the time is not here yet

Posted on February 25, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #252: Chiang Mai: 05.00: When I open my eyes in the morning I don’t remember where I am. The great white neon light of the hotel sign across the way fills my room and takes away memory. I’m here so infrequently, there’s only a sense of the last time I came, an unfinished jigsaw puzzle with some pieces left over but no place where they fit. Or a thought appears in the empty mind like a beautiful small fish, and then it’s gone… where’d it go? Taking everything apart to see where that thought went, but can’t find it.

Ah well, pull the pillows together in a cushion and settle on top of that in a folded-leg sit. Aware of the breath, focus on nothing in particular. Early morning kitchen noises across in the hotel, clatter of plates, rolling-around-clunking sound of objects as they collide with their surroundings: bump, scrape; a cupboard door squeaks, water sloshing-in-sink noises, cutlery in metal mesh baskets becoming high frequency white noise received over here in the neon glow, seated in a third floor apartment on the other side of the street.

All and everything that occurs here, there and everywhere in the scenarios through life from start to finish pass through me now and the world becomes neutral. Non-intrusive, random thought mechanisms that function at the edge of attention pull me into the gentle whirr and flicker of thinking-about-things.

A far cry indeed from the western automatic-reflex-attached, “thou-shalt-not” society of the late 1940s when I was born, unaware and unschooled in Good Orderly Direction and seemingly by chance (?) narrowly escaped the fierce lock-down of a mortgaged future by means of sacrificed present time, with the simple thought that the thinker has no other form than thoughts… and with that, everything just drifted away from its moorings.

All that resolved itself somehow really very well. Now here in a street in a tourist town in the North of Thailand with a passport and inconsequential luggage… items of thought can pass through freely, fish uncaught – no reason to be holding on to anything at all. The emptiness of the moment is no-self. Nothing here except the operating system; form, feeling, perception, mental processes and consciousness [Link].

In a clamor of sounds, auditory events jump out in perceived grabs of recognition, registered, processed; memory updated. It happens so fast that trying to find words for it are like action-replays in slow motion, and I have to catch up after, as everything has moved on. Pause button; awareness aware of itself, the eye turns inwards, consciousness as a sensory organ, the ghost in the machine, no self. The process itself selects the sound – or the sound selects the process, and there’s no ‘it’.

Sensory mechanisms waiting for things to happen because it’s in their nature to do that, inseparable parts of the world out there/in here. Nothing happens, the time is not here yet. The alertness is all there is, receiving the world and, since we are also the world, so to speak, it’s an all-inclusive enfolding, unfolding, and remaining in the present continuous form, ‘listening’. Suddenly the great neon light is switched off. Blinded for a moment in the absence of it, traces of blue sky out there, birdsong. Without any sound, go quietly (whisper); the time is not here yet…

Photo of a young man named Namo (as in Namo tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma sambuddhassa), French-speaking Thai/Swiss, who became a monk then left for a career in fashion modeling.

place

Posted on February 18, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #251: Bangkok: Sodium-orange street light illuminates tarmac and concrete in colourless shades of grey. Nothing to see at this time of day, on the road to get the 3am flight to Bangkok, awake as if in a daze, car headlights pierce the smoggy darkness in low visibility. Everything creeps in on itself, reduces in size… I am a cell in an organism, tumbling out of the car and into the crowd. Bags on trolley, head spinning around for signs in the usual urgency of searching for where I’m supposed to be, everyone else doing exactly the same thing; check in, boarding pass, queue for security, then immigration. Stamp passport, thump, duty-free, then boarding and take off… catapulted 5 miles up into the night sky, look out and see a few stars shining. No one interested in food or drinks on this raggedy old, middle of the night, flying bus to Bangkok. Large, long-legged Indian men, block up the aisles with limbs like tree branches, trying to get comfortable in the small Thai economy class seats.

In my place, eyes closed and there’s that wonderful light coming in at the edge of vision that I haven’t seen for a long time – a kind of unreal ‘heavenly’ warm creamy white moonlight light. Open my eyes again… where’s it coming from… any light on in here? Nope, totally dark. Close my eyes again, lying back, watch the breath, focus on the emptiness… in a moment it returns. Not seen, indirect, it illuminates the space as if it were a moon behind clouds, just about to appear.

I sleep as long as it takes for a neon tube light to be switched off, and switched on again, flicker, wake up, it’s blue sky morning time. Such a short distance from here to there, some people go home for the weekend. Glad I don’t have to do that, I stay where I am for as long as possible these days – some inconveniences, maybe I’m looking for a book and it’s just not there. I can see it in the mind’s eye, but it’s not ‘there’ in this house, it’s ‘there’ in the other house, nearly two thousand miles away. So I reach out my arm stretching like an elastic band, stretching and stre-etching… get the book, and pyang-ng-ng, back to where I am. Well, nowadays everything is on the ‘cloud’ so it doesn’t matter where you are – although I’m aware, there is ‘place’, the sense of the body grounded.

