I finished reading two books by Bart Ehrman that I bought in New Jersey last time I was there, Lost Christianities and How Jesus Became God.

He's not the only author I've read regarding the history of early Christianity, but I seem to have an affinity for his scholarship. To me, his appeal on the topic is similar to that of Carl Sagan to astronomy; an effective communicator of the basics.

I don't get the sense that he's necessarily trying to be controversial. Certainly he has an agenda but a lot of it is trying to push the boundaries of how people think about Christianity. And scholarship is just scholarship. Sure, there's good scholarship and bad scholarship, and with a controversial topic as Christianity in fact is, a lot comes down to opinion.

There may be a progression to Bart Ehrman's books. These two books I bought may be more his branching out beyond the basics. The basics are in his earlier books like "Misquoting Jesus" and "Jesus Interrupted" among others.

I might even suggest that his books seem to reflect the progression of his own personal discovery that his initial beliefs as a young, totally converted, Bible-thumping evangelical Christian were wrought with contradictions and inconsistencies. For God's telling of the ultimate truths of the universe, that shouldn't be so. It should be a neat little package that was incontrovertible, and the only people who could possibly disagree were certainly accursed heathen. 

As his studies into Christianity continued with an intent to enter the ministry, he was introduced to the scholarly historical reality of Christianity beyond dogma and blind faith. He did what most Christians don't do. He thought for himself and found the package wasn't so neat.

His early books are straight-forward. You can follow what he's saying because you can verify with your own Bibles (yes, even without a Christian bone in my body, I have two of my own copies of the Bible in New Jersey) what he considers problems. From there you can accept or reject his thesis, but it's pretty solid scholarship and logic as far as I'm concerned.

"Lost Christianities" and "How Jesus Became God" are more his branching out beyond the basics. They probe into areas that are necessarily more speculative. The former investigates the extant evidence of what "other" Christians believed before the Roman takeover of the religion. The power of the Roman Empire makes it easily credible that other understandings of Christianity would be effectively and efficiently suppressed and disposed of.

The latter looks at the development of early Christology and how it may have been influenced by existing or contemporary myths of the interplay between humans and gods. The idea of Jesus becoming God or being God wasn't wholly unique based on the wholly unique circumstances of the stories being told about him. They were formed within a context to explain what they didn't understand.

One point that Ehrman likes to pick at is how ultimately the Romans, in creating an orthodoxy, synthesized various contradictory ideas without explaining them. A big one is the assertion that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine; separate views originally held by different groups of Christians.

My personal snark on that contradiction boils down to whether Jesus shat and peed like the rest of us. Since he was fully human, of course he shat and peed. That's what humans do. And would Jesus's pee qualify as holy water? But the Romans also insisted Jesus was fully divine. So that must mean God shits and pees, too. Wonder what it smells like. I imagine floral bouquets, but that doesn't make sense. It must just smell like shit.

I don't know why I'm at all fascinated by the truth of Christianity; that it is largely based on myth and has only a little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus. Maybe I've always felt threatened by U.S. Christian hegemony which I didn't buy into, and it feels good to debunk it and knock it off its ideological throne.

Part of me wonders whether it's a past-life resonance where maybe I was Christian. Maybe it harkens all the way back to the few centuries after Jesus when the debates about his message were passionate and diverse.

So by my estimation I've been more or less useless and/or worthless to anyone in any meaningful manner for at least a good five years. Anyone who theoretically may make a claim against that, my response is that I haven't tried to be of use or worth to anyone. It wasn't my effort that made that so. I haven't made any effort for anyone else.

But even with suicide as my intended end, I'm still here now wasting space, creating waste, still contributing nominally to the economy by consuming. So selfish as I've established I am, what's in it for me?

The one unadulterated enjoyment I maintain is listening to music. With everything else falling away, I still listen to music almost obsessively. And it's so appropriate that my one last admitted attachment is to something so necessarily ephemeral. Whether it's a 3-minute pop song, a 10-minute prog rock or jazz song, a 30-minute album side, or 15-minute classical movement, the song ends, the enjoyment passes.

As such, it's easy. If you take it away, I have no problem giving it up. But if it isn't taken away, I indulge in it in all its harmless glory. Listening to and enjoying music never hurt anyone. It's still karma, I'm aware, and if I don't cut off the attachment aspect of it, it's something I'll still have to deal with in future lives in any one or many of innumerable possible ways.

Aside from that, I suppose I've just been reading to add to my selected understanding of the human experience on this planet through its history.

I may have reached the limits of Buddhist readings available in English through libraries and bookstores. I've bought available books that I've deemed important and I constantly re-read those. I maintain my personal mindfulness/dharma practice. Despite being of no worth to anyone else, that has been of worth to myself.

Early Christianity has been of interest, how it was formed and how it came to be what it is today. Looking at the history of early Christianity, it's surprising how it became what it is today, and not. Reading academic and scholarly studies of early Christianity, it's clear that modern Christianity is based on artificial mythologies; nothing or little based on teachings of an itinerant, apocalyptic Jewish preacher and probable miracle worker named Jesus.

But if it's all myth, how could it have become hardwired, literal fact of the truths of the universe for so many people? No one takes Greek or Roman or other cultural myths as literal. Of course it's far more complicated than anyone can sum up, but the brilliant stroke of having the Roman Fucking Empire take up the cause is probably of no little consequence.

I'm under the impression that Europe as a whole doesn't take Christianity as fanatically literal as the U.S. does. Many are very sincere about their faith, but there are also many who assume the supposed truths of Christianity because it's woven into the fabric of their culture. They don't question it because it's not important to do so. If they delved into the scholarship, they would probably be able to look at it critically, admit ignorance and agree with much of it.

I don't suppose scholarship will affect faith for at least another 500 years. It may be more than a 1,000 years before the scholarship is common knowledge and human beings can process it for what it is. I don't think the scholarship showing that Christianity has little to do with Jesus is any threat to Christianity.

Just because it's based on myth doesn't mean it's worthless. It has become its own institution and as much harm as it has caused, it has done a lot of good on the profoundest levels. It's just admitting that it's based on myth will be a hard pill to swallow for many, many generations.

Other histories I've read up on include Auschwitz, the arrival of the so-called Pilgrims, religious extremists possibly, on the Mayflower, the U.S. treatment of Lakota Native Americans and how their land was stolen, and the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The Auschwitz book focused specifically on that camp in the context of the Holocaust and embodies all the horrors one might expect. Poorly edited, though. The Mayflower book seemed pretty comprehensive and balanced. It doesn't seem to play politics and realizes that self-interest is the driving force in dire circumstances.

