or whatever. You’ve heard about that unicorn, Lancelot? Ah yeah. Well, now Tim is down in the South Pacific looking for a mermaid. I figure, anybody who can found a religion based on a science-fiction novel and then breed a unicorn has a good chance of finding a mermaid. So keep your minds open and your eyes open. You might be reading about a mermaid in the papers in the next year or so. He’s down there in the South Pacific looking for mermaids.

Another religion founded in the early sixties was the J—by the way, I’m a water brother myself. I was initiated into the Church of All Worlds. I’m a bit of a connoisseur of religions. I believe you should try them all and then invent your own. Another religion founded around that time is the John Dillinger Died For You Society, which was—this was created in Austin, Texas. The damnedest things come out of Texas! This was actually founded on the campus of the University of Texas. And it’s based on the belief that John Dillinger died for us, as the name suggests. Dillinger represents the independent American spirit and free enterprise. And he showed that, even in hard times, even during a depression, you don’t have to wait for government handouts. You can solve your own economic problems with your own ingenuity. They call him Saint John the Martyr. And a lot of sayings of his are treasured in the John Dillinger Died For You Society. “Lie down on the floor and keep calm.” He said that to many bank presidents, vice presidents, tellers, and others. And it is very good advice. If you ever feel yourself getting too uptight, just think of Saint John and repeat the mantra, “lie down on the floor and keep calm.” Then lie down on the floor and keep calm. And pretty soon you’ll see things are a little better. Another of the wonderful sayings of Saint John the Martyr is: “You can get more with a simple prayer and a Thompson submachine gun than you can get with a simple prayer alone.” I think that’s the foundation of American foreign policy.

Pardon me while I have some a little more to—this is only water. Well, it may say gin on it, but that’s just… that’s what’s known as a breaching experiment in ethnomethodology. You grok ethnomethodology? Yeah, yeah! Ethnomethodology is the science of practical jokes. Or else it’s a criticism of sociology. Ethnomethodology was started by Harold Garfinkel at UCLA. And whether it’s another one of these new religions or whether it’s a branch of sociology isn’t very clear. Garfinkel decided the only way to study our society is to make it anthropologically strange. That is to say: look at it as an alien society. And the way to do that is to change your perspective. So his students were told to go home and observe their parents as if they were boarders in the house and not children, and then write reports on how their parents behaved. The students found this profoundly disorienting. So Garfinkel decided it was worth pursuing. So he told them to go home again and treat their parents as if they were only boarders in the house. The parents found this profoundly disorienting, too.

Garfinkel, though, noted a curious thing. Even when it was explained that this was a sociological experiment, the parents were not amused. So then Garfinkel tried other experiments, like having students go out and, in conversation, they would move closer and closer to the person they’re talking to. Now, if you’ve ever lived in Mexico, you’ve had this experience. Mexicans feel comfortable when they’re about six inches away from you. Americans feel comfortable about a foot and a half apart. So if you’re at a party in Mexico, you see the Mexicans moving closer and closer and the Americans moving further and further back, until gradually they’ve crossed the whole room without either of them being conscious of what they’re doing. So Garfinkel told the students, “I’ll talk to somebody and move closer and closer until your nose is touching that person’s nose, and see how they react.” And he noted that the most extreme reactions occurred when males did this to other males. He said it was almost always interpreted sexually. And even when it was explained that it was a sociological experiment, the anger did not go away. And people said, “But why did you pick me for that experiment?” Friendships were destroyed in some cases.

So Garfinkel decided: I’m really onto something here. And so he had students go for psychotherapy with psychotherapists who gave them random answers. Rather than following any school of psychotherapy, they just followed a random number series about whether they supported or contradicted what the students said. And students found meaning in that as much as in any other form of psychotherapy. You know who were the two most famous students of Garfinkel? Carlos Castaneda and George Lucas. You see, ethnomethodology has gotten to you even if you’ve never heard about it. As a matter of fact, this whole talk is a breaching experiment. I’m a disciple of Garfinkel, too.

