There are two chapters of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (2005 complete translation) that I've mentioned before as chapters I regularly skip when reading through the cycle. Chapter 8 (Signs of Death) and Chapter 9 (Ritual Deception of Death).

I think I may have been diplomatic about them before saying they have dubious relevance in light of modern medicine and understanding of life processes. A lot sounds superstitious and/or based on folk belief. The truth is I found them downright ridiculous. Here's an example that demonstrates what these chapters are like: . . . if one urinates, defecates and sneezes simultaneously, this too is an indication of death. (p. 157, paperback).

You can make that stuff up. I can't, but someone did unless it's true, but much of it defies verification, and there are hundreds of statements like this. Line after line of brow-furrowing "how can anyone have written or believed this?". And how was this included in a cycle of what are sometimes considered sacred texts?

Anyway, I'm reading through the cycle and got to these chapters and decided to give them a shot, and no difference in my reaction really. Reading quickly, eyes rolling, pained expressions, face palming my way through it. And then it hit me. This might be something like what's considered a "hidden text".

I read it, but I can't understand it because I haven't been initiated into practices that might open up the meaning to me. Someone who has been initiated might read the chapters and know exactly what they're talking about and it has nothing to do with the literal words on the page.

And mind you, I love the preceding chapters, I have no problem with them. Chapters 4 and 7 at times I find quite soul-stirring, but not everyone would. And Chapters 5 and 6 might very easily elicit the same reaction I had towards 8 and 9. What the hell is this shit?! That, I would say, is a reasonable outsider reaction without an understanding brought by a guide or intuition. I had no problem with those chapters because I had already been exposed to them numerous times from reading Chapter 11 (Natural Liberation Through Hearing), what before this complete translation westerners thought to be the whole Tibetan Book of the Dead. And yes I was confounded at first, but then figured out how I can interpret them personally to not have a problem with them.

I think there might be a whole tradition of hidden texts, but I know next to nothing about it. I never looked into it specifically and just sort of accepted it as a Tibetan thing. I had no problem with the basic idea. As the story goes, the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself was a hidden text. Padmasambhava wrote it in the 7th or 8th century and hid it until the 12th or 13th century when it was discovered by Karma Lingpa. Some say the physical texts were hidden around the country in monasteries or out in nature or shrines like geocaches. Some say the texts were telepathically embedded in objects or received as revelations in dreams.

OK, maybe I've absorbed more than I thought about hidden texts. It's not a dear topic, though. Or maybe all the magical mythology is something more mundane and Padmasambhava's writings were never really lost, but were limited and the few people who had access to them had no idea what he was talking about, similar to my reaction to 8 and 9. It took centuries of spiritual development and finally when Karma Lingpa came across the writings, he could understand and interpret them.

My experience with these chapters seems extreme where there's nothing unclear about the literal words, and any interpretation into something profound or meaningful would need to make quite a stretch. It might be like reading a cookbook recipe and making a dish that turns out terrible and not knowing why it tastes so bad. But then later returning to the recipe and realizing, "Oh, so that's how you change your car's motor oil". wut?

But I certainly don't think it's in the realm of the impossible. Even recently I've mentioned re-reading books that I've gotten before and was even inspired by, but having a tough slog at them this time around, going sentence by sentence and having trouble getting any of it.

This isn't intellectual understanding. If I could switch into intellectual mode I might be able to just read through them and get the gist just fine. For a heart understanding, they're not just words on a page and information. The heart must be open to understand it, and if it's not I'm not going to be able to fool myself that I'm understanding it, even if I've understood it before when I read it when my heart was open.

There's another curiosity about Chapter 8. In a section entitled "Signs of Extremely Near Death", on pp. 174-176/7, the description is not signs of extremely near death, but from everything I've read, it's literally describing the "death point" bardo/between. This is what everywhere else describes as happening once a person dies.

I've mentioned before that I think this belongs in Chapter 11 as part of the recitation for the recently deceased, and in my copy I've written in where to jump back to these pages of Chapter 8 to be recited repeatedly during the first few days after death because it seems important. It confounds me because it's such a glaring discrepancy and it's not mentioned in any of the commentary.