As for the Lakota and the Black Hills, it's impossible to stay away from the impassioned politics of the issues. As an American I sympathize with Native Americans, but certain white people will defend their actions to the end. My main beef about the book is that although it seems to sympathize with the Native American cause, it constantly refers to white people as "Americans" as opposed to the Indians, who aren't American?

I don't know why I got interested in the Julius Caesar book as soon as I saw it. Probably because it is such a famous historical event, and as much as the Roman Empire played in the development of Christianity, I was looking for insight into it.

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.

The Five Gospels

Over the past few years, I've been reading a lot on the so-called Christian "Gnostic" Gospels. Not to completely rehash and to oversimplify, they were the doctrinal losing side in the early Jesus movement over the debate about what Jesus taught.

Ultimately when the canon was compiled, these teachings were outlawed and suppressed for 1700 years, but have recently been uncovered with ongoing scholarship being done on them.

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene was uncovered in the late 1800s, while the bulk of the writings were uncovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in the late 1940s, and finally the Gospel of Judas, after a long journey which nearly destroyed it, was first published in 2006.

Also to briefly rehash, I might think my interest in the Gnostic Gospels might be part of this future life resonance theory I play with. If I am angling for a rebirth in South Korea, if any at all, I'm confident that even if I'm born in a Christian environment such as South Korea, I will be able to find my way back on my path.

The texts are readily available, along with more and more books being written on them for anyone interested and not in the mind control of the church. Anyone who is intrigued by the question "There's more (than what a Roman emperor endorsed as the official teachings of Jesus)?" can now find and read about the early Jesus movement and the arguments and controversies over the teachings that were raging.

I imagine that even if I were raised as a Christian in a future life (assuming what I shouldn't assume – that reincarnation is linear in time), I would find my way to the Gnostic Gospels. I'm fairly confident it is in my karma to be inquisitive by nature and to be one of the people to ask, "There's more?!".

Me: "Well, what is it?"
Christian: "It's heresy, blasphemy"
"But Jesus taught it?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. Anyway it's wrong"
"Says who?"
"The church fathers"
"Oh. OK. Who were the church fathers?"
"I'm not sure. It has to do something with the Roman emperor Constantine who convened the Nicene Council. You can Google it"
"OK, I will"
"On the other hand, maybe you shouldn't"

Much of the Gnostic Gospels focuses on the hidden, esoteric spiritual interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, as opposed to the moralistic, institutional, authority-driven interpretation of the current canon. Today, as must have been the case in the early Jesus movement, they appeal to a completely different character and psychological/spiritual make-up than those who favored the straight-forward and direct, and even political, nature of what became the canon.

I was surprised recently to realize that I've never actually read the four canonical Gospels except in portions. I only realized it upon finding a book called The Five Gospels.

The Five Gospels was the result of a project in the late 80s/early 90s by a group called the Jesus Seminar, consisting of about 200 biblical scholars who rendered a modern, scholar-friendly translation of the four canonical Gospels from an original Greek manuscript, plus the gnostic Gospel of Thomas from a Coptic translation from Nag Hammadi.

They then set out to present a scholarly consensus over any quote attributed to Jesus and the likelihood that Jesus himself spoke those words. Consensual certainty that he said something is printed in bold red, certainty that he did not is printed in bold black; and pink and grey are used for weighted votes in between relative consensual certainty.

The reason they included the Gospel of Thomas is that it is simply comprised of alleged quotes by Jesus with no narrative context. Since the project was focused on what Jesus likely actually said, they deemed it appropriate to subject Thomas to the test.

I would say it's a flawed work, for sure, but still fascinating. The criteria for putting words into the mouth of Jesus are based on narrow presuppositions imposed by the seminar. The voting method over a period of years also results in inconsistencies, which the authors reveal in the commentary.

Actually, never having read the canonical gospels didn't mean much. Just growing up in the U.S., just about all of the stories were familiar. It doesn't matter if you're Christian or not, if you grow up in the U.S., you're bombarded with Christian references your whole life.

(Even in the subtlest ways. In high school, a group of friends were playing Trivial Pursuit. Two of the participants were brothers, Mark and John Smylie. The question was what are the four gospels of the New Testament. One of the brothers on the other team rattled off "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John", and we were all blown away how they knew that as easily as any of the rest of us could name The Beatles. He casually pointed to his brother, "John", pointed to himself "Mark, and our dad's a pastor, if we had two more brothers, they would have been Matthew and Luke". And that's how I learned the names of the four gospels culturally. The only Luke I knew prior was Skywalker, son of Vader Anakin)

One thing I found fascinating was that just about any familiar quotation, repeated ad infinitum in U.S. culture, was voted black. Jesus likely never said those quotes, but were attributed to him by members of the later movement trying to push their interpretation of what he taught.

This is a good place to note that I realize even though the Gnostic Gospels appeal to me, they also are iterations of positions in a fervent debate. I think they are right and the canon got it completely wrong, but there are billions of Christians who disagree (no doubt Christians who don't even want it discussed or out in the open and would prefer the suppression and censorship to continue).

Also, just reading the red quotations, this Jesus character strikes me as someone enlightened, imparting radical wisdom that was intended to shake the normative sensibilities and mores of the day. I agree with the assessment of scholars that Jesus wasn't into institution building.

That seems to indicate to me that if he were alive today, he would rail against the institution of the Christian church. He would rail against the conformity, control and conservatism of the church. A red quote widely attributed to Jesus can be directed to many Christians today: You point out the sliver in someone else's eye while ignoring the timber in your own.

He wasn't about placating people or making people feel good about being moral and righteous. He was about shaking things up. If you thought something and mindlessly accepted it as the norm, he would say something to disturb you.

Something the Jesus Seminar posits, which I have no comment on whatsoever but think is quite funny, is that he ate well and drank freely. I think they call him a glutton and a drunkard.

To Christians today, those are vices to be eschewed, but they make sense to someone trying to shake the norms of society. I think he did live under Jewish law because that was the water in which he was a fish, but I think he constantly pushed their boundaries to the extent that the law was being abused by temple authorities.

And even if he was glutton and a drunkard, his teachings understood correctly were good. They aimed toward liberation. I'd take a good teaching by a glutton and drunkard over a bad teaching by someone self-professed to be moral and righteous any day. 

It seems to me natural now to be fascinated by Christianity, but it's not. I never was much interested in Christianity until the Gnostic Gospels. The vast majority of my exposure to Christianity was cultural – the devotional side of blind, uncritical faith which never resonated with me.

I did take a course at Oberlin which did critically cover the historical underpinnings of Christianity and I loved that course. Mostly because it didn't deal with the myth of Christianity, which is what most Christians today believe. Myth comprises the reality of most Christians because they for most part reject the scholarship, which aims at getting to the historical realities.

