POSTCARD # 481: Singapore: Compassion for those caught in the conundrum of chasing forever-ness – pushing their luggage trolleys, carrying their children, headed for Departures. We are all caught up in the flow, part of the great exodus, on-the-run from what we don’t want, towards what we do want, but never quite getting there, and moving on to somewhere else, then somewhere else. An urgency of thought, searching for an understanding of the way things are, finds that something is not quite right… what is it? Even trying to define it is not satisfactory. This is how it gets triggered – the Buddha’s First Noble Truth from two thousand five hundred years ago, arrives in the here and now of present time: “There is suffering.” It’s a universal reality… not just little old me, fretting over this and that.

Going through the airport security portals; laptop out of the bag, and take off your watch. Remove your shoes put them in the tray then on to the moving belt, shoes get X-rayed. ‘Excuse me sir, show me what you have in your shirt pocket.’ It’s a sheet of capsules, my medicine for the headaches, the tinfoil sets off the metal detector. Jumping through the hoops, getting dressed again and down the narrower and narrower tunnels leading to the seats. Where are we? Look at my number (aisle seat is less claustrophobic). Sit down, seat belt fastened, experience the elongated flying bus with wings. Look out the window as far as I can see, at the small patch of blue sky.

[1st Noble T.] There is Suffering (Dhukka), in the most general sense, encompassing all kinds of slightly distressed states and [2nd Noble T.] it is caused by craving (Tanha); wanting things to be better than they are or different than what they are, or more beautiful, more comfortable, more bearable, less painful, less irritating, less disturbing and a whole range of undesired, unhappy conditions of the mind. But in simply knowing there is a reason for it, a cause, [3rd Noble T.] we find there is a solution to the problem. (Nirodha) This is the key to the locked door… for an instant the suffering is gone! The door is thrust open, sunlight enters the darkness of where I’ve been. So now I know how it works! [4th Noble T.] If I tackle the cause, I can put an end to suffering, by way of the Eightfold Path (Magga).

But today there’s another form of transitional suffering hanging around, a sense of something suspended, isolated, uneasy – why should it be like this? And I start to think it’s the fact that I don’t know why it’s like this, that’s causing the uneasiness. ‘A riddle, wrapped up in an enigma’ [Winston Churchill]. Uncertainty, impermanence, the Ajahn Chah teaching, ‘Not sure’ [mai nae]; poised on the edge of something – a kind of alertness?

This mass of suffering is to do with the upcoming trip to Scotland in about a month from now… and here we are high up in the clouds, on the way to Singapore for a holiday, Jiab and I and our niece M who is now 18. It reminds me that my own departure date to UK is getting nearer and nearer. This brings up a whole range of feelings I haven’t thought about in a long time. Revisiting memories of my less-than-perfect functioning in a dysfunctional family, growing up without a father, a very young mom, more like an older sister than mother, and sharing life with a younger sister, the other chick in the nest.

Living in a household of women and feminine things, the adolescent male falls out of the nest, discovers it can fly and leaves that place there and then. I’ve been away from the North since that time, never went back to stay. I’ve been here and there in the South of England and in Thailand for 38 years – where did the time go?Living in someone else’s country, a permanent foreigner. Now there’s a feeling that it’s been so long since I was in the place where I was born, my ‘home,’ I’ve become a foreigner there too. The loss of my Northern heritage was all my own doing of course, and there’s the regret, remorse and guilt, a burden of suffering I’ve learned to live with all these years. Perhaps visiting it this last time (?) will bring it to a close.

Arriving in Singapore at night, coloured flashing lights, buildings are huge architectural sculptures and everything looks like a celebration. It’s a young person’s city, parties, happy times. Meanwhile I’m engaged with remembered instability, insecurity, vulnerability and there’s this ‘mai nae’ (not sure) out there, neither this nor that.

