Category Archives: Switzerland

sailing away

Posted on by

7

IMG_0798POSTCARD #170: Delhi/Zurich flight: Leaving it all behind, a far and distant shore slipping away… there’s a feeling I could be on an old sailing ship, clouds and air currents like the swell of the sea. Jolts of turbulence like the flip of waves at their peak and passengers have to fasten their seat belts and remain seated. These huge engines, velocity 600 mph, bolted onto a lightweight metal cylindrical structure with wings; sailing across the world in a gigantic wind. In my mind, it’s like this; massive areas of stretched canvas sail cloth filling out. The creak of long hemp ropes, old wood decking – a wide open sky….

Sitting here lost in my screen most of the time, I don’t usually consider passenger jets flying above the clouds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Active shipping itineraries reaching out around the globe, and down below, train tracks, highways and rivers of traffic. Arterial routes, ring roads, crossings, lights, junctions, and one particular lorry rumbling along a bumpy Indian road containing all our goods and chattels – rattle, bang, crash, in a cloud of dust; our temporary home. We’ve moved so many times it’s as if it were continuously on wheels.

The present moment is forever in transit, on-going, always underway. It goes by itself, I don’t need to do anything. I try not to dwell on the anticipation of things unforeseen, mind showing a disaster movie of it all crashing through the restraints of planning, and there it goes… it’s all coming to pieces in my head because I’m holding on to it too tightly. Let go, let it go, let it all go, and return to the stillness I feel contained here in the interior of this passenger jet, an enclosed bubble of air flashing through time and space… seeing the curvature of the planet sometimes, so wide and all-encompassing it includes absolutely everything – a breath-taking sense of ease, a very long drawn out out-breath, like the never-ending horizon seen from the aircraft window at dawn, cloud layers upon layers below.

‘Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.’ [John Milton]

————————-

This post inspired, in part, by a dialogue with Michael Mark
~   G   r   a   t   i   t   u   d   e   ~

something, anything, nothing

Posted on by

29

16x20_webOLD NOTEBOOKS: Geneva, Switzerland: (originally dated September 29, 2012) I get on the Airport bus crowded with people and all their baggage, but I’m not going to catch a plane, I have to teach a new English class in the airport building, and feeling a bit nervous about that. Staff entrance, visitors’ ID, then I’m led along corridors to an elevator and down two or three floors into a network of underground rooms. Door opens and I’m in this claustrophobic space. No windows of course, a large white board, the smell of whiteboard markers, harsh penetrating fluorescent tube lighting. Find the air vents, adjust the air flow by remote and I can breathe better.

Three large athletic men enter; customs officers and senior security people, I see from my notes; shake hands with everyone. There’s a relaxed informal locker-room awareness of each other; deference among them, recognition of something about one individual I guess must be the most senior. Anyway I’m the foreigner in the group, and I have to give an account of myself.

Introductions over and we get started with the class. Pretty soon, something comes up, one of them stands, as if to attention, asks me a question about the use of ‘anything’ rather than ‘something’. After he’s asked the question there’s a hesitation, as if he’s going to say something else, then I notice he’s just observing my body behavior, the professional investigator…

So we’re looking at each other like this, and after I realize he’s finished talking in fact, I’m giving an answer to his question while gradually realizing I’m having a kind of out-of-body experience. I can hear my voice saying the words; the echo in the concrete room, feel the moisture and movement of the mouth but everything else is somehow unfamiliar.

It seems to work ok, I manage to articulate properly and tell him that ‘anything’ is usually used either in a negative context: “I don’t have anything”, and it’s also used in the interrogative form; you might ask a person: “Do you have anything to declare?” Me saying this with a smile, thinking of the Customs Declaration, and hoping to get the intensity to lighten up a bit.

No reaction (maybe he didn’t understand). So I continue with the example: “If you thought that person did have something to declare you could say: “Do you have something to declare?” Still no reaction from this hypnotic look and I’m feeling really weird. He sits down and discusses with the other two in French and they seem to agree about this. I’m still kinda not ‘here’… maybe it’s the underground room, the intensity of the officer’s stare

Somebody else in the group asks a follow-up question and an interesting discussion follows on from this. I sit down with them and can feel myself get back to ‘normal’ – learn not to pay attention to ‘the look’. Class time, comes to an end, shake hands (everybody shakes hands in the French culture), and I’m up in the elevator out along the corridors to the exit and the fresh air.

