What I also loved about the book on Kabbalah I just read is that the Zohar indicates that the scripture is all about symbols and metaphor that must be decoded to be correctly interpreted towards a divine understanding. It's not what it seems on its face.

That's the way I was taught to watch films in a religion class I took in college that had a film syllabus. Always look for the symbols (of course you have to know what the symbols are to spot them), and look for a subtext of what a director's message might be, expressed through metaphor.

Actually that second part I learned in law school in a class that also used a film syllabus making parallels between trends happening in law and society at the time certain films were made and how the films reflected those trends.

Basically those two classes taught me to view films broadly and look for subtle meaning that might not be obvious if just watching the film as entertainment. Looking for meaning in films is about the same as always being on the look out for learning in life. It's a metaphor. Bam.

If we're going through life without learning, but just to be entertained, it's sort of condemning ourselves to meaningless existence and ignorance. We can put on our tombstones, "He/She was entertained". Or as Roger Waters put it, "Amused to death".

It's like having and raising children without any thought that there's so much to learn from them. Easily equally as much as they have to learn from you.

I also like the idea of looking at our own lives and the lives of the people around us as metaphors or having a larger meaning than we might realize; a reason.

There was a funny story in "The Essential Zohar" about a deluge starting to come down looking like it could challenge the great flood of Noah fame. It rains so hard for several days that it starts to flood. The police send out a car to a pious old man in the country to evacuate him, but the old man refuses to leave, saying, "I have faith in God. God will protect me from harm".

Several days later, the water has risen up to the first floor ceiling and the police arrive in a boat to evacuate him, but he says, "I have faith in God". After a few more days, the old man's house is inundated and he's sitting on top of the chimney, and the authorities send a helicopter to airlift him, but he's adamant in his faith, "God will protect me".

Finally, the waters keep rising and the man drowns. When the man meets his maker, he implores the Creator, "I had such faith in you, why didn't you protect me?", to which the Creator replied, "What do you think the police car, the boat and the helicopter were?!!"

I dunno. Earlier this year, I read Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" and wasn't impressed. One of the main themes in that book is that when your heart truly desires something, the world conspires to help manifest it.

I sarcastically thought, "Oh great, I really want to commit suicide, so according to this book's insight, the world is conspiring for me to kill myself".

Well, actually it's true.

I myself have personally led my life to where I am now, and I've set up the conditions and situation that is perfect for me to go ahead and execute it. Not only all the conditions favor it, but all the people in my life are all complicit in encouraging it, without them even knowing it.

You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard the same message from everyone in recent memory: "Follow your heart", "Do what your heart tells you to do". I even asked, "What if what my heart tells me to do is something that other people would have a lot of trouble accepting?". The answer: "You're only accountable to yourself". And I can't argue with that.

The type of parents I have and my relationship with them, and the nature of all of my relationships all feature such a disconnect that they are of no consideration or impediment. I've wounded myself emotionally and fractured and shattered my reality to the extent that re-integration into any kind of living life would be traumatic.

Everyone wants me to be happy. Fulfilling this life's mission to kill myself would make me happy, because I believe it will advance me on the spiritual path. I'm too attached to a notion of self or ego to advance further, I've hit a wall, and the symbolic gesture of intentionally throwing a lifetime away would help impress upon my karma that any particular self, any particular incarnation, is impermanent and shouldn't be attached to.

It would be better if I could sacrifice myself for some cause, for the good of other people. The stories of the Buddha recount how he recalls his previous lives and in many of them he sacrificed his life for the benefit of others, but I'm doing this for starters. Just end this life, don't be attached to it.

It's also good to remember that I do believe that death is not an end. Death as an end is just a perception. Another interpretation is that it's a transformation or a passage. Jews don't overtly expound reincarnation, but "The Essential Zohar" repeatedly implies that reincarnation is a feature of how the world was created.

Once I get past this wall, I hope that I can develop more compassion, or bodhicitta, so that sacrificing myself for others will be a more stable concept. Bodhicitta is a concept in Kabbalah, too, but it's called "desire for the sake of sharing", as opposed to desire for the sake of oneself, which is the normative human attitude.

And in Buddhistic terms, Abraham was certainly a bodhisattva.

Me, I'm just here being attached to this selfish existence.

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I wonder if the La Niña phenomena is the reason for particularly rainy years in Taiwan. This year has been one of them, similar to my first two years here. The interim two years weren't rainy and I remember them being pretty nice. This summer it rained just about every day in the afternoon like monsoon rains. And personally, I haven't seen much sunlight in quite a while. I suspect it has something to do with La Niña.

