mizerable daze

The weather oracle has already declared this to be a La Niña winter and the long-range forecast for Taiwan is that it will be mild until the end of the year, and then temperatures would plunge after New Year's followed by a long, cold, bitter winter (of course Taipei is subtropical, but that's how I read it). I remember cold, bitter winters over the past 10 years because I would bring cold weather stuffis back from New Jersey because of them. Below average winters aren't pleasant, but at least I should be sorta prepared for them.

And that "mild until the end of the year" is turning out to be no comfort as Taipei has just had two solid weeks of gloom and drear when it wasn't outright raining, which it has a lot, and at least another week and a half of the same according to the forecast. Weeks and weeks of this kind of weather is also in my experience here, notably my first two winters. It seems every kind of worst winter weather is being dished out all at once this season, perhaps the universe's answer for Taiwan avoiding the worst of the CCP pandemic and making sure 2020 sucked for everyone!

Adding to the personal suckage of 2020, one of the two major hypermarts near my place closed at the beginning of the year/pandemic. It was the closer of the two and was in walking distance for alcohol runs during extended rain periods. The remaining store isn't too much farther away in the opposite direction, but requires going by bike. The result is that whenever there's a lull in the rain, I do an alcohol run and accumulate a stock to last as far into the rainy period as possible in case it turns into constant rain. So far there have been enough lulls to consistently maintain over a week's worth of alcohol. 

Even more suckage is developing sciatica in my right leg. Somehow I immediately knew it was sciatica when the pain started (the word just came to me) and was able to confirm its likelihood with a web search that described it exactly. It was pain that was both dull and sharp and I couldn't pinpoint where on my leg it hurt, it was just the whole turkey leg. The description of a "radiating" pain rang true. And since it's a nerve issue, there's nothing that can be done about it but wait for it to go away (similar to the ridiculous issue I had with my cervix long ago).

I expect the pain to simply go away as that seems to be my karma (pattern/habit) my whole life. Same with the pain on my left knee that has developed in the past two days. That's too soon to worry about and I'll finish off the glucosamine I have left which usually takes care of knee pain. Only a little disturbing is that Advil seems to have no effect and it really fucking hurts (not quite as fast as "sciatica" came to mind, "gout" became a possibility). It's far worse than the usual glucosamine-cured knee aches and hampers mobility. Outwardly, sciatica only slows down my walking to thinly veil a limp. This knee pain has shown effects on walking, stairs and bike riding; makes me look crippled, even on bike. 

And then there are the cold showers as mercury continues to descend. Even no where near the depths of a forecast long, cold, bitter winter, cold showers aren't pleasant. I'm still mindfully gauging my emotions at the lack of hot water while in the shower. I scroll through my range of emotions, wondering what I'm feeling. I know what I'm thinking; I'm thinking at least I'm not in the Siege of St. Petersburg, at least I'm not Jewish in the Holocaust. I'm only at "abandon ye all hope of hot water", but how do I feel about that? OK, cold. I feel cold. That's not what I mean. Frustrated? Wronged? I don't deserve this? Injustice? Violated? Tempting, but no, none of those.  

How am I supposed to feel as I jump under the cold shower? This sucks!, yes but that's not a feeling, it's a fact (or an opinion depending upon who you ask, i.e., someone who isn't directly experiencing it). Holy shit! yes, but that's more an expression of a feeling. What is the emotion behind that expression?

What goes through my mind is "let go of ego, let go of attachment (to comforts), let go of the self (what suffers)". There's something practice-related going on. What comes up in my mind is certainly not the peaceful deities/lights (representing the ground of reality) in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, but rather the wrathful deities that appear after liberation through the peaceful deities is missed. 

Wrathful deities is more like it. Wrath; this is more akin to anger. Not anger at anything or anyone, just a violent and virulent dissonant energy. It helps me get through it. If I wasn't angry, maybe I'd be wimpy and whiny and complain about it in bouts of self-pity, but St. Anger says, "be damned, cold water, it is not you who will defeat me". All the while not knowing it just may (along with sciatica, seasonal affective disorder, gout, isolation and not being known, gastrointestinal issues, alcoholism, etc., etc.). 

Anger has helped me survive a lot along my way. Is that a good thing? It can't be, can it? Anger and negativity feed each other. But I'd posit negativity as a general or background state – that's not good, it just taints and sours everything. Anger, when controlled, can be a sword, a weapon, an adrenalin bomb, something you need when confronted. Actually, no, it's not a good thing. I'm probably just trying to justify the "way I am", but it has likely caused more grief than good for me.

WordsCharactersReading time

A year ago I expected hot water. Last winter I demanded hot water. I can't recall ever living in a place that didn't have hot water. I'm a product of the first world and hot water is a hooman and hoowoman right!

I did start to have troubles with hot water last winter and given the above statement, it was perfectly reasonable to run the tap until I got hot water. I demanded hot water. Until last winter, hot water was completely reliable and I'd get it after running the water for just a bit. 

Last winter, for the first time ever there were more than a handful of instances when hot water wasn't forthcoming. It was a new experience, it was perplexing, and my solution was to run the tap until hot water came through, which it always eventually did. Sometimes it took 10 minutes, sometimes 20, once it took nearly an hour that I was wasting perfectly good fresh water down the drain waiting for hot water to come through! There was frustration and anxiety involved, and since I shower closer to lights out than not, it disrupted when I went to sleep. Even though it happened only a few times, every day there was doubt whether I'd get hot water reliably soon or I'd have to run the water for extended periods while going back to my computer and futz around, checking the water status every 5 or 10 minutes. 

As summer faded this year and temperatures started cooling, I just had a feeling remembering last winter, a premonition perhaps, that there would be no hot water when I asked the tap for it. Maybe not a premonition but just the product of my negative mind and pessimism. Whatever, the fact is that my fears have come to pass and I have no hot water. However, I was able to brace for it and change my attitude and assume and accept that I no longer have hot water. 

Going into winter, cold showers are now the expected norm. Granted, Taipei is subtropical and winters are on par with San Francisco, but even in SF I took hot showers in the winter (and summer). It's not like snow-bearing regions like New Jersey, Ohio, Seoul or Tokyo where I suppose cold showers in the winter would range in the realm of howling holy shit 'unbearable'. 

Currently I think of showers as "jump in the river" experiences. You jump in the river and it's shockingly cold, but then you just have to deal with it and endure it. Every night. Or I can recall and emulate the legendary Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi who supposedly stood under freezing cold waterfalls to steel his discipline. Probably not every night. 

Or I can visualize plunging into cold, ocean surf.

Another way of looking at it is from a mindfulness practice perspective. Living life we habituate ourselves for most part to gravitate towards comfort and avoid unpleasantness as much as we can. Yet according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead that attitude may help keep people in the cycle of death and rebirth. In particular during the second death bardo, the bardo of "reality", it is said we are faced with bright, bedazzling, blinding apparitions of colored lights so intense as to be fairly characterized as terrifying, but if we recognize them as the nature of our own minds, that can lead to enlightenment (whatever that means). However if we fear the lights and flee from them (downwards) towards comforting dull lights, we are running towards another rebirth in this world of suffering where we have to go through birth, disease, old age and death anew. The dull lights represent various levels of lives we can live, according to our karma. Going for the comforting dull lights is the natural, habitual tendency of the vast majority who have not been introduced to or trained in the bardo death practices.

I find that certainly applicable. My entire life now is all about maintaining a dull comfort and an uneasy, ultimately untenable, stability. The day-to-day conveyor belt is about comfort. Staying close to my bathroom because of gastro issues is about comfort. Recovering from whatever minor disruptions to my daily routine is just about comfort. This is all fine as I consider my life already over. There's nothing I need to do in life, nothing I want to do, so this is my personal version of palliative care as I wait to die. 

