to be determined III

Just my imagination, running away with me.

I would have left music at home. For the past however many many years I rarely, if ever, wasn't listening to music when I went out. I only turned it off when people were taking my money (but giving me something I wanted in return). It was such that there were times I would turn off the music and be fascinated by what the ambient world sounded like. It became such that I designated certain conditions whereby I would turn off the music and experience the world as it sounded (sometimes becoming bored with it and turning the music back on). But no music this time; leaving behind the habit, not taking the emotions and attachment that music embodies.

I wouldn't have left alcohol at home, but I wouldn't have been drinking, either. I'd have a cute half bottle of Jack Daniels along with other things, but I'd be keeping clear to keep calm, peaceful, positive, tapping into happiness. The ha'fifth because it, or something like it, has always been there. Not even just in case, it's just always been there. I've read it isn't ideal to be disoriented by substances like painkillers or things that dull the senses, but I'm going to create a loophole for that. I will disable, hamper, stymie my consciousness, but realize only my physiology is affected. The substances will be more of a facilitating device.

In this regard, years of mindful alcoholism(!) may prove to have been helpful. Mindful alcoholism, wtf? I don't think I've ever used the term "mindful alcoholism" before; I don't think I've ever even thought of it. Using it now surprises me because it suggests how dangerous the practice I've developed is. Alcoholism is not a legitimate mindfulness practice. There are aspects of my practice that are even more risky, I shouldn't wonder, in possibly deluding myself thinking I'm doing a practice with one targeted aim, when I may be doing something entirely different and destructive in my mindstream and karma. I would never suggest to anyone to practice "mindful alcoholism". At least not as a starting point. If yer a drunk already, might as well give it a shot, so to speak.

But my loophole is being aware that whatever happens that doesn't rely on bodily structures will not be substantially affected by the effects of the substances. It may be detrimental to be pumped full of morphine or other drugs by some clinician who's just doing a job based on their own assessment of what's preferred treatment. Consciously using substances oneself for the purposes of dying and being aware of the need to keep mind and body separate, especially when mind and body separate, may prevent detriment caused by disorientation.

Despite near-death accounts suggesting it's not necessarily painful, I expect pain, at least discomfort and unpleasantness. Like a prostate exam. I don't know why, just to be on the safe side maybe. It seems logical, might as well expect and brace for it. It won't be for long, but it will be pretty intense. I won't like it, but I'm hoping mindfulness practice will keep me from panicking and help me keep calm in an experience that I visualize as difficult and intense as being exposed in the midst of a violent hurricane in the middle of the night.

And I do practice it as much as I can. Whenever I find myself challenged in uncomfortable situations, I imagine it as a bardo experience and react accordingly with equanimity and calm. Not that in my daily life do I find myself in terribly challenging, uncomfortable situations. Crowded rush hour MRT, sweaty and sticky in torrential rain, noisy children in the library. Maybe I should schedule a prostate exam. Even amusement park rides and extremes of physical challenges I would practice as bardo preparation. Not that I can even remember the last time I've been to an amusement park, but I see it on Korean TV. I imagine I wouldn't be much fun to be with at an amusement park. I'd be on rides calmly contemplating how interesting the experience is.

There will be a loss of consciousness. That's obvious. It's hard to die if you don't lose consciousness at some point. It's even described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that after death there is no continuum of consciousness and whatever continues on is subject to "losing consciousness"; and logically the residual habit of past existence would include the experience of losing consciousness. Losing consciousness is no big deal, we do it at least once a day when we fall asleep. That may be to say that one of the most profound and frightening aspects of dying, going from awareness of being here to not being here, is something we regularly experience. The difference being the assumption of waking again when we sleep and the lack of said assumption when we die.

From asphyxiation to brief but intense pain to loss of consciousness, I expect death to occur fairly quickly. How quickly death occurs after loss of consciousness, I gather, depends on circumstances. Death can be immediate in cases of sudden or violent deaths, or it can be prolonged like my father who was kept alive by a machine, with zero prognosis of regaining consciousness, for a week. When the dissolutions occur, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is probably variable and individual. A straight-forward, starting point visualization of the dissolutions might have them occur sequentially after the loss of consciousness, but I have read other descriptions that describe the outer dissolutions as the dying process leading to the loss of consciousness, so occurring before death, rather than after. There's almost certainly not a uniform model of how or when they occur.

I take the descriptions of the dissolutions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Sogyal Rinpoche's book as starting point templates, maybe ideal dying-at-home-surrounded-by-loved-ones-along-with-a-chanting-monk situation, and not literal nor universal. My impression of the descriptions of the dissolutions is that they are universally experienced in varying forms according to the individual and the circumstances, but that awareness of them differs between practitioners and non-practitioners, as well as degree or level of practice. Non-practitioners who haven't prepared experience them but in a more or less non-active manner, almost analogous to animal instinct, like a fish trapped in a net, with little to no understanding what's going on. If they were visible, they might look like me on an amusement park ride; something's happening, but no reaction.

If my mindfulness practice can kick in and weather the experience with some degree of awareness, I imagine the four outer dissolutions being very intense, almost as if they were happening all at once. Earth or ground (sensation of solidity) dissolution feeling like great crushing pressure all around, acutely felt at every point on the body where there is physical sense. Water (sensation of fluid elements) dissolution as feeling like being tossed uncontrollably around in a great torrent of my own bodily fluids, but not reacting in fear. The heat dissolution (remnant sensation of metabolism from being a living being) arising as a heat sensation while being tossed around by water, but then also dissipating. The wind/air dissolution is the end of breath and the movement of gas elements. The outer dissolutions signal the end of our subjective awareness of our physical existence of this life, separate from the continuation of the physical corpse left behind which will begin to decompose on a cellular level immediately.

Also the end of this exercise. The description of the dissolutions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead are found on pages 174-176 (chapter 8, sub-heading "Signs of Extremely Near Death") of the 2005 full translation (paperback), and pages 255-258 (chapter 15, sub-heading "The Outer Dissolution: The Senses and the Elements") in Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. They go into greater detail than I can imagine or understand, which is part of the purpose of this exercise. What am I getting out of their descriptions? If it's a personal experience, how do I personally envision it? It's no doubt inferior to the profundity of the actual experience, the nuances of which are suggested in the books, but it's worth it to try to be prepared. In any case, it's my death, not the bookses'.

I managed to consciously push myself into a conscious dream state 2 or 3 times this morning. I've been trying since my last post, and it isn't easy. I'm still not sure what conditions are amenable to succeeding.

It reminds me of Star Trek-like scenarios where they're dealing with fabric of space challenges like trying to keep wormholes stable or negotiating different dimensional realities. But it's "psychic" space in this case. Difficult to induce, difficult to maintain.

As difficult as it is to induce these dream states, I'm not surprised that when I first managed it this morning, I was lying in a bed since that was what I was actually doing. When the dream coalesced, the color of the room was a cold light blue and bare. I could look down towards the foot of the bed and see the entrance of the bedroom and see that it led into a hall of a colonial-type architecture house. And that's all it was for a few seconds, just a framework dream image.

Then in what could have been a horror film image, a ghostly image floated into the room and came towards me lying in bed. When it reached me, it turned around and turns out it was a woman. She resembled a past girlfriend, Shiho, but her personality was too flighty to be her.

It was apparent we were intimate. I remember telling her that this was a dream and I was conscious of it, but she didn't respond to that. I don't remember how it ended, but it probably fell apart as I couldn't maintain it in my consciousness.

I'm remembering the second and third dreams as one dream, even though I remember a total of three instances of pushing myself into these dream states. There are both differences in the former and latter parts of the dream, but also a continuity, so I'm not really sure. No surprise, we're talking about dreams.

It was set in a corner apartment on the second or third floor of a building with an outside view, afternoon-ish, orange-y light, and also a mysterious woman with whom I had an ambiguous relationship. It seemed like our interactions indicated some level of intimacy and at one point I coyly asked her what her name was, which she coyly avoided answering.

That's interesting because I was consciously asking what her name was to try to get more information about the dream, but her avoidance is also a reflection of my subconscious. What about my subconscious, I don't know. Maybe it just didn't know who she was. That . . . makes sense.

In another part of the dream, I saw a post-it that included my name on it. I forget if there was any qualifier regarding it, like indicating an appointment, but I remember the awareness in the context of the dream that the people in the dream knew who I was. Or not.

Also as an indicator of my level of consciousness, at some point, one of the people in the dream suggested going to a certain place, naming it by name. It could've been a bar, an eatery or a record store. So I asked, "You mean so-and-so place in . . ." trying to prompt them to give an indication of where the dream was taking place. They didn't take the bait.

