For me, there isn't any disparity going from spiraling mental health to the overt religious directions of the past six months or so. And again, I have problems with describing the left turn as "religious", similar to having a problem with identifying myself as "Buddhist". 

It's "religious" only to the extent that that's a convenient reference for description. To me, it has nothing to do with "religion", it's just me and my relationship to reality, existence, and the world; which is, not ironically, my definition of religion.

To me, my deteriorating mental health was never completely separate from my "religious leanings", just different perspectives. It's not even that one was negative and defeating and the other was positive and reinforcing. What fueled my mental health descent is the same thing that sustains my religious (my definition) inquiry and pursuit (religion is less about faith or worship). A manifestation of my mental health decline becomes tools for the inquiry. 

Furthermore, these two aspects are not mutually exclusive; it's not a matter of I was that way and now I'm this way. They co-exist and feed each other and alternate dominance, requiring a broader definition and acceptance of both. 

What it boils down to is that my tenuous mental health involves my inability to accept and deal with life and physical reality as it has been presented since I was born; this matrix, this web, this menagerie, this reality that I've never accepted as self-conclusive and real. 

In turn, the religious pursuit is a proactive inquiry into the nature of that which I'm unable to just accept, informed by metaphysics, Buddhist cosmology and theory, psychology, astronomy, scientific cosmology, post-modernism, astrophysics and quantum mechanics (what little I can understand), and . . . metaphor. 

Either way, really. Mental hospital or monastery is fine. But just living life, although still possible and even attractive, is empty and unappealing.

I'm not feeling the probability that I'll give notice on my apartment on Friday. I'm not sure what that means, or if it means anything, or if it needs to mean anything, but it probably does. It probably means something but nothing will come of it. Story of my life.

So I tiptoe into March.

Even that is good. Even that is alright. Practice period is half over, and nothing bothers me much these days. Thoughts are light and elusive. With the exception, perhaps, of sometimes waking up first thing in the morning and feeling how warm and comfortable my sheets are.

That, my friends, to me is a disturbing thought. It's not as simple as calling it an attachment and attachment=bad. It's more sublime than that. Maybe it's the desire for things to stop and stay that way that's disturbing. Maybe it's the mundane thought of not wanting to die in order to experience these wonderful passing moments.

Suicide doesn't bother me these days either. No anxiety or angst associated with it. Often when suicide seeps up, it's like arriving at a house, and walking into the house, I can go into the room on the left and be anxious and angsty about what's going to happen to my stuff, or the inconvenience it will cause people like my landlord. Or I can go into the room on the right and be anxious and angsty about my family and project on what their reactions might be. Or I can go up the stairs and into a room and be anxious and angsty about the metaphysical implications and possibilities regarding the afterlife and reincarnation, the stuff I have no idea about.

And through it all, it's still a house. The house is still shelter, it's still home, it's where I go at the end of the day and drink . . . tea.

These days, suicide is just suicide.

sometimes we're just the sum total of our bodily functions.

practice period:
Constantly clearing one's mind, focusing on being conscious of as many moments as possible, mentally (imagining) breaking down and dissolving thoughts and forms, and throwing a wrench into any logical thought process.

Makes it difficult to blog.

geekdom
I found a terrific website reviewing and giving synopses of the episodes of the latest "Star Trek" franchise, Enterprise. I remember the episode about which he writes, "Best line of the series to date: I can see my house from here! Priceless!". It was said by a Klingon who was just shown an advanced holograph of the Klingon capital, created by a species that the humans were trying to convince the Klingons not to destroy. I remember hitting the floor laughing at that one.

All it would take is one person to know me for me to exist. I need to make sure that never happens.

and then this creeping feeling realization if not now never thinking in terms of time frames is only a means to get to and past certain dates i.e., living

And the days and the weeks keep counting down. It just doesn't stop. It's been counting down for a loooooooong, long time now. End of second week of February. End of third week of practice period.