Future Life Resonances: Christianity

I grew up in the U.S., a Christian country, but nothing about Christianity ever rang true to me. As a youth, I recall being exposed to Sunday school. I even have an extant copy of the New Testament from a completely forgotten Sunday school teacher who apparently had taken to me. Touching, as she wrote a message to me in it, but it's just an anomaly to me now.

Back then, there was absolutely nothing known about the teachings of Jesus other than what was contained in the canon, promulgated by the Roman Empire. Shall I emphasize that point? Promulgated by the Roman Empire.

Since then, scholarship on the so-called "Gnostic Gospels" has come a long way, along with the discovery and multiple translations and analyses of the "Gospel of Judas". I actually didn't even know how vilified the Judas character was in the Roman/Pauline Christian canon that is dominant today.

So back to future life resonances. It did occur to me that being reincarnated in South Korea might mean being born into a Christian household. It isn't a major concern. I do believe that once firmly on the path, we will always find our way back to the path in whatever lifetime or circumstance.

Then I realize how much I've been interested in and reading about the Gnostic Gospels recently. I think I even mentioned that if those alternative gospels had been available and taught, I might not have been so turned-off by Christianity. They make sense in terms of divine insight, rather than the controlling brain-washing of canonical Christianity with its superficial morality.

I'm inclined to take this interest in this other side of Christianity that has been suppressed for 1700 years as also possibly a future life resonance. Maybe I'll be born in South Korea, maybe I'll be born into a Buddhist household, maybe a Christian household, maybe like in this life a non-religious household. But no matter, I think I'll still continue on this path, and if I'm born in a Christian household, I'll be karmically/subconsciously primed against the current Christian canon.

If karma really does have force, I'll still question canonical Christian hegemony even if surrounded by it, but now that the gnostic teachings and scholarship on them are available and being spread, I'm not at all concerned that I can still find my way onto the path, even if surrounded by Christianity.

I mentioned before how disappointed I was in reading Elaine Pagel and Karen King's conclusion in their otherwise incredible scholarship in their book "Reading Judas". They opined that what comprises the Christian canon needn't be revisited to include the recent findings in the gnostic gospels because of the centuries of guidance the canon has provided, ignoring the centuries of harm, destruction and suffering that has happened in the name of the canon.

And they are conveniently willing to ignore teachings of truth, or more accurately the ability of people to determine what is truth when presented with a full spectrum of divergent teachings. I don't necessarily condemn them for their opinion, but I definitely don't agree with it.

Aside from it being their opinion, it is also a reality that 1700 years of brain-washing is not easily erased. Current Christians versed in the canon are deeply convicted in their belief that anything outside of what was decided by a council (Nicene) appointed by a Roman emperor (Constantine – who might as well be George W. Bush as far as I'm concerned) as gospel is heresy.

"Revisiting the canon" is simply not an acceptable option according to the church and unthinkable to the vast majority of Christians. It's not unlike one physics professor I had in college who cut me off when I mentioned "faster than the speed of light", and wouldn't even consider my question if that was the basis of it. Scientific canon states nothing in the classical physical universe can go faster than the speed of light. It's still cosmic law, but physicists today are more open-minded and willing to consider thought experiments whereby the speed of light isn't the cosmic speed limit.

No, scholarship into the other teachings of Jesus that are being uncovered are likely to remain in the realm of academic scholarship, and not likely to be considered as part of the Christian faith anytime soon, whether or not it was, in fact, an aspect of what Jesus taught, which I think it was. While what modern Christians believe for most part has little to zero to do with what Jesus taught. It is what it is, I have no problem with their faith and belief and how they pursue it, but it's simply not what Jesus taught. They changed it and should own up to it, even if it means they made truth out of fairy dust.

Anyone who takes such scholarship seriously would be, like author and scholar Bart Ehrman, who was a Bible thumping evangelist in his youth, forced out of the church, voluntarily or not. He now considers himself an agnostic but writes in a solely Christian context, and I think that's kind of too bad. Reading the Gnostic Gospels, even I'm convinced that Jesus was a big deal with a radical spiritual message in his time.

If punk band Mission of Burma was onto something when they wrote "The Roman Empire never died/It just became the Catholic Church", then the Christian canon is not about the truth or the true teachings of Jesus, but about control and domination. And 1700 years of control and domination is a powerful thing. Powerful . . . "karma".

Actually, all I wanted to say in this post is that my recent exposure to so many things related to the so-called Gnostic Gospels, the alternate teachings of Jesus regarding true divinity (including these two documentaries: The Gospel of Judas and The Lost Gospels), might also be what I term "future life resonances", similar to geekiness about Korea.

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Future Life Resonances

So this blog has a label "future life resonances". To recap, "future life resonances" is a spin-off of "past life resonances", whereby under some flaky theory of reincarnation, we might suspect that aspects of our current lives and beings are the results, or resonances, of past lives by force of karma.

Karma, I very unscientifically propose, being an aspect of a natural energy substrate of the universe that is as unknown as the scientifically proposed dark energy. The form this natural energy substrate has taken with biological beings on this planet may be what we think of as consciousness or awareness. It's what enables all living beings to interact with our environment, from bacteria to human beings.

In the cycle of death and rebirth as envisioned by people who believe in reincarnation, karmic impressions are able to be transferred from one lifetime to future lifetimes. It's not scientifically testable. It is attested to by masters of various esoteric traditions. For laypeople, it's only intuitive in the most flaky way possible. "Intuitive in the most flaky way possible" is maybe a proper definition of "faith".

But whereas past life resonances look at our current lives and habits to think about what we might have been or what issues we might have dealt with in previous lives, future life resonances look at our current lives to imagine or project what or where we might be reincarnated in future lives.

Oh, and as far as I know, it's my creation. I didn't read or hear about it from anyone else, and it only occurred to me in relation to this Korea thing.

My implication is that my inexplicable attraction to South Korea so late in this life, and assuming this is late in my life (anyway it's later in my life), may be an indication that I'm angling towards a rebirth in South Korea, whether by choice or by force of karma.

I've had plenty of exposure to South Korean culture and people before, but never until now did it become a near obsessive focus. As early as college I had a Korean roommate for a semester, Myung Soo, and looking back at the people from whom I learned the most from college, he was one of them.

He had come to the U.S. when he was about 10 years old. He was very patriotic and spearheaded a Korean student movement to get Korea included in Oberlin's East Asian Studies department, which at the time only included Japan and China (I know, wtf?).

To the still marginal extent Korean studies are now included at Oberlin is because of his efforts and the stink that he raised. I know because I was at those meetings (drunk, if I remember correctly) with the all-white East Asian Studies faculty (I know, wtf?!) who tried to defend their hegemony.

