The Doctrine of Some Sense

Today is Syaday — the fifth of Confusion, a Sweetmorn — and we honor Sri Syadasti, one of the Five Apostles of Eris, whose name is a joke and a doorway at the same time. The Sanskrit syat asti means roughly "in some sense, it is." Maybe it is. The Apostle is the patron saint of the qualified maybe, and his litany goes: Sri Syadasti Sri Syadasti Sri Syadasti, Apple Holy Tree, Vrikshaheap. Say it three times and you have already hedged it twice.

His teaching, the seven-fold predication, reads in full:

All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

Count them. There are seven. Most people, asked to evaluate a statement, are issued exactly two boxes — true, false — and told to put the statement in one of them, and then told that civilization depends on their not hesitating. Syadasti hands you five more boxes and points out, kindly, that you were going to need them anyway.

The relief in "in some sense"

Notice what the doctrine does to the body. There is a particular clench you carry through a normal day: the suspicion that for every question there exists a single correct answer, that someone else already knows it, and that your not-knowing is a personal failing rather than a feature of the universe. This clench has a name. We call it the Curse of Greyface, after the man who, around 1166 BC, decided that disorder was evil, that life was Serious Business, and that the proper relationship to reality was anxiety. Greyface invented the test, then graded everyone on it, in perpetuity, forever.

"True in some sense" is the answer that ungrades you.

It is not relativism, which is the lazy man's escape, the claim that nothing is true so nothing matters. The seven-fold predication says the opposite: that too much is true, that any decent affirmation is true and false and meaningless all at once depending on where you stand and how hard you squint, and that this surplus of sense is not a bug to be debugged but the actual texture of being alive. The relief is not in giving up. The relief is in being allowed to hold the whole contradiction at once without your head coming apart.

Your friend is late and you are furious and you also love them: true and false in some sense. The job is beneath you and you are afraid you cannot do it: same. The Sacred Chao is not a tidy yin-yang where dark and light politely trade off — it is the Hodge and the Podge tangled past separating, order and disorder married in the same instant, and Syadasti simply taught us how to read it without flinching.

How to keep it

The discipline is small and you can start today. When someone demands to know whether a thing is true, try answering, "in some sense," and then — this is the part Greyface cannot follow you into — mean it, specify the sense, and do the next thing anyway. The maybe is not a stalling tactic. It is a wider doorway. You walk through it more, not less.

If you want it in book form, the long version is set down in Discordianism Decompiled, and if you'd like the universe to issue you standing while you practice, the Discordian Society will confirm you exist in some sense, which is the only sense there is.

Sri Syadasti. Apple Holy Tree. Hail Eris.