Do I give notice on my apartment come the last week of February. Do I get rid of my stuff all through March and enter the monastery? Do I pack up and go back to New Jersey? Do I continue in cruise control in perpetuity, waiting to the last minute and then flipping a coin?

Do I even reach the end of February? Or the end of March? Does the trail pitter out, fade to white, like the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the movie)? I get scared. I get attached. I feel the push and the pull, pushed and pulled. What if I give in and live, instead of give in and die?

It's the same wall. It doesn't change a thing. Why the attachment to living? I don't think otherwise it's an attachment to dying, it's more impulse or intuition. I imagine how freeing it would be just to let myself live, get these ideas of leaving out and away, once and for all, and . . . live another how many more decades and die anyway?

Why not now? Why later? I've never lived my life to live for the later. I've lived my life to die, well, just about now-ish. And thus, this wall. The moment is a masterpiece, the weight of indecision's in the air.

It's the 200 years later theory. What will it matter in 200 years, so don't waste time glombing and gloombing and lolling around in the negative if I don't want to. My parents will die, too, hopefully a little shocked to find that shit happens and some things money can't take care of, family will die and pass, friends will pass.

With luck, we can hope to become someone's memories, and from someone's memories we can become someone's stories, and from someone's stories we can be someone's curiosity.

No, living is not a solution to this puzzle. Life is a koan, a puzzle that can't be solved with linear, logical, normative thinking. Solving it requires releasing this grasp and attachment to this matrix, this structure of forms and thoughts. Spirituality doesn't provide answers. Science doesn't provide answers. But they point in resonant directions. And in the swirl of theory and intuition, there's me and my own decisions.

No solutions, no end to the path. In my belief system, I will come back to continue the journey, hopefully with a similar intuition to pick up on the trail where I got stuck in this life and move further along on it. Perhaps with a little less attachments. Perhaps more. Perhaps more struggle. Whatever works.

And if I'm completely wrong, and killing myself is karmically equal to killing another person regardless of the circumstances and situation? I'll have to jump off that bridge when I get to it.

Hm. Hmm. Happy birthday, blog! Who thought you would've lasted two years? Certainly not I, for obvious reasons. But here you are. Story of my life. And boy have you said some stupid things in the past. But that's probably just me being self-critical. I'm sure there were people who enjoyed various posts at the time. Boy, have you said some substanceless things in the past. I certainly don't want to read you over. Ah, but it's all for integrity (so, please be honest).

Anyway, many happy, subtle, and neurotic false departures and returns. Thanks for keeping me company these past two years when no one else would *pity* *pity* *pity*.

My life has definitely started taking on the feel of a movie. Definitely an art film. There's little to no dialogue at all.

I still get negative thoughts creeping into my mind. It's easy. It's habit. It's the way my mind works. It's how it processes the feelings into imagery and words.

But it's also very easy to take each one as it comes and run the exact opposite, positive thought, and feel it's just as valid and real. It works because, I dunno, I'm mental.

I wouldn't say they cancel each other out, but whether it's the original negative thought, or the turned-around positive thought, my life and reality surrounding me strangely remain exactly the same.

Just today, I was sitting in Border's, reading, wondering if Madoka and I were done as friends. Then she called tonight.

I quickly dove into talking about myself. I think the phone conversations we tried to have while she was in the U.S. were hampered by my tendency to steer any conversation away from myself. And she didn't ask or press, and then I would ask questions about things she didn't want to talk or think about, and that led to dead air.

We managed OK for a while, but then it started falling back. By the end, I think I was doing it again, unconsciously. Overall, it was a much better conversation than the previous ones. I think I can pat myself on the back. I don't think it will be easy for the friendship to completely recover from last year when we just didn't tell each other anything. It was a broken connection. 'Broken' as a verb, not an adjective.