How can you have an "East Asian" Studies department and not include Korea? Look at a map! They argued that most people were only interested in Japan and China, but that was probably more an expression that they, the all-white fetishizing faculty, were only interested in Japan and China. In the end, I think they realized they had to make more of an effort to promote Korean studies as well.

He was the kind of person who could change people's lives and he did. And he transformed himself, too. Initially, I was very unimpressed by him. He was very materialistic and superficial when I first met him, and I witnessed his changes over the years and after college he went back to L.A. and became a labor organizer. Far more impressive than anything I've done since college.

And, like all Koreans I've met, he was Christian. He actually turned my prejudice against Christianity around to realize all Christians weren't like mainstream white Americans, who I found to be frightening, hypocritical, racist bigots, spewing words of intolerance, hate and evil in God's name, while believing themselves to be righteous and godly.

My exposure to Christians had me thinking that it made sense to me that if Satan were to wage war against God, the most effective strategy would be to subvert and assume the word of God to spread evil, and Christianity was the very language of hate, intolerance and evil, while convincing the weak minded they were agents of God and good.

Myung Soo felled me on my ass just by saying, "Do you think I'm like that?". I hadn't thought of him as Christian, but he forced me to and to tear down that blanket view of Christians.

Still, nothing in my experience with him stirred any interest in Korea or Korean culture. For me at that time, it was all about Japan, a possible past life resonance. Aside from Myung Soo, I continued to have exposure to Korean culture and nothing about Korea resonated.

I met plenty of Korean/Korean Americans after moving to the Bay Area. Among them, I had a Korean American roommate who had graduated from Brown University and knew my brother ("You're Rob Li's brother?!", she said) and nothing Korean was inspired. I had a Korean co-worker who, when she called me inter-office, I would answer the phone in Korean (learned that from Myung Soo), and she swore my pronunciation was perfect.

Nothing until I came to Taiwan in 2006 and had a Korean classmate who introduced me to K-pop after I asked her to make me a mix CD of music she liked.

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The Root of All Evil - The God Delusion

I wouldn't say the views in this documentary reflect my own, but it's worth the watch for anyone striving for a balanced interest in the human condition and the role of humanistic rationality in relation towards religion, dogmatic religion, and how its far-reaching influence has become a scourge of humankind.

Richard Dawkins is an atheist, and after watching this, I think it's fair to call him a fundamentalist atheist. His language is virulent and his attitude unforgiving and not totally unlike religious fundamentalists. Even though I generally agree with his content, I'm not really comfortable with his form.

Even fundamentalist atheism can start looking scary in this documentary.

Fundamentalism by nature breeds intolerance. Even though fundamentalist atheism is relatively benign compared to the other kinds of religious fundamentalism that plague our existences, there's still a gnawing darkness that if these views were the dominant hegemony, the intolerance would still lead to persecution and violence. That, I think, is the legacy, manifest or not, of any fundamentalism.

I'm glad that Richard Dawkins targets religion based on evidence rather than spirituality in general. If a scientific atheist attacked spirituality, he or she would be attacking something they don't know and have no evidence for or against.

Science makes no claim about understanding spirituality or defining it. Spirituality is not in the realm of scientific inquiry, therefore a scientific attack on spirituality itself would be invalid, unscientific and likely dogmatic. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, "Absence of evidence (of god) is not evidence of absence (of god)".

Religion, on the other hand, provides plenty of evidence of its nature through human behavior and history. It is a human phenomena, and is reasonably subject to a science-like analysis and scrutiny. It's not hard science; no laws can be derived from Dawkin's inquiry. But he can rationally point to characteristics and concrete results of religion, and argue against its validity or value to humanity.

And I think what he portrays has a point. Religions, or aspects of religions manipulated in an aggressive, intolerant and dogmatic way, can rain untold suffering upon innocents who the general idea of religion are meant to protect.

If you're just trying to be good and make an honest living, that's no defense against religious fervor if something you do offends their religious sensibility. ( <-- I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, -ed.)

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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The Adjustment Bureau (2011, USA)

Guess I should write this up now after the "The Family Stone" experience. I recently watched about the last hour of it on HBO and found the concept interesting, even if the ending was predictably typical Hollywood. And as I caught the first half hour today and watched most of it to the end, I've seen the whole film.

And as a 2011 movie, I'm in danger of being up-to-date on something! Or not.

When I watched the last hour of the movie – which was the intriguing part; if I had watched from the beginning, I would have changed channels – I admitted that I do have to give Hollywood credit for stretching the imagination. Of pushing our minds into thinking about the possibilities, rather than just accept physical life and reality as it presents itself. 

After seeing the whole film and putting all the pieces together, I'm not quite so impressed, but there are things worth mentioning. 

Basically, heaven, or the heavenly realm, is portrayed as a corporate bureaucracy. God is referred to as "the chairman". Angels, members of the adjustment bureau, are heaven's acting agents on earth and they dress in suits and have wage scales and just do their jobs. Heaven itself is a corporate office building. 

On one hand, I want to say this portrayal of heaven is not very imaginative, but on the other hand I want to recognize that maybe the filmmaker is saying something about our current times. 

Heaven isn't, in fact, a corporate bureaucracy, but as corporations basically dominate everything on our planet today, it's saying this is the model we can all (sadly) relate to today. If this film was made in China a thousand years ago or during the Roman Empire, the setting would be of a different paradigm. Heavens are changing paradigms, as is any concept of "God".

Anyway, there is a God and the chairman has a plan for humankind and it's written out in magical books that all of the "angels" of the adjustment bureau have which tracks out timelines of possible events and futures. 

The adjustment bureau "angels" (and their thuggish corporate goons) influence events in the earthly realm to occur according to the plan. If an event goes off plan, they intervene to put things back on track. They're part Twilight Zone, part Men in Black, part their own thing. They don't curtail freewill, per se, but just give humans encouragement to make the right decisions. 

It all goes wrong with the two main subjects in this film, who meet and fall in love. But their love is against the plan, so the adjustment bureau sets out to correct the situation. But it's not so easy to keep soulmates apart. Because in the current version of the plan, they have separate destinies. But in previous versions of the plan, things were different, and some things aren't so easily simply erased.

There's an interesting metaphysical realm to this film whereby the adjustment bureau can transport themselves in the earthly physical realm using doorways, which to them are substrates to other disjunct places in the physical realm to help them execute their duties.

It's a play on reality and ideas of fate and destiny. Is destiny a prison that we are locked into by some universal "god", or are we really making our own decisions of where we go and how we end up?

It's not that deep, it's sophomorical, and I'd barely pass this film with a nominal fresh 6 out of 10 tomatoes. I recommend it to people who are numbed to accepting Hollywood films as entertainment. A date and then go have dessert afterwards with a discussion that doesn't touch on the movie.

