PHILOSOPHY

The universe isn’t in motion. The universe is motion. What we are isn’t in the past, present, or the future alone, since they are not separated by any permanent line. We are not anything, not in a single frame of time, alone. Our minds do not work that way. We are at all times at once, and we are all things at once.

Thought is motion. Meaning is motion. Truth is motion.

FROM NOTEBOOK H4, DECEMBER 1995 (MID 10TH GRADE) - EARLY FALL 1996 (BEGINNING OF 11TH GRADE)

Life in itself is not only constant pain, but also a constant pleasure, and should be extended. I’ve been alive for 5862 days, 7 hours, and about 10 minutes. It’s 4:22am, Saturday, April 13, 1996. Now it’s 4:24am.

FROM NOTEBOOK H5a, EARLY 11TH GRADE - WINTER OF 12TH GRADE (FALL 1996 - WINTER END 1997)[2]

I should reconsider the labels that I assign to things in terms of being pleasant and unpleasant. I should reconsider the assumption that something I supposedly enjoy such as watching TV is any better than doing homework or something else I consider unpleasant. Considering homework to be unpleasant makes it more unpleasant when I do it. Considering something to be pleasant puts too much pressure on it.

But am I just creating another artificial value system by taking all things equally?

I think that most of my problems come from a fear of death. Ways to cope: Learn about religion. Find out what you really want and go for it; try harder to find a girl. Activity is good.

I was trying to focus on the positives in life, not worrying about everything, especially not worrying about worrying, trying to take small joys where I could find them. It worked very well for a few hours, maybe less, as I was getting ready to go to the gym I was basically tired from the effort it took. Still, it’s not completely gone, and maybe with a little practice I can get the balance a little better. Something to hope for, I guess.

Maybe if I truly believe myself to be complete, the pain will stop. Just a theory.

Maybe what I am dealing with is joy, and it might be premature for me to put it in cause-and-effect ascensionist terms, but maybe it is the helix opposite of pain, the opposite member of the pair, with equal force. This is one of my main question marks at this time.

Maybe being happy just isn’t one of the things that I’m good at. This is all very convoluted.

My crazy nervous pain is a bit better now hopefully as I am trying to learn to accept it, let it flow through me rather than increase it drastically by trying to fight it.

FROM NOTEBOOK H6, LATE SUMMER 1997 TO JANUARY 1998 (SUMMER BEFORE 12TH GRADE, AND FIRST HALF OF 12TH GRADE). DARK RED COVER[3]

I have been thinking a little about trying to find out what’s inside. Maybe the deepest you can go into the mind is desire, the most basic being the desire to live.

Is there anything beyond desire, or is nothing beyond desire? Is nothing good? Maybe in nothing there is neither good nor bad, as good and bad are created by desire.

Continuous consciousness (identity, self): Is it an illusion? (Where there is not memory there is not unity.) Is my past self me? The memory of my past self is 99.9...% gone already. Is my future self me? My future self doesn’t exist yet.

James is here, body, mind, name, form, and exists in all three tenses, to a limited extent. But where am I?

Written words and TV etc. are examples of unchanging thought (truly static in the case of writing), but it doesn’t really matter because it’s translated out of and back into dynamic (transitory) thought just like anything else. Still, it has an interesting power to that limited extent.

I think that a lot of people (like me, to a huge extent) search for old memories and places and unchanging things in an attempt to unify time. The functioning of the human mind spreads time out in a strange way, like a thin line going only in one direction. But time itself is really relative, static, unified. To revert to a state where you could perceive this unity would be to unify time.[4]

I was thinking about this as I walked out alone into the back yard of the Salt Lake City house in the darkness, seeing it for the first time in maybe eight years.

I stayed up all last night packing very slowly, and then I biked over to the little park overlooking the East River just before sunrise. I was thinking about two big questions.

1. Is there order in the universe?

2. Are we immortal souls?

Sure, a lot of things about you stay the same. Your basic personality and mental process don’t change all at once. But what seems so ephemeral is our consciousness itself. One minute we are happy, then we are sad. Is there some kind of unchangeable center to it, aside from the void?

Cases for the existence of God, soul, order, are things like love, beauty, laughter, dreams. But just as strong are the cases against, like hatred, pain, suffering, sadness. Anyway, this is what I was thinking about at the park on East 58th Street.

One more thing about unifying time: If it was unified, then all the suffering as well as the joy would be eternal and universal. So try to bring joy to everyone and be joyful yourself. Maybe there is a kind of purpose in this. Maybe all the joy and suffering unified add up to something that is more good than we can understand now.

Questions: To what degree are patterns in the universe that we perceive really just patterns in our mind? Would another kind of intelligence see things in a completely different way? Is the nature of things cyclical or linear? Do all things have an opposite? Do we have an immortal soul? Why does the universe come into existence?

One night, as I was coming back into the kitchen of my dark apartment with my friend after smoking on the roof, I felt that I was half-recalling some very distant memory of being in that same place in the dark as a small child. Then for a moment I saw life as a screaming crumbling hideous dust world of agony. Then I saw a few green grapes on the counter which I thought of as an example of the fruit of life, a sort of miracle of temporary happiness for us dust creatures.

This has in a way been haunting me since then, or at least it is an image or face on the thought pattern that is haunting me. Yes, it’s somewhat clichéd imagery (dust and fruit, both of which are equally significant), but just now I got the sense that it was almost completely accurate, that I had hit the nail on the head. Let’s hope that it I didn’t. Anyway, based on this, I’d say that more introspection is probably a good idea.

A warm-weather storm wind and just a ways off rain: Most incredible sunrise I’ve ever seen.

1. No one knows the future.

2. Life’s pleasures are usually pretty small; don’t expect a dramatic transfiguration.

3. You’ve got to stop trying to convince yourself that you’re the best person in the universe and everyone else is wrong or something.

# On the yellow map:

1. Life and Mind as vast, intensely passionate forces, separated from and in mortal conflict with their opposite, negation, absence; from the void.

5. How the subconscious mind / memories work, like on a string or branches.

# [5]

Hey, everyone has awkward moments, not just me. Yeah!

For some reason it made me so happy for just a few moments to think of how tiny we really are, while being aware of other things like general unreality and the quietness of the great spheres.

There are always these things bothering me at these really low levels that I hardly think about. Maybe it helps for me to bring my focus together more.

God I get so lonely, that’s almost what defines my life, my emotions. To look outside yourself: thought, religion, friends, love. Can any of these absolutes be found?

Dreamers have a vision of an ideal world which of course they can never completely create, but maybe they can make the real world more like their vision in small ways, starting with those close to them. Seeing outside yourself is in a way a leap onto a larger scale.

Struggle with the pain, with the desire, with the ascension. Enjoy the pleasure, the fulfillment, the temporary completions. Without these there is not life.

I am a part of this sick world.

Take joy in life. Fear can flip over to become excitement.

When you feel the joy helix you can feel more clearly. When you can feel more clearly you can balance the ascensions better.

As the causes of different people’s pain are different, the paths that they take in the process of destroying their pain probably need to be somewhat different as well.

It’s so classic. I to some extent withdrew emotionally from life as I found that it would not last forever. Trying to break the attachments. But the attachments are life, are joy.

People, too, I am so afraid of. I worry so fitfully about what people think about me. Try to override that with the joy of knowing them.

Shedding inhibitions is of course a selective process, a balancing. Even when the inhibition is no longer an overwhelming fear, there is still a natural balancing and tension between the myriad ascension joys.

Being uninhibited with people should make them more rather than less happy themselves. It is better to laugh with people than at them.

Perhaps one way to describe it would be that I had a lot of potential love, but felt afraid or unable to actualize it.

Letting go of regrets, seeing that things in the past cannot be changed (constant rebirth), especially accepting as inevitable PAINS of past as well as hopefully future and present.

That is trying to constantly keep the source of my joy clear and unobstructed. The joy is love for life, the universe, etc. I try to clean it, to open it up, to nourish or cultivate it. It is greatly needed to fight against all the bad shit in my head.

Thus the entrance that I am looking for is a specific reality shock: the mortality shock that I have had a few times, the true realization that I am going to die, to be obliterated, to not exist.

There are many reasons why I think that this would be a good entrance, at least for me. It is arguably the base of my particular self-consciousness. Also it is one of the major roots of my fear-pain. Also it carries with it such a power of awareness, such a resonance of reality. It defines me to a great degree.

What I plan to do once I get there is only theoretical. Certainly I want to sustain the shock rather than retreat from it. That alone could be enough. I could try to fight the fear with whatever love I can find. I can try to accept it, the fear at least, say that is me, that is true. I can try to flip it over to become something else.

# January 5, 1998

Letting go of fear, as well as the stupid badass vision of myself in my mind.

# January 7, 1998

To me, living in the present often has a similar resonance as a sweetly old memory.

# January 9, 1998

One way to look at it is that it’s kind of like going back in time, for example if I had become old and died, but God let me come back to my youth or relive one day. I have been experiencing life just a little, just a hint or suggestion of its potential, but even that is indescribable, and it is getting even a little easier.

# January 14, 1998

I will try to write down as much as I can here. Not in any order other than the order in which my memory can recover things.

Let's say hypothetically that there was some sort of science fiction transporter beam that got a complete reading of your molecular composition, destroyed you completely in your original location, transferred the data to a new location thousands of miles away, and then used it to build a perfect copy of yourself, so perfect that you would still retain all of the same memories, thoughts, and so on. Would it still be you? Wasn't your original self destroyed? Your new self would still experience itself as being you, as it would remember the moment before you were transported, and there would be a sense of continuity with the reemergence in the new location.

In a way I think that we are like this anyway. We are in some respects a new person in each moment, but we have memories and a feeling of continuity which create a sense of identity, of continuous consciousness.

Why am I who I am?... For example, why am I am human being, a white North American male, attending such and such a school, doing this or that, rather than a 50 year old woman in Switzerland, or a turtle, or a squid. The answer is tricky to word: It is because such a person exists. There is no ‘I’ that is guided by fate or coincidence to ‘inhabit’ such a person. All of these exist, the North American male, the Swiss female, the turtle, the squid. All of them are ‘I’. There is no coincidence.