No hot water and cold water showers is not in my control. Apparently I'm the only one affected as no one else has called the landlord to complain about it. Unless . . . they're all like me? If they're all like me, who am I to complain? But as long as it's not in my control and is not a wrist-slicing disturbance, apply it as practice. Cold water showers is looking at and facing the blinding bright colored lights and not wanting hot water, which is the dull comforting lights leading back to rebirth. 

On the other hand, it might get old real fast as temperatures continue to decline. And I have to be honest with myself, cold water showers in cold weather suck. However I choose to cope with them, they're annoying, frustrating and remind me of the big joke that is my life (Really? The Universe can't send me cancer or liver failure and instead turns off my hot water? The Universe is #worstlandlordever). 

It's still unknown whether this will be a moderate winter or particularly cold; either which is possible. If the unpleasantness ranges into first world unbearableness, I might have to resort to setting up my space heater to point into the bathroom during showers. I don't know if that'll work, but at least the air will be warmed after shivering under the cold water is over.

For the past several months I've been focusing morning sitting on the Tibetan Buddhist concepts of sem and rigpa. Both of those terms are translated as "mind", but distinguish between different types of mind. Sem is mind as manifested in our perceived reality and it is also divided in two. One aspect of sem mind is how we subjectively perceive things, what is received through our senses and how our brains integrate them and interpret reality. The other aspect of sem is what's out there, what's being perceived and is also a product of mind. It's not to say that without us being here that it would disappear, that would be a misinterpretation of it being "product of the mind", but rather establishing the non-duality between reality and mind – what's "out there" IS our mind. That takes a bit to get one's sem around. 

The focus on sem is also good for returning the wandering discursive mind back to the breath – Zen focus on breathing – that I perennially wrangle with. I start by identifying breath as being representative of sem, so as soon as I think "sem" my mind immediately goes to my breath and the sensation of breathing and then that expands to focusing on all senses and what they're doing, as well as the discursive mind and the thoughts which are also sem. It sometimes takes a while for the thought of sem to trigger the focus, sometimes it's there from the start or even before starting (although once it came to me literally right before the 46-minute timer went off (sem! *beep beep beep*), which wasn't ideal). Doesn't matter. And once the focus on the perceiving is there, it spreads to the objects of perception, the other side of sem.

Rigpa is a more elusive concept of mind; it is mind as the ground of all being. Sem mind is merely the projection or manifestation of rigpa. Sem is how mind appears as our perceived reality and with what and how we interact in our lives, but rigpa is the true mind, the true ground of existence. Imagine seeing the trees (sem) but being unable to see the forest (rigpa), or the waves but unable to see the ocean. You look as hard as you can and you can see the trees and the waves, but for the life of you you fail at the challenge of seeing the forest or the ocean. The problem with the analogy is that we can see the forest and the ocean, but that's also the conceptual difficulty of rigpa where everything is rigpa, rigpa is imbued through everything around us, but we can't see it or point to it. 

Rigpa can't be learned or taught, but must be experienced, it is said, and experiencing rigpa is akin to enlightenment. And as I understand it, it is the "clear light" or "pristine cognition" (or many other terms) described in the death-point between in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. There's a point in the death process where all beings experience enlightenment but it is so subtle that beings generally blow through it without any recognition or notice of it. It is possible to train oneself to try to recognize it, and enlightenment can be achieved during the death-point bardo if successful. 

Of course, not having a teacher I haven't received any instructions on it, but maybe while alive keeping a meditative focus on the understanding that rigpa is life and reality itself all around us and we are experiencing it, just not noticing it, will help recognize it when encountered in death. During the death process, not succumbing to the fear and tumult of the death process and concentrating on recognizing the clear light/pristine cognition so that when it occurs it's the most obvious thing because we just lived our entire life marinating in it. It's something that becomes obvious at that point along with the recognition, finally, that it's been there all along. 

Both of these focuses on sem and rigpa are ideally maintained or returned to throughout the day and not just for the cushion.

Recognition of experiencing rigpa is described as something very familiar, like the meeting of mother and child. I hope I can be forgiven if that analogy is somewhat lost on me. I mean, yeah, familiar – I've never failed to recognize my parents whenever they or I came out of customs at the airport no matter how many years have passed, but any implication of a pleasant familiar reunion would be pushing it. I suppose the analogy may have been a sentimental expression of what Tibetans believed was universal. Even Paul Simon wrote a song about it, so OK, fine. 

Me? I'd go for a familiarity that's less sentimental and perhaps even more universal than the mother and child reunion that's only a motion away. I'm thinking the familiarity more like whenever we wake up and we know who we are and that this is reality. We aren't repeatedly freaked whenever we wake up wondering who or where we are. It's just here immediately, not frightening, not necessarily comforting, just fact and possibly profoundly familiar if you think about it. I also like that familiarity being of oneself as similar to The Conference of the Birds when the thirty birds reach their stated goal of meeting the Simorgh, which we find can be translated to "thirty birds" in I think Persian or Farsi. You reach the clear light/pristine cognition state and its basically a mirror, yourself. 

2019 mix CDs

Yes indeedy, yet another addition to my vanity project of making a mix CD for every year I've been alive! And same as since 2012, it's a double-disc collection filled with K-pop! Yay! Of course there's no reason on multiple levels for doing this. There's no reason for most of my life, what's your point? The CD medium itself is an artificial and/or obsolete construct. Who even uses CDs anymore? (oh yeah, me) But for me the physical limit is important (if allowing for a second CD can be called "limiting"), as is the concept of a "collection" with track order, segues and flow and contours. Who even thinks that way anymore? (oh yeah, me)

What a long, strange trip it's been in just these mix CDs. The extreme left turn that is K-pop so late in my life still confounds me to the point that I still can't dismiss mystical attribution of future life resonance – that my next life will be in Korea. FLR might also be why I'm primarily attracted to girl groups, whereas if it was just about the music genre I should be equally accepting of the boy groups. I'm drawing analogies with passages in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead that describe the bardo of rebirth whereby individuals that are to be reborn as male will feel jealousy towards the father and attraction to the mother and vice versa for females (that's just the basic template while, as my theory goes, genetics also play a part; the gender-"determining" experience in the bardo primarily affects subjective identity and may influence physically being born one gender or another (or yet another these days) but can't counter genetics dictating otherwise. It explains a lot if you think about it). So the Korean thing may be a resonance as to where I'm to be reborn, while the focus on the female may be sticking with current karma that I'll be born male (getting XX chromosomes notwithstanding). What the hell am I talking about?

Back on planet earth I've tried to explain the K-pop in other ways – that it's about songwriting, really good melodies, tight backing-track arrangements, the progressions, the gestalt and other musical/production attributes – but I feel like I'm trying to legitimize something that doesn't need legitimizing. I've always trusted my musical tastes and rarely have I made the blunder of thinking something was good only to realize there really wasn't much substance (mostly when I was trying too hard). But I suppose maybe none of this matters if it's future life resonance at play. It's no longer my musical tastes in this lifetime, but echoes from a future that hasn't happened yet or is supposed to be happening if I had kept to script and departed for that life long ago. My music listening has been hijacked. And I've mentioned before that the Korean thing is the future life resonance, not K-pop. The K-pop is because of love of music in this current life. In future lifetimes I may not be interested in music at all. Theoretically, if I had some other strong interest, it would be some other aspect of Korea that would be inexplicably manifesting.

I wonder what I would've been listening to for the past decade if K-pop hadn't happened. Anything good coming out of the west aside from Hamilton? I haven't noticed anything. I wouldn't need anything new since all the music I acquired in those hard-drive exchanges in 2009-2010 may have taken 10 years to get familiar with; as I mentioned, it's good stuff, I like it, but I frustratingly just don't know it. 

*sigh* Music show video clips from 2019 still had live audiences. Because of the CCP pandemic, there have been no audiences for the music shows in 2020 and there's a palpable difference in energy without the screaming audiences and fanchants. 