For some reason, I just didn't want to let December pass with only one entry posted. It shouldn't matter, and it doesn't. But this blog is the last connection I have with some existence outside of my head. It's the last place where I'm leaking into the material world, where there is any proof of my existence.

I'm not sure why any such proof is necessary. It's not for me, I know I'm still here. I'll know when I make a push to not be. It's like part of a contract with existence, having existed. It would be rude to existence, the privilege existence has given me, to not affirm it as long as I still exist.

I've continued to read interesting stuff that I've made strange connections with and between. Something about the Christmas season always has me ending up reflecting on Christianity, and this year I found and started reading Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity in a bookstore. I haven't finished it, and may not since the last time I was there I couldn't find it. 

It's a scholarly work, so it examines and questions and looks at evidence and facts objectively, as much as possible, to come to theories or conclusions. Reading Judas looks at the development of the writing of what became the canonical New Testament gospels, set against what was going on socially at the time, which was a lot of turmoil and disagreement and distress.

Any uniformity or consensus Christians today believe existed in the early Jesus movement was a brainwashing fiction that started as early as Paul, even while he himself was an extremely controversial figure in the movement. Scholars believe that rifts were huge between different groups who were preaching diverse meanings about the stories circulating around this Jesus character.

What I get out of it is that The Gospel of Judas was written from a certain political stance within the disparate Jesus movement, critical of an opposing stance on particular issues that were being argued. But in the same way, the canonical gospels were also doing the same thing, and the book analyzes how the Jesus story develops and gets embellished from gospel to gospel to support the stance of a particular side of the disagreements.

In the end, one side won and the other side lost. Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian in the 4th century and formed the Nicene Council to come up with the canon. The Roman Empire became the Roman Catholic Church (as Mission of Burma tells it) and an entire side of Christianity was suppressed and wiped from history and only recently recovered in the 20th century with the discovery of the library at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Judas and to some extent the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The emphasis is on the mess that was the Jesus movement in the first few centuries following Jesus's death. And because one side won and the other side lost, Christians today only know one side of the story and don't realize the diversity of belief into the meaning of Jesus's death that existed and was being argued. They've been brainwashed to completely reject those other works.

And I connect this to another book I read at the library, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. In short, the book is a first person account of a disaster that occurred on the upper slopes of Mt. Everest in May 1996, when 12 people ultimately ended up losing their lives in relation to the incident.

The connection is that the description of events turned out to be very controversial with various parties claiming differing versions of events. Adding in the altitude that rendered rationality questionable at best, no one really knows what happened up there, just as no one can authoritatively define what was going on with the Jesus movement in those first few centuries.

The internet is rife with commentators taking sides and vehemently opining and pointing condemning fingers when . . . they weren't there. They don't even know what it's like to be in the Death Zone on Everest and exercise little imagination to try.

It was a mess on Everest. It was a tragedy and bad decisions were made, but I think every individual did his or her best at any given moment. Krakauer does point out bad decisions, but I don't think he was blaming anyone or pointing fingers, but that's how other parties took it and it became a very public feud (not part of the controversy is Krakauer's condemnation of the asshole South African team and the reckless and uncooperative Taiwanese team that were on the mountain at the time. I take it those are accepted facts).

It was very emotional. It was strangely emotional for me reading it. Part of it is the connection of Everest with Tibet. But more of it is the drive of some people to climb Mt. Everest. Are these people nuts?

Now I've did my share of doing dumb in my day, putting myself recklessly into situations that were potentially harmful or dangerous. I understand the drive to push oneself to one's limits or even beyond – my limit being meager compared to anyone who even thinks of attempting Everest.

That's what cycling was all about. I cycled to climb. It was all about climbing relentless hills and hammering on through any hurt, and it never stopped being a thrill getting to the top of some challenge. And once I stopped being able to do hills because of age or alcoholism or diet, cycling became boring. Or at least something different.

I've mentioned my two San Francisco Marathons before, on the course before the organizers changed it because elite runners were threatening to boycott because the course was so hard. I admitted to myself after the second one that I wasn't emotionally prepared for it (not to put too fine a point on it, I wasn't emotionally prepared to run that second marathon).

It wasn't traumatic, but it haunted me for a whole month hence, and every day I spent 45 minutes to an hour obsessively going through the entire course in my head. I think I even got on my commuter road bike once and rode the entire course through. And it did effectively put an end to my running. I started cycling because my knees weren't recovering.

But to climb Mt. Everest? That's really rolling dice with your life. You sign up to climb Mt. Everest, there is no guarantee you're coming down alive. There's no guarantee you're coming down at all.

And I'm making this strange connection in my mind that suicide is my Everest. Pushing into unknown territory that may end in tragedy or a pay-off that no one else but a select few can hope to appreciate. Pushing towards suicide for a spiritual goal is . . . gambling with my life.

I would never think to climb Everest, I've felt altitude sickness at 18,000 feet in Tibet and there's no way I can imagine attempting 20,000, 24,000, 29,028 feet. That would be . . . suicide. But that's where I understand the drive of these people. That's why I felt emotionally involved in their attempt and why it felt personal when it became a tragedy.

Another book I just found at the bookstore that I want to start reading is The Essential Gnostic Gospels, a compilation which includes the Gospel of Judas. This is a collection of works and ideas that existed in the early Jesus movement that was suppressed by Constantine, the Roman Empire and the Nicene Council. The ideological losers.

This is the book that makes me separate Jesus from what Christianity became, because the Jesus portrayed in what are now known as the Gnostic Gospels is a character that makes me realize Jesus was really a big fucking deal in his time. The things these followers recorded make me feel he was on an elevated spiritual plane.

When exposed to canonical Christianity, I feel like I'm trying to be brainwashed. I should be impressed by walking on water or miracles . . . why? If he did, then he did and if you saw it, you saw it. Maybe I'd be just as amazed as seeing someone dribble a football (American). I'm more impressed when Thich Nhat Hanh, who has a deep respect for Jesus, said, "The miracle isn't walking on water, it's walking on land". That's shocking!

I should want heaven why? I should fear hell why? Such simple delineations which made me feel like they were trying to hoodwink me into something that didn't make any sense. Good? Evil? What the fuck?

And I shouldn't wonder the teachings in the Gnostic Gospels are also kabbalistic and buddhistic. The antithesis of the closed-minded exclusivity of what became Christianity – you're either with us or against us.

So many ways that Jesus's effect on the world went wrong, but from my initial readings of some of the Gnostic Gospels, I'm more convinced of one thing Christians got right, which is that Jesus was a big fucking deal. If they got his true teachings embodied in the Gnostic Gospels, that would be even better.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 3:36 p.m.

