Branch
Core tenet of Discordianism

Order and disorder are both things you are doing.

The Sacred Chao is drawn with a pentagon on one side and a golden apple on the other — the Aneristic and Eristic Principles, order and disorder. Neither is a property of the world. Both are grids people lay over an undivided reality, and the grid is not the thing.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The Sacred Chao is the Discordian answer to the yin-yang, and the substitution is the argument. Where the Taoist figure shows two forces in balance, the Chao shows a pentagon and a golden apple — the Aneristic and Eristic Principles — with the note that both are illusions. Order is not found, it is imposed; disorder is not found either, it is what an imposed order fails to cover. The Principia calls the residue the Aneristic Illusion: the belief that the grid was there before you drew it. Discordians differ on whether this is a serious metaphysics borrowed from Zen and general semantics or a very good joke about both, and the Principia declines to settle it. Robert Anton Wilson, who did more than anyone to spread the idea, treated it as both at once and called the position model agnosticism.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
T The Three Pure Ones. Taoism · figure Meet them →
T The Force. Jediism · figure Meet them →
All things arise dependently. Buddhism Go deeper →
Syadvada — the sevenfold answer. Jainism Go deeper →

The conversation

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