Disc One: (zip download)

1. All Mine (Coast of Azure) (GWSN) (choreo video)
2. Bing Bing (Nature)
3. Uh-Oh ((g)I-dle)
4. Umpah Umpah (Red Velvet)
5. Tiki-Taka (99%) (Weki Meki)
6. Butterfly (LOOΠΔ) (music video) (choreo vid)
7. %% Eung Eung (Apink)
8. One Blue Night (Jiyeon (ex-T-ara)) (lyric video) (audio only)
9. Sunrise (Gfriend)
10. Bbyong (Saturday) (choreo vid)
11. Well Come to the BOM (Berry Good) (official audio)
12. Kill You (Hot Place) (lyric video) (audio only)
13. Hip (Mamamoo)
14. Dalla Dalla (ITZY)
15. How You Doin'? (EXID) (lyric video) (official audio)
16. Lalalay (Sunmi (ex-Wonder Girls))
17. 1, 2 (Lee Hi) (unofficial upload) (lyric video)
18. 5 More Minutes (DIA)
19. Sugar Pop (Cosmic Girls (WJSN)) (lyric video) (music students react)
20. Turn It Up (Twice) (lyric video) (official audio)
21. yeah yeah (Kisum) (audio only)
22. Guerilla (Oh My Girl)
23. This Winter (Berry Good)

Disc Two:
1. Picky Picky (Weki Meki)
2. Woowa (DIA)
3. Devil (CLC)
4. Thumbs Up (Momoland) (choreo video)
5. Hakuna Matata (DreamNote) (choreo video)

6. Late Autumn (Heize) (lyric video) (official audio)

7. Hush (Everglow) (lyric video) (official audio)

8. Underwater Love (Oh My Girl) (lyric video) (official audio)

9. Kkili Kkili (G-reyish)
10. Fever (Gfriend) (choreo video)

11. Boogie Up (Cosmic Girls (WJSN)) (full-stage fancam)

12. You Don't Know Me (Yoomin (ex-Melody Day)) (audio only)

13. New Day (Ladies' Code) (lyric video) (audio only)
14. Hocus Pocus (Bvndit)
15. Fancy (Twice)
16. Lion ((g)I-dle)
17. XX (Bolbbalgan4) (lyric video) (official audio)
18. Moonlight (Lovelyz)
19. Goblin (Sulli (ex-f(x)))
20. Recipe ~ For Simon (GWSN) (lyric video) (official audio)
21. LP (Red Velvet) (lyric video) (official audio)
22. Memories (Apink) (lyric video) (official audio)
23. Love RumPumPum (fromis_9) (unofficial stage mix)
24. Ruddy (Cherry Bullet) (official audio)

2018 mix CDs

afterglow II (fin)

When I first read the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (1994 Robert Thurman translation), perhaps what perplexed me most was what seemed to be repeated mentions of being able to attain "liberation" at sequential opportunities while in the between states. In the "reality" between, the second of three, there are repeated mention of "dissolving in rainbow light", "entering" various pure lands, and becoming a Buddha or attaining buddhahood. What does that mean? It doesn't say what that means, or I haven't encountered any explanation that satisfactorily explains it. So, me without a teacher, I'm left having to make something up myself. Funny how that works.

I have a hard time believing it means full enlightenment. However nice that result sounds, even logically it can't mean full enlightenment. The force of karma is said to be inexorable. It's hard to imagine how a person's accumulated karma over countless lifetimes can be expunged so simply and instantly. Further, there's possibly a bit of a Catch-22 when it comes to enlightenment which may or may not be relevant. In the Mahayana tradition, part of the bodhisattva vow of compassion is to refuse to exit the cycle of samsara until all beings can attain enlightenment, like the captain of a sinking ship refusing to get into a lifeboat until everyone under his or her command is safe. That is to say an enlightened being will always choose re-birth in order to help beings reach enlightenment, which is counter to the idea of selfishly and individually dissolving and entering buddha-fields and escaping the cycle of re-birth.

My speculative interpretation to make this all work, without any sources to back me up, mind you, is that liberation or buddhahood attained in the bardos through these methods and means may be a partial enlightenment with the effect of slowing and delaying our passage through the bardos and into re-birth, which is inevitable due to either not being full enlightenment and the inexorable force of karma (if there still is karma, there will be re-birth), or the bodhisattva vow to be re-born to continue the work of assisting beings towards enlightenment. Viva la run-on sentence! Whenever I stop Englishing means don't take me seriously.

Delaying re-birth is basically a prolonged suspension in the non-corporeal bardo states, "buddha-fields" or pure lands possibly. This idea of delaying re-birth, albeit not explicitly mentioned, can actually be read into the Tibetan Book of the Dead. After the bardo of ground reality, it is said one enters the bardo of "existence", the third of three, also translated as the bardo of re-birth or "becoming". The bardo of existence is when we most identify with our previous incarnation and when our ego-habit of who we were is strongest. It's the most Dante-like experience and includes opportunities for liberation by recognizing the nature of mind. But as opportunities for enlightenment are missed, the force of karma draws us towards re-birth.

But even still, the book has instructions for "blocking the womb entrance" to prevent re-birth for those who have made it this far without recognition. Again, it's not explained what this means nor what the results of blocking the womb entrance are. I think the implication is that if this person has gotten this far, they are heading for re-birth, it's unavoidable. They didn't have the aptitude or cultivation or practice to recognize the nature of mind. But still these last-ditch instructions to block the womb entrance. Why? Attaining buddhahood or entering buddha lands are no longer mentioned. So maybe it's to delay re-birth for as long as possible.

I wonder if maybe the benefits of prolonged suspension in the non-corporeal bardo states is immense. I wonder if maybe prolonged being in the bardo states infuses karma with the nature of that state, in perhaps an analogy of acclimating to different environments such as altitude or temperature. I'm just making this shit up at this point, by the way. It's not only a non-corporeal state, but a state of non-duality, which is what teachers repeat over and over as the state practitioners aspire to recognize and understand. Non-duality is what practitioners all over the world scratch their heads trying to get their minds around. Our corporeal existences are by nature dualistic separation from enlightenment, the ground luminosity that characterizes enlightenment. All phenomena are pulled out of the ground luminosity into existence by our samsaric, habituated minds of duality, like waves out of the ocean. We can't see the ocean for the waves.

I wonder if maybe more time spent in the bardos can lead to a re-birth with a predilection (seeds, at least) towards higher states of spirituality embodied by the ideals of compassion, wisdom, cultivation and transformation. I think the Tibetan Book of the Dead applies to all levels of practice. The most advanced practitioners will attain realization early in the bardo states when opportunities are most potent, and will remain in the bardo states for longer periods. There is precedent for this idea in the literature, but I'm not arguing anything so I'm not going scrounging for cites. Lesser practitioners can more likely attain recognition in the existence bardo and resist re-birth for shorter periods. Those who only hear the instructions for blocking the womb entrances and are able to execute them can still benefit with certainty of finding themselves back on the path in their next life.

As for how long beings remain in the enlightened states of the bardo, it's tricky to say because time is a convention of our physical world. Within the experience of the bardo, time may be totally irrelevant. From the perspective of the physical world, I just have an anecdote my cousin Audrey mentioned. We didn't discuss this at length, this is just my thinking about her once reporting one of her daughters telling her when she was still an infant something like "don't worry, I'm your mother", the implication being clear to us that she was the reincarnation of Audrey's mother who died in 1993, some 11 years before the daughter was born.

Initially, I questioned the gap of time between Audrey's mother's death and her daughter's birth because my understanding was quite primitive. Now, it's not outrageous. Audrey's relationship with her mom included complications any mother-daughter relationship can have, but her mom's effect on her especially after death can be seen as that of a spiritual mentor. It's not outrageous that her mom was able to remain in the bardo state for that long in our measure of time until she could let karma bring her back specifically as Audrey's daughter. I'm not saying I absolutely believe this or that it has some great meaning to how Audrey or her daughter should live their lives. Just that I'm sure stranger lore has been told.