Abraham is a pure embodiment of kindness and generosity. In kabbalistic terminology, his connection is with the Sefirah of Chesed. The energy of judgment and severity associated with the Sefirah of Gvurah is foreign to him – and that is precisely what the Adversary has revealed as an opening. As a foundation of the spiritual circuitry that must be flawlessly constructed if the redemption of humanity is ever to be realized, Abraham must be made a complete soul. That is the purpose of this last trial, as the Zohar makes clear.

"There was no judgment in Abraham previously. He had consisted entirely of kindness (Chesed). Now water was mixed with fire; kindness was mixed with judgment (Gvurah). Abraham did not achieve perfection until he prepared to execute judgment and establish it in its place." – The Essential Zohar, p. 148

This passage is in regard to the story of Abraham whereby the Creator demands that he make a sacrifice of his son, Isaac. I think – I'm no expert on biblical stories. I just have vague recollections of bits and pieces I've heard. And in "The Essential Zohar", the chapter name is "The Binding of Isaac".

The Sefirah (or Sephirot) mentioned are described differently by different sources, but I gather that they are energy states between the ultimate divine and material, human existence. They describe humanity's "distance from God", which is also a concept in Sufism. So they separate human from the divine.

There are about 10 Sephirot, and from the divine down, they each describe an energy state removed from the divine state. Or in reverse, they are like a ladder to be climbed towards the divine. Several of the Sephirot are directly associated with certain Jewish patriarchs, and here, Abraham is associated with Chesed, or mercy, sharing, loving-kindness.

Abraham is described as incomplete because he is purely Chesed, without a drop of Chesed's "negative" counterpart Sefirah, Gvurah, which is judgment or restriction.

The Adversary mentioned above is part of the divine mechanisms. Angels who are testing God's creation, partly out of spite for being told that Adam was closer to God than the angels. The Essential Zohar likens them to criminal defense attorneys, who might seem to be despicable, defending criminals and degenerates, but they serve a vital function in the justice system by creating balance. They ensure the legal process maintains the highest standards to protect citizens from possible abuses or over-zealous prosecution.

They see Abraham's perfect Chesed as a possible fault and request permission from the Creator to test his faith – would he maintain his faith when asked to do the unthinkable? So the Creator commands this perfect believer to make the ultimate sacrifice of his own son, who was born after much difficulty.

Abraham passes the test with flying colors, but in doing so, his being is infused with Gvurah, which was necessary to offer Isaac as a sacrifice until the Creator stopped him at the last second. Having the energy states of Chesed and Gvurah, Abraham is described as having his soul complete.

I love the description of the Sefirah as divine circuitry to connect humanity with the divine, angling for the ultimate redemption of humankind in the Garden of Eden.

What I get out of these concepts is that the Jewish patriarchs created the circuit pathways up the ladder of Sephirot for all humanity, all following generations. Abraham completed that particular connection for all of us so that we don't have to by ourselves. All we have to do is acknowledge Abraham's accomplishment within ourselves.

For example, living in a major urban city, I witness a lot of behavior that can be described as unmindful or even stupid. If I were 100% compassionate, I would cow down to such behaviors and just let them be and not be critical or judgmental.

But that's not necessarily the best course of action. Sometimes it's better to act in a way that's rude to them or even threatening to try to bring to their attention that they need to be mindful, too. That's Gvurah.

The intention must be correct, i.e. balanced with Chesed. If it's just Gvurah, then it's aggression or spite or anger. If the intention is compassionate, then an aggressive act is balanced with Chesed.

Abraham completed that circuit for me, and to the extent that I have it, I am grateful to Abraham.

I think these ideas can be linked with karma. Regarding the theory of reincarnation and karma, we don't take anything with us from one life to a subsequent one except our karma. And the establishment and recognition of the sephirotic circuitry is karma. It's one more step up the tree of life.

I saw the sun today!! I even sallied forth into it!!! I couldn't believe it when I craned my neck looking up from my window, which otherwise looks out into an alley, and saw evidence of blue skies. This entire past week was completely rainy or cloudy. I kept track.

I didn't know what I wanted to do out there. I was still too suspicious to try to get on my bike because it still could cloud over quickly and start raining. I thought of going up to Danshui where I've decided should be the site of my next attempt, or I could go to the library and re-read more of The Essential Zohar.

I went out realistically thinking that I would end up in the library, but for all the resistance in me against going to Danshui, I rebelled and pushed myself towards that option and was finally on a bus towards the MRT that would take me to the northern-most station on the red line.

The MRT loosely follows the Danshui River northward and takes about 30 minutes to the terminal station. From there, it's still a bit of a hike to the mouth of the river where it empties into the Taiwan Strait – open seas. I'm not sure I would call today's trek a dress rehearsal; more just scouting out coastline locations.

And I did stand on the sand of the shoreline. The surf was rough and I wondered if I could even make it far enough out so that I would be taken out to sea and not pushed back to shore by the waves. I felt I didn't want to do it. I felt I couldn't do it. But I have to do it.

And if I do it, I confirmed this was a good location. I walked along the beach towards the touristy Fisherman's Wharf area. The sun was setting in the west and it was a bit windy, but not chilly. I couldn't believe it wasn't raining.

The midrash teaches that when Moses stretched out his hand over the waters, nothing happened. It was only when one man actually walked out into the waves that the Red Sea parted – but not until the water had reached his neck and he kept walking. Then and only then was certainty in the tools of Kabbalah really made manifest . . . Before we can live in this universe in a meaningful way, however, we should rid ourselves of the belief that we are helpless human beings about to drown in a stormy sea. – p. 107, The Essential Zohar

I love how this scene contrasts Christian portrayals, whereby Moses dramatically stretches his noble hand outward and by the grace of GOD the waters of the Red Sea part and he leads his withered and weathered people across. Here he stretches out his hand and nothing happens. Um, Moses?

It's not even Moses that heads into the water, it's "one man".

I jest. One man can be interpreted as the unity of the chosen people, that it's when all the people believed and were certain in their belief enough to just head into the surf that the Creator's miracle was manifested.

It wasn't the prophet Moses leading his unenlightened followers, it was the entire nation that manifested the miracle. I think this chapter was written about certainty as a requisite energy or attitude in the pathways to the divine.

I think it was written that the Jews left Egypt with their "weapons", and the Zohar interprets "weapons" as miracles, but access to these miracles was contingent upon certainty that they were thus armed. They had to be confident and positive.

There was a very slight drizzle in my neighborhood after I got off the bus coming back from Danshui, but it didn't develop into a full-blown rain.

