the whole nine yards

Posted on January 30, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Somebody gives me a lift downtown and she’s upset about the traffic, shouting at the other drivers, voice echoing around in the acoustics of our small vehicle, really letting it all go. She’s a local person and this kind of pressure-valve release is weird, like a bad dream; road rage is the same everywhere, I suppose. We’re accelerating down these narrow sois (small streets) lined with parked cars, pedestrians everywhere, sudden braking and lurching around corners, then reversing all the way out of there because there’s an obstruction. I’m sitting in the back seat, she’s twisted around peering through the rear window, as she negotiates reverse gear, so I get to look at this tense face, complaining about how these drivers all come from the hills; they don’t know anything about road courtesy; the whole nine yards …

Maybe she’s just having a bad day – correction, she is having a bad day. What to do? I can get upset about how upset the driver is, or I can just watch the road on her behalf – two options. I opt for watching the road; the mindfulness thing, and immediately I’m into this kind of alert awareness of everything that’s happening. I’m discovering this (or maybe I always knew) instinctive preparedness that just seems to engage: life is fragile and tenuous. At the same time struggling a bit with the other option: Hey! what’s all the fuss about? Smile and pretend it’s not happening. But there’s just no getting away from it, and this fully switched-on-headlight of fierce alertness is locked in and focused.

Part of me is asking what is going on here? There’s awareness, conscious awareness and then consciousness itself – so this is it, the big question… what is consciousness? Turn the mirror around like that, and consciousness sees itself; there’s a duality and we return to the default reality of ‘me’ in here and ‘that’ out there. It’s this thing about mirrors again; ‘I’ become the subject of what is being mirrored: you can see for yourself, it’s saying, this is proof of how it is… right? But I choose to take refuge in awareness of the danger, rather than do the ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing. I can take sati-sampajañña, awakened awareness, as my refuge. The inclination is to be awake, to be watchful, all sensory receptors are switched on full blast; any little sense of ‘me’ as a person is a distraction. So this is the way to go, I stay with that and there’s a clear knowledge that it’s not a ‘created’ mind state. It’s something Ajahn Sumedho would call the Unconditioned [see link below].

We get to the destination and I’m very glad to get out of the car, ‘thanks for the lift!’ Wow, life, as we know it, returns – it puts on its appearance of comfortable familiarity. Amazing, how does it do that? It really is such a fine balance, we are just on the edge of all this disappearing, all the time! And with conscious awareness the system is more inclined to go directly with what is really happening than run for safety in some kind of ‘pretend’ world. I wonder, though, what happens to people who’ve never bothered to look beyond the reality of the fictional ‘self’. It would require a lot of last minute revisions; could it all be done in time? Maybe it’s possible.

The driver… well I dunno, but she was pretty good. Somebody told me later she did a training course in driving emergency vehicles, so maybe that’s it – life for her is just one continuing emergency. That’s OK too….

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‘… We take that which is aware of the conditioned realm, sati-sampajañña, awakened awareness, as our refuge, rather than trying to find or create a condition that will give us a false sense of security. We are not trying to fool ourselves, to create a sense of security through positive thinking. Our refuge is awakening to reality, because the unconditioned is reality. Awareness, awakeness, is the gate to the unconditioned…. You can’t take refuge in your thoughts or your perceptions. That’s just the way the conditioned mind functions. It can’t help it. It can’t do anything other than that. You can only take refuge in awareness. All the problems are resolved right there. Of course, the conditioned mind thinks that awareness is nothing; it not worth anything – but it’s everything….Whatever assumptions you have about yourself, no matter how reasonable they might be, they are still a creation in the present. By believing in them, by thinking and holding to them, you’re continually creating yourself as a personality.’ [Ajahn Sumedho, ‘The Problem of Personality’]

castles made of sand

Posted on January 22, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Traffic congestion at the intersection and everything comes to a standstill. The tuktuk driver makes some remark, I ask him what he’s saying and out comes a whole string of words I think I can’t understand. Then I start to recognise a few familiar vocabulary items and can reply with the same kind of observation. He laughs and says this thing I’ve never heard before: jai yen-yen (heart stay cool) jai ron mai dai (heart hot – not okay). So what now? He looks around to see if we can do a U-turn; not possible, we have to wait and see, and he switches off the engine. Sit back, relax, silence, it’s strange to be suddenly quiet after the large sound of the 2-stroke engine stops with the flick of a switch. Seems like another world; sitting on a sofa in someone’s living room, decorative chromium bars – an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor on wheels? The driver has photos of his family stuck above the windscreen, and decorative flower garlands swaying in this slight wind. No walls, a canvas roof and the outside world enters my space, like it’s always been here; the inside merged with the outside. Birds could fly through… it’s odd, just metallic creaks and the sound of other engines turning over. The smell of fuel, tarmac; this is somewhere in some part of town. Ah well, I’m glad it’s not too hot, we might be here for a while.

