I was wrong about the two previous posts not needing to have been writ. They were actually helpful. Sometimes you need to go some place to realize it's not a place you want to go. Oh. That's kinda the story of my life.

The conveyor belt/treadmill metaphor was useless, albeit accurate, but realizing that still requires formation of some other paradigm. New paradigm. Different paradigm. What was wasn't working.

Nothing should be comfortable about my existence, considering how it has to end. Well, how it has to end for all of us, but trying or pretending to choose to in my case. Itsa big difference. For people in general, we all have to die but that's no reason to not get comfortable about existence as much as we can. Let it come when it does. Don't go where you're not invited until you're invited.

For people like me with the realization of death as a focus, there is no getting comfortable with existence. Death is a reality that can't be put aside because putting it aside is ignoring the obvious, and existence is by nature uncomfortable because it's fleeting and needs to be explored and understood as such. Maybe that's what the great adepts were getting at. Maybe they were as bad at it as me. Probably not.

I'm thinking I have to tap into sadness and despair, not as emotions but as concepts, which is a bit ironic since Buddhism teaches to do away with concepts. In this case, the concept is a tool in furtherance of doing away with concepts. Which in many ways is exactly what many Buddhistic methods necessarily are.

Sadness and despair are useful in that those are the normative emotions, tools, concepts that ordinary people avoid or are given as reasons or explanations for suicide. But I'm not ordinary, I'm not necessarily suicidal, it's just what I want to do and will eventually have to do since that's the way I set my life up. Not being suicidal makes it hard to commit suicide. Tapping into sadness and despair just as concepts, and not as the things humans generally attach to as real and things to avoid, can help. 

There's a lot of blurring that goes on. All the beauty in the things I love and appreciate become sadness and despair because they are fleeting. They won't last no matter how much I want them to be loved. Dig deep and deeper into those emotions of love and appreciation and they become sadness and despair because they all come to pass. It's still love, and joy is still joy, laughter is still laughter, but they take on more dimensions, they become multi-faceted. Anger is no longer a feeling but an energy that's pretty useless and can be stopped when recognized as an energy. Lust is no longer some base animal impulse for desire and self-gratification, but a very powerful energy that is very useful if controlled. Despair and sadness don't mean depression. Everything starts getting transformed in practice.

I don't know when it will be time, I don't know how others knew it was time, but I've come to imagine it's a full-body realization. I've never had that before. I used to talk about being at 100% or getting to 100%. As a full-body realization, I doubt I've ever been near 100%. I won't project on what I think I was, I may have never even been 1%, I may have gotten to 80%, I just don't know myself that well. 

Appalled. Fucked. Wack. Facked (Australian accent). Those are some words that have occurred to me to describe my previous post. I was poking fun at myself, but what I wrote is seriously twisted. Ah, another word. Some sick shit. I could probably go on if I put my mind to it. Totally muhfoofooh.

The suggestion that I should just comfortably accept staying alive just because shit isn't hitting the fan is mind-blowing and has been sending me into core code wtf? reality collapses and existential fishtail skids. Poking fun at myself as a coping mechanism for neurotic dysfunction and things not going my way is fine and dandy, but it's wack telling myself it's fine and dandy when all the screens start blanking on and off with static and white noise because the frivolous bit of code I introduced (the previous post) is just that bogus.

So no, no, no, no, no, no, no (oh mama-mia, mama mia) on that smooth-ride-day-to-day, wait-for-something-to-happen-first attitude. I should be stressed, I should be on edge, there should be existential angst. Mindfulness practice should take any emotionality and hysterics dramatics out of it, but the tension and cognitive dissonance is necessary. I should be constantly pressing towards suicide despite a pattern and history of failure (the 'failure is overrated' claim is still valid). There is something seriously wrong with this picture, this program that is my life, and pretending it's a smooth ride that I can be lazy about (lazier than I am, apparently possible) is way off mark. The previous post is just a sub-routine, a fail-safe. It's an aspect that's there and may actually come to pass, but it's not a primary paradigm.

This may come off as sounding really strange, but it also conflicts with my ideas of interdependence, which I believe in as a part of mindfulness practice. Interdependence is integral to mindfulness practice, actively recognizing the connections and relations between everyone in our lives. When you think and act independently and not interdependently, you risk running into trouble. The interdependence aspect of mindfulness practice helps avoid or mitigate those problems because you considered other people before acting.

In my case, consideration of interdependence of course comes with a twist. Where's the interdependence when my life has been all about isolating myself and cutting contact to some degree or another with literally everybody? But even with my idea to commit suicide, I'm aware of interdependence. And actually I theoretically couldn'twouldn'tshouldn't commit suicide without interdependence, it would be pointless. The interdependence is still there in the removing myself from their lives and affecting them as little as possible. It's a whole life thing, cutting off from people doesn't eliminate interdependence.

Somehow, though, distilling suicide to a knee-jerk reaction feels like an independent, selfish (yep, I went there) act. It treats suicide as just needing a trigger and becomes a matter of cause and effect and suggests I can be casual and cavalier until that trigger occurs. That all reacts badly with my ideas of interdependence which require continuous, mindful recognition that there is gravitas in such an act. However little impact it may have, it needs to be respectfully contemplated. I've done all I can to mitigate any impact, and there may be shock, but not any real impact beyond knowledge of an unpleasant fact; a fact of life I may add. I could've been killed by a bus and the impact should largely be the same.

So with the albatross firmly back around my neck, I'm back to wondering how will I know it's time? How did they know it was time? What strategies do I have to determine when it will be time? The spanner in the works is that time has long past, anytime will do really. Then the question becomes a perpetual 'why not now?' and I've been asking that for so long it's meaningless and ridiculous. Really, this and the previous post shouldn't have happened. I should've just posted about riding and the weather. Taipei should just cancel winter at this point. I think this is the first winter I haven't switched out my floor fan for a space heater. I don't think it's possible at this point for Taipei to get cold enough for a long enough period to salvage any notion of winter.

meet the new paradigm, same as the old paradigm

I started using the metaphor of the conveyor belt to cynically describe routine getting me from day-to-day, hoping to spur me to some sort of action. That was an abject failure. Even cynically observing that it had morphed into a treadmill has done nothing. Instead, the metaphor itself has transformed to accurately describe a "smooth ride". And who doesn't like a smooth ride? Would you rather be riding in the backseat of a car driven by a really smart kangaroo or on Space Mountain? It doesn't matter if it's a conveyor belt or a treadmill, my day-to-day is a smooth ride and I don't have to do anything, and as long as it's a smooth ride day-to-day, why do anything?

I'm well aware the smooth ride can get bumpy rolling on a dime. How long can a life designed like mine go on without something going wrong? It's become clear that I need something looming to actually do something, but loomage doesn't have to be some long, drawn-out thing where I'm watching the train approaching from way off in the distance, like finances dwindling away, and I have time to brace myself for impact and wane philosophical. Loomage can dramatically appear with the drop of a hat. I have a "go bag" ready (sort of) so that when I'm confronted with the situation whereby I assess I really don't want to deal with this thing and I'm done, I can go immediately.

