Meteoric Moods

Murder Bound, xvii.

Conrad Lauring likes the Californian climate but:

"He doubted if the climate had caused his moods to become this meteoric." (p. 150)

He catalogues what has happened:

Saturday, horror;
Sunday, the time of his life;
Monday, near death;
Tuesday, the happiest he can remember.

That is going to send a man up and down:

"Meteoric was the wrong word for his new temperament, though. Meteors fell. He kept bobbing upward." (ibid.)

When I was under stress, my feelings rushed up and down so fast that I learned to disregard them. Buddhist practice is nonattachment to momentary mental states. Either there is no permanent reality or they are not it.

"His sense of happiness was absurd in view of what he had undergone..." (ibid.)

On the contrary. Let us consider three examples:

(i) anecdotal;
(ii) scriptural;
(iii) fictional.

(i) Alan Watts, who:

gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area...
-copied from here -

- told this story from World War II. A man hears planes above and a bomb falling and knows that he is about to die. The bomb hits the roof but does not explode. The man has let go of his identity and remains free from it.

(ii) Gautama practiced extreme austerity, then, realizing that this was not the Way, accepted food, restored his physical health, sat in quiet meditation and realized his enlightenment.

(iii) Alan Moore's anarchist terrorist, "code name V," makes his assistant, Evey Hammond, think that she is being interrogated by several Fascist policemen when it is he alone that holds her head under water, locks her in a cell with a rat etc. When she refuses to sign a confession, she is told that she will be shot but then finds that she is free to walk past cardboard policemen and a caged rat back into V's Shadow Gallery. When he leads her to the roof in the rain, she is cleansed and liberated.