Skilful Avoidance

Posted on August 6, 2012 by tiramit

A small town in South India: I was walking through a quiet part of town. Not much going on, turn a corner and there’s this mother hen fussing around agitatedly with her brood of little chicks all going ‘chee-eep, cheep, cheep.’ And the hen is making loud cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck noises and strutting around, strangely fast, unusual body movements, like a dance. It didn’t look right somehow, the mother hen was dashing about and jumping backwards and forewards and the little chicks were falling over themselves trying to keep up with her. I stopped to watch and thought, wow, what is going on here?

But mother hen had seen something ominous up there in the sky… and I was about to find out what it was. Suddenly there was what I can only describe as a huge SWOOP down from above. A large bird of prey with outstretched talons ‘dropped’ from sky to earth – must have been going at a tremendous speed – and in a great wide arc curved back upwards in the direction it had come. It needed space to do this and I saw it from further down the road sailing on upwards in the momentum of its fall, and up in this large curve, then winging it’s way back to the higher altitudes. Amazing. There was just this almost silent whoosh of feathers and outstretched talons – but it missed the chicks! It didn’t get what it was after, the mother hen had saved the chicks with her strange dance. She and her happy brood went on with their day. ‘Cheep, cheep’, story with happy ending.

I was so glad to have been there and experienced it because afterwards it really, really cheered me up. The Great Bird of Prey missed it’s dinner, but the whole thing was a fortunate turn of events; cute little chicks with their lives all laid out in front of them, And, the thing is, it helped me a lot with a problem I was having with a little part time job I’d started. Something backfired, no proper contract; a breach in the proper way of going about things. Next thing I was unemployed. Then, to make matters worse, there was this irate person in the office who’d gotten the idea it was all my fault and no hope of convincing her otherwise. So it was just a case of skilful avoidance, dodging angry remarks fired at me like heat-seeking missiles.

But the missiles were not hitting the intended target. I was untouched – not a hair on my head harmed, just like the little chicks that avoided the steel talons of the Great Bird of Prey. The mind would become transparent, a large empty space; nothing can hit it because there’s nothing there. I was able to see what was going on and yet be unaffected by it. The fierce eyes, the anger, the voice: the missile misses the target and all that’s felt is the wind of it as it goes by.

What I learned from Ajahn is related to the teaching: sati sampajanna, clear comprehension and from that, the power of ‘wholesome’ thought – wholesome reasoning, or quiet focus. It’s the ability to look at any situation and “see” what it means (really) with alertness – no illusions, no assumptions – and monitor that ‘seeing’ with just the right balance of effort. Having ‘seen’, it’s possible to know that it is ‘mind’ that is the threat and the threat can be diverted from its course by kamma of Right Intention. It’s understood in a moment and after that the system does it all by itself. The simple power of all that is wholesome and correct in the world is sufficient to shield against the attacks from mind (it’s not a mine field, it’s a mind field). When I think of it now, I can see the fixed hovering of the bird of prey, suspended in the air. When I’m not thinking about it, it’s not there. Some things are just like that.

‘Footfalls echo in the memory.

Down the passage which we did not take.

Towards the door we never opened.

Into the rose-garden…..’

(Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot)

mindfulness of irritation

Posted on August 4, 2012 by tiramit

New Delhi: Around midnight, the neighbour’s dog starts barking. It’s done this before. I know where it is; standing out there on the second floor balcony, facing the tall trees in the park, where birds, squirrels, and small creatures are trying to sleep. Other dogs must be thinking: really! what’s all the fuss about? The dog barks (sounds more like a shouted ‘woof’) in multiples of 7 woofs: woof, woof – woof, woof – woof, woof – woof! Then it stops for a breath and starts on the next round of woofs: woof, woof – woof, etc. The only voice in the silence of the night. It’s a guard dog; it barks for a living, just doing its job. The problem is, it’s left alone most of the time in a house owned by people who don’t live there. They go away and the dog shouts out: I am here, I am here….

