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.
