This rules! I was giggling uncontrollably:


You are a suicidal/self-mutilating blob! Sucks to be you...
::Which rock personality disorder (from the Zoloft commercial) should you have? (Results contain pictures!)
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Poor Zoloft blob. That is so wrong.

Last words on enlightenment: Really, the topic isn't that dear to me.

Anyway, once enlightenment is attained, there is no enlightenment. That's one of its idiosyncrasies – it disappears once it is attained. Sort of like time stopping once you reach the speed of light.

If you ask an enlightened person if they are enlightened, they shouldn't be able to answer, because to them, there is no such thing as enlightenment. There is no answering "yes", there is no answering "no".

As long as one strives for enlightenment (or not), there is such a thing as enlightenment. It's an idea, a concept, a goal, and as a goal, it is also a barrier. It can be mulled over and meditated upon. There is a separation between the thinker and enlightenment.

Enlightenment erases that duality, and it is no longer an idea or a concept that can be mulled over, and the goal/barrier disappears because there is no separation between the self and enlightenment. That's what it means to be enlightened, but to the enlightened, it doesn't mean anything because those dualities are gone.

Given all this, I still think it's possible that enlightenment changes with changes in reality and perception.

Critical Mass riding through Times Square:

The guy at the end making faces at my camera is funny. I was pointing the camera back blindly.

Another meme that I got from Infinitely Pie, seems like I get all of them from her:

Pick your birth month and cross (strike) out what doesn't apply to you.
FEBRUARY:
Abstract thoughts. Loves reality and abstract. Intelligent and clever. Changing personality. Attractive. Sexy. Temperamental. Quiet, shy and humble. Honest and loyal. Determined to reach goals. Loves freedom. Rebellious when restricted. Loves aggressiveness. Too sensitive and easily hurt. Gets angry really easily but does not show it. Dislikes unnecessary things. Loves making friends but rarely shows it. Daring and stubborn. Ambitious. Realizing dreams and hopes. Sharp. Loves entertainment and leisure. Romantic on the inside not outside. Superstitious and ludicrous. Spendthrift. Tries to learn to show emotions.

It seems if I didn't cross out "intelligent and clever", I should have crossed out "humble". And I thought I should cross out "intelligent and clever", but doing so seemed unnecessarily self-deprecating, especially in this forum where I try to come across as intelligent, if not clever. In a context where I more commonly make an ass out of myself, I'd have no problem crossing out "intelligent and clever". It's relative, I tell you!

Has anyone seen the animated Zoloft commercials they show here in the U.S.? What is that thing anyway? It's like a depressed little . . . blob. I wonder if they'll ever make plush stuffed depressed Zoloft blobs. I'd buy one. They'd be so cute. They can have pre-Zoloft blobs with little grey clouds hovering over it, and post-Zoloft blobs with wry "life-isn't-so-bad" smiles. I'd totally buy one.

Afterthought: So I'm not quite sure . . . alright, I'm no where near sure . . . what I was positing about the nature of enlightenment being different now from what it may have been before. Maybe it's just been attitudes about enlightenment changing. Maybe it's the absolute vs. the relative, and perhaps they both function simultaneously.

That is, perhaps there is an objective absolute, ultimate reality, God if I may, or G-d, that we shouldn't even be bothering with on a functional level because it's just so way beyond that it's ten thousand times more inconceivable than pointing towards a 4th spatial dimension.

puzzle: Point towards the Fourth Dimension now!

An ultimate, objective clarity. Which is fine, I'm totally fine with things that I can't go near. Once when I was trying to get a physics professor to consider "faster than the speed of light", he refused to do it, even hypothetically, it's just impossible, and I was just like, "OK, whatev".

(Imagination dictates that going faster than the speed of light is possible.)

But on the relative level, the realm of our reality, this physical manifestion, maybe enlightenment can and has changed, not just in conception or definition, but in actuality. Relative actuality. After all, our conception of reality changes, too. It's relative. What we thought was reality before Einstein is very different from what we think it is now.

Reality and world view before modern science is very different from after (or is it "world view after modern science is very different from before" – it's relative), and the differences are considered substantive, even though nothing changes the relative experience of reality.

So maybe the manifestation of enlightenment has also changed according to changes in perceived reality. Maybe how it's handled or perceived has changed, which arguably may change its substantive nature. Who knows? It's all relative anyway.

Or am I just complicating things? I wouldn't argue against anyone who says, "If it's relative, it's not enlightenment".

Life support on my computer failed.

I don't mind having everything on my computer wiped out because it feels fresh and clean now, all that stuff on my computer before was just so cluttering. Although I'm not sure I was minding not having my computer wiped clean like it was robbed.