It was in 1968 that Timothy Leary made the decisive turning point and brought all this to fruition. He wrote—that was when he was the head of the League for Spiritual Discovery, which, by some strange coincidence, had the initials LSD. The League for Spiritual Discovery was devoted to raising consciousness on a planetary scale. And one of the first publications they put out was a pamphlet by Leary called Start Your Own Religion. And it was based on the idea that humanity will always be in a mess as long as we’re looking for others to tell us what we should do. And so everybody should become the priest. Every man should be the priest of his own religion. Every woman should be the priestess of her own religion. Every home should be a shrine. And we should all be in the God business, or the Goddess business, as you will. And that’s it.

After the Reformed Druids and the John Dillinger Society and the Church of All Worlds, the country was ready for that, so it really caught on. And so a lot of new religions cropped up. And I think it’s one of the most interesting developments that’s happened since the sixties. For instance, Antero Alli, who put on that magnificent mime show at the beginning of this, founded the Church of Fred Mertz-Bodhisattva. Ah, we got some here! The Church of Fred Mertz-Bodhisattva is based on the notion that Fred Mertz, on the I Love Lucy show, is a Bodhisattva, and that this whole show is actually an attempt to enlighten the planet. And if you’re in the proper state of mind, you will find the profundities in everything Fred says. Some people think this is—is this a breaching experiment? Is this in the Garfinkel tradition, or is it a way to enlightenment?

Well, it depends. If you look at I Love Lucy reruns in the proper frame of mind, you’ll find Fred is really saying profound things. Like, sometimes he’s like Nasreddin. One show, Fred says, “I don’t understand women at all.” And I thought: what a confession of the intellectual bankruptcy of patriarchy. The whole patriarchal system. Fred says, “I don’t know what the heck is going on around here.” No Buddhist, Vedantist, or Daoist has ever given a clearer description of the mystical experience than that. You know, Zen students meditate on one-word kōans, like there’s the one that’s “Mu.” You’ve all heard the Mu kōan? “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?” And the answer is “Mu,” which means negation or nothing or no in Chinese. There are a lot of one-word kōans and murts, you know, like, “Huh?” “What?” You know? And you can go “Oh?” And you can meditate on these, and people, human beings, human critters, domesticated primates, critters like us, we live—no, no, stop laughing. This is one of the important parts. We live in our myths. We only endure our realities.

Now, when I was in New Jersey at the beginning of this tour, I met a lawyer who seemed to me as—oh, even New Jersey gets it. This is a lively audience. How about Brooklyn? Can I get a round of applause for Brooklyn? Hey, Bakersfield! Grover’s Mills! That’s where the UFOs landed! Hey, yeah. Now I forgot where I was going. Oh, yeah. While I was in New Jersey I met a lawyer who seemed to me a sane, sober, honorable, decent, trustworthy person. And he turned me onto some grass, which he said was Johnny Carson’s own. He swore that this is grown in Mendocino, only for Johnny Carson, on a private farm. And none of it is ever put on the open market. But last year they had a bumper crop. And Johnny, out of the goodness of his heart, out of his Buddha nature, he told the grower: you can put some of that on the market for a selected clientele for people who really appreciate it. And so—and that’s what I was saying. We live through our myths. We only adore our reality. I don’t know if this lawyer was putting me on, or whether this really was Johnny Carson’s own. But I tried it and I looked at I Love Lucy, and I became convinced. Antero Alli is a genuine profit. Everything Fred Mertz says is incredibly profound if you’re in the right state of mind when you’re looking at it.