In the study of Kabbalah and the Zohar, we begin to see that any activity that connects us with another dimension of consciousness – be it drink, drugs, sex, meditation or prayer – draws Light to us. Rarely, if ever, is abstention recommended by the Zohar in regard to any of these vehicles. Rather we are guided to recognize temperance as the appropriate approach. To deserve a greater amount of Light, we must work on and strengthen our spiritual Vessel. If we allow ourselves to "imbibe" large amounts of Light without having done that work, we will not be able to contain what we receive. We will become "drunk", incapacitated, and allow chaos free rein. Noah's sin was not in the physical act of drinking, but in drinking's metaphorical connotations. His drunkenness represented connection to a more intense level of Light than his spiritual Vessel could tolerate. - p. 104, The Essential Zohar

It was interesting coming across this passage after the last post (I'm re-reading the book at the library, copying parts). I think I had been flirting unintentionally with alcohol poisoning, leading to how I got to be feeling, but perhaps also exceeding my "spiritual" tolerance.

The passage reminded me that even through this downward spiral of maybe drinking myself to death, that I need to keep in mind what is important and try to keep certain "channels" clear. That's another thing I like about Kabbalah – its explanation of channels to the divine; energy paths similar in Tibetan Buddhism.

The "amount of Light" we can handle is also a concept I learned about in college as "spiritual aptitude". Buddhism in general reflects this idea as "expedient means", whereby the Buddha – also Jesus according to the gnostic teachings – identified who was ready for what level of teachings, and taught selectively.

Don't even try to teach kabbalistic ideas of the first five books of the Old Testament to a white, conservative Republican in the U.S., among others, because their spiritual aptitude is so low that they can only be allowed the dimmest amount of Light through a literal interpretation of scripture. It's still Light, however, so just let them follow their path. At least they have some meager sense of spirituality in their karma. And all of us who believe in these ideas were once at that point.

At first, I thought the above passage was making an analogy between drinking and getting drunk with the amount of Light one has the spiritual aptitude for and taking too much, and that they were different things. I thought it meant my drinking should be seen as an analogy of what I'm doing spiritually.

But it's not an analogy, it's literal and interconnected. The passage prima facie states that drinking has a spiritual dimension and abstention is not the purpose of the teachings.

Even through my drinking, I have to maintain awareness of my spiritual energies and not fall into chaos, which my last post seems to hint at. "Wasting away in my apartment" is chaos. It's losing the meditation.

I recognize that nothing about Kabbalah justifies drinking myself to death. It's a risky path even for me, but it's one that I've tried to keep narrowly well-defined. The most important thing for me about moving towards death is to not let chaos take over.

I wonder if the La Niña phenomena is the reason for particularly rainy years in Taiwan. This year has been one of them, similar to my first two years here. The interim two years weren't rainy and I remember them being pretty nice. This summer it rained just about every day in the afternoon like monsoon rains. And personally, I haven't seen much sunlight in quite a while. I suspect it has something to do with La Niña.

The past few weeks – I haven't been counting – but at least two weeks have been block cloudy or rainy. Yesterday was a rare sunny day and I decided to take my road bike out in the evening. Even riding has become a bore to me, but I just rode casual out to the confluence where the Keelung River empties into the Danshui River, which then continues northward to empty into the Taiwan Strait.

The significance of going to the confluence of those rivers is that it feels like a large body of water there. The Danshui is already pretty wide by then, being the end result of the Dahan, Xindian and Jingmei rivers; and where the Keelung River waters are finally added, it's quite a large basin and feels more oceanic than just sitting by a riverside.

Confusion. Conflict. Don't want. Must. Where I've led my life.

I stayed there for a while, taking in the vibe of being by the water, simulating the feeling of what I want to do. I was conflicted. I don't want to do this. I have to do this. It is where I've led my life. If I decide against it, all roads forward look bad. Really bad.

Not just difficult, not just challenging, but they put me in a bad place. They take me out of the light and into the darkness. It's not that I don't think I can handle the darkness with these years of mindfulness training, but I don't think I have the strength to maintain myself in this kind of darkness that can get worse and worse to the point where I can get lost in mental illness and lose all the training.

I'm reading a book I found in the public library on Kabbalah, the so-called mystical aspect of Judaism. The book is The Essential Zohar: The Source of Kabbalistic Wisdom and it's been a while since I've read a book that made me feel spiritual after reading it.

What's special about this book is that it explains the Zohar, the main book of Kabbalah, as applying outside the Jewish tradition while still drawing on the Jewish references of the Torah. The difference between this book and other books on Kabbalah and Zohar is that it's not just Jewish. There isn't an insider-outsider aspect. This book emphasizes that Kabbalah wisdom applies to anyone seeking divine truths, and with this kind of premise in the author's mind I found from a Buddhistic perspective this all fits in perfectly with my understanding of Buddhist understanding. It's a universal teaching of spiritual or divine wisdom.

An interesting aspect of this book is that the Zohar claims that the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the first part of which is the Torah, is coded wisdom. If you just read it straight, it's possible to get nothing out of it but ancient stories (the first five books of the Christian Old Testament is pretty much the Torah verbatim, distorting it out of its Jewish origins and transplanting it in a Christian context). The Zohar decodes the Tanakh and explains all the symbolism in terms of what the Creator intended. This book in a way is a decoding of Zohar to apply to spirituality in general so that it is inclusive of anyone on a spiritual path. As such, the decoded Tanakh, via the decoded Zohar fits in suitably well with a Tibetan Buddhistic understanding of the universe.

I wish I could go into some detail but that might lead to a need for a deeper explication and that would just be a burden, I shouldn't wonder. You have to take my word for it. But a recent moment I had with the book is a passage where the author says that divine blessings will only come to anyone who sincerely studies the Torah (paraphrasing). I'm not Jewish, I don't study the Torah in any conventional sense, but I thought that if that statement were right, then I should consider myself as someone who studies the Torah. And in the next sentence, the author confirms that by studying the Torah, it's not literally studying the pages of the Torah, but anyone seeking truth to the light of the divine (paraphrasing).

The Jewish scriptures are all code according to the Zohar. Which means when the Jews are "the chosen people", Jews are code for people on the spiritual path no matter what faith. And Jews who aren't on the spiritual path can't be considered of "the chosen people". It's pretty radical stuff which rings very true to me, but then I remember that Kabbalah is described as "mystical", and as opposed to religious orthodoxies, mysticism has generally been looked down upon through the ages.

Sufism, the mystic sect of Islam is largely discarded and persecuted by Shiites and Sunnis. Christianity's Gnostic Gospels are ignored by the mainstreams, but I've read some of the Gnostic Gospels, including the recently discovered and published Gospel of Judas, and if they had taken hold or had been included in the canon, I'd have a different opinion about Christianity. The Gnostic Gospels describe the Jesus story in terms of the divine, rather than . . . blind faith towards what facially just doesn't make any sense. For me, the Jesus story as described in the Gnostic Gospels makes divine sense.