An irritating situation, ‘mind’ racing around in a panic, bordering on anger and outrage and I’m very conscious there’s nothing I can do about Dog; mindfulness is all there is. I need to try to be mindful, then doubt comes along: I’m trying to be mindful, but still feeling the irritation, so maybe I’m not doing it correctly? Why isn’t the mindfulness easing the suffering? Fortunately I find a short video of Ajahn Viradhammo talking on this subject. Ajahn V is saying that mindfulness is the capacity to know what irritation is. That’s different from being irritated. Being irritated means, ah, now you’ve got this barking dog, okay, so that’s bad, very bad; it shouldn’t be like this, no, etc. That’s not being mindful, that’s being irritated.

So, gratitude to Ajahn V, I managed to see the difference between ‘irritation’ and ‘mindfulness of irritation’. With mindfulness, I can make a choice: get irritated about Dog? or watch my breathing. I can choose to mindfully listen to the voice of the dog and use aspects of the experience to calm my mind

Dog usually goes on barking for about 20 minutes and then has a rest. Well, I suppose all that energetic barking must be quite tiring… yeh, well after it’s had its rest, it comes back to the balcony and gets into its next round of multiples of 7 woofs for another 20 minutes or until it chooses to stop and the night can drag on like this…. So, eventually I realise I have to get to know this dog voice; make friends with it. The ‘woofs’ are dog-shouts – I am over here now – large, breath-sized, full-lung-capacity, plosive, gusts of dog breath forced at velocity through vibrating vocal cords – a kind of dog song.

The woof sound has a deep, rich bass quality, an acoustic resonance that suggests to the listener a spacious hollow chest cavity; definitely indicates size, a large creature. I’ve seen it up there on the balcony, a black Alsatian, but when it sees me, it goes into accelerated barking mode. Unfortunately, it seems to take a long time for Dog to wind down from this excited state of dog-shouts to the ordinary pace so I don’t allow that to occur. I don’t have eye contact with it.

As the night goes on, it becomes heavy and laboured; barking requires energy, and there’s a noticeable tiredness or monotony about it – the dog is not spirited and happy, rather, it’s like it’s bored; why am I doing this? What’s the point? Motivation for barking at its best is beginning to slip. That’s when I’m inclined to start thinking it’s going to stop any minute but I’ve been caught in that wishful thinking state before and discover Dog has sufficient energy to go on for very much longer: woof, woof – woof, woof – woof, woof – woof!

So, necessity determines the right action, and that is mindfulness. Ajahn says there is the irritation, I feel it, but I don’t become the irritation. I now have some space around this thing called irritation; I see there is a choice. I’m not that irritation; I’m bigger than it. Mindfulness is bigger than that, I’ve met it, I know it, and I can make a choice because I’m not caught up into it. I’m not caught so I’m able to let go at last and fall into profound sleep, where I’m happily unaware if Dog is barking or not. Wake up next day and I’ve forgotten all about it.

……………………………….

‘The choices I make with thought, with intention with action with speech, they have a consequence. So if I just (tolerate the situation) in a state of frustration then that means a certain amount of stress is going to carry on into the next five minutes. And if I’m not mindful of that sort of stress and not able to say, well this is the way it is now, I will feel rotten or negative or unhappy and I never really awaken to the moment then each next moment is just driven by habit and I’m like a leaf in the wind…. The craft of the heart. Pottery, carpentry, knitting. A craft requires skill. We, as human beings can do skillful things, do our craft, get better at it. It’s the same with our minds. Our minds are not just hard-wired to be a certain way, they are flexible’ Ajahn Viradhammo [Link to video]

Power Failure

Posted on August 2, 2012 by tiramit

New Delhi: Power failure across 21 States of the North, East and North-East regions of India on Tuesday for about 10 hours. Trains came to a standstill, commuters squeezing onto overloaded buses (see photo). Newspapers say 300 million people were affected, half the country of India; it means something like the whole of Central Europe without electricity.