For example, I have it established in my mind that I'll never move again. I can't imagine having the energy or motivation to ever put in the effort to futilely organize all the stuff in my apartment into manageable parcels to transport. My apartment now is the last place I'll reside. So if my landlord says he's selling the flat and I have to move, I'd look at all the circumstances and what I'd have to deal with to move, decide I don't want to deal with all that, and it's a go. I'd tell the landlord I'd begin looking for a new place and that's the last he'll hear of me (with apologies since he's been so good to me).

Actually, I don't know what situations would qualify as triggers, I don't even know if needing to move would actually qualify. I've been there before with the same attitude and duly ended up moving. Multiple times. I just don't know myself that well, but apparently I do have a survival instinct to deal with situations. My life is all about discrepancies between what I intend and what I do. Wait, everyone's like that, why am I tidying it up like that? My life is all about the discrepancy between intending to kill myself and never actually doing it. Imagine my surprise on the day that I actually do have to die. I'd just be so relieved that I don't have to do it myself. Disappointed, I'd consider it a failure, but relieved. Failure is overrated anyway.

How bad of a disruption to the smooth ride is necessary for me to decide it's more than I want to deal with; that finally ending it all would be the better option?
- Despite what I said, I think having to move still qualifies, past resilience notwithstanding. How would I even go about finding a new place? I don't have a phone. I can look up listings online, but convincing someone to deal with someone without a phone is probably asking a lot. How do I go about getting someone to move me? I don't have a phone. I don't speak the language. I don't know anyone I would be willing to impose upon to help me. Prior times I've had to move, at least I could figure out logistics of what I had to do. It was at least possible. Conceivable. Ideatable.
- Broken toilet that I can't figure out and doesn't affect anyone else? Things like water outage or internet down affect my neighbors and I'd just have to sit tight until they contacted the landlord. If it's something that affects only me, I'd have to contact my landlord. I don't have a phone. I could ring his doorbell. My Mandarin is pretty completely gone. Can't shit, commit suicide. Strange, but for me it's not so crazy. I'm a pampered, privileged bastard.
- Finances. That, my usual albatross, goes without saying. At some point, somehow, the money will be gone, and when the money's gone, the money's gone. It's math even I can do.
- Losing my keys. I've long contemplated that. I even mentioned it to Sadie when she was here that it was a trigger and she was like, "Let's get your keys copied NOW". I don't know how hard of landing or a brick wall this one is to go. First of all, forget the "go" bag, it's out of reach in my apartment. It may be a slow burn figuring out how bad it would be to ring my landlord's doorbell and get a new set of keys. Given my past and my psychology, I'd probably ring his doorbell despite long contemplating it to be an absolute trigger.
- Enlightenment! That strangely actually makes sense, but I'm not going to get into the mechanics of that. Believe it or don't, I couldn't care less. I think we just got an answer to the likelihood of this one.

All of this purely speculative and none of these likely to happen. But something will. I can count on that. 

personality insight

A cold is a cold, and calling it "low-grade" didn't make recovery any quicker. Recovery from that cold wiped out three ride days last week. Not a bad thing really; that day I went out and abandoned almost immediately was actually unpleasantly chilly from wind and radiant cold despite air temperatures in the 70s. All three days were like that. Three days of 20-mile rides would've added up to 60 miles, giving me a total of 180 miles for the month, leaving only one more ride to hit 200 miles for the month; a loose goal, totally unnecessary, that had looked easily attainable. Without those three days, not so much.

Come this week, I gave Monday one last day of recovery for good measure and the last three days of the month were forecast to be in the high 70s and sunny. Days I would regret if I didn't take my bike out. It occurred to me if I did 25 mile rides, I could break the (totally unnecessary) 200 mile mark. And so it was, no longer sick but still coughing. 25 miles the first day, 26 the second and I only needed 20 miles the third day. What a difference between 20 and 25 miles. It's just 15-20 minutes more, but at my age feels like it's starting to take something out of me. Mind you, 30 miles used to be the minimum of what I considered "a ride". 20 miles will do as a standard outing now, a daily constitutional. It's a quick jaunt and on with my day. Don't even need to shower if it's cool enough.

The "duckhead" is the upper left portion of the ride. If I didn't cross that bridge, it's a perfect outline of a duck head:

26-mile duckhead-Waishuangxi-Maishuai:

I caught a low grade cold on Saturday. Then it got cold, moist and gloomy outside for a few days and I used all that as an excuse to stay home for most part and feel sorry for myself (not really, I love staying home all day, the only problem is going out is my excuse to not drink through the afternoon and dry out, which I do like). The cold peaked Monday (the low grade one, not the weather) and today was recovery with a lingering cough, the kind that feels juicy and satisfying but is still a cough, and some wheezing and fatigue. Tomorrow and the rest of the week is supposed to be mid-60s and up and no rain. Sun, actually. I'm wondering if it's stupid to be planning on doing 20 miles tomorrow. Obviously I'll keep expectations low, I won't "time trial" it like I usually feel like I'm doing, and I'll abandon and come home the moment I feel I can't finish it. Thursday and Friday are definite ride days.

I wonder about how I caught the cold. Maybe I touched some surface with some germs on it and delivered them to a facial orifice? I went to a tonkatsu restaurant on Saturday with plenty of surface areas shared with other people. Leaving and entering my building I touch doors where germs can have been left by neighbors. Should I consider this to be my first social interaction of the year? 'Tis the season to carry a handkerchief to open doors.

<in the end>:
- Wisdom prevailed Wednesday and no ride. If I were still young and stupid, I may have pushed to go in a fit of braggadocio, as the pros call it, but I gauged my fitness and thought of consequences to my throat, to my lungs, to my metabolism and decided better not.
- I got out on my bike Thursday, but with the help of unprecedented construction completely blocking the bike path, forcing a 180 not even 2 miles out, I took that as a sign and abandoned. It would've been a disaster if I tried to do 20 miles. As soon as I started I was figuring out shorter routes using which bridges, 13 miles, 10 miles, 8 miles, . . . 3 miles! The construction said go home now, thou shall not pass! Seriously, when I first came to Taiwan, random construction was practically expected. In the past however many years, though, Taipei had advanced to the point that if there was construction blocking a bikeway, detours would be created or alternate routes posted.
- Friday I took the Thursday hint and I'm staying off bike until full recovery. See? We can still learn even at our ripe old age.

Phil:
Last month I finished re-reading Pete Townshend's autobiography "Who I Am", and I was out near Eslite bookstore with time to spare, so I bought Phil Collins' autobiography "Not Dead Yet". I'm a bit surprised I didn't buy it the first time I saw it more than a little while ago, seeing as Genesis is my fave band of all time and Phil is at the top of the list of my fave drummers. But unfortunately he was more than a great drummer who fronted post-Gabriel Genesis to the heights of success. Solo, he also became an international pop superstar and fronted Genesis to their arguable artistic low of the wildly successful Invisible Touch, which for people like me tainted his legacy. As a fan, it's hard to begrudge him success, but . . . "Sussussudio"? I couldn't listen to any of his solo work after that, aside to see if I might like it. I never did.