/ One of the most basic looking-around things could be described as seeing the creation in everything, every moment, not as a thing which occurred in the past, distant. I see things, anything, and feel that basic wonder that they are created out of nothing, that they just exist. (I feel this along with an intense reality.) This is something that I have felt before.

/ I think that a large part of the euphoric element of the experience was release.

/ Worrying about what others think about me in various situations is one of the first things to fall away. The idea is for me to do stuff for other people, while not trying to make myself powerful or to control them.

/ I keep catching myself with this sense of loss. Cut it off!

/ Childhood flows seamlessly into adolescence, etc. You can draw an imaginary line, say “now I am a man,” but it doesn’t mean much. This way, childhood flows from babyhood, which flows from nothing.

/ My mind seems clearer lately, in that I have been able to recognize which of my thoughts are destructive.

# January 15, 1998

I think it was Thursday night when I took that walk down through Hell’s Kitchen to the west edge of the upper 40’s. I believe that night was around 58°F. Like going back in time or from the dead. Thinking of everything there as being created, as coming out of nothing. Dream resonance.

Then Monday January 12, 1998. The first real thing was standing on the NE corner of 94th and Lex with Sam: a door opened in my mind, allowed myself to “know” on a much deeper more powerful, non-intellectual level that other people’s lives are as real as my own. (Lately I have been walking down the street or whatever and imagining the thoughts and points of view of others as I see them.) The intensity of the experience was very surprising. Like a pleasure and a high more intense than anything I can remember. That part of me recoiled from it is partly shown by my physical reaction: I turned all the way around (therefore facing north rather than south) and put my hands over my eyes.

Eventually it calmed down. I was able to enter to lesser extents through the whole conversation, I think. A very long conversation. As I left I was feeling an unreality which I chalked up to tiredness, maybe rightly.

I went home and had a burrito, then sat in the dining room with the lights off letting my mind wander for about an hour. I fell asleep for about 20 minutes, and then had a cup of tea. These two refreshed me to the point of not being able to go to sleep early like I usually plan on Mondays. But this is good because during that time I was able to enter a few times into the gate in my mind of my own mortality, joyfully. Certainly it was incomplete and very brief, but I did feel the overwhelmingness of the larger reality. (These words are so inadequate, I couldn’t describe it if I tried.) The excitement which becomes fear, the experience that nothing could be held onto. Seeing the creation as a miracle in everything, that everything is a miracle (although at the time I didn’t even think of the word ‘miracle.’)

/ If these experiences are all in your mind, then the truth-resonance might be meaningless. (This is disturbing.) Am I socially freer? Yes, who knows what the hell is going on there.

# Monday, January 19, 1998

I keep forgetting so much. I intended to laugh with people, seek out their good points, their humanity, break through the ‘paranoia.’

# Wednesday, January 21, 1998

I should try to cut down as many of my preconceived images of people as possible. Possibly that is the best that love can do, to keep as close as possible to the source and annihilate your preconceptions as frequently as possible.

In time, might one be able to live in the here and now? I think so, yes, but not right away.

FROM FOLDER "MID 1998"[6]

Reality and unreality play off each other. Instead of seeing individual things in reference to other accumulated thoughts and preconceptions, seeing them in relation to nothingness (rebirth, creation). They take on the miracle quality.

No present, only sets of time, no moments, no self, everything flows through itself. Infinite foci - form, shapes. Paradoxical realities, like we do and we don't exist. Pairs of entity and non-entity. Survival and ascension create the hierarchy of morality. Lines spread out through the system.

PAIN: Life is perpetually dipped in pain like black water.

Everybody tries different ascensions.

“I know who you are, you’re me!” Everybody is ‘me’

The weight and wildness of all the experience past present and future. So many different experiences!

Our thoughts mostly about like the surface (or that of our level) of it all; ignorant of the hugeness they are standing on.

Aspects are so myriad and we are 1/∞. Forms are the same. Experience drifts so strangely if you allow it to. This strangeness is part of a deeper nature and beauty

The pervasiveness of one's lack of knowledge; all the things that we don't know. The independence of reality from the knowledge of just one individual (1/∞). All the stuff that flies and floats and wails around you, it's amazing. Only once I pick up the phone do I know who has called.

It’s sufficient as it is, right now.

Wisdom exists no matter what happens to me. The only thing I can do is advance it, participate in it.

The things that separate me from Joe X. and Mike Z. and everybody else… the mark of “James G-A” on my particular experience, how significant is it? Memory, lines, learning, ego.

The self is real in one sense but from other perspectives what I see as myself is part of something else. For example, memory lines are real, but there are many other types of line; phenomena are bound together in many different ways.

Responses to fear of death. Seeing my own smallness without becoming self-destructive. Even tempered-ness, balance, kindness etc.

Seeing myself as existent or nonexistent are ways of avoiding the paradoxical truth.

I am two sets of experience, my experience of myself: that is self-evaluation, etc., and my experience of the outside world. (The two interrelate)

Normal human cognition is limited, within certain parameters perhaps set by language. The complex universe’s potential reality is unlimited.

If you’re not afraid of being lonely then you can truly be with people.

I’m afraid of losing my youth lonely.

It’s okay the way it is right now.

Likes and dislikes branch in increasing abstract and empty ways.

We are only what we are thinking about at any time.

Now is all times; all time

/ Self and other exercise - talking to another person, realizing to 99.99% of people, you are the other --> an object. Even to your past and future selves, you are only object. Even to your present self, “me” is an object.

Love is identification.

Watching a movie of your life[7]

Boredom is caused by frustration.

Written on a cigarette carton: A look at the fabric. Life as a series of revelations – remember fireflies or hot summer days. Opening them up to find the truth inside

Even if one accepts the existence of God, it is still such a big leap from that to the point of believing that some people have access to understanding God's will while others don't.

Nobody can see another person’s memories. It is often hard for people to care about other’s memories as much as their own, which is sad.

Judgement is as inevitable as making decisions.

Being with other people can be good but it is a mistake to try to find / form “your identity” in them, to take their perceptions of you as a kind of enduring and unambiguous reality.

Towers of Babel = Towers of words, concepts, including self-conceptualizations. Identifying with only the towers, worshipping them, clinging to them, is unhealthy, since they are transient. Identify with the whole.

Life creates the I tension, death releases it. Too bad that nobody is around to experience that! Is there any way to experience that oneness?

Fully confused I only know that it is amazing.

People tend to think of the creation as something which happened in the past, disconnected. But the creation itself is eternal, is everything.

Through the gate of death-in-life into a reality so vast and pure that it is frightening, infinitely frightening, infinitely overwhelming.

[A treebranch diagram.] Thoughts like these, connecting conditional past, present, and future to the present moment. These thoughts go on and on.

/ Humans think that they own things, own the world. But they don't, they only experience them.

Desire you move toward. Fear you move away from.

Can happiness exist without pain?

How many people want to understand the truth of human life? Some people don't give a shit, and would rather be entertained and spoonfed. Why is this? Is it a product of an oppressive education system? Or just a basic tendency toward laziness, or in kinder terms a desire for rest.

/ Breaking down the structures of linear thought so that you can see outside of them. Breaking down the stress and rigidity of these lines, which are so tightly burdened by fear and desire.

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For early 1999, see college admissions essay

For late 1999, see metaphysics paper

For early 2000, see existentialism paper

For mid 2000, see Tassajara journal

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FROM NOTEBOOK C3, FALL 2000[8]

Try to remember to be compassionate with others, to be more nurturing, supportive kind, rather than just trying to elicit love and support from others. Don’t always be needy and dependent; observe other people’s fears as well.

I accepted over and over that it couldn’t be grasped, that my life is as it is. I didn’t feel the need to hold back much. I was really happy and surprised about how very real everyone seemed, how authentic.

Always losing time. I never had it to begin with.

/ What if creation is eternal? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I tend to focus more on the destructive force, of death, sickness, chaos, decay. This exists in a dynamic balance with the creative force. I tend to dread that ultimately the creative force will run out and existence will end, but perhaps this is not so.[9]

/ Every moment a whole horde of new stuff comes up for me to try to accept so it’s pretty continual work.

I wanted very much to express myself, to communicate, but I felt that various potential conversations might end up being limiting and tiresome. Thus I felt somewhat anxious and confused.

Believing that we are trapped, we trap ourselves.

Having some experience of embracing life while still striving to change. Actually this second part strikes me as a non-issue: of course I am always changing, always striving.

A feeling in perhaps all my social relationships of guilt for holding back somehow, not fully loving people. Most people might feel this way. (Would it be different in different cultures; if I had a different personality or history?)

And we’re not taking it for granted, we are trying as hard as we can to fully love one another in each moment. It doesn’t stop time but there’s a joy in it as well as a sadness.

Interesting the intersection of absolute and relative in our lives, of spiritual and mundane, or pure and cynical. They can’t be separated from each other.

Happiness is never pure happiness, there is always some tension and anxiety in it, but my view now is that those are not two mutually exclusive things. Relaxing some in terms of trying to perfect my experiences.

Being able increasingly to love people in a way on such occasions, not holding back perhaps in certain small ways, an illumination of the moment, of emptiness, of transience, of compassion, of our mutual identity, of joy, of suffering and tension, of passing from and into and through the unknown.

I write this alone, and so I am uncertain of it; I write this because I am uncertain of it.

Rising to embrace life, to commit myself to its passionate nature; what is there to lose?

My life is good. Two apples are sitting next to each other on my bed, one is blushing. I am inside the void. Comparatively speaking, I am grateful.

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PHILOSOPHY FROM CHARLESTON FOLDER, SPRING 2001[10]

Joyful about the creation of everything

Joyful is the creation of everything, its maintenance, and destruction.

A sunny day, a baseball diamond, the grass below me.

The grass, sun, dirt, are miraculous creation.

My eyes and seeing are, too, creation.

I am nothing but this. Which is humbling because agony is a part of this. It's hard for me to accept that I'm nothing but this. I sometimes drift off by believing that I am something else, that I am some thing.