It may even not be too outrageous to question the parinirvana of the Buddha. It is said that when the Buddha died, he entered parinirvana: total, full, complete, absolute enlightenment, melting into the ground energy and reality of the universe, escaping the cycle of re-birth never to be born again.

First of all, when I said that I believe in reincarnation because it resembles cycles that occur in nature, there is nothing unnatural about parinirvana just because it breaks the cycle. That's not the reason to question the Buddha's parinirvana, which theoretically could be a character of nature. After all, reincarnation assumes the existence of people, and people haven't always existed and the continued, perpetual existence of humans is simply not something that can be assumed.

I'm saying the teaching of the Buddha's parinirvana may have been a sham to give humans a goal, because chicks humans love goals. Only Buddhists don't call these things "shams", it's the doctrine of "skillful means" explained in the Lotus Sutra. It's OK to lie if you're ultimately benefiting humankind.

The Buddha escaping the cycle of re-birth doesn't make sense because of that boddhisattva vow of compassion. It just doesn't make sense that the Buddha of infinite wisdom and compassion would enter parinirvana, unless he couldn't avoid it, when he could continue to benefit beings by continuing in the cycle of re-births. But such an enlightened being isn't continually re-born uncontrollably like we the rest of us are. The Buddha can choose selective re-births when moments are most opportune to the maximum benefit to humanity. Such as when the people who were living on what we call the Tibetan plateau became ripe to receive and develop the dharma. Tibetans consider Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, a second Buddha, a follow-up to the first, but I wonder if maybe Padmasambhava wasn't the actual re-incarnation of the actual Buddha after some 12-13 centuries. Stranger lore has been told.

tbd, afterglow I

According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, after the outer dissolutions come the inner dissolutions. I don't think it's entirely inappropriate for me or anyone to try envisioning the outer dissolutions without a guide. The way they are described still deal with senses that are in our experience. The inner dissolutions, on the other hand, are so subtle that I think they likely defy gross-level imagination or visualization. Maybe it's like remembering a dream and being tasked to describe all the gossamer details of the dream you weren't paying attention to because . . . it was a dream.

Something I find fascinating and profound on a philosophical level are the descriptions of the first two of the inner dissolutions, referred to as "redness" and "whiteness". In biology, life begins with the sperm and egg successfully mashing together after a man and woman have successfully mashed together sharing bodily fluids and all sorts of erotic noises, like ooh-ahh (하게) and uh-uhn. And that wet, slapping sound you can make by rapidly pulling both cheeks in and out with your mouth slightly open. Philosophically speaking.

In the Tibetan conception of conception, basically the male contributes his "white essence" and the female her "red essence" which separate in the newly-formed being to create the experience of duality to exist in the world. The white essence moves up the central energy channel to rest in the brain center for the duration of life, while the female red essence descends and resides in the bodily center, commonly referred to in Eastern spiritual physiology as the 'chi' center, a few clicks south of the navel and a few clicks back. I don't know what a 'click' is, but I find it funny when people use it as a term of distance. It doesn't seem to mean anything but everyone just pretends it does.

In the experience of the redness and whiteness stages of the inner dissolutions, it seems to me to be suggested that death involves the dissolution of the father and mother's contribution to a life. That is to say they themselves were necessary elements of the child's psyche, its psychic life. It's not like the father contributed sperm, the mother egg, and out came baby running helter skelter throughout life as a completely separate, individual being. Rather, in the child were always the father and mother essences, presences, for the whole of its life. There was no awareness when their essences were established, and it is only when awareness recedes to the subtlety of the inner dissolutions that they dissipate as part of the death process of the child, but they were there the whole time in between.

The color associations of the dissolutions are said to be the result of the end of the energy currents that existed while alive, including emotions, psychology, the sort of internal things yogic exercises deal with, i.e. chakras, nadis, bindus, etc. I'm obviously not writing from experience nor inspiration, just processing what I've read and don't really understand. The psychic elements kept the red and white essences in place, and after death the experience of whiteness is said to occur as the white essence descends in the central channel as the psychic winds weaken and redness occurs when the red essence ascends for the two of them to meet and dissolve at the heart center. So long mom, dad, thanks for all the fish. I never really liked seafood.

TBD (to be determined) II

Visualizing approaching death positively is super important as far as I'm concerned. I recall an old "happiness generating" practice I used to do and that comes in handy in this regard. It was cold generating happiness without relying on outside factors, the way we usually conceive happiness. Happiness is an energy that can be tapped by not being afflicted or attached and just letting it emerge, accepting it despite counter outside factors, including death.

I visualize or mentally rehearse the death process with the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as guides or templates. I don't take them literally, but I use the descriptions to help envision what I think it might be like for me to die. I agree with the notion that the death experience is not the same for everybody, rather it is informed by the subjective person, including psychological make-up, beliefs, overall life experience, circumstances of death, what was eaten for lunch, etc. Someone dying peacefully in a hospital bed will have a different death experience from someone being murdered in a violent crime or in a war. Two people sitting next to each other in a crashing jetliner, one of whom is a long-time mindfulness practitioner, will have similarities in the death experience because of the manner, but how they go through it would be different. Just for the record, I don't think I know what I'm talking about.

Although I think subjectivity may inform various aspects all through the bardo experience from death to re-birth, I also think that maybe the overall structure of the bardos as described in the Tibetan Book of the Death is universal, and whenever something is described as happening, something is happening but how that something appears depends on the previous and future lives. As much as I dislike the idea of imposing my beliefs on the rest of humanity, if I believe in reincarnation because it just makes sense as a natural cycle, one of the many that we see in nature, then I'm positing that it happens to everyone. We're all part of nature, regardless of belief that we are not, that we are somehow special and above it. Even a bardo experience of going to heaven and meeting God can occur as a result of strong belief and expectation during life, but then it will melt away like a reincar-ception into the bardo of re-birth and the process of reincarnation, with the last remnant wisps of the previous life wiped away by or at the conception of the next life, only taking karmic imprints into the new life. I did mention that I don't really think I know what I'm talking about, right?

The many near-death and death-revival accounts that exist may suggest the subjectivity and diversity in experience in just approaching death. Those accounts, often described as varying degrees of peaceful, may just be skimming the surface, either going deep into death with critical functions stopped but not for long, or being clinically dead for a longer period but not so deep that they couldn't be revived. By nature they did not go so far where the brain structures that support life processes were destroyed. Still, I think our mode of existence and being is so habituated (ego) that there's a lot of momentum of subjectivity that goes deep into the bardo experience.

Beyond near-death and revival experiences, when brain and physical sensory processes definitively stop functioning, I think we go into what the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes as the outer and inner dissolutions which may be less affected by subjective experience. I think even the habit consciousness of the vast majority of people fades to black, maybe because it can't handle what's happening to it. I might even say the dissolutions characterize the end of awareness. The only way to maintain awareness is through training and practice while alive to prepare and recognize it when it occurs. And even then the death experience as described may be so overwhelming and disorienting that recognition isn't necessarily possible (spontaneous recognition, however, is still possible because anything's possible).

The Tibetan Book of the Dead makes sense to me when it describes parts of the bardo experience as being extremely disorienting and confusing. I imagine it would be. Our habituated existence has always relied on sensory input processed through our brains to form all of subjective reality. Very stable. At death, the senses stop reception, the brain dies, reality fades away, and all that's left as described in the book is a non-corporeal habit of subjectivity feeling like it's blown about in hurricane force winds.