A difference between these forced consciousness dreams and ordinary sleep dreams is that I can remember them more clearly afterwards, whereas sleep dreams start fading within minutes and can completely disappear in hours. Still, as I try to recall them now, it's apparent I should still rely on recording them orally because they do fade.

As I mentioned, I still don't know what conditions are amenable to inducing these forced dream states. Insomnia or some sort of sleep disturbance seems to play a part. Otherwise I'd simply fall asleep.

There's some sort of balance involved between not being able to fall asleep, and navigating a liminal state where I know I haven't gotten a full night's rest, and I'm still trying to get more sleep.

I might just have found a way to take advantage of insomnia to help progress my training into the nature of mind. Insomnia may no longer be a source of frustration and suffering and become an opportunity to appreciate.

I've had two experiences during insomnia whereby I was able to force myself into a dream state while essentially still being aware that I was still awake.

The first time was a few months ago and I wasn't posting anything so I didn't write about it, but I remember it. It was a bout of insomnia and eventually I turned on the TV to something mindless, maybe LPGA or some other sport or CNN.

During the mindless listlessness, I would start drifting into light sleep and start having dreams, fading in and out. At one point I faded in during a dream that had been interesting and I didn't want to leave it. So I wondered if I could force myself to sink back into the dream. I tried it and it worked!

I was able to force myself into a dream state that certainly was no where near REM sleep. The dreams were vivid and chaotic, too chaotic to relate afterwards, but with many elements memorable for a while.

This morning was back-end insomnia. I woke up after a few hours of sleep and couldn't get back to sleep. After a couple hours of ritual music listening, and an uncomfortably high body temperature that may have been the source of the insomnia, I tried to see if I could force myself into a dream state instead of trying to sleep. It worked!

That's weird, right? But that's what's important. The dream state definitely wasn't sleep. I was awake, but dreaming. When I was trying this out while the music was still on, I was fully aware of each song that was playing. I was fully aware of the position I was lying in, which was dictated by discomfort from high body temperature. But I was dreaming.

It wasn't lucid dreaming, whereby being in a total dream state, and being consciously aware of it and having some degree of control where to go in the dream. I was actually awake with an active consciousness, and in the dreams I wasn't aware that it was a dream, I'd still be just going through the dream as I went through it, without the thought, "This is a dream and I'm aware of it". I had no control over it.

That's super weird even as I write it.

Actually, at one point there was a lucid dreaming-like incident where I remember wondering if I could create a situation and was briefly able to do so. But what that was is a secret at this point. Saying it's a secret possibly gives away what it was, but I'm still not sure how to breach the topic.

Another important aspect that is different from the first time is that back then it sort of happened organically. This time I was trying to force myself into a dream state and it was difficult to maintain it. All during it I was aware and worried that I'd lose it and come out of it. Sometimes I'd come right to the edge of coming out of it.

And one thing I clearly remember: the me in the dream state was like a "dream body" and distinct from my physical life consciousness, but there is a nexus between them where one becomes another. I remember there was one point that I was just getting into the dream body, but failed and coming back to consciousness was actually a shock, it kinda hurt.

I'm a little bowled over about what to make of this. Important to note that right now I'm in full conscious awareness and I know I can't go over and lie down on the bed and make it happen. It's that twilight, intermediate zone of mind between wake and sleep that is particular for insomniacs where these ideas can be revealed and explored.

If the true Buddhist path is anything, it's exploration of the nature of mind.

I know I'm no longer a part of this world. I don't occupy the same world as mostly everyone else does, I shouldn't wonder. No doubt there are others like me, searching, striving, wondering. Failing even, which I don't posit as a bad thing. I readily admit it, I'm a failure in many things. It's just not necessarily a bad thing.

But the vast majority of people are a part of the nominal world of physical phenomena, accepting it for what it appears to be.

I know I have trouble getting past that, too. I sense and experience reality and the world just as everyone else does, but I have that requisite doubt that what I'm perceiving isn't all there is to it and I have to attack that doubt head-on to try to figure out what my truth is about it.

So I read. My current reads are spread amongst libraries and bookstores.

Alice Sebold's (author of "The Lovely Bones") "Lucky" is a current read. It's her autobiographical account in which she writes in painful and gruesome detail about how she was raped, beaten and degraded as a first year college student and the ensuing events that led to her rapist's arrest and conviction.

Mind you, personally "rape" is my most hated word in the English language. I don't know why, it always has been. In any catalog of  "worsts" in the human experience, rape has always been an item that I've found particularly egregious and disgusting.

I'm not sure how it ties into my inquiry. Perhaps it's the subjective intensity by which we feel the human experience in the worst way possible. Similar to my fascination of high altitude climbers and their sick obsession with a basically suicidal sport. And I'm not criticizing it. I thoroughly understand it and am intrigued by it.

I now regard Alice Sebold as one of my life heroes. I don't know why. Maybe in a similar way as I consider Stevie Ray Vaughan as one of my guitar heroes even though I don't think of myself as a guitarist in any way. Her bravery in handling the aftermath of her rape stands for itself, but she didn't get through it unscathed.

She graduated from college, endured the rape and alienation by one of her closest friends and confidantes, and subsequently went through hard times of falling apart that I'll never know. And most disturbing in "Lucky" is her description and realization of having post-traumatic stress disorder.

I self-diagnose and know how I consider my feelings about myself and my experience, but when they match up perfectly with someone who genuinely has PTSD, it just makes me realize what a wuss I am. What trauma have I experienced? None. I'm no survivor of anything.

Still, discovering Alice Sebold's personal story and realizing the type of psyche from which a twisted and disturbing, yet lovely, work like "The Lovely Bones" can emerge made me feel somewhat connected. When you experience that kind of trauma, you no longer live in the same world that most everyone else seems to.

I'm also reading "Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, which is about scientifically accepted phenomena of things that are completely beyond human subjective experience, such as quantum mechanics and cosmological space-time theory and sub-atomic entanglement.

A lot of weird shit is described in what science is finding about the nature of reality, but what strikes me is about the effort to describe reality using our limited observational ability. As human beings, as biological products of the universe, our perception and observational ability is a product of evolution on this planet. i.e., for this perceptional reality.

As humans, we arrogantly believe we can understand the big picture, the whole enchilada. But really all we can really understand is what is observationally perceivable, and our perceptions are limited (granted human nature strives beyond our limitations to boldly probe natures of reality we weren't biologically meant to understand).

A very simple example is that we only perceive electromagnetic radiation in a limited range – mostly visible light. We need instruments to perceive electromagnetic radiation beyond that limited range. Our limit is natural. Perceiving what we call visible light is a product of evolution. We don't need to see ultraviolet or infrared electromagnetic radiation to survive.

On other worlds and other environments, it might benefit other biological creatures to perceive in those other ranges, and perhaps what we perceive as plainly visible in visible light, is imperceptible to them.

We have sound perception, but the sound spectrum is greater than what our facilities are equipped for. But we hear according to what is beneficial to us. Smell, touch, taste? These are just tools that make our environment navigable. But change the environment, and the tools will change, as will the general perception of reality.

The whole of reality is actually the entire range of everything, beyond our senses and include senses that we haven't even developed because of our limited environment on this planet, and we have no idea what those are!

Could there conceivably be an environment or a world where what we categorize or even deride as spiritual perceptions are requisite to survive? For us on this planet, the question ends right there. I don't think we can even conceive of it.

And, of course, death is foremost among my readings; meditations on death and the biological beings that we are, destined to die.

One book I've been reading in the bookstores is How We Die by Sherwin Nuland. Another is The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead by David Shields. Straight shooters of books about our biological reality.

How We Die is written by an M.D., a cardiologist like my brother and uncle, and his book is more about the biological process of dying. Describing what is happening to and in our bodies when we experience external forces that are bringing our lives to an end in various ways.

The Thing About Life is more philosophical and uses general scientifically observed facts and data about aging and the life cycle for readers to think about the life and aging process, which always culminates in death.

Lastly, I mentioned the book Reading Judas before, but it disappeared from the bookstore shelves before I finished it. Well, it reappeared.

Its relevance to my inquiry is that one of the issues that had disparate views and divided the early Jesus movement was sacrifice and death under the reality back then of Roman persecution; namely torture and eventual execution, either by crucifiction or games at the Coliseum.

They were pondering and meditating on death in a very deep and real way, because just by being followers of Jesus they were under threat of Roman horrors. The meaning of Jesus's death was a central concern among them.

One side promoted being martyrs and encouraged followers to bravely and willingly meet their end as sacrifices. Mind you, if you read the book, it shouldn't be lost that this attitude is the exact same attitude that current day Muslim extremists and militants hold. I can imagine those early Christians who held this view yelling, "Allahhu akbar" as they were condemned!