# Monday, April Thirtieth, Two Thousand One

Perhaps meeting with the divine is not just some experience, but something which actually happens. Perhaps this may or may not be experienced, or recognized as such in the realm of experience

I have been trying to practice meeting with God. In meeting with a pain in my side, meeting with an eye infection, meeting with anxieties, thought, a cut thumb, my girlfriend, customers at the book store, a cold breeze, capitalist society, the future, the past, the night sky…

I know nothing; I have found nothing but a searching. I have no truth but a question. Everything for me is a question.

# 5.1.02.

Perhaps free will is not something that exists in a vacuum, separate from causality. But perhaps rather there is a type of causality is characterized by freedom.

This world may be dying. It may not. This may be the only world. There may be other worlds. There is no answer but only a mystery.

Death? Perhaps awakeness always creates itself anew. Perhaps it doesn't. Will I die? Will life die? Will joy die? Will passion die, will creation die?...

I was mistaken in high school to desire acceptance by people without first / also desiring to know them and accept them. Why should anyone ever like me if I don't like them? That would the point of that be anyway? What substance would it have?

# 4/15

This organismic life, the struggle for survival, the circumstantiality, the sickness, the aching of muscles.

/ What is the divine? Maybe it is a sort of silence. A silence on the edges of things, the edges of experiences. Perhaps a silence that is the source of creation but is rarely felt.

/ People have many different experiences at the same time.

/ How to meet with fear: Know it as a whole rather than seeing single instances as aberrant, surprising. Practice knowing the fact that we are never sure that we will live into the next morning, the next minute, the next moment. That at any moment the ground might give way beneath you or the sky might fall open. The laws of nature as we understand them might not be quite right. The present situation as we understand it may not be quite right. There might be a cause of death about to happen that we were not able to predict, because the causal mechanism is not one that we are aware of.

This is true.

To be alive is to live in the constant possibility of death.

Compassion is to recognize our self; competition is to attack our self. It takes courage to recognize oneself, to recognize each other.

I seemed to remember myself as a person who had lived and fought for freedom, who had seen death closing in on him, who in the mystery of death had been uncertain whether or not he would continue. Fighting for life in the face of chaos.

But here I am again! I think that my self is not different, not broken, only cast into and saturated by void.

Here I am again with the future still uncertain, possible… Here I am with the outcome still hanging in the balance. Here I am, living by the mysterious grace of creation, maintenance, destruction. Maybe the I will go on again after my life ends, too. Who knows how old I am, how much the empty space of memory and forgetting cut through.

Why give up? Why not be present, settle into agony. Take it in the present and address problems in the present. Don't accumulate them from the past. Constant rediscovery!

# 4/1

Everything is self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-destroying.

What can I do? What is the best thing to do given these circumstances?

Study the light of being. Study the fact of being. Study that which makes existence possible.

/ This miracle. As I run, the creative perpetuative destructive action of the ground, the sky, support me, sustain me. I am running in the void.

# Sunday - Monday March Twenty Fifth - Twenty Sixth Two Thousand and One

In general, nervousness, fear, pain: These things, we should be grateful for them. For the fact of passion, duality.

/ I imagine a world where the playing of children will not be bound by social class and useless old rules... taking joy in the freedom of movement and boundless meaning of life, in the duality between themselves and other people, between themselves and life… A world where wisdom grows and selfishness, cruelty, meanness may be put down.

Life is fundamentally joyful. There is not one particular way. We have the capability to learn from experience what causes suffering and what does not. One chooses to be happy. Yet happiness is not a thing, not a particular, discrete state.

With each creation there is also a letting-go of that which is not real. For example, various ideas of a self, or hatred for things that you can't change.

There is a decision to make about whether or not to embrace your own life, and life itself. A year ago I still hadn't made that decision. Finally though, I decided that there is nothing real to be lost in deciding to embrace life. It isn't a withdrawal or sacrifice, but just a devotion to the real. The decision to embrace life is not a single discrete event, two-sided with a separate before and after. It is continual.

# Sunday, February 18, 2001

I do not understand. I'm doing my best, I think.

The substance of beauty is fully, completely present in each moment.

# February 8

We do not choose to be born. Instead we are called into life, by life, as it tries to fulfill its aspiration for life, for survival, for living joy, living freedom. Such an amazing and arduous process for everyone: being born, growing.

To embrace the dark half, the possibility of death and pain. To be intimate with the feared possibility, to integrate it as a part of my whole self. To be wholeheartedly ourself. This includes light, dark, and the motion from dark to light.

Feeling how frighteningly beautiful and perfect this time really is. Moving towards the future, The flow of time is not affected by my trying to rush ahead or hold back. A feeling rather that I am falling through towards the future.

The confrontation with impermanence or the death of our self in each moment. The confrontation with suffering, sickness, loss. The confrontation with the bare fact of our existence, unexplainable, incomparable, strange, amazing, joyful, anxious, passionate, boundless, beautiful, sad, irrational, purposeless, vast, free, and real.

In actively confronting these and trying to find my way, I feel a sense of authenticity. In communicating with others about these, I feel a sense of authenticity.

To step from hell to heaven is impossible. So many years I spent struggling to find the gate and break the barrier. Seeking heaven, I placed myself in hell. Struggling to break the barrier, I created it. Struggling to find the gate, I became lost.

But heaven must be found in hell. Hell cannot be departed from. Heaven cannot be arrived at. Heaven and hell merge in each moment, as do being and nonbeing, life and death.

# February 12-13

Meditating by exerting a kind of effort of awareness but not trying to dictate the form or focus of this awareness.

Before making a decision, say "Yes!" That is, although the answer to the decision may be unclear, and you cannot wholeheartedly affirm one outcome or another, you can at least wholeheartedly affirm that you have reached this juncture in the first place, that you are currently making this decision. Hence, "yes."

# March 4

To be oneself honestly, courageously, authentically. As compassion, as the light of being, as intelligence, as impermanence, as uncertainty, as passion, as the desire for joy, as the exact causes and conditions, as the past, present, and future possibilities. As a motive force. To be the self that is undivided, the self that is not a self.

Perhaps compassion is not just a phenomenon among phenomena, but is more so a temporal-spatial, ontological fact, that is the fact that the light of being is spread across time and space. Perhaps this is the same fact as the temporal-spatial anguish of separation.

# Friday, May 25, 2001

No contact? No parting?

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FROM FOLDER: SUMMER 2001[11]

I am sort of sad these days. I think it’s partly due to how alone I am. It’s sad to me that time is passing and this is what my life is like.

But in a way I think it’s fairly healthy to be stripped of purpose sometimes.

# Friday – Saturday June 8 – 9, 2001

Taking a rest? Exploring nihilist stuff. Letting myself not be so focused, so aware. Letting myself be unhappy, unproductive. Letting myself doubt everything.

My intentions are still good though. I am resting, but I don’t want to be like this for too long. Good to inquire about reality with not so much attachment and all that.

The other extreme is nihilism, a misery. Am I drifting between them, playfully without purpose, without hope? Well yes with less hope, less belief in a basic goodness over badness.

I really am pretty alone here. It’s amazing to be so alone. It’s sort of awful being alone but I think that there is something sort of authentic about the things that make it awful. “Being alone with death.”

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

It can’t be seen from the outside.

I look at things so many different ways. I don’t believe anything but in a way I believe everything. I feel a sort of tension between living for myself and living for something outside myself. I guess like these are like the two forms of that never-ending search for solidity and thing-ness. So many different angles of good and bad, of possible values and structures! Forge on, in this uncertainty! There is no permanent sin or paradise? I will keep on guessing.

# June 19, 2001

Some people think I'm neat. Some people think I'm not. I guess none of these are really right definitively. I guess they form a sort of paradox. Each view of my character is conceived in the relationship of the observer to me; the position of each observer is different. I too am an observer of my character, with a specific relationship to it. So my character exists, but a definitive appraisal of it is perhaps impossible.

I'm trying not to internalize people's different impressions of me too much, learning them as a kind of knowledge but without attachment, knowing that I am not definitively superlative or defective.

There is a distinction between my being in social-practical terms and in experiential terms. My use or function, my benefit or harm to other people is not the only reality about myself.

Buddhism usually seems to assume that the power of life to sustain itself is infinite, eternal. In a world view incorporating and endless cycle of rebirth, one doesn't seem to have to worry too much about sustaining life. But as I tend to see it, this struggle of life to perpetuate / reproduce itself is a radically important and central concern for us as organisms / living creatures.

Yet, why is it me who makes the effort? Why do I really feel what I feel? Why does there have to be actual being, actual suffering and joy, instead of just complex determinism? Why would I be so uncomfortable with all this, if it is my nature? If death and sickness are my nature, why do they make me uncomfortable? I should be able to hate them without hating them.

Do they make me uncomfortable? Can I hate them without hating them? Can I realize that I am actually not uncomfortable with my own nature? What's going on?

Objectively I might be fairly happy. But I haven't been experiencing it that much.

The degradation of mortality. Disappearing unnoticed in this pretty sand world. It's so pretty this morning, especially in the shade. So pretty here in this passed / past world. I find that I don't have much to say or write lately.

Acting foolish/goofy is okay as long as it's sweet foolish and not asshole foolish. Tricky distinction though.

It is possible and possibly easy to love everything, or at least anything.

Probably this activity is pointless in the face of death and ending, but why not.

Just that kind of simple silly affirmation of things. It doesn't have to be applied to all things at all times, it's not heavy. It can be applied to the most dull and boring and dreary cones of the life plant in the cloudy afternoon.

Memories well up again and I long for joy, a sweet empty longing for perfect expressions and realizations.

I like this simple desire or fondness for life better than I like nihilistic boredom, depression, and complaint. Both are fairly pointless probably, so why not? (which is a form of freedom).

# Sunday, July 2001

"Draw near, draw away." This represents a fundamental dynamic in a relationship between two animals.

For example humans and other humans: There is the urge both to draw near and to draw away. Humans are social animals: if you draw away too far you might starve, won't be able to reproduce or exchange favors, will be underprotected and unable to protect our blood relatives.