The past few weeks – I haven't been counting – but at least two weeks have been block cloudy or rainy. Yesterday was a rare sunny day and I decided to take my road bike out in the evening. Even riding has become a bore to me, but I just rode casual out to the confluence where the Keelung River empties into the Danshui River, which then continues northward to empty into the Taiwan Strait.

The significance of going to the confluence of those rivers is that it feels like a large body of water there. The Danshui is already pretty wide by then, being the end result of the Dahan, Xindian and Jingmei rivers; and where the Keelung River waters are finally added, it's quite a large basin and feels more oceanic than just sitting by a riverside.

Confusion. Conflict. Don't want. Must. Where I've led my life.

I stayed there for a while, taking in the vibe of being by the water, simulating the feeling of what I want to do. I was conflicted. I don't want to do this. I have to do this. It is where I've led my life. If I decide against it, all roads forward look bad. Really bad.

Not just difficult, not just challenging, but they put me in a bad place. They take me out of the light and into the darkness. It's not that I don't think I can handle the darkness with these years of mindfulness training, but I don't think I have the strength to maintain myself in this kind of darkness that can get worse and worse to the point where I can get lost in mental illness and lose all the training.

I'm reading a book I found in the public library on Kabbalah, the so-called mystical aspect of Judaism. The book is The Essential Zohar: The Source of Kabbalistic Wisdom and it's been a while since I've read a book that made me feel spiritual after reading it.

What's special about this book is that it explains the Zohar, the main book of Kabbalah, as applying outside the Jewish tradition while still drawing on the Jewish references of the Torah. The difference between this book and other books on Kabbalah and Zohar is that it's not just Jewish. There isn't an insider-outsider aspect. This book emphasizes that Kabbalah wisdom applies to anyone seeking divine truths, and with this kind of premise in the author's mind I found from a Buddhistic perspective this all fits in perfectly with my understanding of Buddhist understanding. It's a universal teaching of spiritual or divine wisdom.

An interesting aspect of this book is that the Zohar claims that the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the first part of which is the Torah, is coded wisdom. If you just read it straight, it's possible to get nothing out of it but ancient stories (the first five books of the Christian Old Testament is pretty much the Torah verbatim, distorting it out of its Jewish origins and transplanting it in a Christian context). The Zohar decodes the Tanakh and explains all the symbolism in terms of what the Creator intended. This book in a way is a decoding of Zohar to apply to spirituality in general so that it is inclusive of anyone on a spiritual path. As such, the decoded Tanakh, via the decoded Zohar fits in suitably well with a Tibetan Buddhistic understanding of the universe.

I wish I could go into some detail but that might lead to a need for a deeper explication and that would just be a burden, I shouldn't wonder. You have to take my word for it. But a recent moment I had with the book is a passage where the author says that divine blessings will only come to anyone who sincerely studies the Torah (paraphrasing). I'm not Jewish, I don't study the Torah in any conventional sense, but I thought that if that statement were right, then I should consider myself as someone who studies the Torah. And in the next sentence, the author confirms that by studying the Torah, it's not literally studying the pages of the Torah, but anyone seeking truth to the light of the divine (paraphrasing).

The Jewish scriptures are all code according to the Zohar. Which means when the Jews are "the chosen people", Jews are code for people on the spiritual path no matter what faith. And Jews who aren't on the spiritual path can't be considered of "the chosen people". It's pretty radical stuff which rings very true to me, but then I remember that Kabbalah is described as "mystical", and as opposed to religious orthodoxies, mysticism has generally been looked down upon through the ages.

Sufism, the mystic sect of Islam is largely discarded and persecuted by Shiites and Sunnis. Christianity's Gnostic Gospels are ignored by the mainstreams, but I've read some of the Gnostic Gospels, including the recently discovered and published Gospel of Judas, and if they had taken hold or had been included in the canon, I'd have a different opinion about Christianity. The Gnostic Gospels describe the Jesus story in terms of the divine, rather than . . . blind faith towards what facially just doesn't make any sense. For me, the Jesus story as described in the Gnostic Gospels makes divine sense.

Why haven't I done what I want to do? My head is still too filled up with things that I'm attached to. There's still just too much superficial stuff going on around and around in my head...

Some of the worst thoughts about not wanting to pursue this aspiration come to me when I first wake up. Then as I gain more normative consciousness, a more rational mindset occurs, for better or worse. Worse, because I find myself confused or conflicted.

