Watching my mind through the stress, through the negativity. These are my habit energies, and as they chase me and as I attach to them in life, they chase me and I attach to them in death. They are ingrained, they are in my spiritual genetics, and they stay with me in future lives unless I find a way to transform them.

Not the stressors, which are variable, but the reactions. My reactions to the stress and my behavior are indicative of my habit energies. As real as they feel, they aren't objective facts. Other people wouldn't be feeling it or dealing with it in the same way. I can attribute it to my being, just being me, but what am "I"? I don't accept that I'm some objective, absolute, existing fact. My being, as is all reality, subjective and conditionally created; shifting and changing.

This realization that what I'm experiencing through my stressors in life is directly linked to what I might encounter in death really helped, because I've been working on the "what I might encounter in death" part quite intently. Just take that and apply it to these stressors in life. The absolute very least that it does is calm me down and makes me feel lighter. Not bad.

In one moment when the stress loomed today, I envisioned it as a cartoon version of what the actual death experience might be, which for some reason I think of as being more intense, vivid, disorienting and cacophonic. Today, it was just this single, paltry stressor, creating this anxiety and frustration in me, chasing me down.

I envisioned recognizing me for what I am and recognizing it for what it was, and this was not a big deal. This was at worse, a practice run and I should be able to handle this much better than I was. I was right.

12:54 p.m. - from a balcony at school shooting northwest at the landmark Shin Kong Mitsukoshi building next to Taipei Main Station

12:54 p.m. - from a balcony at school shooting straight down.

12:55 p.m. - The Mandarin Training Center is on Shida's annex campus. Those buildings over there are Shida's main campus.

12:57 p.m.

iTunes soundtrack:
1. Nice Age (Yellow Magic Orchestra)
2. Shower Song (Versus)
3. Wake Up and Live (Bob Marley & the Wailers)
4. Totally Nude (Talking Heads)
5. That's Me (Genesis)
6. Long Distance Drunk (Modest Mouse)
7. Shred A (Le Tigre)
8. Electioneering (Radiohead)
9. Taa Deem (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
10. Destroyer (The Kinks)