But if you draw near you run the risk of that other person harming you. (For example killing, injuring, robbing, infecting, impregnating, ostracizing...) When we draw near there is not only the direct fear that we will be harmed. Also we might harm the other person, who might then harm us in reprisal. (And maybe harming another person is frightening enough on its own...) I might even be afraid to draw near because drawing away later could harm the other person.

In any case the presence of an enemy, someone inclined against you, is unsettling, a cause for worry.

Is it possible to be happy when sick? This is one of my main questions.

I've been thinking lately that in a way I should try to really appreciate the beauty of life, to live that beauty, to try to penetrate to the heart of it, the source, the substance... to learn beauty, to use it as a standard, to create from it, to love.

THIS LIMITED VISION.

#####################################

FROM INDIA NOTEBOOK (C6): FALL 2001[12]

I have exhausted attempt to grasp. I have exhausted attempts to let go. I have exhausted various views.

I have exhausted various attempts at revelation and experience. I have exhausted lots and lots of views, trying to settle on a Right View. All that’s left is this life.

I remember one time when I was about ten on the cafeteria lunch line I calculated out what portion of my life I had lived in ratio to the likely remainder. The ratio was very favorable; I was basically pleased, although of course the underlying notion of finitude was already there.

This time here is not necessarily present, and the other is no more past. Well, now I'm here, then I'm there. I-now-here and I-then-there are just two different phenomenal clusters. One doesn't necessarily transform into the other, but they're related somehow. Other people are just related to I-here-now in a different way than I-there-then is related to I-here-now.

Anyway, I am here now and there then. I seem to be hurtling through time or something. I shrug. I don't know what to do about it exactly. I can't seem to stop the motion through time.

I mean, it's not just this, it could be anything, and there could be anything to do about it. I don't know though, right? So I shrug. I kind of look at it. And I still try to look at it closely, intimately, with love. Maybe to go beyond thinking. But I haven't been pushing myself as hard as I used to. I mean time just keeps going along and I go from place to place caught up with different tasks and whatnot.

Maybe it's better not to push myself so much, because this way I am more flexible. It's a little sad though. There is still that light of being, but even that seems to sound in emptiness, a flash in the dark.

Yes, yes, there may still be a natural effort. The light may come again, and freedom may give rise to freedom, all this still in impermanence.

Am I beginning to enjoy this nihilist fog, rather than only wishing for it to stop? It's funny and a little disquieting that all of this is just a story that I'm making up to pass the time. I know that, don't I? I want to be happy, and I want my story to say that I'm happy. But I'd rather actually be happy than just believe I'm happy, assuming that there is such a thing as actually being happy. In order to believe that I'm happy, I have to decide what happiness is, and the explanation never seems totally satisfactory. The ideas just spin around in boring circles after awhile.

What is happiness? Is it physical pleasure? Emotional pleasure. These are pretty unstable. What about cognitive pleasure, some kind of self-assurance. Isn't this unstable and hollow too? Isn't it funny to look for stability by accepting instability?

Yeah, I hit a rough patch a little bit back. It sounds in emptiness. Now I'm feeling a little better. It sounds in emptiness. I sometimes, often, maybe always, want to explode in every direction at once. I wish I had something to do, something real and worthwhile. Some things are more worthwhile than others, but is anything ultimately worthwhile?

A store alarm in the city night, the memory of this is so peaceful and makes me long for it so much. Strange to think that at the time - I mean when I was living in my childhood or any time of these sweet memories - I must have been absorbed in some other concern then too... But the suchness comes at me in strange ways. Is it ever consummated?

As a child, we drove in one night from upstate, and when we got back to the apartment I had soup at this little table in my room. It was a miniature kid table made of some cardboard / wood-like material, and there were some stickers that I had put on it. Once it got wet and that damaged it, wore it down.

Anyway, there is a feeling of a sort of loneliness of that night, a kind of desolation, a sense of the pitifulness of this sad table which didn't offer much protection against the loneliness of the night.

I personally guess that all the Rinpoches and Roshis and Arhats are ultimately speaking as lost as anyone. We all exist in uncertainty, and life and death remain mysterious. I think that personal development (psychological, spiritual, etc.) is great, and at least as worthwhile as anything else, but that it doesn't change the basic fact of uncertainty, and of impermanence.

This notion bothers me that "Buddhist Masters" have really got it figured out, and that ordinary people haven't. And the whole idea that there is some correct frame of mind to have and that the other ones are incorrect. As for enlightenment, one could have any number of experiences of joy or clarity or love or insight, sudden understandings, visions... One's mind can go through any number of amazing transformations, but how can you say that there is one type of these that is the One over and above and incorporating all the others? How can you fit all human experiences into a single hierarchy? How can an experience raise someone into an authority which cannot be questioned by others?

I’m playing around in my head with the inconsequentiality of things, or maybe the semi-randomness of the consequentiality of things. After I die, the more time goes by, the more random the consequences of my actions will become.

You know all these things I’m afraid of? It’s like a ghostly dream. Sun, don’t set too soon, I’m coming but there’s no time, always it’s ahead of me! I’m catching up!? The sun is setting and I want to bake in it for a long time! I remember my sixth grade play. It’s beautiful, that I can remember that. I need a raft or something to hold onto. I wish I could shine for people. I wish I could bake in the sunshine with people, running free and all of that. I want to keep going and doing, growing brighter instead of fading out. The sun is setting and I want to keep on being.

I am writing. Here I am. Hello. Hello me. Hello you. Can I meet you? Can I meet me? Can we be together? Are we ever together?

Ode to nothing to do. How you frighten and confuse me, nothing to do, but how I long for you. I long to do nothing, to be afraid of nothing, to go on, to do everything! My heart beats, my skin and muscles tingle. My bones and sinews strain. I take a breath.

I want not just to make, but to be. To be, to be without making, to not be afraid, to be together. Are these just longings and dreams, always on the horizon, far away? I think I'm agnostic about those questions too.

All my gloomy behavior makes sense, but it is provisional instead of being ultimately correct. It is experimenting with my reality. It is thrashing about one way and then another.

If we met it, wouldn’t we still be living the same life? Are there transformations that can bring us beyond death? I don’t see this. I turn away from what look like false promises, scared but strangely reassured by the thought that I am doing what I can with what I am… If I am mortal, perhaps it isn’t a mistake of my own but because I can’t help being mortal. If I’m not sure about the way to go, then it isn’t a mistake I made, but because I just don’t know.

My heart keeps beating. I didn’t catch it. Did I make a mistake, is that why I didn’t catch it? No, maybe I didn’t make a mistake! Maybe! It’s just maybe. Maybe I didn’t make a mistake. Do you know what I mean?

Maybe there is something to catch. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it would be immortal life. Maybe not immortality, but happiness. Of course I keep running forward. Why not? And there is a strange joy in it, in exerting my body and mind, my muscles and nerves. Why not keep going, exerting this strange joy of anguished exertion? Climbing with this breaking-up body, smelling the freshness of the air. Struggling tiredly through various mundane tasks, a ghost of various cares.

To want to make is to grasp outside. To want to be is to grasp inside. To try not to try is to grasp inside. Why shouldn’t we grasp? Why shouldn’t we try? Because it makes us unhappy? There is no mandate that we have to be happy, nor is there a mandate that we shouldn’t try to be happy. There is no mandate that tells us what happiness is.

I have trouble believing in a happiness that is solid and unmistakable like a block. But then again I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll find it one of these days.

The most pleasant kind of life is to have nothing that you have to do, and lots of things you can do if you like, all the things which you like best.

I often withdraw from the absurdity of social situations, and then after being alone for some time I get lonely and seek them out again. Actually I don't think that I'm making any mistake here; I don't think that there is a contradiction.

I feel like everyone probably wants the divine in some way or other. It's funny, settling for the best you can do, or what you are willing to try and all that. For example if I am with a group sitting down at a meal, we might sadly settle for the conversation as a limited version of what we really want. When I ask someone how they are and they just say 'okay,' there can be a lot that goes into this. For example, "I can't seem to reach the divine, but I've basically come to terms with this limited existence and incomplete satisfaction; although it isn't how I want it to be, it is what it is; I don't see much reason to expect anything drastically better." Or it could mean "I am totally wretched, but I can't see any benefit in talking about it."

#
I used to think that I had to make people think I was better than them in order for them to like me. What a contradiction! Maybe it works for some people, but now it just seems too crazy for me.

This carried over into my spiritual quests too: I thought that once I became all enlightened people would want to spend time with me so that they could learn how to be likewise. Ha! This is so stupid.

Am I really so tired as all this? Is my love for things somehow evaporating? How strange... it's not nearly so bad as I might have imagined. -- Oh, silly, is my love for things really evaporated? No, I guess it's still there.

Miguel and I used to play this idiotic and hilarious game. We would put our index fingers on our temples and say "Grandma's in the... kitchen!" And we'd both run to the kitchen. Then we'd put our index fingers on our temples again and say "Grandma's in... James's room!" And we'd run to my room. It just kept going like this; we'd just choose the room at random, I guess. Of course there was no grandmother anywhere in the house.

Ah... damn, the beauty of it is still agonizing to me because it's lost.

I look on a beautiful scene. But something is missing. Maybe I want someone to share it with. But if I had someone to share it with, and even if they would agree to appreciate it alongside me, their appreciation would be just as temporary as mine.

In a way I want the scene to be completely self-affirming, sentient, self-aware, self-satisfied, permanent. I want it to be absolutely affirmed in a world of total awareness - an awareness which does not suffer, which affirms everything as pure beauty and joy, and which is permanently aware of everything, of all times, all at once and forever. The raw impermanent tissue of the world shining forth as completely permanent and perfect.

My world is just love.

Love or desire, and the obstacle of love, the frustration of desire.

I have nothing to fear but that I will lose everything. This is indeed what I do fear, and the basis for all my fear. Also, I suspect that it is true; that I will lose everything. I will lose this life, I will lose what I love, I will lose what I want. Many things I want I will never have; I will lose them even before I have them.

Still, there is something sweet about it, about a life that is only the pursuit of love, the pursuit of life. The worst that can happen is that this love will be lost.

