The monastery didn't work out. That was that. It's interesting how a few months ago, it was truth to me that they had rejected my aspirancy. Then that truth became an interpretation as a tool to justify leaving without any commitment to return. Now the truth, looking back, is that it was completely my decision to leave and not follow the monastic path. Truth changes.
Removing the monastic option, I go back two years in time and I'm done with this life. It is again my goal, a part of my path, to succeed in voluntarily giving up this wonderful, blessed life endowned with opportunity and freedom for no other reason than to come to terms with my understanding of self(lessness), emptiness (which is not nothing), and non-attachment to the form of this life.
I'm not arguing anything, I don't feel I need to argue anything, and I don't have foolproof or faultless logic in my train of thought, even though it makes perfect internal sense to me. More importantly, I believe in myself and the decisions I make. My reality is my own, and no one else's.
Killing myself is not killing myself. I don't believe in killing myself, but it's a matter of semantics...
It's just my decision. It's my path that I've been laying out for years and years and years, following the topography of the specific circumstances of my life and personality. Suicide really has been my starting point. It resonated from the very beginning when I first learned what it was. With that as a given, it's interesting how the edifice of it has metamorphosed.
Wow. I could have killed myself 20 years ago just because I was angry; a bad reason by my current standards. Now it's a whole philosophical edifice surrounding me, a web, a fortress, a thicket, a treatise. A machine. It covers existentialism, existence, reality, agency, self, inner spiritual sciences, philosophy, psychology, karma, madness. There's probably some cosmology tucked away in some corner for good measure. No Western philosophy though, pompous field of well-fed blowhard European men that is.
It is such that I don't even have to do it. I'm not compelled to do it. I will if it feels right, and to me it would be a completely logical, rational next step along my path, albeit risky. I may be giving myself more credit than I deserve, but I think I'm prepared for it and for any repercussions, spiritually speaking.
All said, it's a good thing I'm enjoying my days.
January 23, 1998 - Nevada