I didn’t know the full scale of this power failure until the next day. As far as I was concerned, I was the only one; it was just ‘me’ that was suffering; padding around in the house, barefoot, like a wet frog in T shirt and shorts, dripping little puddles of sweat on the floor. The AC went out straight away, that was at 2.30 am and there’s a back-up system in the house but it lasted only a few hours then the fans stopped, one by one. The last fan stopped spinning mid-morning and that was it, no alternative. Hot like this for an indefinite period.

So I open up to it and take stock of the situation: 30°C, not too bad, skin feels like the sticky side of scotch tape, could be worse. Struggling with the need to be mindful. When something like this happens, there’s a tendency to feel that it’s ‘wrong’, so wrong you can get caught up in a kind of imagined, collective guilt – that’s how seriously ‘wrong’ it feels. There’s a Pema Chodron quote about this: ‘People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That’s not the idea at all.’ The heat is bad enough but ‘mind’ makes it worse with all this, it’s ‘my’ fault, stuff.

‘Fault’ is a loaded word: it leads to ‘blame’ and this tenacity of the mind-lock around ‘my fault’ is so fierce it takes continuing mindfulness to keep mad thoughts from spiralling way out of control, problems proliferate and body discomfort equals ‘mind’ discomfort. Thinking, it shouldn’t be like this; ruminating over why the power outage occurred in the first place, and who’s to ‘blame’ and why and what’s really going on?

It’s not getting me anywhere, so there’s only one thing to do, open all doors and windows to maximum, get on to the cushion and try to settle the body/mind. Shirt sticking to back, takes some wriggling around to get it to unstick, then it’s better. There is the immediate advantage in that sitting absolutely still, even though you’re hot, doesn’t involve energy and doesn’t create body heat. The body just takes up the position; it’s getting the mind to settle that’s the problem.

Sweat dribbles down the face and at first it seems like there’s no air; the outside temperature feels like it’s the same as the temperature inside the body? Then there’s an awareness of tiny movements of air across the forehead and everything inclines towards this source of relief. The effect of deep breathing comes with the first conscious long inhalation, and it’s like there’s a great space opened up inside: all the distress is gone. For a moment, there’s awareness that the heat has dispersed. So, if it can just disappear like that, then I need to look at the conditions that caused it to happen. I’m naturally inclined to investigate this.

Ajahn Buddhadasa talks about learning from the experience of suffering: ‘If I see things in terms of suffering, I come to know the truth. It’s a natural process. The whole purpose of life is to find out what’s going on, to gain knowledge attained through clear insight….The simple fact that we exist means we are working with mind/body every day; what we learn about ‘self’ comes from the direct experience of being alive. To do this, there needs to be sufficient mindfulness to carry out a detailed investigation every time suffering arises in nama-rupa.’

There’s a distinct sense of ‘body’, just sitting there, patiently waiting for instructions, quite still and at ease. It’s an awareness of the mass of the physical body; the totality and volume/weight of all the internal systems – it feels kind of heavy or something like inert, comfortable just to be in that one position. Body acts as a measure, against which the hectic thought flow can be stabilized; the nama-rupa relationship.

After some time sitting, I realise it’s not a problem anymore. As soon as it becomes possible to ‘know’ ignorance, well-being follows and the knowledge that such a thing is possible motivates me to identify the cause of suffering. ‘Craving is completely destroyed because ignorance cannot be in that same moment when knowledge arises.’ [Link to: Ajahn Buddhadasa text]

The power came back on after about 10 hours and the house seemed like a different place, bathed in all the comfort of cool airflow from ACs.

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[image link]

High Altitude Sunset

Posted on July 31, 2012 by tiramit

Bangkok-Delhi flight: A glance around the departure area at the gate for the Delhi flight, children running around. It’s a weekend flight; plane is going to be full of kids. Okay, ready for boarding, I have a gold card (frequent flyer) and can board early. It gives me time to get things stowed away and squeeze into my seat. Not a lot of room in economy class. I’m in an aisle seat. Keep shoulders in to avoid getting hit by people with large bags. The line moves along slowly and children are on the same eye level as me, seated in my aisle seat. They look at me – first close encounter with a blue-eyed foreigner, all part of the experience, the plane has their attention

“Crew at your stations,” we’re all set to go, one boy crying – boys cry more than girls, the voice is very loud; nothing is the way I want it to be right now so leave me alone and don’t bother me, okay? But we’re soon on the runway then takeoff, engine sound increases and as plane lifts off from the ground, all the children’s voices are combined in one small exclamation: WOOOOOO-OOH!… are we flying yet? Yes! And there’s a straining of necks to look out the window to see if it’s true, ground disappearing below. Jumping out of the seat belts, a stewardess raises her voice. After that everything quietens down.

