Wednesday, June 28, 2006

It's getting too hard again. I'm thinking monastery again. It was almost one year ago that I left Deer Park feeling lost on my path, that I didn't want to ordain, but I didn't want to rejoin material life either. But I can't do nothing.

After seven months of doing nothing I ended up here, and four months of doing this, as minimal and low stress as it should be, I'm struggling, suffering and hating it. I look at the people around me as mirrors, and I don't want to be doing what they're doing. I can't do what they do. I don't have the tools.

The annoyances of modern material life are huge. The negativity is huge. Everything is so petty and inconsequential. Why are people doing what they do? They have their answers, and that's great, but their answer is not my answer.

I'm not blaming or attributing my suffering or negativity to anything outside of myself, separate from myself. The triggers may be external, but my feelings are not to be mistaken as being innately caused by those triggers. The feelings are all me and my reality.

Throw a rock into a pond and it causes ripples. The rock is the triggers. The water is me and my reality, seamless and one and the same. The ripples are the form the negativity of my reality takes when triggered by the rock. They manifest and become apparent.

The annoyances and the frustrations are ripples in my reality, but the substance of the ripples is of my reality. This is most important in understanding my reality and the nature of my feelings.

The impact of the ripples on my psyche may as well be that of a tsunami. And this sensitivity is my karma. So what am I going to do? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why would I want to? What's so great about this living this life? I've well documented that it isn't. Even if that isn't fact, that my reality dictates that is what I write about and document.

The ball is rolling again, and so momentum is starting for me to leave Taiwan after this term, and go to Plum Village to ordain. Why this feeling of deja vu? Fuck me.

3:28 p.m. - default shot