POSTCARD #41: Chiang Mai: Awake with the sound of birdsong and the first signs of daylight. A kinship with all beings. We breathe the same air, experience the same kind of heart beat – the tastes, the smells, light, sound, body sensations and consciousness. Suddenly a thought arrives, a memory of something that happened a long time ago; not important, like an aspect of another thought that got overlooked somehow – now seen in a different way, simple and easy to be with. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, bare feet on cold floor; not completely awake, contemplating the start of the day and it takes a moment to notice this thought is still here. I have the feeling that I understand more about it now than ever before. Quickly! Get up, search around for a pen, I’ll have to write it down in my notebook before I forget.
In the next few minutes, the thought seems to expand, occupies my whole attention. It’s as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. Even as I’m going around doing early morning things, the thought remains – like a stationary object. A feeling of meaningfulness, a sense of amazement with the functioning of the mind; watching to see what it’ll do next, where’ll it’ll go after this. What’s it like? Getting to know it, like a child understands a thing directly. Got keys, wallet and down in the elevator, still thinking about it. Out on the street and walk to the main road. Aware of mind phenomena and looking at that thought in particular; the fragility of non-grasping and allowing things to be un-held. Where did it come from, where was it before it arrived here? Somewhere in The Great Space, fragments of it dispersed in actions not yet taken… am I creating the thought by noticing it?
A tuktuk stops, I get in, we accelerate along the road; wind in the face, noise all around. The present moment is an accumulation of pieced-together thought-items; bits of language imagery from environmental-input and memories of past-time brought into present-time, projected into future-time. Time is a human measurement: applied time. Reminds me of something I read in a book written by somebody wise, saying that TIME is just God’s way of preventing everything happening in the same instant. In one microsecond, the entire history of the world, up to the present and off into the future… watch it as it flies past.
Pause for a moment. Traffic lights at the intersection and everything stops; a curious extended, stretched-out moment – just the circumstance itself. It takes a conscious effort to get it started again. Is conscious awareness moving from one moment to the next? If so, is this the next moment yet? Are all the fragments of the next moment combined sufficiently in the endless stream of things so that I can now say definitively, THIS IS THE NEXT MOMENT? And all of a sudden it’s the past again. There’s only one moment, always has been. One long moment that includes immensely distant things. A single passing thought lasts a thousand years. Its parts so remotely scattered, a great ocean of nothingness invades the space between things. No easily seen reference points, objects get forgotten about eventually and all that remains is the idea that, a long time ago, I think I was searching for something but I can’t really remember. Anyway, I was never able to find it – still distracted sometimes by the idea that I might stumble upon it by chance one day, but otherwise at peace with everything the way it is.
‘The fact that we can never “fully know” reality is not a sign of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is “incomplete,” open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of Becoming.’ [Slavoj Žižek]
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dhamma footsteps 
Been think/writing along similar lines today. And then I come across this post of yours, 🙂
Thanks for your comment, and I’m reminded it’s the kind of thing that we all experience sometimes and doesn’t usually go beyond what it is, a single thought arising in the mind. I tried to develop it from there…
Beautiful and expansive. I felt ecstatically homeless after reading this, like I was caught in between everything, in a space full of warm awareness that was waiting for me to do one last thing before leaving my home in this moment forever.
Michael
Thanks again for your kind words. Reminds me of the first days of the ‘going-forth’ of the Theravadin monk, into the life of homelessness, happily without any means of support other than the kindness of others. I tried to make it more of an aloneness, than a lonesomeness, careful about how the absence of personification would affect the reading…
when a single thought goes for a thousand years
I wonder how many connect with it and pull it in to think
the same thought to send it another thousand years…
interesting post….I think the now that is now the past will give one pause
to try and suspend the thought to hold longer….and if we do hold onto it, does it change?
I always like coming here…you have such an energy of thought waves….that always
carries me further….to think
Take Care…You Matter…
)0(
maryrose
Thanks for this, and giving me something new to think about. Time is a concept, the reality is the stars in the sky are moving further and further away in terms of light years and everything is getting slower. We can hit the pause button and focus on something for a while, long enough to consider how far back you’d have to be to take in the whole thing, and release the pause button again. Thanks for dropping in, I enjoy your visits.
you’re welcome…
and I enjoy your thoughts its like a chain reaction into different thought patterns…not sure that makes sense, but it does to me LOLs
)0(
A chain reaction into different thought patterns… yes, makes sense – unable to put it into words, though. The way you express it is good enough for me; the idea that the development of Wisdom, Truth and everything we aspire towards is not structured so much but more like organic growth and we might not see how we arrived here until after the event…
Thank you…my mind these days seem to be going in opposite direction at the same time LOLs…
I read somewhere woman have the ability to have? or recall the memories of 17 generations back….I thought how wonderful to be able to access all that experience….
sometimes when I am doing something I catch myself thinking of where did that knowledge come from….
this was a good post…one to read more than once for I am sure it will show me something else…
Take Care…You Matter…
)0(
maryrose
Have been thinking about this. Asia has a kind of feminine quality, looking deeply at ‘what is’ rather than what it could be. Women are better than men at letting go of the structure, the plan, the way it appears to be, or might be. Men get attached to the agreed-upon scheme of things and can’t see the wood for the trees. These days I’m spending time more and more in the state of openness…
I am working on Faerie houses, I use lichen, when you said “can’t see the wood for the trees, I thought wow, they must be missing the incredible life within lichen and moss…
I have been working inside my greenhouse and gardens in between the cold spells, I am amazed how “open” my mind is when I am doing that, time disappears, music is where no radio or CD is, and it creates this blissful zone around me or maybe in me that nothing upsets or bothers me…
I have never been a good planner…I just listen and things seem to fall into place…I need to make some major decisions in my life, but its as if I just said no, I will wait and see what is to be..this is a strange energy year already…I have had two people I know pass this month, and I wonder who will be the third( everything 3’s for me)
see your post are thought-thinking posts..long after you write others…
today was the first day I got any emails, wordpress notifications,not even junk, just a few nature, recycling newsletters and a “What God wants me to Know”
it’s been almost 10 days…at first I was upset, then a shrug? then oh well…and poof here everyone is again….needless to say I am slammed with them right now…but, I will slowly open and read…
I think that was the lesson…everything comes sooner or later…it will be as it is meant to …
maybe thats the open-ness for me…slowing down even more as I wander through Gaia’s world…
okay..this is rambling now LOLs..
Thanks Tiramit….as always I enjoy the energy flow within your words…
Take Care…You Matter…
)0(
maryrose
Thanks for your reply, I’m going over to your site now to read some more of your writings…
Just excellent.
To be honest, I envy how you seem to be in a free place, at peace, and as I go to the office to sit in cold air conditioned horrible hate it conditions, I wish, I wish…
I leave the office for my half hour lunch break and I pause by sitting kerbside, reading a book in the sun. Why, I beg to know, why isn’t it that I am “allowed” more freedom to do this. Sigh. Rent is due.
Thanks for your kind words. I wish you well, hope you find peace in your work, find the calm in the storm, and can see your way through all the difficulties going on right now with custody and court proceedings and the formalities of all that. There’ll come a time when it ends and you’ll be able to step out into the daylight…