Now, if you can’t get Johnny Carson’s own, you can do Pranayama. Pranayama, you breathe through one nostril. Then through the other. You know, that’s a brief introduction to Pranayama. You get more detailed instructions over it in the Roper or a sub-local institute. You do Pranayama and sit down and look at I Love Lucy and you get the same effect as Johnny Carson’s own. Everything Fred Merck says is incredibly profound. So this is the answer to the great Zen Cohen. Who is the master who makes the grass green? Who makes the sad man sad? Who makes the angry woman angry? Who makes those assholes out front, right pamphlets like this? Who makes the grass green? Who’s in charge of the whole show around here? Well, if Fred Merck seems dumb to you, then you do Pranayama or smoke Johnny Carson’s own if you can get your hands on it. And then Fred Merck seems profound. You’re the one who’s made the change.

The whole universe depends on you. Which brings me to another religion that I played a role in founding, the Discordian society. The Discordian society is based on the worship of Aris, the Greek goddess of chaos, confusion, discord, bureaucracy and international relations. And we’re Hanotheists. The debate between monotheism and polytheism has gotten pretty stale at this point in history. We still have a lot of polytheists around. One of the interesting homemade religions of the 60s was the Church of the Golden Calf in Berkeley, California. They carried around a golden calf and they would go to street meetings by the campus crusade for Christ and they would bow down and worship the golden calf. And then hand out leaflets denouncing monotheistic bigotry.

I think that got a bit corny. I’m neither on the side of the polytheist nor the monotheist. We take a middle path in the Discordian society which you’ll find in your dictionary. Hanotheism. Hanotheism is the belief that there are infinitely many gods but you have the right to pick one for yourself that you like best.

Or you decide is most important. Just like there are many many composers and I pick Beethoven is my favorite. But I don’t go around saying Beethoven is better than Mozart. I just say Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me most of the time.

There are times I’m just in the mood for Mozart and it’s the same with Arise. I accept her as the chick what done it all. Most of it. That’s the official title in the Discordian society. Most of the time. Other times I can see the parts of the universe look like maybe Loki or Coyote had something to do with them. Some of them look a little bit like Shiva may have been active there.

But mostly it looks like the work of Arise. Because what I see when I look around what I see most of is chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy and international relations. And since she’s in charge of all five of them it’s obvious that she is the most active divinity on the planet at this time. And these are the five stages of chaos. First there’s simple chaos. Then there’s discord in which people start arguing about whether they can find a pattern in the chaos and that. And one group says yes we found the pattern. There is one mind behind all things. And others say no the one mind is not behind all things.

It’s above all things and it’s male and it acts like an oriental despot and it wants us to worship it. And the other gang says no. There are three minds, the father, the son and the holy ghost. And then somebody else says no there are nine of them and there are nine nuices.

And so then you get discord trying to find a pattern in the chaos. Then you get confusion when philosophers come along and try to decide which of these visions are more true than the other. Is it one mind or many minds or no mind? The Chinese think it’s no mind.

Wuxin, no mind. That makes sense to me because what’s behind all minds is the class of all minds. That’s obvious mathematically and the class of all minds is not a mind.

For the same reason the class of all pianos is not a piano. And so Wuxin makes sense to me part of the time. On the other hand, once you get to philosophy and confusion arguing about which metaphors are best, the next thing is that you’ve got to set up a bureaucracy to organize society according to whichever metaphor the philosophers or governors have decided is best. And bureaucracy inevitably collides with other bureaucracies and thus we get international relations, which is the high AC. All of these are different stages of chaos. The Pentagon is a holy shrine to the discordian society because it shows the steady escalation of chaos until you reach the level of bureaucracy, which looks like the opposite of chaos, but is actually the highest form of chaos until you get to international relations, which is an even higher form of chaos. There is a story about a general who kept moving his desk and nobody objected because they’re all eccentric in the Pentagon.

They just look at the United States policy and you see that. Nobody objected until he moved his desk out into the hall and then they started worrying about him. And then he kept moving his desk down the hall and finally he moved it into the men’s room. And at this point they appointed a committee to decide what to do about him and the committee appointed a fact-finding committee to make recommendations. And the fact-finding committee appointed a research committee to make recommendations to the fact-finding committee.

