kop

Posted on December 13, 2014 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Chiang Mai: I get woken up in the middle of the night… there’s a sound outside: ‘kop’. What is it? There it goes again: ‘kop!’ It’s a man’s voice, ‘kop?’ It takes me a moment to figure out he’s calling someone whose name is Kop. In the Thai language ‘kop’ means ‘frog’, it’s the sound made by these cute little green frogs they have: ‘kop-kop-kop…’ This is felt to be child-like and sweet, and it’s used as a girl’s name. So he is calling her name, standing outside her door, and she is inside the house, not responding to her name being called. Maybe she’s asleep, it’s very late. Or maybe she’s just not letting him in; she threw him out? It’s a story I just arrived in… missed the beginning.

The man doesn’t lose his patience or get angry; he’s not reacting in any kind of emotional way, or saying anything else other than her name – repeated over and over: ‘kop?’ It’s a voiceless, insistent, urgent, loud whisper: ‘kop?’ There’s something very Thai about this, the anxiety about “losing face” he’s compromised with having to call Kop just loud enough so she’ll hear him but not too loud or the neighbours will hear him. What time is it? 3.30 AM. Oh wow! Come on Kop, wake up, or whatever, let the guy in.

There’s a long silence, she must have opened the door, and now he’s inside. I drift off to sleep but the sound comes again: ‘kop?’ and I’m jerked back into wakefulness. She didn’t let him in. It’s frustrating, frantic loud whispering is not enough, he needs to shout. If this was happening in the West, he’d be making a huge noise probably. But he doesn’t do that – non-confrontational behaviour… there’s an interesting balance in this situation. There’s stress of course but also mindfulness. I’m awake enough to see how it works; the sound comes at random, it’s almost painful. I feel I’m beginning to lose it; stress – okay, I’ll not be averse to it, welcome Stress! Come on in, sit down, make yourself at home.

Then it changes. The next sound I hear is: bhrrrr and then: bhrrrrrrrrrrrrr it’s the sound of a doorbell with a flat battery, or it’s nearly flat – not a sharp piercing ring like: rrrrrrrrrrring! More of a dull rattle: bhrrrrr…. There’s barely enough battery power, I can hear it getting slower and slower. After a while there are just odd buzzing noises and the battery runs out. He persists for a couple of minutes, pressing the button on a dead battery and the click sound of the bell-push striking metallic plate; enough to remind Kop he is still outside.

Desperate but able to remain balanced, not engaging with the emotional side of it, upekkha (equanimity) – not being ruled by passions, desires, likes and dislikes. It’s a bit like that for me too, struggling with the disturbance. There is compassion for his predicament and after a short while the ‘kop’ sound has the quality of birdsong. The Buddha described it as: ‘abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill-will.’

He continues with his enhanced stage-whisper… ‘kop?’, persists with the faulty doorbell until eventually Kop opens the door. I hear it close again, there’s an indistinct mumbling after that. Then there’s no more sound for the rest of the night.

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reblogged earlier post. My computer is in the repair shop again and this post created on the iPad, limitations…

non-becoming

Posted on October 6, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: Dreamy half-formed images swim before the eye without identity, no recognizable or known parts of the image. I’m trying to see it this way: no identity, otherwise ‘self’ intervenes and it ‘becomes’ something [bhava]. I’m falling asleep again; still early morning, comfortably dark and sitting on the cushion on a futon on the floor in the upstairs room. One advantage of sleeping on the futon is that you can roll over and up into the sitting position on the cushion quite easily – a smooth transition from sleep to wakefulness. The disadvantage is that it’s difficult to stay awake.

The process of waking up in the morning means the mind is in the process of getting shaped into a form, a ‘self’, and it all gets locked down then; ‘becoming’. So what I’m trying to do here is not let that happen. Without the habitual inclination towards ‘self’, conscious attention gently searches out another way, one that is identity-free, no ID card. The problem is, of course, ‘self’ tries to take over, as usual and if the identity-free state is present, ‘self’ understands it to be sleep. So I start to drift off to sleep again. I see it happening and think: Hey! Why should the ‘self’ impose itself like this? But the ‘self’ goes around imposing ‘itself’ and making assumptions about everything all the time and if I were to just let it go on doing that, I’d not see that things are actually quite different from how they appear to be.