Those passages are also the only descriptions that aren't totally outrageous. If you're willing to have faith in these teachings, this describes what happens. It's not if such-and-such happens you'll die in 9 months, or if this happens you'll die in 5 months, or that happens you'll die in 1 month. Or if you stand naked in a field in the morning and do prostrations to the east and press your palms deeply into your eyes and then look into the sky and see an image of yourself missing a head or a leg or peeing in forking streams while doing the hokey pokey and farting, then you're already dead.

I'm gonna burn in hell.

Watching every day. Watching every day go by since the reality of the limited funds, and therefore time I have left manifested. Man, did March blow by in a hurry. Not really. If I was trying to be dramatic, it went by in a hurry, but actually days went by as they always did. I just paid more attention to them begin and end.

On principle, I'm not changing how I go about my days. I don't know why I have that principle, it's just what I always told myself to do. Actually, I imagine many suicides are like that. Once the mental decision is made, nothing is particularly different externally until doing it. The decision is faced and the plan is made without trying to project "warning signs" unless they're trying to be saved or stopped.

"Once the decision is made", I kid myself. Even though the depletion of funds is concrete and unavoidable, why am I even waiting? Why not now? That's the question that has characterized my pathetic pathology, and in the past has always indicated I wasn't going to do it. Why not now? Because I don't have to. Hopefully, in a few months I'll have to, but only then can I tell myself that my decision is made.

I wonder if there's anything about my life I wish I had done differently or better.

Not really. Aside from perhaps having suicide as my dream, my goal and aspiration in life. Given that, I think I've absolutely excelled in that regard by distancing myself from people who may be affected and minimizing any impact on them. I'm a very considerate and thoughtful suicide.

So no, there's nothing I could have done differently or better. Anything that qualifies to be in that category would be being more social and present in other people's lives, ego-affirming acts or being. Making connections, contributing to the betterment and well-being of others. Just making someone laugh over drinks. I think I used to be considered funny at some point.

Worthy enough things to do and be, but when you know you're suicidal, when your end goal is suicide, and you design all the little bits of your life to make sure it ends with suicide, then not so much. It just creates attachment and sentimentality. I think I did it right.

Regrets? I can't possibly say I have no regrets. No, I have regrets. I wish I could have practiced better. The Dalai Lama once described himself as a "lazy monk". He was being humble, the point being practice can often, if not always, be better. But we practice to our ability or else we might do more damage than benefit. I just wish I could have practiced better, that doesn't mean I could have. Given more time, I still wouldn't have practiced better.

I regret being born to my parents. Yeesh, what a monkey wrench that was. I still can't make heads or tails of why I was born to them. It happened. I can't just brush it aside as a mistake, even if it might have been. I have to examine whether there was any substance in that relationship and it's a cold trail.

But no, they were the perfect parents for what I want to do. No attachments, no sentimentality. If suicide is something I need to do to advance spiritually, they were the perfect parents. Practically inspirations. Actually inspirations. I don't remember when I was first introduced to the idea of suicide, but I think it was a bit of a revelation of, "you can do that?". And it was a response grounded in being a miserable child of my parents. I was probably in the 8-11 age range, I'm not sure. It was pretty early, I shouldn't wonder.

When it comes right down to it, my only theoretical regret is being this way, what Sadie said she hated about me. It theoretically would have been nice to not have suicide as a goal and have been some positive influence to someone else. It just wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. And I hope that regret is something I can carry over as karma to push for in future lifetimes. But in this lifetime, the big spiritual challenge is to voluntarily give up the attachment to that which is so dear and precious to me: my ego, my subjective perspective, my life.

I don't know what came over me, but I recently read a flurry of WWII books. I guess I have a predilection for reading about harrowing ordeals and a fascination with the unimaginable extremes of the human experience. In this case during wartime. I've always thought it bonkers that we created these beautiful, graceful, elegant, powerful machines like planes and ships and then used them for destruction and killing and to get attacked and destroyed by some construct of "enemy". Well, no, not "and then used them for", but for the purpose of.