And the various services start, the food and the drinks come and go; children running up and down the aisles chased by a parent, brought back to their seats and they run off again – it’s the game, playfulness. We’re in the Hindu world here, mostly, on this plane flying to India – thinking of the Hindu concept of a world created by Gods in play. This high altitude sunset glow going on and on, and I’m sitting there looking out the window at this eternal sunset, when the stewardess leans over and pulls down the shade: Plap! Goodbye sunset. The opportunity to fully experience flying through time and the eternal sunset is not available right now; we have to watch the movie instead, okay? Yes, so that’s all right with me, no mustn’t have a tantrum about it, I’m not a kid anymore.

Some time later we land at Delhi airport, get out of the plane and set off on the long walk to immigration, children laughing, playing and running wildly along the miles of beautiful autumn-coloured carpeting.

……………………………….

‘Everything is impermanent. Nothing has a “self-being” of its own apart from its time. All of us are actually part of the same current. My sense of self is composed of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting—all of them being temporal processes, different forms that time takes. If the flowing current includes everyone and everything, our normal understanding of time as something external to us is misleading. Often it’s convenient to distinguish things from their time, but that is the relative truth. According to the ultimate truth, things can’t really be distinguished from their temporality, and when they are nondual then time is really not different from eternity. The eternal present always stays the same—it’s always now!—even as it always changes.’ [David R. Loy ‘Money Sex War Karma‘]

The Dhamma Moment

Posted on July 29, 2012 by tiramit

Listening to the Ajahn giving a Dhamma talk, listeners seated on the floor, the chanting; this is an event that goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha and it fills me with awe to consider that moment then is actually this moment now. These days, I don’t have the chance to be present in the Dhamma hall very often and I listen to the Dhamma on audio files, CDs [link to: Forest Sangha download/ listen]. There are some talks on youtube and I was watching one recently about ‘non-self and reincarnation’. Something clicked for me there. It was an instant of insight but the video got stuck in buffering, unfortunately, and I had to wait. The long pause somehow intensified this quickening, but when the video resumed I found the immediacy had passed. I downloaded it later and studied it again but it was like holding on too tightly to something that’s gone.

If I’d had a transcript of the Dhamma talk to read while watching the video, I wouldn’t have lost the place. And anyway, listening to a talk is sometimes too fleeting for me, I usually try to make notes that I can refer to later. I’m interested in how to make an accurate simultaneous transcript of a Dhamma talk from an audio file using voice recognition software – can it be so finely tuned? I remember seeing musicians sitting in the audience at an orchestral performance listening to the music and reading the score (the musical notation sheet) at the same time. Listening, backed up with reading, is essential in any learning situation. There’s also writing and discussion. All of these are required in order to study the subject. Listening on its own is not enough.

I came across something in a webpage about how we listen to a speech given by a public speaker and in the first 20 minutes people can only remember about half of what was said. After that, recall drops off further. It may be that listening to a Dhamma talk is different from listening to ordinary talks because the words of the Dhamma are likely to have an impact greater than the normal functioning of the short-term memory. It goes directly into long-term memory – deeper in a state of knowing? I’m not sure about this but the problem is it’s not immediately ‘remembered’ unless you make notes and discuss with others about what they can recall.

