Forbidden Book: Actualizing Your Portentous Dynamic Potential.

Actualizing Your Portentous Dynamic Potential – Google Docs

Actualizing Your Portentous Dynamic Potential

“Wisdom” is an ethereal, subjective concept that nonetheless meaningfully exists, in worlds with a strong enough metaphysical or Platonic infrastructure.  Wisdom can accumulate, dissipate, manifest, influence its surroundings, and do all the other things that you might associate with ‘real’ items. Indeed, under the right circumstances, “wisdom” can even take tangible form — in, say, the guise of a book.

Unfortunately, all of the above is just as true for “nonsensical bullshit,” too.

If you’ve ever wondered where the trite platitudes, offensively vague life principles, hideously misattributed quotes, self-contradictory banalities masquerading as Revealed Truth, and other examples of pretentious codswallop come from; well, in some deeply unlucky universes they all spring from the decidedly Forbidden Book known as Actualizing Your Portentous Dynamic Potential.  It’s all in there, somewhere.  Every single stupid self-contained meme that seals off, and then rots, brain cells; start reading this book at page one and you’ll be a gibbering lunatic by the end of the third chapter.  Not that anybody ever does, of course. Well, at least not twice.

What most people do instead is open the book at random and recite whatever errant nonsense leaps out of that particular random page.  Why? Because it’s a potent attack, God help us all. Against the weak-willed and foolish, the recited nonsense acts as a sort of mental domination; the idea takes over their heads, which makes it really easy for them to be talked into doing other things, like being a cultist.  Against the strong-willed and wise, well, the recited nonsense is like a physical blow. Unless the target is in very good shape, said nonsense will at the very least cause a nosebleed, and probably knock him or her down.  Somebody in poor shape might even die.

Note, by the way, that high intelligence in and of itself is no defense against Actualizing Your Portentous Dynamic Potential.  It’s all a matter of willpower and discernment.  Also note that you can safely use this particular Forbidden Tome never.  Reading it aloud gives absolutely no special protections, and those that use it regularly (otherwise known as ‘once or more’) are hideously vulnerable to any further uses of it in their presence.  Which is why most sensible cults actually either try to destroy Actualizing Your Portentous Dynamic Potential themselves, or send it to their rivals as a particularly vicious trap.

Alas, the first option never really works permanently.  This artifact just pops out of the aether, remember? Destroy it, and a copy will just promptly pop out again.