Waking Life

As I imagine anyone pretentious enough to start a blog (which is to say, everyone) feels, I spend much of my time contemplating the nature of what is real.

After all, why write if you don't have a thought on reality? Some writers wouldn't put it in quite those terms, but whether you're writing about cooking or cars or Socretes or finance, you are facing something expressible, something that you perceive not only as real, but in some way primary to your existence. Something that in the confused primordial sea of what we see and feel and hear and smell and taste on a daily basis that strikes us as somewhat MORE REAL than the rest; if not, what about that particular topic arrests us out of the literally millions of sensations demanding our attention?

I read a fascinating fact the other day: every minute, 8 hours of video is uploaded to youtube alone. Every day, eight years are added. It is literally impossible to watch everything: you would need 480 screens streaming simultaneously and updating to the newest content instantly to keep up. If nothing else tells us how much our reality is entirely designed of our own choosing, by what we SELECT to perceive, and more importantly, what we elect to ignore, this fact, the literal kaleidoscoping of time, drives the unfathomiblity of the universe into us like a spike into our frontal lobe.

Eleven years ago, Waking Life, in its own wandering, dreamlike way, gave us the most beautiful elucidation of our weird reality we could ask for. And, driving home the futility in trying to keep up, it has taken me eleven years to catch up and give it the viewing it deserved. This is unacceptable; I've watched The Secret and What the Fuck Do We Know, two films that attempt to sell this philosophy and reality paradigm shamelessly and blatantly, in this time. Where Waking Life ruminates and sheds light and asks questions, those films preach, paradoxically attempting to sell their concrete vision of reality that is based off the impossibility of certainty. And yet, somehow, those made it on my viewing queue before Waking Life. One of the characters in this film tells us "the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off or see each other as a victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are." And in the spirit of this, I accept responsibility for making the choice to define my reality as one that includes The Secret and doesn't include Waking Life.

Until now. And in honor of this beautiful film, I present my favorite quotes from perhaps my favorite existential pondering.

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They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because if you can do that, you can do anything.

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.

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving.

It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.

As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough.

This is where I think language came from. It came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another.

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

The function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them.

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'm closer to the end of my life than I've ever been, I actually feel more than ever that I have all the time in the world.

The funny thing is our cells are completely regenerating every seven years. We've already become completely different people several times over, and yet we always remains quintessentially ourselves.

We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a giant Dostoyevsky novel starring clowns.

Lady Gregory turns to me and says, "Let me explain to you the nature of the universe. Now, Philip K Dick is right about time, but he's wrong that it's 50 AD. Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now. And it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question. And that question is, basically, do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven? And we're all saying, No, thank you. Not just yet."

If you can wake up, you should...because someday you won't be able to. So just, um-- But it's easy. Just--just...

Wake up.