Reading about Genesis was a delight, and I read extra slowly during the Gabriel years to savor it. He could've written a book twice as long just covering every detail of his Gabriel-era experience and I still would've read it. I would've bought it right away, too. He gives his view of his role in the 80s as the "it" guy who was everywhere and you couldn't get away from him unless you turned off the radio and never watched MTV. In previous interviews he's said that he basically took every call that came his way because you don't know when the calls would stop coming. I suspect constantly working was also his way of running away from his personal problems, which became a part of his personal problems.

Unlike the vast majority of egomaniacal superstars, Collins was aware of his bad press and that there were quarters that reviled him. Despite his success, he remained characteristically self-deprecating, almost to a fault (like when he dismisses claims that he's a "world great" drummer), which likely kept him grounded and realistic. The stunner is how willing he is to make himself look bad in the name of getting his own truths out. And his failed relationships make him look really bad. He just had some seriously wack relationship mojo, aside from engaging in the typical male rock star behaviors. I've read a bunch of rock star autobiographies and messed up and failed relationships practically come with the territory. But this is the only rock autobiography that was followed by a lawsuit by his first ex-wife for defamation. That's wack mojo! For crying out loud, just let a little old man tell his life story.

I went back looking for articles about that lawsuit, filed in 2016, and from what was reported I hope it was or will be summarily dismissed. Collins doesn't ever say anything defamatory towards his first wife, he just gets facts wrong that were construed to be defamatory. He outright states that the book is just how he remembers it and differs from other people, so personal interpretation of even wrong facts I don't think is actionable. How his first ex-wife feels defamed by a wrong fact doesn't make the wrong fact defamatory. How Phil feels about not being a "world great" drummer doesn't make him not a "world great" drummer by any objective standard.

No doubt there are mistakes of fact in the book. In fact, there is one mistake of fact that can be verified by hundreds of thousands of fans who saw Genesis live in the 80s. He was writing about being a showman in the 80s and making the audience do dumb things (pretty close to his words) in the name of entertainment. Specifically the introduction, he writes, to the song "Domino" when the lights come down. Every Genesis fan knows that "lights coming down" doesn't mean they were dimmed, but that the entire lighting rig is lowered so that the stage, seen from the front, looks to be in letter-box format and the lights are hanging just a few feet above the drum overhead mics, extra vivid because they're less diffuse. It was just a gimmick, I reckon, they did just because the technicians figured out that they could do it. It didn't serve any part of the show; it wasn't a requirement that had to be brainstormed on how to do it. To justify the gimmick, Phil had the audience do dumb things. Only, as the video verifies, the song wasn't "Domino" but "Home By the Sea". I wanted to sue-sue-sue-dio Phil Collins for getting the song wrong.

To geek out a bit, "Second Home By the Sea", which is segued into, has my second favorite note Phil Collins sings. The song is mostly instrumental, but at the end reprises lyrics from "Home By the Sea" including the line "things that go to make up a life". The way he sings "life" the last time in the reprise is totally different from all the times before (with appropriate echo) and to me has always been the song's emotional closure before the actual closing line of the song, "as we relive our lives in what we tell you". (My favorite Phil Collins note is the backing vocal on the chorus of "The Light Dies Down on Broadway". He's just doing "ah"s, but on the third note where I expected the note to go down, back to the first note actually, he goes up to a harmony note and I love it every time I hear it.)

And as long as I'm geeking out, my favorite lyric from "Home By the Sea" is:

Coming out the woodwork, through the open door

Pushing from above and below

Shadows with no substance in the shape of men

Round and down and sideways they go

Adrift without direction, eyes that hold despair

Then as one they sigh and they moan

Needless to say, it was worth the read. My opinion about him is the same. He's still a drum legend and always a thrill to watch, but I'm not going to be getting into his solo catalog beyond what I already have, his first two albums. He does fill in a lot of information that I didn't know, even about Genesis, and his physical struggles that forced him to stop drumming are tragic. He suffered for a career and ambitious drive that was always pushing his own limits as a drummer, vocalist and entertainer, it's no wonder his own body would smack him down like a fly on a windshield.

Pete:
I will re-read Phil's book, possibly right away, but last month was finishing off Pete Townshend's book for the second time. When I look back and think of my favorite rock bands, The Who is faded far off in the background microwave radiation, but it's undeniable they loomed large in my formative years. It was no less than a legacy they left on impressionable young rock and roll minds without our necessarily even knowing it.

Memory is replete with the evidence. Keith Moon's epic drumming is the stuff of legend, figuring out John Entwistle's "My Generation" bass solo, listening to the synthesizer solo on "We Won't Get Fooled Again" loud in the dark, wearing a Who t-shirt in an extant teen birthday photo, writing out Who lyrics on the cover of school-owned textbooks (we had to cover them with brown paper shopping bags and could write all over them as we pleased), even traumatizing my baby cousin later (she told me even later) by telling her 11 people were crushed and killed at a Who concert on her birthday, December 3rd.

It has to sink in now what a towering talent Townshend was. Reading his narrative of what went on, the words "brilliant" and "genius" don't necessarily jump off the page, but coupled with watching past concert and documentary clips on YouTube and having enough files in my iTunes collection for them to come up reliably often on shuffle, there is a sense of who is this god among us? 

It's hard to conceive of why he couldn't get the "Lifehouse" project off the ground after the success of Tommy. It's actually better explained in documentaries by other people who really had no idea how to make Townshend's vision happen. Out of the rubble of "Lifehouse" we got the classic Who's Next album, but it's confounding wondering what he was getting at and what the album could have been above and beyond the multi-platinum, classic, must-hear-before-you-die Who's Next.

I did download the Lifehouse Chronicles, the "Lifehouse" project demos that Townshend ended up releasing in 2000 and it's fascinating, amazing stuff. Not least because versions of almost everything that ended up on Who's Next is included, plus songs that would end up on Who By Numbers and Who Are You, but these are fully formed, high quality demos that he made himself. He is not only among rock's most underrated guitarists (and by no means is he rated low), but an accomplished engineer, and no slouch on bass and drums. I always wondered how Quadrophenia was recorded because there's so much synthesizer on it, played by Townshend, with lots of space between band-playing sections. It wasn't an album where The Who could gather in a studio and play through the songs. How did they do it? It's likely the band worked off Townshend's demos to record their parts.

Both Phil and Pete mention Phil's offer to fill in for Keith Moon after his death, but they tell different stories. It was fun and interesting reading the differences, because of course they have different memories of the fact. That it was an important enough anecdote for both to mention tickled me pink and erased any suspicion that Pete's rejection might have been a diss, and personally I think Phil's version is actually closer to the truth. He was the one putting himself on the line, so it would make sense that he remembered it better, despite not being able to remember the Genesis song where the fucking lights are lowered.