The argument in Reading Judas is that the opposing side, the side that was suppressed for 1700 years, was that this attitude was completely counter the teachings of Jesus. Thinking oneself as a willing sacrifice was primitive and vulgar. Jesus preached love and rebelled against the Roman Empire by refusing the practice of sacrifice.

And it won't happen, but it theoretically makes logical sense that Christians could use the Gospel of Judas to argue against Muslim suicide bombers, saying that's not what Islam is about. It won't happen because the Gospel of Judas is not canon, and it would be hypocritical because the attitude of Muslim suicide bombers is not much different from the early Christians martyrs who are canon.

And to wrap this all up, after trying to gain perspective on scientific observation despite our observational limits, which is a result of evolution, I have to admit that spirituality is also beyond our biological observational limits.

We don't need spirituality to survive, evolutionarily speaking. So what am I doing? What are we doing? Perhaps basically the same as cosmologists and astrophysicists – trying to describe reality.

What seriously disappointed me about Reading Judas was the authors' final stance that the Christian canon need not be challenged to be revised because the (Nicene) canon has been counseling and inspiring Christians for 1700 years.

This thoroughly goes against what they uncovered in their analysis that if the teaching and preaching of the canon is about a wrong God, it should be challenged. If Christians are being counseled or inspired by a doctrine counter to what Jesus taught, it should be challenged. They just roll over to the status quo.

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From the Zohar:
"'When you walk, it shall lead you; when you lie down it shall keep you and when you awake, it shall talk with you.' (Proverbs 6:22) 'When you walk, it shall lead you,' refers to the Torah that goes before a man when he dies. 'When you lie down, it shall keep you,' refers to the interval when the body lies in the grave, for at that time the body is judged and sentenced and the Torah acts in its defense. 'And when you awake, it shall talk with you,' refers to the time at which the dead rise from the dust.

"Rabbi Elazar quoted the verse: 'It shall talk with you' (Proverbs 6:22). Although the dead have just risen from the dust, they remember the Torah they studied before their death. They will know all they studied before departing the world. And everything shall be clearer than it was before death, for whatever he strove to understand yet did not successfully grasp, is now clear in his innermost parts. And the Torah speaks within him." p. 190-191, The Essential Zohar

What I found fascinating about this passage is that Christians probably interpret the quote from Proverbs as referring to faith. It's a very simple, direct interpretation: when you walk (go forth or act in the world), faith will lead you (whatever you do will be righteous); when you lie down (rest) it shall keep (protect) you; and when you awake, it shall talk to you (ask you what you want for breakfast inform you how to act). Often even more narrowly interpreted: faith in Jesus or an exclusive Christian, white male God. That normative, bland Christian interpretation is fine and obvious regarding physical, material life, but nothing to go on and on about.

But the Zohar interprets it in a manner that I can re-interpret as squaring with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Tibetan Buddhism describes the life and death cycle with three bardos of living (conscious life, sleep and meditation), and three death bardos (the point of death, the bardo of reality, and the bardo of becoming).

My reading of the death bardos and the guidance the Tibetan Book of the Dead counsels is that what we're striving for in the death bardos is the same as what we're striving for in the living bardos. Or striving for enlightenment in the living bardos is training for attaining enlightenment in the death bardos. Life and death are mirrored realities.

Actually the three elements of the quote from Proverbs can apply both to the three living bardos and the three death bardos, but what's fascinating to me is that I can interpret what the Zohar says to the death bardos at all.

Tibetan Buddhism is very meticulous about the death process and what happens between one death and the next incarnation of a . . . person, a soul, karmic energy. But there seems to be little in Judaism or Kabbalah about the mechanics of what happens after death. Just a far off resurrection and judgment that Christians took and ridiculously interpreted literally.

The book I've been reading, The Essential Zohar, doesn't explicitly state or endorse any theory of reincarnation, but the author seems pretty open-minded about the possibility of Buddhism-like multiple lifetimes and reincarnation.

The Zohar interprets Proverbs 6:22 not as some vague notion of faith leading us forth in life, but Torah, i.e., spiritual cultivation, leading us through the death experience. It doesn't explicitly say that the "when you awake"/"dead rise from the dust" is reincarnation, but that's how I read it, because it then fits in with Tibetan Buddhist ontology (alternatively it might not refer to reincarnation, but the awakening in a "mental body" in the bardo of becoming that precedes reincarnation).

Torah is what we do with spiritual energy in our lifetimes, how we cultivate it or not cultivate it. It's also karma. When we die, we take nothing with us except our karma, the energy patterns and habits that we've indelibly stamped on our manifestation of some primordial energy that is the basis of our consciousness through our behavior and thoughts.

We don't take our possessions, our body, or memories or anything that relies on brain matter for existence. Memories and thoughts rely on brain matter. Karmic energy doesn't. Our karma has no relation to our identity as a person, because our identities also rely on thought and brain matter.

So when we die, it is only Torah that leads us. All else falls away and dissolves. Tibetan Buddhism describes the death-point bardo as being so subtle that only the highest levels of practitioners can achieve realization/enlightenment in it.

For ordinary beings, the dissolution of awareness of the physical body elements and mental consciousness elements is so shocking and unfamiliar and disconcerting that it is impossible to maintain any stability to achieve realization, and it goes by like the snap of a finger.

The interval in the grave where the Torah acts as a defense can be likened to the bardo of reality where we are immersed in the primordial energy of the universe that is the substratum of what our human consciousness has become on this planet.

It is enlightenment, but we don't know it because of our conception of physical reality from having lived previous lives on this planet, karma. Even in the Tibetan description of the bardo of becoming/rebirth, a judgment takes place because that's what naturally emerges in this state as the wisps of karmic memory recall what occurred in our previous life and there is some recognition of "right" and "wrong". Enlightenment can occur in this bardo upon the realization that the judgment is itself mind, or created by "mind", and that right and wrong are manifestations of mind and not concrete or objective judgments.

What is Torah defending us against? Our spiritual cultivation defends us in the bardo states against the notion created by the karma from physically having existed that worldly manifestation was some ultimate reality.

The final bardo of becoming in Tibetan Buddhism describes the process by which reincarnation takes place. At some point there is a crux between a prior life and future life, and if enlightenment isn't attained, our karmic energy moves towards a future life.

Torah shall talk to you when you rise from the dust. If you cultivated yourself spiritually, that survives the death process whereby you lose everything that depends on material existence. With rebirth, your karma still applies, and if you studied the Torah, the Torah will remain with you. You can continue to undertake the spiritual path you were on in a previous life, provided you studied the Torah.

They will know all they studied before departing the world. And everything shall be clearer than it was before death, for whatever he strove to understand yet did not successfully grasp, is now clear in his innermost parts. That is literally exactly what is said in the Tibetan Book of the Dead regarding the death bardo states.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 7:44 p.m.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a pretty intriguing text on the topic, but I do take it with a grain of salt. It's a template, a starting point, but it is a culturally-b(i)ased work. It should be liberally interpreted by others and the general concepts that can be gleaned from it are more important than the actual text, I think.

One thing from the "Old Souls" book that stood in contrast with the Tibetan Book of the Dead was the time scales involved, and I've never been comfortable with the time scales in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Too concrete, too normative, grounded in our subjective reality. I'm concluding that is one of the things that should be interpreted liberally.

I don't think time is an objective, normative phenomena of the universe. I agree with Einstein that time and space are inseparable, and once we don't exist physically in space, neither do we exist in time as we know it.

Time is our fishbowl. We don't have the mental architecture nor the imagination to envision the non-existence of time. If time was created by the Big Bang, when did the Big Bang occur? We can't even approach that concept since time is so hard-wired into our very existence.

So for people who read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and are intrigued and find some belief in reincarnation, we can formulate our own ideas of what happens and how and why, but not when. So when my cousin says that her infant daughter had mentioned she was her mother in her previous life, who had died some 15 years earlier and thus beyond the bounds of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I have nothing to say about that. My cousin's instant acceptance of her daughter's statement is no longer completely outlandish.

Ghosts are another issue that have recently been brought to mind. I'm open to the possibility that just as in "Old Souls", a death can be so sudden and violent that actual memory can be transferred into a next life, but that a life and death could be so filled with anger and attachment and/or fear that the phenomena of what we call "ghosts" occur.

A ghost phenomena may occur when there's a death but the circumstances prevent the natural progression towards rebirth and the energy gets "stuck" in its previous existence and can't move on. And again, time is irrelevant. A ghost existence can last for quite a long period in our normative understanding of time, but for a ghost, time is not a concept.

