I think I've already enumerated all the things I've lost interest in, things that used to comprise my identity. Music is gone, photography is gone, physical activities all gone.

While trying to find my way to my next attempt, things that interest me now reveal themselves in what I find interesting to read in the bookstores or libraries. And things that interest me to watch on TV.

I still have base, gross, human attachments, indicated by an ongoing appreciation of listening to my music collection. It's an attachment in that it's something hard to let go of. It's hard to just stop doing it.

I used to be a coffee drinker, a caffeine addict, but when I decided I just wanted to stop doing it, I did. I'm sure it would be the same for alcohol if I ever needed to make that decision. Stopping listening to music is just not an option.

Another attachment I have is towards food, indicated by my attraction to food programs on the Travel & Living Channel. But I think I can give up that attachment pretty easily. It's really simple desire. I can drool, drool, drool, but if I can't have the food, I have no problem with that.

I still waste a lot of time watching superficial South Korean entertainment media. I am a master of wasting time. All my life I've been good at occupying myself doing mindless, repetitive shit. I would probably be happy as a clam working on some assembly line that my mind might take as some kind of meditative environment.

I guess another ongoing interest is human mortality. I'm attracted to books and TV programs that deal with the human life cycle, death, and any investigations involving death. Even criminal investigations are a meditation on life, mortality and extreme human behavior.

I mentioned before getting wrapped up in people climbing the world's highest peaks. To me, that's a habitually suicidal activity. If you do it, no matter what the reason, there's a high risk that you either might die, or face a life or death experience.

You can't climb the world's highest peaks assuming you'll make it down alive. All the stories of people who've died on the peaks attest to that as fact. No one goes up assuming they will die, but no one can go up and assume they won't.

I'm still interested in Buddhist teachings, which is closely related to death, since the ultimate teachings of Buddhism regard death as the ultimate meditation on life. There are a lot of feel-good teachings of Buddhism on living that are propagated because that's all what most people can handle.

But a real challenge of Buddhism, I find, is the facing of mortality and contemplating what it is, or what one believes it is. Tibetan Buddhism outlines what past practitioners have discovered about it, but none if it is provable, so it's a matter of what makes sense to any one of us.

At least Tibetan Buddhism takes a good, hard challenge of the experience and what it is. It's not just some fairy tale of some mythic heaven or hell which seem an awful lot like human psychological projection. Human psychology = not ultimate reality. It's a created reality.

Also related to Buddhism, I'm still interested in cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics. Any ultimate spirituality must take the entire universe into account (most organized religions aren't universal, they are "us vs. them and we're right, they're wrong"), so any valid spirituality must investigate scientific findings on the universe, or be open to such an investigation somewhere down the line.

I don't mean blindly accepting scientific findings in the realm of spirituality. Science is by its own design unqualified to deal with spiritual questions. But as science limits its scope, it does what it does very well, and spiritual seekers would do themselves well by looking into those findings.

There's a lot that's scientifically unprovable in cosmological theory, but it's interesting how there's a lot of crossover with Buddhist conceptual thought. Likewise, it's interesting how concepts that have been taught in Buddhism for centuries match descriptions of reality by quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics and astrophysics have been finding there's a lot of real fucking strange shit when dealing with reality. Buddhism has been describing reality as some real fucking strange shit for quite a while.

On DVD I have Columbia University physicist Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe which dealt with string theory. National Geographic in Taiwan has recently started airing what seems to be another Brian Greene series called Beyond the Cosmos, which I think might be a TV presentation of his book The Fabric of the Cosmos.

When I was at Deer Park monastery, one of the monks was reading The Fabric of the Cosmos, but I wasn't able to get some of the esoteric concepts he was trying to explain. With this TV presentation, I think I'm starting to get it, and so I'm giving the book a shot at the library.

It's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It's interesting how Buddhist descriptions of reality are affirmed by scientific cosmology, but scientific cosmology is also on shaky ground as it's ever-evolving and can't rely on the scientific method to prove itself.

It's interesting how findings in quantum mechanics are no surprise to Buddhist cosmology. Buddhism has been saying those things for centuries but had no way to prove them. And quantum mechanics prove them.

In the end, the ultimate thesis is that the universe and reality are a pretty bizarre place, and that counteracts our daily conception of living and reality that it's . . . just normal.