Wait at the Airport bus stop, it comes, and we’re off into town. The bus is full of wide-eyed people just arrived from distant parts of the world, large suitcases blocking the passageway. How can I say that there is no self, because, if there is no self, who/what is it that realizes this? There’s this feeling that I’m not here – clearly in the public eye but vanished away, invisible. Bus speeds off to town with passengers all speaking loudly in different languages.

Are you an object being watched by another Presence? Or are you the Presence in whose view an idea of yourself is watched? [Mooji]

————————

Notes also from David Loy: Enlightenment in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta: 
Are Nirvana and Moksha the Same?) Image source

Transparent

Posted on by

0

Switzerland: Up here on the 7th floor of the building, windows look out both at the back and at the front. Light enters the apartment from both sides. They call it, traversant. Quite nice but not something you’d notice unless, maybe, if you are a practicing Buddhist and you ‘notice’ things more than other people? That’s how it was for me this morning, doing walking meditation jonkrom from one window to the other: 35 paces in a straight line, then turn around and walk back.

I start the walking meditation path at the West side of the apartment and the balcony (where the pigeons are roosting [Link to: Birds on the Balcony 4]). Walking slowly and mindfully away from the balcony, through the hallway and into the bedroom, then to the window and I’m at the East side of the building. Pause there for a moment, look out the window, and I see the rays of the rising sun behind the apartment building opposite. I turn around with my back to the rising sun and walk back the way I came, through the hallway, into the main room and straight on to the window and I’m looking out at the balcony again. Pigeons look at me curiously. Pause for a second and turn around and go back. Walking forwards and backwards like this, watching the movements of the body, is the essence of walking meditation.

Every time I walk to the East side, where the sun is rising, I notice it’s getting a bit brighter but I don’t think too much about this at first. The whole of my side of the building is presently in the shadow created by the sun behind that building out there. Slowly stepping out my 35 paces forwards and 35 paces back to this point and returning to this window, it becomes obvious: the shadow is diminishing and the sun is in my eyes. I pause there at the end of the jonkrom path on that East side, turn around and walk back to the West side. The sun is beginning to shine in the window along the direction of my walking path and a shadow is cast by my legs walking. This is an amusing discovery and concentration falls away from the jonkrom so I stop to consider what’s happening.

The sun is now shining all the way through the apartment to the front window.  It seems to be happening very quickly. How is it that I didn’t notice this before? It must be, at this time of the year, the sun is at a lower angle in the Northern Hemisphere? The sunbeam extends all along my meditation path; a brilliant band of sunlight with illuminated specks of dust caught floating in the air, all the way straight through to the front balcony on the West side. It is in full sunlight, lit from the back of the house all the way through and out to merge with the sunlight in this side – it’s as if the building is suddenly not here.

Standing there with my back to the sun and looking out the West side of the building, in the direction of the path of sunshine, I can see the shadow of the building cast on the ground outside and on the building opposite. I should be able to see where I am in the shadow… and after a while studying this, I’m able to identify the window where I’m standing. I can see a small shape of light in the large shadow.

The sunshine is passing through the whole building and, standing there in the sunbeam, it seems as if the sun shines through me; permeates the mass of the building and everything in it through all the corridors and window apertures. The building and everything in it is engulfed in light – everything suddenly immersed in a great flood of light passing through; a distinct sense of transparency; a nothingness of being.

The phenomenon lasts for a little while then the sunbeam moves out of range and the apartment returns to its normal level of light.