As I continue to read "The Lovely Bones", the murdered girl continues to watch what happens for years and years after her death. I'm reading at the point where she's watching her younger sister's college graduation, and to me, it seems that it's not like she's sitting in heaven watching in real time what happens 2, 5, 8 years after her death; that in heaven, it is actually 8 years after she was murdered.

But in her death experience, she watches what happens after her death, far into the "future", but not occurring "in time" at all. So if I were to hypothetically plug her case into the template of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, she could witness all the things she reports as being far in the future, but it has no bearing on when her time in the bardo states ends and when the natural sequence of events pushes her into a reincarnated existence.

She narrates events years and years after her death, but in our normative time line, she may have already been reincarnated when those events actually occur.

Last week's trip to Matsu was as excruciating as I expected. The only consolation was that there was no on-the-bus karaoke as the islands of Matsu are so small, there are no extended periods of time on the bus, and there was more Mandarin spoken, not just Taiwanese, so I didn't feel totally shut out and isolated.

The place itself was well-worth visiting for its historicity. The reason why Taiwan holds several islands so close to the mainland is because right after the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists in 1949 and retreated to the island of Taiwan, they immediately established strongholds on Matsu and Kinmen with the intent that they would be the footholds from which to launch attacks to re-take the Chinese mainland.

That never happened, but the islands became highly militarized, with posturing not totally unlike between North and South Korea or India and Pakistan. Enemies warily watching each other across the border.

Taiwan ended decades of martial law in the 80s, and by the 90s began demilitarizing Kinmen and Matsu, allowing them to develop their economies, which largely are comprised of Taiwan's signature liquors (Kinmen Kaoliang 56 and Matsu's Tunnel 88) and tourism.

The Matsu archipelago consists of, well, many islands, but just a few main islands. We visited the two biggest ones, connected by a 20-minute speed boat ride, and they are tiny. From any place to another destination was a very short bus ride, sometimes less than a minute, which always made me wonder why we couldn't just walk the distance.

And unlike the Taiwan mainland, the islands still retain their character of old, with traditional architecture from the early 20th century currently undergoing refurbishment for tourism purposes.

It was excruciating just because it was traveling with my uncle, who although means well, still lives on a planet of his own. Interesting is that he had trouble sleeping, and as a man-animal who is driven by his desires and getting what he wants, he isn't the type who takes well to not being able to get that basic daily elixir called sleep.

As insomnia is old hat to me, sleep is take it or leave it, and it was almost with delight that I lay pretending to sleep to hear someone else going through it, the pacing, the grunts of frustration, finally turning on the TV. Newbie. Apparently insomnia loves company.

Not social company in my case, though, I for most part was listening to music through the night, and him not being the most observant person in the world, likely didn't even notice that I wasn't asleep, even when my hand moved every few minutes to adjust volume or check a song name.

There was one point on one of the two nights, I forget which, that I had an experience that I'm not sure what to make of. I've been trying to re-create it and have been unsuccessful. It may have been the product of that specific situation with those particular stressors, including someone else awake in the room, from whom I was concealing that I was awake.

On one of the nights, probably around 4 in the morning, I turned off my iPod shuffle and determined to mentally will myself to sleep. It sounded counter-intuitive to even myself at the time. How do you will yourself to sleep when sleep is a state where the will is lost?

I think I broke something. I ended up in a state where I wasn't asleep, but it wasn't anything like previous quasi-lucid dreaming states I've been in before.

My previous experiences were that I was lucid and clearly conscious in the dream, but I didn't have awareness that I was dreaming or control over the elements in the dream, which I think defines lucid dreaming. But it was more than normal dreaming because I was in a state of self-awareness, rather than just the mental-habit, subconscious meandering of ordinary dreams.

This time I immediately went into a state where I knew I wasn't consciously awake – my direct connection with my physical body was no longer there – but I was self-aware in a manner similar to my previous experiences. The way I thought to describe it immediately afterwards was that I felt I had accessed a separate "dream realm", where the energy of what forms dreams is channeled.

I wasn't dreaming, I wasn't in a dream, but I had access to dream images that I could "pull down" and sample. It sounds weird to me now, but that's how I would word the description. I don't remember if or how I "chose" what dreams to sample.

Maybe it was like window shopping for dreams, but what it felt like is that if I wanted a dream, this was where to go; this is where they come from. The energy is instantly transformed by our subjective experience and psychology into dreams, but the basic energy is clay, the medium that makes the dreams possible.

I know this is self-serving, me projecting my own theories on my own experiences, but it made me think of the bardo of sleep/dreams in some differentiations of the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A lot of teachers in the West point to 4 bardos, the life bardo comprising one, and then the 3 death bardos.

But in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the life bardo is separated into 3 as well: the bardo of waking, the bardo of sleep/dreaming, and the bardo of meditation. I think it's fair for the teachers to combine the living bardos. The subtleties may be too challenging for Westerners, and the pursuit of understanding them impracticable with the Western lifestyle. But it's possible that a state like that dream realm is what is meant by the bardo of sleep/dreaming.

Feeling that it was a special realm where the currents of energy are the source of dreams might add to my thoughts on human consciousness being formed from some basic, natural energy that pervades the universe that evolved in conjunction with biological life on Earth and became attached and enmeshed with it.

Dying releases it from a physical existence, but the imprints of the physical existence remain and as if it has been given a life of its own to be attracted back to another physical form, instead of melting back into the raw universal energy.

When humanity becomes extinct, the energy will have no choice to either melt back into the basic energy, or may continue attaching itself to whatever life remains and being reincarnated as lower animals and continuing to evolve.

I may have covered some or much of this before, but those delog (returned from death) accounts from Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth got me thinking. Granted all kinds of death speculation puts my thinking into runaway train mode.

Again, it seems to me the various accounts of what happened during the death bardos were similar because the delogs were all taught in the Tibetan cultural and religious tradition. There were differences because all individuals have their own conceptions and interpretations, despite being taught the same source material.

But, again, it's still most important to keep in mind that the experiences are subjective projections, not objective universal experiences.

Reading the book, I did find myself getting caught up and worried about, among other things, the descriptions of being called before the "Lord of Death" where good and bad deeds are counted up using black and white pebbles and then judgment being proclaimed as to whether beings would go on to rebirths in "higher or lower realms".

I don't believe in a Lord of Death. I've never been taught that, it's never been instilled in me, it's not part of my tradition, it doesn't make any rational sense that there is one, and I don't believe in external judgment of the ultimate being of a person anyway.

So what I make of it for myself is that we have our life experience stored in our memory. Can we recall most of it? No, I think if any average person recalled every memory they could possibly dig up from their entire life, it would be some minuscule percentage of all experiences received through their 5 physical senses over however many years of life they've lived, and then also throw in dreams, thoughts, meditations and musings, etc.

The collective information of our experience, stored in our brain structure, is hyuge. And the reason why we store all that information is because it's inefficient for our brains to have memory recall of all of it.

Our consciousness, what we sometimes refer to as mind, in our human form is limited by our physical bodies, in particular the physical brain, and constrained by our senses. The manifestation of our consciousness in sentient bodily form is limited and defined by what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and otherwise process mentally.

What I envision from the delog accounts of encountering the Lord of Death is that once the brain structure biologically stops functioning, the limiting attribute of the physical structure ceases. What they describe as a state of clarity far greater than anything they had as a physical being is actually the unleashing of our consciousness – all of that information emerging into sudden, unlimited recall.

The biological function of our eyes have stopped, we no longer see with our eyes, it is all part of this omni-consciousness with visual formations being just habit from how our eyes functioned before, and so it is with all our senses. All of this information and memory emerging, I think, is the overwhelming overdrive experience of the bardo.

The Tibetan delogs had been taught, subconsciously or actually, to focus the images into a certain experience. My interpretation is that as all our memories of all our life experiences – the most current being most vivid, but I'm not opposed to any suggestion that elements of all our past life experiences are part of the mix in the background – are unleashed, they become the bardo experience.

All our positive memories come out and simultaneously all our negative memories also form again and become present in our unlimited consciousness. Loves, enjoyment, happiness, good deeds, arguments, fights, injuries, interactions, etc., etc. ad nauseum, all come out and this is what I think is the delog description of counting out good and bad deeds with black and white pebbles.

It's the force of this emergence of our experience which ultimately colors the bardo experience as positive or negative. If our human life was full of hardship and we characteristically had a bad attitude about it, ultimately the recall in the bardo is negative, and that affects the continuing journey through the bardo and ultimately our rebirth in our next life.