But what if it was the end of the friendship (back in Borders)? So what? What's the big deal? All of my friendships have fallen away and passed, and we've all survived. I don't imagine any of them missing me any, which is totally fine by me. In fact, the pattern in re-acquaintancing with people from the past recently has been one-offs and then nothing. Friendships that used to be really meaningful, Mark in Tucson, and Pasha last year. And others.

Madoka's friendship survives, but it doesn't have to. We'd go on, perhaps just a bit the poorer. But I'm just a bit the poorer for having lost other friendships, and it's alright. Not to be dramatic, but this all changes, this all passes. Life goes on, we die.

In 200 years, our lives and friendships will have moved on to different forms. These forms will be long dead. Who cares if I kill myself? Even if you care, in 200 years will it mean anything? In 200 years, would you still care? Would you forgive it? Either way, in 200 years, I or society won't care what you thought or felt about me killing myself.

But there are people here and now. Why does anyone need me on this planet, here and now? What's the benefit? What's the attachment? Better to understand that these things would pass eventually anyway. If our relationships are substantive, we'll eventually meet again in other lifetimes.

I might kill myself or I might not, but if I don't, I want to know that even if I did, these people wouldn't have been attached to this form of me. Just as my past friendships and loves who have fallen out of my life wouldn't be attached to this form of me.

I'm sorry, but when I die, I want (not quite expect) people to be happy for me, if not themselves. Like in that Star Trek episode when they think Geordi and Ensign Ro are dead, and Data, who has no emotional experience of "friends" dying or mourning, is entrusted to prepare the memorial. He makes it into a total party because he concludes that's the best way to memorialize a "loved one"!! That ruled!

Maybe I'm missing something. Am I missing something?

I overheard someone at SFZC say, "Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?", and I just get this queasy feeling in my gut, manifested in an involuntary, pained look of disgust on my face and a roll of my eyes. People throwing around the term "karma", "bad karma", "good karma", like it was the breakfast they had this morning, but maybe I'm just missing something.

I do believe in karma, the metaphysical law of cause and effect promulgated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Hare Krishnas and hippies. But I don't believe in it as simple, humanistic moral law. It's something to be aware of, but impossible to know the mechanics of or to project on other people or situations.

"Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?" The way I understand it, there are karma creating events and karma manifesting events. What might look like a bad karma creating event because it causes grief or harm (in the Bay Area, it's probably just inconvenience) to another person, might really be a karma manifesting event for the person receiving the grief or harm *ahem (inconvenience) cough*.

In fact, depending on the sum total of the karma of the person creating the event, it might not be creating bad karma at all for him. In conjunction with the sum total karma of the person being harmed, it might even be creating good karma for himself. How much does that suck? Someone screws you over, and in the end it's good karma for them!

Let's say it was a landlord-tenant dispute and the landlord is evicting the tenant. "Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?" Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe the tenant is experiencing the effect of some previous cause, even if he's been an absolute angel in this lifetime. If the landlord is otherwise upstanding and carries a total sum of what amounts to pretty good karma, and merely becomes the instigator of a karma manifesting event for the tenant, that does not instantly translate to creating bad karma for himself.

Although it may. I'm just saying it's counter-productive to project on another person's karma. Saying, "Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?" might also be a bad karma creating event, if ignorance was the source of that statement, and I don't know if that was the case.

It might even have been a good karma creating event if it was the landlord's karma to teach the tenant something, or, by evicting him, to open him up to some realization. If the situation caused grief or harm, and that was the result of the tenant's karma, and if the landlord's action relieves some of the tenant's bad karma by how he reacts, that might equal good karma for the landlord. Still suck?

And through this all, I know I might be the one who's missing something. I just feel that much of what happens to us or what we are or become is karmic manifestation, and at the same time, what we do is karma creating. We can keep these things in mind in deciding how to act or react in a given situation, but we should realize that we don't know how the karmic wheels are spinning, so the best thing to do in any situation is to act with the most positive spin possible.

Shh. Quiet.