Phil also mentions Eric Clapton enough that I think I'll try reading his book again in the library. I'm not a Clapton fan. I find him overrated and boring for most part and my favorite work of his (the original "Layla" excepted) is as a sideman playing lead guitar on Roger Waters' The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. I tried reading his book before but it was boring going and I swore to myself that if he mentioned going fishing, I was closing the book and putting it back on the shelf. It was totally random, just imagining what is the most boring thing to read about. And then he mentioned going fishing. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf.

The best I can accept of Eric Clapton's purported greatness is Jimmy Page describing him as the greatest ambassador of American blues. That's totally fair. He's a great guitarist, but basically a copycat and interpreter for white people. As for who Jimmy thinks is the greatest of the Yardbird guitarists, he points to Jeff Beck. There's an assumption that Jeff Beck would cite Jimmy Page. Neither would say Eric Clapton.

marking time

Taipei sending 2018 off cold, wet and miserable. After an earlier long-range forecast that this winter is expected to be on the mild side, it's already as cold as winters get in Taipei (upper 50s). Cold that in recent years hadn't come until at least a month later. That said, the short-range forecast does see temperatures creeping up through the 60s by degrees until hitting the 70s by the end of the week when it's also expected to dry out.

I shouldn't be surprised by this extended stretch of two weeks of wet weather, after all I did just get back on my bike. Of course it's going to start raining! That's what the weather does. I get off bike for over a year and it's perfect weather for cycling or running like I'd never seen during my time in Taipei! I get on bike and it's back to rainy for weeks at a stretch. It's what I used to call "the big joke" of my life. The universe conspiring to taunt and toy with me to remind me that all I am is the bare butt-end of some divine joke.

Not to contradict that mild winter forecast, though, the week before the wetness was sunny in the upper 70s/low 80s and I did ride four days in a row, racking up 80 miles, even applying sunscreen for the last two days after feeling a slight singe on my arms after the second day. Can't complain. And to put the current cold and wet into perspective, I still haven't switched out the floor fan for the space heater, and heating pad is still stowed. Those come out when the cold is protracted and starts defining misery at home.

On one of those 80 degree days earlier I met up with my old Mandarin teacher for coffee. Thought I should mark that since she informed me we had met up earlier this year. I couldn't remember the last time we met up and thought it was some time last year. So I met up with someone socially twice in 2018. Had email contact twice with my sister-in-law as usual. Got out of Taipei once for a day trip to Kaohsiung for some family issue. And those were the only notable interactions I've had with people in 2018. Hermit w/internet and alcohol. 2019, here we come.

Why am I still here, alive? The question has started to almost haunt this month, arising in my mind, whispering in my ear with everything I do. I ask it of the universe during morning sitting and to send me something I could interpret as a sign. Like a winning lottery ticket. It might not quite answer the question, but as signs sent by the universe go I wouldn't complain too much.

August last year I was hoping to hop off the conveyor belt of routine that took me from day to day in furtherance of getting to my goal of exiting this illusory existence. Not only was that endeavor a complete failure, but the conveyor belt has morphed into a veritable treadmill. I have no responsibilities; no job, family or friends to whom I'm accountable, yet every day is filled with inconsequentialities that make me feel I don't have enough time. It's totally neurotic.

At the same time, there is no "haunting". There is neither conveyor belt nor treadmill. Those are mental formations and descriptions that only describe assumptions about reality that can't be assumed; the illusory life. It's just neurotic.

"Neurotic" is a word that I've noticed popping up quite a lot in my Vajrayana readings the past few years, referring, I gather, to our conditioned thinking, reactions and behavior. Basically, a vast majority of our thoughts and behaviors are pretty much neurotic, with not just a hint of irrationality implied. Perhaps from a pure Vajrayana point of view, whatever that is, all. If we're mired in treating reality as it's presented as absolutely real, all of our reactions and interactions are neurotic. It's irrational to treat reality as presented as definitively real, solid, permanent. But that's a little extreme since only a slight percentage of humanity has been exposed to Vajrayana teachings and even a slighter percentage, including real Vajrayana practitioners, whoever they are, would consider all of their conditioned thoughts and actions as irrational.

A larger slice of humanity have family, and therein lies the low-hanging fruit to demonstrate how afflicted we are with our neuroses. We can choose our friends and form our social tribes who understand us better and who don't step on our every last nerve, but go home to blood family for the holidays (I'm no where near them, mind you) and see how fast you become neurotic about various things they say, do, imply and/or insinuate. With our friends, it may be to a lesser degree, but it's there. I'm here alone with neither friends, family nor acquaintance and the neurotic is totally right here, front and center.

I'm trying to start working on lessening my neurotic. Emphasis on the 'try' and 'start'. I haven't even started, and I'm only trying to do that. It's not enough to know myself that it's nutty and irrational. I already know it and that's not doing anything. It's not cognitive. I'm searching for the starting point.

For years I've been working on myself to reduce negativity and confront internal anger issues. It's ongoing work, but I think I can feel alright about being a lot better than I was. It's not like I was a gloomy Gus or a hair-trigger rager. It's in my personality to give and take my share of laughter and I don't think anyone would describe me as a particularly angry person. My bar for anger or negativity is pretty low, though. I don't want any of it; it's all bad, shut it down. As soon as I recognize it, it's *stahp!*. That happens all the time.

Those techniques were Vajrayana-inspired, if I dare say so, but a good deal of it was cognitive mindfulness, watching the energies and processing them to cognitively transform them rationally. Working on transforming neurotic obscurations is a lot trickier since they are by nature to some degree irrational. Rationalization isn't going to help because I already know they're irrational, yet freely maintain them.

I appeal to the energies to help purify or clear obscurations – karmic obscurations, negative obscurations, neurotic obscurations. The energies are the many intangible things about us, but subjectively verifiably real. All thoughts and feelings are energies, but feelings are more potent. I think we think of feelings as things that just happen and pass, but recognizing them as energies makes them something to tap into to enact change on subtle levels. 

Anger is a favorite example. If when angry we can stop being angry for a second and examine the feeling, it's an energy. You might even be able to locate where the energy is in your body. Once you stop and examine it and recognize it as an energy, . . . well, you've already just stopped being angry and you're in new territory. It's now a lab experiment and you can go, oh yea, there it is. What's it doing there? I don't like it. It feels bad. That's how it starts getting transformed. 

Sexual energy I've mentioned before as possibly the most potent human energy, but working with it requires a high level of discipline, removing all animal aspects of it and any idea or conception of desire, lust, attachment, self-gratification. Focus on just the energy aspect of it. Very difficult to do, but the same principle applies. When the energy arises, arousal, you stop and identify it and try to get to the point where you realize desire is not what you want. Lust is not what you want. Attachment is not what you want. Self-gratification is not what you want. Needless to say, spouse, house, mortgage, rug rats, etc. are not what you want. It's not about sticking your dick in someone else or someone sticking their dick into you. They may seem to be what you want, but where does it get you? If those are what you wanted, fine, you're there. If you're trying to get beyond it, then you have to realize they don't get anywhere and they're not what you want. I think I've said too much already. But it doesn't take too much to recognize that feeling as a very potent energy. Surprisingly it isn't located where one might obviously think, but activates the entire central energy channel. Oh, and the energy is subjectively pleasing. That's alright for some reason! There's no throwing out the pleasing aspect as something you don't want, but there's still no attachment and no object of pleasure. It's more like a communion or oneness of masculine and feminine energies.