I could send someone a text message …reach for my phone – then resist the urge. Okay, so, what’s the plan? All things are now directed here: the Plan; an habitual thing from long ago, frequent updates, always in line with current changes. It’s a comfortable space I create in the mind and that’s okay but sometimes I feel compelled to have a plan about the Plan. Then a plan about the plan about the Plan. The Plan is an end in itself, detached from its location in some future time, it’s now placed in present time – more like a plan for the present moment. We’re always only part the way through anything, anywhere, anyway and never at the end – we just don’t know what happens after that. Nobody ever came back from What Happens After That to say what it was like… we just don’t know.

Nothing is permanent, anicca, but the intervals between change may be immense; it doesn’t change for a very, very long time – then it does. I have a vision of it coming to an end one day… there goes the world, collapsing like a dead star, all matter reduced to an atom… all gone in a flash. Or maybe it’ll be slower; bits start to fall off and you hardly notice. And there’ll come a time when the System and all who sail in her will begin to fall in on itself like great empires do that have spanned the centuries; in the end, become too unreal and like castles made of sand and all things subject to collapse, tumble to the sea – nothing is permanently permanent – eventually. But it depends how you choose to see it, of course. In a different kind of temporality, it would just arise again and pick up where it left off; a continuous unfolding transformation and that’s how it is, even as we speak.

Something happening up front, cars beginning to move, the driver switches on the engine and it starts up immediately, a few turns of the throttle and we’re suddenly not there anymore, away in an exhilaration of speed and noise….

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‘For many lives I have wandered, looking for, but not finding the house-builder who caused my suffering. But now you are seen and you shall build no more. Your rafters are dislodged and the ridge-pole is broken. All craving is ended; my heart is as one with the unmade’ [Dhammapada v.153-154]

the ‘I’ metaphor

Posted on January 19, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Contemplating birdsong here in this place, next to a wooded area and a very large tree in the early morning and there’s a male Koel bird on a branch somewhere repeating its call: ko-el, ko-el, ko-el! a two-syllable utterance, at measured intervals, getting louder and louder each time, reaching its peak and the bird stops for a breath. It starts again from low volume working up to high volume, The sound, ko-el echoes around in the spaces between the hard branches and trunks, the layers of foliage and around in the air into my space here in the room: ko-el, ko-el. The end of the sound –el collides with the beginning of the next sound in the sequence: ko- and for a moment it becomes more like: el-ko-el-ko-el-ko, smoothly presented in a unity the bird knows so well and I’m just discovering it.

The preception of the sound shifts back to ko-el, ko-el, contained in this space. And in the space contained in all the other rooms in this building, the corridors and passageways, as I go down to street level; the elevator and front lobby. The ko-el sound can be heard everywhere in the building. I know, of course, it just seems like the ko-el sound is contained in the building, it’s an illusion. In fact the ko-el sound and the whole building are contained in space; space holds all, there are no boundaries, no beginning, no end. The ko-el sound can be heard all along the street too.

Back upstairs again and I am in this space, the space is in me. I can say ‘I’ am here, meaning the fictional ‘self’arising from the five khandhas, the mechanisms that filter conscious experience received through the senses. And the ko-el sound reaching my ear convinces me that if there is sound, there must be somebody in here hearing it – and that’s ‘me.’ The belief in self is backed up by sensory data input through ear, eye, nose, mouth, feeling sensations and mind. I can hold on tight to this belief that I am ‘me’ but there’s really nobody there. I can let go of it. It’s a metaphor; it’s saying conscious experience ‘is’ individual identity – a figure of speech, a kind of analogy. Not real. The emphasis on it being the same as the object of comparison pushes the whole thing over the edge and it ‘becomes’ the object. In fact the conceptual metaphor is a tricky business….

My Western conditioning still struggles with the anatta teaching, and the misleading statement: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ [René Descartes] isn’t helpful. It’s like the opposite of what Buddhists know to be true. If Descartes had been a Buddhist, he might have said: ‘I think, therefore I am a thought construct’ …but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? What I think I am is not what I am. Thoughts think themselves, dependent on conditions arising from other conditions which are dependent on other conditions; peeling back the layers of onion, like this, to discover there’s nothing in the center; just empty space (again). It’s the ‘I’ metaphor; a structure created by words to explain a concept. In the mind’s eye we can leave the body behind, soar up into the sky and leap up into the heavens. It’s a figure of speech. The self is not contained in me, ‘I’ am contained in ‘self’ – the universe – everything, no subject/no object.

