My social circle during my undergraduate years consisted mostly of people who were connected in one way or another with my interest in religion. I converted to Buddhism and became the President of the Buddhist Student Association — a long and interesting story which I may tell in later posts. There are, however, a few items related to my depression, and to my efforts to overcome my parents’ attempts to destroy my scientific career, which I will relate here.
Because of my association with Buddhism, I began to meditate regularly. In fact, I took part in organising regular meditation sessions at the university. The practice gave me the strength to cope with my parents’ abuse. Naturally, as soon as they discovered what I was doing, they started to attack me for (what else?) “wasting my time”. Of course, it was not a waste of time, because without it I would have been unable to function entirely. But this was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again in my life: whenever I discovered any tool or method which helped me manage their abusive behaviour towards me, they would strive to take it away or neutralise its effectiveness by continually attacking me for using it.
In Toronto, I had a community that provided me with emotional support, and re-affirmed that support at regular intervals — and I had become a member of this community before my parents found out about it. When I was about to come to Waterloo, however, my parents pre-emptively ensured that I would not have such a community by harassing me about it before I even arrived, ordering me not to “waste my time” with such activities. Furthermore, while there were meditation sessions in Waterloo, groups of experienced meditators were few and far between, in comparison with Toronto, and so I never practised regularly. I think that one of the main reasons that my deterioration proceeded so rapidly once I became depressed in Waterloo was that I did not have the support of a community that met regularly for meditation.
I have written previously about how I had used desktop publishing software to put together my high school’s handbook and literary magazine. I have tried to keep abreast of the technology at each stage of the electronic publishing evolution, and so in university I put up a web site with some of my writings and a description of my interests. But I took it down almost right away because my father had somehow found it; I don’t know if he had searched for my name or if he had seen it on my computer. Nevertheless, I did experiment with publishing the newsletter of the Buddhist Student Association electronically, after I joined its publishing committee. Before that, it had been printed and distributed only physically. So my involvement with the Buddhist Student Association allowed me to continue to think about electronic publishing when it had nothing to do with my degree program.
And finally, being the President of the Buddhist Student Association meant that I took part in a lot of multifaith activities, such as interfaith dialogue and religious counselling. (There was no Buddhist chaplain at the University of Toronto when I started, though such a position would be created by the time I left, due largely to the efforts of some of my friends.) I have already alluded to this in a previous post. At that time, there was no secular humanist association at the university, or at least it was not very active, so I was the de facto “atheist” voice at multifaith religious events, which made for a lot of interesting incidents. (I have heard that nowadays the University of Toronto Secular Alliance is quite active.) I put “atheist” in quotes because there seems to be a lot of confusion about the relationship between Buddhism and atheism; I will probably write about this in later posts.
– davinci
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