I had the greatest night tonight in years. I can hardly remember the last time I felt such wonderousness as I felt tonight. It was a rare reasonably warm day that melted into a rare reasonably warm night. I smelled Summer in the air, a scent that has occurred so rarely that I can’t even remember when I smelled it this Summer. Tonight was the full moon, the night that should be celebrated as the Moon Festival and being thankful for good fortunes. I felt I wanted to celebrate in my own way and find a way to be close to the moon.
I took off on my bike this evening for the Marin Headlands, doubting that I’d actually go all the way there, because whatever distance you go on a bike you have to be aware that you have to go that same distance to get home. I figured at some point I’d realize that if I went any further, the return trip would be too daunting to continue and I’d probably end up somewhere like Twin Peaks to watch the moon.
But I went, listening to the New Radicals CD that I recently got, and which turned out to be a perfect soundtrack for the ride. I headed down Church St., following the J Church tracks, did the zig-zag through the Duboce triangle area into the Haight and through the Panhandle and into Golden Gate Park. I took the 10th Ave exit and cut all the way through the Richmond District to Lake Street, turned left and then right into the Presidio on 15th Ave.
It was absolutely gorgeous, but then it started becoming glorious. There was a section in the Presidio where there were no streetlights and tall redwoods overhanging and enclosing the road. I couldn’t see the road and I only knew where to go by the clearing up ahead lit up by moonlight. Not a soul in sight and I felt like I was flying through space.
I kept going, down Lincoln to the Golden Gate Bridge, to the catwalk where I had to go through a gate that they close after 9:00 except for bicycles. I crossed the bridge, pausing briefly to watch the moon and its reflection rippling on the bay and the San Francisco night skyline. Right when I got to Vista Point at the other end of the bridge, the CD ended. It was glorious.
I watched the moon from Vista Point for a short bit, but it wasn’t very satisfying. There were too many people, too many cars, too many cameras. It was too low, too far away from the moon. There was only one place to go from there, so I headed up into the darkness of the Headlands.
There were cars going up, but not many, not enough to be disturbing or distracting and my fears that it would be too dark to see the road were quickly allayed by the moon. All the roads were as clear as day and it was soothing to watch the shadow of my wheel spokes whizzing in the moonlight. Then at the final ascent, the road was closed to cars and from there I was completely alone. I got to the top of the Headlands, well, pretty darn close and the spread was unbelievable. And it was all mine and it was only me.
It was prayer and homage to the moon. It was being on the top of the world, it was being out of the world and looking at my life and what it has been. I used to live there and there and there. That’s Sutro Tower, I now live down the hill on the other side of it. There’s the entire stretch of Golden Gate Park; I ride that entire length to the ocean. Ocean Beach and the Seacliffs, stomping grounds? My whole life in the Bay Area was spread before my eyes.
The ride home was a little hard, but rewarding. I felt like I had touched something I hadn’t touched in a long time. It is a feeling that I love so much and it feels like I’m living my life for that feeling. It’s a feeling of vastness and being part of the entire universe. It’s almost always on Summer nights that I feel that. I wonder if it’s a feeling from a past life. Maybe like in the Japanese movie, “Afterlife”, you take one memory with you from this life into the afterlife.
Not a great movie, but I can take that basic concept and run with it. You can take a memory from this lifetime, but not into the “afterlife”, but into the next lifetime. Well, kinda the same thing. In the next lifetime, you’re always striving to touch that memory, that feeling, again. Perhaps it’s not the same stimulus that would trigger the feeling. But when you feel it, it resonates and you know it’s something much bigger than all that your life is.
That would also be a part of the “life is suffering” notion of Buddhism. Because the feeling is momentary, it’s like an intense deja vu that happens and then disappears without trace. When you have the feeling, you feel like you’ve attained something, but then it melts away into something you can’t even describe, much less share with other people. That to me is true suffering.
Saturday, September 25, 1999
Wednesday, September 22, 1999
1557 Noe St., San Francisco
Josephine is OK, I guess. I found her online, but she wouldn’t talk to me. All she wrote was “busy”, and that was it.