Photo image above: 18th Century gravestone, Jewish cemetery, Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, by Louk Vreeswijk

Alert

Posted on by

0

Switzerland: Sun rising, water reflects the light and a black crow flies in from the lakeside with louder and louder calls until it passes below the balcony and the sound gets fainter as it disappears behind the next building, then into the distance … CRAW … CRAW.  I’m sitting here, alert, and listening to that sound until nothing can be heard at all. No object to activate ear consciousness. It’s the Sunday morning sleep-late feeling; only the zzz zzz zzz ZZZs coming from all the apartment buildings around. Look out the window, nobody about, streets are empty. Am I the only one awake? I listen for some sound and there isn’t anything happening here; only the act of listening. Awareness poised, waiting for some object to come into range of the receptors. Without an object, awareness goes on forever. I can hear some sounds that are very far away, therefore I have an idea of  ‘faraway-ness’. Beyond the range of receptors there is the great empty dome of sky, the void, suññatā1, spreading out around all things and present in all things

Attention drifts away and a series of incidental thought episodes appear; an anthology of short stories, then it’s all gone again in a moment. The empty space returns, the interval; why this pause? What is this still point where there’s no thought?

‘… (the) still point is not in the mind, it’s not in the body; this is where it’s incapable of being expressed in words, ineffable. The still point isn’t a point within the brain. Yet you’re realising that universal silence, stillness, oneness where all the rest is a reflection and seen in perspective…. personality, kamma, the differences, the varieties … are no longer deluding us because we’re no longer grasping at them.’ [‘The Way It Is’, Ajahn Sumedho, page 123]

The period of pause is just the space that happens before the next intensely demanding thought arises and the tendency to create an identity for it, but before that happens there is this state of nothing. A non-event is taking place; everything gradually stops shifting around, settles down; time begins to stretch out and it all moves incredibly slowly. I forget and attention wanders again.

A pigeon flutters in, comes to rest on the balcony rail, folds away it’s wings, and there’s this small sigh. Quite a deep bird-sized sigh, filling its lungs with air, releasing it and a little ‘bob’ of the fat round body: ah, that’s nice…. It looks at me with extended neck curiously then gets involved in preening feathers in strangely revealing postures.

I hear Jiab in the back room, doing things. She arrived from Phnom Penh via Bangkok yesterday. Not jet-lagged, she says, but we do have to do the laundry at this unusually early time in the morning. The laundry room is in the mezzanine of the building, so off we go, very quietly, one step at a time, downstairs, 6:00AM, past all the sleeping doorways of other people’s apartments, carrying the laundry in bags and trying to be really silent because the whole thing is a bit like being in a graveyard.

Then Jiab wants to sneeze… Oh no! It’s held for a moment then escapes. A surprisingly loud short sound like the bark of a small dog played backwards. The noise of it echoes around the tiled corridor and staircase, the glass panels vibrate for a moment; metal rails hum in resonance and there’s the echo of it all through the stairwell. Dynamic. The silence is shocked by it! We spend some time after that trying to control the intense laughter as we go quietly down with our heavy bags.

————————-

1suññatā: (Śūnyatā) the absence of inherent existence in all phenomena.

Alert to the needs of the journey,
 those on the path of awareness, like swans, glide on, leaving behind their former resting places. [Dhammapada verse 91]

Storm

Posted on by

1

Switzerland: Just before the storm started I was having this problem with the internet upload speed; trying to get a post into Publish but Mbps too low; let’s see, okay try again; waiting for it to come up with the WordPress site to click on the upload button, maybe it’ll do it this time. Nope…  stuck again and I start to take it personally, caught in thinking this is ‘bad.’ And, pretty soon, it gets blown out of proportion, turns into a small crisis, like a fire burning down the house. The intensity of feeling is incredible. This is what a very low internet speed can do.

Am I in withdrawl? Focus for a moment, just there at the desk, feet flat on floor, watch the breath, stop the mind, and suddenly I’m in an empty space, surprised to discover it was that quick! And without the wandering thoughts, there is just silence! Just the physical awareness of the body, comfortably seated with this inactive thought process… I could hear the storm really loud around this time; lightning and thunderous bangs and crashes across the sky – a perception of vast distance.