And after several months the committee of the first part reported to the committee of the second part, which reported to the committee of the whole. And the committee of the whole came to the conclusion the thing to do was to send a psychiatrist into the men’s room and ask him why he had his desk in the men’s room. So they got an army psychiatrist to go into the men’s room and he’s sitting there at the desk busy working. And the psychiatrist says, pardon me, would you mind telling me why you moved your desk into the men’s room? He said, not at all. It’s the only place in the building where people know what they’re doing, do it and get the hell out.

Speaker 2: Marx believed that all societies go through three stages, thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But according to the Discordian revelation everything is related to the number five because we’ve got five fingers and man is the measure of all things except those things of which woman is the measure. And so therefore everything relates to the number five. And so therefore that’s why we have the five stages of chaos, simple chaos, confusion, discord, bureaucracy and international relations.

And every society actually goes through five stages, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, paralysis and parisus. I was on a radio show in Edmonton, Alberta last year. We could even get a clause for Alberta. That’s pretty good. And there was a teacher up there who was recently fired from his job for teaching. He was a civics teacher in a high school up there. He was fired for teaching his students that there’s a Jewish conspiracy that runs the world.

And they have a law in Canada against inciting hatred against any specific group. As he got fired from his job there was a lot of controversy about it. And the interviewer asked me, you’re an expert on conspiracy theories, I’ve heard. I said, well, if you get a book published on anything, you’re an expert on it.

So I guess I’m an expert. He said, well, how do you account for theories like that? And I said, parisus. And he said, what? He thought I was going to give him some complicated psychological theory.

I told him it takes 20 years for syphilis to turn into parisus. By that time, you’re the head of the corporation. And if you look at the membership of the John Birch Society, you’ll find they’re all middle-aged men who are heads of corporations. They’ve got to the stage where the syphilis is turned into parisus. And that’s how they developed these elaborate theories about Rockefeller working in collaboration with the communists in Moscow to screw the middle-class businessmen in Des Moines, Iowa. And nobody who didn’t have parisus would possibly imagine David Rockefeller and Gorbachev sitting down to plot against people in Des Moines.

But once you’ve got parisus, that makes perfect sense to you. That’s what keeps fundamentalism alive. One of the major tasks of the Discordian Society is to make every man, woman, and child on the planet a pope.

We’ve decided that Kirby Hensley did not go far enough in trying to make everybody a clergy entity. We want to make everybody a pope. And so we’ve been distributing pope cards for nearly 20 years now. And if you buy my book, Illuminatus, you’ll find a pope card in there. You can cut it out and put it into your wallet and purse, and that makes you a pope.

Those... If you don’t want to read all the way through Illuminatus, you can buy the Discordian Bible, Principia Discordia, from Lumpanix Unlimited, and cut out the pope card in there. The pope card has also been reproduced in Margot Adler’s book, Drawing Down the Moon, which is a study of contemporary goddess-oriented religions. And she has a whole chapter on Discordianism and includes a pope card, so you can cut that one out. Between the pope cards distributed by Discordian missionaries and the pope cards that got distributed through the circulation of those books, over half a million popes were created. And then the Vatican recently announced that bishops can give indulgences over television.

They never allowed to do that before. And indulgences is a big thing if you’re a Catholic. It means you spend less time in Purgatory. And believe me, you don’t want to go to Purgatory. It’s almost as bad as Paseik, New Jersey. So now bishops can give indulgences over television.

Of course, there’s some debate about this. In most countries in Europe, you have to pay a license for your TV set. And the question is, if you haven’t paid your license fee, use the indulgence valid. Or if you make a videotape of the indulgence and play it for your friends, is it transferrable?

Or if you keep playing the videotape over and over, do you get perpetual indulgence? That’s another interesting religion that cropped up recently. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

That’s a group of transvestites in San Francisco who go around dressed as nuns. And I keep hoping they’ll make a visit to Ireland sometime, because Ireland badly needs to see them. They had two lesbian nuns on Irish television last year. And a circle of pious Catholics formed around the television studio and said the rosary continually, all through the program, to exercise the demons within. And I didn’t get a whole circle around here today, but maybe next time I’ll be luckier, at least I got a leaflet announcing me.