Everything is gone between us, I don’t even want anything to do with her anymore. The love between us was human love, base human love. There was nothing between us beyond human love and our recent communications and this earthquake is very indicative of that. If the earthquake happened here, the first thing I would have done was contact the people I love to let them know I was alright. All she could manage to address my concern was “busy” several days after the fact.
I have my job interview with Ritu’s firm tomorrow. I might have a job. The philosophical ramifications of having a job stagger me. Everything will change. Not having a job, life was one thing. Having a job, life will be a completely different thing. I haven’t quite figured it all out yet, but it feels like the end of my life, nothing more to strive for, overcoming the last obstacle to prove I wasn’t running away from failure.
Having a job means integrating into society and becoming nobody. You are now living to make money and money serves all the activities you want to do, and in that way you become a servant of money. It’s not life anymore. It’s making money. I’ll only know for sure what it is once I’m in it, and then I can decide whether I live or die, or die sooner or later.
Everything is gone between us, I don’t even want anything to do with her anymore. The love between us was human love, base human love. There was nothing between us beyond human love and our recent communications and this earthquake is very indicative of that. If the earthquake happened here, the first thing I would have done was contact the people I love to let them know I was alright. All she could manage to address my concern was “busy” several days after the fact.
I have my job interview with Ritu’s firm tomorrow. I might have a job. The philosophical ramifications of having a job stagger me. Everything will change. Not having a job, life was one thing. Having a job, life will be a completely different thing. I haven’t quite figured it all out yet, but it feels like the end of my life, nothing more to strive for, overcoming the last obstacle to prove I wasn’t running away from failure.
Having a job means integrating into society and becoming nobody. You are now living to make money and money serves all the activities you want to do, and in that way you become a servant of money. It’s not life anymore. It’s making money. I’ll only know for sure what it is once I’m in it, and then I can decide whether I live or die, or die sooner or later.
Monday, September 20, 1999
1557 Noe St., San Francisco
Still the reminders of how much Josephine means to me. An earthquake hit Taiwan today and the images of destruction and that Josephine is there struck me on a sublime level. I didn’t know exactly what it was I felt, much less how to express it. On the outside, of course, I can’t do anything about it and so worrying would be pointless.
But when I headed out on my bike, I could feel tremors inside me. I felt the potential for panic and the possibility that Josephine isn’t alright. I don’t know what I would do if something happened to Josephine. I still love her, she still is so much a part of me.
I still think of Amina and Shiho being the women I’ve loved the most, but “getting over” them was relatively easy. Or maybe letting them go was easy. Which makes more sense since if you truly love someone, you need to be willing to let them go. The earthly love for Josephine is greater, which makes it harder to let go of her. But the spiritual love was greater for Amina and Shiho. Which has greater value is subjective.
But when I headed out on my bike, I could feel tremors inside me. I felt the potential for panic and the possibility that Josephine isn’t alright. I don’t know what I would do if something happened to Josephine. I still love her, she still is so much a part of me.
I still think of Amina and Shiho being the women I’ve loved the most, but “getting over” them was relatively easy. Or maybe letting them go was easy. Which makes more sense since if you truly love someone, you need to be willing to let them go. The earthly love for Josephine is greater, which makes it harder to let go of her. But the spiritual love was greater for Amina and Shiho. Which has greater value is subjective.
Friday, September 17, 1999
1557 Noe St., San Francisco
Still no job, still playing lots of Nintendo. I got a job lead with a personal in - Anita’s friend, Ritu, is hiring legal assistants, but their friendship is on the rocks, and this thing has been dragging on for two weeks. I don’t know if that is normal.
I hit rock bottom a few days ago. The job frustration was exacerbated by a flare up of tendinitis caused by playing my hollow-body bass hard, competing against two acoustic guitars, and a bout of seasonal affective distortion, not quite a disorder.
It took me a whole day to get out of the funk. I think it’s been a while since I’ve been so low. Depression has a texture which is almost physical to me, as do good moods. They are mental textures, but they aren’t completely intangible and so I’m able to control them pretty well. I can feel the texture of depression and then I can use my mind to feel a good mood texture. The texture is like a blanket that surrounds me and I can feel it on my skin and in my bones and in tension of my muscles.
