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.