The ko-el sound shifts to some other location and it must be because the bird has flown to a different tree, further away. Later in the day I hear it again, coming from some distant place and after a while I don’t hear it anymore….

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‘…the anatta teaching is not a doctrine of no-self, but a not-self strategy for shedding suffering by letting go of its cause, leading to the highest, undying happiness. At that point, questions of self, no-self, and not-self fall aside. Once there’s the experience of such total freedom, where would there be any concern about what’s experiencing it, or whether or not it’s a self?’ [“No-self or Not-self?”, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 8 March 2011]

the non-personal self

Posted on January 17, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Death is a failed internet connection. Three o’clock in the morning, unable to sleep so I get up, stumble through in the darkness and start up the computer. The brightness of the screen is blinding. But no internet, and no matter how much I think there should be a connection, it’s just not there. Consciousness operates in terms of subject and object; to be conscious I have to be a separate entity, a subjective being situated here. And the object, the internet – my friend, is part of this assumed ‘self-ness’ I’ve been accustomed to see in everything, still held by the conditioning of my childhood. But my friend is not there, and it is a death in that sense.

Stubborn and resentful, I go back to bed, and for quite a long time, mind continues rummaging through the disarray of its files and references; I see, with mindfulness, there’s a sense of it being a bit put-out; can’t sleep, the dream-state is set in the context of my being awake. It’s been like this, for as long as I can remember – there’s a created ‘self’ everywhere, it has it’s own momentum blindly searching for situations that offer pleasurable gratification (or gratification in displeasure), and not much more than that. I can see what this is about, but lose sight of what’s beyond ‘self’ in the attempt to grasp an understanding of it.

Same old thing. There’s something about this that’s so clear and obvious yet, again and again, when I look for it, it’s not there – the direction to take is unknown; the means by which I get there, as yet, uninvented; I study it as an object, and it’s the created self again. Up till quite recently I’ve been thinking in terms of anatta (no-self), an undefined nothingness, and now starting to think there’s also a desire to ‘not-exist’ involved here – the way I’m doing it. So if the ‘I’ construct isn’t what this is about, what is it, then? I can change the pronoun from ‘me’ to ‘it’ and that gives me distance, somehow there’s an ‘it’ there that recognizes ‘itself’ everywhere….

Head leans back and enter into a huge yawn, yaaaaawn… so deep and large, …aaaawn… and reaching optimum yawn capacity, coming to an end, and there’s a distinct ‘click’ noise in the ear. The hinge of the lower jaw – is it supposed to do that? This holds my attention for a moment, wetness around the eyes, nasal passages blocked up and fuzziness. There’s the beginning of a thought related to something I was puzzling over and a little picture of it is somehow revealed, a solution to the problem… I have to get up and find a reference in my notebook, mark it with a bookmark, come back, collapse on the pillow and drop off into deep sleep completely.

Some hours later I wake up for the second time. Senses switched on, eyes open, sounds enter, taste in the mouth, feet on floor, arms push upper body into sitting position. And there’s the notebook with the bookmark lying where I left it: ‘What had been realised in that moment was that self isn’t personal, it’s non-personal. And not only that, the realisation wasn’t personal. The realisation was simply something else appearing in what had been assumed to be my consciousness, and was realised to be the Self: absolute, timeless, radiant being.’ [Roger Linden, ‘The Elusive Obvious’, Conscious TV, July 17th 2008]

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how it is

Posted on January 14, 2013 by tiramit

‘All conditioned Dharmas are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows. Like dew drops, a lightning flash. Contemplate them thus.’

Chiang Mai: It’s late morning, getting near to noon and I have to go out and get something from 7-Eleven. Down in the elevator and it’s not far, along to the end of the lane, tall buildings on either side and the brightness of the daylight is astonishing as I step out of the shadow into the open space of the main road. Intensity of colour, noise, people and everything is undeniably what it is, no room for considering what it might be or might have been, a tendency we have – those of us originating in the indistinct climates of the northern hemisphere, colourless eyes and no pigmentation of the skin – to ponder like this over hypothetical situations, papañca, that proliferate without end.