All of this is just my own little thought experiment; envisioning a scenario maybe a way of trying to be prepared. Everyone who does this might come up with something completely different. Very little is narrowly defined, I think, in the bardo. The subjectivity of the death experience might also include the sequence of events. They don't occur in one uniform way and may not be clear-cut. I heard one lama talking about the dissolutions starting even before death, and listening to that I couldn't say I disagreed or thought it was wrong. I thought it was interesting, a very broad interpretation. And the bright light many people attest to and the calm that comes with it may also be related to the dissolutions, which I've contemplated as beyond the point of revival.

All of this is contemplating just the death point bardo, the first of three death bardos. I couldn't do this sort of thought experiment with the remaining two bardos because I don't have any real insight into them to add to what the Tibetan Book of the Dead already presents. Doing a personalized version would be like doing a bardo version of the Divine Comedy, and as much of a big joke my life has been, I'm no Dante. The death point is something we're all eminently qualified to contemplate, because it's something we will imminently expect. No one has to believe in anything in particular to contemplate it.

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.

I Dream of Jinn

So I was reading an article in National Geographic magazine. Something about the Silk Road. Something about China developing a modern "Silk Road". Something about the reporter/writer traveling it on foot. It was a casual read, killing time, being lazy not reading things of real interest. The Silk Road is of casual interest to me for what it represents and has to say about human development; anthropology and archaeology. Basically I'm saying I have no concrete context for writing this.

But I came across this passage:

In "The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows", central Asian polymath Al-Biruni observed that jinn were "the impure parts of the erring souls, after they have been separated from their bodies, who [the souls] are prevented from reaching their primal origin, because they did not find the knowledge of the truth, but were living in confusion and stupefaction."

and a little later this:

What to do if approached by jinn on the Silk Road: "No matter what it does, no matter how frightening it is, don't panic or show emotion. Just sit down on a rock and wait. It will lose interest. It will go away".

Jinn is the origin of the word "genie", so can be broadly understood to be supernatural in nature. Even superstitious, fine. Possible phenomena beyond normal human perception, I would put it.

The author projected some of his ideas of jinn in his writing, noting certain circumstances and wondering if they were jinn at work. In another encounter mentioning that he was likely the jinn in that situation. He was interpreting jinn in his own way that he could understand, and he was open-minded about them.

"Impure parts of erring souls" I don't read as judgments but descriptions. The parts that are impure aren't necessarily good or bad, the souls that have erred aren't necessarily good or bad. They are just descriptively impure or erring, as well as possibly actually being either.

"Primal origin" is from whence we came and . . . whernce we go (the word I believe you're looking for is "whither", you idiot. -ed.). I think the more sophisticated understanding is that they are the same place or state. The more ridiculous understanding is that we come from our parents bumping uglies and go to places called heaven or hell based on external judgment of our behavior.

The Buddhist-based description that I'm familiar with suggests the primal origin is a primordial energy state that's part of the cycle of reincarnation. A well-defined and self-identified drop of water falls into the sea and disappears until natural process create another drop of water out of the same molecules. A different drop of water made of the same stuff. Reincarnation is literally the recycling of souls. It's very green.

"Knowledge of the truth" a Buddhist might interpret is the truth of impermanence, an extension perhaps of one of its four noble truths of suffering. It's an easy lesson because we all ultimately experience it in death. When we die there is no greater expression that nothing stays the same, everything changes. But there are people whose attachments are so strong that they try to defy death and cling to some aspect of their life so much that they miss the lesson, even as they die.

"Living in confusion and stupefaction" is the way they lived their lives or their karma that preconditioned them to not be able to come to terms with death and the impermanence it reveals. That aspect of them gets stuck here as jinn. Basically ghosts.

"No matter how frightening it is, don't panic or show emotion" can be cut and pasted into parts of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and no one would even notice. In fact that's exactly what it says about the death bardos. I extend that to the living bardos. Except where large spiders are involved.

"Just sit down on a rock", well that's just meditation. "It will lose interest. It will go away".

That's great advice, I'm gonna start doing that. When negativity starts to overwhelm and I let myself get annoyed and aggravated by other people, I'm just gonna stop, get out of anyone's way and wait until my bad attitude loses interest and goes away. Jinn, ghosts, in us, out of us, as us. Discuss.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I'm not doing a recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for my father. He wasn't spiritual at all as far as I know, much less did he pay any mind to Buddhist teachings or mindfulness practice. There's no proscription against reading it for non-Buddhists or atheists, but the times that I've done it were for people far distant from me.

In my thinking, having no guidance or instruction whatsoever, the concern is to not disturb the consciousness of the deceased, and with someone distant there's reason to think there would be minimal affect anyway. Even if there was a mental impression from their name being called repeatedly and then exposure to the teachings, there's no personal connection to disturb the consciousness.

In my thinking, if there's a personal connection, the deceased could be distracted or disturbed by the recognition, which could lead to feeling negatively, wondering what I was doing. I wouldn't do a reading for my brothers if they died, either, because it might be an affront to their sensibilities.

I am, however, taking advantage of my father's death, since it is so proximate, to track the stages of the recitation to get a sense of what goes where and when; what makes sense to me. For me it is mindfulness practice to meditate on and visualize the death process, even though I have no formal training in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The first few (about three) days are focused on various root and aspirational prayers and introductions to the death-point bardo. The reality bardo recitations begin on the fourth day, and the injunction that the recitations be done "three to seven times" is fulfilled (in my thinking) by staggering the daily recitations so that each day/section is ultimately done three times total.

So on the first day I recite day one. On the second day I recite days one and two. On the third day I recite days one to three. On the fourth day I recite days two to four, etc. Each "day" gets read three times. I don't know if that's the way it's supposed to be done. It's almost assuredly not right, but that's what I do.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead mentions that a source of distress for the deceased may come when the family gathers for meals but doesn't set a place for the deceased and the deceased feels despair and abandonment.

To counter that, the practice is to set a place for the deceased and to provide meals. The important part of the practice is not only to ease their despair or sense of abandonment, but to help the deceased realize that he or she is dead.

The experience in the death bardos is described as being very confused and turbulent and the deceased may not even realize he or she is dead. Setting their place at meals and even calling them to come for the meal can help them realize they are dead when it occurs to them they cannot partake in the meal.

We did that until yesterday. I got a sense that he had already realized he's dead a few days earlier and has moved on, but we did it for a whole week just in case. I mean you never know and too much practice is better than too little.

I continued sitting meditation every morning when I was in New Jersey, partly helped by back-end insomnia, whereby I never got a full night's sleep when I was there. There were two days in those initial days after my father died where I got the sense to help him move on.

On those occasions during sitting, I clapped my hands loudly to get his attention and called out aloud, addressing him as I normally would (and would be familiar to him) and said, "Ba! You are dead, you have died. You have nothing to fear so do not be afraid of anything you are experiencing now. You must move on, you can't come back. Focus on being reborn in a human life".

The Tibetan description of the experience of the consciousness after death resonates with me as being possible or plausible. After the consciousness is released from the body and the concrete sensations that informed the mind and existence cease to function, it enters a state of being (maybe an energy state) whereby it is buffeted by confusion and disorientation. Mmm, buffet. Oh, but of confusion and disorientation. Ixnay on the buffet.

Deeply ingrained habit senses kick in and the consciousness is drawn to what was habitually familiar, so it is drawn to places and people that were familiar. In my father's case, he would have been habitually attracted to the house and to my mother, and since that's where I was staying I was in a unique position to intervene if I sensed the opportunity. That's what I was doing.

I guess I have written quite a bit about the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. So much so that sometimes I'll think of a new idea during a recitation only to find that I've thought about it before and already written about it.

Something that may really be new is an idea that when doing a recitation, whatever is being recited wouldn't be "heard" in the death betweens like a person sitting next to you hearing you read something. Already I've come across suggestions that in the betweens there aren't barriers of form or language.

Traditionally in Tibet, as I understand, it was ideal if a trained lama did the recitation by the deceased's bedside and it would be recited in Tibetan. But as Tibetan teachings have spread beyond Tibet, ironically spurred by the Red China invasion of Tibet and the ongoing destruction of its culture, there has been recognition that the subtleties of the teachings go beyond "form or language".