Digital is so good for forcing us to let go of metaphoric attachments. When the crash happens, it's just gone, nothing you can do. Any emotional reaction is unreasonable, all you can do is let it go and work with what's now.

I even considered letting the whole computer thing go – cut loose my online presence and focus on the future. It would be that easy. Computer dies, can't afford a new one, can't figure out how to make it work, fin.

Series IX, Roll 7, (Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak T400CN): Zen Mountain Monastery, Mt. Tremper, NY

Frame 19 - Not sure what that roof was doing in the middle of the lawn.


Frame 24 - The main building of the monastery. It used to be a church. The cement Asian lantern must have been added later.

Monastery I:
I'm gonna be up at a monastery in upstate New York from tomorrow to Sunday. I told my parents today that I'm going to upstate New York from tomorrow to Sunday, without mentioning the monastery part. Part of me held off to the last minute to tell them because I didn't want them asking too many questions about it, but I at least expected them to ask where I was going. They didn't.

It was actually part of my strategy that they ask, so I could put it in their heads what is coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks, if I decide to enter one as a life choice. It was also family habit, and maybe ingrained strategy, that I didn't volunteer the information – they had to ask for it.

So what does it mean that they didn't? I don't know. They've never been hands-on parents, and I think with me and my brothers in our adult years, they've somehow gotten into their heads that they shouldn't ask at all about anything. I don't know if I'm a part of making them be like that, but I might be.

But not even a nominal modicum of curiosity? Even when relations between us has normalized and nothing has been particularly strained for a very long time? Growing up, they never showed much direct interest in our upbringing, and this behavior also comes across as disinterest to some degree, even if it's some twisted notion of caring by not prying or nagging. I certainly never gave them any reason to believe that I want them knowing what I'm doing or planning, or that I want them asking.

Suicide I: subtext
But it does say to me that I shouldn't care what they think about whatever I do, and I should just go ahead and do it. A conclusion at which I constantly arrive.

Family relations are always complicated. You make your decisions and deal with consequences as they come up. I think they're curious about where I'm gonna be for a week, but they're consciously deciding to not ask. There are probably no consequences that will come up from this particular decision, but in other matters there might be.

If I do decide to enter a monastery, how much advance notice am I going to give them? More than a day, I assume. But I can imagine telling them a day in advance that I'm leaving for a monastery in San Diego and don't know when they'll see me again.

Suicide II: context
Strangely, although I'm not planning on suicide at this point, I recently decided that if I did do it while living at their house (not at their house, I wouldn't do that), I would leave a note. Never in my 20+ years of suicidal history have I ever considered leaving a suicide note. And boom, here it is, to solve a problem.

I don't want to leave them with a mystery, that would be a cold shot, so just write a damn note. The world opens up with all the things I can say in it to comfort them and make them feel better about it and to go on that vacation to Australia in October that they are so looking forward to.

But a suicide note, and trying to do those things in a suicide note, would be for me. I don't know if they would need comforting or if they would change their plans or not enjoy themselves just as much. They might be far more enlightened than I can even imagine.

Enlightenment I:
Remember in the old days, a thousand years and more ago, when people "attained enlightenment"? "Attaining" enlightenment has stayed in the vernacular into modern times, but I think the days are long gone when people would have a sudden awakening, a moment of attainment.

I do think that used to happen. But the mechanics of enlightenment has changed through the course of human mental, psychological, and spiritual development. I might even go so far as to think that the very nature of enlightenment has evolved. I don't know how, I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just theorizing, I might as well be talking about black holes, but no true seeker on the path today thinks or talks about "attaining enlightenment". It's a red herring now.

I don't think they had red herrings back then, either.

It's all relative anyway, thanks to Einstein. There are people I know who I consider "enlightened" (non-attached, wise, living in the world, living in the moment), but they themselves would be horrified and embarassed at the suggestion. And to the suggestion that I'm even on the path, whether I'm further on down it or further back (it's all relative), the path is still more like a balance beam I keep falling off of.

Enlightenment II:
Oh, and my computer crashed. I'm borrowing my brother's laptop until I leave for the monastery, and I think I'll be able to get my computer back on life support after I get back, but I've lost all my programs and emails, including the ones I'd been planning on responding to.

Bill Gates should be ashamed of Windows ME operating system. He should feel personally responsible for an operating system that was worse than all those that came before it, and all those that came after it. He should have issued a public apology for Windows ME, and ordered a better version of Windows sent to everyone who bought a computer that ran on Windows ME. And he should have been forced to lick the envelope and stamp of every single one that got sent out. /fantasy

On one hand:
I understand the conception of self and identity that exists independent of all other factors. The "I" that is different from everything else that is not "I". It's just me. And the border of me ends where my cells end.