This is the tropical, the equatorial, and all in uncompromisingly vivid maximum pixel, vibrant colour. This is how it is; clearly defined, good looking people with black hair and golden skin. And all with a will to go out there and get it done. We’re all in this together, including the pale foreigners, who live here with us for part of the year. This is the public domain, the shared environment, we are a large population accommodated in small houses and rooms and we like it like that. No allowances for personal space – what is ‘personal’ space? It’s structured to allow for large numbers of human beings who may carry with them their ‘personal’ space and other needs and requirements, their babies their infrastructural support systems, schools, hopitals, shopping malls, cars, motorbikes and everything as it is here and now, inherited from generations before us to whom we are grateful and pray for earnestly.

I’m having some resistance to the immediacy of it, I don’t want it to be like this; too bright, too public; I feel like an owl in the daylight, a nocturnal shadow, like I shouldn’t be here, cloaked in the darkness of my quiet space, buddhist vampires wither away. Same old story, just see this aversion without being overly attached to the thing. Have metta for the state of mind. There’s the getting into it; there’s the attachment, the ‘hook’ to get caught… or is it a ‘perch’ to rest on for a moment and look at the view… waves of samsara all around; I’m wanting ‘it’ to be ‘this’ and believing this is really how it is – the experience of being able to change the image in the mind’s eye, to make it be how I want it to be – a skill I learned as part of childhood conditioning. I can see the folly of it, the baseless fabric of this vision… all which it inherit, shall dissolve…’ it leads nowhere, exists for it’s own sake, momentarily and comes to nothing in the brightness. The sun shines through all parts of it; they become shadows, vapours and disappear.

It’s that ‘letting-go’ thing again. Why does it have to be like this? You could say there’s a kind of glue spread over objects and attention gets stuck on that. Seeing it like this means, of course, I recognise the possibility that there’s also a solvent that renders the glue unstickable, it doesn’t adhere and, there’s no need to remind myself to ‘let go’ because everything has been let go of already? There isn’t anything anyway that has the power to cause one to attach. It’s the mind that’s doing it. Stop creating it and there’s nothing there! I get what I need from 7-Eleven and back upstairs to the apartment, where it’s cool and quiet and shady.

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‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors,  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and  Are melted into air, into thin air:  And like the baseless fabric of this vision,  The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff  As dreams are made on; and our little life  Is rounded with a sleep.’ [The Tempest Act 4, Prospero, scene 1, 148–158]

wisdom in unknowing

Posted on January 10, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Street-side, noodle shop, low headroom under wide umbrellas placed at an angle to create shade. I duck my head and squeeze through into this place, aware of obstructions and watching for uneven surfaces at ground level I could trip on; feet in rubber slippers appear below me, first left then right, then left… ask the noodle shop man if he has what I want, find an empty place, sit down and look around. Thai language like birdsong and traffic sounds, a bell rings, cooking pots collide, somebody’s ring tone… ‘hello?’ All kinds of noises, smells and the fragrance of jasmine with faint odour of a sewer nearby – not unpleasant. The mind has to discern which is which according to likes and dislikes. And the high-activity level of it all more or less insists on mindfulness. Head spinning around to register environmental activity; this curious reality of receiving sensory input by means of sense organs situated mostly around the head and face, has that effect of the whole head seeming to enter into an ‘outside’ world.

Attention moves from one thing to the next. Loud sounds take priority over quieter sounds, the whole sequence adjusts to allow for it, then continues as it was before. In the same way, a chain of thought waits to be completed as soon as there is a gap in the flow of other thoughts. It’s the traffic of thinking about things; the mechanism engaged in its functionality, never any peace. I find some stability in the constructed self and hold on to that – that’s what it’s there for.

Focus on a particular sound, or sensory object and logic says if that’s out ‘there’, then I must be in ‘here’ – subject-object link activated by default. The world enters through eye, ear, nose, mouth, body feeling, mind, and creates consciousness: ‘I’ am born and the ‘world’ is out there. Being a ‘self’ is a little trick I learned when I was a child, it’s not real. It only appears to be a personal experience, because if there’s a sound that’s not demanding my attention, there’s only a neutral awareness, no reaction, nobody at home; the sound is there but there’s just the receiving of it and our shared world. Sensory input enters and there’s no ‘self’ to really notice it’s there, so I imagine it just buffets around for a while like the wind from the fan above my head disturbs the papers on my table and then it’s quiet again.

Conscious awareness is the sixth sense. It knows the other five senses, and knows itself as a ‘self’ then attachment to that dissolves away; the ‘self’ aspect is gone – seeing the events without the story. Deconstruct everything, carefully disassemble it to see how it all fits together, like a mechanic breaks down a car engine into its parts. And this is such a phenomenal thing to do, putting it back together again doesn’t seem worthwhile.