Continue the meditation by following the breath, and a curious feeling that I’m sitting at an angle, or the weight of the body is over on the right side and on the left side there’s something like an empty space… what’s happening? Next thing is, I’m thrust into another dreamlike scenario and some sort of memory sequence. Here we go, I’m falling asleep again and losing it all in the dreamy half-formed images of the sleep I just emerged from. Mindfulness cuts in when I remember to let it all go. Hold on and let go… I need to hold on to the intention to let go. Everywhere I look there’s a ‘self’ searching for an opportunity to create an identity, (sakkayaditthi) ‘personality view’. It’s what holds beings in the cycle of rebirth. Breaking out of the cycle is arrived at by non-becoming – allowing it to ‘become’ without becoming.

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It does not appear or disappear.
It is not born and does not die.
It is neither constructed nor raised up,
Neither made nor produced.
It is neither sitting nor lying,
Neither walking nor standing still,
Neither moving nor turning over,
Neither at rest nor idle.
It does not advance or retreat,
Knows not safety or danger,
Neither right nor wrong.
It is neither virtuous nor improper.
It is neither this nor that,
Neither going nor coming.
[Lotus Sutra]

Photo: Louk Vreeswijk

the end of TV

Posted on October 2, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia: There used to be a TV here but I gave it away. A big old fashioned dinosaur TV, too large for this little old cottage. No room for it; limited floor space, low ceiling height, clutter and junk (jutter and clunk). I manhandled the TV upstairs but it was no good there; then downstairs again and hurt my back in the process. It was always in the way; just too big. I had it under the table for a while but it looked silly there… and I started to see that it had to go.

But I was dependent on TV watching; every other activity took second place to that, and attempting to disengage from TV was a struggle. What to do? I’d try switching it off suddenly, right in the middle of something, a chat show, whatever, just to see what the room felt and looked like without all the noise, bright lights and rewarding, congratulatory applause. But every time I did that, the absolute silence of a world without TV was devastating! The lack of colour and severity of greyness in the house was just… sad! I had to switch it on immediately. TV was like a friend, I couldn’t say goodbye to it. I kept on doing that, though, switching it off and on again, in the middle of programmes, to surprise myself. Eventually I started to get interested in the idea of the silence that remained without TV, typical of the location I was in – a house surrounded by quiet fields and nature.

But TV-cold-turkey was no fun and I was in denial for a very long time. Then one day I was watching the BBC news and noticed the newsreader pronounced his words with a weird sort of ‘smirk’… kinda disgusting, and then the whole ugly ‘self’ aspect of it was revealed. Shocking, but I was glad it happened because it was obvious then that I didn’t feel comfortable with TV in the house – it had to go. I carried it out the back door and left it in the garden; went back inside and discovered this huge space in the room where it used to be. Interesting to see the directions in the room created by a focus on TV; chairs arranged so that viewing could take place comfortably. So I rearranged the furniture, changed it all around, and that was really quite liberating.

I’d return to the kitchen window from time to time and look at the TV out there in the garden – holding my attention, still… thinking, that object should be ‘inside’, not ‘outside’. Completely out of context in the garden, but I just left it there; no longer connected to it. Later that day, it started to rain and drops were falling on the dusty black surface – the urge to take it back in… that was difficult. The neighbour dropped by and he said it’s not a good thing to leave a TV out in the rain. I told him I didn’t want it anymore, maybe he’d like to have it for his spare room? Okay thank you very much… and, you’re welcome. So I gave him the channel changer and that was it. Off he went and I watched him carry it into his house, happily bewildered by my generosity and failing to understand my joy at having escaped the inertia of TV.

That was then; and this is now. I’m sitting on the cushion in an absolutely compelling silence. It’s before dawn, still dark, and I have the window wide open. Not cold but it’s raining, I’m upstairs and can hear a few rain drops hit the window sill, most of the rain drops are still on the way down. I want to experience this rain so I go downstairs open the back door, get my meditation cushion positioned so that I’m not bothered by drops or wetness coming into the house. Sitting on the surface of the planet listening to the rain striking the hard concrete outside and the grass beyond that. The open door to the garden, no wind here, dry and the sound of raindrops merged together in one whole mass of tiny collisions. An endless wave of pitter-patter-pitter-patter, like thousands of tiny finger snapping sounds. The generosity of rain.

[Link to: Rain]

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‘Like a thief entering an empty house, bad thoughts cannot in any way harm an empty mind.’ [Padmasanbhava]

Photo Image Source

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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