Traditionally, these are things that may not have necessarily been considered. But with the spread of Tibetan teachings it's more recognized that the clarity of consciousness in the death betweens transcends language. Language understanding is a trait of concrete human existence, but not of the subtle existence in the betweens as a so-called mental body. And this interpretation is not sourced in the dispersion of Tibetan teachings, but in the work itself.

I'm thinking it's not a matter of language at all. It's not that a recitation can be performed in English and those words can be understood in whatever language the deceased knew. It's not the words that a between being "hears", but impressions, even intentions. It's a mental or emotional communication that is sent as human language, but is "heard" as energy of the intention of the words, not the literal translation of the words.

I don't know what I'm sending out with a recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into an unknown dimension, it might be nothing, it might be fantasy, it might be fiction; or it might just redeem a person that we call a soul.

This idea came about from various specific descriptions of what a between-being may be experiencing, but it's actually a very lightly veiled example of a teaching. I would be wondering why a passage was being presented in this very specific way, clearly a basic teaching.

That led me to think it's not the words that necessarily matter, but reciting the words is sending the teaching as emotion or energy into the unknown and hoping it resonates and leads to something positive. The constant repetition of the deceased's name may attract the consciousness to the recitation, but what's being recited may be received as the deceased's own consciousness, instinct, impression or awareness.

I think maybe the work was composed in a certain culture, whereby the intent was that practitioners could be exposed to the images and guidance as part of practice, and after death when the recitation is done, they would be open to the guidance and recognize the images and remember the teachings and attain liberation.

I think maybe what makes this a sacred work is the template of guidance in the betweens. It doesn't matter that it uses Buddhist/Hindu imagery. If the book is studied and meditated upon, the insights come through and a recitation of it for a between-being may be of benefit.

My sister-in-law's mother died early this month. I've been reciting the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Natural Liberation Through Hearing) for her. It's been almost a year and a half since I've done a recitation, and that's kinda too long.

Not a big deal, but I feel I "got it wrong" by "starting too late". There are preliminary portions that probably should be begun immediately, and there are various prayers that are suggested in the book for this purpose. Which ones get used depends upon the reciter and the deceased. That's not an official teaching, just going on instinct.

I also like to include a description of the "dissolution of elements" that supposedly occurs during the death point between (the first of three death betweens). I'm not sure why it's not included in the Liberation Through Hearing recitation. It seems important.

The description is in a chapter entitled "Signs of Death", which I don't read because it seems heavily based on superstition in light of modern medical perspectives. The difference in the superstition aspect of that chapter and the entire book is that modern medicine has little insight into the after-death experience itself.

There's also a good general point in time to get into the thick of the recitation, about 3-4 days after death. That's in the book and I have no instinct on that matter. When I say maybe there is no real "getting it wrong" or "starting too late", it's because those are just . . . concepts.

The recitation itself is a matter of faith. Being of scientific bent, I'm not putting any great meaning into the recitation. Maybe it's something, maybe it's not. But whatever is occurring to a person after death according to Tibetan Buddhism (science has nothing), it's still something very amorphous and inexact and the living's strictures on time may not apply. Whether someone is receptive to someone doing a recitation on their behalf is probably a shot in the dark. But if there is even a moment of recognition, the benefits may be great, so might as well.

Something different about this recitation is that it's for someone I actually knew and who knew me, and someone who professed herself as being Buddhist and knew at one point I was considering becoming a monk.

Perhaps at a theoretical worst, she won't recognize the recitation, but will be reborn open to it in her next life. Maybe that's what happened to me (or maybe I was well-versed in it, I don't have to be modest about what I can't know).

The last time I read through it, I recognized parts that seemed out of place. I had taken on an analytical perspective that some human being, a person, compiled this work in a social, cultural, historical context and so it is fair game to be analyzed and critiqued.

So I am reading through the work and rearranging portions to make more chronological sense to me. I'm keeping an eye on things that don't make sense where they are, and even written in a tense that doesn't make sense where it is. If something feels wrong or is facially inconsistent, it may have been human error.

I'm also going through both translations I have with me here. I'm only using the 2005 Gyurme Dorje translation for the recitation. The earlier Robert Thurman translation was the first one I was exposed to, and I think I did read/study it fairly intently and got a lot of great ideas from it.

The 2005 complete translation is clearly the superior translation. I think Robert Thurman was doing something specific in his translation. It's more academic and ecumenical and still a very valuable piece of scholarship that would interest people who might not necessarily get hooked by the 2005 translation.

There are various tweaks in the recitation I put in of my own. Like terminology for the six classes of beings. There is a class that Thurman calls "titans" and the 2005 translation calls "anti-gods", but those terms don't quite describe anything. My own term is "aggressive gods", meaning they are elevated beings, but they are driven by strong ambition and desire for power (politicians, military leaders, CEOs).

And another class that Thurman calls "pretans" and the 2005 calls "anguished spirits"; neither of those are descriptively as helpful as "hungry ghosts". Thurman does explain why he doesn't like to call them ghosts, because ghosts are a completely different thing, but I think it captures the concept well. Beings who have insatiable hungers for something they constantly pursue in futility. I believe my parents, or at least my mother was born in this realm. Her insatiable hunger is for money and material wealth. Even in retirement, she's still chasing how to get more out of what she has.

The 2005 translation also assumes only Buddhists are reading the book because it mentions things like the "three precious jewels" and the "six syllables" without clarifying that they are the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha; and om mani padme hum, respectively.

I suppose the important thing is that it's not taboo to change things around. It's a sacred work, but not in the Western sense that it's perfect and can't be messed with (which to me is more an imposition of power). With something so varied, important and personal as human experience, spirituality should be flexible and accommodating.

I had a flurry of unsettled sleep this past weekend, but last Thursday into Friday I had unequivocal back-end insomnia. It settles my prior mention of insomnia as not being insomnia. Mere unsettled sleep is not insomnia. Insomnia is the switch flipping and nothing happening; unable to sleep, fuhgeddaboudit. Even constant waking up and drifting off into fragile doze is still not insomnia. There is rest still being accomplished.

I finished my most recent recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I don't know if it's a new thought, but it affirmed for me that the recitation isn't strict and should be thought about and can be altered to given situations. As I mentioned before, I would think about removing any suggestive negative portions; don't even bring that stuff up. Reading it that way is fine for contemplation, but I'm uneasy about it in directed recitations.

Also, something I noticed is that there are passages that seem out of place. Deep within some description of a bardo phase might be a general descriptive that sounds like it would be much better as an introduction. From a narrative point of view, it would seem logical that the passage was stated earlier. So I might go through my edition of the book and make notes and rearrange passages.

That sort of deconstruction might be influenced by one of my recent reads on the Hebrew Bible (the Christians' so-called "Old Testament"), Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? I gather the book is nothing new amongst biblical scholars, and is only one voice in an ongoing scholarly debate about the origins of the Bible.

To me it was fascinating. I know next to nothing about the Hebrew Bible except what is generally known culturally (Christian culture); the names and stories are familiar. I've gone through a phase of fascination about how the New Testament came about, and it's nothing what most Christians believe or are taught.

I don't accept the Christian co-option of the Hebrew Bible and making it their "Old Testament". I find that nonsensical and offensive, given how much anti-Semitism there is and how Christianity rejects Judaism and denies that Jesus was Jewish or disconnects Jesus from his Jewishness. It's the ultimate in cultural appropriation whereby a culture is stolen and claimed as its own and original claims to its own culture denied. If the "Old Testament" is part of the Christian tradition, so is Judaism. Accept it, respect it.

I digress. Anyway, it's a fascinating and compelling read which in its course guided me through the history of Judaism as told in the bible, and although nothing new to people well-read in the subject, was a bit of a breakthrough for me.

