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.
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