Regarding all this stuff in my head, I hold to the mantra that nothing whatsoever should be clung to. So even if I have certain mental preoccupations and tendencies that suggest that I'm still attached to certain things, I'm still constantly telling myself to not be attached to these things.

Experience them, but don't be attached. And I hope the mental karma of the tendency of telling myself not to be attached is stronger than the mental karma of the suggestion of attachment. By karma, I mean anything experienced through the senses which contributes to the unenlightened notion that I'm an independent, continuous, self-existing entity in the universe.

Furthermore, I'm still impressed from going way back into my archives and realizing my goal has been constant over years and years. OK, decades, I'm old! It's possible that a tendency towards suicide as a mental illness can persist across the span of time as it has for me, but in those cases, I think there are always signs of mental illness that manifest that other people can recognize.

I don't think I'm mentally ill, although I may exhibit behaviors that are symptomatic of mental illness. I even recognize them myself (which in an inverted Catch-22 confirms I'm not mentally ill). For me the symptoms are kind of a pathway to my unorthodox goal. Other people get there from being mentally ill, which I suppose is too bad and warrants sympathy.

There must be a peer group somewhere in the world for people like me. It would be a whole lot easier if I had a support group. Not just one willing to send me off, but also understands the reasons I'm doing this. I also wouldn't mind a ride if anyone has a car.

I'm sure I've said this before, but I know if I don't do this, it's not going to go away, and it will continually come up as an issue. I'd like it to be now. I'm trying for now. For the past several months I've kept it just a few days ahead. Walls, I'm thinking of calling them. And they've all been soft walls as I've just blown through them.

I'm starting to face hard walls now, meaning that if I continue to blow past the days without doing anything, it's getting more and more dire, ultimately ending in a decision to return to the States. By year's end at the latest.

Hard walls because if I don't go through with it, everything looks bad. From the simple logistics of moving back to the States to the long term realization that I'm not resolving anything and will end up back in this position again.

Hm, "not resolving". . . life is about solving problems and resolving issues. It's not that I'm trying to resolve anything. If I continue living, then resolution becomes an issue, a necessity. My paradigm is that it is not an issue. Or not supposed to be an issue. Or learning on the spiritual path that it's really not an issue.

My paradigm is that this just has to happen. This is what I need to do. I'm not supposed to need to resolve anything!

If for some reason I'm able to achieve what I want, no one will know what the last months of my life were like. Which is actually all for the better. No one needs to know. Just trying to maintain practice while not actually practicing.

No real highs, aside from the regular highs of mindful awareness of being alive and breathing, and in particular positive emotions through human expression through media . . . specifically Korean media, which seems really superficial, but that's where I ended up. Emotional highs also in listening to music.

No real lows, aside from a growing ennui and difficulty of getting through each day to day and wondering how I got to this point, which inevitably leads me to remind myself that I got here by leading myself here. No mystery.

Is it too late for my other useless thoughts?

Thoughts like about the Occupy Wall St. protests. My heart is with them, but I don't think they'll bring about any change. My feeling is that the fundamental flaw with modern Western capitalism is that it's driven by greed and a wealth incentive, and that the benchmark for success is perpetual growth. Only if an economy is constantly growing and growing is it considered to be healthy and successful.

On its face, that is not sustainable. It's not even taking sustainability into consideration; just growth, growth, growth. This kind of economic growth requires the population to continue growing to maintain a consumer and labor base. And the population is growing, but this constant population growth also means all these people need to be fed and supply chains need to be maintained and the waste they create needs to be managed on greater and greater scales. I just don't see how it's sustainable.

And when I hear about the growing and looming economic crisis in Europe and the U.S. and the solutions being put forth to solve it, the solutions are just to shore up the unsustainable status quo. Very few people are thinking that the entire way of thinking needs to be re-thought.

Thoughts like how Obama really dropped the ball and it looks like he may become a one-term president. He hasn't been the agent for change he proclaimed to be and at every turn he has just maintained the status quo.

I thought the bailouts of the auto and financial industries were mistakes. If they were businesses that were failing, there were reasons why they were failing, and as capitalism dictates business that don't have the wherewithal to succeed should be allowed to fail. The whole idea of businesses that are "too big to fail" excuse for bailing them out was a betrayal of capitalism and it applied socialism, if not selective communism, to the big corporations who least deserved it.

