conjecture

For the past week, I've been playing with this hypothetical idea of suicide at the center of my existence as the result of having sent myself a message from my past life into this life, not unlike Data did in the "Cause and Effect" episode of Star Trek TNG.

I keep looking at my life and wondering how did I end up here? Looking at the environment from whence I came, there are so many paths my life could've taken. It was one full of privilege and material opportunity. The answer is, of course: I brought myself here. I squandered the privilege and opportunities and ran the whole damn thing into the ground. All by myself! This is actually nothing new, but I'm looking at it from the angle of that final temporal loop in which the Enterprise finds itself after Data sent himself the message. Unlike the previous loops where all the strange occurrences and déjà vus were just a mystery, in the final loop they align in a way that they realize there's a message there.

Did I send myself a message that my subconscious is bearing out? Year-by-year, location-to-location, pursuit-to-pursuit, point A to point B to point C, I've lived my life in a way that would guarantee that I would be in my current position. And where suicide has always been an attracting, if not compelling, force in my life, I would of course create final conditions where suicide is logical and optimal, even while acting in a way that accords with living my life.

It was an experiment from the start, conditions controlled. Realizing the value of human life, I had to be responsible about affecting as few lives as possible. I've been constantly lowering my impact as much as possible, and now even my own memories won't be impacted. I've phased even my identity out. It's not important. It's not the point.

What might I have told myself at that moment of death when the Enterprise started shuddering and Captain Picard called to abandon ship, or in the final moment in the bardo of rebirth if I had learned to navigate it like lucid dreams, before all traces of what I was consciously aware of before in my past life dissolved because a sperm hit an egg and anything that could be said was me is created anew in the fresh and clean architecture of a new brain and body with just a splash of past karma vomited all over it? And perhaps a message.

A message that gave its first nudge in this life in an attraction to Japan of all places from a very young age. There may be other reasons for it. Such as when I was a kid, NHK would have a weekly broadcast on Saturday nights of Japanese programming out of New York. UHF Channel 47 if I remember correctly – oh, and not New York, but Linden, New Jersey, I remember it said so in station IDs between programs – and my parents never missed a Saturday night since they couldn't understand American broadcasting and there was no Chinese language broadcasts either back then, I shouldn't wonder.

Me and my brothers' interest was in the weekly episodes of anime; three series that I recall watching were Raideen, Ikkyu-san (a monk!), and the original Space Battleship Yamato, as well as the live-action, original Go Ranger!

The reason for the Japanese programming was the same reason for the success of my father's office (a private medical clinic) at the time: Japanese companies were doing well and sending corporate slaves over to New York and settling them and their families in New Jersey, and with so few Japanese speaking physicians, they flocked to my father's office. That also created a sphere of Japanese names in my childhood as me and my brothers were recruited to comb through the white pages and collect addresses with Japanese names to whom my parents would send advertising. I remember a lot of folding and licking stamps and sealing envelopes (forced child labor, lol!).

I'm not sure of the time frames involved. Obviously the airing of the anime can be pegged to the mid-to-late 70s, no surprise there. But another element was my grandparents' visits. I'm not sure what years they took place, or even if there were multiple visits, but in my memory, my mother's parents visited from Taiwan every summer. I would create lists of Japanese vocabulary, plying my grandmother for basic words in Japanese. Although I'm not sure how that worked since my grandparents sure didn't know English. I'm sure I was a resourceful little monkey.

The point being I was interested in Japanese, and had absolutely no interest in whatever language my parents were speaking to each other, which I wouldn't know until decades later wasn't even Chinese (Mandarin), but Taiwanese.

And the point of all this is that not many years later, there was something very comforting and familiar when I learned that in Japanese history, suicide was not only not condemned, but was even expected in certain situations (why the corporate head of the Daiichi Fukushima Nuclear Plant hasn't committed suicide yet is beyond me, and is probably indicative of some part of Japan's spirit dying).

Bah, this wasn't supposed to end up being a stroll down memory lane.