I find myself viewing "alternate spaces". Alternate spaces usually referring to a mental breaking down of this perceived reality; physical phenomena. Stop the linear thinking. Use imagination.

It's the Buddha's enlightenment. Zen teaches it. Artists envision it. Quantum mechanics theorizes it. Post-modernism analyzes it. The physical form of reality breaks down.

But in recent alternate spaces of unreality, I just live.

Why don't I just go on with this? Soaking in the weirdness that is life. Move to Chicago. Move to Tucson. Just stay here where it's familiar. Now that's too weird for me to handle. But ease into it. No one knows what's happening. No one needs to know. I don't need anyone to know.

It's February. Counting down.

After one week of Winter self-imposed/designed practice period, I'm exhausted with the routine, but it's really good. I'm doing this because I got the sense that monasteries usually do something special during the Winter months; some intense, focused period of practice.

Deer Park is in its Winter Retreat until the end of March; SF Zen Center is doing a Winter practice period until the beginning of April; and I've read about at least one other place, too. But true to my non-conformist, rebel without a cause, bad self, I'm not joining with some group.

I'm glad about that. At least at this point. Especially since I'm still leary of organized religion and don't want to be a "part" of something unless I can convince or prove to myself it's not contrived. Whatever that means.

So I'm doing my own thing contiguous with SFZC's practice period. At the center of it is joining their sitting periods during the morning and evening five o'clock hours (this involves setting my alarm for 4:55, being out the door within 10 minutes, and riding the 1.81 miles to the center), in addition to my home sitting during the morning and evening eight o'clock hours.

This is theoretically supposed to go on until the end of March. But . . . counting down. Do I give notice on my apartment on March 1st? I can't go on like this too much longer. Do I not? Do I "not"? And when?

Things changing. Things spiraling. Counting down.

"There's something solid forming in the air
And the wall of death is lowered in Times Square
No one seems to care
They carry on as if nothing was there

The wind is blowing harder now
Blowing dust into my eyes
The dust settles on my skin
Making a crust I cannot move in

And I'm hovering like a fly
Waiting for the windshield on the freeway"
**SPLAAAAT!!!**
- "Fly on a Windshield" (Genesis)

When I'm alone, I'm whole and here
When I'm not, I utterly disappear.

SF Civic Center/UN Plaza

February 2, 2004; 5:30 P.M.

I don't remember if I remembered it while dreaming last night, or sitting this morning, but it was a childhood memory that makes a connection to both suicide and Zen later in life.

It's not that I had a miserable childhood. I don't perceive it has having been miserable. Whether my childhood meets with scorn or sympathy is probably relative. People in a worse position in life might show scorn, people in better positions might show sympathy. Or is it the other way around?

It's all perception, you see, because it involves my parents, but there's no way they could have predicted I'd end up the way I did. They provided just fine, they weren't grossly negligent. Not even negligent. Or maybe they were negligent and just lucky that nothing horrible happened to us. But they planted us in suburbia because it was safer, so maybe they balanced everything out in their heads. So no, they weren't even negligent.

But I remember in the perceived recurring worst moments of my childhood memories that probably weren't that bad, thinking to myself that none of it mattered, my self didn't matter (they'd be sorry when I wasn't around anymore), I can endure because my self is something I can separate from the misery. What was I?, like 8? And what was the misery?, like raking leaves? I have no concrete memory what I was so miserable about, and I of fair mind can safely say I'm not repressing anything major.

This personality creation might have been from even before 8. I think by 8 I was creating the misery on purpose, walking to school in the dead of winter without a jacket, just to see if I could endure it. No, not to see if I could endure it, I did it because I could endure it, I told myself.

Separate misery from self, and I can endure. That was the theory. And later it became, separate misery (self) from self, and there's Zen; and separate self from misery, and there's suicide. And in either case I can't endure, because that's built into whichever theory by then.