For this reason, reading the Dhamma talk is possibly better than listening to it although doing both is best. When I read it, the pace of involvement is controlled; I can read, make notes, then go off and do something else and come back later. I have the option of re-reading and even if it ends up that I don’t, just the possibility that I can do that has an effect upon my ongoing understanding of the text. It appeals more to a contemplative understanding that takes place over a longer period. This is partly because I’m used to the idea that a written text is a considered piece, it has been constructed in a different time; it may be written and rewritten in early drafts before reaching its finished state. Our reading attitude to a written text is conditioned by this kind of experience. It’s what we’re used to.

The transcript of a Dhamma talk is quite different. It has the appearance of a planned, structured piece of writing but it started off as a long utterance; a flow of words, without preparation, recorded and edited from an audio file. And it’s this quality that’s really quite special and uncommon in the world of publications today: the spontaneity of understanding, as it happens, written in words on the page. The reader experiences that heightened sense of meaning while reading parts of it, and it’s not due to a contrived technique in the use of words by the author or an editorial team of experts, it comes from the Ajahn, in the here-and-now. It is the Dhamma moment.

……………………………………..

[image: Luang Por Piak in* Vimutti Monastery]*

nothing in itself

Posted on July 24, 2012 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Silence all around in the heat of the afternoon, save for the sudden ‘crack’ of roof tiles expanding in the high temperature. Birds and insects for the most part quiet, an isolated single syllable: ‘chirp’ sound, then quiet again. I look up, anorexic chicken is standing in my open doorway because it sees me sitting inside. It’s thinking maybe some food will get flung out of the door because this is what usually happens. The cranium darts forward in an inquiring sort of a way and it watches me with one eye then maneuvering around in stages to watch me with the other eye and I used to think this was funny and cute but now I realise, sadly, that no matter how much loving-kindness I could extend to that creature transfixed in its observation of me, it is motivated by food, only; there’s just the process driving itself and not much further on in evolutionary terms than its dinosaur ancestor. So I make the single sound: ‘SH!’ that I learned from Jiab’s mum and it’s gone.

I’ve got the fan positioned just right in the room, seated on the cushion, body getting grounded – all internal processes and organs settled, gravity helps. It takes about five minutes. Thought movements start to get slower and it’s possible to monitor the situation and bring attention to the breath. Then it drifts off and I have to bring it back again to the breathing pattern and focus on that for a while.

And there are times when it seems like there is only this continuing present moment, kind of surging through from the past and into the future in one constant movement – like standing at the bow of a small ship plunging through the waves, rising and falling; moving forwards but no landmarks in the sea to say you are going anywhere.

When I look around for the landmarks to gauge my progress, and try to picture it in my mind, that sensation of standing at the bow of a small ship fades away and that’s how I learn not to push aside the experience and put in a constructed ‘self’ in its place, with the thought that ‘I’ am doing this. ‘… impossible to be aware of an experiencer because it is always the experience itself that momentarily occupies that space.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’] So the sensation of being on the ship returns and around it there is periodically the experience of moments of nothing – and that’s not ‘nothing’ as in ‘not much happening’, but ‘nothing’ in itself. It seems like a worthwhile thing to focus on this for the time being.

‘Nothing is after all just nothing. It cannot be a place that resembles an idea of nothingness. A place involves area, or extension. It is defined by coordinates and boundaries. It is not nothing. It is room. Nothing has no room, nor can anything be located within nothing. Nothing cannot have an inside or an outside. It cannot destroy, swallow, or terminate. As nothing, it can have no energy or effect. As nothing, it cannot be a thing, a realm, a state, or anything. It is absolutely nothing to fear. It is nothing to hope for.’ [Robert Thurman]

The focus finds a comfortable place and I just let it sit there for a while then, as the afternoon dwindles away, squirrels get argumentative, great hosts of squabbles and a periodic shrill chattering fills the air.

If A Tree Falls …

Posted on July 21, 2012 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Exotic red Hibiscus flowers and butterflies as big as birds. A zizzle of insects in the night and numerous coconut palm trees just standing around contemplating the situation: if a tree falls in the forest …. Does the world continue to exist when I close my eyes? Was this world here before I was born? Hard to believe it was, everything just going on as it is now, probably, farmyard animals, birds in the trees and all the other random events taking place as they are now, experienced from here on the top floor of the house where the treetops are level with the roof terrace and higher.

