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hraa
Mar 10, 2004 22:36:53 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Mar 10, 2004 22:36:53 GMT -5
am i the only person who still calls you mike? and do you still have all that blackmail tim sent everybody way back when? i deleted most of my pictures. except for the wonderful whipped cream shot. oh, and by the way: i'm vaguely surprised it was still there..
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hraa
Mar 11, 2004 2:59:51 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Mar 11, 2004 2:59:51 GMT -5
most of my friends still call me mike. i call me chaney. amber calls me chaney because she's nice.
i don't have *anything* tim sent me way back when. i'm pretty sure most of that got lost two computers ago. maybe if i plugged the hard drives into something that works i could get those things, but i'm computer-retarded and unmotivated.
that man has a small flesh penis.
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hraa
Mar 16, 2004 21:32:17 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Mar 16, 2004 21:32:17 GMT -5
you mean i'm the only person who still owns any of the old sapien blackmail? oh no! well, we'll have to find him and get him wasted again. "that man has a small flesh penis" - self reflection? that was mean. i am sorry.
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hraa
Mar 16, 2004 21:32:40 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Mar 16, 2004 21:32:40 GMT -5
hey! i have three stars now! neataroonie!
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hraa
Mar 17, 2004 14:31:24 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Mar 17, 2004 14:31:24 GMT -5
reflecting on one's motives for creating a gigantic wooden penis, actually why all the concern with tim's whipped cream-covered-genitals, anyway? he's moved on. either to a phase of his life which does not include sitting with his computer for a frightening multitude of hours, or to another life altogether. either way, i don't think we'd be able to blackmail him, and i also don't really think he'd have anything we'd want. maybe you and tim's penis had some sort of relationship that i'm not aware of, and you want to take a fond look back in time?
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hraa
Mar 23, 2004 20:06:51 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Mar 23, 2004 20:06:51 GMT -5
man, i fucking miss my friends. i miss the "good old days", you know? when it was you and tim getting stoned and us all calling matt a pedophile and me and melinda brutally raping one another and greg talking for hours about poop and so forth. when i get my internet back, i'm making it my mission to glue all your heads back together.
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hraa
Mar 24, 2004 3:06:57 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Mar 24, 2004 3:06:57 GMT -5
yeah, i don't think that'll ever happen. phases exist for reasons, and once all the changes that were supposed to occur have happened, all involved first quarters turn into a waxing gibbous.
plus, i think al qaeda has been using #alinkuei for communication between cells in tajikistan and north ireland. maybe we could stage a hostile takeover, but i kind of fear the repercussions.
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hraa
Mar 28, 2004 14:34:15 GMT -5
Post by MonkMojo on Mar 28, 2004 14:34:15 GMT -5
Now that's a WOODY! Nice place place you got here chaney!
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hraa
Mar 29, 2004 12:52:25 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Mar 29, 2004 12:52:25 GMT -5
danke, monk. it's green.
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hraa
Mar 30, 2004 21:52:00 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Mar 30, 2004 21:52:00 GMT -5
but that's as much as to say that people are only of value as tools with which to modify oneself, and after said modification, are rendered irrelevant and should be excised from one's life. is that truly how you think?
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hraa
Apr 2, 2004 21:27:30 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Apr 2, 2004 21:27:30 GMT -5
i think you're looking at what i said in a "how other people relate to me" sort of way. i look at it in more of a broad sense. i believe that people co-exist in a synchronized way. several people's lives will take certain turns so that they can develop relationships with eachother and affect eachother in certain ways. if the purposes of those relationships are achieved, then those people will tend to just grow apart. of course, i believe in karma and reincarnation, and what i just said might make less sense without those concepts to provide it some context. but, feh
i don't think people's "value" should be determined by looking at how they affect oneself. i also don't think that you should ever excise anyone from your life. but if two people less-than-consciously excise themselves from eachother's lives, then i think they should just accept it as the nature of things. i'm not sure if that all made sense, but that's ok
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hraa
Apr 6, 2004 18:43:03 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Apr 6, 2004 18:43:03 GMT -5
well, in my case, it wasn't a voluntary excision, conscious or otherwise. and from what i hear, tim's situation was similar. and i understand what you're saying, it's just that somehow it seems that, at the end of the day, if these people aren't all still my friends, and i can't really see any benefit from having associated with them, then it's like there wasn't really any point. consider brig, my best friend throughout most of high school. he acted as my conduit back to the real world and out of the emotional carapace i had built up. after a time, i didn't need him anymore, but i still kept on with him. after he degenerated, however, i didn't feel anything wrong with him no longer being a part of my life. so it's not as if i don't understand the point you're making, it's just that i don't get why i should just accept it when people i still like, whose company i still enjoy, just sort of fade away. the drift you're talking about, for the most part, is one-sided. i mean, after i stopped being online for a million years, can any one of my internettles say that it actually affected their lives not having me around? maybe i'm just depressed and/or insulted that i could matter so little to people that matter to me.