Since the Catholic Church has decided bishops can give indulgences over television, I decided that a Scordian society can create popes over the radio. And so I was on a show in England in January, only a month ago, midweek. B.B .C.

midweek. And they have an estimated listenership of three million. And I announced that everybody listening to the show was now a pope. And had full authority to pontificate on all subjects. So now we’ve got three and a half million Scordian popes, and the number is still rising. And everybody here is now automatically a pope.

And you’re all just as infallible as those dundics out in the street there. There are mom cards for feminists who object to the word pope because it has a male root to it. And you can get a momed card by getting in contact with the Wiccan, the Scordians, and Palo Alto, California, if you can find them.

And this card says you’re a genuine and authorized mom instead of a pope, if you want that. We sent the pope card to the anti-popes in southern France, thereby making him an authentic Hofstadter strange loop. He’s both a pope and an anti-pop at the same time. We also sent one to the gent in Rome who thinks he’s the only pope. So now he’s two popes, a Catholic pope and a Discordian pope.

But that isn’t the first time we have moved in on Catholic turf. Back under John the 23rd, who must have been a Discordian with a number like that. And the John the 23rd, they threw out some 300 saints they admitted were mythical and didn’t belong in the Catholic Church, including Santa Claus. And the Discordian Society accepted them all. They’re now all Discordian saints.

If the Catholics don’t have them, we will. I was recently in Des Moines, Iowa, just before I came here, and I found another new church that has just appeared. It’s called the Church of the Unconvinced. Their first activity is to open a book store called Visions, which has flotation tanks. They have two flotation tanks and a lot of books on mysticism and Kabbalah.

So you can either read books to give you visions or go downstairs and float in the tank and have visions. And their second activity was to bring me to Des Moines, which I thought was rather nice. And so I know about the Church of the Unconvinced.

They never explained their dogmas to me if they have dogmas. Yes? That’s not a bad idea.

Let me try that. Maybe they don’t have dogmas. The Discordian Society doesn’t have dogmas. We have catmas. A dogma is something declared by a single pope of a single where there is only one pope. Where you’ve got three and a half million popes, you can’t have dogmas, so we’ve got catmas instead. So every Discordian is entirely infallible, but only about what’s going on in his or her own nervous system.

And that’s what a catma is. I think one of the most... Then there’s the Java Crucians. The Java Crucians... Have you seen their ads?

A coffee break in eternity? I don’t know whether they’re a new religion or not. They claim they’re not. They say not a religious organization. The Java Crucian revelation is that if the first thing in the morning you get up and make a pot of coffee, if you raise the coffee and face the rising sun, just like a Freemason, just like a lot of occult groups, you face the rising sun, raise the coffee to your lips and take a sip and then put it down and then you say profoundly, God, I indeed did that.

You will then be in a state of mind to deal with all the problems of the day. This is the American coffee ceremony to rival the Japanese tea ceremony and give us an Otoxthonist mystical tradition. There’s a secret Discordian teaching which I am now at liberty to reveal, which is even stronger than that one. This is the secret toad ritual.

That is, if you eat a live toad as soon as you get up in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you all day. Now there’s the Church of the Subgenius which claims to have 200,000 members. I don’t know whether they’re exaggerating or not, but I saw an issue of the LA Weekly recently where they had a monster convention in Los Angeles and it said 30,000 monsters are tempted. And so apparently the Church of the Subgenius is really growing. And that’s based on the Discordian society together with Madison Avenue techniques.

It seems to have been invented by two advertising executives in Dallas. The Church of the Subgenius includes practically everything. And it even has a synthesis of Discordianism and Daoism for those of you who are into heavy metaphysics. Daoism divides the whole universe into yin and yang, the dark, feckoned yin forces and the bright, shocking yang forces. And Discordianism divides everything into the hodge and the podge. The hodge is symbolized by the Pentagon which represents the attempt to create order which always leads to higher and higher chaos.