There was a time when I wasn’t here – not born yet. I can understand that, so it means I can understand what the world is without that person called ‘me’ going around, being myself, and there’s an anonymity about this observation that’s quite liberating. I am in it, that’s all – no more, no less – and undeniably, the present moment is all around the place, spread over the surfaces of the things I see, as soon as I look at them. It was there when the dogs got tangled up in the leash a short while ago – it can be inexplicable! Not always, but I keep bumping into it, the present moment is all there is. And it is as it is whether I am aware of it in its as-it-is-ness or not.

Sometimes it gets stuck, like a failed internet connection. The internet room at Hat Yai Airport was closed when I was there, all the computers covered with dustsheets and a sign written in felt tip pen explaining the reason why. And in the center of this Thai message were the words, in English: “could not make a connection” copied from the message on the browser – okay, everybody can go home now. Is this what Death is like? The unexpected occurs – it does that sometimes, fatal error – quit all programs and try restart. It doesn’t work; just another aspect of the ‘as-it-is-ness’, probably yes, whatever.

Systematically eliminating the idle chatter of the mind as it arises leads to a state of mind free of all the tugs and pulls. Everything that comes to conscious mind can be thought of as recognition of the object; bare attention, continued awareness applied to everything in the environment and the various happenings of the day.

It’s really nice to be in this pleasant rural remoteness and So What if I’ve been trying to get a connection all day? I’m an optimist, hoping for the best, without clinging to the idea there’s a problem about that. Meanwhile, the world and everything is just going on, the original state, always there. Death arrives one day and it’s that letting-go thing again.

“… how much more harmoniously the days are passing compared with those when we gave in to the slightest stimulus for interfering in the world by deed, word, emotion or thought. As if protected by an invisible armour against the banalities and importunities of the outer world, one will walk through (the) days serenely and content, with an exhilarating feeling of ease and freedom. It is as if, from the unpleasant closeness of a hustling and noisy crowd, one has escaped to the silence and seclusion of a hill top, and with a sigh of relief, is looking down on the noise and bustle below. It is the peace and happiness of detachment which will be thus experienced.” [“The Heart of Buddhist Meditation” Nyanaponika Thera]

Loving-Kindness to Animals 1

Posted on July 18, 2012 by tiramit

I was on a cliff path by the sea, in the North of Scotland, cold and windy, and there were all these nesting gulls making a terrific high-pitched screaming sound. Suddenly this large gull flew past my head, so close I could see its eye looking at me as it passed. I felt its body heat, was aware of the complexity of its massed intestinal organs, lungs, heartbeat and all this in just that ‘gull’ moment caught zooming through the air. Some piece of it’s time zone made an impact on me – an unexpected contact with a living creature in nature that you don’t normally have. It was protecting its nest, I was the predator, a wild animal on two legs; an egg thief coming to steal away its offspring.

I hurried on out of the nesting area, chased away by the gull, and spent some time in thought about the carnivorous relationship I have with the animal world. A friend told me about these two girls, twins in fact, who had their 15^th birthday and their parents asked them what they would like to have as a birthday gift. After some discussion – twins always have to agree on birthday gifts – they decided they would like to ‘liberate’ a lobster. I saw on a webpage that scientists believe lobsters can live to 100 years but the normal life span is about 15 years. I’d not heard of the Lobster Liberation Front before. Mum and Dad said OK to the plan and they went around all the storage areas where lobsters are kept for consumption in sea food restaurants, chose a lobster, bought it, put it in a bucket went out to sea in a boat and set it free.