I understand it because that's the world in which I was conditioned. But it isn't what I intuit now after so many years of development. My conception of self and identity is not just this thing, this composite of cells, forming organs, forming being. I think, therefore I am crap.

I've grown to think of self as a process, metabolizing and breathing, as being an inextricable function of time moving forward. I am not separate from the air I breathe. I can't separate my being from the time I move in, in which my lungs breathe in and out.

How far I extend this is arbitrary. It can encompass just the immediate processes I directly experience, or it can encompass all the people I know and the things that I do. It can encompass all creation and conception. Whatever I'm comfortable with in defining my "self".

On the other hand:
I'm listening to my old grade school and high school LPs. Check it:

I'm ever upper class high society
God's gift to ballroom notoriety
I always fill my ballroom - the event is never small
The social pages say I've got the biggest balls of all

Oh, I've got big balls, I've got big balls
And they're such big balls, dirty big balls
And he's got big balls, and she's got big balls
But we've got the biggest balls of them all

And my balls are always bouncing, my ballroom always full
And everybody COMES AND COMES AGAIN
If your name is on the guest list, no one can take you higher
Everybody says I've got GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

Some balls are held for charity, and some for fancy dress
But when they're held for pleasure
They're the balls that I like best
My balls are always bouncing to the left and to the right
It's my belief that my big balls should be held every night
- Big Balls, Bon Scott-era AC/DC

Come on, let's see Modest Mouse or Death Cab write lyrics like that! These lyrics are sublime in their own way, even profound (in their own way). Think about what Bon Scott was a product of. Rock and roll was sure something different then. And that lascivious voice, those inflections. He was the embodiment, the voice, the caricature of degeneracy.

Of course he had to die before he grew old (unlike those doddering buffoons left over in The Who). There's no way that he could have lived to be old bones and maintained any credibility, any self or identity that he created. Ain't no one these days writing on this level.

Man, this weblog has lost its plot.

When I said the suicide thing was tired, it just means that I've pretty much exhausted writing about it, it having culminated in getting to the metaphoric edge and then walking away from it. We're walking away from the edge. We're backing away from the edge. We're tiptoeing away from the edge. We're moonwalking away from the edge. I can still theoretically break free from my captors and turn and make a mad dash off the edge, but that's just theory.

And with all that mystic/metaphysics/pseudo-physics gibberish I've been rambling on about lately, and it's not over yet mind you, I don't know where this is headed.

grounding:
I'm in suburban New Jersey.
I can't be here much longer.
Cycling in New Jersey is stressful and sucks.
Cycling in Manhattan is stressful and rules.
Hurricane season has started with remnants of T.S. Bonnie arriving later today and Charley on the way for the weekend (hurricanes move faster than I remember).
I might go to a monastery in upstate New York for a week next week.
Entering a monastery near San Diego is still in the cards.

That actually helped. I never meant this weblog to become so abstract. There is context here, you know. And I am so all about context.

I've been in New Jersey for a little over a month now. San Francisco is a distant memory whose reality is mine alone. I can close my eyes and still see it in vivid detail, all the streets I know by heart; no one knows, no one can relate. There's no drama associated with the thought that I'll never live there again, that it's not my city anymore.

It's sinking in what a bad decision it was to move back to my parents' place in New Jersey. Even assuming it was going to be temporary, knowing my high degree of entropy made it a very, very bad decision. Family will always be family, and nothing will change family. Not even killing myself would change anything here.

I've been in contact with one of the monks at Deer Park Monastery, angling only for indirect guidance, trying to work out my issues for myself. Why am I balking? Why am I not there now? Why don't I have a train ticket back West yet? It's a no-brainer, there's nothing else for me to do in material life.

The idea of entering a monastery has been with me since college. Through the years, there has always been something else distracting, something else to pursue. I've chased down all those paths and found nothing. This is all that's left, this is all I'm motivated to do, the only thing that I feel.

The problem is the same as it's always been. I don't even want to live, how do I get motivated to do anything with my life? The suicide thing is tired now, now I just don't care to live or be motivated. I'm sort of waiting for my parents to start driving me nuts enough to buy that train ticket, and that's a poor motivation. Or is it? I told them I'd be out of here by the end of this month anyway.

There's nothing really to discuss with anyone anymore. Now it's just a matter of a kick in the pants, someone telling me definitively to just go, and there's no one who can do that except me. That sucks.

Oradell Avenue pedestrian overpass over the Garden State Parkway

August 10, 2004; 4:52 P.M.