Things get (**enter descriptive**) when you're walking south on Laguna in the rain at 6:50 in the morning after someone tried to jack your bike (they failed, but a visit to the bike doktor is required), but it's really OK because these things are expected in the city.

And for a moment, and just a moment even though I tried to hold onto it longer, I felt . . . felt? or was it a trickle in my stream of being? . . . the understanding life in order to live life. Life and reality are the same thing here.

If my life is alive, so is all of reality around me. If reality around me is dead, so am I? Time slowed down, frame by frame. Understand reality to live life. Those are the words (I think), and I understood them then, but I sure don't now, although I can superficially remember the feeling.

What else? Having theories about the universe can't hurt. Recognition of psychological and biological factors is probably important somewhere in there. There are no answers, though. Nothing that can be communicated to another person. There will always be someone who thinks your beliefs are crap, and are formulating their own brilliant theory of everything for themselves.

Time slowed down, slo-mo, I turned around to see if anyone was there. Just a homeless person sleeping next to a parking meter in a water-logged blanket. Living is easy, existing is easy, you just have to understand it.

Floodgates: 

Damn, why can't I just take a pill that will make me want to live? Why isn't there a pill I can take to make me depressed, just so that I could take more pills to make me not be depressed? Why is my life so black and white in its greyness, and grey in its black and whiteness? 

It would be so easy to take Elizabeth up on her suggestion to move to Chicago, where she's pretty sure I could land a job where she works. Just go on living. Get out of the Bay Area. 

And then what? Live in a dream. Float through a dream. Even be happy. Just live, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be wonderful? It would. And a friend who is apparently good enough that she thinks of me when she knows there are job openings and I want to get the hell out of San Francisco? That kind of blew my mind, as the suggestion came out of the blue after several months of radio silence.

And my daily life now filled with practice and reading, cut through the bullshit that is institutionalized Buddhism, secular Buddhism as far as I'm concerned. Moral Buddhism that encourages dualistic thinking. Boy, have I got a beef about that.

Enter the monastery come April? And how do I see myself one year hence? Five years hence? Ten years hence? I don't know, I really don't. It could be that in the chain-of-lifetimes scheme of things, I'm just about ready to enter a monastery, but not quite there yet. I keep killing myself. 

I believe this repeated killing myself in subsequent lifetimes is part of my learning, since there is no tangible reason why I'd be killing myself. Of course I don't know if this is the first time I don't have a reason but want to do it, or if that has been par for the course and part of the learning. I'm aware of all the nuances of possibility in this, so any Buddhists reading this, keep your fucking karmic projections to yourself please. 

In my past beliefs, which might be self-serving, I have been killing myself in successive lifetimes, but for karmic reasons, I've always been able to be re-born human. Since I'm eschewing human moral interpretation, "karmic reasons" mean that the suicides have exhibited "non-attachment". Suicides that exhibit attachment to delusion, i.e. the physical/phenomenal world, are more the kind that might lead to re-birth in the lower realms. Attachment = "bad". 

And of course entering a monastery isn't an end goal. For me myself, entering a monastery means having reached the point where I'm ready for that environment to cultivate . . . whatever, I'm not going to try to describe or explain it. 

I got the sense from the Deer Park monks that at least some of them were in a chain of lifetimes where they had reached that point and successively end up entering a monastery to continue their practice. A few of them highly advanced who come back and become monks to aid others. 

And, in my belief system, it doesn't end there either. In my world, there are beings who have already done the monastic practice and have fully cultivated and mastered non-attachment to physical reality, and die and are re-born just living unattached lives, enlightenment being unlikely or impossible in this era of mappo, degeneration of the dharma. 

They could be your neighbors, could be a homeless person, a doctor or a lawyer, could be Madoka, could be Bob, but they're out there. They're here. We can only know ourselves, so don't bother figuring out who they are, just be glad they're there. The keys are compassion (material) and non-attachment (spiritual). Balanced. 

But that's getting a bit far out there. 