In general, I don’t distinguish between the reality of physical objects and intangible things that exist in the physical world like imagination, fantasy, ideas. They are all a part of the same symbolic reality and therefore have the same substance. The difference between them is just in the form of existence. An analogy is between the different forms of existence of water. Water can exist as an intangible gas, as a fluid liquid, or as a solid. But they all have their existence in the same reality – they are all basically water.
So the substantive reality of depression (and moods) is the same as a physical object that I can move from one room to another. Even though it’s intangible, it’s still part of the symbolic reality.
To get to what is not part of the symbolic reality, one must be able to lock onto all things perceivable by the senses as symbolic, rather than Real. Physical existence, anything that can be sensed is not Real. What is real is what the symbols stand for, the meaning, and only intuition can sense that.
When I sit, anything I consciously do or think during sitting is not real. Thoughts come and go, I can sense my mind working on another level or being in some other “place”, but none of it means anything, all of it can be let go as irrelevant. The “value” in sitting, not that value has anything to do with it, is in what is happening in my mind on a level that I can’t sense. It’s the intuition that is developing in my mind, or developing my mind on a level I can’t perceive, but has its expression in the symbolic world.
It didn’t automatically happen that moods and feelings are textures to me. It took a long time to realize they were textures, and then it took an even longer time to realize that because they are textures, they are as controllable as physical objects. But it all happened on a level that I wasn’t aware of, I didn’t do anything.
I hit rock bottom a few days ago. The job frustration was exacerbated by a flare up of tendinitis caused by playing my hollow-body bass hard, competing against two acoustic guitars, and a bout of seasonal affective distortion, not quite a disorder.
It took me a whole day to get out of the funk. I think it’s been a while since I’ve been so low. Depression has a texture which is almost physical to me, as do good moods. They are mental textures, but they aren’t completely intangible and so I’m able to control them pretty well. I can feel the texture of depression and then I can use my mind to feel a good mood texture. The texture is like a blanket that surrounds me and I can feel it on my skin and in my bones and in tension of my muscles.
In general, I don’t distinguish between the reality of physical objects and intangible things that exist in the physical world like imagination, fantasy, ideas. They are all a part of the same symbolic reality and therefore have the same substance. The difference between them is just in the form of existence. An analogy is between the different forms of existence of water. Water can exist as an intangible gas, as a fluid liquid, or as a solid. But they all have their existence in the same reality – they are all basically water.
So the substantive reality of depression (and moods) is the same as a physical object that I can move from one room to another. Even though it’s intangible, it’s still part of the symbolic reality.
To get to what is not part of the symbolic reality, one must be able to lock onto all things perceivable by the senses as symbolic, rather than Real. Physical existence, anything that can be sensed is not Real. What is real is what the symbols stand for, the meaning, and only intuition can sense that.
When I sit, anything I consciously do or think during sitting is not real. Thoughts come and go, I can sense my mind working on another level or being in some other “place”, but none of it means anything, all of it can be let go as irrelevant. The “value” in sitting, not that value has anything to do with it, is in what is happening in my mind on a level that I can’t sense. It’s the intuition that is developing in my mind, or developing my mind on a level I can’t perceive, but has its expression in the symbolic world.
It didn’t automatically happen that moods and feelings are textures to me. It took a long time to realize they were textures, and then it took an even longer time to realize that because they are textures, they are as controllable as physical objects. But it all happened on a level that I wasn’t aware of, I didn’t do anything.
Wednesday, September 01, 1999
1557 Noe St., San Francisco
I had a dream with Josephine in it this morning. I thought I was over her, but issues still linger. It doesn’t help that it touched on abandonment issues that I still have. It happened at a time that I normally would have been in a deeper sleep and wouldn’t have remembered it, but there was noise that brought me into a shallower sleep.
