the sense of coming home

POSTCARD#290: Bangkok – New Delhi: The early evening flight, leaving Bangkok at 7pm, arrives at Delhi 9.30pm local time; a four-hour journey swiftly moving into the darkness of an evening already turned to night. How many times have I been on this flight? Must be at least thirty times; travelling back the 1½ hours to India Standard Time as if it were an unseen future event just arrived in the space where it hasn’t happened yet. Now it’s almost the end of all the there-and-back-again years, we pull up our roots and return to Thailand in six weeks, after nearly 7 years away. Looking forward to getting back… yes, when we get there, it’ll all just seem like yesterday…

Now it’s later, the descent into Delhi and attention focused on this last arrival. Directionality of Plane-Rush to hit Runway where it is expected to be, where wheels touch earth, first the left side then the right… deep sink-down lurch, take the weight, waiting for the bounce-back tipping point – contemplation of death, and disaster averted, we have arrived. The last Delhi flight I’ll be on, last chance to feel the sense of coming home, taxiing over bumpy ground towards the lights of Indira Gandhi Airport in the distance.

This is how it must be, wandering from one life to another with no direction or purpose other than Jiab’s office, and to go on doing it – but I came around to seeing how it works; how fleetingly one life passes and another arises in circumstances that suit the event as it’s looking for some reason to “be”, seeking name and form in waves of samsaric yearning. That’s how long the thought of it lasts before the letting-go-of-it intention comes to mind, and the whole thing is let-go-of in a shavingth of a slice of time.

Everything else remains to be seen. Passengers de-plane; step into the great halls of Arrivals and Moving Walkways for nearly a mile, then stand in line, passport stamp, thump! Get bags and out into the Delhi night – into ‘severe-level’ air pollution, visibility 200 meters, over 20 flights delayed. It smells of dung fires, red diesel and something like fried eggs? Why do I need to be here? That tenuous awareness is all that’s attached to a wholesome direction in this pattern of peaks and troughs. Every now then mindfulness cuts in and I remember again, to let it all go. Hold on and let go – hold on to the intention to let go.

Thus everywhere I look there’s a sense of ‘self’ searching for the opportunity to ‘become’… anything’ll do, whatever. I see it’s what holds beings in the cycle of rebirth – finding that reference in so many words, again and again these days. Breaking out of the cycle is by non-becoming. Allowing it to ‘become’ without becoming it.

Bags in car and we’re off in a tunnel of light surrounded by darkness and other’s tunnels of light. Nothing can change it – only the mind, of course… but that would mean starting up the engines again… seeing it from one moment to the next. And moments do not lead to other moments as I used to think, it’s only one moment, one long, extended moment, beginningless and without end.

‘You are the one witness of everything and are always completely free. The cause of your bondage is that you see the witness as something other than this.’ [Ashtavakra Gita 1.7, translated by John Richards]