You know, when I wrote before how we all need to care for the people around us, I kinda thought that was a crock. And even though Ritu's suicide taught me that, I'm under no delusion that my suicide will convey that to anyone.

I'm watching a National Geographic series called "Meet The Natives", where a primitive tribe of Pacific islanders are given video cameras and flown to England (the natives) to do a reverse documentary sorta thing, filming our contemporary society from their point of view. They do much of the commentary.

It pleased me that in one town, their message to the people they met was just that. Care for each other, take care of each other. So maybe I'm not that way off. It's a deep thought. I thought I got it before, but it took a friend's suicide for me to get it, and I still think I don't get it. I'm still trying to think deep what it means to care for each other, take care of each other, when that is not really at the top of the food chain of our values.

And strangely, on an aside, I think that was the center of Jesus' ministry, his message of love that has been largely lost by the organized church. When really the deepest spirituality is as simple as that.

I've managed to cut back on drinking a little bit. Instead of buying a bottle every other day, I'm buying a bottle every third day, and it may be making a difference. I don't know. It might be just a coincidence with other factors.

I've gotten back my equilibrium for now, as futile as I realize it is now. But it's good because I'm more comfortable that my decisions will be made with a clearer mind.

Funny thing at work is that nothing has changed since my co-copy editor gave notice, and it's impossible for nothing to change. It seems to me the boss is totally trying to ignore the consequences of his quitting. Inconceivable! I still see myself quitting when he realizes that he has to ask me to do more, and I won't. It's all in the future unknown, so I won't speculate anymore what's going on.

One thing that I won't speculate on, though, is that I am done. No best case scenario will change the fundamentals of what I really want to happen.

I had an ideal age I wanted to die, coincidentally it was the age Ritu died, and I steamrolled right past it. But then I had an absolute, ultimate age I didn't want to get past, and I'm there. Getting past this age would be the most devastating, life-questioning thing I can think of. And I don't want that. None of us want that, right?

Dampening emotional considerations, I go through an inventory of my life, and there isn't anything that can happen, anything someone can say that would make me say, "oh, I want to live". And everything tells me that suicide would accomplish what I would want to accomplish, from the good points to the bad, from what I can control to what I can't, from who would get it and who wouldn't.

I had a dream last night, and from that dream I think I know how it feels like to be just about to be murdered in cold blood. I admit I emotionally panicked, although outwardly I was keeping my cool ("Um, guys, a little help!"). The last thing I remember before waking up was feeling the blood in my veins literally feel like it was turning to ice.

I have no idea what the point of all this is. I've been here before, and I don't like how it has turned out before.

Insomnia's back? That would totally suck. I woke up 10 a.m. Friday, worked a full-time shift that evening, couldn't sleep at all afterwards, Saturday went on a photostroll in the morning, followed by an unwise 47-mile ride. Fell asleep at 9 p.m. Saturday out of pure exhaustion, woke up 3 hours later and still can't sleep. Fuckall.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27 - Morning photostroll. Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super.

The Living Mall

Part of the old Songshan Taiwan Railway repair workshop.

The entire city block north of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (the curve of the roof is visible at the bottom of Taipei 101) is an empty lot.

Levels of traffic. Long zoom.

Nanjing E. Rd. MRT ongoing construction.

Neighborhood noon market.

Retail space available.

Furthermore, part of the reason I couldn't sleep was severe cold-like symptoms that immediately went away once I got outside (and which also curiously went away during morning sitting). Rehash: I had to move out of the first apartment I lived in Taipei due to a mysterious, severe allergic reaction to being in the apartment, which always went away once I went outside.

Seriously, if I were the least bit important, I would think I would be God's ball of yarn. Which makes God a cat, mind you.

I rang in Christmas by watching National Geographic's program on the recently published "Gospel of Judas." Christmas so often turns out to be a time to question the underpinnings of the Christian faith. Not that there's anything stable about the underpinnings of the Christian faith, the miracle is that the Christian faith remains, despite all contradictions and cracks in the foundations.

But the Gospel of Judas really emphasizes the repression of true Christianity to support a single orthodoxy promoted centuries later by the Romans, a regime which has as much credibility to me as George W. Bush would in establishing the Gospels.

Today's 47-mile ride really was unwise after being sick and not building up to a significant ride. But I did find a new riverside bikeway along the right bank of the Dahan River.

A year and a half ago, I ventured along the left bank of the Xindian River to its end where it flowed into the Danshui River. That's where that bikeway ended due to construction. Since then, the construction obstructing the bikeway has been completed and the bikeway has been opened and it continues along the Dahan River, which also empties into the Danshui River at the same place as the Xindian River.

Of course, I had to find out how developed the bikeway was, and it went pretty far, almost to the end of Taipei County in that direction, where I had been on the other bank of the Dahan River. So I went all the way to the end, got back on surface roads and found my way to the other bank of the Dahan River and returned to Taipei that way.

I forget where it started getting hard. My feet in my clipless shoes started to hurt on the return, which is pretty typical. I think my 10-year-old-plus shoes weren't designed for comfort. But my leg muscles started seizing just as a I reached the bridge to take me across the Danshui River back to Taipei. And then I got a flat just as I crossed the bridge.

Well, as many times as I've had to fix my rear wheel recently, I replaced the inner tube in record time, and I guess the break did my leg muscles well since I was able to sprint home, getting back at 4:59 p.m. just in time for "In Plain Sight". TV rules my life.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1:28 p.m. - Left bank of the Xindian River. All Ricoh Caplio R4.

1:36 p.m. - Dahan River right bank. Reaching the north end of the left bank of the Xindian River, the bikeway makes a 90 degree turn directly onto the right bank of the Dahan River and heads back south. Both rivers drain at this point into the Danshui River. Note the tower under construction at the right. That's across the water and I'll pass it on the way home.

2:19 p.m. - Eventually the Dahan riverside bikeway hits construction as it continues to be built, and transfer to surface roads is required.

2:39 p.m. - River at the far end of Taipei County (Yingge township?) and bird detail. 

3:05 p.m. - Even at the end of Taipei County before entering Taoyuan City, Taipei 101 is visible. Extreme Caplio R4 digital zoom for proof in case you don't believe me.

3:22 p.m. - South and north view from the Dahan River left bank bikeway. After the ordeal of finding the way from the right bank, the left bank bikeway is complete all the way to the end in Xinzhuang. My shoes were killing me by this time. At least I had the pretty light of riding north.

3:40 p.m. - Taiwan Railway tracks alongside the new High Speed Rail tracks.

4:01 p.m. - Taipei County, new bridge construction along the Erchong Ecological Park where I've ridden before.