So it's entirely positive, even though it's perpetually frustrated.

Here is the desire for life, and the pursuit of life, and the frustration of that desire. The desire for God, the search for God, and the unattainability of God. The desire for beauty, the wish to maintain beauty, and the unattainability of beauty. And so on.

Funny how people behave in conversation, just sort of mentioning things they might briefly enjoy talking about. Dissatisfying. It's hard to avoid though, I mean all this dreariness.

I'm not even really a vessel for experience. Or if I am I have a hole at the bottom and it just runs right through.

This feeling of beauty is elusive, and has always been elusive. But I have no intention of giving up the search for it, for the divine, even though I don't necessarily expect it to go anywhere in particular. Why would there be any reason to stop trying? I can't think of one.

There is also this strange emptiness, this strange indifference. I neither love nor am loved. I am like empty space. And yet I am nothing but this love, nothing apart from this world. In a way I think this natural indifference is a real comfort. It softens everything, but just so it blankets everything in destruction of time - the total oblivion of the dead, the past - if it is so.

On one of my first nights of sleepaway camp as a kid they took us to the town to see a movie. I enjoyed it, but when it ended and we had a longish bus ride back to the camp, I came back to my own situation I had this pretty deep feeling of emptiness, like loneliness, dread, fear.

Metaphysical theories should be presented just as a set of possibilities. For example, "it could be like this... or it could be like this... but who really knows? Not me." In that spirit, here are a few possibilities:

Each moment has a reality which can be either isolate or not isolate. For example my instantaneous here-now moment-self doesn't know if any of the molecules in my shoe possess a similar feeling - awareness, will - or what. Isolate.

There is a connection of some kind between this here-now moment of mind, and a previous JG-A moment in Arizona nine years ago. There are two separate, individual moments which have some kind of connection or relationship. So they are partially isolate to one another, and partially not isolate.

Maybe the feeling of traveling forward in time is sort of an illusion, like my past moments didn't happen to me, but rather in this moment the I is in the process of remembering the past moment. On the other hand, maybe this connection is very deep and meaningful, goes down to the heart of things, like a soul, of which memory is a function. Maybe it is true to say that a self or person travels forward through time.

Maybe there is some divine storehouse consciousness which perpetually remembers all the moments ever lived by all beings at all places and times, so that the moments themselves are immortal, though the minds of animals have feelings of mortality because of their particular function.

Maybe we are immortal ghosts who can travel through these mortal moments which have the feeling of mortality. Maybe we are bending and changing them making more moments and more worlds, blossoming out in emptiness.

Or maybe we are the spirit of the moments' creation. Maybe this spirit is split up into infinite parts, into partially isolated times and places, bubbles and flecks of foam.

Maybe once these moments have been created, they go on existing forever, solid and real in the form of a divine storehouse consciousness. Maybe not only the subjective, experiential part is immortal, but so are the causes, the solid physical world.

Or maybe once these moments - and these solid existences - have been created, they vanish altogether never to return, except that they form the causes for future existences which go on.

Or maybe at the culmination of all these impermanent existences is a permanent existence, infinite and completely self-fulfilling, a heaven. (Heaven is at the end of the future.)

Or maybe there has always been this permanent heaven, and the impermanent universe is just a temporary tangent off of it which will eventually fade. (Heaven is at the beginning of the past.)

Maybe heaven is equivalent to a God in itself. If heaven is a reality where various feeling, aware, (acting?) beings are completely happy and fulfilled... perhaps these various beings might also be so completely interconnected with one another, and their intelligences might be so unified and cooperative, that there would be little difference between this heaven and a single God. But what would the difference be if there was one?

Maybe heaven fires out a part of itself to try to build a new home, another heaven, in chaos, or to try to transform an area of chaos into a new heaven.

(Aha, now you can see the life-drive peeking through that one. The life myth is a living being or process struggling to create order out of chaos - the kind of order that is necessary for life - reproducing the good-self-ness to fill the universe...)

Maybe there is some way or other for the isolation of a moment from other moments to break down, so that the moments meet in some way that is deeply fulfilling, or fills them with some deep faith.

Maybe one moment can somehow experience all the other moments at once.

Maybe it is possible for one moment to see the inside of another moment rather than just the outside, no, not see it, join with it, in some kind of total identification.

Maybe experiencing-ghosts don't just travel through moments along the time axis of a single being's life; maybe they travel around in other crazy ways.

Some objections to the God concept are emotional. It's the emotion of a person who doesn't want to bow to someone as being much bigger than themself, more valuable, etc. This is a social emotion; funny that it should carry over into the religious sphere. A similar objection is that I don't want my own experience to be any less profound and perfect than that of any other being.

Is this the good time or the bad time or the in-between time?

Will I still be here to enjoy it when it's finished?

My life is my life. Here it is. And yet I am turned away from it, ahead. If I am turned away, I am turned away. I don’t even know if I can choose otherwise!

Different relationships exist. But love does not necessarily bring immortality. Hence: don’t expect that.

I look at another person & I see the same hesitations of concern.

Can subject and object meet? I have to be agnostic about this question. I really don’t know. Even if there is transcendence of subject–object duality, perhaps there is still duality. Subject–object duality is already transcended, yet perhaps nevertheless it is still active, still reality. Reality could be both the transcendence of subject–object duality and the activity of subject–object duality. What divine worlds may open up, I can’t say.

Do you want to experience the transcendence of subject-object duality? But isn’t experience dualistic? That which is, is. That which I am, is. But if I want to experience something, then isn’t my experience something else?

Everything I've learned is extraneous. What I've learned is miraculous, useless, and sad. Everything that I've learned is ordinary. It doesn't set me above anyone, above pain, struggle, or death. Learning is ordinary. It is a life thread. I think that even wise people go on struggling in pain and death. I am really just one person, with specific characteristics and sources; there must be plenty of virtues and understandings that I will always lack.

Am I even really trying my best? I know how lazy I am. Still, I hope that at some point I I'll be able to do really good things, to solve problems, to do something appropriate given my potential, whatever that actually is.

I know my time is running out. I want more of this life, but better than this. Given time I think I could work it out, but time runs out.

Funny that a dying-thing like me wouldn't want to die. There's a mystery about who I am.

Practicing agnosticism. Uncertainty, anxiety, mystery, spatial and temporal separation. Light of being. Duality and nonduality. Great care and great emptiness, suspension, freedom. The life struggle, life ascending against chaos. Etching an understanding of the structure of the world, human minds, human societies. Thinking and beyond thinking; self and beyond self.

There is still a mystery as to who we are -- our subjectivity, light of being, lebensvelt, freedom, will, experience. It is not necessarily apart from causality, and yet it is not explained by causality. And so there are things we don't know about this subjectivity, and its relationship to causality.

I still have a great love for life, for things... for day and night.

# "duality and nonduality," first essay[13]

1 Nonduality is a great freedom. Everything is free to be itself.

2 Yet nonduality coexists with tension, dread, sickness, death, and so on.

1 Because nothing is known to be specifically so or otherwise, it is free to be anything. Because everything is exactly as it is, it is free to be itself.

2 Yet because I am a living creature, I depend of various conditions to exist. Although these conditions are not necessarily in that they are free not to exist, they are necessary for me in that I am not free to exist without them. Thus although it is free to be anything, just so is it free to be my antithesis. I am not free to be anything, because from death I cannot return to life.

# "duality and nonduality," second essay

The human situation. is both dual and non-dual. How could it be dual when it is itself? How could it be non-dual when things are antithetical to each other? When it is in tension with the other, when it is open to the other, when it is without permanence, individuated being.

For example, death is a mystery.

2 Because it is a mystery, there is anxiety.

1 Yet because it is a mystery, there is release. Because there is no knowing, there is no necessity; because there is no necessity, there is freedom.

2 Yet although there is no necessity, there is necessity. I need water to live. Necessity is duality. Necessity is dependence on that which sometimes exists and sometimes doesn't This is contingency. I am contingent on water because I am contingent on life and life is contingent on water.

1 But am I contingent on life? For who am I? Because I am a mystery, contingency is a mystery. Necessity is a mystery, and so there is freedom. Because necessity is a mystery, necessity is free to be necessity. Because I am a mystery, I am free to be myself. Because I am not otherwise, it cannot be necessary for me to be otherwise. Because there is nonduality, life is free to be life and death is free to be death.

2 But because there is duality, death is not free to be life.

1 Because there is nonduality, I cannot know that I am alive and I cannot know that death is to be feared. Because of this there is nonduality.

2 And yet I cannot know otherwise, and I cannot know that death is not to be feared. Because of this there is duality. Because of duality I know that I am alive, and I know that death is to be feared.

1 Because of non-duality, I don't know. If my death is necessary, it cannot be other than it is, and so it is free to be itself.

2 Yet my life contains its own necessity, such that my death must not be. Thus my death must be other than it is, so it cannot be itself, and is not free.

1 Why does my life possess its own necessity, which may differ from the actual, the eventual? Why on earth would multiple, conflicting necessities exist? My necessity may be unreal, or its frustration may be unreal. Or neither may be unreal. How can an independent necessity be produced? This too is a mystery, and so it is free.

2 Yet the clash or tension between necessities occurs in each moment. This is duality.

1 Because death cannot be known to be one way, then it is not possible for any way to be excluded. Because all possibilities are present, there is freedom, and there is nonduality.

2 Yet because some possibilities are antithetical to my necessity, there is duality. In this antithesis of value there is tension.

#
We are concern, sorge, care. The beauty of life is far beyond our capability to appreciate it. We can't appreciate it from a detached perspective, we can't apprehend it or consume it. We only appreciate it through concern.

The preciousness of human life is its own. I will not see these people for long, nor will I be long in this place. If I have the heart to love these things, that love is something sweet and honest, maybe even brave.

A suggestion: Look closely at your experience; look at what happens in each moment. Is it what you tend to assume? Or are some things different?

#
To act from a basic appreciation of beauty.

I know it is ending, and I love it, I am sad that it is ending. I will try to find a way, a salvation, a truth, I will go on trying to find it but... possibly it's not there.