This is not Vajrayana. It's my own personal voodoo. It might even be psychological self-brain washing. I don't know if the results I've noticed are an actual result of practice, or the obvious result of concentrated, psychological mind power. But even in Vajrayana practice, I think, whatever methods, techniques or visualizations are used, whatever deities or dakinis are entreated upon, it is emphasized that any results stem from not any outside source. Whatever outside source used is just oneself, and there's no separation from the self and the "outside" source. 

After over a year off bike, I got back on this month. I don't know how I feel about it yet. It was slow going, mind you. Not just the riding, but even the getting on the bike. I took it slow; step-by-step. The first step was pulling my road bike out from the corner of the room where it lives and wet-wiping off the layer of dust and spider webs. That was depressing and discouraging. And that was it for that day. And my first forays were on my clunker, daily-use street bike going farther on the riverside bikeways than I have in over a year just to test my fitness.

There are several reasons for doing this. A trigger excuse was getting sick of a growing paunch and wanting to do something about it, but I don't think this my paunch has anything to do with being active or not. It probably has more to do with alcohol. It was just an excuse; a feeling that exercising would be working on the paunch, but it isn't. Hopefully it'll help tone the paunch.

Another reason may have elements of self-punishment for not carrying out my ultimate goal in this time. August of last year I was wanting to stop or get off the conveyor belt of daily routine that got me from day-to-day, and running or cycling was part of that. Over a year later, I'm still on the same conveyor belt, but it's occupied by other neurotic activity getting me from day-to-day that completely fills my time. Forcing more than an hour of exercise into the routine is really inconvenient and it's me telling myself if I insist on continuing being here, it's not going to be just all comfort and convenience and doing what I want.

It's, quite honestly, so stupid. It's totally neurotic. And working on neuroticism is my next mindfulness project after years and years of working on negativity and internal anger issues.

Twenty miles on every rideable day weather-wise is the goal and limit, although knowing myself I will probably extend it to 30 to 35 miles if I persist. Neurotic demands it. The question is whether the neurotic schedule of things that artificially completely fill my time will be overcome by the neurotic drive to uselessly go farther and faster.

20-mile Nanhu Br-Bailing Br loop:

I was watching a dharma talk by a Tibetan lama on YouTube and during the Q&A, someone asked whether the dream state produces karma. I quickly intuitively answered out loud, "no", and then the lama matter-of-factly responded, "oh yes" and I quickly changed my answer to "yes". Not just because he said yes, but once he said yes it was easy to realize yes and why. So much for intuition.

My error was in too closely aligning karma with action and there is no acting per se in the dream state. If you can't act, you can't produce karma. That's wrong. Karma is rather the mental impression of all experience. Karma creation is the mind being impressed (seeded) with stimulus and karma manifestation is the form the impression takes through action when causes and conditions arise for it to manifest (germinates). That can and does happen in the dream state.

That night I had a dream that put not too fine a point on it. I don't quite remember the dream; a situation including my mother being in town and calling to ask to meet earlier than we had agreed and suggesting what I could do to make it earlier and that not sitting too well with me. I woke up and was able to identify various emotional reactions in the dream indicative of how my mind is karmically impressed. 

I remember feeling pressured. I remember being anxious, stressed, resentful, resistant. Those aren't things I feel these days in the physical world, possibly/probably/obviously/definitely because I've engineered my life to avoid scenarios whereby those feelings would arise and challenge me. I can brush off external pressure and anxiety. I can fool myself into believing I don't get stressed or anxious anymore because of mindfulness practice, but in the dream, there they were.

The key about karma and transformation is, of course, how you react to and handle situations (stimulus) that arise. The usual way of living life is thinking we are simply separate, individual agents accepting reality as it's presented. We have our experience and our feelings and we accept them exactly at face value and we react to them and outside factors in the myriad ways we do, generally unmindful that karma is at work at every moment and with every thought and feeling.

Part of mindfulness practice trains the mind to pay close attention to every moment and thought and realize how we perceive and react is karma. Collectively they are not isolated or separate incidents, but part of a continuum having come from something in the past and lead to something in the future. It works on the subtlest levels. If you're thinking about something and change your mind, that's karma. What you were initially thinking about was already karma, but then something from the past made you change your mind. It didn't come out of the blue from absolutely nowhere, and what you changed your mind to may influence something in the future in ways you wouldn't notice. The idea of being able to change your mind is karma. If you're the kind of person who finds it hard to change your mind, that's also karma; that came from something. These small karma examples can be translated up to bigger things in our lives, personalities and psychologies.

Experience is important for transformation. Dreams qualify. My attitude in my present world and avoiding those situations may be totally fine and acceptable in working to change the karma in the future. It is also karma. Being neurotically avoidant isn't great, but I don't think that's necessarily what I'm doing. Not that I have a great argument against that. But it does allow me to work on cultivating attitudes and perspectives to deal with difficult interactions with people in the future, whether this life or further on. It's not like I'm not challenged at all, after all I am who I am and the challenge is always here. My situation allows me to mull over interactions and cultivate best courses of action instead of being thrown into them for reals and failing by reacting with anger and negativity.

The ideal is to become a person who doesn't automatically react to negative stimulus with anger and negativity. There are people who are like that, I shouldn't wonder, where such a reaction is totally foreign. That's a great way of being. It's a wonderful way of being to always be able to see the light side of situations and laugh things off; to not groan about how I've got the practice all wrong, but to laugh and make light of my errors and set me straight. At the very least in that dream, I felt those karmic seeds that I no doubt have, but I didn't react. I didn't snap in anger or say anything snide or sarcastic. I think I didn't say anything, which is a good neutral starting point.

There actually is a thread that runs through the last two posts. It doesn't tie them together, it's just there, hidden, noticeable only by me. The book I quoted, Dakini's Warm Breath, was a relatively recent purchase but I had seen it years ago in Eslite, a local chain of bookstores, when they carried a respectable selection of English language books. However, it was always shrinkwrapped so I couldn't sample it to see if it was any good. By the time I thought I might buy it anyway, it had disappeared from the shelves.

Part of how society has changed and passed me by and is no longer something familiar might be exemplified by changes in Eslite. I used to spend hours there. If bored, going there was always an option to pass time. It's different now; barely an afterthought as an option to pass time and more often than not passed as an option. For one, with only a mention of the decimation of its previously massive CD/DVD section, the English language religion and spirituality section has been severely trimmed down from what they had before. They used to have wall-sized bookshelves full, but now just a few shelves on a much smaller bookshelf. This applies to all of Taipei and life. What I'd be attracted to and familiar with isn't in demand anymore. What does exist now is boring to me.

