I don't remember if I remembered it while dreaming last night, or sitting this morning, but it was a childhood memory that makes a connection to both suicide and Zen later in life.

It's not that I had a miserable childhood. I don't perceive it has having been miserable. Whether my childhood meets with scorn or sympathy is probably relative. People in a worse position in life might show scorn, people in better positions might show sympathy. Or is it the other way around?

It's all perception, you see, because it involves my parents, but there's no way they could have predicted I'd end up the way I did. They provided just fine, they weren't grossly negligent. Not even negligent. Or maybe they were negligent and just lucky that nothing horrible happened to us. But they planted us in suburbia because it was safer, so maybe they balanced everything out in their heads. So no, they weren't even negligent.

But I remember in the perceived recurring worst moments of my childhood memories that probably weren't that bad, thinking to myself that none of it mattered, my self didn't matter (they'd be sorry when I wasn't around anymore), I can endure because my self is something I can separate from the misery. What was I?, like 8? And what was the misery?, like raking leaves? I have no concrete memory what I was so miserable about, and I of fair mind can safely say I'm not repressing anything major.

This personality creation might have been from even before 8. I think by 8 I was creating the misery on purpose, walking to school in the dead of winter without a jacket, just to see if I could endure it. No, not to see if I could endure it, I did it because I could endure it, I told myself.

Separate misery from self, and I can endure. That was the theory. And later it became, separate misery (self) from self, and there's Zen; and separate self from misery, and there's suicide. And in either case I can't endure, because that's built into whichever theory by then.

Things get (**enter descriptive**) when you're walking south on Laguna in the rain at 6:50 in the morning after someone tried to jack your bike (they failed, but a visit to the bike doktor is required), but it's really OK because these things are expected in the city.

And for a moment, and just a moment even though I tried to hold onto it longer, I felt . . . felt? or was it a trickle in my stream of being? . . . the understanding life in order to live life. Life and reality are the same thing here.

If my life is alive, so is all of reality around me. If reality around me is dead, so am I? Time slowed down, frame by frame. Understand reality to live life. Those are the words (I think), and I understood them then, but I sure don't now, although I can superficially remember the feeling.

What else? Having theories about the universe can't hurt. Recognition of psychological and biological factors is probably important somewhere in there. There are no answers, though. Nothing that can be communicated to another person. There will always be someone who thinks your beliefs are crap, and are formulating their own brilliant theory of everything for themselves.

Time slowed down, slo-mo, I turned around to see if anyone was there. Just a homeless person sleeping next to a parking meter in a water-logged blanket. Living is easy, existing is easy, you just have to understand it.

Floodgates: 

Damn, why can't I just take a pill that will make me want to live? Why isn't there a pill I can take to make me depressed, just so that I could take more pills to make me not be depressed? Why is my life so black and white in its greyness, and grey in its black and whiteness? 

It would be so easy to take Elizabeth up on her suggestion to move to Chicago, where she's pretty sure I could land a job where she works. Just go on living. Get out of the Bay Area. 

And then what? Live in a dream. Float through a dream. Even be happy. Just live, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be wonderful? It would. And a friend who is apparently good enough that she thinks of me when she knows there are job openings and I want to get the hell out of San Francisco? That kind of blew my mind, as the suggestion came out of the blue after several months of radio silence.

And my daily life now filled with practice and reading, cut through the bullshit that is institutionalized Buddhism, secular Buddhism as far as I'm concerned. Moral Buddhism that encourages dualistic thinking. Boy, have I got a beef about that.

Enter the monastery come April? And how do I see myself one year hence? Five years hence? Ten years hence? I don't know, I really don't. It could be that in the chain-of-lifetimes scheme of things, I'm just about ready to enter a monastery, but not quite there yet. I keep killing myself. 

I believe this repeated killing myself in subsequent lifetimes is part of my learning, since there is no tangible reason why I'd be killing myself. Of course I don't know if this is the first time I don't have a reason but want to do it, or if that has been par for the course and part of the learning. I'm aware of all the nuances of possibility in this, so any Buddhists reading this, keep your fucking karmic projections to yourself please. 