Be it as it may, the concept of suicide was then always there. Always. There was never a point in my life where I thought I never would or could commit suicide. I would even go so far as to say that even during relationships it didn't go away, and I likely had more of a sense that suicide was still more realistic than being with this person for the rest of my life and living happily ever after. Although I'm sure I was expert at blocking it out.

Committing suicide, or not committing suicide alternately, became my signposts in my life, marking directions to not go, or otherwise to generally half-heartedly strive towards. If the vine I was swinging on wasn't the one to let go of, it was always there several vines down. I even made it into my own inside joke to torment me that I never would.

There are any number of bad reasons to commit suicide. I've long discounted any reason as being a bad reason to commit suicide. But if I don't have a reason to do it, why this lifelong impulse? What might I have said to myself? That perhaps in the pursuit of enlightenment, one must first be prepared and willing to give up one's own life, characterized by all our attachments and aversions, voluntarily, no matter what the circumstance? It's counter-intuitive to life. To reach enlightenment in any lifetime, some future lifetime, one must have experienced the willingness to give up one's own life. That idea solidifies as more difficult than it sounds as I type it since accompanying the thought is "selflessly".

In the metaphorical tales of the Buddha's description of his past lives are ridiculous stories of self-sacrifice, such as coming across a dying tiger mother with her cubs, but she's too exhausted to kill him to feed herself, much less her cubs. Guess who comes to the rescue and does it all himself (whispered hint: it's not Jesus).

And even contemplating the extinction of this particular existence, try as I might, alive, I'm just not that selfless.

WordsCharactersReading time

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a pretty intriguing text on the topic, but I do take it with a grain of salt. It's a template, a starting point, but it is a culturally-b(i)ased work. It should be liberally interpreted by others and the general concepts that can be gleaned from it are more important than the actual text, I think.

One thing from the "Old Souls" book that stood in contrast with the Tibetan Book of the Dead was the time scales involved, and I've never been comfortable with the time scales in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Too concrete, too normative, grounded in our subjective reality. I'm concluding that is one of the things that should be interpreted liberally.

I don't think time is an objective, normative phenomena of the universe. I agree with Einstein that time and space are inseparable, and once we don't exist physically in space, neither do we exist in time as we know it.

Time is our fishbowl. We don't have the mental architecture nor the imagination to envision the non-existence of time. If time was created by the Big Bang, when did the Big Bang occur? We can't even approach that concept since time is so hard-wired into our very existence.

So for people who read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and are intrigued and find some belief in reincarnation, we can formulate our own ideas of what happens and how and why, but not when. So when my cousin says that her infant daughter had mentioned she was her mother in her previous life, who had died some 15 years earlier and thus beyond the bounds of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I have nothing to say about that. My cousin's instant acceptance of her daughter's statement is no longer completely outlandish.

Ghosts are another issue that have recently been brought to mind. I'm open to the possibility that just as in "Old Souls", a death can be so sudden and violent that actual memory can be transferred into a next life, but that a life and death could be so filled with anger and attachment and/or fear that the phenomena of what we call "ghosts" occur.

A ghost phenomena may occur when there's a death but the circumstances prevent the natural progression towards rebirth and the energy gets "stuck" in its previous existence and can't move on. And again, time is irrelevant. A ghost existence can last for quite a long period in our normative understanding of time, but for a ghost, time is not a concept.

As I continue to read "The Lovely Bones", the murdered girl continues to watch what happens for years and years after her death. I'm reading at the point where she's watching her younger sister's college graduation, and to me, it seems that it's not like she's sitting in heaven watching in real time what happens 2, 5, 8 years after her death; that in heaven, it is actually 8 years after she was murdered.

But in her death experience, she watches what happens after her death, far into the "future", but not occurring "in time" at all. So if I were to hypothetically plug her case into the template of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, she could witness all the things she reports as being far in the future, but it has no bearing on when her time in the bardo states ends and when the natural sequence of events pushes her into a reincarnated existence.

She narrates events years and years after her death, but in our normative time line, she may have already been reincarnated when those events actually occur.