Back to the book, perhaps it was strange that it reappeared on the shelves this year amid all the downsizing of shiny things that get my attention. I didn't know it before, but now I consider it an essential read for my learning and I'm going through it for the third time already. I wouldn't argue against the suggestion that it reappeared only when I was ready for it. When it reappeared, I didn't hesitate again, I bought it that day. My hesitation before was partly measured doubt about shelling out for a book I couldn't sample, but it may have also been partly intuition that I wasn't ready for it. After all, this time I still couldn't sample it and shelled out right away.

And at over US$30, it's not a cheap book, especially one with so many typos in it. I've probably mentioned before that a side effect of my prior job as a copy editor is that I, for most part, can't not see mistakes anymore. It's like a sub-conscious habit to look for them now. I don't think I ever noticed books having mistakes before, but now I often find at least one typo per book and it always makes my eyes roll (that's also probably a side-effect of copy editing). This book had 5 or 6 mistakes, 5 of them in a 30 page stretch, so it's possible that section was (not) edited by one person. My favorite mistake was "iconography" misspelled as "ironography". Someone really needs to develop a system of categorizing irony. 

I dabble in Vajrayana. I don't claim to practice it. I'll impose on myself from what I've read that if I don't have a guru, I'm not practicing Vajrayana and whatever "dabbling" I'm doing, I hope I'm respecting that. On the other hand, there are many books now expounding upon Vajrayana and its teachings. Perhaps they are just teasers to encourage people to find and follow a guru? I don't know, I've come across a lot of what seem to be substantive teachings.

But I get it, the personal touch of a guru (not the type in recent scandals reported). For even substantive teachings written in books, ideally a guru could go on at length about any, and teach how they should be practiced and even tailor specific instructions for an individual. But I haven't met any such guru and I don't think finding a teacher is something that's going to happen in my current lifetime.

Instead I'm going by my own intuition. And intuition vs. guru, I wouldn't bet on intuition, but it's all I've got. Anyway, according to the Mahamudra view of Vajrayana that I've read, whatever path I'm on and whatever I'm doing on it, that is my path. It might be flawed, it might not be ideal, but if I understand it as my path and treat it as such, I can still learn. A teacher might groan laugh in exasperation, "that's not what that teaching means". Well, then I'm just fucked, ain't I?

I'm currently re-reading a book that I bought . . . earlier this year or last year, I forget, and I latched onto a part regarding mandalas as an example of how intuition kicks in. Mandalas are 2-D or 3-D depictions of Buddha fields or worlds, very symmetrical and include representative characters in Buddhist mythology and various levels and positions of being. They aid in imagination and creating mental images of what's described in the literature.

The author writes:  . . . from an awakened perspective, all pain and confusion are merely the play of wisdom. And that play has a recognizable pattern called the mandala principle. If one can identify difficult situations as mandalas, then transformation of painful circumstances is possible. The mandala principle lies at the heart of Vajrayana Buddhism and is the sacred realm of the inner dakini. Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (2001), Judith Simmer-Brown, p. 118.

She writes that all pain and confusion are plays of wisdom, and that hearkens back to the title of a book I recently mentioned, Confusion Arises as Wisdom, which I only recently started to understand as the basic thesis statement of Mahamudra. She then ties that basic thesis of Mahamudra to the mandala principle and expresses its potential.

She goes on: From a Vajrayana perspective, we live in many mandalas at the same time: our career or livelihood, our leisure activities, our family, our spiritual community, our neighborhood, town, city, country. In Vajrayana, . . .  the most intimate mandala in which we live is our own personal one, in which all of these parts play a role, adding the dimensions of our physical bodies, health, and state of mind. In each of these mandalas, there is a similar dynamic in which we do not customarily acknowledge the sacredness of every part of our circumstances, and because of this we experience constant struggle and pain. Ibid., p. 119

My reaction to passages such as this is intuitive. It's not an intellectual processing regarding whether it makes sense or if I think it's right or wrong. It's an immediate almost emotional whoosh of all reality around me suddenly becoming a mandala, a matrix that I'm navigating through in furtherance of wisdom understanding. And it makes sense to me. Suddenly my world around me is one of those 2-D mandala depictions I have on my altar, and how I travel through it is very important, guided by mindfulness and wisdom and compassion.

The body is a mandala with all its biological systems functioning and metabolizing. Mental space is a mandala with all its neurotic processing and useless thoughts and judgments. K-pop obsession is a mandala that I have to figure out what it means and that I'm not just mindlessly wasting my time in enjoyment. Family relations are mandalas. Your lover is a mandala. Everywhere I go during the day is navigating the mandala and everyone I see is part of it. And the idea of space and position, inner and outer/center and fringe, is important in the mandala visualization. Wherever I might position myself in whichever layer of mandala, there's always the other interlocking and interconnected spaces and positions. Is this getting heady? I don't know. It's how intuition takes over.

Seeing the world as mandala makes it possible for Vajrayana practitioners to drop their habitual ways of relating to events and aspects of life and to engage directly. When this is done everything is accentuated, whether it is pleasurable or painful, and there is nowhere to go. The central seat of the mandala may be a throne, but it may also be a prison cell. When we feel the inescapability of our life circumstances true practice is finally possible. Ibid., p. 120.

Well I sure hope so. Anyway, that's how my intuition works.

Nice these late autumn days in Taipei. There was a spell of cooler weather earlier with some rain but warmer again currently. I suppose this is the equivalent of Indian summer. Aboriginal summer. Last gasp of warm weather before however we get into winter, ease or plunge I forget.

Yesterday was so nice that after lunch I started wandering and meandering on my bike, thinking of all the possibilities where I could go just casually riding before heading back to my own neighborhood. I didn't get far. With each pedal, the prospect of going further became more unattractive. I've done this before. I know Taipei and there's nothing new to discover by going on; nothing interesting, nothing fascinating, only familiar nothing. Dead to me city.

It's been years and years that I've been doing nothing, never venturing beyond about a two mile radius of my neighborhood. There's been infrequent reason to go beyond that. I know any changes I notice will be changes of the same things. In a similar vein, I can jump on the MRT to some random station to see how things are different in that area and I'll end up feeling how pointless that was.

I used to get on my faithful Giant road bike and go on "rides", so long ago in the past that I can reference them as something I used to do. I would get out of Taipei and ride in the surrounding townships, in the mountains, in what used to be Taipei County. All of those towns and cities are now districts with their same names in one consolidated entity called New North City, literally translated, or New Taipei City otherwise. I explored as much as I wanted to and as much as I want to. There's nowhere I haven't been or want to revisit.

And retreading old ground, supposedly and theoretically this would all be different if there were someone else in my life that I might enjoy doing . . . things. Finding something new somehow becomes fun when it's with someone whose company is enjoyable. Even going somewhere familiar with someone is enjoyable because it's about the company. Even going somewhere familiar with the same person because it's about us going there this time. How charming.