If we had a lot of good experiences and warm memories and a lot of recall of doing good things for other people, it colors our experience with positivity, which then affects how we move forward. This is not a moral judgment, but just a natural outcome of our own behavior. We're not rewarded for doing good or punished for doing bad.

When we remember good times in our lives, we feel relaxed and happy. When we recall bad events in our lives, we feel anxious and tense. In the bardo, it's like that, but it becomes all of reality. It's much more than just memory. And actually, we can say the same thing about our experience in the life bardos, but the experience is much more vivid and the consequences more dire in the death bardos.

These are just general parameters and the possible variations are endless. You can have a person who suffered greatly in his or her life, but mentally was even-keeled, and that was the most important character attribute carried into the bardo. That equanimity opens the possiblity of avoiding being affected by negative experience in the bardo.

Or someone could have led a cushy, pampered life, but underneath was always insecure and afraid.

I might be in trouble at that stage in the bardo, sometimes referred to as the "bardo of reality", which is the second of three death bardos, but . . . I don't know. Maybe not.

On one hand when I set myself to recalling my life's experience, it's just filled with unresolved negativity. There is very little I would like to re-live again, and when I see other people at various ages in their lives, I recall myself at those ages and I would not want to go through any of it again.

On the other hand, even though that sounds like negative aversion to the experience, it may be simple detachment or non-clinging, which is good. Objectively, I can't say my life has been all that bad, with few, if any, major traumas.

Also I don't rule out that I remember the negative experiences because they stand out, and I shouldn't discount that on a daily basis, part of the background of my life was a positive appreciation towards being and this experience of being alive and healthy and free. I might even be able to add the effort, I'd say huge effort, I placed into overcoming a lot of the negativity.

Under my theory, all of this comes out when the brain loses its constraints on consciousness.

I'm also vaguely confident about meditative trainings to prepare me if this paradigm of the death bardos is actually what happens. Without training or preparation, it makes sense that most people are naturally swept uncontrollably through the bardo experience and guided by their karma to their next rebirth.

A nagging question, though, is if the delogs and the descriptions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead are right about the death experience, if some sort of realization or attainment can be had in the death bardos, then what?

The Tibetan Book of the Dead itself is slippery about the issue. On one hand, it suggest that simple exposure to these teachings is enough, and once in the bardos, consciousness becomes so clear that the slightest recollection of the teachings will lead to non-rebirth and attainment of reality. Easy.

On the other hand, the bardo experience is overwhelming, thousands times more intense than being subjected to the worst hurricanes on earth. If we try to recall the latest dream we had and the difficulty of becoming lucid in it and realizing we were dreaming, then realization in the bardo states is that much more difficult.

And what is this realization? This attainment? Is anyone foolish enough to think it is the absolute enlightenment/extinction of the Buddha? Even if I can have a bit of confidence in my efforts, what is the best case scenario I can hope for in the bardos? I don't know and it's just not explained.

I do notice that the way I write about this is trying to hold onto a rationalist view, hoping to win over other rationalists' favor, but there's nothing really rational about this, is there? Death is death, suicide is suicide. If I commit suicide, that's pretty much it and I have nothing more to contribute.

On another hand, someone with a different point of view may be hoping that I will trust and have faith in Amitabha Buddha to be born in the Sukhavati pure land, even though I've expressed doubt about the idea of a separate pure land out there somewhere. Just because I can't get my head around such a place, when it comes right down to it, I shouldn't discount that perspective, either. I just don't know. If this life is such a fairy tale, what makes what sounds like a fairy tale any less valid?

Yea, well, OK, perhaps a proclamation of an aspiration to die was pretty lame, I realize, since I'm still pretty unclear on the concept of death. We have life and we have death, and I say I have no problem with life, and I say I'm aspiring to death, but then remember my problem is not with life and living, but with existence.

Juxtapose existence and death, and then I wonder if I know what the hell I'm talking about. I went for a run the other night after work, trying just to focus on the experience of existence and fit the pieces together with the puzzle of death.

My experience of existence is all I know. I'm steeped in it, I'm marinating in it. There is nothing objective about existence as I move through it, and everything around me is my existence. So what is this thing death? What is this thing where this existence doesn't exist?

My consciousness is the center of my existence. The world revolves around my consciousness, even though the whole experience is my existence. As my arms swung and legs strode, I thought about the "existence" of my body as a whole, all its parts. They, too, exist, as does my consciousness. Then I got the weird thought about how can my consciousness alone decide on the existence of all my body parts?

My consciousness says I aspire towards death, but what do my feet have to say about it? Knees? Liver? Blood? I don't know if the idea is really translating into words, but it did remind me of something in Tibetan Buddhism which mentions that gods or deities "live in our body". I didn't really buy it, because it was in the context of condemning suicide, because committing suicide kills these deities, blah, blah, blah, and I was like "whatever".

I must say, though, that my thought, having originated in me, did make that thing in Tibetan Buddhism resonate. Not that I believe deities live in my body parts or that committing suicide kills them and is therefore an inexpiable sin, but . . .what that is talking about is the same thing that crossed my mind in that running meditation.

I'm still having sleeping problems, still trying to come up with new methods to deal with it. It's like rotating frequencies to deal with the Borg. I stopped drinking coffee, and I'm finally going to see if I can stop drinking, see if that has anything to do with it.

If my unconscious is trying to tell me to break habits, well, drinking is a habit. So I haven't drunk anything in almost 48 hours, doesn't sound like much, but . . . nevermind. I'm leaving the bottle and the last shot glass I used where I left them until I say 'fuck it', or I realize I'm stopping for the duration. I won't ever say I'm stopping for good.

What was I thinking? Big bang. Scientists describe it as literally as possible so that non-astrophysicists can understand, can relate. Some describe it as literally as possible so that they themselves can understand, can relate. But I think there are some who realize how inadequate the convenient description is. What actually happened is far more abstract, far more fragile, intangible than our minds can fathom.

It goes at one point in time, the more advance thinking goes, at one point in "time", since the concept time was also created at the same moment as the big bang, all matter in the universe was situated in an infinitesimally small, atom-sized space, and "something" happened to trigger this thing to explode in a massive eruption that created time and space, and thus the universe was born.

As I write it out, I'm unconvinced. Make it so linear, and it's too arbitrary to be scientific. After all, as Freud once said, it's just a theory.

I think some scientists know it's not that linear or concrete or even conceivable. To conceive something, we think we should be able to describe it, to visualize it, but one current cosmological theory of the beginning of the universe acknowledges that there was a span of time between the big bang and the existence of light. How do you visualize something without light?

After the big bang, the nature of what existed wasn't visible, and it was after some time when conditions in this unseen, primordial, molecular soup changed that finally the process that would become the shedding of light would occur. Finally the conditions were that a photon of light wasn't immediately absorbed or dissipated and it shot forth and suddenly the universe became visible. It shone, gases were revealed.

But that uncertainty of what was going on in that period, that murkiness, I think, brings question to that concrete idea of "everything in the universe within a tiny space suddenly banging and creating the universe". Maybe that's just a convenient, concrete description. As humans, maybe we're too arrogant, or maybe it's just our natures to resist the idea that there is some phenomena that we can't explain. Or maybe it's just coping with that inability.

Maybe the dot wasn't quite so small. Maybe there wasn't a nothingness of a void before then. Maybe it was an event that involved a previously existing universe. I'm just trying to cope.

And I've been thinking about the idea in physics of conservation of energy, or maybe my version of it since I'm no physicist. I think I heard somewhere the idea that the amount of energy in the universe is not only finite, but is quantitatively conserved. No energy is ever lost, it can only be converted to another state.

Aren't my thoughts energy? Aren't my memories energy? My consciousness? How much of my life do I not remember? I think it's easy to state that the vast majority of my life, I don't remember. Where is that energy? Why do we forget? Why don't we remember absolutely everything, especially since it is said that we only use about 10% of our brain's capacity? Hmm.

Yea, that can go several ways. I can't help tying it in with karma. These things are the energy of karma, karma exists because we do, because our consciousnesses do. The energy is not lost just because the memory can't be recalled. The energy is imprinted, converted into an energy called karma. And that karma converts back into manifestations of future personality, a continuity of energy, of being. A soul, maybe.

I'm losing the thought. I mentioned that I'm having insomnia these days, right? Well, I am. I can't get more than a couple hours of sleep without waking up fully alert. Even with sleeping pills I wake up – they just helped me get back into an unsettled sleep because I'd be too groggy to find the bottle of Jack Daniels.

Extended hiccups make me want to kill myself, insomnia also makes the option attractive. I know I won't, but I wonder about these things and why my afflictions just happen to be of this nature. It's in my mind, I know. If I had eczema, or if I still had asthma, I'd think the same thing. At least it's not a tumor.

