self indulgence

I am glad you like that new title "From Beijing to Being" I thought about yesterday. I have all the materials from Beijing, and now all I have to do is to get to Being. That quote I sent you from my diary 4 years ago was translated directly into English while I was writing to you. The sentence "Maybe I am myself a mistake" is actually "Maybe I myself am wrong". I found it very difficult for me to translate between these two languages, because I appreciate the subtleties of the each language and there is really not a one-to-one mapping for translation that I am satisfied with. Thank you for your comments and suggestions. If we were to do this (put my old Chinese writings into English in the book), then I will have to rely on your help.

You do write English so well! (with European accent though).

Here's another good one, from age 16 (year 1987): "Today I studied, read, took a walk, slept, ate, watched TV, read the newspaper. My day is just like this. It is like a flower without the stigma, a seed without the nut. No taste at all..... (read a novel, learned something about the Christian religion.) I am (or I am like) a lost sheep. I cannot find my god. I listened to the Christian preaching, and I laughed at their hypocrisy and ignorance. I have always made myself believe, that the god I believe in, is only in my heart, but not the one that is in this world or out of this universe, not the one (jesus) who created everything. My god is the one who created my feelings, my mind, and guides my heart. Nonetheless, I still doubt all the time, and I don't believe anything that I try to make myself believe, and I don't believe even more those what other people make me believe. Since I don't believe in anything, what's the point of living? But what reason do I have to doubt those things, the every every thing that I used to firmly believe that god created? China is a mess now. The adults are doing the usual political things. I don't want to know the current affairs, because I dare not believe in anything. What I can do is that, deep inside my soul, I draw a circle around me, and using complete admiration and complete detestation, I stare and observe the world around me."

Hmm, I really haven't gone that far from 17 years ago.

OK, enough self-indulgence for now.

Yeah, I sort of got awakened 3 years ago but it only lasted a few hours I think. I was excited but scared, so I didn't stay there for very long. I told some people about it, but only you understood what happened to me. You said that you could help me go back there later, after my thesis. Something like that. So you are right to say that when I was ready, I found you and made it happen.

Did you already know a lot of the theory about the Path before your first awakening? Or you learned about the aspects of IT after your first experience? Did you study about IT intensively at some point? Or you just accumulate general knowledge and extract the ones that are relevant to the Search? Is Bruno a Master for you? Is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a Master for you? They seems like the knowledge seeker type of "masters".

-- email excerpt to F.