I also take it as a sign of human progress when so-believed sacred, ancient texts are challenged. Generations and generations are told and taught a certain work is one thing, but then someone comes along with a critical mind and notices something wrong and asks what's really going on.

None of the critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, which began in the 19th century, is definitive, but it seems there's a lively debate going on about the sources of the bible and when it was written and by whom. It's compelling when the evidence suggests who the authors were and what their interests were.

I'm still continuing my recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for RiSe and EunB, although by now I'm under no illusion that it is actually in any way "for" them. I'm not thinking my recitation has had any "real" effect on what is happening to them after death beyond "who knows?". They presumably don't have the background or training to be affected, even if many of the ground assertions in the book of what happens after death are objectively something, somewhat accurate.

I put real in quotes above because real supposedly suggests something concrete. And I don't think anything is concrete. Even science is finding that fundamentally, objective reality is not something concrete, and the more they research, the weirder they find the nature of reality is.

How much more so any description or attestation of the after-death experience, and especially one that purports to be more than the fairly tales offered by subjective moral-driven imaginations of religions.

I do think the Tibetan book is an enlightened template of the after death experience. I don't think it's the only one. I definitely don't think it's a universal description of what happens. I do think a lot of it is more for the reciter, the living, than the dead. Possibly intentionally so.

So when I say I do a recitation of the book on a particular situation, I don't strictly recite what's in the book. If something doesn't feel right for the person I'm concentrating on, I'll change it.

There are portions that describe horrible things that are happening in the bardo, many involving religion-specific imagery, and I wonder if they are unnecessarily negative. I think including those descriptions in the recitation may actually conjure up those images in the bardo experience. Those are for the living to reflect on, but for those in the bardo states, I prefer to keep things positive and not mention anything negative which might conjure negativity. It's a fine line between horrible but simply descriptive and unduly negative.

I do think the book can be written without the distinctly Buddhistic references and replacing them with more general spiritual, energy-centric experiences. The book was written from supposed recollections and resonances of actual enlightened experience, but it was still contextual actual enlightened experience. That context was Buddhism. The context can be removed to offer a more universally compelling description of that experience.

Another morning of back-end insomnia. I set the timer on my electric fan to turn off after three hours. When I awoke, the fan was still on and I wondered why, and then it dawned on me that three hours hadn't passed. I looked at the clock and estimated that it was just about to shut off and it did within five minutes.

I hardly even tried to get back to sleep. I listened to one of my mix CDs then got to sitting.

I've begun a recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, focusing on RiSe and EunB.

I used to, as part of practice, loop read the Tibetan Book of the Dead cycle. I don't know how many times I've read the thing trying to make sense of it in light of my scientific faith, which allows for quasi-logical spirituality (or quasi-spiritual logic) that hard science can't touch.

The last time I tried to do a recitation with a specific focus was in April after the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea. It was less than a week through when I got a very bad feeling about it, purely intuitive. I felt that what I was doing could spiritually be doing more harm than good and I stopped. Maybe it was that I had no idea about the energies I was dealing with on such a massive scale.

On the first day for RiSe and EunB, just as I started there was a roar of thunder and rain started pouring down at a time of day that was totally unusual for recent weather patterns. I took that as a good sign.

I don't think I'm seriously reciting the book for them, I remind myself the recitation is for myself. If there is any efficacy in helping them, it's beyond my knowledge, figuring or belief. It is solely within my hope.

It's been a long time since I've written anything about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and anything I've written before may be outdated by my constantly evolving thoughts on it. Or it may remain valid if it was at all valid in the first place, who knows?

The basic framework of the book, specifically the Natural Liberation Through Hearing chapter, is that after death, the mind separates from the body. The body is dead, and what is released is the unenlightened karmic energy "habits" of the deceased. The habits are primarily the ego, the sense of "I" and identity of who we were in the form of a naturally existing cosmic energy, something that pervades the universe.

This basic energy is what carries a being to their next re-birth as a cycle of nature. More specific in the energy is imprinted the strongest psychological baggage from previous lives. My favorite example to explain it is fear of spiders.

My theory being that my fear of spiders is from past lives of being bugs getting caught in spiders' webs and being eaten. Imagine yourself as a bug and getting caught in a web, and then imagine a spider relative to your size (the thing can be eight feet in size) coming at you to wrap you up in its web and sucking the life out of you

Bugs don't have the emotions that humans do, they don't have the analytical capability that we do. But when they're flailing in the web with that huge spider coming at them, there is something in their reaction. It's still energy, and that energy is karma that carries over. It's what we call terrifying and is strongly imprinted.

Lifetime after lifetime of evolution until reaching the level of acquiring a human body, that imprint is still there for the experiencing and analyzing. My brother hates cockroaches; so maybe he was a cockroach in previous lives and the imprint was something unpleasant. I think cockroaches are disgusting, but I don't react to them as viscerally as he does. On the other hand, I have an affection for cats, possibly indicating lifetimes as cats that were pleasant.

Getting back on track to what I was talking about, the physical body dies and the mind-energy is separated and released from it and enters a state of being the Tibetan Book of the Dead refers to as the intermediate states, the bardos.

The description of the experience in the bardos is like being in a storm, but without solid reality and an identifiable ego body, it's extremely disorienting and confusing. My recitation is a calling out to the energies of RiSe and EunB, but it's a call into a hurricane an ocean away.

Theoretically, having no exposure to this sort of practice or spirituality and being nominally Christian in this life, there's only a small chance that my call would reach them. Rather they would be buffeted by their previous habitual tendencies, experience and attachments and aversions within the storm of the bardos.

The hope is that my small voice does attract their attention. Tibetans describe the disembodied energy body of those deceased as experiencing a highly clarified reality. If my voice can cut through the storm, with no barriers of form or language, it's possible to hook them and bring them to my recitation. And if they can be just slightly touched by teachings of compassion, it might do worlds of good for them. That's the hope.

It's not an affront to whatever closely-held Christian beliefs they may have had. Personally, I think the Tibetan version as metaphorical, describing archetypes. There is the Buddhistic language and imagery, but they are just archetypes.

My metaphor is of a multicultural, multilingual nation living in a land bordered by a mountain range. No one thinks of crossing the range to see what's on the other side. But then one person decides to try and accomplishes it and sends back directions on how to cross the mountain range. But only people who understand that language can follow the directions. Anyone who speaks another language can't.

So it may have been that the "psychonauts" (a Robert Thurman term) of Tibetan spirituality investigated the death process and through reincarnations subsequently described the process. But the process is in Tibetan Buddhistic terms. It doesn't mean the experience is just for Tibetan Buddhists. It's just described in subjective terms. It's unclear what Padmasambhava, credited for authoring the Tibetan Book of the Dead, knew about other spiritual paradigms.

So so far I'm comfortable doing this recitation for RiSe and EunB. Through my days I try to remain positive and in times that I think of their deaths and that they're gone and start to feel sad, I try to transform the feeling into joy. Just something positive for them, that their memory doesn't lead to sadness but to joy. Joy that they existed and chased their dream and brought joy and entertainment to their fans and their industry.

Total insomnia last night. Not bad, almost two weeks without reportable insomnia. Sleep hasn't always been great; there have been frequent incidents of fragile sleeplessness on both front or back-end, but not rising to insomnia. Even though that kind of sleep meant not getting a good rest and fatigue usually in the evening.

Last night, already exhausted and nodding off all night, I put on a CD with the timer set, as usual, extended the time as I continued to remain awake, and when the entire CD played, that's when it's officially insomnia. So then I put on one of my yearly mix CDs, which at least makes sleeplessness enjoyable as those songs include songs I love and never get sick of.

I might have been able to fall asleep during that CD and slept the rest of the way, making it only front-end insomnia. Except for the dream.