And I still think the fundamental nature of our consciousnesses has something to do with dark energy.

It's so easy to move my hand from here to here. It's so easy to control it. But when I try to hold my mind in one place for five minutes, it's impossible. Within seconds my mind wanders and suddenly I'm somewhere else, in the past, in the future, certainly not sitting here on this cushion.

That was last October. Why is it so hard to control my own mind? Why is it so hard to still my thoughts? What is the nature of thought? What kind of energy is it that makes controlling it so elusive?

The zen training is to just let it go. When I realize I'm wandering, bring it back . . . at least for the few seconds before it goes wandering off again like cattle, meandering like Taipei pedestrian traffic.

Recently I try treating the wandering thoughts as stones. Words are a heavy thing, they weigh you down. They prevent me from lifting up, from flying, from liberating. The thoughts come as words, the words are stone, let them fall to the bottom, knowing they are weighing me down.

Everyone already is enlightened. That was resonating today as I was walking home. It's just mine and our minds that have this thing, maybe call it habit, of distinguishing this from that, me from you. When really there is no separation.

We are all formed from the same materials that formed this Earth, this solar system, this universe.

And the energy that forms our consciousness, our being, even more closely related. Everyone's different opinions, different beliefs are just illusion, thoughts, stones weighing us down. Separated by the trivialities of physical existence, habitual existence that makes us think we are physical.

They really are all the same, all reconcilable, and all correct. I can't disagree with anyone else's spiritual or philosophical belief. How can I? If they tell me their belief, it is mine. They can only tell me their belief if it was mine in the first place, or how else can it be formed.

Hiccups have been occuring more frequently, randomly. My gut feels hard as rock. Trying to finish this Motown mix for Hyun Ae. Starting tomorrow, I'm no longer drinking in the morning. I don't want to drink in the morning anymore. Anyone who wants this Motown mix is welcome to it. I'll post it when I finalize it.

Drop the thoughts like stones, and maybe I can rise like sky lanterns:
Sky Lanterns 天燈

I was procrastinating in the library this morning.

Instead of studying, I was staring at a dead mosquito. Usually the sight of a dead mosquito is one smashed flat with legs and wings in disgusting array, unsightly to just be unceremoniously washed or wiped away.

This one had died because it hadn't been able to get out of the library. It fell where it died, starved, all parts where they belonged. It didn't even look like it had fulfilled its mission, it looked quite lean and unladen, with neither blood nor coconuts.

It's just instinct I'm going on now, to believe that beings like mosquitoes, basically saying it was not endowed with the liberty and opportunity to influence its own karmic fate, die and also go through the same death betweens as humans and all living beings. But they shoot through the betweens almost instantaneously.

There's nothing in their karmic fabric to slow them down, to reflect on or experience. Very quickly upon hitting the point of death between, they're zipped through to another round of rebirth as a mosquito. By the time I was staring at this dead mosquito, it might have already been forming in some swamp as a baby mosquito.

Why a mosquito again? Because that's the habituated "being" that it knows. It's all it knows. Which is why Tibetans teach that it is very difficult to obtain a human form (I think they put it that way to urge people to appreciate this human life). From one form to the next, we are drawn to what is most familiar, what is most templated in the basic fabric of our being based on the only thing we know – our past experience.

So once human, it's easy to be re-born as human. It's even just natural if no other karma or thought goes into it. But even as humans, depending on karma, people still might live an existence not far removed from other types of "advanced" sentient being, the most apparent in our physical lives being animals.

And even as other types of beings, many exhibit characteristics of humanity. Basically suggesting that from a human form it's possible to be re-born as a dog, if the template or imprint or affinity to dogs was that strong as a human.

But as a dog, the karma is still human, so the dog would probably be karmically predisposed to a dignified existence, pampered, or living close to humans, even functionally in human society, even to a further extent than some humans. They are dogs with a strong affinity or imprint of their human owners, and they karmically wouldn't have too much trouble being reborn as human.

(This discussion can go on forever. It's also possible that as a dog, with whatever experiences it has, it finds an affinity to its animal nature, and that gets more strongly imprinted into its being. Maybe it kills, maybe it hunts, and the taste of that is exciting and pleasurable, and that is indelibly imprinted. And then stuck as a dog, until some lifetime comes along where the imprint of humanity is strong enough so that in the betweens, there's a sense of some attraction to becoming human, instead of what it naturally is familiar and comfortable – a dog. I'm saying it might pay to cultivate taking left turns and breaking out of habits.)

I was admiring a dog like that this afternoon. The Summer heat has broken and the weather has been pleasantly warm lately. I was sitting at a picnic table on campus with a cup of coffee and this dog was wandering around.

It didn't seem like one of the many random, disgusting strays that roam Taipei. Quasi-wild animals as far as I'm concerned. This one had a beautiful coat and an air of dignity. It neither threatened nor felt threatened by me.

Then I realized I saw this same dog yesterday, and I had thought the same thing about it. But curious, it had just pulled food out of a garbage to eat. It had a bright red collar on, but no indication of an owner. I'm guessing it is a domestic dog that got away and is off on an adventure for a few days before returning home to a worried owner.

And then one answer to the old philosophical chestnut of why we're here occurred to me, and it came to me in the voice of the little girl in "Field of Dreams" when she's explaining why people will come to the field.

And it's so obvious based on what I've written before about the development of consciousness from a cosmological point of view. If consciousness developed out of the fully natural evolution of an energy we haven't identified yet, something like dark energy, then the reason why we're here is because we naturally developed to be here.

Physical sciences have a good running theory of our physical existence, religious extremists of all stripes notwithstanding. And by extremists, in this context I'm covering most of the center mainstream, too. But for some reason, scientists have stayed away from the slippery, tricky question of consciousness – intangible as God or any religious construct.

And that's why it's such a big deal to me to put a purely scientific stamp suggestion on the development of consciousness. It's purely natural, purely a result of the physical universe. It's just portions we aren't able to detect.

Whoops, slippery slope.

Why am I here? It's just natural. It's part of the cycle, part of the evolution, the transformation. But it's different from the scientific formulation that consciousness is just a function of biology, and when the biology stops, so does the consciousness. It's separate, but it's interwoven, inter-being.

And maybe Buddhists think (without wording it this way) that the enlightenment or extinction the Buddha found is a return to that primordial state, that being. Consciousness and physical reality is manifestation of it, and the Buddha got beyond it all and melted back into the universe, became the universe, the basic energy that is everywhere and beyond conception.

Upon his breakthrough, there were no more karmic impressions or templates left. When he died, he died at the death-point between where our existence and consciousness melts into primordial components.

Only we with our strong, clinging attachments and template to exist still exist and in non-corporeal form flow the river of the betweens to be reborn – to cycle through another round of nature, another round of seasons, another round of the the water cycle, another revolution around the sun, another turn around the Milky Way. Those things happen just because it's natural.

And the Buddha isn't gone. When I say extinct, when I say melted into, these are just problems with words and conceptualization. The enlightenment of the Buddha means that he became the energy of the cosmos, no separation, and we are all part of it, he is part of us, no choice in the matter, no religious dogma. Just nature.

Oh hey, I just called him my very definition of God. I guess I don't believe in God after all.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 11:04 a.m. - Coming home after a 45 mile ride up Yangmingshan.

on a night too hot to sleep, I lay in bed fading but not sinking. but enough to dream. dream consciousness. i became aware of consciousness that is attached to, contingent upon a biological being. because of my biology, this consciousness occurs.

but somewhere in there was an awareness of a consciousness that is not attached to biology. and from there it's not a far stretch to think that this has something to do with the "pristine cognition" in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This has something to do with the subtle mental body. luminous awareness.

something to do with, not it itself. Because i was thinking about it, or perceiving it, or thinking of perceiving it, it was a function of my biological being. it was glancing glance at it. like when you can't see a star when you look directly at where you think it is, but if you look off-axis, then it's there.

this is something new to add to my 'consciousness as something akin to dark energy' theory. not saying that consciousness has something to do with dark energy that astrophysicists are theorizing, but that the idea of a mysterious energy that pervades the universe and comprises about 75% of it, and about which we know next to nothing, is an inspiration for what may be the ground of human or life consciousness.

that consciousness has a naturally occurring basis in the universe. it's based on some fundamental energy that has taken concrete form in cooperation with biological life, not unlike how molecules and atoms coalesce to form matter.

wait, so what's my thesis now? am I saying consciousness is a function of biology or not, or both? Both, I guess. Or that fundamentally it's not a function of biology, but biology makes it something, makes something out of it. Shocks it into being something, and by doing so it becomes something particular to biological life on this particular planet.

