View source for Three-fold Ship

The Three-Fold Ship is a metaphor.  A metaphor is a kind of "mind picture" which is used to relate one thing to another thing.  And that has never been more the case than the case here now.

==Origins==
The Three-Fold Ship, or the [[Larquanus]], was first described in [[Robery Joyman]]’s  [[Upwards the Dinos trilogy|Upwards the Dinos]] by [[Leptherio]], the Dinoesident of the [[Udino States of Dinmerica]].  [[Robery Joyman]]'s character, Leptherio, when reunited with the handles of Tabrush following the [[trials of the slanted branch]], revealed to his followers the ‘truth of the end of life itself.’

==Background==
Before the threefold ship was explained, there had been a great debate among the followers of Leptherio.  The question remained unanswered as to what happened to a dinosaur, or for that matter, a man reading about dinosaurs, when he/she/it died. 
 
One group believed that the body disintegrated, releasing a bright white lamb into the forest, that was then herded by a Grultch, a large wingless bird with a large winged smile, or "flyle" (because it flies (and is a smyle)).  

Another school held that after death, you lived underground, upside-down, so that you stood on the ceiling, and the sky was beneath you.  Of course, from your perspective, you were standing on the ground and the sky was above you, but you somehow knew you were wrong and were left with an eternally unpleasant sensation that even though you sensed one reality, everything was just slightly different.  Unable to feel at ease, you lost some weight from worry, and people generally told you that you looked pretty good. 

And yet another school held that when you died you should try to take as many people with you as possible.  It wasn't really a theory of an afterlife, but it was a good theory none the less, and attracted many enthusiastic followers.

==The Teaching==
When Leptherio returned from the trials of the slanted branch, he had already reunited himself with the handles of Tabrush.  The handles now were quite well lubed, and they slid pleasantly over the upturned faces of the children who gleefully soaked in the oils he dribbled from his [[slank]].  He stood upon a [[Buick Skylark]] and addressed his followers, telling them how he had been, and where he had been and things of that nature.  Then he told them that he had been given a revelation, through practicing [[thinkonomics]], the mental mind science.  

"After death, there is a three-fold ship that takes us to the afterlife.  The first ship carries the man, the next ship carries the mind, and the final ship carries the yams.  For he who is dead should be mourned, but should he not also be considered a great possessor of yams?  Take solace in the vast barge full of yams of varying sizes, grouped into bundles and stored in crates, stacked 5 crates high.  This is the afterlife, not a destination but a journey on a ship.  

Your mind doesn't go on the same ship as you, because it's tired of you and your friends.  It goes on its own ship.  Is that not meet?  It is meet that the mind should have a ship, but not meet that the ship should be better or larger than the body's ship.  The mind's ship is pretty small, to be honest.  It's sort of rounder too, and doesn't have as many flags and poles.  

The third ship, as I stated, is the best one, it's the one that has all those delicious yams.  You can basically NEVER eat all those yams.  A friend of mine died when I was a child.  I was playing in a thicket and a coiled [[Raspivont|raspivont]] snaped out and bit him on his hind legs.  After a great and painful agony, he passed into the death realm.  If he had an average of 10 yams a minute, 24 hours a day for the past 48 years, he would have eaten 252,453,888 yams. Trust me, that wouldn't even make a dent.  Maybe if he could eat that many in one day, then sure, by now, you might notice a TINY dent in those yams.  But from what I've been told, they actually restock the yam ship whenever the threefold ship stops to let you off so you can see some old statues or waterfalls and things.  Actually, the first ship, the ship with the body in it, it's not that big.  The mind ship is tiny.  The yam ship is really the main ship.  It may be, actually, that when yams die, they go to the yam ship, and then we go along to keep the yams company.  Maybe ... maybe we shouldn't eat the yams.  Okay, I'm done."

==Analysis==
Actually he basically got it spot on.  There's more to it than that, obviously.  For one thing, it's not a metaphor at all but should be taken literally.


==Historical Perspective==
This was the last speech that Leptherio made before his famous [[10 Speeches on Yams]], including the most prominent first speech [[Maybe don't eat from the Yam barge]].  Historians frequently try to make the connection between the content of the speech above and the later speeches, but historians are made of organs and fibrous tissues, suspended from brittle calcium endo-structures.  They eat food and turn it into energy.  Historians are just people like us.  They are cave dwellers, like us.