The dream was that I was in bed, on my loft, and I looked across the room at a calendar on the wall, where there isn’t one in reality, and noticed a post-it on a certain date, a post-it that I didn’t put up. Intuiting that it had something to do with Josephine, who was still in the country and staying in the house that I was in until she left, which changed from this apartment to a house, possibly my parent’s house, I jumped out of the loft taking blankets down with me and read the note. The note was from Josephine, it was a tender note saying that she was leaving on that date, the position of the post-it was probably August 31. The tenderness was in a quote from a musical that only existed in the dream and referred to an inside joke between us that also existed only in the dream, something about being a star. At that point I panicked and ran around the house looking for her, going to the rooms where I expected her to be sleeping. One was a couch and the sheet on the couch was undisturbed and neatly tucked in. I was trying to scream, “No!”, but my throat was thick and I could only manage a scratchy tone. The feeling of a loved one being gone was too much to bear.
All day today I was thinking of the tender moments between Josephine and me, the fun times, the way she laughed and was so full of life, and it hurt to try to reconcile that with the selfishness I sense from her now.
My recent thoughts on having abandonment issues, along with this dream, reminded me that the earliest dream I can remember was an abandonment dream. I’m not exactly sure when I had the dream, it was probably in the old house in Englewood Cliffs, and I’m not sure how old I was, but my arbitrary guess would be between seven and nine years old.
I mostly just remember the feeling of being abandoned. There are two actual images I remember. One is a God’s Eye view of a boat like a yacht sailing on the Hudson River on a sunny day and the feeling that I wasn’t on it and was supposed to be. The other image is me on the banks of the Hudson River, one foot upon a rock looking out over the water. The view is from the ground up at me, the George Washington Bridge may have been in the image. The feeling was that I was alone and that I had been left behind.
And this all led me to a real memory that may have contributed to these abandonment issues. I think my age was in the same range as the dream. Parents were visiting someone on Virginia Ct. in Englewood Cliffs, a few doors down from a classmate of mine. I was playing in the backyard, probably with Tom and Bob, and they all got in the car and started to leave without me. I think I remember running after the car for I don’t know how far until they noticed I wasn’t in the car. It may not have been too far, several houses. I was crying but they were all laughing about it. I don’t know if the memory is real, though.
The dream was that I was in bed, on my loft, and I looked across the room at a calendar on the wall, where there isn’t one in reality, and noticed a post-it on a certain date, a post-it that I didn’t put up. Intuiting that it had something to do with Josephine, who was still in the country and staying in the house that I was in until she left, which changed from this apartment to a house, possibly my parent’s house, I jumped out of the loft taking blankets down with me and read the note. The note was from Josephine, it was a tender note saying that she was leaving on that date, the position of the post-it was probably August 31. The tenderness was in a quote from a musical that only existed in the dream and referred to an inside joke between us that also existed only in the dream, something about being a star. At that point I panicked and ran around the house looking for her, going to the rooms where I expected her to be sleeping. One was a couch and the sheet on the couch was undisturbed and neatly tucked in. I was trying to scream, “No!”, but my throat was thick and I could only manage a scratchy tone. The feeling of a loved one being gone was too much to bear.
All day today I was thinking of the tender moments between Josephine and me, the fun times, the way she laughed and was so full of life, and it hurt to try to reconcile that with the selfishness I sense from her now.
My recent thoughts on having abandonment issues, along with this dream, reminded me that the earliest dream I can remember was an abandonment dream. I’m not exactly sure when I had the dream, it was probably in the old house in Englewood Cliffs, and I’m not sure how old I was, but my arbitrary guess would be between seven and nine years old.
I mostly just remember the feeling of being abandoned. There are two actual images I remember. One is a God’s Eye view of a boat like a yacht sailing on the Hudson River on a sunny day and the feeling that I wasn’t on it and was supposed to be. The other image is me on the banks of the Hudson River, one foot upon a rock looking out over the water. The view is from the ground up at me, the George Washington Bridge may have been in the image. The feeling was that I was alone and that I had been left behind.
And this all led me to a real memory that may have contributed to these abandonment issues. I think my age was in the same range as the dream. Parents were visiting someone on Virginia Ct. in Englewood Cliffs, a few doors down from a classmate of mine. I was playing in the backyard, probably with Tom and Bob, and they all got in the car and started to leave without me. I think I remember running after the car for I don’t know how far until they noticed I wasn’t in the car. It may not have been too far, several houses. I was crying but they were all laughing about it. I don’t know if the memory is real, though.
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