what people fail to realize about logic is that each person prioritizes factors in their arguments differently. right now, for example, thorium based nuclear power is suddenly of interest to me as clean energy, but to my neighbors that subject is of no interest or importance. therefore, when asked what are the critical realities of the world today? i don't need to explain how different our answers will be.
what people fail to understand about relative importance is that, to make a comparison, we must have a frame of reference. if i say that my childhood was a care-free cakewalk i am implicitly comparing my childhood with those of the kids i've lived with in cambodia and other places.
the purpose of doing so is to rationalize my conclusion that the world i know as an adult, in which my neighbors have no interest or awareness of fixing environmental problems, is a world mostly of competition and suffering. it's a world which is exhausting to me.
those statements are the preface to these:
death is always experienced in negative circumstances of sickness, accident, malice. in other words, people fear death because of the circumstances of the event of death (also because of the fear of the unknown afterlife - strangely ignoring the subject of the beforelife, which was billions of years long). why, then, even if suicide is cultural taboo, should that form of death be any worse? death is inevitable.
in my view, suicide has the significant advantage over other causes of death in that we can plan the circumstances to reduce the pain and duration of the event. we can put things in order and say farewell to friends and family. after one has lived a full and interesting life (my relative frame) then it must be and indeed it is my choice to plan such a method.
within my relative frame of reference, i can honestly say that i wanted to escape this world after i read books about the nazi holocaust, in which people killed people for the reason that they were jewish. i concluded that i don't want to live in such a world where that atrocity is possible, even imaginable. that conclusion i reached 30 years ago. why did i not act on it? if i knew then what i know today i would have done so. and helium was in abundant supply then.
in the meantime, i learned that killing anything, including myself, is impossible for me to do. a realization which forced me to research how the holocaust was even possible. at that time i was severely depressed about that subject. i was also severely depressed about environmental degradation caused by humans. however, members of my family, especially my father and grandmother, reached their conclusion that i am simply depressed because of some unknown defect in my constitution. i pointed out that the dsm-4 then described a list of symptoms of depression but no cause.
the fact that no cause is stated is critical to me. my family wanted me to change my behavior; they did not want to acknowledge that the family structure was breaking down in the usa, that people were killing the other species, and that there were still more genocides to come. was that not cause for depression? (btw, now, 30 years later, now that people widely acknowledge that human activity is definitely the cause of environmental problems, my those family members have not recanted).
my father's frequent reply was, "i know all about those problems, but it does not stop me from going to work everyday." (implicitly, that he drives his car, sitting in traffic an hour every morning and evening, to work at a hydraulics company which contributes to the destruction of the environment - in other words, those world problems don't bother him).
there were a couple of books in which the authors claimed that the nazi holocaust was carried out by "ordinary german people." the point was that the nazi who killed the jew was not an extraordinary type of monster, but instead an average person. that is when i realized that the ordinary people all around me were equally capable of doing atrocities.
sure enough, in the subsequent years, more genocides and holocausts were yet to come: rawanda, bosnia, myanmar. ironically, a genocide which occurred during my high school years was the last one i studied when i was 30: cambodia. khmer rouge. the present day dictator of cambodia, who enacts a fake election every five years, was a khmer rouge soldier. and if you've ever wondered what germany would be like today if hitler had won the war, visit cambodia and look at the sad people there (the half of the population that is older than 20 - anyone over 55 cannot stand to talk about the past. they are either survivors or killers - another example of why i say "god spared the ones who died).
within a frame of reference, there sometimes appears a window of opportunity. there are so many relative terms in the previous sentence that i cannot unravel them all. an opportunity for me is possibly an unfortunate prospect to someone else. why is it so difficult for people to understand each other? because each person has different priorities.
in cambodia i brought a group of students to the killing caves. the most eloquent one of them reacted that, "that story of the genocide is not real. people made it up to scare me. i don't believe it." rachana. i'll never forget that girl.
therefore, is it not clear that she will interpret my opportunity to end my life as an unfortunate prospect?
we have totally different views of the world. now, five years later, her boyfriend cheats on her and she jumps from the kampot bridge. at that time, i found a new method of meditation which distracted me from developing plans to end my life. within that method, and for several years, i discovered a way to perceive this life's events as a dream instead of a reality, one that i can wake from as i wake from a dream during sleep. in this method, real events are no longer vexing, solid, definite problems. instead, they are only ideas in my head. ideas which i can transform.
the method works. i can feel calm, even get a burst of endorphins any time i choose. yet i am tired.
now i have reached the moment when that window closed. it's a relative closure.
that window began to close because of the backward way that people in borneo reacted to the covid virus pandemic. i was stuck in my condo for months and months, forced to find tricks to sneak out and get into a natural place to swim like kionsom. it reminded me of the nazi and khmer rouge regime, that latter one still in power. the oppressiveness of backward policies in which fear overwhelms a group of people such that individuals suffocate, get fat, fight, divorce, lose their businesses, go crazy, and hang themselves in their shops and fling themselves from rooftops.
i was thirsty for weeks during my meditation but i could not figure out what water i was missing. then one morning i talked to my mom and we reminisced about the neighborhood in stone mountain when we were young. our friendly sociable neighbors, the calm progress of daily life. there were problems we had to solve but there was no genocide (well, there was a genocide in cambodia then, but we were all ignorant of it).
the window of opportunity with the meditation is closing as i realize that thirst for the care-free experiences of youth, those memories, even if they are exaggerated and inaccurate, there is nothing to satisfy the thirst for those experiences when we loved life and were ignorant of our suffering.
the window of death opens simultaneously as an escape from the suffering.
i am grateful to mungyur rinpoche for his effort to show us a way out of suffering. but this book in which he details that he was raised in the awareness that death and life are interwoven natural wonders - it is utterly foreign to my way of thirst and quenching - and i credit him for noting that older people have more trouble being flexible about transforming - i could use the breathing practice to calm my emotions, but that will not quench the thirst for childhood. ultimately, recognizing that this waking world is a dream still does not actually prevent specific kinds of suffering that people infliict on each other. it makes an great creative procedure for re-interpreting the problems of human cruelty, environmental abuse, but it does not persuade me that re-interpretation is a better solution that actual death (in fact, i felt that the book persuaded me that there is really no difference between accidental death and intentional death).
(in part because, when i attempted intentional death, i failed for technical reasons which i couldn't understand, and information about the methods is censored from internet search results. therefore, if i attempt and succeed the next time, it will be partly accidental, because now i am not sure how to do it. even if i am sure that i want to do it, there are factors which prevent doing so).
well, like so many other journal entries that is a rough draft which needs a lot of revision.