Conan

IMDB is an awesome site. It has tons of information and resources for almost every movie publicly released. Every movie has been reviewed and rated by thousands of movie junkies. It's fun to see what the general public's consensus is for how good a particular movie is. However, sometimes it's distressing to see good movies with extremely low rankings, and such is the case with Conan the Barbarian.



Conan the Barbarian features amazing direction, one of the best scores for any movie ever, impressive cinemtography, amazing action sequences, good special effects and decent acting all around. So why is it rated 6.5 on IMDB? I looked through the reviews, and the primary complaint is that Arnold is a bad actor. I find this particularly amusing since Arnold has very little to say in the movie's 2 hours. Even if the acting is bad, Arnold couldn't have wrecked the movie with so few lines. To prove my point here is everything Conan says in the movie:



> To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.
> Crom!
> Snakes, did you say snakes?
> No.
> A standard, a symbol, perhaps on a shield. Two snakes, coming together, facing each other, but they're one.
> Yes.
> Crom.
> And who says you will?
> Who are you?
> So what are you doing here?
> What gods do you pray to?
> To Crom. But I seldom pray to him, he does not listen.
> He is strong. If I die I have to go before him, and he will ask me, what is the riddle of steel? And if I don't know he will cast me out of Valhalla and laugh at me. That's Crom, strong as this mountain.
> Crom laughs at your four winds. Laughs from his mountain.
> No, let's waste no time.
> It's good.
> Does it always smell like this? How does the wind ever get in here?
> They're all sluts! He's dead already. Can you believe that? Can you...
> Come let's leave this place.
> Can you summon demons, wizard?
> You care for these places?
> Do flowers grow around here?
> Oil the sword, and feed the horse.
> No.
> For a girl!
> I'm afraid.
> Could we talk over there, where the others can not see?
> I'm afraid and I'm shy. This is your robe? Priest's robe?
> Good, that's all you'll ever need.
> You killed my mother, you killed my father, you killed my people! You took my father's sword...
> The riddle of steel.
> Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you will remember if we were good men or bad, why we fought, or why we died. No, all that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important. Battle pleases you Crom, so grant me one request, grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!

http://www.barbariankeep.com/ctbds.html

Traveling Upstream

Some people use meditation to reach higher levels of consciousness. Does it work? Yes it does work. Achieving higher levels of consciousness is easy and I believe anyone can do it. Here is the method that has worked for me, it stems from a simple model of consciousness.



Every thought you have spawns another thought and another thought and yet another thought in a continuous stream. Think of each thought as a point on a spiral moving outward at incredible speed from the center. New thoughts are created at the center of the spiral and follow the path of the spiral around and outward over time.

The trick here is to take a hard look at the thoughts coming out of the center. The goal is to analyze the root cause of your thoughts. Ask yourself where are these thoughts coming from and focus your analysis on this. What you need to do is step back and allow your thoughts to encompass the framework that's generating them.



To do this you must look at each thought you have and analyze it to find the previous thought that spwaned it. As you analyze each thought as it moves away from the center of the spiral, you are of course creating new thoughts. These new thoughts are actually the ones doing the analysis. As you become aware of these new thoughts being created, you must jump from analyzing whatever thought you were analyzing to analyzing the new thought.

Eventually your current thought will be the same as your next thought and you will no longer be looking at your last thought, but your current one. When this occurs, your thoughts will be exposed and your consciousness will be briefly elevated. You will have a thought that recursively references itself.

Another visualization of what's happening here is a snake eating it's own tail. The object here is to think a thought that encompasses itself.