In my past beliefs, which might be self-serving, I have been killing myself in successive lifetimes, but for karmic reasons, I've always been able to be re-born human. Since I'm eschewing human moral interpretation, "karmic reasons" mean that the suicides have exhibited "non-attachment". Suicides that exhibit attachment to delusion, i.e. the physical/phenomenal world, are more the kind that might lead to re-birth in the lower realms. Attachment = "bad". 

And of course entering a monastery isn't an end goal. For me myself, entering a monastery means having reached the point where I'm ready for that environment to cultivate . . . whatever, I'm not going to try to describe or explain it. 

I got the sense from the Deer Park monks that at least some of them were in a chain of lifetimes where they had reached that point and successively end up entering a monastery to continue their practice. A few of them highly advanced who come back and become monks to aid others. 

And, in my belief system, it doesn't end there either. In my world, there are beings who have already done the monastic practice and have fully cultivated and mastered non-attachment to physical reality, and die and are re-born just living unattached lives, enlightenment being unlikely or impossible in this era of mappo, degeneration of the dharma. 

They could be your neighbors, could be a homeless person, a doctor or a lawyer, could be Madoka, could be Bob, but they're out there. They're here. We can only know ourselves, so don't bother figuring out who they are, just be glad they're there. The keys are compassion (material) and non-attachment (spiritual). Balanced. 

But that's getting a bit far out there. 

Maybe I'm in a stage of progression that we all need to get through, all who believe at least, a stage where we need to exhibit non-attachment in the "ultimate" fashion. A stage where despite having all the reasons to live, we are not attached to this physical life. It's not an end, we still come back. But we come back a little further along the path. 

I don't know. But the possibilities are endless and wonderful.

I had a dream last night where I dreamed I was aware that I was dreaming. I remember picking something up, something semi-fragile like a bottle, and thinking that this was just a dream, and to prove it, I could throw it and not be concerned that it would break. And I remember flinging it away, and then *doink* it just disappeared, along with the background scenery where I was flinging it. Proof positive. (what is the sound of something disappearing? I don't think it's "doink".)

Now I can't remember if I was dreaming I was conscious that it was a dream, or if I was in the dream and really conscious. Yo'm say'n? Occasionally I try to condition myself to be conscious in my dreams. I think the latest trick was to concentrate on a keyword while falling asleep that would act as a trigger. If I could remember the keyword in the dream, that was a positive step or a link between consciousness and dream. It hasn't worked yet, but I'm hopeful.

On the fringes of my belief system is the possibility of maintaining some sort of consciousness through the betweens, the bardos between death and re-birth. I have no pretention that I could navigate them consciously, which is why the belief is way out on the fringes, but I don't disbelieve there have been Tibetan monks who have mastered it. I think they developed and mastered dream consciousness as an exercise to get to that point. Now that's concentration! I'm fascinated enough by it to see if I could elicit that keyword during a dream.

I remembered all this because during a Dharma talk this morning, the speaker jokingly referred to the "bardo of getting into a car". Yesterday I thought of a t-shirt for cyclists that says, "Drivers are morons, ride safe!" So I liked the suggestion of driving a car being a death state.

I've been wanting to be and working on being spontaneously nicer. Compassionate. Whatever.

I was struck by a Simpson's episode several weeks ago, when the ghost of Lucille Ball appears in Lisa's room, smoking a cigarette. Lucy asks Lisa if she has an ashtray. Lisa is, of course, like seven years old – why would she have an ashtray? She is also smart, articulate, politically correct, and somewhat uptight and smug in her intelligence, and so I expected a response about smoking being bad, or that her parents probably wouldn't be happy about her smoking in the house, or that she just didn't have one. Instead, Lisa takes a can filled with pencils and pens, dumps it empty, and hands it to Lucy, "Will this do?" Wow!