I'm never done trailing this out...

My suggested theory of consciousness, with absolutely no grounding or backing, so it is arbitrary, is inspired by this mysterious thing scientists in the astronomical field call "dark energy". They postulate it comprises about 75% of what the universe is made up of. How they came up with this and why they think this is scientific theory is unadulterated human arrogance. In 500 years, science will have progressed to believe this is all wrong.

But I digress.

It's not really a theory, it's just a loose concept inspired by this energy pervading the universe that we have no idea about, but is so powerful that it is not only the cause of the universe's expansion, but also the acceleration of that expansion. That acceleration is based on scientific observation, but theories stemming from scientific astronomical observation have also been known to be wrong.

Maybe the observations are right, maybe they are faulty. Maybe they are jumping to conclusions based on those observations. Maybe they're dead-on right. But not even our truths stay the same is what I'm saying.

The idea I'm playing with is that our consciousness on earth, those of all metabolizing sentient beings on earth, not just human, is the materialized form of something naturally occuring in nature, something like this dark energy.

Our physical lives and the evolution of life on earth can be traced back through a progression of circumstances, organic compounds, and chemical reactions, etc. That's physical life.

Through it all, there was the building blocks of something else, something intangible, but completely interrelated, interbeing, with the evolution of physical life. It likewise evolved into consciousness. Our consciousness is formed by dark energy or something like it the same way our bodies are formed by organic compounds, molecules, atoms.

When we're done with our bodies, it breaks down and goes back to a more basic form. Maybe so does our consciousness. It washes back to some intangible, naturally occuring energy in the universe. The energy exists throughout the universe, so in that form, "our consciousness" exists throughout the universe. It's one, it's totality, no separation.

It has nothing to do with gods or will or buddhas, those are just labels people put on insight into this. Even this can be considered a scientific sounding attempt at what is really just religious mumbo-jumbo.

But something about planets where life and consciousness develop. Our molecules recycle, but maybe so does the energy of our consciousness. Maybe it's the shock of consciousness that keeps the energy on the same planet, maybe it's the karmic habituation of consciousness, that once it materializes on one planet, it basically stays there because that's all it knows exists.

Once you turn on the light to the room and see the contents, you can't just turn the light off and go back to the state where you had no idea what was there and can imagine that anything is there. You now have a concrete idea what is there.

And that's why some metaphysical/spiritual orders speak of past lives and reincarnation.

Um, that's all.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Pristine cognition. My brother is getting rid of his old car which has been sitting in the driveway of my parents house for more than a year. Someone's gonna come and tow it away. What a great car. Lots of fun to drive, 16 years of service. How can there not be any sentimentality?

February 12, 2006, 9:55 a.m. - Sad Porsche 944

We do attach to material objects. We project our feelings and consciousness on objects. I have several too many guitars because I project feelings on them. I love my bikes. And I habitually thanked my cars after a long road trip.

And here I am, my consciousness, my view of the world from my eyes. And I view these objects around me, upon which I usually don't attribute any consciousness or sentience. Why not?

Their physical matter isn't inherently the objects they represent. Their physical matter is the way molecules are put together in a certain way. Rearrange the molecules of this object, and you'll have that object. We are stardust. Every physical thing we perceive in our solar system is the remnants of an explosion of some ancestor star.

And I think of the potential for consciousness or sentience in objects the same way. Their perceived lack of consciousness is just the way the ground of consciousness has been put together for that object.

It's my thesis, inspired by dark energy, that consciousness is naturally formed from something naturally occurring in the universe. There is a naturally occurring "ground" of consciousness, just like there is naturally occurring grounds of physical matter.

It's all continuum. Basically, I'm no different from the objects around me, physically or sentiently. I'm organic, they're not, I'm sentient, they're not, but the ground of our beings are the same – stardust. It's just the way we're put together.

And this is still not going to put food on my table.

Dude, whoa. I had this flash of a thought this morning equating consciousness, or the origin of consciousness, or maybe sentience, with dark energy, an as-of-yet unknown and mysterious force hypothesized to comprise almost 75% of the total universe. However, in the bright light of day, the idea is a bit too grandiose and far-fetched.

I must have been such a hippie in the 60's. Deep, man.

The way I figure it, my spiritual investigation into existence needs to delve into the origins of human consciousness. I don't believe in a "God" that is separate from ourselves that arbitrarily created us just to arbitrarily judge us in the end. That concept makes so little sense that I don't even know where to begin about how little sense it makes. It's so fraught with human projection that how it could possibly be regarded as "divine" is beyond me.

Delving into human consciousness in the grand scheme of things runs into the problem that human beings are bit players in the grand scheme of things. Spirituality tries to attach some meaning to our existence in the grand scheme of things, but if the history of the universe was placed on a 12 month calendar, humans occupy hardly a few seconds approaching midnight on December 31st.

There might be spiritual meaning to our existence, but it needs to take into consideration that our individual lives are just not that important.

So I try to trace back human consciousness to its beginning, to its source. Where did it come from? What is it in the grand scheme of things? How did the universe come from a place where human consciousness did not exist to get to a place where it did exist?

I think about how did this planet come from a place where life did not exist to get to a place where life did exist. The current theory is that all the naturally occuring elements required for organic life were present on this planet, as they are suspected of existing on numerous planets throughout the universe. The combination is not uncommon.

We had the "primordial soup", we had an atmosphere, and with all the conditions in place, energy, in the form of naturally occuring lightning, created the first amino acids, which became the building blocks for life. It's so simple and not uncommon that it is hypothesized that the universe is teeming with organic life.

Getting to sentience, much less human sentience and consciousness, is another matter. It may have been a long development of evolution for it to come into being, but what is its source? What is the ground out of which it was able to develop?

So I was just playing with the idea of how little we know. Almost 75% of the universe is completely unknown in what we're arbitrarily calling "dark energy" in affirmative pronouncement, as well as denial, of our ignorance.

Then I think of the theorized 4% of what comprises the observable universe, all we can detect, all that we know about. Much of it is known in various forms of electro-magnetic energy. 75% "dark energy". 4% known energy. My thought came out of thinking that dark energy isn't this one monolithic thing, that there are multiple, multiple, multiple types of "dark energy" as there are electro-magnetic energy, permeating the universe.

And as it may have been lightning that provided the energy to catalyze the formation of life on this arbitrary planet, I'm wondering if something similar might have happened to form sentience or consciousness, or human consciousness out of some refined form of what we're calling dark energy which permeates the universe. It's everywhere, it's here right now, we just can't detect it, just as we can't detect consciousness.

I'm seriously not proposing this at all seriously.

What I am proposing is that human consciousness is a form of something that is naturally formed by natural elements that exist in the universe, albeit exotic to our current scientific understanding. It may be rare. It may be unique in the specific form it has taken on this planet. But in the grand scheme of things it's not something uncommon or mystical.

Even in a spiritual interpretation, what we're deeming "spiritual" is something naturally occuring in the dark energy. Spirituality is the best scientific tool we have to investigate this natural phenomenon. That is what I think spirituality should be, not the garbage organized religions brainwash people to think and believe.

A spiritual investigation into the nature of the self, consciousness, and existence should not lead people to oppress, persecute, or denigrate other people. It should not try to teach people 'what is', implying that other beliefs are 'what is not'.

Now, for Buddhists, that ground of reality, consciousness, and existence is the ultimate reality, referred to as Buddha nature. It is the ultimate, the absolute – non-created, non-destroyed, non-dualistic, all things inextricably interconnected. The form Buddhism took on this planet, with its ideals of compassion and equanimity, was more or less a fabrication by living beings on this planet necessary to promote interest in these teachings of well-being and respect for other beings as a means of striving for enlightenment.

Is the essence of Buddhist teaching naturally formed? That's what I'm suggesting. But then there's a reason why Buddhism is so consonant with science, more so than God-based spiritualities. I'm not suggesting either way is right or wrong. Just what makes sense to me.

soundtrack:
1. Fireplace (REM)
2. The Smartest Monkeys (XTC)
3. Change It (live) (Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble)
4. She (Suede)
5. (Just Like) Starting Over (John Lennon)
6. Strawberry Fields Forever (Take 7 & Edit Piece) (The Beatles)
7. I Can't Imagine the World Without Me (Echobelly)
8. Rudy (live) (Supertramp)
9. One More Day (The Neville Brothers)
10. Tell Him (Lauryn Hill)

Blasphemy: 

I always find it perplexing that there is a perception of Buddhism that there is no God. And I don't think "Buddhists" themselves have given it much thought, and have simply rolled over and agreed with that outside, colonial perception. 