It’s like someone in the floor above has gone berserk, pushing over huge pressed steel cabinets and metal desks, metal oil drums, BOOOOM, BADAAANG, and a small silence in between, then the echo of it returning from a long way away in the immense space of night sky. Still sitting at the desk in the violence of the heavens and the room is brightly illuminated by a flash of lightning very close, followed immediately by another overwhelming CRASH. The lights go out, and for a moment I’m thinking the sound is the bricks and masonry of the building tumbling down.

I fall to the floor in a crouched position to protect the head and then up from there quickly out to the front room, and exit by jumping over the balcony from our place on the seventh floor? No, can’t do that, look here and there, no damage I can see. The flap of wings as birds roosting on the balcony rail are stirring a bit, but they’re not really getting in a tizz about this. If the buildings were to fall to the ground, no problem, they’ve got wings and can just fly away.

Back into the room, waken up the computer and I get a connection right away, loading completed immediately. And that’s the story of how I got this post done in a room full of flashing lights like a Press event taking place and uploaded no problem – harvesting ambient electricity? The sounds of war and bombing raids; the noise of it was colossal, somebody said later it’s because of the Jura mountains reflecting the sound and the lake resonating like a huge sheet of metal; an area of about 500 square kilometres.

The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. We don’t even have to call it suffering anymore; we don’t even have to call it discomfort. It’s simply coming to know the fieriness of fire, the wildness of wind, the turbulence of water, the upheaval of earth, as well as the warmth of fire, the coolness and smoothness of water, the gentleness of the breezes, and the goodness, solidness, and dependability of the earth. Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. [Pema Chodron]

Link to: Weather and the Four Noble Truths, Pema Chödrön

————————-

Aloneness

Posted on by

9

Switzerland: No news from Jiab in Cambodia. People call me up looking for her and I tell them: Sorry, Jiab is not here right now, she’s coming back in a few days. I’m like a recorded message. This is how it is with us; Jiab is the star of the show, I’m the supporting act. Tried calling her one night last week – 6.45am in Phnom Penh, Hotel Intercontinental, room 710: ‘Just one moment please…’ and the receptionist connects me to her room; I can hear the phone ringing. Then a very sleepy voice says, quite loudly, ‘Thank you!’ and puts the phone down! Disconnected and I’m 6000 miles away again. Try again; key in this very long number and wait. Explain to the receptionist, she connects me, and same thing happens: ’Thank you!’ and puts the phone down. This time the receptionist put me on hold and, I imagine, explains that this isn’t a wake-up call, it’s an overseas call. Eventually I get through and Jiab is so totally and profoundly asleep, the conversation had to be abandoned. I guess I called too early.

Truth is, I’m in a state of aloneness here. The Worldly Winds are blowing hard and strong. In the post office sits a lady behind the glass window with her painted smile of resignation because obviously the answer is ‘no’ even though the question hasn’t been asked yet. And even when I manage to engage her in a dialogue, there’s that clear signal that if we’re going to talk, let it be known she is somebody who doesn’t listen to people – asks me a question and eyes glaze over as I give her the answer; not listening because she’s busy with the next question. Maybe she was just having a bad day.

After I get back to the apartment it feels like I’ve been wounded in battle; discomfort likely to break out into fully fledged distress any minute. I manage to do a sidestep before it locks into place. I wrote a post about this: Skillful Avoidance; if you can sidestep the clinging tendency, the ’velcro’ of self cannot attach and in its place there’s a feeling of relief, wow! how good is that! This feeling moves it all forward in a wholesome direction. These small successes are necessary here in a non-Buddhist country where people are careless about what they say at the best of times.

I’ve lived in Thailand for more than 20 years and I’m used to being in a Buddhist society where, on a very ordinary level, people are generally courteous; they smile, they’re pleasant and try to be helpful. You can see monks everywhere and there’s the atmosphere of mindfulness. When I’m in Europe, I have to take extra care in relating to others and it does get to be difficult. But that’s the way it is, and I have the opportunity to watch my reactions here whereas in Thailand I don’t have to do that. But anyway, when Jiab is with me I can get things more in perspective – and she’s not here….

