Do you ever get to that level of tiredness that you can't even sleep, you're so tired? That you can't get up from where you are, because you don't have the energy to get ready for bed (and you're far too anal to just fall asleep, unshowered and un-toothbrushed, in your clothes)?

Although I just got home from a team (departmet) holiday outing (it's 11:30 or so), I'm not quite at that level of fatigue. Last night I was, though. From about 7:30 pm to about 12:30 am I transcribed a taped lecture as a favor for my dad. His temple asked him to do it, since his English is very good, but he said after the first tape, he got sick of trying to figure out the guy's Australian accent and the guy's tendency to say "ummmm...." every 5 seconds. He said he'd pay me to do it, even though his temple wasn't paying him, but I figured it was the least I could do after all he's done for me.

On second thought, I shoulda made him pay me.

At first it was pretty interesting, the lecture being about the process of death as understood by Tibetan Buddhists. They identify eight specific stages of death during each of which the person loses some of the 25 basic elements of human life. But by the end of the fourth stage, I was like, "I can't believe we have four more stages to go. Please let the poor sucker die already, will you?"

My interest perked up again, though, when the lecturer talked about the last stage, the stage at which the dying person experiences a vision of clear light: "Your experience or vision is like an empty sky, they say, like the clear sky of an autumn dawn. A vision that is not a vision."

He went on to say that nearly all people will miss this stage of the death process, and most will miss the fifth, sixth and seventh stages too, because most people have not practiced the deep meditation necessary to achieve the kind of nonconceptual consciousness to experience the clear light of death.

I liked that the lecturer also addressed possible skeptics in the crowd: "You might be asking, 'How do we know?' All of these states can be duplicated in meditation. One can cause the absorption of all of these elements into a point in deep meditation where the breath is stopped and which actually mimics the death process. That's one way of relating to it. But where much of this information comes from is from the accounts of Tibetan lamas who die consciously, who reach a level of attainment within meditation that they're able to die consciously and go through the intermediate state consciously and take rebirth consciously and recollect their experiences. And so the texts that are written of this are in fact written by people who have recollected their experience of the death process, of the intermediate state, and of the rebirth process. This has being corroborated by yogis, meditators over countless centuries in terms of the Buddhist experience.... Many of these yogis can stay at the actual point of death in meditation posture with the breath stopped for periods of three weeks, a month, is commonly reported ?one yogi, for three years stayed in the meditation posture, breath had stopped completely for three years without the body decomposing, remaining at that point of death. So these are levels of control over the death process, over the mind that enable someone to remain conscious through the process and to recount their experience.

"The Tibetan author on the Tibetan Book of the Dead refers to these sort of yogis, these highly realized beings, as ?like we know about the moon firsthand from the astronauts that have been on the moon, and we know about the death process from the Tibetan yogis, the psychonauts who've been through the death process and recall it. So these psychonauts that able to travel from lifetime to lifetime with that level of control of their mind are able to bring us that information."

He also cited an example of a Tibetan yogi who threw the Indian police into disarray in 1959 (when the Chinese invaded Tibet) by staying in a meditative pose for three weeks after having stopped breathing. The Indian authorities, because of hygiene, naturally wanted to dispose of the body very quickly. But when they went to dispose of this lama’s body, he was still sitting in the meditation position.

"Well, we've got to take him away," the police said.

"He hasn't finished the death process yet," replied the other Tibetans.

"How do you know?" asked the police.

"Because the body hasn't started to decompose."

"How do you know?"

"'Cause there's no smell. The sign that consciousness has left is that smell, of the decomposing body."

A few years ago, I first came across descriptions of yogis doing this in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (also called Tibetan Book of the Dead), which is one of the sources the lecture was derived from too. It all sounded very mystical eastern hoodoo voodoo to me, and I thought, "Do people really believe this? This is nuts," and I put the book aside and didn't finish reading it.

I still am pretty skeptical about it, but am more open to the possibility. Don't get me wrong, I believe in science, but even scientists tell us that there's more we don't know about the brain than what we know. And all religions include fantastical elements, so why should this be any more outlandish than any other?

But this is all very metaphysical and religious and philosophical, all large pieces of machinery better operated when one is not sleep deprived.
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Mr. Roh, the moderate candidate, won the Korean presidential election yesterday. (Roh's name in Korean is actually No, but as one of my work colleagues explained, Mr. No sounds very negative -- not to mention very James Bondish -- so the name is romanized as Roh.) Roh is a human rights lawyer and won by about 2 percentage points over the other main candidate (there were seven total), who is a conservative. Approximately 70 percent of the electorate voted, which isn't so bad (especially compared to the U.S.), but in the past two presidential elections, the number was about 80 percent.

I told Myung-soo, Woongil and Soo-hyun (my lunch partners today) to wait -- the numbers would continue to go down, since that seems to be the trend with democracies.

I think Mr. Roh is the first presidential candidate I've ever seen who used a cartoon commercial to promote his candidacy. This week I saw a lot of campaign commercials, and Roh's featured a guy sweeping the street clean of snow, picking up the garbage, trundling it up the hill in a handcart (ubiquitous here), and having trouble doing so until all the people of the town, appreciative of his work, come to help him push the cart up the hill. The commentary intones: "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a presidential candidate who actually helped people? We do." And the guy unwraps his scarf to reveal Roh.

It was pretty effective. Apparently.

I learned that if you want to be a presidential candidate in Korea, you have to put up a certain amount of money (this is true in the States too, I think) to show your serious intent. But in Korea, if you win a certain percentage of the vote, the government will reimburse you that sum of money, which is in the area of a couple hundred thousand won (Woongil wasn't sure if it was 200,000 won or 500,000 won). Interesting.

Would like to tell you more about my interesting lunch conversation and the crankified way in which I dealt with having to go out for the departmental holiday outing, but I must sleep.

New year's resolution: sleep more, stress less. (Why do I have the same resolution every year?)