Maybe I'm in a stage of progression that we all need to get through, all who believe at least, a stage where we need to exhibit non-attachment in the "ultimate" fashion. A stage where despite having all the reasons to live, we are not attached to this physical life. It's not an end, we still come back. But we come back a little further along the path. 

I don't know. But the possibilities are endless and wonderful.

I had a dream last night where I dreamed I was aware that I was dreaming. I remember picking something up, something semi-fragile like a bottle, and thinking that this was just a dream, and to prove it, I could throw it and not be concerned that it would break. And I remember flinging it away, and then *doink* it just disappeared, along with the background scenery where I was flinging it. Proof positive. (what is the sound of something disappearing? I don't think it's "doink".)

Now I can't remember if I was dreaming I was conscious that it was a dream, or if I was in the dream and really conscious. Yo'm say'n? Occasionally I try to condition myself to be conscious in my dreams. I think the latest trick was to concentrate on a keyword while falling asleep that would act as a trigger. If I could remember the keyword in the dream, that was a positive step or a link between consciousness and dream. It hasn't worked yet, but I'm hopeful.

On the fringes of my belief system is the possibility of maintaining some sort of consciousness through the betweens, the bardos between death and re-birth. I have no pretention that I could navigate them consciously, which is why the belief is way out on the fringes, but I don't disbelieve there have been Tibetan monks who have mastered it. I think they developed and mastered dream consciousness as an exercise to get to that point. Now that's concentration! I'm fascinated enough by it to see if I could elicit that keyword during a dream.

I remembered all this because during a Dharma talk this morning, the speaker jokingly referred to the "bardo of getting into a car". Yesterday I thought of a t-shirt for cyclists that says, "Drivers are morons, ride safe!" So I liked the suggestion of driving a car being a death state.

I've been wanting to be and working on being spontaneously nicer. Compassionate. Whatever.

I was struck by a Simpson's episode several weeks ago, when the ghost of Lucille Ball appears in Lisa's room, smoking a cigarette. Lucy asks Lisa if she has an ashtray. Lisa is, of course, like seven years old – why would she have an ashtray? She is also smart, articulate, politically correct, and somewhat uptight and smug in her intelligence, and so I expected a response about smoking being bad, or that her parents probably wouldn't be happy about her smoking in the house, or that she just didn't have one. Instead, Lisa takes a can filled with pencils and pens, dumps it empty, and hands it to Lucy, "Will this do?" Wow!

I do try to be nice, considerate, and respectful to strangers, but it's all a bit contrived. I think too much, so when I'm nice to strangers, I'm usually very conscious of it. It's not as spontaneous as it could be – microseconds of action without thought. Lisa Simpson had to think about how to accommodate Lucy, but the accommodation was immediate (we're interpreting here, folks). She didn't run through the negative arguments in her head before deciding to accommodate her.

I'm primarily working on it while riding my bike, because that's when I'm at my instinctual most aggressive, defensive, and self-righteous. It comes out without forethought or premeditation. And it's nothing I do, I'm not particularly rude or stupid, it's all feeling. But I know about it, and sometimes I ride away ashamed of the thoughts that ran through my head in situations that weren't even a near-miss.

And it has to be more than that. A couple days ago I almost got doored riding east in the Folsom St. bike lane. I was completely in the right. I was riding along in the bike lane when the passenger side door of an SUV that was in a car traffic lane was flung open in front of me. I swerved so hard that I had to come to a full stop (yay, fast reflexes), and later had to check to see if the alignment of my front tire was off.

When I turned around, there was a girl standing there looking scared, and meekly said, "sorry". I'm not one to tell anyone off, and especially not a child. I said in the most non-admonishing tone as possilbe, "just look out for traffic next time," and rode off. No harm as far as I was concerned.

Later as I thought about the incident, I thought that I should have taken the extra step of asking her if she was alright. That would have been proper equanimity and compassion.