On Wednesday August 3 I was bored out of my tree and seriously struggling to find motivation at Uni. For some reason I decided to browse the website of the Buddhist Society of Victoria. At the very end of the July newsletter I came across mention that Peter had died in March.
I knew Peter for about 20 years. There had been a time when I counted him as a friend. I gave him work in my gardening business Big Russ's Gardens.
I changed. We lost touch. I wandered in and out of the Buddhist Society. My first marriage foundered and then died. Selina entered my life and love flourished.
As my new life blossomed and I entered the glory of my life, I began to find Peter more and more irritating. For a long time I had found him to be patronising. Felt that he was talking down to me and without good cause. I thought of Peter as the worst example of a hopeless case, a pretentious nobody whose opinion of himself far exceeded any demonstrated capacity. As my contact with the Buddhist Society spluttered and stuttered my irritation with Peter grew. He was, at best, a gormless blob. The last time I spoke to him he had tried to tell me how to parent my eldest son.
I leave the Buddhist Society. The friendship I had wanted to save had died. I have changed too much, become too confident, care too little for others approval, feel too little need for guidance and am utterly unwilling to place another in a higher social standing for the friendship with Nissarano to work.
Then Peter is dead.
Curious I contact people to find out why he had died. I assumed given that he was middle aged and over 100kg that Peter had died of a heart attack. Peter is at most only 5 years older than I am. I feel like I have been hit by a truck.
Peter had taken his own life. As I begin my inquiries people clam up. I find where he volunteered and message them in Facebook. They are the ones who tell me that Peter had suicided. Information is sparse and his family have disappeared. His Facebook pages gives little more than the barest of details.
An acquaintance from the Buddhist Society tells me that Peter had been diagnosed years before with bipolar schizophrenia. He had stopped taking his medication. He also had put his elderly mother into a nursing home, gone home and killed himself on a blisteringly hot day. No one is willing or able to tell me how Peter killed himself. I learn that there had been a memorial service at the Buddhist Society and Peter had been cremated. His mother was given his ashes.
Knowing that Peter was mentally ill changes my perception of him. In hindsight he wasn't always being patronising to me, what he was, was often as not seriously medicated. His inability to achieve goals is now seen in a different light. This explains why his highest qualification was a year of English at Swinbourne University. Peter's schizophrenia robbed him of his ability to deal with stress. He simply couldn't get it together enough to study.
One way Peter dealt with this was to find someone he could reasonably feel superior to. Given that throughout my time as a Buddhist Society member I was an emotional mess, I was that person...and rightfully so. I was the one person who was communicating on a regular basis that I was in worse emotional/mental shape than Peter was.
Given all this. Given that by the time Peter chose to die that we hadn't been friends for over 10 years, why am I writing this?
For me Peter is a lesson.
I saw a quote attributed to the actor Richard Gere which says that none of us are getting out of this alive and that we should live our passions, be loud, be adventurous, watch the flowers and love without inhibitions. He also says we shouldn't condemn ourselves for our mistakes.
And this is precisely what Peter didn't do.
One reason why I left Traditional Theravada is because it actively promotes a life that is passion free. In Traditional Theravada a practitioner is supposed to be quiet. We are taught that a life spent with our eyes shut is the ideal.
I prefer to live a life that is jammed full of passion, of adventure, of love without limit. A life where I have pushed my envelope so far that the term has no real meaning to it. Mountains are there for a reason, mountains are to be climbed. I am climbing my mountains. By the time I leave this lifetime I will be worn out.
I have stood and screamed my defiance at my demons. I have upturned what I thought I was. I have done everything but be quiet. Answering the question: How good am I? Has brought the peace, the confidence that spending days with my eyes shut and being quiet never did. Trying to be quiet never took Peter into the intellectual elite, which is where I find myself. Being quiet never took Peter to walks of 100 km +. It never took Peter into deep pleasure. Being quiet and trying to be the perfect Traditional Theravadin never took Peter to mountain tops. Being a good little Theravadin got Peter dead with a life that was, at best, half lived.
This is Peters lesson.