I’m part of it but not ‘in’ it and can see what’s going on; insulated against the fierceness of it. I get into the apartment at the end of the day, door is closed and it’s all gone. My files, books and notes about the Buddha’s teaching are here. All my friends in the world seen through the window of computer screen are practicing Buddhists and I have a small correspondence with Buddhist monks. If the doorbell rings, I take a deep breath because it’s not impossible the flames of unrest will come leaping into my quiet space and what I’ve noticed is that it’s an all-inclusive situation; my reactions, my aversion to it, all become part of the ‘me’ thing.

The fact that I dislike it exacerbates the problem – then I heard Ajahn A. saying something wise about it’s the energy we use in being averse that creates the obstacle, not the ‘obstacle’ itself. The energy accumulates and the tendency is for it to come into ‘being’. All the usual suspects are there; the same old familiar stories unfolding. I can see the accumulated energy; simply that and nothing more. I don’t need to love it, don’t need to hate it, don’t need to hold on to it: ‘Sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya’. Nothing whatsoever should be clung to. There’s a separation from all ‘likes’ and dislikes’; a pleasant feeling of aloneness and wishing people well.

————————-

The Eight Worldly Winds, Ratanagiri Newsletter [Link to: Hilltop]

Photo: Louk Vreeswijk

Birds on the Balcony 4

Posted on by

2

Switzerland, September: It’s a really windy day up here on the 7th floor. The birds on the balcony [Link to: Birds on the Balcony 3], huddled and sheltering on perches made from bamboo canes bound with string and held with duct tape. These pigeons are getting tugged at by the wind, pushed from side to side but claws are anchored firmly to the perch. This strange high wind comes at you from any direction, very gusty, buffets the birds around because of feathers designed to catch the slightest up-draught of air and a weightless skeletal structure. It’s a problem sitting on the perch on a day like this, but they do have these extremely long toenails to hold on with. The wind can’t snatch them away.

This is how it is. If you’re a pigeon, a life form evolved from the causes and conditions of air and wind currents, there’s the danger of getting whisked away in the wind at any moment. Necessary to quickly find shelter and, for young birds, sometimes it does go wrong. Yesterday I was downtown waiting at the bus stop; it was windy like this and suddenly a bird drops straight down from above and soft-lands on the street, feathers sticking out at all angles showing white undersides. People waiting at the bus stop go: wooooo! in unison. It was a young pigeon. The bird corrects itself and walks around in circles, dazed, a car swerves to avoid it. The young bird walks in a zigzag fashion across the road jumps up on the pavement; wide-eyed with its sense of danger and takes refuge in a doorway behind the bus stop.

The dukkha of a windy day. It’s the mistral coming from the Mediterranean and North Africa; sudden gusts of wind come at you in a kind of anarchy of directions, very intense for a day or two then it’s gone. The pigeons are so actively engaged with the mechanism of flight, it’s as if the movements of their wings and the movement of the air are one and the same thing. I see them caught in hectic flight movement; a stationary moment in the air, suspended in time and space, then the audible flap of wingtip and fluttering away – adjusting wing positions in response to complex changes in wind direction.

Each air current has a quality that results in the corresponding wing tilt and flip, extend and hold. If you’re a bird, ground level is not the reference point; ‘up’ is not necessarily up and neither is down. Bird flight is an expression of the air movement itself, sudden and unpredictable; birds in flight and the sky – the space where the flying takes place; it’s about non-duality: ‘self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are the poles of a single process1‘ The flying and the air are not different, there’s no separation, no division between them.

‘… an ever-present no-boundary awareness wherein the subject and the object, the seer and the seen, the experiencer and the experienced form a single continuum.2‘

A wind like this is energy to the birds; it’s a dance. All their skills and everything they are is in readiness, alert. They have the ability to do all of it. Flying and the wind are in unison. But they need to find a place to shelter and these birds come into the balcony space here, grab on to a perch, clamp down on the landing gear, and claws lock into place. Held like this until the wind has gone. Eyes glaze over; they’re in a state of partial sleep, head sunk into the body, feathers fluffed out. They’re just not concerned at all about the wind buffeting them around – or me, looking at them through the glass, or what goes on inside this terrestrial place, 7 floors up from ground level. It could be anywhere, just a place, like the branch of a tree, elevated as it is, to be a convenient stopover for birds of the air.