I do try to be nice, considerate, and respectful to strangers, but it's all a bit contrived. I think too much, so when I'm nice to strangers, I'm usually very conscious of it. It's not as spontaneous as it could be – microseconds of action without thought. Lisa Simpson had to think about how to accommodate Lucy, but the accommodation was immediate (we're interpreting here, folks). She didn't run through the negative arguments in her head before deciding to accommodate her.

I'm primarily working on it while riding my bike, because that's when I'm at my instinctual most aggressive, defensive, and self-righteous. It comes out without forethought or premeditation. And it's nothing I do, I'm not particularly rude or stupid, it's all feeling. But I know about it, and sometimes I ride away ashamed of the thoughts that ran through my head in situations that weren't even a near-miss.

And it has to be more than that. A couple days ago I almost got doored riding east in the Folsom St. bike lane. I was completely in the right. I was riding along in the bike lane when the passenger side door of an SUV that was in a car traffic lane was flung open in front of me. I swerved so hard that I had to come to a full stop (yay, fast reflexes), and later had to check to see if the alignment of my front tire was off.

When I turned around, there was a girl standing there looking scared, and meekly said, "sorry". I'm not one to tell anyone off, and especially not a child. I said in the most non-admonishing tone as possilbe, "just look out for traffic next time," and rode off. No harm as far as I was concerned.

Later as I thought about the incident, I thought that I should have taken the extra step of asking her if she was alright. That would have been proper equanimity and compassion.

You represent... apathy.
You don't really show any emotion. You can be considered cruel and cold, but you just don't really care about anything. This is just the way you are... you're quite a challenge to get close to, and others may perceive you as boring.
What feeling do you represent?
brought to you by Quizilla

This isn't true. Just my answers to the questions were apathetic. Because they were boring.

Counting down. I'm still counting down, but to what, I don't know. It's habit for me to be counting down to some end. It's even natural. Isn't each of our passing days counting down to an end? 

People don't like thinking about those things, not knowing when anything will end. Not knowing when anything will end, people find it useless or impossible to count down the days. But they're nevertheless counting down. 

I've been finding myself in conversations trying to tactfully figure out what people's motivations are. What are they doing? Why are they doing this? Instead of just floating through our lives to reach 60, 70, 80, just because we were given these lives, what is compelling us, propelling us to reach 60, 70, 80? 

Sometimes it's hard to steer the conversation away from depressingness, and if it looks like it's headed that way, I'll try to dissolve it before it gets there. If a conversation on life is going to be depressing, what's the point? 

I'm still counting down, but to which choice, I'm not sure. I must have a fear of making a choice, of being proactive; either positively kill myself being true to myself and understanding it and being able to explain it for myself, or wild blue yonder it and implement the monastic choice. I have good arguments either way and I'm in danger of freezing up and not doing anything. 

Instead, I play games with myself, try to set tangible chains of events into motion to force a choice. This time it is giving notice on my apartment on March 1st so that by April 1st, something will have to happen. But I think if I'm giving notice on March 1st to force something to happen by April 1st, it won't be committing suicide. So counting down. 

Suicide actually hasn't been feeling very tangible lately. I don't think that means anything in terms of what I do, in fact it might be a positive step towards it, in that it might indicate a loss of attachment to the idea of it. In my mind, it's less and less real, but that just might be a mini-breakthrough of sorts. But it's counting down and having no idea what's at zero. 

We're at second line from the bottom of January. Counting down. Something has to happen. Something has to change.

I seem to think that non-Buddhists might listen to me on the topic and think of me as a Buddhist. And folk that pat themselves on the back as card-carrying Buddhists might listen to me and point out what is "Buddhist" and what is not "Buddhist", and generally not think of me as a Buddhist. Whatever, either way I don't care.

Do you go to the Buddha and ask, "Are you Buddhist? You must be Buddhist, you're the friggin' Buddha"? And maybe he'd reply, "It makes sense when you put it that way, but it just doesn't sound right. Maybe it's better to say that I'm a . . . a . . . I'm a me-ist".