Again, strange space. Loosening the grasps and tendrils of this physical reality. A good portion of my days is spent experiencing the input of this physical reality, this life, and reminding myself not to be attached to any of it – both negative and positive; it is ALL not much more different than a dream. It all passes and passes by whether we are I am here or not.

Again, meditating on all the random people I see around me throughout a day and wondering what's their motivation. Why are they doing this? Why do they do what they do? And no matter what I can imagine, my own response is that I certainly do not want whatever they have. I don't want their motivation or reason why they strive for whatever they do. I don't want to be them.

I don't want to leave a body. I don't want to leave a body that someone, I don't know who, might be asked to come identify. I don't want to leave any physical evidence of my gross bodily existence. I don't want any identification with a body suggesting that was me, when it certainly wasn't. Whatever physical remains I may leave wasn't me nor anything anyone should identify as me. I desperately do not want to leave a body.

While I was in the U.S., I read the book Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Their Past Lives. I wish the author used the word "testimony" in the title instead of "evidence". As testimony, it is compelling. As evidence, it's easy or possible to discount. It doesn't prove anything. The author of the book is a journalist who accompanies a professor, whose main body of work is focused on gathering testimony of children who claim they remember their previous life, on what may be his final rounds of gathering such testimony.

The approach is as scientific as it gets for the topic, with numerous checks to weed out "tainted" testimony. The criteria for credibility is pretty strict, and that's what makes the testimony compelling. If there's a risk of susceptibility to suggestion in a case, it's not given much weight. That goes to my criticism of the film Unmistaken Child, where it's shown that a child remembers his past life as a high ranking lama, but it's not discounted that the memories were suggested by the people around him. In fact, as Tibetan literature is replete with cases of past life remembrances, I liked that this book doesn't even have a hint of mention of Tibet. It's such a part of Tibetan culture that it is all suspect and not even worth mentioning. That's how strict the criteria are in this book.

I liked that there is consistency in the cases: all of the children's testimonies recall a violent or unnatural death. To me, that suggests that if an experience is traumatic enough, the psychic or karmic imprint can survive the destruction of one physical construct of a person and can carry over despite a new physical brain constructed in another body.

The theory might go that we generally don't remember past lives because the information is lost with the dissolution of: first, our physical bodies and brains at the death of our physical selves; and then second, our consciousness, our true selves, our enlightened selves, our selves that is the basic energy of the universe from whence we come, which generally is not part of the software that is naturally installed when sperm hits egg and a new biological being is created with a completely new brain architecture.

Actual memories are all erased. What generally does carry over is karma – the deep-seated, ingrained habits and personality of what we've done and who we were that characterized our behavior and being. But we generally can't attribute those things to anything in our new life (unless we consider reincarnation). It's just who we are, but it's still pretty plastic and can be countered by our new environment and personality.

What this book suggests is that a violent death, or a death with a heavy impression, can carry over more readily because of that severe, psychic imprint. You tend to remember the shit that happens to you in death as well as life. In general, perhaps suicides also fall into this category. Suicides are often accompanied by tragic circumstances or extreme negative emotions. Hm. I don't remember any of the cases in the book as being suicides, but that's not fatal. There are any number of reasons on this slippery topic why suicides weren't part of the sample.

If I commit suicide, it won't be tragic and I hope to have tamed my negativity. If I commit suicide, I imagine euphoria. The idea of dying still makes me happy in a way that I can't explain.

WordsCharactersReading time

Wow, I did it. I verify having lucid dreamed. It was a messy, disturbed dream, possibly caused by the return of insomnia. After not being able to get to sleep, I got up for several hours and puttered around, then feeling some exhaustion lay back on my bed still not feeling like I would sleep, but then faded in and out of half-sleeps.

The key component in the dream was that I had my hardcover copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in my lap. I turned a certain way and ripped the paper covering over the hardcover, and was shocked and annoyed because it is supposedly a sacred book, which doesn't mean anything in itself, but it's one that I try to be mindful about.