————————-

‘I am infinite like space, and the natural world is like a jar/ I am like the ocean, and the multiplicity of objects is comparable to a wave/ I am like the mother of pearl, and the imagined world is like the silver/ Alternatively, I am in all beings, and all beings are in me. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.’ [Ashtavakra Gita 6.1 – 6.4]

[Image source: detail from: pigeon_flock_large_0410094946. I am grateful for the use of this image]

1Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are  

2The Essential Ken Wilbur, page 21: The Real Self

Backwards

Posted on by

2

P1000542r3Switzerland: The number nine bus arrives but the destination shown on the front is saying the bus is going in the opposite direction to where it should be going. It takes me a while to figure it out. The driver forgot to change the destination sign for the return journey when he got to the terminus and he’s just carrying on with it as it is. How could that happen? I’m tired. I just want to get home, it’s the end of the day, I step up on to the bus and ask the bus driver where it’s going: où ce bus va, monsieur? Simple question really, it’s not a personal remark: hey, what’s happening? Indirect, where’s this bus going, sir? But he doesn’t reply, the francophone shrug – eyebrows raised, pout of lips, shrug of shoulders and held like that; a freeze in video downloading: buffering … no further response. I get off and look at the front again to make sure and, there it is, according to the sign, this bus is going backwards? I see other people asking the driver the same question and he’s still locked into his downloading ‘freeze’ – the same question being asked over and over can lead to induced hypnosis? I don’t know and neither does anybody else, so I get on, find a seat and wait to see what happens next. Not at ease, turbulent thoughts spinning around: it shouldn’t be like this. Accelerating into different scenarios that end with the same old ‘UNABLE TO FIND THE SERVER’ window. At some point I manage to get it together enough to know it’s necessary to take note of this.

Not getting hijacked by how horrible it is. Everything is okay, the bus is not going backwards; the driver is not involved in a subversive act, he just forgot to change the sign – or maybe it’s broken. Yeh, but there are these waves of unease; passengers are talking about it, grumbling discontent, nursing a negativity about the driver. Deep breathing. I try to allow it to be what it is and not get injured with the thought of it. Meanwhile, tightrope-walking high above the raging inferno of things not being right. Mindfulness keeps the balance. Not easy… it’s not possible to be completely sure that this driver isn’t actually having a nervous breakdown.

What to do? There’s a place coming up where the 9 bus intersects with the 10. The 10 can take me to the station where I can change to a 3 and then I’m on the way home. So jump off the bus, run across the street – fortunately traffic lights change just at the right time – the 10 bus is arriving. I get on and the bus moves off, all in one movement. This in itself is quite a satisfying achievement. Now I’m on the 10, speeding along, looking out the window. The 10 drops me at the station, and it so happens a number 3 is waiting at the stop. Jump on that and I’m on my way home – a fortunate sequence of connections and I’ve already forgotten about the 9 bus going backwards (unless I consciously bring it to mind). Wonderful! And I’m glad it happened as it did, I had an opportunity to practise uppekha. I hope the driver is okay and found out what his problem was.

Later that night I’m up in the apartment, sitting on the cushion and just being with the pleasant quietness up here on the 7th floor. Away in the distance, I can hear the bus just leaving the stop at the end of the road. The sound of it is present here in the room. So familiar; I recognise everything about it. The engine noise increases with the accelerator as it moves away from the stop, I can see it in my mind. It’s coming to the corner. The sound becomes less as it slows down for the corner. Then increases but I can’t hear it as it passes behind the buildings (I know this so well). Then in a short while there’s a break in the buildings and I hear it quite clearly for a moment. After that it becomes faint again and fades away, becomes less and less. It’s really quite far away now. I follow the sound until it becomes just a distinctness in the bzzz of the hearing mechanism… then it’s gone. Some time, soon after that, I bring the meditation to a close, crash out on the bed and fall asleep.

