# When I Was Ethical



## Selene (Aug 2, 2009)

What is this feeling? I haven't felt it in nearly a year. It's the feeling of having something to look forward to, maybe. Something in the future or outside of me which seems objectively meaningful. Me rushing toward a goal that I actually really want.

While I was cuddling with my girlfriend this morning, I had this nostalgic recollection of a year ago when we were walking in laps around campus. When we first were starting to get to know each other, everything was new and fresh, and there was so much to look forward to. Every time I saw her, I had this feverish anticipation of all of the new experiences I could have. I felt very young and naive, like there was this whole big world out there, and someday I would find it and connect with it. Someday, I would capture that vaunted pie-in-the-sky called love, and she would be the one to help me solve it. I would finally understand things.

But for the past year, I've felt none of that. If I've felt joy or accomplishment, it's only been something temporary and fleeting--a small distraction from my aimless wandering. Nothing has been genuinely exciting to me in over a year. I get into happy frenzies, but they don't mean anything. I haven't had a goal that I really cared about for a long time. When my goals seem to be just self-generated tasks or benchmarks which I've created arbitrarily, just so I have something to do... when it doesn't seem like anything called happiness, love, or enlightenment is actually possible or a tangible achievable goal ... it is not overjoying or ecstatic to achieve your goals. Your goals seem like just something to pass the time.

I pine for when I was a One, as I was back then, and everything seemed like it could make sense. Things were perfectible, and I had something to aim my life at. When I did something helpful, or I was happy, I was able to take pride in the fact that I was getting closer to some absolute. The stars were in alignment. Everything had its purpose, and was directed toward my goal. I walked to my physics classes feeling like I was in the presence of greatness. I bowed before the masters who held the keys to quantum physics, which was going to unleash a profound metaphysical understanding that would alter my perception of reality and help me realize sunyata. I ardently read all of the philosophers I could get my hands on, and I wanted to read more to uncover more jewels, get closer to my ideal.

What was better then was that I wasn't self-directed or self-centered. I sought an ideal. I did get angry and upset when things frustrated my designs. I did contradict myself and have an inconsistent framework. But at least I was striving toward something. At least it felt like there were actually things which existed outside of me. There was something real I could set my sights on and accomplish that would bring me transcendental wisdom and genuine bliss. There was some "good" or "right" out there that I could lean on.

I wish I could remember more. What it feels like to be genuinely excited. To feel something and think "This is important. This might help you toward your goal." rather than "This is a phase. Pretty soon you'll be feeling something else. All of these feelings are insubstantial."

I wish I was a realist, or just any kind of "ist". I wish things were real again and fit into some kind of order. At least when you punish yourself for not reaching your goals, you have a reason to live.

I wish I could get back into Buddhism, and actually even start reciting prayers and doing some of the ritualistic practices again. As closed-minded, unloving, agitated, hypocritical, and stupid as I was 3 years ago...I felt like I was doing something meaningful. As moralistic and judgmental as I got, and however far I was from my goals (which I couldn't identify), I still felt like they existed and I had millions of years to attain them, one step at a time. My actions carried weight and power, because I was trying.

I remember when I thought asceticism would do something. I was in control of me, and telling me what to do. I took pride in how long I was able to go without eating, masturbating, listening to music, playing piano, using the Internet for non-schoolwork, playing computer games, or reading any books not related to my religious practice. I also would keep track of how many times I had lustful thoughts towards a girl, how many times I got distracted from my work during school, how many times I engaged in "idle chatter".

Non-Virtuous Actions

I saw myself as emulating the practice of a monk I read about:



> It doesn’t happen swiftly, but the mind can change. There was once a man who decided to keep track of his thoughts. This isn’t an easy process, for though one can be determined to watch one’s thoughts, many get away, coming and going without being noticed. Nevertheless, he put down a white stone for every virtuous thought, a black stone for every nonvirtuous one. At first this produced a huge pile of black stones, but as the years went by, the pile of black stones slowly became smaller while the white pile grew. That’s the kind of gradual progress we make with sincere effort. There is nothing flashy about the progress of the mind; it’s very measured and steady, requiring diligence, attentiveness, patience, and enthusiastic perseverance.


I wouldn't do anything other than what seemed right to me...I was extraordinarily self-disciplined. Because it wasn't deprivation. It was me giving up the lesser for the greater. And when my body or my spirit rebelled, and I felt pain or anxiety, I saw that as evidence that I was growing and doing something challenging and worthwhile. I would see how fast or long I could run on the treadmill without succumbing to exhaustion. And I would push myself by imagining that I was in a desert, miles away from a sick person who needed my help. I couldn't just quit on them! They needed me to keep going. The pain...that was the test of my strength. This was the one time in my life when I diligently followed an exercise plan for more than a month. When I was able to force myself to wake up at 5:15 am, and I gladly ran 2 miles in the morning even before my parents woke up...and then I would sit on the cushion, and fill my water bowls, and do my prostrations and recitations.

In my spare time, I read books about shamatha, I spent dozens of hours completing an online course in Tibetan Buddhism, and I used my pi-memorization skills to memorize extensive outlines of the lam rim, different categories of Buddhist arguments against substantialism, the names and dates of different lineage holders and their works and commentaries, and dozens of stanzas of Buddhist texts. And this was in my spare time when I wasn't getting weeks ahead in my classes and outlining entire textbooks just to make sure I knew the material. It was stressful, but that was just another test--to see how long I could withstand doing something and put myself back on course. And at that time, I also knew a half-dozen Beethoven sonatas by memory, along with 10 Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, half of the Chopin Nocturnes, several lengthy Gershwin pieces, and 15 Preludes and Fugues by Bach...and I kept on learning more music. In my senior year of high school, I spent four months learning the entire Hammerklavier Sonata by memory...the 4th movement was particularly difficult to learn.






That was 11th grade. I was an INTJ. Things made sense then. There was actually a reason for everything. There were truths out there waiting for me which I would find someday if I did enough penances and worked hard enough. That feeling of engaged self-denial...is very satisfying. To be able to control and will oneself to do things, and to be able to force yourself to do things against your own wishes. I've lost that though, because now nothing is more important than my wishes and impulses in the present moment. I can't deny my feelings, because nothing is more important than my feelings.

I wonder if I should go back to how things were before.

I am dissatisfied with being an aimless wanderer, following my feelings whichever way the wind blows, being dragged along by fate. I want my control and purpose back. I want something worth flagellating myself for.



> The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness – was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
> 
> -Friedrich Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_


This kind of quote fills me with a desire to go outside, run 2 miles at a brisk pace until I'm exhausted...and then run 3 more miles after I've reached my limit. Just to show that I'm still the real deal--I make shit happen, and I'm fucking unstoppable.


----------



## snail (Oct 13, 2008)

The idea of the "piles of stones" exercise appeals to me. I'm probably going to try it with marks in columns on a piece of paper. It's interesting that you would want to have all of the flaws associated with who you were in order to have the sense of purpose. That, in itself, seems kind of un-one-like. 

Do you know Chopin's Op. 72 No. 1 ? It was my favorite song for several years.


----------