I had negative thoughts, thinking things like, "damn", and realized it was only the paper covering that I could simply discard, and then saw the back of the covering had also ripped and more negative thinking, "total loss". Then I thought, "This isn't right, I can't have ripped the cover of the book because the book is sitting on my bookshelf. All I have to do is get out of "here" and it'll be there as always. Then I started struggling up through layers of consciousness.

As I was pushing myself out of sleep, I imagined the book on a bookshelf in my room that doesn't exist, but then as I came closer to consciousness, I revised the image so that it was sitting where it should be on my night table/altar, and I had the feeling that I was right, the book was fine, I'd been in a dream. When I broke the surface and woke up, the final position of the book on the table was a little different than I had imagined, but that's not the point.

This was a classic description of lucid dreaming – realizing being in a dream triggered by an object in the dream. However, I didn't navigate my way in the dream, but forced myself out of it, still realizing it was a dream.

This was very different from the strange sleep paralysis dream experiences I've had before. This felt like a dream in every way, whereas before I was in some lucid state where I didn't have a conscious sense I could "get out of". I never consciously processed that it was a dream, but was reacting like it was an actual experience, like in a dream. And in those states, even though I could move around, I did have a continued sense or connection with my physical body laying in bed but that it was paralyzed. That was still part of the actual experience, with no external thought of it being a dream.

I also have to totally retract what I said yesterday. Drowning in sleep doesn't suck nearly as much as insomnia. Furthermore, there is a difference between the insomnia I've been having, whereby I could sleep for 2 or 3 hours before waking up and not being able to fall back to sleep, and the type where you can't get into a full sleep at all, like today. That's worse. You don't even get the false comfort of being able to slip into a sleep state.

Aside from the lucid part, I have no recollection what was actually going on in this dream. It wasn't location specific, but some, if not all, of my family members were around and I think they were annoying me. It was in a public area, but I'm not sure if it was indoors or out. Just a lot of stuff going around, messy, but not all negative.

There was one situation that would have normally made me aggressive or combative, but I handled it calmly and wisely, the way I usually imagine handling a situation after an initial negative reaction and realizing that was wrong and would just make things worse.

This insomnia – yesterday and today – came as a total surprise after my last post and it's mucking my thoughts. I want to get out of the apartment either to ride or to shoot, it looks perfect outside for either – cloudy but unlikely to rain. But I'm not rested and I've been able to ride 3 days in a row, so I probably shouldn't.

I've been enjoying my brother's Nikon D80, to my surprise. It can't shoot sky for shit, the gradients come out all pixelized and may be why people recommend shooting in color and then removing the color components one-by-one to get black and white.

I've just been shooting in black and white mode because I don't even like the idea of shooting with an SLR in color. Not sure what my hang up is. Feels like I'm cheating somehow.

I'm gonna make coffee now. And make my fucking bed.

Bwahaha! I have no recollection typing the end of the last post. I think I was heading towards some point there. Or not.

Actually, almost every night lately I haven't been able to remember finally shutting everything off, brushing my teeth, washing my shot glass and coffee mug, turning out the lights and crawling into bed. Party animal. Although I think the time of the last played songs on iTunes gives me a general time of when it happened. One time it was 5:45 a.m., which I do remember because it was getting light out.

There was a time not long ago, when I was resolving to try to be awake by 9 a.m., and that's been a miserable failure. No insomnia, but drowning in sleep, which almost sucks as much. If it ain't one thing, it's a fucking nother. I pendulate between the two.

And after almost 2 weeks of sporadic computer use, I'm trying to spend less time online. I actually did start practicing bass more, and none since I got this laptop. I have a book "J.S. Bach for Bass", and I'm learning how to tap using it. And seriously, Bach on bass fingerstyle sounds like shite. Victor Wooten can get away with it because he's god (and he's usually tapping, slapping or double thumbing or a combination of all of these anyway), and the author of the book isn't terrible, but there's no way I could pull it off. Tapping works for me. And is fun. So there.

