The Search For The Third Diamond

By Mel C. Thompson

A handsome, successful young man who has it all is driven to boredom by the lack of challenge his life poses. Meanwhile, an elderly, homely, so-called monk, stumbles through his predictable routines. The two don't know that they are on a collision course brought about by an off-hand suggestion from an uninspired sage who's losing interest in his role as guru. Unexpected things happen as the reels of the cosmic slot machine are set to rolling in this global casino we all must inhabit.

This short booklet is a planned addition to an updated version of the book now called "The Third Diamond." And that book is a planned addition to the 2022 or 2023 release of "The Triple Diamond Sutra." The epigraphs at the end of this book are also scheduled to be a part of a 2023 release of "The Scroll of Hi Nu." Because the larger version of "The Triple Diamond Sutra" is such a large project, I am releasing portions of it as separate books so as to keep making new material, or revised material, available to readers as there is yet to be certainty about the release date of the larger project.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mel C. Thompson
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005542955

Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

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The Search For The Third Diamond

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2022

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, CA 94549

[e-mail]

Cover image under Creative Commons license with Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by the International Gemini Observatory under the title Telescope Silhouettes at Cerro Pachón.

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The Search For The Third Diamond

Simple Monk With No Concerns lay in his single bed trying to rouse himself to enter the world that day. Once he had embarked on the career of having no career, motivation became a tricky problem. Once he had begun to seek out a romance with the universe instead of romances with women, socializing became difficult. Furthermore, he had been ordered by a supernatural entity named All Living Beings to save all living beings through Not Saving them (which meant that there were certain limits to how strenuously he was to try to help people).

Had he been a member of a real monastic order, he could have busied himself with pleasing his superiors and the public with grim displays of self-denial and social virtue. Had he been a real employee, he could have assumed the countenance of stressful ear-nestness and sincere ambition. Had me been a real boyfriend, he could have pretended that his lovers had some transcendent beauty or some life-changing genius.

As things stood though, he had no worldly credentials due to his having fled every Buddhist organization, profitable business and committed relationship that he wasn’t kicked out of. The main problem he had with jobs, sex and temple membership was that the people involved in these things tended to demand periodic displays of ostentatious, solemn seriousness. Because he just could not take employment, sex or scriptures that seriously, his ability to maintain communion with employers, lovers and religions was naturally limited.

In light of all these considerations, it was hard to think of a reason to get out of bed. But at last the struggle would be concluded this way: My way of being in the world is the reason to get out of bed, although that will never be a convincing enough reason to get me out of bed. Hence, there must be maintained a strict half-hour limit on wondering why, at which point one must push one’s self out of bed and begin the day, relying solely on the light of pure thusness and the exclusive path of total suchness.

Now he had many acquaintances who suffered from depression who faced a similar dilemma; and when they asked him how he forced himself from bed every day, he replied, We are to stay in bed a minimum of seven hours and a maximum of nine hours, after such time we are to prop ourselves up and roll out of bed; and ruminations while in bed must be limited to one half hour, to which they tended to reply, I see what you’re saying, but I could never make myself do that.

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As he shuffled toward the bathroom, mincing his steps in a bid not to trip and fall while he was still bleary-eyed, he thought to himself, I never thought I would really make it out into the world today, but here I am really beginning another day, as if such a thing were even conceivable. Wouldn’t it be amazing if I somehow managed to make something of this whole fiasco? Perhaps I can yet rescue another day and somehow come to the conclusion that it was all worth it, although, admittedly, I cannot yet see by which standard I could come to such a judgment.

He did not shave as other monks did, with a severe single razor blade, but rather used a Norelco electric razor which left him with minor stubble instead of the immaculately clean face his contemporaries had. Looking slightly unkempt was a small price to pay in order to avoid paying for shaving cream, replacement blades, styptic pencils and all the rest.

He flossed his teeth with Tom’s flat floss and brushed his teeth with Sensodyne. This bit of extra expense was worth it as it apparently contributed to his keeping all of his teeth in his mouth into his sixties, a thing most of his fellow low-income associates struggled mightily to do. His dentist, aware that the monk was born with a cleft palate (many of whom ended up toothless at an early age) was quite impressed at his patient’s having beat