We sit in a cafe the next day, next to the window and have a scone with butter and jam – oh no, it’s so British! It starts raining, then the sun comes out, then it’s raining again and the AC is so cold… this feels like British weather! I start to realise I’m attached to the historical Thai time-warp, remote from internationalism. I don’t know how I will cope with the cold reality of Scotland. The urgency of thought seeks the safest place to be, the midway point and holding the balance; a place of equanimity in the midst of uncertainty, find a calm abiding there. Allow the suffering to be here – there’s nowhere else for it to go. Let it in. It’s the willingness to allow it a place of its own, that leads to an immediate sense of release, inside and outside… understanding the way things are.

But there’s now the feeling that the Scotland scenario remains an unfinished story. There is the death of ‘self,’ of course, and I can say the self that was lived in Scotland came to its end a long time ago – if it’s an unfinished story, it’s because I’m still holding on to it… time to let the ghosts of that go. The self that I am now, is transparent in the Buddhist sense. Mostly it’s not there at all. Everything that is associated with this body will have its death however, at the end of my allotted time. Other than that, there is the actuality of ‘forever-ness,’ (the unconditioned) things (chittas) evolve, they reform, (annican), become other things in the vast oneness, and there is no ending.

“For many lives I have wandered
looking for, but not finding,
the house-builder
who caused my suffering.
But now you are seen and
you shall build no more.
Your rafters are dislodged and
the ridge-pole is broken.

All craving is ended;
my heart is as one with the unmade.

[DHP. Verse 153 – 154, A Dhammapada For Contemplation]

Photo: Jiab’s pic of the Financial District, Singapore, taken from the Tourist Cruise Boat

POSTCARD # 480: Bangkok: The world is functioning everywhere at the same moment. The here-and-now taking place in all other locations at the same time as it is for me right now, in this place… population of the world, 7.753 Billion (2020). Overwhelmed by the immensity of it in terms of ‘Self,’ “the vast myriad of things seen as independent entities” [Buddhadasa Bhikkhu]. “When the mind contains unknowing (avidyā) it inevitably experiences all things as being ‘self.’ It’s not that we make a deliberate effort to consciously establish a self. The ‘self’ is merely a condition that arises when there is grasping and clinging in the mind.” Attempting to grasp an impossibility, and it just gets more and more impossible.

Characteristic proliferation of mind when confronted with an immutable truth; when I understood that the Macular Degeneration AMD in my right eye is a permanent condition and I’d have to have the injections in the eye once a month for the rest of my life, I was reminded of a comment by blogger Jude: “… the mind is creative no matter what the stimuli. Imagination, let loose like a racehorse, goes careering off then is yanked back unwillingly and all kinds of fearful things arise, created by the struggle.”

How to have mindfulness so I can catch that creative awareness before I get hijacked by how bad it seems? But this is the classic “End Of Days” scenario (not the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, no not that one,). It’s the bit where mindfulness steps in and I stop having the injections in the eye, because there are more important things to be considered before the arrival of death itself.

Birth and death, I remember seeing a TV programme about a woman giving birth – it was the first in a BBC series on the human body, about 20 years ago, I remember it was so vivid, I suddenly felt this immediacy of it happening to me: the blinding light, echoing sounds; the coldness, the impact of air entering the breathing passages, inflating lungs? Revisiting the birth experience… emerging into the world,  the first consciousness of where we are now sweeps through, and the body/mind organism is removed from its inner world.

Seventy-five years go by, and even though the mind clouds it over with improvised explanations, and received knowledge, the body sense knows I don’t breathe the air, the air breathes me. I am not looking out through my eyes at the world, the world is looking in through my eyes and enters my inner being. As the Buddha has said, all sensory objects enter the physiological organism through the sense gates āyatana, and sounds are heard, food is tasted, words are spoken, things are done but there is no doer doing the deed – no Self in charge (anatta). The process itself selects the sound, or the sound selects the process, same with mind actions, the words, the thought, the concept appearing in the six external sense bases bāhirāni āyatanāni. That TV film left me quite transformed… awareness is aware of itself, “consciousness is outside the thinking mind, the uncreated.” (Ajahn Sumedho)