Like those movies with a God character that goes, "Oh God! I mean, 'Oh Me!'"

I'm a thousand times more comfortable thinking of myself as a me-ist. Call me a Buddhist and I feel like being put into a box and framed by all these things I'm supposed to be or believe in. That I'm being fitted for an identity that is supposed to define me, rather than the other way around. Like there's something special or separate or compartmentalizable about it. Commodifiable. Able to be put into the commode.

It may be so that I am this or that which seems kinda Buddhist, or believe in this or that which seems kinda Buddhist, but it's not because I'm a "Buddhist". When you see a duck, you know it's a duck. Why is a duck a duck? It's just a fucking duck!

I saw a sign the other day for an "Orthodox Buddhist Church". It made me wonder why I haven't seen any Unorthodox Buddhist Churches. This is San Francisco after all.

It's alright for me to think of myself as Buddhist, but I won't call myself "Buddhist" to anyone, and as I said, each to their own if they call me Buddhist or not. This is all a conceit, mind you. Most people, Buddhist or otherwise, couldn't give a rats ass who, what, where, why or how I am. Well, no, there are people who give a rats ass how I am, but not how I am. Right

Got this from Randy a while ago, forgot to post it:

To the survivors:
According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.)

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors!

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms.

We had friends! We went outside and found them. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

And you're one of them!

Congratulations. Please pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors?

A must read for people over 25 yrs of age.

arguing against suicide:
"Why would you want to kill yourself? Isn't there a million things you want to do?"
"No, not really, I've pretty much done everything I want to do."
" . . . Aren't there a million things that you don't want to do?"
" . . . ***!!! . . . "

Flatter myself not, it's not easy to stump me. But it's possible.

Also on the suicide front, I read the following today that I found here: http://www.moonpointer.com/zeph/index.htm. I'm not encouraging going there, I'm just citing the source:

Please forget that idea entirely. Suicide means dying in fear and hate. The Buddha tells us the destination will be hell, which is a world which corresponds to the mindstate of fear and hate. When we overcome problems, we can only become stronger. If not, we remain weak.

Don't jump from the frying pan into the fire. If you think this is hell, killing yourself will only land you in REAL HELL.

People who end their lives LACK courage to face problems. Death will NOT end the problems. There will be rebirth and as long as lessons are not learnt, we face them again and again. What's worse is that when you build up the habit of running away, you might contemplate suicide again in a future life when you face similar difficulties. Make a resolution to NOT get caught in this vicious cycle!

Moralistic, self-righteous fucker. This is exactly the linear, literal thinking that gives me a twitch when confronted by normative, mundane, not-very-well-thought-out-or-inspired generalizations and interpretations of organized religion.

- Suicide might mean dying in fear and hate, but not necessarily so. Whether dying in fear and hate is better or worse than living in fear and hate is anyone's opinion.
- "The Buddha" also "tells us" that women cannot attain enlightenment.
- Who gives a shit what the Buddha tells us, what do you tell yourself? They are the same.
- Overcoming problems can make us weaker. Not overcoming problems can make us stronger (or might be needed to make us stronger).
- There is no difference between hell and REAL hell. Once you find yourself in REAL hell, what if you find there is a REAL REAL hell?
- If you can't figure out the rest of my commentary on what he wrote yourself, stop reading my fucking blog (just kidding, I'm just lazy (please keep reading my fucking blog, oh please, please, please)).

No wait, don't be lazy:
- People who end their lives aren't the only people who LACK courage to face problems. Everyone has their own path to discover and challenge their problems or not. Suicides aren't special except to the extent that society vilifies them.
- Society's inability to empathize with and show compassion and understanding without pity or moral indignation and superiority towards suicides might show a LACK of courage on the part of society to truly engage the complex issues of life, death, self and identity that suicides intimately have to deal with.
- Death will NOT end the problems. Life also will NOT end the problems. What's your point?
- People who do not believe in rebirth are not reborn. Imposing Hindu, Buddhist and related ideas of rebirth on those who don't believe in it is just as bad as Christians telling you you're going to burn in hell for not proclaiming the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal friend and sole saviour. The flip side of that, which is also true, is that they will be reborn and you will burn in hell. (I'm still trying to work that one out, though).
- The rest I have no problem with, except for his calling it "worse". That's his personal judgment, but again, we have our own paths for better or worse. What he considers "worse" might turn out to be a viable stepping stone for someone else.