Upon reviewing the tracks later, I found that I did fall asleep for 2 tracks, but I remember the tracks that were playing when I went into the dream, so I was in a twilight state at that time.

There's a bit of insignificant precursor before it became The Dream. A portion that looked like a gas filling station before dawn. A portion there where I was wondering if my music was playing too loud and disturbing my non-dream neighbors here, being concerned because it looked in the dream like I was blasting the music.

Then I was in a suburban house, an offshoot or morph of the gas station, during daytime in a sparsely furnished den or family room. I was making a round of the room when I ran into some spider webs. There was a large pillow on the floor so I dropped down on it to wipe off the webs.

When I got up, I realized the pillow was quite dirty and I had all these specks in front of my face and thought I might need to jump into the shower. But I soon realized a bunch of the specks were baby spiders and looking closely at the pillow, it was covered with baby spiders.

That's when things quickly escalated and the spiders started growing in number until they were a seething swarm of frenzied spiders of all different sorts carpeting the floor. Then there were other people who I don't know, but it felt like we were renting the house together.

Someone got the idea to burn the furniture that the spiders were on and a fire was started and I yelled at them to do it outside, especially when I noticed a bunch of car tires on the pyre that was quickly becoming an inferno.

I stepped out of the room just as another housemate was arriving wondering what was going on and I encouraged him to tell the others to put the fire out and to take the fire extinguisher with him. I was pro-put out the fire, but in retrospect I realize the ONLY solution to the problem was to burn down the house. Burn it. Burn it down.

When I stepped back into the room, the fire had been extinguished but the spider problem remained. They weren't crawling over us, but they were still a seething mass and any object that had been on the floor were now riding on top of the mass as if on waves.

The spiders were aware of us, and when someone poked a stick at the mass, they reacted. There were so many it was impossible to move anything without killing them. The dream ended with me asking one of the housemates, "You know I'm afraid of spiders, right?", and him almost sarcastically answering, "Yes, I know. If there's anything I know about you, it's that".

Upon waking, my thought was, "I'll take the insomnia".

So I lay awake for several more hours, first listening to another mix CD and then a lecture on Tibetan Buddhism by Robert Thurman. Then same as last time, instead of getting up close to 9 o'clock, I tried to drift into twilight sleep and see if I could investigate dreams in that state.

At one point, I do remember in a dream thinking that I was in a dream, so that was successful from a lucid dream perspective, but the nature of the dreams became totally bizarre and hostile. It was almost as if my unconscious was testing me after realizing I was in my own dream.

I don't remember them clearly enough to relate, but enough impressions to recall that scene after scene, I found myself amidst hostile people, trying to maintain calm. Actually, as I just wrote "amidst hostile people", I remembered that is a projected experience in the Tibetan-described bardo death experience.

Not suggesting it's objective, as my subconscious could be projecting what I'd read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I do know that in the dream I never reminded myself that this was all projections from my own mind of reality, as the book suggests training towards.

I recently re-bought the Robert Thurman translation of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. There are four translations. The first I think is marred by Western-centric chauvinism, the second by Francesca Fremantle includes an incredible introduction by Chogyam Trungpa, Thurman's is the third and is very scholarly and professor-ly (he writes in an open-minded way, sometimes muddled, that really encourages "getting" the ideas from one's own point of view), and the fourth one is currently the most complete and comprehensive translation of the available cycle of literature.

I think I first picked up a used copy of this translation at some bookstore on 16th St. in San Francisco some 9 or 10 years ago. It was my introduction to Tibetan thought and methodology.

Robert Thurman ordained as a novice monk in the 60s, but before fully ordaining, he returned his robes (not an uncommon occurrence) and returned to the States and became a scholar on Tibet; professor of Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and founder of Tibet House, based in Manhattan. Father to Uma.

It was pretty mind-blowing back then and I marked up that book real good. I gave that copy to my cousin in 2004 or 2005. The last I heard, she hadn't read it and I'm predicting she won't until I die or disappear, presumed gone for good.

It's not quite as mind-blowing this time around as the ideas are pretty standard Dzogchen teachings, which I've repeatedly been exposed to through the years. I've also gotten more acquainted with Robert Thurman's distinct style, and I'm reading that more in the book now. Although there's still a lot to appreciate, there's very little I'm marking this time around.

There is an aspect I've been delving into that makes re-reading it now very timely. I don't always like Robert Thurman's choice of terminology, but there are concepts that I've been exploring that are clearly the same as what he explicates in his book.

The Tibetan methodology on death studies I might describe as personal scientific. It has been referred to as "science of the mind", but I don't think many of the insights can't be objectively verified scientifically. They can, however, be subjectively verified, following the methodology, but even as such, they cannot be dogmatically insisted upon as being some truth. It's an aspect of faith that instructs, "go figure it out yourself".

Another book I've recently read and found illuminating is the Dalai Lama's Advice on Dying and Living a Better Life. Tibetan methodology on death sciences focuses intently on the nature of consciousness and meditation on it.

On the most basic level, it's important to separate gross consciousness, which is the result of our physical senses feeding information to our brain which processes the information to form what we call consciousness, from suggestions that other processes are involved which define our being and are important.

When we die, those physical senses fail and that gross consciousness which is the result of our senses becomes irrelevant. And it might be the other processes, perhaps described as inner winds or subtle winds, that carry our karma through to whatever's next for each individual.

It's suggested that our adherence to gross consciousness is the deepest form of karma there is. It's what keeps us in the cycle of life, death and rebirth because it has become habit to live according to these perceptions which create what we call consciousness and reality.

As Robert Thurman puts it: The "presence-habit" is the deepest level of misknowing conceptualization, which maintains the sense of "being here now" as something or someone finite . . . supporting addictive and objective instincts of self-preservation, and blocking awareness of the primal bliss-wisdom indivisible of the eternal reality of enlightenment.

So what else is there? I don't know if the Dalai Lama used the phrase, but the phrase I got out of his book was "energy body". Thurman mentions a "magic body" which might be the same thing, although that's an example of his terminology that I don't like. There's nothing "magic" or magical about it.

But it suggests we're not just living corpses. Take away the senses that we identify as providing our living aspect and we become corpses. There's more to our consciousness than what we grossly perceive through our senses. There's a lot going on with our bodies that we can't perceive through our senses and this comprises an "energy" body that carries subtle "winds" of our being that are just as important as sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

On a physiological level, there's an analogy with electrical impulses of our nervous system, neurons firing in our brains, cellular formation, blood creation in bone marrow, skin dying, hair growing, etc., etc. It includes our heart beating and digestion and the functions of our major organs. We're not consciously aware of these things, but they are happening, and they are of great importance to our being alive.

The meditation starts with these functions, realizing them or imagining them or imagining being conscious of them, even though we don't know the particulars of what they are doing at any given moment.

But the energy body also contains emotions and impulse thoughts, intuitive thought and instinctive reactions. Humor is an example of one of these energy elements. As well as desire and hostility. Focusing on different elements can help different people start to be aware of and identify this "energy body" and the winds that carry aspects of our being we're otherwise unaware of or don't care about.

This is just the starting point. And there's a whole nother aspect of investigating it which involves sexual energies. It's something I'm certainly unwilling to go into. I don't think there's anything written down in terms of specific teachings because it can't be taught.

It might be within a category of intuition meditation where individuals have to figure it out themselves because any external teaching is suspect of being perverse or prurient. You can only learn it when you're ready, and when you're ready, you'll figure it out yourself, and no one else can know if you're ready and have the proper discipline to separate instinctive, animalistic sexual urge and lust from transcendent, "divine", sexually instigated understanding and wisdom. Wisdom not derived from consciousness based on our gross senses.

I've said too much already, meaning I've displayed too much of my ignorance already. Although Thurman's use of terminology such as "primal bliss-wisdom" and "orgasmic ecstasy" to describe the experience is specifically chosen and not unrelated to this, I shouldn't wonder.