Enlightenment
Enlightenment is the process of decreasing one's knowledge until one attains a state of emptiness, or "no-mind." This state is considered very pleasurable, hence the common saying "ignorance is bliss." A common cause of enlightenment is spending many hours playing Computer Games.
How to become enlightened[edit]
Becoming enlightened has always been a long and tedious process requiring many hours of prayer and meditation. However, in modern times, people are able to become enlightened through study on the Internet. A key step to enlightenment is to study pages of a wiki. Although various wikis claim to have a different emphasis, any wiki will do the job and produce an enlightened reader.
Some rather intelligent people out there[1] believe that enlightenment can be gained through other means, such as Computer Games and Google. They are known as the Computer Games Enlightenment Sect. They don't believe that they are a sect; but then again, followers of a sect never do, so that proves they are.
History[edit]
There have been many notable enlightenments in the past. Each enlightenment has been followed by a so-called reformation.
The Middle Ages[edit]
The Middle Ages featured the most famous enlightenment of all, an enlightenment so successful that we refer to it as The Enlightenment. During The Enlightenment, mankind learned many crucial things, such as:
- When the sun goes down, it will tend to come back up; and when days get shorter, they will tend to get longer again. (We abbreviate this lesson by saying simply, "What goes around, comes around.")
- Apples thrown into the air tend to fall back to earth. (That part of That Enlightenment never arrived in Detroit, at least with respect to bullets on holidays.)
- Art would be more attractive if the artist pretended that Eve and the Virgin Mary shaved their pubes, though there were certainly no safety razors in the Garden of Eden.
It was not long before the priests hired to promulgate The Enlightenment started to get self-serving and spend all their time arguing about things like the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. Consequently, The Reformation occurred. Martin Luther led the Reformation, and got several religions and people named after him and it, such as famous rocker Martin Luther van Dross.
Mexican Enlightenment[edit]
The 1910 Mexican Revolution led to the installation, within two decades, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. This was a major advance; it was the first enlightenment to include its own reformation. Within a century, the Mexican people reformed their own reformation. When they failed to see any difference, they put it back.
Movie Enlightenment[edit]
At some point in the Me Generation, movies lost their emphasis on a well-told story. In this cinematic Enlightenment, the priorities became stamina and muscle tone. Good acting was still a key, but oral performances became much less verbal. A coherent plot was secondary, though the enlightened movies did require a good climax: the ubiquitous "money shot."
During the early years of cinematic Enlightenment, the most enlightened members of the gentry would go to the rear of the shopping mall, where a strange, low-slung movie house would entertain them with the new art style.
Movie Enlightenment had its own reformation, once evangelicals identified retailers attending the new movies and began organizing protests outside their shops. The reformation involved the use of technology to let individuals watch the fine new presentations without leaving their homes.
Tobacco Enlightenment[edit]
American intellectual John McCain took a look at the landscape of his day, saw thousands of lawsuits against tobacco companies, and devised his namesake enlightenment, a "national settlement fund" into which every tobacco company would pay (except some of the small ones). The money, easily raised by a modest $2 increase in the price of a pack, would go to delivering health services to smokers, or at least nagging them; or to Boeing, or to "pay off the national debt" though it is now larger than before the tobacco Enlightenment. McCain himself chuckled that "the reforms will themselves need reforming." This was called a "conundrum," and marked the moment when the U.S. began to regard McCain as a policy genius.
Political Enlightenment[edit]
McCain would go on to apply the same approach to Political Campaign Enlightenment, in which government forced all candidates to hire staffs to fill out forms and pay fines. This Enlightenment was followed by a Reformation, when lots of Committees and Groups formed in order not to be political campaigns, though they really were, and new regulations had to be written to ensure that nobody got away with anything. In 2008, McCain ran for U.S. President, although the electorate decided that Barack Obama had the same gifts but more of each of them and was just as qualified to wage a war from having read a bunch of Conan the Barbarian comics, and how to handle killer robots and administering extra judicial justice from Spiderman. Another Political Campaign Enlightenment soon took place, when the Supreme Court declared that corporations were people too, and could contribute as much money as they wanted to political campaigns without limit, as a form of Freedom of speech, in addition to their routine purchase of lobbyists and PR campaigns. After all, lobbyists are cheap compared to regulations or additional competition (such as the government joining the healthcare marketplace ).
The essence of enlightenment[edit]
Since enlightenment exists in the eternal 'now', the entire history of mankind has been an illusion. There has never been a past, nor will there be a future. It is only the mind, with it's constant meandering that creates the illusion of the passage of time. The current location of 'now' is June 6th, 1978. We have been living in an illusion ever since. The first person to reach enlightenment was Drinkus Alcoholicus, the great Roman Hobo Prophet. He managed to drink himself into a coma and then beat the God of Death and Trickery, Bill Maher, in a game of beer pong. This allowed Drinkus to reach a state of Nirvana.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Out There may refer to just an arbitrary place, but may also refer more specifically to a place that is beyond somewhere local such as the corner shop, Earth, or even being beyond The Universe itself.