And it's Monday, so I thought it should be the day that life in Taipei would start getting back to normal. Neighbors started returning yesterday, yay going back to normal. Or not. Apparently not all of them have to go to work today. One was in the kitchen banging around all through
And I started drinking already, so I don't know if I'll be able to get out for a 20 mile sprint today. Weather still looks good. I didn't go yesterday. Recovery days aren't needed for short rides, but avoid-getting-bored break days are probably wise.
And my 80GB iPod Classic went fetal. I'm trying to fix it even though this iPod is superfluous. That is, I wasn't affected or that much bothered by its pooping out. My iPod shuffle is my main iPod, and at home I can just use iTunes on my computer. I'm still trying to fix it for fixit's sake, which means long stretches of time my laptop is doing something that I'm not involved with, which always make me suspicious what it's up to. I'm doing something called a "low-level format" now. No idea.
Hovering over the laptop and micromanaging each "format error" (no idea) makes it all too tempting and easy to reach over to my right and pour a shot.
The neighbor banging around in the kitchen really didn't bother me, I didn't mean to imply that. Although at one point it almost was disturbing, but not in a normative way. I'm trying to maintain a meditation I've recently come upon. Well, I'm always trying to maintain whatever meditation I've come up with, and rarely am I successful. These things come and go at my mind's behest, and my mind and I don't have the greatest of relationships.
But this recent one seems pretty important, and is grounded upon something a little more concrete and not necessarily driven just by the inspiration of having come across it. It's based on what I mentioned before of focusing on the five senses and how they make up our perspective of reality, and upon isolating and discounting them, there's a better chance of being open to . . . I don't know, whatever. Whatever else there might be that is not constructed from our senses.
I don't know if I'm successfully preparing myself to recognize the inner mind, but it's just what occurs to me, and the 45 minute sitting sessions recently have been virtually timeless. When the timer goes off, I've had no sense of the 45 minutes going by as time.
I've also been visualizing a burning blue-hot flame at the top of my skull to incinerate all constructed conceptual thoughts that flow through my mind. Thoughts, memories, mental progressions and constructions get sent up into the flame as soon as I'm aware of them, and often what I'm left with is just the empty blackness of my eyelids, which although they start slightly open, have closed by then.
Only the black isn't purely black. I wonder if anyone can do this, just close your eyes and you don't just see black, but specks of light and color that move and change. That's what I stop in and just focus on what formations occur, as long as they don't lead to discursive thought. I'll refrain from interpreting it, because at this point I have no reason to believe it is anything but subjective projection, however once I wondered if what I was seeing wasn't a subconscious memory of a past death bardo state.
The banging around in the kitchen didn't bother me, per se. I've been sitting in urban residences for years and you just have to tune out outside noises and distractions. But today it was more of the idea of the disturbance that almost started disturbing me. Like in bardo descriptions where it sometimes feels like being assailed by one thing or another horrible disturbance. It's all subjective and it's a loss of perspective, but if and once you regain it, it's no longer a disturbance. Although it still was a distraction.
