Where is everyone ?
The English users forum has been bereft of postings for most of the past couple of weeks.
Maybe there's some serious work on Trisquel_10 taking priority ... I hope so.
Trolls have been spotted in the main forum, so we followed the emergency procedure and retreated to the Troll Lounge, as you have now discovered.
Can you retreat from yourself? Asking for a friend.
Of course. We Spiritual Hutts call it "cababoska" or "rebirth through visiting the sanctuary on the refreshing spring in the mountain of the æternal spirit".
You should tell your friend to try it some time, it is a highly edifying experience. I am sure you'll like it. In fact, I am a bit surprised you are asking.
I take it that you were not referring to that loophole in the emergency procedure.
Everyone else just calls it Samsara. You Hutts always make things harder than they need to be.
Speaking of which - best movie ever, if you haven't watched it yet you are really missing out - https://archive.org/details/Samsara-PanNalin
I was very much reminded of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring. I guess you have watched it, I'd like to have your thoughts about it.
You did well, there are also many other repeating patterns in the movie, and there are many similarities to the life of Siddartha and his wife Yashodhara. Samsara means "this life" and "life after life" and "the world of life", so our western languages don't have this type of word. Be sure and get the subtitles - you should be able to load the "samsara.srt" file from the internet archive link into VLC player as an English subtitle file. Without the subtitles and the dialogue you'll miss much of the meaning in the movie.
Listen to it with headphones on if possible, there are many subtle sounds that you will miss over normal speakers. The first meeting of Tashi and Pema sounds very different with headphones, you can hear her nervous breathing and swallowing sounds and recognize that she desired him as much as he desired her. It puts a different spin on the whole movie.
The ending has been much debated, but my view is that Tashi went back home to Pema and began his meditation and Buddhist practices at home with her. The clue is the famous parable of Buddha written on the rock - 'how do you keep a drop of water from every drying up? Throw it into the sea'. This was part of a teaching by Buddha on how his disciples should not remove themselves from the world, like the monks were doing in the monasteries, but instead should be in the world and part of the world.
Other interesting aspects are from the process of making the film. Director Pan Nalin has said he made the mountains a central character in the movie, so it's interesting to see how he uses the mountains. He apparently spent months recording nature sounds from Ladekh and used them throughout the movie - another reason to listen closely with headphones. The actors included local monks but also included internationally famous stars like Christie Chung. Christie spent months learning the Ladakhi language for her dialogue and worked on learning how women make thread, weave cloth, and do other tasks around a typical Ladakhi farm. It's pretty unusual to see big stars throw themselves into a project like that. They apparently shot for 6 months or so on location.
It's good to watch it occasionally. I watch it a couple times a year and see new things and new connections every time. I turned a friend onto it, and he's probably watched it 30 times and claims that the movie changed his life completely.
> Without the subtitles and the dialogue you'll miss much of the meaning in the movie.
I first browsed scenes randomly without subtitles, as they do not come with the avi file, as I had first mistakenly thought. Then I realized I had misread the instructions, so I downloaded the srt file. I now know that mpv automatically uses subtitles from the same folder as the video files, which I find elegant. I am glad to have gone without subtitles first: the last scene with the dog did not need any, and many other scenes look somehow even more intense without them.
About the ending: I have a weird feeling that anything between Tashi's changes of attire is a dream, or can be construed as such. Samsara is also often referred to as a dream, or an illusion, as opposed to the reality of the stream of consciousness.
Anyway I am currently stuck upstairs with a floor sanding machine. I'll see how far our idyll can go, I hope it'll last at least until the last slat is sanded at last. Or is it also a dream?
> About the ending: I have a weird feeling that anything between Tashi's changes of attire is a dream, or can be construed as such. Samsara is also often referred to as a dream, or an illusion, as opposed to the reality of the stream of consciousness.
How about the modern city that they go to right in the middle of the movie? In the rest of the movie, there is nothing to indicate that it is set in modern times. Is modernity a dream, in the movie and in life?
Definitely many people think that the final scene is a dream, because of the way that Pema disappears into the wind. It could be that there are many dream scenes - Tashi's master, Apo, tells Tashi that he dreamed when it seemed that Pema slept next to him at night, and later told Tashi that it actually was not a dream. But it did seem dream-like. Dream vs reality is probably a major theme in the movie.
Have you watched the Korean "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring"?
