Prof. Dr (Hon) Turiya Pataphyx, @ Victor's Way in Ireland

A much-condensed, thus user-friendly biography of

Prof. Dr (Hon) Turiya Pataphyx

A word of caution: The general view of Turiya, hereafter referred to as Turi, is that he is an idiot (derived from Greek idio, meaning: own or self-emerging, regulating and so on), and that his activities are, consequently, absurd. However, Turi has convinced himself that the only valid rule is the rule of the 1 (i.e. one), and which establishes the equivalence of all emergents. In short, he believes that the rule of the many is an exception to the rule of the 1 and from which he infers that he is sane and those participating in the many are mad. Hence, caveat emptor!

Turi (short for Turiya, the 4^th) Pataphyx (not related to Miraculix) was born in 1940 into the 1000-year Reich, and which lasted only 12 years. His mother recalls that Turi was a brainless little twit but loved him anyway.

At the age of 5 Turi, while crouching three quarters suffocated under a bench in the farthest recess of the subterranean air raid shelter of Dresden Station, was graced with the Baptism of Fire courtesy of the Imperious but compassionate Brit, Bomber Harris, who had sent 1000 bombers to kill the maximum number of unarmed civilians possible. Turi survived the mass slaughter and his first of many NDE’s (Near Death Experiences). Emerging at 6AM, as it were as a twice-born, into the brilliant red glow of a city being cremated by a firestorm, it was, after all, Ash Wednesday, little Turi was instantaneously, albeit unconsciously converted to the pataphysicist creed, whereupon he first uttered the pataphysicist mantra, namely “But this is absurd!”

Thus baptised, like the Lord Shiva, by fire, Turi arrived, in 1946, in the land where the sense of the absurd is sipped with mother’s milk and later enacted on in pubs and on the stage, in Ireland of the thousand welcomes.

Fast forward to 1952. At that time, and time is a yet unverified entity, apparently invented by a drunk watchmaker from Geneva, Turi, now reborn as a 12-year-old prat, spent his Sunday mornings singing in a church choir for six pence. Then, one Sunday during another merde sermon by the curate, and who later became a charismatic bishop, Turi had his 1^st fully conscious initiation. Evidence is scanty and unverified but suggests that Turi had a mild Temporal Lobe petit mal during which he seemed to hear the universal voice saying: “The priest is lying!” and which caused a hyper-metaphysical self-reinvention to absolute scepticism.

Fast forward to 1963 when Turi, now a workshy and disorientated drifter, arrived in the Shangri-La of metaphysical spoofs, namely Hindustan. There, as avatar of scepticism, he began a 30-year journey in search of one, just one meta-physicist who wasn’t lying. He failed abjectly in his search.

In the fall of that year, he visited the ashram (actually a mental health asylum) of the internationally renowned spiritual entertainer going by the stage name ‘The Beautiful Sage’ (i.e. Ramana Maharshi) and came away with the sense that ‘the Beautiful One’, and who, as it later turned out, was a closet pataphysicist, was peddling a quite enchanting fantasy to stay in business.

Fast forward again. At the age of 40 Turi, now a fully ordained Buddhist Bhikku, achieved sammasambodhi (falsely translated as the Great Awakening) in the Birla Dharmsala not a vajra’s throw from the Bodhi Tree under which the Indo-Scythian Shakyamuni, posthumously named the Buddha, is reputed to have had his. Indeed, Turi woke up to the astonishing revelation that the Shakyamuni had told only half the story, indeed, the lucrative half.

Fast forward again. Recently, and after some 50 years, Turi returned to the asylum of ‘the Beautiful Sage’ at the foot of Arunachala Mountain. It seems that Turi had been unknowingly initiated in 1963 by ‘the Beautiful Sage’, as it were from the other side (though pataphysicists know that there’s only one side) and whose diksha had now, 50 years later, come to fruition. And the lucrative con was still ongoing. But Turi, though now well advanced into his dotage, finally figured out how the Maharshi had pulled his wholly absurd con but also the extraordinary mental health benefits it produced in the much afflicted. That insight came as a huge shock, indeed as a trauma that triggered another conversion, and which was the reason why Turi finally outed himself as a pataphysicist.

Now Turi, suffering creeping senescence, enjoys sunny afternoons reclining on a bench beside a small lake and smoking cheap Java cigars. Occasionally he looks to the horizon where he observes an ominous dark grey band and realises that it is the mighty tsunami of oblivion approaching, relentlessly. Soon he will be swept away into the black hole of eternal sameness as though he had never existed, and which, in the flaky opinion of the majority of Advaita Vedanta lickspittles, he never did.