Out of the plane, expanding into normal shape, inflating back into size in the long walk to immigration , passport stamp, thump! Bags arrive, car into town and the day just morphs into shape, heat, dazzling brightness, and time difference is 1½ hours later. The feeling you arrived before you left… a quirky strangeness in the corridors of time. I’m not able to see the actuality of my situation in the midst of experiencing it, unless it’s something that gets my attention, usually I’ll reflect on it later – ‘later’ arrives and the hindsight of that recent past is forgotten. Flying time does this, I notice, not a scrap of it remains, except for a few words to my future self, scribbled on the back of the boarding pass: When time and space and change converge, we find place. We arrive in Place when we resolve things. Place is peace of mind and understanding. Place is knowledge of self. Place is resolution. [Abdullah Ibrahim]

Photo: Win Sein Taw Ya Reclining Buddha, Mawlamyine, Burma [dinksintransit.com]

valentine 2017 falling in love again

Posted on February 14, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #250: New Delhi: Completely blown away at the Bahá’í Lotus Temple with the monk, Bodhinando – and it could be that an experienced young meditator like him, now entering the world for the first time after 5 years of intense practice, was just giving off this unseen bliss and harmony when sitting in meditation. Or it could be the dome itself, the amazing acoustics with fragments of birdsong, trills, chirps and whistles from the high windows up there; acrobatics of sound echoing 40 meters above our heads.

When we started the sit, I was struggling with head pain and didn’t think I could do it… pressure over the right eye. I couldn’t get up and leave without disturbing others, so the only way out was ‘in’. I tried getting focused on the in-breath/ out-breath, but the mind scampered away, again and again like a playful puppy. I persevered with it, over and over, did my best but in the end, gave up, or it might be better said that I gave in; whatever… ready to get up and go. But, just then, things started happening, triggered by that decisive acceptance, release of tension, and a huge enfoldment began, with everything tipping over, collapsing into a gentle falling.

A slow-mo picture of what happens when falling off the top of a tall building and the fun aspect of it is there’s no ground down below. Pieces of thought imagery flying past me in the fall, some are on the same level as the whole thing remains in free fall like this. It was a giving-in to it, a kind of birthing, a relinquishing, transitioning, and a swoon, a falling in love again, again.

The fall was without gravity; direction ‘down’ had no particular meaning, nor was ‘up’ or ‘through’. I use word ‘me’ object, and ‘I’ subject, as location points in the description of the event, and not as me, the Person walking around in the world. In the slow spinning enfolding through all directions and dimensions, the ‘I’ aspect was everywhere, all around, above and below, and inside and including the ‘me’, the Person who is normally separate, walking around in the world.

Then there was a small noise, and in response I opened my eyes; a shocking brightness of the here-and-now… what’s happening? Some people were leaving and the rustling of their clothing had drawn my attention. Closed my eyes again and the inner enfolding sensation was still there. It continued like this and when we left I carried it with me, looked at my watch and maybe an hour had passed, completely enthralling.

The word is Jhana perhaps; there was a familiarity about it. I must have experienced this years ago, and knew how to just go with it and when the opportunity arose, I gave up (gave in), relaxed the intensity, and everything was enfolded in the fall. As we were walking in the huge grounds surrounding the place, I was describing the thing with Bodhinando and asking him about it. I remember he looked at me once with small smile, and didn’t reply. Then I was going to ask him again later but forgot what the question was…

Love is everywhere on Saint Valentine’s Day (and every day). Upper picture: the interior of the Lotus Temple, click on this link for more from Wikipedia. Photo above: Heart shape in the folds of a blue towel our taxi driver had placed on his seat in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, North India… and Marlene Dietrich from 1930, falling in love again.

finding suññatā in Lucknow

Posted on February 7, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #249: Lucknow, North India: A short flight from Delhi brought us here, hired car to the Ambedkar Memorial Park. A vast space of nothing but polished marble flooring – no trees, no earth left uncovered. Two and a half acres of marble paving rising in a gentle slope, with some monuments and an avenue with hundreds of life size elephants carved in stone.

The panorama of it, an oasis-mirror-like flatness as far as the eye can see; a heaven realm… hold that thought, from two thousand five hundred years back in the distant past, comes rushing towards us now, into present time, 2017, the Buddha’s First Noble Truth – as valid as it was all these centuries ago.