‘When we feel assailed by the fluctuations of experience, where do we turn for refuge? When we can’t see our way through complexity and confusion, how can we make sense of things? Dhamma directs us to an awareness informed by understanding’ [Ajahn Munindo’s Comment in Hilltop Newsletter on the Eight Worldly Winds]

Photo Image: Ajahn Vajiro’s Portugal Collection

Paper Day

Posted on by

0

Switzerland: Woke up this morning and it was a paper day, according to Jiab – meaning the day the garbage truck comes to collect cardboard and paper for recycling: ‘jeter les papiers’. The garbage guys are fast so I have to go down to the basement immediately, get all the newspapers, then up one floor to ground level and put everything out by the entrance. Waiting for the elevator to arrive, check the phone is in my pocket because the basement is 8 floors down, below ground level and there’s only one key. The key fits in a keyhole inside the elevator that takes you down to this strangely claustrophobic space. I wouldn’t want to get stuck in the basement. Unless I meet any other tenant, it’s a solitary experience. I come down here and it feels like entering the death state.

“… death is as near to him as drying up is to rivulets in the summer heat, as falling is to the fruits of the trees when the sap reaches their attachments in the morning, as breaking is to clay pots tapped by a mallet, as vanishing is to dewdrops touched by the sun’s rays …” [Visuddhimagga, Mindfullness of Death]

Elevator drops all the way down and stops, solidly at the bottom. Door opens, I’m inside a large mysterious network of small rooms, white walls, grey doors. It’s a reinforced concrete nuclear fall-out shelter built for the occupants of the apartment building. This is the law in Switzerland. A lingering sense of paranoia all around here; strangely thick doors on huge hinges held open with large iron stays. Lighting system is permanently on, they just replace the bulbs. Years from now, it’ll be exactly like this; and maybe even generations into the future, a vast supply of continually replenished light bulb stock keeps this space illuminated.

I find our concrete room, number painted on the door, another key on the ring opens the lock and I step into this familiar place. Discarded old things, vestiges of a former life. Papers in stacks, carboard cartons flattened into sections and bundled up. What a curious space. I suppose this is where we’d sleep, in the event of a nuclear catastrophe up above. ‘All that is mine beloved and pleasing will become otherwise, will become separated from me.’ The simple fact of being alive seems to take on a whole different meaning when you’re aware of the nearness of death. There’s some old furniture here, a broken chair. I can squeeze around, back against the wall, and there’s just enough space to ease the body down on the old chair and sit. What does this feel like?

Rupa kandha, a distinct sense of ‘body’ just sitting there, patiently waiting for instructions, quite still and at ease, inert. I am ‘contained’; internal organs in a sack of skin. Meditation in a subterranean room; reinforced walls to create the space I’m in. The grave. This is how it’ll be when I’m dead? Focus on the breath, after a moment, it’s calm. Strange acoustics. The silence is exceptional. There’s the solidity of the body, the totality and weight of all the internal systems, the earth, fluids, heat and breathing; just being comfortable in the taking up of the space it’s occupying.

Mind flow drops down a notch, thought patterns and changing images, flitting around, have no identity; darting all over the place like little flashes of energy. Body acts as a conductor, through which the sparkling electric current flow of small thoughts can be earthed. It’s like a fireworks display. Strange how, in contemplating death, it ends up that you’re contemplating life.

Phone rings. An extremely loud ringtone. It’s Jiab: what are you doing down there? Breakfast is ready! Okay, coming now. Pick up the paper bundles, lock up the room. Into the elevator and up one floor. Out of the door into the daylight, drop the papers and there’s the fresh mountain air. Into the elevator and up again to the 7th floor. Large, spacious interior, picture windows, landscape below, white clouds above; clear open sky. It feels like nothing really matters. It’s a paper day.