I’m saying there is no self but there is the small sense of self associated with a craving for ‘things’ that enter the physiological organism. This is the self that arises in the sensory world, driven by desire and bound by suffering. When I stop thinking about it, it disappears. Not so for most people I see. Everywhere I look the surroundings are populated by people with bowed heads, unable to face the world without their devices, their small window on the inner self. Stuck in the basic functions of interacting with the world of sensory stimuli. The deluded, not-knowing state, attachment to sensory events, caught in the vast myriad of things, beset with random karma…a tangled skein of thread, a woven nest of birds, a thicket of bamboo and reeds. “It is by their not being able to comprehend the dependent origination, that people are entangled like a ball of cotton, and not being able to see the Truth, are always afflicted by sorrow – born often into conditions that are dismal and dreary, where confusion and prolonged suffering prevail. And, they do not know how to disentangle themselves to get out.” [The Buddha’s words on Dependent Origination]

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Image Details: Five forms of the Buddha, in Wat Phra Soon Kaew, Phetchaburi, Thailand

POSTCARD #478 Suddenly I’m not thinking about this and that anymore, just sitting quietly here, aware of the in-breath/out-breath. It’s that wait-and-see thing… and when there’s an opportunity, look for a place in the middle ground. Find equanimity in the midst of uncertainty, the balance, the midway point, neither yearning for this nor not yearning for this… find a temporary abiding there.

There’s a plan taking shape; I go back to Scotland for a visit, long enough to see what remains of family. Now that the threat of Covid is over and over, and under and through, we are free to go where we will.

Almost nothing of my UK ‘self’ remains. I have a sister, the other chick in the nest. And a cousin who tries to keep the strands of family together. The others… all gone in the passing years. I remember mother, warm skin-to-skin palms in that cold air-conditioned room, where she came to her end.

Present time is more connected with the past, where we arrived from, than with the future where we are going to; a place of unconfirmed likelihoods, stumbled-upon in following the here-and-now to the there-and-then – a past tense form used to refer to future time.

This returning is likely to reveal some old faces. Always and forever, (the collective ‘we’) are in recovery from to overwhelm, our dwellings lost in the floods of ancient times – the timeless metaphor of Mind overcome in a tide of worries, fears, and things left undone. Sorrow, lamentation and despair; swept along by unrelenting events, surfacing and going under. But it’s an adherence that appears more difficult to unstick from than it is.

Remembering my life as it was then, extending in the mind’s eye, from that existence stretching into the future. Now here in the future foretold, where there is no ‘there’, there. It’s ‘here, and now (always), nothing remains of the past, only the conceptual wreckage of it revisited.

Access the power that immediately releases the tenacity of grip, the jaw clench, tongue adhered to roof of mouth…. unlock, unfasten, undo; the process of having to reassemble the parts of who I am in every new circumstance – inventing a self that’s satisfied at times, happy and sad, dissatisfied other times.

Arriving ‘home’ after 30 years or more, in the tradition of long distance train drivers, itinerant peoples, travelling salesmen, nomadic Bedouin, and outsourced peripatetic teachers of music in rural schools, there’s an immediate opening to the incidental, innovative, event. Start again on a new page.

Rather than seeing it as it is, I’m looking for the ‘story’ that might be there, comparing it with other stories and understanding it all in stories that are composed of other stories. We create a working structure that we believe is nature rather than seeing Nature itself, in the same way as a ‘story’ is understood by a child.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not
[Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief]

POSTCARD #477 ‘It was as if lightning coursed within my chest. The impact lasted for a while, and for the next few weeks whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not.’ [‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life’].

The Dalai Lama, in the sixties, reflecting on the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, phenomena being dependent on conceptuality and his discovery that the “I” exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body; not an entity in itself.

