OLD NOTEBOOKS#220: [First Published August 26, 2016] Chiang Mai: A long story short is that I fell. Gravity got me, it gets us all in the end. Friends took me to a Chiang Mai hospital – “flactured lib,” the X-Ray man said, with dodgy pronunciation of the /L/ and /R/ sounds. They took me home, but later that night I was having such an awful time struggling with pain, family members took me back to the hospital, I had an injection and spent the night there.

The ‘self’ is a sensory experience; everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think… and cognition too, is a sense that responds to stimuli received through the senses. I inhabit a simulation. Not possible to see it any other way – well, it is possible, you could see it another way but it’d just be seeing the same thing another way. There’s something about this that’s obvious, so clear and evident yet, again and again, when I look for it, it’s not there – the answer I seek is difficult to find because the seeking-it occupies the place where the seeing-it is needs to be.

What happened? Well, I’d had in fact, two falls; the first was straight back-over past the tipping point and down, crash. My PHN headache meds have something to do with that. The second fall was some hours later when, getting up too quickly from the lying down position, then forgetting about the pain in the lower back, attempting to allow for that in mid-air, and the whole thing came down with a spectacular CRASH, colliding with some hard-edged furniture on the way… and that’s what did it for the rib. Awareness of these disorientating pain meds means I now go carefully; the world is a perilous place; mindfulness is a necessity.

If the ‘I’ construct isn’t what this is, what is it, then? I can change the pronoun from ‘me’ to ‘it’ but it’s the same thing only there’s an ‘it’ that recognizes its ‘self’. I need to allow the mind to clear itself, and there again the word itself – no ‘it’ and no ‘self’, is getting in the way of the Buddhist anatta, ‘no-self’, nobody at home – where am I now?

It’s not working because the effort to create no ‘self’ results in a mind running around everywhere, taking ‘selfies’, you could say, in different places and with various friends. Smile please, pose… click and take another one, okay? Clicick. And it’s happy doing this, but deep down it’s not really satisfied, seeking always for a way to become whatever it is that is PERMANENT HAPPINESS. But it’ll never happen, everywhere I look there’s another ‘self’ seeking an identity and becoming that form. Seeking the next opportunity to ‘become’ is the default aspiration; could be that this is what holds beings in the cycle of rebirth…

“The apparent reality of the mind, body and world is imagined with the thought that thinks it. In other words, the constructs of thought, that is, the beliefs we have about the mind, body and world – are only real for thought itself.” [Rupert Spira]

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