I am a vegetarian, mostly, it’s a sensitive area. The fact that I sometimes eat animal products is not something I like to think about. There was one time in rural Thailand I was walking with Jiab in the fields around her home, and she takes me to see the little cow they have there. It has a bamboo bell around its neck: takata-takata. We stop and look at the cow, and it looks at us. A miniature creature, it comes towards me with cautious movements and swinging head in motion with the way it walks, raises it’s head and points a snuffling, sniffing wet snout in my direction; large snorts, extends long tongue and sticks it in it’s nostril (how do they do that?), comes a bit closer and quite a bit of sniffing of the air around me – not in Jiab’s direction. This cute little cow is curious about me due to a certain familiar milky smell coming through the pores of my skin? Thais don’t drink much milk so I was thinking, wow! here is proof that the (Western) body releases a noticeable odour of milk. I know this little cow has never been near to a Western person before in its life. The smell was familiar; a naïve recognition of an upright, standing-on-it’s-hind-legs member of the species – a cow person?

But we are carnivores. And there’s this unpleasant conceit about being at the top end of the food chain bothering me now while eating a breakfast of grains, nuts, fruit and cow’s milk. Jaws move in a slightly circular motion; down up, down, up, down, grind, grind, and swallow. I’m an animal too. I consume the environment, whether it’s other animals, fish, vegetables, eggs, milk – we are the cow’s babies (there’s a thought!). And cutting up vegetables is a bit of a sacrifice really; every time I start to cook food there is the opportunity for this kind of contemplation. Vegetables and fruit may not have the obvious characteristics of sentient beings but we may eat their reproductive organs along with everything else [link to: Buddhism and Beef].

There’s a couple of lines of text somewhere in an essay by Tan Ajahn Buddhadassa, that I cannot find at the moment; it’s about consciousness of all the things we eat, bits of animals, poultry and fish and how all their ghosts will come back to haunt us in the end. Pretty scary, nowhere to run, everything we are: mental, physiological, flesh, blood, and bones is a composite of what we have eaten, internalized. And it extends back through the generations to the beginning of time. The cellular substance of what we are is a genetic composite of all kinds of animal fats and enzymes and there’s just no getting away from it.

So, it has to be about being aware of the reality of it all. Contemplating the eating of meat helps me to see the true extent of my voracious appetite for all consumables. Things I feel drawn to consume surround me – and I mean, here, non-food items: ‘mind’ hungers for mind object. Consciousness is dominated by habitual ‘mind’. Remove habitual ‘mind’ and there may be something like a deluge of reality comes along and with it comes a deluge of understanding. Somewhere in there is an explanation for the fact that people eat animals.

When Acharn Mun was at the end of his life, weak and lying in a village in NE Thailand, a very large number of his followers began to assemble. He asked the bhikkhus to take him away from the village because the villagers would have to kill many animals to feed those people. They took him to a nearby town where there were market places and various kinds of prepared food could be easily obtained. Shortly after that Ajahn Mun passed away.

‘From the day of my ordination I have never thought of harming (animals), let alone killing them. I have always extended my loving-kindness to them, never neglecting to share with them all the fruits of my merit. It would be ironic if my death were to be the cause of their deaths (‘The Venerable Phra Acharn Mun Bhuridatta Thera, Meditation Master’, page 201 – 202).

[link to: Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta Thera, Wiki]

[link to: Image source]

Listening 1

Posted on July 15, 2012 by tiramit

South India: Birdsong. A small wave of tiny notes. Sitting on the cushion under a thatched structure built on the roof. Focus on breathing, soft warm air, it’s the end of the night. Dawn light coming up. The birds near to me are surprisingly loud, so much energy from such a small body, such a tiny breathing system. There are these silent intervals, to take a bird-size breath of air, I think, then a long musical ‘verse’, and another silent interval for breath; the ‘song’ moves on to the next verse and so on. The regular pace of these silent intervals contributes to the pattern of the verses. Birdsong is a ballad, a story about something that goes on and on; more than enough; an abundance. It blows away the scarcity of my small mindedness. I can see why they call it ‘The Dawn Chorus.’ Sky is full of sound, a huge chord played on an instrument with a great number of strings

Listening consciousness and sound object are one and the same thing, there’s an affinity with birdsong. Maybe it’s about acoustic resonances of the bird cranium being all of a oneness as far as we other living creatures in the world are able to perceive it. And, part of it too, are the echoes in the spaces between things: reflective surfaces, tree trunks, branches, walls, the air, clouds. Sympathetic resonances create multiple frequencies like the echo it makes on the underside of my thatched roof. And now it’s gradually diminishing; no grande finale, just a musical occurrence that takes place every day and gets forgotten about as soon as the sun rises in the dramatic way it does, expanding into our lives and everything becomes secondary to that main event.

