I recently watched the Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" DVD, and Roger Waters said something that I've always agreed with, that our basic personalities are formed in the formative years of our lives, and not much of that basic personality changes for the rest of our lives.

I bank a lot on what a child takes in prior to learning what "mommy" or "ball" or "doll" is. From the point our memory kicks in, what I consider the proverbial beginning of the end, we start discriminating the world around us. We receive stimuli and experience things, we learn and grow and develop, but our reactions and what we learn and how we grow are all informed by that basic personality; what our infantile minds soaked in unconsciously without discrimination.

This means two things to me, variations on a theme, really: 1) we should live true to our nature; and 2) we can't change ourselves into being what we aren't. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm making a huge sweeping theory that I think applies to everyone.

It comes down to: 1) I have always tried to live true to myself (that was a very conscious thought when I was a teenager); and 2) there are limits to how much I can change or stray from my basic core personality.

I think of this because of the seeming changes since spending a week at the monastery, but nothing has changed. We experience things that make it look like we've changed, but it's more blossoming of different realizations.

The idea of renouncing material living resonated in me a long time ago. It has never completely gone away, although it has never solidly taken root. The same goes with suicide (which is a form of renouncing material living if you think about it), it's something that resonated early and it has never gone away, and has never pushed itself as an issue over the edge. So to speak.

I'm not saying that renunciation or suicide was specifically planted in my subconscious infant mind, but something was that when I came across the idea of suicide in my life, a realization blossomed, something resonated. Same thing with the attraction to monastic life.

In Buddhism, they say physical manifestation occurs with causality and conditions. So looking at a barren hillside, it is not accurate to say that there are no flowers there, because come Spring and the cause and conditions presented by the sun, rain, and seeds, then will there be flowers.

Or here's a more modern-day example I thought while standing outside the SF Zen Center: when you have a date with someone, you don't immediately go into the bedroom and hit the sack. You prepare, get dressed to look and smell nice, you chit chat and charm, you have dinner, some drinks, maybe a movie, and then when the conversation winds down and the attraction is there, then all the causes and conditions are in place to head into the room with the bed to do the nasty. I can't wait until I can give Dharma Talks.

Anyway, maybe that's what's happening now for me with a decision to be made towards one form of renunciation or the other. The core impulse towards renunciation has always been here, never went away. But now the conditions have arisen in this life, informed by my entire history of karmic causality, whereby one of these two things must happen.

Living a normative life has never been a primary focus in life; job, career, family, growing old. I had a job and quit it because I find it meaningless to be caught in the cycle of making money to spend it; endure 9 to 5 in order to entertain and sustain myself from 5 to 9.

I haven't been in a relationship for five years, and now as a practical matter, considering my values, it would be pointless to get into one. My desire to obtain the benefits of being in a relationship is outweighed by my lack of desire to be caught up in that whole relationship thang.

Finally, playing music has been a motivating factor for continuing on with material life all these years, but even the desire for that gratification is completely gone.

To me, it all makes sense, and I don't feel trapped by feeling these are my only choices. It feels right and true to myself, although I can see how that kind of choice might be horrific to most folk. Hm, I hadn't thought about how other folk may react being in my shoes. Interesting. But then I read other folks' weblogs and I feel that if I were in their shoes, I would feel trapped and horrified at the choices I would have to make.