The hard part about analyzing that is the auto industry looks like it's being responsible with the bailout and getting themselves back on their feet and paying back the loan. But the same can't be said about the finance industry who took the bailout money and treated themselves to lavish retreats, and I don't think they ever thought it necessary to pay the loan back. For them, it was "woohoo, money, let's spend it".

In retrospect, those two different behaviors do make sense. The auto industry has a tangible product they're putting out and the companies themselves are something the corporate boards are invested in. They cared about the survival of their companies and realized what they'd be losing if they failed. The financial industry on the other hand, all they see is the money they are getting. They don't care about the companies or the industry. If they fail they just go find a job somewhere else.

So what? Do I think those companies should have failed bringing on the possible collapse of capitalism? Well, I don't think bailing those corporations out will prevent the fall of capitalism, and from the crisis happening in Europe and looming over the U.S. I don't think it's out of the question that capitalism may collapse. When Soviet communism collapsed, I remember some short-sighted commentator declaring it was the "end of history". Capitalism triumphs. At the time I remember thinking how arrogant and stupid that comment was and that capitalism could also fall, but I had no idea what it would look like or what would replace it.

Now with the debt crisis looming, I can see what capitalism collapsing looks like. Just look at Greece 2011 and apply it to everywhere. There's just no more money after years of partying on credit. Capitalism was a fairy tale that was maintained on a collective imagination that wealth will constantly grow and grow, sustainability be damned. But when everyone realizes there is no money, there's just no where to go but in debt, and I don't know what opposite of growth there is other than in debt.

Thoughts about cosmology that I haven't written about in a long time because I realized that there is a lot wanting in such a theoretical field where scientists push forward their findings as facts, but where many cosmological studies are based on our limited observational abilities from our one tiny perspective in the vastness of the universe and can't be directly experimented on and subjected to the scientific method. True, a lot can be verified. Einstein's theory of relativity has been verified through space missions and predictions and observational confirmation. The Large Hadron Collider will also no doubt make inroads into the veracity of more areas of quantum mechanics. 

But other fundamental theories that are generally accepted such as the Big Bang and Inflation theories, I don't know anymore. Cosmic acceleration has also been generally accepted just years after observational findings but I want to question the observational methodology. Might we be misreading the data? Five hundred years from now, the Big Bang, inflation, cosmic acceleration are all theories that may fall by the wayside, just as many ideas from five hundred years ago have now been disproven. We can't go somewhere and test those theories scientifically. We can only read the observational data and our readings may be chauvinistic and wrong. At the core of our error might be our human chauvinism. As humans, we have our senses to observe the universe, but our human senses are limited. They are not the only way to view the universe. Our senses evolved for survival on this planet, in this environment.

In a universal environment – the environment of the entire universe – what is ultimately, objectively "perceivable", or what is there, is not necessarily what can be perceived by us. We need special instruments to observe things in different electromagnetic wavelengths and that may just be the tip of the iceberg. There are things beyond our senses that we can build instruments to detect, but there also may be things completely beyond our understanding or conception. I've read theories about how there may be areas of the universe where the physics is completely different from ours in a multiverse within one "universe" and there's no way to prove or disprove these theories. And that's the point.

Science is currently unable to detect anything that may be considered "spiritual".

The scientific method is terrific for what can be subjected to it, but a lot of cosmology and astrophysics can't be subjected to it. We can't go to these far off places and observe the strange phenomena and definitively say it's scientific fact. We can only report what we observe from countless light years away and propose our best guess to explain what we observe. There's always the possibility that we're misreading the data and in centuries to come a better understanding with better proof will emerge.

Where I am may perhaps look bleak, but I keep reminding myself that this is where I've brought myself, and as such I can just accept it and keep looking at what I'm trying to do in the face.

I don't know when was the last time I saw someone I know. I'm pretty sure it was my former Mandarin teacher for a language exchange. I think that might have been in June. She asked about meeting up maybe a month or two ago, but I declined. I was already in my groove. I don't owe anyone anything. Not even meeting up. And I've completely given up on even pretending to study Mandarin. No matter what happens, there's just no point to it.

Tako, a former Taipei acquaintance, messaged me about meeting up about a month ago. She said she wanted to meet with me before she left for Australia. I had no idea that she was going to Australia. I think I last saw her in March. I declined. I told her I didn't want to meet up just to say goodbye. That may have been just a dramatic way of covering up how I don't feel comfortable in any social situation anymore. I don't think I could keep a simple conversation, perhaps merely for the reason that I'd get too bored even trying to maintain one.