Ironically, the first book I read, Flyboys (2003) by James Bradley, is the one about which I'm most lukewarm. The premise was intriguing with the first chapter mentioning a recently declassified case regarding navy pilots who were shot down near a Pacific island not far from Iwo Jima and captured by the Japanese and executed. George H.W. Bush was shot down but was rescued by a U.S. sub before being captured.

It turns out it wasn't that extraordinary a story. It was just another incident of a wartime atrocity. Not to trivialize it, maybe all such stories should be told, but not all of them need an entire book for the telling. What was special about this story? What's the emotional take? Is anyone going to make a movie out of this story like Bradley's first book, Flags of Our Fathers? I doubt it.

Nothing really stands out except a future U.S. president participated in the mission and if he was captured and killed our history would be slightly different (he was a one-term president). This book would still have been written, with one less interview subject and his story as a victim would have been told in it, but we wouldn't know that he would become president, albeit one term, if he lived. I'm being snarky, as a navy flyer defending our country, I'm glad he survived.

(Holy shit! No, our history would be radically different because he wouldn't have spawned that idiot other Bush president who was probably the worst U.S. president ever at the time. Second worst now. Not only that, but I've always said that without Bush junior, there would be no Obama presidency. I had serious doubts that Obama could win because I knew how racist the U.S. is (NB: turns out it's even more racist than I thought it was), and I had trouble believing we'd elect a black man for president. But we did! That's how bad junior was!*)

To compensate for the lack of a book-length worthy story that tells itself, he writes about everything else he can to pad the book. He writes about the history of Japan-U.S. relations, Japan's modern history and militarization, the development of the U.S. air corp, U.S. aggression and racism, and more. It goes beyond just setting up context, but covers things only related with a huge stretch. I was waiting for a chapter on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the war. It never came, but considering everything he writes about, it was fair game.

The way he writes had me leaving the library always in a sour mood. I'll give him benefit of the doubt that everything he writes is sourced, but I felt he shaded the facts in a way that emphasized the worst, the most negative, unredeeming, gory aspects of war. Maybe he's antiwar, which I have no problem with. If I had to take a stance I'd probably be antiwar, but this book didn't make me feel antiwar. It just filled me with disgust in general, and not at anything.

I have no great love for FDR. I agree that he was among the greatest U.S. presidents, but he's also the one who signed the order to imprison all Japanese Americans on the west coast during the war, a clearly racist act as German Americans weren't subjected to similar treatment and Hawaiian Japanese were exempted because they were too many and it would have been "impracticable". But Bradley's referring to him as "the Dutchman" definitely betrays something about his attitude towards the wartime president. That is not a term of respect. It's like writing a book about killing Osama bin Laden and constantly referring to Obama as "the Muslim" (even if FDR is of Dutch descent (I personally don't know), he was, I imagine, as Dutch as Obama is Muslim, i.e., not at all).


Left For Dead (2003) interested me because it's about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which I knew about already and many people recall from the movie "Jaws", which is mentioned in the book as a key inspiration for part of the story. One part of the story is, of course, what happened to the Indianapolis and how it was entrusted to deliver the Little Boy atomic bomb to Tinian Island and afterwards was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on its way to its next assignment. The tragedy was that no one came to rescue the survivors who floated three or four days, suffering death from exposure, shark attacks and hallucinations and delirium. Now that's a story that tells itself. No matter how you write it, it's harrowing and emotional.

The other part of the story is the redemption of Captain McVay who was court-martialed for the sinking and blamed for the deaths of his crew and committed suicide in 1968. His court-martial can be viewed as a big black eye on the face of the integrity of the U.S. Navy. It was the classic sacrificing a "lowly" captain to save the careers and egos of higher up generals. It shows the disgusting, shameful, cowardly effect of hubris of those in power who don't want to admit responsibility.

The book also dispelled a myth I held about the Indianapolis that the failure to be rescued was related to its top secret mission to deliver the atom bomb to Tinian. It simply was unrelated. That mission was completed and its next mission was just its next mission.


I found two books at one library that I ended up reading in tandem because they both involved B-17 raids in Europe in the second half of 1943. They sort of complemented each other, although one book was about a single mission involving many flight crews and its aftermath, and the other was about a single incident with the story surrounding one flight crew and one German fighter pilot.