Personally, I think the true "Buddhist" way of confronting the issue of suicide is to counsel against it and discourage it, but compassion and humility suggests withholding personal biases and moralistic judgments and what are essentially opinions. Assuming a high moral ground and making sweeping statements about universal truths and burning in hell is not particularly compassionate.

When confronted with the issue of suicide, whether it's one's own or someone else's, it's a challenge to you, and this person's hypothetical response, in my own opinion, would be a failure in many cases. There might be people who would hear that and decide against it. Obviously not suicidal, though.

Better to just say "don't do it". That's all you need to say. All that other moralistic crap is just offensive and is not going to stop anyone from committing suicide because it simply dismisses everything that has led the person to consider suicide, and that is not a way to deal with it.

"Don't do it", and let them find for themselves within themselves whether to do it or not.

"Don't do it" puts it in their mind doing it or not doing it, encouraging not doing it, and the wheels are set in motion. Whatever reasons a suicide has, it comes down to "do it or not do it", and that's a hard precipice in itself to stand on.

"Don't do it", and don't be attached yourself to someone else "doing it" or "not doing it".

Anyway, this is all a knee-jerk reaction to that one post. I admit that I didn't read the whole site to get a better idea where he's coming from, or if it even is a 'he', and I may be putting just as much on him just to forward my own soapbox ranting.

Strange. I haven't been looking back at 2003.

Truth to tell, there's just not a whole lot to look at, and there should be even less, except for that curly-fry shaped branch of fate distracting what had been my path. As straight-forward as I may describe the monastery option, the actual path looks more like how the solid-rocket boosters of the Challenger went after it exploded. There, that's better – using a national tragedy to envision my life. Geez.

But that's kind of it; how my path blew up under me and reality flew apart at the seams. For once in a good way. And looking back, it all seems so hazy, less concrete, less defined by definites and absolutes. The idea of the monastery brought me back to a home with a vengeance and grounded me. It completed an arc of a storyline. Even though I still don't know how the story ends.

Music has been a constant in my life, a passion to pursue if I were interested in continuing living a material life. Otherwise, it's just a distraction, something to do.

Suicide has also been a constant, and a logical, ironic end to the story. Having an ironic end is always very attractive.

But this thing, and I don't know what to call it, has also been a constant. Calling it religion is too simplistic. Calling it an ongoing existential inquiry into the nature of being is too hokey. But it presented itself and resonated, and I pursued it and read about it, and it developed from a crude, cursory practice in a dorm room, sitting on laundry as a cushion, with a stick of incense stuck in a tin container for some anise liqueur, filled with sand that I stole from the local Oberlin golf course, next to the cemetery.

It was always a solo practice and I never talked about it. It was personal. I balanced what I read about monastic practice with what I felt made sense. I never blindly did something because it was written down somewhere as the thing to do if you were to be this or that. From the start I was uncomfortable with calling myself "Buddhist". I did, however, get caught up in thinking Zen=Buddhism. And in some ways it is, in others it isn't.

Through the years the idea of entering a monastery faded, but I continued my personal practice; always aware of and looking for signs, even when they stopped appearing; sporadically sitting, but everywhere I lived since college I know I had some set up, so I don't think I ever spent too long away from it.

So when the monastic option reared its pretty shaved head in 2003, all of this that had been in the background through the years washed over and washed reality out. And I couldn't even begin to describe what that is. It's like painting a masterpiece of a painting and then smearing it all up with both hands and told to describe that in detail.

What I said, not a whole lot to look at, because there's not much there. And even that doesn't describe it.

happy new year's eve

December 31, 2003; 1:55 P.M.