I go on with my life. My heart is full, not full, full of this love, the love is crowded in with the busy-ness and the love for this is crowded in with the search for that. The love is crowded in with a restlessness. Because of impermanence my heart is a too-small boat.

My heart is full of love but the object of that love, ah, is it absent? Does time make it absent, one part after that other? There is something which it longs for, the requital, the fulfillment, the other half. What is it? Does it exist or not? Is my heart an idiot, just deluded? My heart is full of absence, of a love for something absent. What is it?

Or maybe it's like this (another myth): At a moment of enlightenment everything knows everything else; every moment knows every other moment at once. Nothing is lost, everything is found. This knowing is realization of the pure and complete beauty of all things, by all things. This knowing does not take place within impermanence or within suffering.

FROM NOTEBOOK C7: SPRING 2002[14]

Have to say one thing or the other. This is the great confusion.

Maybe it’s not just language which makes for this sort of forced-choice quality of human being. I mean maybe it’s just a basic quality of human consciousness, like it isn’t just pure nonspecific Being, but always being-something-in-particular.

Without a more nonspecific being it’s hard to imagine an ultimate or perfect state of being. What else might ‘perfect’ being be?...

I’ve decided to embrace my anxiety. Currents of thoughts that deem anxiety to be aberrant, I find sinister.

It bothers me when people don’t drive themselves to see beyond what they see, to know beyond what they know. When they stick to their own understanding as if it were the only reality, and force out the ambiguity that leads beyond what they already believe.

Everyone, please keep your mind open. Know how much you don’t know. Let your mind be soft, chaotic, expansive, unknown, free, rather than brittle, small, repetitive, comprehensible. It requires at least as much effort to close your mind as it does to leave it open and flowing with the chaos outside.

I see all these different points of view. I just see them, they flash by. They bloom like flowers, chaotic.

It’s funny how I’m always judging my reality, judging good and bad. Trying to figure out if my situation is good enough, what is good and what is bad, and so what should I choose for the future. And yet choosing good and bad isn’t simple or clear. I am constantly trying all these various different points of view in order to help me figure out what is good and what is bad...

And there’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to have to judge things all the time, but just to enjoy things... I wonder why this happens! Is it a tiredness of the mind, equivalent to tiredness of the body. Are there benefits from relaxing effort in function and resting, rebuilding???

Is it a desire for heaven? The desire which an impermanent being has for permanence? The desire of an intangible (mental) creature for form? The desire of an isolated creature for contact with the outside?

I like being with other people. But I hate holding back from them. It’s often better for me to be alone because of this.

I thought about how my screwed-up life is probably not much more screwed-up than those of most living creatures, if not actually a good deal less screwed up. My life is limited in many of the same ways as the life of an insect.

It’s so strange how we finite creatures with these imperfect lives still long for perfection, for completion, for immortality. So damned strange. It made me feel kind of good, just that awful resignation again. That my desire isn’t matched by the actuality. To bring this fundamental tension into focus makes it slightly less confusing I guess.

I’m transparent now, that’s why no meaning emerges. I wish I had a girlfriend. It’s winter now. That’s transparent and simple. Winter is unpleasant, dark. It’s bad, but it keeps happening anyway. We all just deal with it one way or another. I have this funny assumption or something that life should be good, that it should be its own fulfillment.

I remember in my year after high school how excited I was. I walked by outdoor garages set into lower midtown avenues and gazed at them with wonder.

The time being dies. It tries to live on in other moments but the creation of new moments washes over the memory of old moments.

Human consciousness basically looks for a way out of impermanence, death, dissatisfaction, often through a causality-oriented, reason-oriented awareness.

What strange things happen when a person starts to think that there is no way out of impermanence, death and dissatisfaction?

Is there some kind of peace? Some kind of self-contradiction? Some kind of silly irony? Some kind of anguish? Some kind of release?

When I think about something worrying / bad, for example being upset if I have a pimple, then for that moment my consciousness, my focus, is on-badness, and I’m un-happy, which is to say dis-pleased or worried. Is it true that in that one moment, I am nothing other than that focus-on-that-situation, which is momentary, of passing importance, which is mundane, unpleasant?

Somehow I have this feeling like my reality should be important, universal, perfect... I’m not totally sure why.

Time spent focusing-on-unpleasant-things, is spent. It can’t be recalled and spent otherwise. Time, my time, which seems to have a sort of unlimited value, because it is the source of all value in my own life. My time is “running out.” If something is the source of all value, and it’s running out, then each grain of it must be valuable indeed!

But I think that there’s another, stranger side to this issue. Time is running out. Yet there doesn’t seem to be anything else that this running-out commodity can be converted into, anything that isn’t running out.

Focus-on-good, focus-on-bad. Worried focus, glad focus, angry focus, focus on a doorknob or a philosophical idea or an itch. Choose your focus. Each moment is it’s own value.

Time is running out. It’s the source of all value and yet it’s worthless in that it has no permanent value and can’t be converted into any kind of permanent value.

Two things operating at the same time.

1. Greed for my life, concern, hope, impatience, frustration.

2. And a knowledge that my life isn’t of lasting importance, only of transitory importance.

Neither of these two cancels the other out!

I was often aware of the possibility that whatever I was doing might have been socially undesirable. And I knew at the time that the importance of this was limited.

This continual fact that all my human relationships are with semi-strangers is slightly hellish in a way.

I want to make infinite value out of my experiences. Because it’s the only life I have, every moment is an unrepeatable opportunity for value. Because my life fails to be permanent, the next best thing that I want is for each moment of my life to be totally filled with positive value. Every moment that goes by without reaching this ideal is painfully a lost opportunity.

Yet even as impermanence creates the desperate and hopeless urgency behind this desire to perfect experience, it also decreases the urgency of it. This is because of impermanence, each moment is only capable of fleeting value - it is not capable of permanent or lasting value.

Here I am tending this strange organism.

Can I say what I am? This subjectivity, this actual-existence, this light, shit, can I explain it?

Does the organism itself create the possibility for actual-existence, or does it only create the framework for subjectivity’s being-as-such, its particularities? Is subjectivity anything without the structure of the world? Is there any awareness without the organism? Is death better than life, or is life better?

Life is like a dream in that we are constantly forgetting it.

Yes, I exist. My existence comes before my ability to doubt my existence.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I follow what I desire or love, and I try to outrun what I fear. I follow this love, this call, but I don’t know where it’s going, so I don’t expect anything.

I listen to its promises and I follow it, but I don’t necessarily believe them. It’s just one source of information, one perspective.

Love is limited in this world. I don’t expect otherwise, though I hope to actually love.

I’m assessing myself as okay lately. It’s just time. Grimacing outside in the cold and cloudy bright, because it’s all too much for me to take in; really I can’t take anything in.

Appreciating things the day and the spring time and the ground and even the people. And feeling how I can’t take any of it in or even be all right with it, I mean I’m always awkward in the world.

So it is, or I-am-with-it, and the way I am is awkward and impermanent, but I also feel a sense of appreciation too - an appreciation which I can’t take in either...

FROM NOTEBOOK C8: MID 2002[15]

There is not necessarily one right choice. Either way there is a loss.

"Boundaries, limits, endings of my awareness." I thought: I’m feeling relatively alert now, not sleepy. Then I thought: or am I? Am I fully awake, aware? This is a confrontation between an awareness (me) and its limits - the obscure space which surrounds it. And that feeling, like a physical shock, a sensation...

I am an awareness that wants to expand, to grow, to be unlimited, unending.

I am the world. I am not a subject independent of the world. I am the world, through and through.

Health of the organism as a basis for happiness, for social good?

What is valuable, good, happiness, joy?

Well, for one, there’s healthy physical activity and exertion, movement of the organism, walking running dancing breathing.

Also, healthy mental activity. One, in terms of solving problems that need to be solved. Two, thinking without boundaries, thinking towards the absolute (even if the absolute is absent), thinking towards Being. It’s like walking and running without restrictions, rather than being stuck in a cage, a cubicle, a desk, a store, a prison.

A happy human male and female couple is happy in a lot of the same ways as a male and female couple of various other species.

It’s a very simple, basic kind of happiness. It’s happiness as psychological pleasure. Pleasure and pain are structured respective to goals of survival, health, and reproduction. The pleasure of reproduction is similar to the pleasure of health.

Human consciousness desires an absolute. It seeks a pathway into the bright, happy world.

But how and where people look for this absolute varies widely. It’s not entirely conscious. Even stuff like advertising can take advantage of this basic semi-conscious structure of desire.

I want to do many things at the same time. To expand my awareness beyond its limits, of time and space for example. I don’t know if I can, though.

We know that we are experience, but we don’t know for sure what we are experiencing, and we can’t have experience or knowledge that isn’t shaped by outside influences.

We know that we are willing-to-act, but we don’t know what actions we make or can make or have made or are making, or whether our will has any effect at all on what happens.

If there’s no absolute, life is so damned crazy, just sort of orbiting the empty space where it might be, trying to reach it but not reaching it, like an insect flying around a light bulb.

The impossibility of self-awareness.

The desire for self-awareness.

Different perspectives can be valuable, because each perspective represents an adaptation. An adaptation that might be beautiful and/or useful.

Time doesn’t just move around. All times are and are not. I exist and I don’t-exist, partly exist, time-exist. Time is many many forgotten worlds!

The challenge is to try to make something wonderful out of this absurdity, if it is absurdity.

Whole worlds open up beyond my tired logic.

I’m both happy and sad at the same time.

Probably no one understands. We’re all just bumbling about. Funny, sad.

“Sadness based on love.” <---> “Both happy and sad at the same time.”

1. love of life - happiness - desire - existence

confronts --> 2. death - impermanence - nonexistence - dissatisfaction

which causes --> 3. sadness... sense of loss, anguish... a sadness based on love

The problem isn’t that life is bad... just that it isn’t good enough. I mean not as good as I want it to be, doesn’t last... It’s better than nothing, by definition: more good that no good.

Funny how it seems like no one really knows what’s going on.