To Kingdom Come (2011) is about the September 6, 1943 deep-penetration, daylight bombing mission on Stuttgart, Germany without fighter escort that one general thought was the road to winning the war. It was basically a "test of concept" mission. He was wrong, the mission was statistically a disaster and such missions would soon be abandoned until the development of the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter could be completed to provide escort all the way to targets and back.

The book is about the mission so it focuses on several crews who flew the mission and survived to tell the story, including crews that were downed and aided by the French Underground to get back to England. Extraordinary stories.

A Higher Call (2012) is centered on a bombing raid three months later in December 1943, so there is overlap between the stories of the two books (crews from To Kingdom Come were still trying to get back to England) as well as mention of same bomber groups. Some descriptions, such as bomber groups taking off and mustering in the sky, are virtually identical.

The subject incident in the book, the purpose for the book, is very simple. The subject B-17 was badly damaged in the bombing raid and against all odds managed to stay in flight. One German pilot was the last chance to make sure the enemy didn't get away, but he ended up deciding not to shoot them down and let them go over the English Channel, albeit certain they wouldn't make it all the way back to England. If the crew were able to see the damage that the German pilot saw, maybe they wouldn't have made it!

The rest of the book is all back story and aftermath, and like To Kingdom Come, which jumps from story to story, so does this book which made reading them in tandem feel perfect. And I have to admit I wasn't sure what to make of the author and his background, but it's a well-written book. Towards the beginning of the book he describes an incident of the German fighter pilot trying to find work after the war and then cuts it off to go into the back story. When he goes back to finish the incident much later in the book, I didn't need to go back and refresh myself what had happened. I remembered exactly what was happening and I attribute that to good writing.

The emotional take from this book was huge and profound. The pilots and surviving crew met decades later and it was amazing the gratitude of the descendants realizing if it weren't for this former Luftwaffe fighter pilot standing before them and his one act of mercy, none of them would be here.

No one forgets who they owe for their survival for generations. Even in To Kingdom Come, the B-17 crews remembered the brave French citizens who helped them survive, some of whom were later caught and executed by the Nazis. All of them doing their jobs and what they believe in. The German pilot didn't do his job, but did what he believed in, which is that you don't shoot a crippled, defenseless plane out of the sky.

This actually hearkens back to the book on the Armenian Genocide I read a few months ago. The granddaughter of the genocide survivor travels to Syria during her research to find the descendants of the Bedouin sheikh who saved her grandfather's life to thank them. They ask her how many people their father saved by saving her grandfather. She counts her relatives and replies 15, much to their dismay. Only 15? That's plenty for a U.S. lineage, but the sheikh's lineage was in the hundreds! It's still a funny anecdote.

It's crazy. The lives we lead are crazy. The world we live in is crazy. Who knows the effects of our actions? The Japanese narrowly missed killing two future U.S. presidents. But they illegally executed POWs whose future effect we'll never know. There's no way to judge it. It just is what it is. I say I'm glad Bush senior survived, but what if his spawn wasn't just a bungling moron and was a Hitler or a Trump? Then it becomes hard to say I wouldn't be glad he didn't survive. It's a conundrum that defies logic or morality. And that's the world we live in.


* more of my hare-brained political theory (a.k.a., the Busherfly Effect, yea I just made that up):

I finally went to the ATM and found that the injection did not go through last month, so no buffer. I'm just mentioning it to mark when I learned I have a few months left in my bank account. I've been in this position before of counting down months, but all those times something happened to keep me afloat. I don't foresee anything this time.

Well, I said I need it to LOOM, and here it is now looming. I've always told myself I wouldn't do anything different ahead of a next attempt. I still hold to that in principle, but if I want to waste my time differently from what has been my routine, I'll allow it. I'll be more economical about how I waste my time. I have a few books I'm reading in the libraries that I'll finish up, but then I'm going to focus on the books that I have on Buddhist practice.

It's fine, but I feel it. It's not nothing. It's not something I can ignore. But it's something I suppose will evolve.