Other sounds become heard; ordinary household noises, miscellaneous gentle ‘clatter’ from houses through open windows. Dishes clink, aluminium pots make that dull ‘ding’ sound. A shout, partial sound of a goat. child cries, cock crows, dog barks, a bicycle bell, street trader’s call, a car horn honks. Something clinks, and it goes on, individual recognisable sounds all appear in consciousness exactly as they occur, no end to it. Each has its own space, situated in its place in a clear sequence, one after the other.

I’m thinking there’s something about it that suggests a composer could create an orchestral symphony out of this? But it doesn’t work that way, I realise. It’s not the ‘actual’ sound I’m listening to, it’s the ear consciousness function that is set to rationalise the flow into an orderly pattern of ‘virtual’ sound. Each unit of sound has a place, according to how the consciousness function selected it, unknown partial sounds are replaced by known sounds, ear consciousness triggers a process so the object is placed according to the ‘closest match’ that can be found in the filing system.

The actual sound space I’m surrounded by may well be a tremendous complexity of pieces of things; an ocean of permutations. There’s some insight into what this amounts to but I know I’m not even taking on anything resembling the scale of it. I seek stability from this chaos: the ‘self’ shapes the randomness of the universe into a manageable chunk and I can settle with that thought.

‘In the normal way, attention shifts from one thing to another. Surprising events grab the attention: other chains of thought wait to be finished as soon as there is a gap. So there is never any peace. This is efficient in using all available processing capacity, but what does it feel like to be … in such a system? I suppose it feels like most of us do feel – pretty confusing. The only thing that gives it any stability is the constant presence of a stable self model. No wonder we cling to it.’ Dr. Susan Blackmore [link to: Science tackles the self ]

[Link to: Listening 2]

rope seen as snake

Posted on July 12, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Nontaburi, Thailand: Alone in a house surrounded by trees. Leaves filter a lovely green light all around; birds, lizards, squirrels, I see something move out on the patio… 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, in the same position, 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. It’s still not moving – maybe it’s injured. I go out on the patio and walk up to it. Ahhh… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf, blown by the wind across the patio surface.

Go back inside and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a 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 strange, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not. The teaching about the rope and the snake; a piece of rope lying on the ground is thought to be a snake. It’s an analogy of ‘self’ seen in consciousness + name-and-form: I recognize that the rope is a rope, not a snake, and can see how the illusion occurs. Or I may not see it and be convinced it’s a snake… maybe for a long time – a whole lifetime preoccupied with a ‘self’ that isn’t there.

This small epiphany occurs after another curiously similar event took place in this quiet house. I’m alone here except for D who is a grad student, working part-time, and he also takes care of the place. I don’t see D much, he works night shift sometimes, sleeping in the middle of the day. The house is large and I’m never absolutely sure if he’s here or not. Usually he stays in his room so I’m used to not seeing him around. I just quietly go about the house, day after day, not making too much noise in case he’s sleeping and quite often forget about him completely.

Then, just the other day, I start to wonder what happened to him. I look in the car park and his car is not there. When did I last see his car? Two days ago, or longer than that? I go to look at his laundry – could be the same laundry that’s been there for a while… clothes without a person inside them – remembering the movie: The Time Traveller’s Wife. I have to stop for a moment and think, when did I see him last? Go up to his room, door is open, nobody there. Hard to believe, I assumed D was in the house but I’ve been alone the whole time. The leaf-seen-as-bird metaphor. Something I thought was there, wasn’t… thinking it’s one thing, then it’s not. The usual sense of ‘me’ suddenly gone… then it returns again. Everything feels light and transparent.

‘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] Source: Emptiness and Existence:

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