I was thinking that what we are partly is like an understanding-faculty, constantly processing information, developing understandings... possibly without any final end... just continually processing information, making judgements, decisions, plans, beliefs...

We don’t know that heaven (or, the fulfillment of all our desires, hopes, joys, forever) exists or doesn’t exist.

We have to accept the possibility that heaven doesn’t exist, that there is no final answer.

My friend was saying that it has a powerful psychological impact to accept the nonexistence of heaven and of final answers. I agree that it does have a very powerful impact, but I don't think that we know that for sure either. Instead what I think we are confronted with is the possibility of the nonexistence of heaven, rather than a certainty about it.

Both happy and sad... Terribly sad awfully sad maybe irreconcilably sad. Yet at the same time I feel some kind of basic love or happiness, desire or joy, and I think that maybe the badness can’t exist without this love. ... like negative can’t exist without positive, like nonexistence can’t exist except as a part of existence.

Possible meanings of The Absent Center:

1. There is no center.

2. That thing which is the center is currently absent.

Do people unconsciously construct the second meaning in response to the first?

I wish I was a little happier, like more joyful about things, instead of so worried, always manipulating mean and petty conditions. But I guess I try to be more like that sometimes and it’s not so easy. I’ll keep trying.

My life spreads out around me: past, future, people, plans, emotions, thoughts. I guess I am here somewhere in the middle of all of it. I wonder at it. I love it all, but just now I feel a little sad about it too. Not totally sure why. I woke up with a sadness. In a way, I enjoy the sadness. I try to come back to the existence of things, to appreciate it all and not to take anything for granted.

I want to go outside? Let go this melancholy train of thought? Hold onto this happy one?? Ahh, I just don’t know it drifts along. I can’t achieve understanding!

Is it possible to love without desire? Is it possible to reach union and completion while still alive?

I love the world and yet I feel cut off from the world. I want to understand the world but don’t know if I do or can.

Perhaps there is no way I can supercede this duality. Perhaps that perfect life can never be reached.

Maybe it is impossible to live without living in fear.

I have this love for life and desire for more life, and at the same time a fear of losing life. I try to quiet the fear sometimes so I’m just the love but I don’t know for sure that that’s possible. I accept the possibility that it’s impossible.

Where is the light of heaven? Is it present or absent? What if I took things less seriously? Would I be happier? Would it be worth it? A slight wave of nostalgia hit me a few minutes ago. Why? Why all this absence -- old memories, unreached futures? Can’t I find some kind of joyful presence in the here and now? Does human consciousness just yo-yo between busy-ness and silence, always craving the opposite to stay in motion? Can I awaken in myself a lasting sense of joy?

It is generally unknowable how happy anyone is, or whether one person is happier than another.

Being just for this moment? That seems sort of sad like here it’s gone going gone, what’s left? - nothing.

Being for the future? - Seems sort of sad too like the future never arrives; pining, yearning, longing to be otherwise.

A tension between being for the present and being for the future. Maybe neither is ultimately valuable. Both exist. Exist and non-exist.

Being is. Being is unseen. Being is undone in the flow of time - re-done... Ultimately: ? Undone? Recovered? Wish I knew. Being is. Does anyone ever fully appreciate it?

/ New regrets dawn on me in each minute. A spectrum of regret to un-regret. Pain, loss / anticipated future pain or loss. Anticipated future pleasure or gain / pleasure, gain. Does the regret outweigh the non-regret?

Great? Perfect? Good? Decent? Bad? Painful? Sublime? Wonderful? What are you? What do I call you?

Who, or what, in this confusing-type world, can give me heaven?

I keep working to repair myself. But what is my self and how do I repair it? Can I repair it, and will it really break if I don’t repair it?

There are different spheres to take care of. I have my body to take care of, my personal-social relationships, my systematic-social relationships, and infinitely more, filling up one world so far beyond what I can understand.

Why? Because my understanding is temporal. Because it only encompasses one moment at a time, while the rest is uncertain, suspect, held in the distance. Because my context is always specific, external, given, uncertain, ever-changing. Because new information is constantly appearing, and the mind has limited powers to remember and interpret the old. Because understanding isn’t given. Because uncertainty is present. Who can understand a single moment? Beyond the fringes of my momentary map of reality, is a great and boundless chaos. And not only is this chaos beyond the fringes, it is everywhere, deep in the structure of the map itself.

Can I love things which harm me? Can I only love things which benefit me? Can I love either? What is love worth? I can’t be sure which things benefit me and which things harm me. I’m not even sure what benefit and harm are.

My desire for no fear, infinite leisure and perpetual enjoyment seems so at variance with the nature of life - total alertness, ever-present danger, unlimited ascension... Human society may decrease the probability of sudden death, but only for a certain group of a few billion organisms, and not indefinitely. Plus society introduces new requirements of alertness and ascension: more extensive planning, calculation, foresight, elaborate personal careers, new requirements which have many of us longing for the clear simplicity of sudden death by perdition.

I wonder if our desire for fearlessness is somewhat futile? What sort of hope is there?

# (Waking up from a nap on the floor wearing my jacket.)

Is this reality? How strange. It seems vaguely familiar, and yet somehow unbelievable.

It is difficult to imagine an ideal of heaven which satisfies both the human desire for relationship and growth, and the desire for timeless and ultimate perfection.

The desire for death is interesting. Experience-beings are somehow urged into an effort toward life... what keeps them going? A basic goodness about life? A feeling that life might become good in the future? Pleasure? But what makes experience-beings love pleasure and hate pain and the absence of pleasure? Anyway, are the experience-beings at all independent of this life struggle?

When they have died -- and effort is no longer possible -- does some kind of shining void remain? Whether it does or not, the call toward effort - vitality - struggling is not entirely unambiguous. A basic tiredness remains, for one thing... Is this the desire to end pain (which is in the interest of life) taken to the paradoxically logical extreme of longing for the end to life itself?

Sounds plausible. What else could it be? Some kind of strange at-odds-ness of the experience-being with the life process? What would this be? Does ‘why’ even necessarily apply here?

Has the life process somehow managed to hold the experience-being hostage for its own purposes? Or is the life process itself the source of the experience-being?

Do humans need to live toward a hopeful future in order to be happy? If ultimately our future is death and nothingness, then this turns everything in on itself... Do we have to lie to ourselves to be happy... lie to ourselves that we can reach a fulfilling future?

####################################################################

FROM NOTEBOOK C9: LATE 2002 AND SPRING 2003[16]

It is very hard and not quite as pleasant in a way to live for the present only. It is much more comfortable to be able to live for both at once, to love something in the present that you can also look forward to in the future. Being-towards is primary.

I was already experiencing that night as a memory-to-be, as part of the past for an approaching future. I was sort of surprised to find it to still be the present. I even felt sort of uncomfortable that it was still the present, as if I thought it would be more comfortable as a memory. It was so wonderful, but the fact that I couldn’t make it last was very frustrating and painful. The full weight of its value fell onto the present, a time that was just not large enough to fit all that it could and should have become.

The moment is a miracle but it is useless. The moment is useless, but it is a miracle.

Because we are primarily living towards the future, the expectation of our own death turns everything in on itself in a fundamental way.

Note that if someone believed in immortality or potential immortality, that person would not consciously experience this contradiction, although in a deeper sense it might still be there.

A myth:

Life has called to will / experience, and will / experience has become symbiotically incorporated in the process of life.

Life demands something of will / experience: concern, stress, tension, vigilance, fear, desire, knowledge and the desire for knowledge. Life throws will / experience into duality.

But it offers something in return, the same thing really, that is duality. The drama of separation and contact. The promise of contact. Awareness, taking form, knowledge, self-consciousness, clarity, distinction, value, feeling...

All of this

Will all of this be

as if it never was?

It’s kind of exciting how each person establishes their own reality for themselves. I mean, even if something has been discovered by hundreds or millions of people already, it is still new to each person the first time they personally discover it.

The constant forgetfulness is an enormous tax on the ability of the human species to learn by accumulating and synthesizing knowledge, but it does help to prevent intellectual rigidity.

If nothing matters, is that a reason to be happy, or sad?

When it rests, it disappears?

For the most part I try not to avoid knowledge that I fear might make me unhappy. Rather I prefer to try to prevent unhappy / harmful / unfulfilling circumstances.

Ascensionism: animals (including humans) have no basic threshold of contentment.

The sad way people (very much including myself) try to catch a positive experience through positive thoughts.

Another sort of numinous way that dreams accentuate human existential conditions is the way that they are highly ambiguous in terms of being.

An experience or object in a dream of mine is real insofar as it is experienced at that moment, and as such I may love it in a way, and I may desire a more full being for it, that is I may desire for these objects a being that is permanent, not unseen, self-aware / self-illuminating.

This partial being and desire for being are combined with aspects of nonbeing (for example impermanence, lack of all others knowing about it, shifting, uncertain perspective, lack of fixed observation point for subject, loss of memory, etc.). In dreams many of these aspects of nonbeing are dramatically increased, heightening the anxiety between being and nonbeing.

What is valuable? The question of value is a logical extension of the prereflective constant search for maximum value. An abstracting of the most basic question that living creatures face.

I think maybe one of the most appealing and plausible conception of heaven I can think of is to be simultaneously aware of absolutely everything. To be aware of every moment of the experience of every creature at all times, to be aware of every snowflake and every wave that was ever on the ocean. For there to be infinite universes and to be aware of all of them in their entirety.[17] To be aware of every moment of orgasm, every dying breath, every tear, and somehow in this awareness there would be no loss, nothing that is at all frightening or sad, maybe because everything would be secretly permanent. While in the midst of a relative mortal specific perspective something might seem very bad, in this all-pervading awareness nothing would be. This awareness I think would not be separate from being, it would be being itself. So the continual growth and expansion of relative time which is cleared away for by continual and total destruction of the past may not involve any destruction after all - in reality all times would exist simultaneously. The main nagging problem with all this is that if this fullness of being exists, then why can’t it be accessed by our relative specific minds?