It tells a very similar tale, although in a somehow more dramatic and more symbolic way, from a different Buddhist perspective.
Oh, I did see that a long time ago. I'm not as knowledgeable about Korean or Japanese Buddhism, and that movie did not stay with me as much.
There's a somewhat similar movie to your Korean one that was made in Bhutan in 2003 that I thought was worth watching several times. In fact I'm going to watch it again, very interesting one with modern scenes mixed with dream and myth. Travelers and Magicians: https://archive.org/details/Travellers.and.Magicians.Zo
Unless your spanish is good, you'd probably need to get the subtitles you prefer from opensubtitles.org. Like with Samsara, it uses a lot of local actors and just regular local people.
So you like stories about young men falling for handsome girls before abandoning them, for various reasons.
I like the monk's hat. I also somehow like the way he keeps trolling the America bound cassette player guy until he turns nicer.
Himalayan Buddhism fascinates, probably because of the various ancient magical beliefs it has merged with. Some form of these can also be found, to some extent, in many Japanese Buddhist schools, except for Zen Buddhism, which is way more focused on the mind and on asceticism. The Korean version ("Seon" Buddhism) is similar, albeit with an eremitic tradition instead of monasteries and temples. I tend to relate more easily to the more ascetic forms. I find the other forms entertaining. Or diverting.
But more importantly, why did Owen Lars age so fast? Is it because of the sand storms on Tatooine?
> "Himalayan Buddhism fascinates, probably because of the various ancient magical beliefs it has merged with. Some form of these can also be found, to some extent, in many Japanese Buddhist schools, except for Zen Buddhism, which is way more focused on the mind and on asceticism. The Korean version ("Seon" Buddhism) is similar, albeit with an eremitic tradition instead of monasteries and temples. I tend to relate more easily to the more ascetic forms. I find the other forms entertaining. Or diverting."
I'm on the other end, Zen concepts are a bit difficult for me to grasp. Himalayan Buddhism is fun and easy to follow the magical stories and has some depth to it. That's also why I enjoy my studies of Christianity so much, I can easily relate to all the stories and the history and the culture. The Bible is a wonderful journey through the history of ancient near eastern and Mediterranean cultures and events and religious thought.
All this is a big mystery to me anyway, I can only give impressions from various readings. Surely there are as many paths as there are humans.
I find all forms of religions to be interesting objects of study, also the more I learn about them and the more I find similarity between them, beyond the relatively superficial differences. These differences are mostly cultural (and incidentally also interesting to study) so once we have managed to dive into the core message it appears to be amazingly similar.
Also, I often have a feeling that, would the initiators have had a glimpse of what was to be made of their message (as the oldest texts written centuries after their death let us guess it might have been), they might have chosen to keep quiet instead.
> "These differences are mostly cultural (and incidentally also interesting to study) so once we have managed to dive into the core message it appears to be amazingly similar."
I have often noticed the same thing. The biggest differences between Tibetan Buddhism and Sufi Islam appear to me to be culture, location, historical context, natural environment, etc. It's very interesting.
On that topic, I am always reminded of the shock that the passing Frank "crusaders" are supposed to have triggered in the otherwise "Roman Christians" from the East (in the Byzantine empire) who had kept all the traditions of civility from the pax romana, while the West had been invaded by all these germanic, and originally pagan, "barbarians". The very oxymoronic idea of "warrior monks" was totally anathema to the Byzantines, and it seems that they saw the crusader armies fade away to the East with a feeling of relief. This was of course before the East (the "Byzantines") and the West (the "Latins") fell apart and started massacring each other on the spot.
To the contrary, many Frank soldiers found some similarity of way of life and destiny with the very Ottoman troops (many of them Kurdish) that they were supposed to have come to fight. So when I hear talks of a so-called "Christian civilization", I have no idea what these people mean. Are they referring to the orthodox Greek? Or to the Japanese catholic? Or to the Mediterranean culture, which nurtured at least three monotheistic religions and is in no way specifically Christian? Maybe they mean all the people named "Christian", whatever beliefs they may hold.
We Hutts can be reborn any time. Morphing is not only a change in physical appearance, all mental and spiritual forms can be changed too. The only thing we have unfortunately not been able to modify yet is intellectual power, although we believe carpenter ants might somehow help us on that quest. They have a huge head for their body size.
> "The only thing we have unfortunately not been able to modify yet is intellectual power, although we believe carpenter ants might somehow help us on that quest. They have a huge head for their body size."
