POSTCARD # 483: Bangkok: The days are running out… quick, close that door! Too late, some have escaped. Down two steps and off they go into the garden. How many do we have left? Only twenty days left? Less than three weeks. Twenty days, and counting, before the flight to the North of Scotland, the great catapult into the sky – up and over… where everything is just the same, except it’s quite different.

Up until now, I’ve not been able to think about arriving, It’s the in-between thing, the flight time, itself. The actual process of getting there, but not seen as something with a beginning and an end, it’s a sort of neither here-nor-here, period of twelve hours.

Now seeing it, not as something I’m getting started, more like something’ I’m leaving behind (“But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! Robert Burns ). No, no, something more cheerful than that. I look out the window and see the far and distant shore slipping away… terra firma is slipping away, there’s a feeling I could be on an old sailing ship, clouds and air currents cause turbulence of the waves and jolts of hard contact with the swell of the sea. Then the announcement: Passengers have to fasten their seat belts and remain seated.”

Better to think of dropping the desire to control, and I’m reminded of Ajahn S saying, as long as the world is experienced as ‘me’ and ‘it’, there will always be views and judgments about ‘it.’ I’m aware of the ease to be found in releasing control and allowing ‘it,’ that ‘something’ to be a part of it all. ‘There is,’ is a non-dualist statement, but it’s not saying ‘There is that out there’; instead, it is allowing the dualistic consciousness to relax until we no longer interpret the situation as, ‘I’m here and that’s there’.

“We hold the mind open so that its dualistic tendency can be relaxed and we let go of all the defences, the projections, denials, and fascinations.” Then we come to ‘there is.’ ‘There is suffering (dukkha).’ This has to be understood, not in the intellectual sense, but gnostically, seeing its origins in the desires, aversions and attachments, which are usually built into the personality way of seeing things.”

This feeling of being in the middle of nowhere is a good place to forget what’s been and what’ll be. And I’m saying this in readiness for the actuality of it, I haven’t left the surface of the planet yet – and the science of it that comes to mind: we are spinning at 1000 mph, not what we could say is ‘stable’ in any way. Better to think of it all as ‘unheld.’

It’s the investigation; layers reveal themselves bit by bit until there is only that which is beyond the dualism of experience. See where that gets us. It’s not easy, but the kind of effort required is not impossible. I see how it’s done, and returning to this in the posts that remain before 1st September arriving 2nd September 2022.