The process of destruction and creation inherent in time is very interesting. Is it really necessary for the past to be destroyed to allow for the existence of the present or the future? Is it in fact destroyed? Can all times somehow exist ________? But what can we say here? Exist simultaneously? Obviously they don’t exist at the same time... yet the fact that we have difficulty conceptualizing the mutual existence of all times does not prove it to be impossible.

Is there a more perfect experiential reality besides this one?

Is there one that is permanent? One that has better memory? One that is free from pain and loss?

People should try to make themselves happy, and to make each other happy. People should pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t in terms of leading to happiness. This question is always difficult and so it requires maximum attention.

I have some comfort against my terror of death in the notion that the basic substance of my experience is common to others. There may be some things about me that are rare or unique, and so I feel some desire to try to reproduce the good parts of that, to whatever extent is actually possible.

####################################################################

FROM NOTEBOOK C10: SUMMER 2003 - SPRING 2004[18]

It’s hard to depart from the basic goal of filling up my own life with happiness. Even though I have a sense of impermanence, it’s hard to incorporate it in a practical way. I mean, how can I incorporate it?

Maybe some sort of recognitions of selflessness? Maybe I can draw less of a difference between my enjoying and experience and someone else enjoying a similar experience. For example, maybe in some ways it’s more okay that I’ve never experienced much romantic fulfillment, because other people have, or will. Maybe more of a willingness to work for a better world that I may not experience in my own lifetime.

Still, selfishness remains as a part of the picture, along with what is beyond the self, which forms an interesting border to my experience.

Is all experience a contingent product of life? Of animal life, of animals who have a complex nervous system, of human life?

Is there any part of it that is not contingent on any of these?

Is there any reason to think that there is a non-contingent part? Is there any reason to think that there isn’t a non-contingent part?

I wonder why the past seems so perfect? Could it be because past subject and object seem closer to one another because they are both so far away from the present? I really have no idea.

Is there any way for us relative, phenomenal creatures to go beyond ourselves into some kind of divinity? If so, how?

This funny/sad belief that I should be producing something of value, this desire not to waste time, to gain more than I lose...

How much power do humans have to make themselves happy just through their minds, the last filter of reality, the mind which is assumed to be I?

Hello, death, how are you? You are always present. Can I love you? Should I love you?

Maybe I can prevent my fear from obscuring my basic love for things. I should try to remember to take time to appreciate the things I love that are present, not ignoring them all the time when I’m pining away for the missing pieces.

I don’t know if I’m doing well, I don’t know if I’m happy. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I’m trying, though.

I spend so much of my time in fantasy. I feel sort of guilty about not being more faithful to reality, which at some point I hope can be more rewarding. Fantasizing provides a temporary pleasure which at the same time makes me feel a bit pathetic.

So it’s a strange and ongoing question for me, the pros and cons of fantasy. Of course what I really want is to make my reality more like my fantasies. I hope that that way I won’t be split between the pleasant and the real, that they will both be the same, and whole.

I think that the basic lack of physical contact is an extremely important social problem.

As if a wild and desperate love for things and a desire for salvation waxes and wanes, interwoven with a more practical, less emotionally intense mindset.

[1] I don't intend for people to take these early entries too seriously. I was 14 or 15 when I wrote them. I am mostly interested in the way that these ideas were formed and how they have developed in the 9 years or so since then.

I was pretty unhappy during this period of time, in that I didn't really have a lot going on in my life that I enjoyed. School, girls, friends, and parents all seemed more like a source of anxiety and frustration than anything else.

There are lots of musings in this notebook about the dark side and the light side; Maybe I was deciding between them in some ways. A tension between good and evil, compassion and power, gentleness and malice, competition and cooperation.

10th grade was about as bad as it got for me. Some very slight rays of hope started coming in to my life during the summer of 1996 though, and I think that I became more optimistic. I’ve tended to think of it like a long and agonizing climb back towards some kind of sanity and hopefulness. Probably that's bullshit though, I mean dividing up my emotional history in such a tidy way.

[2] The time span of this notebook seems to overlap with the one after it for the last few months of 1997. I believe that the latter was the primary one after it started during that summer. I remember 11th grade as being marginally less dreary than 10th grade in that I started going to parties and hanging out with people a little more.

[3] This was, to me, a really pivotal period of time, specifically because of the writing that I did in this notebook. I think that it was at this time, at the end of the summer of 1997 when my interest in philosophy really took off, when I really got excited about it and began to think of it as the major focus of my life. It's kind of hard to describe. In memory it almost feels like a big wave came and carried me away.

Most of my philosophical thinking at this point was pretty unschooled, in that I wasn't doing much reading in philosophy at the time. So I suppose that most of the ideas just came out of the general cultural atmosphere surrounding me, such as the popular media and the people I interacted with. At this time I thought of it largely as my "own" philosophy, with its own set of weird jargon and fundamental principles. I almost made an effort to avoid learning about other philosophers for awhile to avoid becoming too heavily influenced.

It was really fun, really exciting. It gave me something to think about, and it gave me a kind of hope, that I could somehow improve my life by deepening my insight. Therefore I think that it was therapeutic in a way; in striving to become intensely aware of life I think that I became more active in untangling my own neurotic emotions.

[4] I took a trip to Utah to visit my mother's side of my family, and this is when I really started to get absorbed into my philosophical quest. This is the first entry written in Utah.

[5] This entry was written on the plane going back to New York. The rest of the entries in this notebook were written in New York, mostly during my senior year of high school.

[6] Actually the papers in this folder are so jumbled up that I don't know where most of them came from. A couple of them are from my senior year of high school, and then some of them are from after that.

[7] I remember being in summer camp somewhere around age 10 and imagining an afterlife that involved me watching my entire life from beginning to end after I died. It's kind of a strange idea!

[8] I was at college during this term. I didn't do a whole lot of independent writing because I was taking a lot of classes.

[9] It would be strange if existence was eternal but was never conscious of being eternal -- always afraid of death.

[10] I spent most of the months of January through May living in Charleston, South Carolina, with my girlfriend at the time. My thinking was still heavily influenced by the Tassajara-style Buddhism from the last summer, but I was sort of stretching those concepts out into new shapes, trying to adapt them to fit other thoughts and experiences. I still had a sort of basic faith in their soundness, though, which I didn't start losing until the summer.

After I left Charleston, I divided the writing I did there (mostly on looseleaf) into three separate folders: philosophy, political philosophy, and journal. The journal writing is not included here, but the political philosophy writing is included on the politics page.

[11] I see this as the time when my faith in zen, meditation, etc. started to fall apart, along with a certain chunk of my general optimism. Perhaps in general my optimism had inflated beyond the point of my life's ability to support it. I broke up with my girlfriend as I left Charleston and went back to college for the summer term. During that term, aside from being pretty lonely, I was sick much more often than I usually am. I had some kind of bizarre stomach thing which kept coming back again and again. I think that I had some sort of sore throat which lingered, left, came back again, and turned out to be strep. I had some sort of weird eye infection, and so on.

I had a class on Buddhism in America, and in it I learned that the Buddhism at Tassajara Zen Center was part of a larger institutional-cultural history rather than being some kind of pure, independent representation of the truth. I started learning more about Buddhism from an analytical perspective rather than the perspective of someone who is more concerned with practicing it and less concerned with critically evaluating it. This process continued at a more intense level during the next term, when I went on the Buddhist studies program in India.

[12] I spent this term on a study abroad program run through my school. It was a Buddhist studies program based in Bodh Gaya, India, with 5 students from my school and about 30 from other colleges. It was a very well-organized program, but I was somewhat morose while I was there. For one, my interest in Buddhism was already on the wane. Also, I was sick a fair amount (colds, diarrhea, vomiting), and when I wasn't overtly sick I still felt a sort of general malaise as if my body was spending most of its energy fighting against various invading microbes. My muscles got weirdly weak and sore to the point where it hurt me to sneeze. Plus, there seemed to be a lot of poverty in the areas of India that we went to, and being exposed to that hardly encouraged in me a sense of giddy optimism. When my life is worse than I'd like it to be, it doesn't cheer me up to know that someone else has it even tougher; quite the opposite, really. Also, I was a little worn out by the schedule on the program, with several hours of class and homework per day, after getting up at 5:30 in the morning or some crazy time like that.

A few weeks towards the end of the term were set aside for us to do independent research projects in other countries. Because of the mounting war in Afghanistan, we had to travel in large groups and chose between four specific locations, rather than setting off in small groups. I chose to go to Kathmandu with the largest group, since I thought that I could at least do a project on Mahayana Buddhism there, instead of the Theravada Buddhism in Burma or Thailand. By the time I got there, though, I was too burned out to do any research, and I spent most of the time there sitting in my hotel room or sitting in restaurants there. After nine or ten the streets were scary and forbidding, so I was denied the pleasure of my customary nighttime walks. I would still stay up late in my room, reading novels which I bought for a dollar or two each in Thamel. I was giddily depressed, basically not doing much or interacting with many people. Entries in my notebooks go on for pages just describing memories that came to the surface of my mind; I had basically nothing to do, and I was interested to find that I wasn't satisfied by having nothing to do.

[13] Paragraphs marked 2 are points in favor of duality, and paragraphs marked 1 are points in favor of nonduality. The point is that the paradox can't be resolved.

[14] This term I was back at school in Ohio. My thinking had undergone a kind of fundamental shift when I lost faith in Buddhism (Buddhism being perhaps a convenient label for something more basic that I lost faith in), and a lot of my writing this term was extending and working out the implications of that shift. I read some stuff about Martin Heidegger for a contemporary philosophy course during this term, and that turned out to be a fairly big influence on my new ideas.

[15] This notebook began during the same spring term, continued through the summer term, and finished off in the middle of the fall term. I spent the summer back in New York City. I had an internship in the East village, and I found an apartment in Brooklyn with a friend from school. In the fall I was back at college again.

[16] I was still at college for both of these terms.

[17] Maybe we could also be aware of every fantasy that anyone has ever had, but they would somehow no longer be insufficient, no longer divided from the real and actual.

[18] During the summer of 2003 I was interning at The Center for Voting and Democracy in suburban DC. The fall of 2003 was my last term at Antioch. The spring of 2004 was the beginning of my time in Berkeley.