But no, I get bored. Boredom is how I got to where I am now. Even enjoyable company will eventually become boring to me, and that makes it pointless. It's pointless to continually find new enjoyable company who I know will eventually bore me. That pursuit, knowing its pointlessness, would become an attachment to enjoyable company. I dislike that kind of pointless more than I like enjoyable company. The kind of pointless into which you have to put energy. I'm fine with the pointlessness of my life in general because I don't have to put much energy into it.

I do remember when Taipei wasn't boring, when there was always somewhere new to go and discover, whether by street bike in Taipei proper, road bike further afield, or MRT or bus along whichever lines they went. Early on, some of it was done with classmates or that Korean chick, but most of it was on my own. Then there was that visit by Sadie in 2013 where it was that enjoyable company thing.

Now I look at google maps and I'm not even curious about anywhere. I just look for food places in and around a two mile radius. Hell, when I first got here there was no google maps, I bought a paper map at a bookstore to decide where to explore. That's indicative of the changes, but the changes are more than that. The world and society has changed and moved on to become a place that isn't mine anymore and doesn't interest me.

I haven't kept up with changes. Mind you, I still don't have a so-called "smart phone". I put that in quotation marks, but for most people that would be like saying I don't have "lights" at home. What do you mean you don't have lights at home? (I don't have lights at home). What do you do for light at home? (I just don't need lights at home). You just sit in the dark? (Computer and TV screens provide all the light I need). I do have lights, but transpose that to a phone.

What do you mean you don't have a smartphone? How do you live? How do you breathe? How do you exist? Are you even here? In a few decades, that may not be hyperbole. And "smartphone" is a word, it's not spell checked as an error. That's how much the world is passing me by. I may not even be a qualified English editor anymore.

I imagine a virus that is only transmitted through staring at smart phone screens and which is time activated and then kills the user. There would be a mass die-off of humanity. I would survive. Who else? You? Would I be the only adult surrounded waist-high in children. Not even, as I read an article about how most kids have phones now. Me and homeless people shall inherit the earth. I haven't seen any homeless people with smartphones. Yet.

I digress. Whoa, do I digress. Well, never mind. I was just going on about how the world and society has changed and transformed and I didn't even notice nor care. Come to think of it, I totally saw it coming, too. And still don't care. It's not judgment, just description.

current status

Alcohol: I haven't quit completely since August last year when I had that great, wonderous, earth-shaking revelation for the umpteenth time that alcohol wasn't going to kill me and it therefore served no purpose. I was drinking almost a bottle of liquor a day with some beer in the mix because beer make happy. I cut down to a bottle every three days or less plus beer still in the mix because beer. The plan was to eventually totally get off the sauce, but that didn't happen because alcoholism.

That makes me question my mindfulness practice which believes quitting completely is not only possible, but even easy when mindfully applied. On the other hand, the reduced consumption (a schedule I've been on many times before in the name of cutting back) hasn't been making me feel like crap like the bottle a day did. There just hasn't been anything compelling to make me quit completely, but like my months at a monastery, now well over a decade ago, I theoretically could stop completely if I had to and not even think about it. Same as it ever was.

Sleep: Insomnia really went away with the reduced consumption of alcohol. Coincidence? The thing is that I've been on this reduced schedule of consumption before during years I've had insomnia, so they shouldn't be related. Psychological? I still always need music on to fall asleep with a timer set to shut off. Sleep is unsettled towards the end with multiple waking in the morning, but I turn on the music and reset the timer and that gets me back to sleep. If I don't turn on music, I don't fall asleep. Average 6 hours sleep with lights out between 1:30 and 2 a.m. and getting up in the 8 o'clock hour for morning sitting.

Exercise: It was full stop on even any thought of running and cycling since August last in the same realization as stopping drinking. Why am I doing this? So much effort and maintenance required, so much pain and risk of injury, so little satisfaction as performance declines. My bike is covered with dust and cobwebs, tyres flat. I don't even want to check how the last pair of running shoes I bought are doing.

Interesting how stopping exercise and stopping drinking are totally different things. Entropy working differently in either case. Or not. I'm kidding, entropy isn't at play at all (or is it?), but I'm realizing my jokes are too abstract, obtuse or just not funny. I realize now I should've been pointing out all along when I'm joking, which is even less funnier. Yes, that was a grammar joke. Yes, that was me pointing out that it was a grammar joke. Yes, it wasn't funny initially and even less funnier pointing it out. Oy vey.

Eating: Appetite has remained completely stable since August last. Faboo. Also alcohol related? Who knows? Maybe not. Maybe it was alcohol related at that time. Which still means it was. The Korean food obsession that started last November lasted until May or June when it relented. Literally Korean food almost every day. I still go for Korean when I think about it, but I no more have to think about where was the place I went least recently to decide where to go. Aigoo.

So what have I been doing? Reading and mindfulness practice has been the all-permeating focus. But mindfulness is more of a Zen thing and I've been playing and fiddling more with Vajrayana, so I should just say practice, mindfulness being a part of it. Pushing the teachings and my understanding the best I can without a guru. No great, mind-opening, satori-like breakthrough, but that's not a focus; not something I'm striving for. More slow immersion into my understanding with tangible, experiential moments of getting things. Applying whatever whenever, focusing on energies. Everything is energy. Energy equals emcee squared (on a total aside, to date there surprisingly has been no notable rock band that has named itself E=mc², but there was a white rapper who went under the name MC Squared).

K-pop girl group obsession and immersion has remained unabated. A lot of time spent watching YouTube videos. But with YouTube videos it's not just K-pop. I watch science lectures and documentaries. There's a "World Science Festival" channel where I watch videos on cosmology and astrophysics.

I watch a channel called "Asian Boss" which features vox pop videos in various Asian countries (at least once in the U.S.) asking people on the street about various topical topics. I think they edit videos for the most intelligent responses, which is refreshing and totally opposite of U.S. talk shows where they do the vox pop thing asking simple questions, but then air the most ridiculous, stupid-sounding people.

I also pay attention to a channel called "China Uncensored", which has sarcastic "news" videos about China-related topics, mostly pointing out China's hypocrisy and unfriendly or hostile relations with other countries. The sarcasm makes the outrage palatable. I like sarcasm, in case you haven't noticed. Wait! Was that sarcasm?! Was I being sarcastic talking about sarcasm?! Good grief. I'm having a crisis of (being) meta.

Back to the South Korea fetish, I follow a few South Korean YouTube vlogs. Apparently professional vloggers. They make money off of it. It's totally voyeuristic watching these people going through certain days they decide to video and narrate. I don't know how I feel about it. It's fascinating watching slices of these people's young women's lives, but it's not prurience. True, they are attractive but that's just the dressing, the bait, the aesthetic. It's the same with K-pop. I'm sure the boy groups are putting out just as good music as girl groups if it were just about the music, but for the pop genre, my aesthetic leans towards the girls. Same with golf, mind you. You couldn't pay me to watch men's golf, but I'll watch LPGA tournaments when sports channels choose to air them (NB: they won't if there's men's or motor sports or such boring bullshit to air).