I've lost interest in my web presence. One by one, each of my sites have fallen by the wayside. There's just this one last blog here and a very meager presence on Facebook. Photography is now totally gone. No interest, no seeing.

I keep my phone turned off for most part because I got sick of it reminding me to recharge it every few days. I turned it on today and found 2 text messages from cousins. I'll respond to one because all she wants to know is that everything is alright. I'll tell her everything is alright and that should be the end of that. The other message isn't even worth consideration. It was an obligatory text that I'm guessing some other family member pushed him to send because he's in Taipei. I really don't know what these people are doing. If they wanted to be in contact with me, they should've contacted me before. Now I'm simply not interested.

Insomnia still occasionally visits, as do spells of drowning in sleep. The bottle-of-alcohol-every-other-day buying persists. Lying on my bed for long periods of time while unable to do anything else listening to music on my iPod sounds like depressive behavior, but music is still such a joy. I'm still working on the illusion of music being a source of anything substantial. Certainly not something that should or could be clung to.

I still don't know why I'm balking at the next attempt. It's definitely the only thing what's next.

I've completely stopped morning sitting under the realization that what usually goes on during morning sitting now – considering my day-to-day life – occurs all day long. Even at the monastery, morning sitting had its place to set a precedent for the day ahead, which was a mindset that still engaged the world and physical reality. There still was a separation there. I'm so disengaged from the world now, my entire days are spent in the same mindset as sitting. To the extent that I get distracted throughout a day from general mindfulness, I also experienced those distractions during sitting.

I also continue to engage in the Tibetan teachings of the bardo and Dzogchen trainings. I'm not sure of the efficacy of reading about them without a teacher, but pursuing a teacher in this lifetime is something I've long rejected. I didn't even realize I'd been exposed to Dzogchen trainings until I started picking through random books on Tibetan teachings and finding remarkably similar things being said. That's because they've all received the same training and are trying to convey the efficacy of that training, and it is the Dzogchen method, philosophy and teachings.

Am I a Dzogchen practitioner? Without a teacher I'll err on the side of not (er . . . no). But still, I'm open to the idea that in past lives I've had a teacher and I've already been initiated in these practices and that's why they resonate or are acceptable to me in this life. 

Most recently I've been attacking the concept of "I". "ME". Mindfulness training teaches to be aware of oneself – what we're doing, what we're feeling – at all times. Aware of external stimuli from all five senses and aware of the amalgam of the stimuli which renders our perception and consciousness. At each point of awareness I tell myself to not be attached to it, not be attached to this, not to cling to any idea that this is "ME". It's all construct like in "The Matrix", but in reality there is no malevolent force or a war against artificial intelligence. It's just the nature of physical, manifested reality that has naturally developed on this planet.

It's a matter of focusing on my senses and abiding in how my perception of "I", myself, is falsely created by my senses. Is what I'm perceiving through sight me? Is it me? Is it my identity? Same with sound, smell, taste and touch. I have these perceptions and they create my picture of reality, but what is the "I" they seem to be feeding? When these senses are destroyed, the perception is gone and then what is reality?

It's not easy. I'm still here, so I'm still very attached to something.

I've also been attacking my attachment to music and the desire that emanates from listening to music – the idea that music is a source of enjoyment. This is the hardest thing possible for me. Other people may have trouble detaching from the concept of self and I, which most people consider absolute reality, but their trouble with that translates to me in my perception and reaction towards enjoyment of music. One main thing that I have not been able to remove from my perception of SELF is that music is a source of great enjoyment. It may be this enjoyment that is my greatest failing, which is that I'm still here. But this enjoyment of music is not ultimate reality. It's subjective, it's constructed, it should be the easiest of things that can be taken apart under scrutiny of the nature of reality and mind. 

I've been using the techniques to analyze other areas of attachment to and debunking of perceived, physical reality to music. What is it that I'm listening to? What is my reaction? Why am I reacting this way? Why do I find this pleasure in what I'm listening to? I take music apart, focusing on the rhythm, the melody, the individual instruments and how they come together and there is nothing I can point to that I can attach with the feeling of "enjoyment". That enjoyment is just fact, separate from any deconstruction or analysis. 

Yet, I know it is not like that. Enjoyment is fleeting. This kind of enjoyment is by its nature also suffering. The intellectual answer is clear: there is no reason. Music and the pleasure I take from it isn't some objective phenomena that is able to be recreated and passed on and explained. My emotional response is something I need to take apart and understand for what it is. It doesn't mean not enjoying it, but rather not being attached to it.