Northern Exposure Quote of the Day:
Chris: Well, you know, the way I see it, if you're here for four more years or four more weeks, you're here right now. I think when you're somewhere, you ought to be there because it's not about how long you stay in a place, it's about what you do while you're there. And when you go, is that place any better for your having been there. Am I answering your question?
Joel: No, not really.

I gather that there is this subatomic world that is governed by uncertainty. Matter at the subatomic level doesn't really exist except as probabilities. These subatomic particles, the ethereal building blocks of matter, move at such unfathomable and frenetic speeds that they are undefinable in the way we define ordinary matter. Or something like that.

It's very poetic. Break matter down into its smallest constituent pieces and basically you have non-matter, you have fields. Fields of probability. I prefer fields of probably, but I'm no scientist, fortunately.

I don't know if this is a good analogy, but the way I manage it is to imagine our planet as an atom. And as long as I'm blowing up a single atom to that size, I might as well speed it up proportionately, too. Speed up our planet's life to the speed of such a huge atom, and we are the subatomic particles. The surface of the planet is the field of probably er, probability, and our lifetimes flashing by as sparks so minute that they are undetectable.

As soon as you try to point at one life, it's gone and billions of other lives are flashing in and out of existence each fraction of a second; so fleeting that they can't be said with any certainty that they happened, just that they probably happened; that they probably were there, mm? All our lifetimes become a blur until they all seem like one thing, only discernible by standing way off in the distance.

I don't really understand Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (rather esoteric stuff, understandable only by certain high priests and wizards we call 'physicists'). I just think it's hilarious for a sound principle of science to be called the "uncertainty" principle – the "well, we don't really know" principle. I mean there's a hell of a lot I'm uncertain about, but I'm not going to go make a principle about it.

It's kind of flaky even. How about having a religious uncertainty principle – having a belief in God governed by an uncertainty whether He or She really exists. Or an uncertainty principle regarding education (eh, I may or may not pass that class) or work (when your boss asks you to do something, ask her whether she's heard of the uncertainty principle in regard to getting it done). Logging onto gmail is obviously governed by some immutable uncertainty principle.

Fortunately, quantum mechanics is not nearly as important as employment, education, or, God forbid, God. It's just the study of the fabric of existence, something we can all take for granted unless the fabric of existence, space itself, starts breaking down and losing cohesion, and then it won't matter anyway (stranger things have happened, I'm sure). Them scientists can afford to be uncertain. Our lifetimes are just sparks anyway.

Free Associating in the Free World:
The faster something goes, approaching the speed of light, the slower time moves. Theoretically, time would stop if the speed of light were attained, but nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and light is the only thing that can go the speed of light.

Stopped time may be one way of viewing eternity. Therefore, light, in its state of being, which paradoxically is a velocity, is eternal. "God" is eternal, so God=speed of light. I'm not stating this as conclusion, I'm just free associating. Just something bizarre to consider.

Black holes are super-massive objects whose gravity is so great that not even light can escape. Gravity affects space-time by curving it, and the more massive the object, the greater the curve. Light is unable to escape that extreme curvature of space-time caused by black holes.

An object falling into a black hole is observed to slow down in time, and at the point it hits the event horizon, the point of no return, the object will appear to stop, as if stopped in time, before redshifting and disappearing. I'm not sure I got that right. It's just theory anyway.

Does time stop? Is falling into a black hole eternity? An observer on the object falling into the black hole would observe no slow down in time at all. A theoretical observer who does not have physical integrity to be destroyed would experience being squeezed and stretched into the infinite curvature. No eternity, but an infinity. Curving and curving but never reaching an end. An asymptotic curve. Free association.

Is Pi asymptotic? You calculate Pi out and the number just keeps going and going, never repeating, never showing a pattern. At least so far. But you have the mathematical representation of Pi, and you also have the graphic representation of a circle. Is the further out on the Pi calculation just getting asymptotically closer, but never reaching the point on the circle where the measurement started, or is the reason Pi just keeps going and going because it already passed the point where the measurement started? I'm not losing any sleep.

Everything is relative to the observer. The observer falling into a black hole sees something different than the observer watching something fall into a black hole. Maybe the observer watching the mathematical value of Pi being plotted on a circle sees something different than the observer riding out the mathematical calculation of Pi.

And maybe Stephen Hawking was wrong in conceding that matter in this universe can never be "lost" to another universe, and there are no baby universes springing out from ours through black holes. Maybe observing from our universe, matter falling into a black hole will never be lost to another universe and there are no baby universes springing out from ours through black holes, but maybe observing from another universe (ours?) the Big Bang already happened. Haven't stranger things happened?