And the podge is symbolized by the apple of Discord which symbolizes the apple that Arise threw into the banquet on Olympus which started the Trojan War and the apple that Eve picked that started the evolution of humanity and the apple that used to appear, disappear from the stage of the Flappish Burlesque Theater in Brooklyn when Peaches Browning did her split on top of it. And everybody is a member either of the House of the Rising Hodge or the House of the Rising Podge which makes Discordianism the only universal religion. Because if you’re a member of the House of the Rising Hodge symbolized by the Pentagon you oppose Discordianism. So therefore you’re part of Discordianism because Discordianism is based on Discord. There you go, those people out there protesting against me are part of the Discordian Church because they’re protesting against the Discordian Revelation. They are popes of the House of the Rising Hodge. Those who, on the other hand, who accept the Discordian Revelation are popes of the House of the Rising Podge. In either case the two balances out.

You have no hodge without hodge and no hodge without hodge. The Church of the Subgenius has improved on this by looking into Gestalt therapy. And Gestalt therapy points out that wherever you see a figure there’s always a ground behind it, right?

Some of you have been to Asselin, right? There’s always a figure-ground relationship. Well, what is the ground? Nobody knows what the ground is. Well, Budo said 2,500 years ago the ground is nothing, right? Anybody here that’s the Buddhist teaching the ground is nothing, no thing. And so therefore every perception consists of something on a background of nothing. If you look at me you see something, I hope, and then there’s nothing as the frame.

So the universe consists of both something and nothing. And this is much more profound than the Discordian Hodge-Podge I have to admit, even though I’m a Discordian Pope. And it’s even more profound than the Yin and the Yang, I think. Because if you get a deep, intuitive understanding of the relation of something and nothing, then you’re in a state of slack. And slack is even better than nirvana.

Because if you’re in slack you are in the balance point between something and nothing, and then you can get something for nothing. This was revealed to J. R. Bob Dobbs, the founder of the Church of the Subgenius by Elron Hubbard on an elevator in Palm Beach, Florida in 1957. J. R. Bob Dobbs was only a humble aluminum-siding salesman at that time, but it just took one meeting with Elron Hubbard, and he learned the secret of power and how to stand on the balance between something and nothing and get something for nothing. And he founded the Church of the Subgenius, and now he’s one of the richest men in the world, but he still acts like a regular fella. Of course, it’s very hard to see Bob these days, because he’s reached such a tremendous level of spiritual elevation that most people who’ve met him can’t even remember the experience. It’s like a UFO contact.

There’s partial, there’s total or partial amnesia, conjunctivitis and eye strain, nervous symptoms, sometimes it requires hospitalization, and almost inevitably you’re persecuted by the men in black afterwards. The men in black are agents of the conspiracy. The conspiracy is that all the groups that’s trying to stamp out the Church of the Subgenius, it consists of all the other religions in the world, the Rockefellers, the OPEC nations, and the people who put Hawaiian music in elevators, and all other evil and sinister forces like that. So if you’ve met Bob, there’s some men in black around to persecute you. Don’t be afraid. The men in black will come to your door pretending to be Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they will try to get into your house.

The thing to do is greet them in a friendly way and say, I’m glad to see you. This is a Satanist temple. We were looking for subjects for a sacrifice and we’ve heard you arrive. This will absolutely guarantee you will never be bothered by Jehovah’s Witnesses again.

They send a report back to Kingdom Hall with your address on it, and nobody ever goes there again. It really works. This is not a put on. It really works. They believe in that sort of stuff. The secret of power.

I don’t know whether it’s safe to reveal this yet. I was up in Edmonton last year. I was staying at the OTO Lodge up there. I’m an outer head of the OTO. When Carl Gamer died, he was the last universally recognized outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus.