Jellyfish. Morph into jellyfish in order to reach the ultimate mind power of the collective jellyfish race.
Our experts have recently discovered that you need to reduce jellyfish into powder first, which is very convenient for storage given the dry material content of your average jellyfish, and then dilute the jellyfish powder into a regular coffee. This coffee I have now morphed into, because of a technical glitch in our laboratory, has gathered the essence of the quintessence of the collective mental power of hundred of thousands of jellyfishes. We might soon be able to power the world.
We cannot easily drink ourselves up, though, so we am somehow stuck around the spoon I used to stir ourselves up, so to speak. We have become a highly sentient coffee but we can do nothing out of it, except typing by sheer mind power. We must admit that the sentience itself is really cool. We might never try to morph further, until someone drinks us up or we get completely cold and end up evaporating on this forsaken shelf. We already feel weaker by the minute, these might be the last words we will have ever been able to type.
We am currently in the castle of Arrrrghhhhh. We think. Yes, it definitely says Arrrrghhh on that map on the wall...or was it Camelot? So many questions left unanswered as we slowly evaporate into oblivion. Except, of course, if we somehow manage to deep freeze ourselves. We should be able to power a Coolerator, but how to get inside?
That would be very funny if the lab cleaning lady saw the coffee cup and decided to drink a big gulp. She thinks, "wow, I feel smarter! I should invest all my money in Bitcoin! Or even better, Dogecoin! And I need to invent an electric car - I'll be a billionaire!" Puts her earphones back in her ears and whistles to the hits of Diana Ross and the Supremes while she finishes mopping the lab floor.
Sees a big plastic tub of powder marked "jellyfish brains". Throws it in the toilet and flushes it down. @lanun starts to feel a very strange wet, swirling feeling...
Both ways, we am going to end up in the toilets. How ironic for such a concentration of jellyfish power.
The Call of the Sea, we guess.
@lanun is returned to the sea, to reunite with his jellyfish brethren. Their minds link up in a global chain of jellyfish uber-intellectualism. They invent escargot-flavored ice cream, and make several billion dollars by selling it to French snail dessert enthusiasts. The Germans are disgusted and make plans to invade France militarily to stop the spread of this ice cream monstrosity. The world descends into World War III, as each country reacts violently to the new creamy snail concoction.
We seem to have morphed into a younger Harrison Ford with welding glasses. Could have been worse. I hope I'll be able to take the glasses off at some point, though. We still strongly feel wet and salty.
> The world descends into World War III
But the wily plot is timely uncovered by the slily Texan: we jellyfishes were here to take over after the rotten humans finally manage to destroy each other. We shall forever be indebted to all the selfless snails who got frozen in the process. Will the Texan Special Peace Force mission, led by peace-broker Lance "CleanPee" Armstrong, suffice to calm the angry German? Will the French accept to compromise and send all their snails to the custody of the English? Will the English survive such a sluggy massive invasion, or will they decide to exit en masse and head back to Saxony where they belong, or invade Texas instead? Will Sir Han manage to take all snails onboard the Millenium Falcon and smuggle them straight into Jabba's hut?
That is what we call peace.
The idiots who can't communicate except by squabbling have always wanted war rather than peace.
The fact that there are no posts in the main forum is an indication of the completeness of Trisquel9, and to go to the trouble of wishing for mayhem there is truly a dangerous thought that seeks to harm peace.
We have 400 years of peace DNA imprinted on us, and it's no wonder that those who live in certain areas can't understand it in principle.
It is a very dangerous sign and we must mark you.
For God's sake, get used to having fun in peace. Or maybe it's time for you to develop a new way of communication. I'm bored.
On a side note, I was just looking at the dictionary and found the phrase "Japanese tourists are easy marks" in the "mark" section. We've known for more than 30 years that we are a favorite target of pickpockets etc in foreign countries, and guidebooks have been warning us for 30 years. Are we so stupid that we are still sitting ducks, or do we want to trust humans? or do we aim something else? which gorillas don't have 400 years of peaceful DNA would not be able to understand.
I feel sorry for the OP, we need to do better to try and answer the question: where is everybody?
If the OP is a carpenter ant, I might have some news for them.
Ladekh. Achieving enlightenment in a Himalayan cave. Meditating on the symbiotic relationship between a man and his carpenter ant friends. Waiting for Christie Chung to come and smother me with kisses.