An Introduction to Moféism

The road to enlightenment is a slippery and dangerous one, covered with ice and patrolled by angry men with guns who try to kill you as you fall over again and again and then you can’t stand up because the ice is so slippery and it makes you cry. Not many make it all the way to the end of the road, and no one is certain what lies there. I think there is probably some cake and a lot of rainbows, and maybe also a nice beach with happy whales playing in the sea and you can ride the whales like noble stallions of the ocean.

While I am not promising that after reading this article you will immediately be transferred to a magic wonderland of inner harmony and peace, I am certain that the things I am going to share with you today will open your eyes to many things. You may be blinded by these things because they are so bright and powerful and could be totally incomprehensible to you, but I doubt that because mostly it is just a lot of crap I made up so I can finish writing this and get back to roleplaying as Colin Powell in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Note to developers: Please include ponies in the next game, I have been waiting for so long).

For the last several years I have been tweaking and refining a brand new theology I call Moféism, mostly because it sounds French and those guys can be pretty clever sometimes. Albert Camus was French and he invented the concept of shooting Arabs almost thirty years before Dick Cheney came up with the same idea. Moféism is based on the Three Tiers of Reality™, which as a whole make up life as we know and perceive it. These are In Real Life™ (IRL), On The Internet™ (OTI) and In Your Mind™ (IYM). In Real Life™ is composed of day-to-day things that happen in what is commonly referred to as “The Real World”, although it is a mistake to assume that On The Internet™ and In Your Mind™ are any less real than In Real Life™. Things that happen In Real Life™ include grocery shopping, going to work, and hitting a stray cat on the highway and crying all over the steering wheel.

An example of In Real Life™.

The second Tier of Reality™, On The Internet™, is what the majority of you reading this today will be most familiar with. This makes up a large percentage of most of our lives, and includes such life-changing events such as being banned from your IRC channel, being constantly rejected by fat antisocial goth girls on okcupid.com, and spending many days trying to kill your first rat in Everquest.

An example of On The Internet™.

In Your Mind™ is the final and arguably the most important Tier Of Reality™. As you should have guessed, this includes everything that happens and everything that you believe within your own mind. This is the most powerful of all these concepts, since you can make almost anything happen or become true. Do not fall into the trap of believing that just because you made it up and it is in your head it is not true. Of course is it true and real. If this was not the case then my friend Boris the Ork would not exist and he is sitting here right next to me singing traditional German folk songs. You must absolutely one-hundred-percent totally believe and understand that what happens In Your Mind is more important that what happens In Real Life™ and On The Internet™. In Your Mind™ is the only place where you are totally alone and totally free to shape your own world out of lego and playdoh.

An example of In Your Mind™.

When combined, these three Tiers of Reality™ merge to complete The Real Truth™. The Real Truth™ is what the universe actually looks like through unbiased and uncorrupted eyes. As you can see from the example image below, all three of the Tiers of Reality™ play a very important part in creating The Real Truth™, which would not be complete should one of the Tiers of Reality™ be missing.

An example of The Real Truth™.

To demonstrate these ideas, I will give a few examples from my own life.

In My Mind™ There is a girl who is made of sunshine and kaleidoscopes. Together we run in the fields where the flowers grow so incredibly high and we sing songs and dance and it is beautiful and at night we ski down the mountain to our lodge in the forest where we watch the unicorns play in the long grass of the meadow. Then it usually snows so we light a fire and watch the snow fall on the window and it is so cold outside but extraordinarily cozy inside and the unicorns sleep under the trees and we sleep next to the fire.

If you like adventure and fun you will like space.

In My Mind™ I am an astronaut and space explorer. I travel through solar systems and galaxies in my rocket ship named Freud. It is beautiful in space, everything is quiet and clean and you can smell the perfect emptiness. The skies are infinitely deep and you are surrounded by them, there are no clouds of smog just the perfect energy of a million suns rising above an infinite number of invisible horizons.

On The Internet™ I met a girl in my Duke Nukem 3D clan called ~=KiLLaGuRrL69=- and we talked on aim a lot, so we met at the local bakery to buy bread together but she was actually a 47 year old man called Bruce. Bruce is a really nice guy but I do not want to hold his hand or kiss him and I wish he would understand that so we can be friends again.

On The Internet™ I play Everquest as Blazrghkark, fearless and noble Neutral-Good Eskimo-Warrior, level 14. I strike terror into the hearts of all the seals I mercilessly club. No sea lion is safe from my harpoon, and any polar bear that dares to wander onto my ice floe leaves in a body bag.

In Real Life™ there is a girl in my astronomy class that I look at sometimes. Often I will be looking at her and she will notice and look away quickly, and she looks embarrassed and angry. I keep watching her though because I know that is the only way to make her fall in love with me and we will be married and live in a desert made of rainbows. Once I tried to talk to her but she ran like they always do.

Hello I am a pretty girl, la la la la do de doop de do.

In Real Life™ I work at a drug store and spend my days wandering the cold and sterile aisles, searching for something I have lost but I am not sure what it is. I like to walk past the greeting cards and look at the pictures, and they tell me "Happy Birthday!" and "I Love You." and "Missing You." and "Sorry." and I say "That is okay, I am too."

I hope we have all learned something today, something about life, something about love, and maybe, just maybe, something about ourselves. If you take one thing away with you today, I hope it is this. The greatest threat facing the world today is not international terrorism, it is not climate change, nor is it the hundreds of huge asteroids that will collide with the earth in a few months. It is that people do not understand that In Real Life™ is not the only important thing in the world. Sometimes it can be pretty terrible and then people kill themselves, which makes me sad. Don't do that okay. If you didn't learn anything today then that is okay and I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

– Tom "moof" Davies