With that said, fast forward out from whatever imaginings you may have about inebriated me. Inebriated me flirting and failing at flirting. Inebriated me ordering pizza in-person as Spider-Man. (Yes, I have a suit.) Inebriated me doing naked beer pong runs …because cups. Or inebriated me convinently ignoring the “do not operate heavy machinery” signs in big, heavy, yellow machines at 4 in the morning in a construction yard. Or inebriated me… er, you get the idea. Fast forward out from all of that nonsense and to me trying to make sense of myself on a mat and cushion behind these walls.

Slightly intimidating walls for a nice place. “Nice place” like a cozy-loving-home kinda nice place.

While the temple was nice, what wasn’t nice was taming that wild elephant called my mind in there. Taming my mind through meditation — now that was hard. It’s probably been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I still haven’t tamed that wild elephant. Nor has anyone really. That’s why meditation is a called a “practice” — because you never really can finish it. You can just get better at it and stay at it. Because if you don’t, the universe will have its way with you and crash your beautiful sandcastle with waves of entropy. Waves of life. With that said, I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I lived in a Buddhist temple for a year, because in the words of the Buddha:

There is nothing as disobedient as an undisciplined mind, and there is nothing as obedient as a disciplined mind.

Learning how to accept and acknowledge thoughts and desires as waves that rise and sink back into the ocean of the mind helped me obtain some control over my temptation to drink. It helped me make sense of my nonsense — — self-understanding is truely a powerful thing.

But, while I had some understanding about the nature of my mind, I still struggled to choose the right decision when presented with whether I should drink or not. (I used “right” without quotation marks there, because I do in fact believe this to be the best choice an alcoholic can make. A person who doesn’t suffer from alcoholism, has shades of grey in between that black and white decision.) …Unfortunately, I didn’t have what it took to leverage me out from temptation.

You think that a life with a mess of non-sense would be enough to discourage an alcoholic from drinking. But it’s not. For those who have never struggled against the urge to drink yourself into stupidity, this may seem like an clear decision, but for those of us who struggle — there are very few things that can keep us from it.

The threat of death isn’t even enough.

And I should know. I’ve cracked ribs and suffered from a mild traumatic brain injury that, according to the ER doctor, could have killed me in my sleep — “when alcoholics fall and hit their head, sometimes they never get back up”. The doctor told me this because I fell down a flight of stairs that ended in a bed of concrete. When I think back to it, I wonder how my head sounded hitting that hard pillow. Did it sound like a textbook slamming onto a table? Or a bowling ball being dropped on cement? Or maybe it sounded the way a hammer cracks a coconut? Maybe it was a combination of the three? I’ll never know, though the blood I was covered in the next morning suggested it was probably pretty sickening.

The temporary death we fall into each night during dreamless sleep; the permanent death we fall into when we no longer wake; these are all forms of neural decoherence. Consciousness no longer resides inside our skulls, because, at least according to some, there is no longer anything really meaningful happening to make us be. We fall into oblivion. We become it.

Existentially, drinking myself into oblivion was and is my choice. My decision. And, even if they hoped, wished, and even prayed for me not to — nobody could change my will. I drank despite it all.

For the alcoholic, the pleasure that’s contained inside a bottle of booze is much more than that everybody else gets. Because, after all, what else would it be? I mean, what else would make somebody break bones, hearts, and lives? Misery? Does misery make anybody do anything? No. Of course it doesn’t. It’s always about the reward, the pleasure we get out of things. Every decision we make in our lives is based on whether or not we think something we do will be pleasurable or not. Saints, buddhas, and all sorts of other charity cases are ultimately selfish at their core. There is no way to escape it. The moral philosopher Mark Twain over a hundred years ago said this, and the neurophysiology of our day tells us this as well. We do moral and immoral acts because they make us feel good.

Sometimes what’s the worst for us looks the best.

It becomes hard to figure out what’s what at times. How do you know when you’re right and they’re wrong? Or when you’re wrong and they’re right? As you know, this can be said of many things in life and it really takes some time to figure it out. Culture is especially culprit in making this problem even harder. After all, culture isn’t just out there, but it’s also in here — inside of you. Ideas are transcendental and don’t care about “us” or “them” now or then. They spill out and over and into people, throughout time and space.