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hraa
Apr 7, 2004 17:06:44 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Apr 7, 2004 17:06:44 GMT -5
well, let me provide a little bit more context. i practice falun dafa, which teaches that one should conform to the nature of the universe. we believe that one should be unaffected by the ups and downs of their lives, and just be truthful & kind, and endure any hardships that may occur. we believe those hardships are all caused by our own karma, whether it's karma we created in this life or our past lives. we also believe that people reincarnate in groups; that those people who have karmic relationships will be born into situations that put them into contact with one another so that they can repay their debts to one another, which is why your friends are your friends, your family is your family, your spouse is your spouse, your enemies are your enemies, etc.
so when you say you don't see a point in having known someone if there's no benefit to you, well, maybe the point was to cause you suffering so that you could pay for your karma and be free of it, or to just change slightly your thinking or your situation in life. and maybe when those people who do benefit you by making you happy or giving you company start to fade away, it's because you have already repaid your karmic debts to one another. of course, there are other reasons that things like that could happen. karmic relationships can be very tangled and complex.
but falun dafa teaches me that one should take these things lightly, and not be attached to anything. for example, two years ago amber and i had a short relationship to punctuate 5 odd years of being atracted to eachother and feeling awkward, and then she abruptly stopped talking to me and moved to nevada. i didn't talk to her for a couple years. then a few months ago, we got back in contact, got really close, and she moved back to olympia. we saw eachother once, and then she abrbruptly stopped talking to me again. it's been a few weeks, maybe a month, and now i hear she has a new boyfriend. at first i was really sad hearing this. why? because i was attached to her. i pictured my future a certain way, involving her, and i wanted very badly for it to be that way. so why did this happen? i would say it had to do with my needing to give up my attachment to her, and more broadly, to being in love. i wouldn't have thought of it on my own, but when she was brought back into my life, it brought the issue into focus for me, and i could see that i placed a lot of importance on being in love and feeling that i was important to someone. once i'd thought about it for a little while, i realized that whether i was alone or not didn't matter, that whether people could or couldn't be happy without me didn't matter. i was able to take it lightly, and now i don't feel sad. her reappearance in my life caused this change in my thinking, and i evolved as a person as a result of it. that was the reason for our relationship at that point.
anyway. i know you're not a falun dafa practitioner, and it's a good bet you don't believe in karma or reincarnation (most americans don't). i'm not saying you should. i guess i just felt that since i got started in the last few posts, i should just explain as fully as i could what i was trying to say. you shouldn't take what i said as a representation of falun dafa, because i'm just a practitioner and i really can't speak for it as a whole. anyway, i would advise you to just take these things more lightly. i've found that the only time one feels really sad is when they're in a situation where they've almost given up an attachment to something, and that if one holds onto it the sadness might continue, but if one lets it go then they're bound to feel lighter and better. i hope that helps in some way.
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hraa
Apr 14, 2004 18:06:41 GMT -5
Post by reyler on Apr 14, 2004 18:06:41 GMT -5
you underestimate my patterns of thought. i believe in reincarnation, and to an extent i believe in karma as well. but you make it sound as if everything in life has to be karmic duty; that every single thing you do or say is either in reference to past life, or in making a success of this one. and i'm not saying that you shouldn't care if your current life is successful, because if it isn't you just end up repeating it (that's what i'm doing, it seems), i'm just wondering why i can't have people and things in my life that i care about that don't impact my current life mission, or a past one. it's like never having time off to enjoy life. i'd kind of like to just have all the necessary adjustments in my soul happen to get them out of the way. of course, given the unpleasant nature of the events that have caused these changes, maybe i shouldn't push that. i may be misinterpreting this, but it seems like you're ttrying to tell me that this life, and anything that happens in it, doesn't matter, because it's all what i get as far as karmic retribution, good or otherwise. but doesn't that sort of mean that the purpose of this life is just to collect all the baggage i've built up from previous existence? i don't think that's the case. i know i'm repeating this life, because whatever the ultimate goal of it was, i failed the first time. i simply can't manage to shrug off the things that happen to me, because usually they prevent my life from being what i want it to be. it feels as if i've incurred so much bad karma that the only purpose of this life is to make me suffer for it, but i know that's not the case. and frankly, i don't see that my thinking needs such heavy blows to be adjusted. i'm not quite *that* dense. and how did our internet conversation turn so quickly from silly statements to dialogue on metaphysical theory?
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hraa
Apr 15, 2004 19:45:34 GMT -5
Post by chaney on Apr 15, 2004 19:45:34 GMT -5
more and more context. and again, this is just my interpetation of falun dafa, and not dafa itself. ok, here we go in falun dafa we say that all beings who'll be incarnated as humans were born as much higher beings. meaning, you were originally an arhat, bodhisattva, dao, buddha, or something even greater. we fell down to this human level by doing things that go against the nature of the universe, which we describe as zhen-shan-ren, thus creating karma. (zhen means truthfullness, shan is kindness, compassion, benevolence, selflessness, etc., and ren is forbearance, tolerance, endurance, self-control). we hold that the purpose of living is to have the opportunity to cultivate into higher beings and return to our origin. so when you say: but you make it sound as if everything in life has to be karmic duty; that every single thing you do or say is either in reference to past life, or in making a success of this one.i have to respond: exactly. except maybe the success you're referring to is different from the success i'm referring to. to me, it means giving up every attachment (including self-interest, and by extension, emotion) and eliminating all my karma so that i can go back to where i came from. the buddha school (which includes buddhism, judaism, and christianity) emphasizes the cultivation of shan. the dao school (which includes daoism, confuscianism, and to a certain extent, qimen) emphsizes cultivating zhen. falun dafa emphasizes ren. we focus a lot on self-control, looking at the larger picture of things, and even taking hardships as joy. there's a particular quote from "zhuan falun" that i think of a lot: "We say that when you take a step back in a conflict, you will find the seas and the skies boundless, and it will certainly be another situation." sometimes things that seem good are really bad, and things that seem bad are really good. i'm not sure how our conversation took this turn either
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