The Buddha identified no-self, [anatta], nobody at home, no self anywhere, anywhen, nowhere, now-here. The world is a construct, look, see, glimpse the nothingness situated at the centre of everything [śūnyatā]. Most people flinch at the thought, because in the West we are taught that the self is real. We are to hold the Self in high regard, a mutual propping-up of the illusion. Everywhere we look, our self-concept looks back at us like a mirror reflection. Our whole environment supports the fictional self, made to measure, tailored to fit, we live in a bespoke world. The Self we know as the body and mind is thought to be not something we ‘are’ so much as something we ‘possess’, I am ‘me’ and this is ‘mine – the opposite of what we are talking about here.

About the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, there was a time, some years ago, I was alone in the Nontaburi house and I wrote a Post about the illusion: “The house is surrounded by trees, leaves filter a green light all around. There are birds, squirrels, lizards all kinds of critters. I see something move out on the path… is it a bird, dropped down from a branch to peck at something? There, it moves again – just a hop and it’s a few feet further on. I sit very still, don’t want to frighten it away. I see it now, sitting still, not moving. 

After a long time waiting for it to change position, I decide to slowly get up and see what happens when I do that. But it’s still not moving… maybe it’s injured. I come closer… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf curled into a shape, and blown by the wind across the surface of the path.  

Step back and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a short gust of wind blows the leaf. The animation of it is absolutely convincing, but I see it now as a leaf, not a bird. How disconcerting, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not.” In the same way, the mind is going around as if it were a bird, but it’s only a leaf in the wind. And we have the idea then that the “I” is a concept, not real. Compassion for those caught in the predicament of believing in the self, I was similarly held, looking for Truth in a battleground of untruths.The assumption is that if ‘I’ am my body, I am my feelings, I am my consciousness – then everything else is out ‘there, and if I’m in ‘here’, disconnected from everything out ‘there’. I’m isolated, alone, anxious – projecting a perceived self that I know, somehow, is not real. I need to resolve this issue of fearful uncertainty so I have a very busy life, work 5 days a week and spend time with friends at weekends. Together we go out and around looking everywhere for indications that align with that ‘Self’ held in high regard, visiting public parks and places of interest, taking ‘selfies’ with a nice background. ’Is everybody in the picture?’ Smile please… click! Everyone comes to see the image on the screen; let’s take another one… click! We all seem to be happy doing this, but there’s still that dissatisfied feeling, seeking a way to have whatever it takes to confirm the identity of that Self (held in high regard). This introspective state of mind allows another kind of ‘self’ to enter the picture, seeing the ‘self’ that is seeking. The seeking ‘self’ turns its attention to the seeing ‘self’ and is, at once, seen.

The self we self-create exists in a distorted reality, each of us as selves at the centre of our own universe. We act in our own self-interest, or as groups of like-minded ‘selves.’ It results in a conflict of interest between those whose lives and interests are, in fact, interdependent. Those of us who have let go of our selfish-selves, are part of a larger network of others, whose pains and pleasures and interests we share.

In a wider context there are scholars and spiritual leaders who say the awakened state is the state of no self. No self is the aspect that pervades all of reality. We are in a totality of consciousness, you can say we are part of God, therefore there is no individual self. When our soul merges with God there is no self – one drop in the ocean.
I am inspired by these speakers and professors and shall continue to listen to their words. In the meantime I’ll go on with the Buddha’s teaching and the ’nuts-and-bolts’ of how the process works, develops, evolves.

‘The deconstruction and reconstruction of the sense of self is necessary to become aware of the most deceptive of meta-narratives: the one we normally do not perceive because it is our ordinary, everyday reality – the ‘real world’ we take for granted but in fact is constructed.’ [David Loy: ’The Great Awakening’(4) 

This post contains sections from two earlier posts:

Rope Seen As Snake

Thoughts Like Clouds.

Also excerpts from a talk by Ishwar Ji Puri

And a paper by Jay L Garfield “Why No Self”