The best of the HS forum...

[October]

The High School Forum seem to need a kick in the ass right now...to (hopefully) bring this forum up to par, I've found a few neglected articles (entirely from the HS Forum) that have helped me immensely on developing myself...and I offer them to you for what they're worth. For the best results, read them with an open mind...be sure to pay attention to your own thought processes...and then take the information as you see fit. Hope you enjoy it, and if you've written any of these posts, I hope you don't mind my using them.

Brazilian_Blues_Boy - Arise
Likretsam - e=mc^2
Brazilian_Blues_Boy - Of Swords and Hopes
Brazilian_Blues_Boy - Realm of the Real Spirit
Smooth as Anything - Smooth's Guide [Don Juan's Technique]
Smooth as Anything - Let's All Evolve
Smooth as Anything - Ride the Snake
Smooth as Anything - Learn to Die
Smooth as Anything - Live Let Live; Die Let Die; Love into the Infinity
Smooth as Anything - Relapse...
Smooth as Anything - Smooth Resurrection: Realize
Smooth as Anything - I took it as a compliment; regardless of what they meant
Likretsam - Child's Play
Likretsam - Binder is Opening
Likretsam - Be a Good Kid
Likretsam - Nothing to Lose; Reform
Brazilian_Blues_Boy - Golden Medal
Brazilian_Blues_Boy - I'm One
The Antichrist_Star - Reloadedism: Niche
The Antichrist_Star - Breakfast of Immortals

 

[October]

Excerpts from the movie "Waking Life":
(http://strivinglife.net/wordpress/waking-life-script-with-revisions/)

Our critique began as all critiques begin: with doubt. Doubt became our narrative. Ours was a quest for a new story, our own. And we grasped toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn't tell it. Our past appeared frozen in the distance, and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive microsociety, in the heart of a society which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication. The adventure of finding it and losing it. We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one.

There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I've always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.

Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes. No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic - fear or laziness?

For I do not await the future, anticipating salvation, absolution, not even enlightenment through process. I, I subscribe to the premise that this ... this flawed perfection is sufficient and complete in every single ineffable moment.

... a single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage from which to view this ... this experience. And where most consider their individual relationship to the universe, I contemplate relationships ... of my various selves to one another.

They say dreaming's dead, that no one does it anymore. It's not dead, it's just been forgotten. Removed from our language. No one teaches it so no one knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it's ever faced. Ever. So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.

"On this bridge," Lorca warns, "life is not a dream. Beware. And beware. And beware." And so many think because Then happened, Now isn't. But didn't I mention the ongoing "wow" is happening right now? We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel, starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world, is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other's presence. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into direct experience. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness.

A thousand years is but an instant. There's nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight I felt an hour or an eternity ago. There's nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from and how I became a human, why I hung around, and now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but infinity.

 

[Flabbergasped?]

Good stuff. Any chance of having this sticky'd/incorporated into the HS bible (is that still around?)

 

[Vincent]

Good stuff. Any chance of having this sticky'd/incorporated into the HS bible (is that still around?)

Look at the very top sticky.