It's the lives that interest me, the living life that they are doing which I'm not. The relating with other people, the moving through their cities/lives/world, neither of which I'm doing. They are reminders of what I'm not doing, what I may have used to have done when I was younger but don't even want anymore. And there is that tension between feeling I want to be a part of something and the reality that I totally don't.

Branching out of those videos, just recently I did a brief spate of watching videos of people showing their apartments in Seoul (still the Korean fetish). Again, it's just the look at and fascination of the lives going on. All those people doing something. Is there anyone doing the worthless nothingness I'm doing?

There's a class of apartments in Seoul that I don't think we have in Taiwan called goshiwon, which are tiny, basic apartments originally meant for students cramming for national exams. Mostly foreigners and students on a budget use them now, but they remind me of my ideal when I first moved to Taiwan. I wanted to live a simple hermit-like existence, and a goshiwon would've fit the ideal perfectly.

Now I look at my apartment and all the stuff I've accumulated and this is luxury compared to tiny goshiwons. This is my karma. I haven't torn myself and my ego down enough to deserve living in a goshiwon. I probably couldn't survive a goshiwon. I'd be like, "I gotta get out of this situation", and I could because I could afford it. I live in an apartment where I had the luxury of being an insomniac and baby it. Luxury of all my perceived problems without the added stresses of the perceived inconveniences of a goshiwon.

What made me think I could be a monk? I didn't deserve it. I haven't karmically earned it. My karma is still such "bad" enough that I tend towards comfort and luxury. In another life, I could easily become the hungry ghost my mother is in this life. That's the harsh possibility. Wow, that escalated quickly.

Last and least, since last December when cable TV went down for two months (I don't know if it's related; could be), I've been spending at least two hours a day with a bass in hand, plugged into my Korg PX5D and connected to iTunes and working on ear training along with K-pop songs. Why? I don't know. I'm not trying to do anything, it's not about making music or practicing bass or being a musician or anything. It may be closure to my discarded "musician" identity. I recognize now that I was never good enough to be a musician. I'm not talented, I never learned music nor got to know it, and I certainly never practiced near enough to be a musician. And if not any sort of "formal" musician, it behooves me to admit that despite my love of music and trying to make it, I was also not passionate enough to be any sort of musician.

Maybe it's an afterglow goodbye gesture towards musicianship. Ear training is one of those things I never got and never practiced as a skill. I'm just trying to see if I can improve my ear training, and that's it. It's not going to make me a musician, it's not going to make me know music. It's just training to listen to notes and develop a sense of what intervals sound like, where to go for the next note. I daresay it hasn't been a totally hopeless endeavor. It has been evidence that if I had started ear training early enough, in my teens, I could've been OK at it. I have good sessions where my fingers find the right notes without even thinking, and bad days where I feel hopelessly tone deaf and flounder about the fretboard hitting notes only after the second or third guess.

K-pop is particularly good for this because the songs are written by professional musicians applying theory, meaning there is a structure to the progressions, unlike rock which a lot is by feel and if theory is followed it's just happenstance. The theory-following structure makes a lot of K-pop predictable (they love their circle of fifths), which is good for ear training, but the writers are interesting enough to put in lots of twists and surprises to challenge ear training.

Ah, it all comes back to me. Another YouTube channel I pay attention to is ReacttotheK, a group of classical music students who react to K-pop. I generally avoid reaction videos as pointless and varying degrees of stupid, but it was interesting listening to people who know music, who pronounce "timbre" correctly, who know the difference between a piano, horns and an elbow, and had something intelligent to say about the songs.

Hearing them use music terms I recognize but have forgotten reminded me how lacking my music education has been, including ear training. That's what inspired me when cable TV went dark to at least try to do some ear training as a last gasp of musicianhood. I can grasp ear training, whereas I couldn't get music theory even if Kim Jong Un threatened to nuke Seoul unless I mastered music theory. I would pretend to try to do it and stall as long as I could to buy time for Seoul to be evacuated.

And bam, I found the gateway video that hooked me:

End of September. I read a local news article recently that confirmed what I felt about this summer that Taipei wasn't as hot as it has been for the past however many years; what I termed "hell hot". This summer was normal Taipei summer heat. It was blazing hot, but it was normal Taipei summer blazing hot. It wasn't hell hot and it turns out I can tell the difference. Because of the past few years, I would brace myself for hell hot heading out, but once outside there wasn't the immediate impulse to get out of the heat as fast as possible. It would be hot, but it was hot that I'd be taking my bike out for a ride in the years before the hell hot started.

Actually, weather has been rather unusual since winter, which was mild and dry compared to previous years in memory. And unusually dry weather continued to characterize the bulk of this year. Even during the springtime Plum Rains, there would be showers for a few days and then break. I'm usually griping about the solid blocks of rain for weeks in Taipei, but this year has not only been great and relatively dry, but there haven't been any drought warnings, either. No worries. Typhoons have been avoiding Taipei, either missing south and plowing into the Philippines or veering north towards recently disaster-prone Japan. Taipei has been grazed by non-events. Southern Taiwan hasn't been so lucky.

Rain has returned in the past month, so weather may be returning to normal crummy Taipei weather. The summer heat has broken with less drama than hell hot summers. Air conditioning has been turned off without fanfare, and even fan usage habit was easy to break. I anticipate within a week I'll sleep under covers for the first time in months. Change.

I wonder what change I'm prepared for. Earlier this year, I wrongly anticipated my bank account would run out not too long beyond June. A scenario developed that would keep me going without change well into next year. That scenario is on track, but hasn't manifested just yet; I'll see next month. If it doesn't manifest, no problem; I'll have loomage and change that I'm well-prepared for.

But since my life has a habit of not going my way, I have to think about change like . . . getting new eyeglasses. It's easily been over six or seven years that I've had this prescription and silly red frames that just don't suit me. I also need a new wardrobe of shirts. Early on, my uniform in Taiwan became light fabric, short-sleeve, button-down shirts. I never wore these in the U.S. Not only am I getting too fat for the shirts I have with paunch becoming embarrassingly obvious, but they're starting to fray and shred because of Taiwan's climate, I assume. I've never had shirts do that before. Fabric just disintegrating.

I'm not sure what other kind of change I expect in the coming year. Visiting the U.S.? Have things gotten so low that I'm willing to do that? Do I re-establish contact with . . . with whom? Audrey? If I haven't connected with her since we last connected, why would I in particular in the coming year? I do have to reply to an email from my sister-in-law, but that's not a change. We actually have a regular email correspondence: twice a year, I don't know if it's intentional. I don't know if she writes because she wants to or if she feels she has to and twice is the bare minimum she can manage. I don't know if she would like to write more but is too busy. But twice a year, one around the holidays and then another one further down the year; I respond roughly halfway in between those emails, so I'm currently a little tardy.

Nah, maybe I should just anticipate a forthcoming year with no change, keep floating along. If life wants to throw me a curve ball, whatever. See if I care. Or please!

afterglow II (fin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tbd, afterglow I

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

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

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

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

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

to be determined III

Just my imagination, running away with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TBD (to be determined) II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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