I think it's more accurate to say that Buddhism doesn't actively worship, as a specialized practice, an anthropomorphized version of God. It can even be argued, at the risk of insulting them, that Buddhism practices what the major monotheistic religions preach – that God cannot be known or rendered in human understanding. 

Looking for the concept of God in Buddhism, God is all things, all phenomena experienced by humans, truly universal, truly omni, and worship of God is an every day, every minute, every moment practice. Theoretically, at least, since in all religious constructs there is a break between what humans are supposed to do and what they actually do. 

The logic would involve God being universal, all-knowing, all powerful. That's something everyone can agree upon. So the easiest conception of God is that God is the universe. What can be more universal than the entire universe, and God cannot be less than that. 

As the entire universe, God is all-knowing as the universe knows itself. If God is unknowable to humans, it is reasonable to suggest that the way humans "know" something is not the only way there is to know something. 

Or another way to think about it is to think of my body as the entire universe. I know my body, how it works, how it feels, how it is, as a whole, better than any constituent part of my universe could know it. I am, of course, God, and at this scale, a human being would be smaller than a String Theory string (if an atom were the size of the solar system, a theoretical String Theory string would be as large as a single tree on earth).  

Encompassing all forces in the universe, God is all-powerful. No force in the universe can be greater than the force of the universe itself and all it contains. 

But this is all very big and abstract. I wonder how many religious types delve on the universe as a practical matter. We get images from Hubble Space Telescope from billions of light years away, but they are just photos, snapshots, and viewing them on the internet is different from the stretches of creative imagination necessary to even try to conceive of these things as real. It is the height of arrogance to simply brush off the immensity of the universe, and the extreme forces involved in stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic interactions whose electromagnetic evidence happens to reach our miniscule telescopes. 

What we can do as humans is apply these big concepts to what we do know as a matter of practical course – our lives, and this planet. If God is all the universe, surely God is everything on this planet, every molecule, every quanta of being, every thought and every idea to the very edge of human consciousness and sub-consciousness. How can God be any less? 

And from there is where Buddhism splits from the monotheistic conception of God by not putting a face, personality, or gender on God, i.e., making God concrete and knowable. And distinctively worshipable. You can have a relationship with God and feel holy, but treat your neighbor like shit, even though as God is universal, you should be treating your neighbor with like reverence. 

As an entity with a personality, God can have enemies. There can be human beings that aren't part of the "universal" rubric of God, which is now conveniently redefined not to be strict universality. You have subjectively identified heathen and infidels; you have heaven and hell, all concepts that stray from an objective universality of God. God is partisan. God is political. God is something less than the universe. And only humans do that.

Free Associating in the Free World:
The faster something goes, approaching the speed of light, the slower time moves. Theoretically, time would stop if the speed of light were attained, but nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and light is the only thing that can go the speed of light.

Stopped time may be one way of viewing eternity. Therefore, light, in its state of being, which paradoxically is a velocity, is eternal. "God" is eternal, so God=speed of light. I'm not stating this as conclusion, I'm just free associating. Just something bizarre to consider.

Black holes are super-massive objects whose gravity is so great that not even light can escape. Gravity affects space-time by curving it, and the more massive the object, the greater the curve. Light is unable to escape that extreme curvature of space-time caused by black holes.

An object falling into a black hole is observed to slow down in time, and at the point it hits the event horizon, the point of no return, the object will appear to stop, as if stopped in time, before redshifting and disappearing. I'm not sure I got that right. It's just theory anyway.

Does time stop? Is falling into a black hole eternity? An observer on the object falling into the black hole would observe no slow down in time at all. A theoretical observer who does not have physical integrity to be destroyed would experience being squeezed and stretched into the infinite curvature. No eternity, but an infinity. Curving and curving but never reaching an end. An asymptotic curve. Free association.

Is Pi asymptotic? You calculate Pi out and the number just keeps going and going, never repeating, never showing a pattern. At least so far. But you have the mathematical representation of Pi, and you also have the graphic representation of a circle. Is the further out on the Pi calculation just getting asymptotically closer, but never reaching the point on the circle where the measurement started, or is the reason Pi just keeps going and going because it already passed the point where the measurement started? I'm not losing any sleep.

Everything is relative to the observer. The observer falling into a black hole sees something different than the observer watching something fall into a black hole. Maybe the observer watching the mathematical value of Pi being plotted on a circle sees something different than the observer riding out the mathematical calculation of Pi.

And maybe Stephen Hawking was wrong in conceding that matter in this universe can never be "lost" to another universe, and there are no baby universes springing out from ours through black holes. Maybe observing from our universe, matter falling into a black hole will never be lost to another universe and there are no baby universes springing out from ours through black holes, but maybe observing from another universe (ours?) the Big Bang already happened. Haven't stranger things happened?

So I've been meditating on my brain. Thinking about it, contemplating it, keeping it in as sharp focus as possible. Grey matter, curved and looped, wrinkly, squishy, encased in my skull, in my cranium. Trillions, or in my case billions, of simultaneous electrical impulses, buzzing with life, like ants, to organize perception and reality.

I've been meditating on consciousness. Focusing on thoughts, the nature of thoughts, what are thoughts?, of perceptions, sensations. What is their reality? I don't want to take this for granted, I want to know. Or at least think about it or die trying.

I've been meditating on memory. Take an old photograph of, oh I don't know, let's say Amina. In my memory I recall the elements of the photo, what it looks like, but can I actually visualize it from this information in my mind? No, I can't. I can't close my eyes, and in the darkness see the photograph floating there, but then I draw on memory to recall the photograph, and I know precisely what it looks like, down to the moment I took it.

How about sound? Um, I've been listening to ELO's masterpiece "Out of the Blue" lately, so let's try the song "Turn to Stone". Queue it up in my memory and press play. Fade in, flanged synth, Jeff Lynne's trademark crisp acoustic guitar, hi-hat shuffling, enter vocals. That's interesting, it's all there. Vocals are loud and clear. The mid-range is a bit muddy with the guitars, but it's there. The bass is a little indistinct, and since bass below 70hz or so, I think, is more something you feel than can recall from memory, that's completely gone.

Well, that was an interesting, if inconclusive experiment.

Back to consciousness, I'm re-reading the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, Robert Thurman's translation with oodles of interesting background information. Try to get at consciousness by meditating on ultimately losing it. So many ways to die. A peaceful dying in sleep is the easiest to imagine reading the book.

I also entertain a gunshot wound to the head like Kurt Cobain, drowning after jumping off the Staten Island Ferry like Spalding Gray, having flesh flayed from bones like Hypatia, being in an unfortunate city targeted for a live human nuclear bomb experiment in the waning days of a war, being bled to death in a Khmer Rouge prison hospital, being mauled by a neighbor's Presa Canario dogs, and this can go on for a while, but that's about as long as I want this paragraph to go.

Death, the final loss of consciousness only occurs when some vital part of our physical mechanism fails to sustain what it's supposed to, fundamentally coming down to the brain, the heart, the lungs, or blood. I wonder what happens to time when we die. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead delineates a specific progression in the final loss of consciousness to death, but is it affected by the speed or violence of the interruption to the brain, heart, lungs, or blood?

What is it that I've had my entire waking life that fades and leaves? I used to look at my legs and toes and muse about how far away they looked. I wiggle my toes, and I just did that. What just did that? What was the connection from up here to down there?, what identifies that as my leg? This is when I still lived in New Jersey.

Now, what exactly was my point? Oh yea, fuck meditation. OMG, did I just use ELO in a meditation?!

Super Geek:
I used to . . . try to guess exactly one minute when I used to take public transporation regularly. Mind you, I don't bore easily. Myself, at least. I would look at my watch, note when the second reached 0, 15, 30, or 45, and then I'd go back to staring off into space. Then I'd try to look at it again in one minute, +/- 5 seconds.

+ or - five seconds is what I considered successful. If I guessed a minute was more than 65 seconds, then I thought my mind's current sense of time was too slow. If I guessed a minute was less than 55 seconds, then I thought my mind's current sense of time was too fast. The idea was to keep doing it and compensate for my wrong sense until my mind's sense of time was properly "calibrated".

You have no idea how freaky it is when you hit the minute on the second five or six times in a row, which happened only once. You're not counting, you're just trying to "feel" this very specific length of time. It doesn't seem too hard, it's only one minute, but to hit it precisely certainly is not a given.

Sometimes I would think consciously about it, asking, "now? now? now?", but it was surprising, or maybe not so surprising, how many times I'd start thinking of something else and then spontaneously snap back and look and it would be on the exact second.