‘As contemplation deepens, the contents of the mind become increasingly rarefied. Irrelevant flights of thought, imagination, and emotion subside, mindfulness becomes clearer, the mind remains intently aware, watching its own process of becoming. At times there might appear to be a persisting observer behind the process, but with continued practice even this apparent observer disappears. The mind itself — the seemingly solid, stable mind — dissolves into a stream of cittas flashing in and out of being moment by moment, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, yet continuing in sequence without pause.’ [The Noble Eightfold Path, Bhikkhu Bodhi, page 82 – 83, Contemplation of the State of Mind (cittanupassana)]

Causes and Conditions

Posted on by

0

I’M STANDING AT THE BUS STOP. It’s a public holiday, the bus times are Horaires Vacances (holiday schedule). Some buses are cancelled and I can’t be sure of anything. Heavy urban traffic situation, heat, noise and it’s been a day of struggling to be calm. Try to remember everything is as it should be. I’m just having to deal with this contracted mind, right now, that’s all. I’m tightly focussed on something very much ‘held’. I need to ease back from that. It’s the ‘letting-go’ thing again.

On the other side of the road there’s a noticeboard with the holiday schedule times displayed. I’ll have to go and take a look, but the constant flow of traffic means it’s difficult to get across; everything seems charged with the energy of: get out-of-the-way please? I manage to get over eventually and studying the bus times on the schedule and, at the same time, watching for the possibility of the bus coming on the other side; I have to be ready to make a dash back across the road to catch it. Causes and conditions by themselves; things seem unattached and random. ‘I am a construct; a body/mind existing within time and space. On some level prior to this, I selected elements that resulted in this problematic sense of self; this calamitous world I now experience.’1

A huge lorry pulls in next to me, squeal of brakes, hiss of decompression and it blocks out the view of the street entirely. I’m suddenly in deep shadow. The driver climbs down from the cab, holding an ice cream cone in his teeth so that his hands are free to hold the various handles and negotiate the steps down to street level. He takes ice cream cone out of teeth in order to speak. ‘Bonjour monsieur,’ holds ice cream cone in one hand and unfolds a piece of paper with the fingers of the other hand; difficult to do this and keep the ice cream cone upright, but completely calm. He studies the paper and reads out a company address.

Mr Ice-Cream man wants to know where such-and-such a place is and I can’t hear clearly because of the noise of car horns behind the lorry, and drivers shouting about him blocking the road. But Mr Ice-Cream man remains completely okay about that, looks at me politely with arched eyebrow as I tell him that he needs to go to zone industrielle and how to get to the road that leads in that direction. ‘Merci monsieur’, he says and climbs back up, ice-cream cone held again in teeth; gears wrench into place and lorry lumbers off, followed by a long convoy of harassed cars who’ve probably been following him for some time through these narrow streets.

After he’s gone, I get back across the road to wait for the bus at my stop. It still hasn’t come and I’m worried now that it could have passed behind Mr Ice-Cream Man’s huge lorry when I was talking with him – hmmm, this is not good… or maybe I didn’t read the schedule correctly? I should go back over and read it again, but if I do that, what’ll happen if the bus arrives over here and I’m over there and not able to get back to this side in time? Deep breath. The entanglement of anticipation; the actively ‘waiting-for-things-to-happen’ mode. I’ll stay on this side. After a few moments the bus comes round the corner, I’m reassured; a wonderful system that has it’s contingency plan monitoring function built-in.

Double doors hiss open, cool air-conditioning, I enter into the familiar world of ‘being taken’ and join the passengers facing the direction of travel: ‘We are going THIS WAY’. Bus moves off into the town. I’m seated, looking at the back of people’s heads and beyond that to the back of the driver’s head and the view of the street out front. I can see where we are going and I can turn around, look out the back window and see where we are coming from. The whole outside world is coming in through these large windows, passing through the inside and out again; it feels like there really is no bus.

I wonder if Mr Ice-Cream man found his way allright and where he is now ….

————————-

‘… Ramakrishna came out of his trance and acknowledged that if the world is an illusion of our senses then we ourselves are part of that same illusion…. The mind is a construct of the mind and therefore does not truly exist.’ [Peter Harvey, Wikipedia, 86.27.37.82 (talk) 22:36, 30 November 2011 (UTC)]

1[Link to: David Bingham, Conscious TV]

Bus Image: detail from a photo by Louk Vreeswijk