‘The Noble Truth of Suffering’, yes, I’ve been wondering what that bad feeling was, gnawing away at the innards… the urgency of the human condition applies to everything I can possibly experience or do, or think concerning the past, the present or the future. The relief is in knowing the Buddha has a name for it.

That’s what it is, situated at the heart of everything, caused by the constant craving for something, anything that’ll satisfy a created hunger; the yearning for it not to be like this, please, no, I want it to be better than this. Thus, relentlessly on the run from what we don’t want it to be, towards what we want it to be; that just-out-of-reach object, or state of mind, or any way of seeing it, by any means possible.

This great marble-floored landscape of Ambedkar Park is exhausting; it needs to have something immense in it. The sense is of something huge that’s missing perhaps. Or is that what it’s intended to be? Can’t think, there’s nowhere to sit, then we see a marble bench over there, so we head towards that and stop for a rest. Thinking still of those who are caught in the conundrum of chasing foreverness, conditioned by society into this way of thinking.

Now I’m in fear of this floor dissolving under our feet into a lake of water, grasping at anything and everything, but I’m sinking anyway. Then I see something I can hold on to coming towards me as if it were a boat… but it’s not a boat, it’s dry land, so it must be me who’s on the boat. Step on to this small island… a space opens in the mind: this must be the neither-here-no-there place… this gentle detachment from things, neutrality, “the middle way”… and I find there’s room enough to see how I can think about what a thought feels like without getting involved in the content of it. Flames of desire flash all around but do no harm. Allowing it all to ‘become’ without becoming it. Recognizing the sense of self without that solitary aloneness of the enclosed ‘me’.

There’s just this huge space, maybe one day filled to capacity with the ‘many crores’ (millions) of people gathered here, to be part of this vision of Shakyamuni Buddha as a political and social reformer. According to Ambedkar, a person’s unfortunate conditions are not only the result of karma or ignorance and craving, but do also result from “social exploitation and material poverty – the cruelty of others.”

Until that happens, there’s only the empty space, a sense of the vast no-thingness, suññatā.

Top photo source, with Gratitude. Centre photo source, with Gratitude. Lower photo, the author with two Theravadin Monks at Ambedkar Park. In the centre Thai, on the right India.
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

the days are running out

Posted on February 2, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #247: New Delhi: “The days are running out”, Jiab says, in her improvised, short-cut English, and I imagine the days like small objects with legs, running out through the open door, down the step and escaping into the garden. It’s February already and we’re going back to Thailand on the 18th. Visas to be renewed, stamped, and the hurriedness of getting bags checked in. Then join the queue shuffling through security portals and on to the plane. I have to fast track but still in slo-mo… hard to get my head together; not ready, unwilling and not able.

Am I prepared for another catapulted leap up into the sky? One hundred thousand horsepower velocity, wings over the landscape, look out the window and see the mountains through the clouds down below. I want to go there, climb that mountain. So I go down to where it is and start to climb… but it’s not there; only the steep slope, and sparse vegetation, some rocks – the mountain has disappeared. Is it that mountains seem to disappear, as well as the days spent engaged in activities just start to run out because this is my 70th year in the world?

Is it because I learned that the vast abundance of the Buddhist no-self is everywhere, in everything? Looking at a thing and the identity of it being a thing is just gone. Slowly, slowly getting to be okay about that, and okay too about not having to want to know anything more than that. The smallest details of conscious awareness, and a lifetime of sensory input, all arising and passing away, associated somehow with the karma of the circumstances I’m in, without attachment and nothing is held, it just folds in on itself and sent like a letter to someone you love.

No end, no beginning, sometimes I can leave it all in the continuous form of the verb: breathing, eating, sleeping, and living ‘now’ in present-moment-awareness… beginningless, endless, all of the past, all of the future, and no “time” passing. Then it breaks free of that and returns to a beginning (so there has to be an end)… and there lies my reluctance, only ten good years… the days are running out. A story is created in the mind, a few pieces get stitched together, switched around, and let’s say this is how it began; a story inside a story (inside a story) leading back through all the previous moments like this and linked to a lineage of stories interconnected through a great number of former lives in the distant past. And all of that has resulted in this; a twinkling held in forever-present time.

The days are running out, language wakes up – I want, I want, I want to be ‘happy’, and I don’t want to be ‘sad’ – no, no, no. Creating a self where there wasn’t one before, and rushing around, naming things, describing things, creating a photo ID. Sign here please, thump, stamped and there’s a picture of ‘me’. Then other days just come along, as they do, with a light that chases all the shadows away and illuminates everything… this is how all the beginnings are connected up: ‘Once upon a time’… il était une fois, (it was once), ‘and they all lived happily ever after.’

Clouds come by from time to time
To give men a chance to rest
From looking at the moon
[Basho (1644-94)]