I'm starting to feel whole again. I got a new laptop on Monday. It's nothing fancy, basically it's just an upgrade of my 6-year-old Compaq; no new whistles and bells, nothing that I can't believe I've been living without for all these years.

The big difference is Windows 7 and getting used to the new OS, which is basically figuring out how to do exactly what I was doing on my old computer on my new computer.

The biggest bitch of a problem was getting my iTunes library information over to the new laptop. I read a bunch of articles online on how to do it, but nothing worked until I hit a breakthrough last night. Per the articles, I'd been focusing on the XML file for my iTunes library.

After I had made a complete mess of my files and where they were between my new hard drive, my old hard drive, and my external hard drive, the final fix that worked was fortunately because I had both the old library XML file and .itl file (iTunes library database file) from the last time I used iTunes on my old computer saved in a location that wasn't affected by opening and closing iTunes, which automatically updates and changes those files.

The trick that worked for me was with iTunes closed, I replaced the active XML and .itl files in my new computer's iTunes folder in the My Music folder (which is iTunes' default location to put them) with the old ones and then opened iTunes and it opened with all the old information. Rejoicing was had and we ate cake. I ate cake. There was no cake. I was relieved.

The key was not only the XML file, but also the database file, you need both. Once I opened iTunes with the old information that was pretty much success. I'd been in that position before.

The only thing left was to direct iTunes to the new location of the files. To fix that, just try to play any song whose file you know exactly where it is in the new location, and you'll get a notice that it can't find the file and would you like to locate it.

Click yes and then just direct iTunes to the new location of the actual music files, and iTunes will do the rest and eventually figure out the new pathway to at least most of the files (NB: you still need to do the consolidation step whereby all your files are in one place, which is something I do anyway :p).

The online advice said you need to mess with the XML file to tell iTunes about the new file pathway, but I don't think you need to. I think all you need is iTunes to be reading the old .itl and XML library files and once you give it a clue about the actual music files' new location, it will search the new pathway itself.

Aside from that my bike is whole again, too. After several rides where the chain didn't "feel" right, my bike computer started also having problems, so I took my bike in. Long story short, they replaced the mount for my bike computer, replaced the chain with a good quality one, and replaced the rear gear cassette because 3 gear rings had signs of wearing and it's best to replace the whole cassette at the same time.

The results were immediate. I took the long way home along the bikeways and could feel the added power and torque in having some new components (and this is an entry level road bike). The chain still slipped if I put too much torque on it, but after I got home, I wiped off the chain with degreaser and lubed it and I just need to break in the chain a little more.

It's feeling like life is a constant effort to maintain some sort of status quo. Fixing things that break or righting things that go out of balance. And that's no way to live a life. Or at least not a good way to perceive it to be.

It's interesting that my iTunes library information was so critical and that my bike computer problem was the reason to definitively visit the bike shop.

There was a point where I had given up on retaining my iTunes information (play counts, ratings, last played, and playlists), and I was at a loss at how to start listening to my 17,500+ music collection again.

Usually I just have the entire collection on shuffle play. And I reload my iPod shuffle every 3 days using a system that is just way too geeky to not be embarrassed about. Should I just re-start that process? Should I just listen to music recently added or that I'm not as familiar with compared to albums that I've had on CD for decades?

In the end, I should just not care. I shouldn't be attached to these things. But as long as these things are here, I do. Or am.

The same with the bicycle computer. It's conceivable to go on bike rides without having the ephemeral information about distance, speed and averages, but I haven't seen a single cyclist that goes on "rides" who doesn't have a computer on the handlebars.

And a ride without the information is qualitatively different from with it. Without it, you're just kinda touring and enjoying the scenery. With it, I dunno. Well, you just know. You can challenge yourself with it. You can take some pride or achievement in it.

But even as ephemeral as the information is, it's a record. As ephemeral as our lives are, what we leave behind is a record. If it's not recorded, what was there? This all ties in somehow. Really. (<-- drunken blogging/lazy/whateva).