When he died, he hadn’t appointed a successor. Four people appointed themselves announcing they had been appointed on the Astral Plane by Alastair Crowley. They skipped over Gamer, went back behind Gamer to Crowley, and they each announced, Crowley appointed me on the Astral Plane.

Now, it’s very hard to get evidence about what’s happening on the Astral Plane that’s universally set up. So you had four outer heads of the OTO for a long time until a group in London, a group of OTO members in London, read the Principia Discordia and got invited to Discordianism. So they decided to combine Discordianism with Thalimba, which is the religion of the OTO.

Thalimba is based on Crowley’s revelation, do what thou wilt, shall be the hole in the floor, or something like that. And so they printed a thousand cards saying the bearer of this card is a genuine and authorized outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus, and they sent them to a thousand writers on the occult that they liked, including me. And so suddenly, instead of four outer heads of the Auto-Templi Orientus, there were a thousand and four. And now the Auto-Templi Orientus is part of the Discordian society, because nobody knows who’s the outer head anymore. Most people thought they could choose between them, but with a thousand and four it gets hopelessly confusing.

And most people decided to appoint themselves the outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus, and not bother with looking for outer heads, which I think is a good idea. Anyway, I was up in Edmonton staying at the OTO Lodge, and we heard on television that Rajani should just acquire his 92nd Rolls Royce. And as some of you know, 93 is the number of the new Aeon, according to the Kabbalah of Alistair Crowley, the main philosopher of the OTO. And I said, hey, Rajani will soon have his 93rd Rolls Royce. Let’s make him an outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus, too, when he gets his 93rd Rolls Royce. So they agreed, and they printed up a certificate making Rajani, an outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus, and they were going to send it to him as soon as he got his 93rd Rolls Royce.

Well, I left Edmonton, and a few weeks later I read that Rajani should just acquire his 93rd Rolls Royce and the American government busted him. And he fled back to India. And I don’t know if he ever received the certificate making him an outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus. He’s living somewhere in the Himalayas now, and whether he knows he’s an outer head of the Auto-Templi Orientus or not, I’m not sure at all.

But Rajanisha, I think, is one of the great exemplars of the philosophical tendencies that I am expounding here tonight. He understood the secret of power. When he started acquiring disciples, he sat down like many of us have. Sometimes I’ve almost acquired disciples myself.

I know what that’s like. And Rajanisha thought, what do I do with these idiots? And so he said, I’ll tell them that they’ve all got to wear orange. This is like, I invented a religion once where you got to pray in pig latin while standing on one leg.

Our way, our the fey, who way, our a, and Evan way, and so on. And he says they all wear orange. And so they all started wearing orange. And Rajanisha thought, hey, this is funny.

So then after a while he came out of the hut where he had his current shakti. He kept charging out and said, orange is out. You’ve all got to wear crimson now.

So they all had to throw away their orange clothes and buy crimson clothes. And by then Rajanisha figured out exactly and totally, at least full philosophical illumination on the question of discipleshood. He knew just what disciples were and what they’re good for. So he said, go out and get Rolls Royce’s for me. So they started bringing in Rolls Royce’s one after another and he got up to 92 Rolls Royce’s.

Then when he got to the quarreling in 93, the ceiling fell in for some reason. He didn’t fully understand the secret of power. But at least he knew what a disciple is. A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to. That basically is the secret of power which Al Ron Hubbard revealed to J.R. Bob Dobbs on that elevator in Palm Springs low those many years ago.

By the way, do you know that God spelled backwards as dog but Bob spelled backwards as still Bob? Take it over. The secret of power, this is what made Al Ron Hubbard a millionaire. It made J.R. Bob Dobbs a millionaire.

It explains why after dozens of exposés of the involvement of the Vatican Bank in the heroin smuggling business, the Pope is still a millionaire and is still keeping the show on the road, the secret of power is this. Think now. Do you know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that. Thank you, thank you.