‘Self-realisation can know itself within complete ignorance, so self-realisation is possible for someone who’s had no education and it can also be possible for a king. There are no preconditions to self-realisation. Self-realisation isn’t just for those who’ve undergone years of spiritual practice….’ [David Bingham, Conscious TV]

Can’t be ‘complete ignorance’, let’s call it ‘unknowing’. Just another mind state. I can look into my own ‘unknowing’ and it’s as if there’s a small seed of wisdom in there, buried deep in the layers of unknowing, that’s saying, come on, wake up! I could call it the Noble Truth of Waking Up (numbered 2a and it comes between Tanha and Nirodha). This is how it looks to me now; there’s the focus on Anatta and freedom from suffering and the Non-Duality ‘no-thing-ness’ takes on a whole different meaning.

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a movement in time

Posted on January 6, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Walking back from the market carrying bags of vegetables through groups of slow-moving people in brightly coloured clothing; noise, heat, bright sunshine, large, coloured umbrellas and dense dark shadow. All kinds of obstacles on the pavement, sidewalk – more like walking on the edge of the road, sharing the space with the traffic, things being as they are, in this densely populated place where the sidewalk is often needed for other civic requirements. Maybe a phone box takes up the whole area. Or there’s a tree in the way, uneven paving stones due to ongoing repairs, or a raised concrete lid over a drain, fallen in, and one corner sticks up at an angle so you step down to street level because it’s easier. Then there’s a parked car in the way and you have to get around that; mindfulness of moving traffic coming in all directions. There’s an alertness that just automatically locks in place, obstructions and dangers above and below and on all sides like this, the infrastructure intrudes, but always there’s just enough room, squeezing through a sort of tunnel of directional force that extends in front, takes me along out from the space I’m in here now, along the way through this urban clutter and busy-ness of objects.

Then something happens that’s completely unexpected. There’s a green cloth sheet that obscures a construction site on my left side; three or four floors up, scaffolding, ropes and there’s a tied-up bundle of concrete blocks being lowered down above my head – it’s coming too quickly, I can see it in the corner of my vision. This lowering bundle strikes a sticking-out platform on the way down and a large board catapaults out, spins in the air and lands just behind me CRASH! There it is, a long heavy scaffolding board held by the green cloth sheet, now ripped, and the board caught there in a small cloud of dusty air. If it had been one second earlier…. People stop and look up, call to the workers in the building. They lean over, wide-brimmed straw hats, observe the scene. There’s some shouting and I don’t want to get involved in this; continue down the path to the apartment, nearly there. Open the door and the air conditioning hits me, up in the elevator, unlock door and into my quiet rooms.

I’m trembling, – there’s an elation too, can’t decide if I’m happy or scared out of my wits. Can’t get over how near I was to being injured by that falling board. The important thing is that it missed me and maybe that’s the way to go with this – no matter how near it was, it didn’t happen. Something is telling me I need to let go of the holding-on thing here; just calm down and watch the breath for a bit. Open the laptop, start-up, find the page I was looking at yesterday, Sangeeta’s ‘Serene Reflection’ and her Inner Landscapes page:

http://serenereflection.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/inner-landscapes/

‘I meander along the babbling brook – all the while realizing that its song comes from the obstructions it surmounts.’ It all fits together. There may be obstructions in the babbling brook but the water passes through them all anyway. We hear the sound of it: a river of small collisions. The near accident is telling me the World is all of this and more; the obstacles and that which encounters the obstacles. Sometimes I can look for an understanding of it everywhere and not find anything because I am part of what I’m looking for; that which is looking for itself, not finding it and seeing that this is what is taking place. This is what it is really but I can’t see it. Or you can say there’s nothing to find anyway because, always, it’s the World revealing itself, and ‘my’ seeking it isn’t actually doing anything. It’s simply a movement in time. This thought is enough to see the event as part of a very much larger all-inclusive whole…. And I can abide in that restful awareness.

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Photos: Bang Pah In (upper) & Khaosan* Road (lower) by Peter and Elaine Henderson*

a handle to hold on to

Posted on January 4, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Going to the airport in a tuktuk through a network of small streets. It’s probably a shortcut, but all these speed bumps? I’m feeling a bit queezy, seasickness must be like this. Or is it just that I’m surprised to be rolling up and over joyful little mountains. First the front wheel then the back wheels (three-wheeled vehicle), again and again; overkill on speed bumps. Sure enough it makes you feel giddy, all the ups and downs and I don’t ‘like’ it much but my wanting it to not be like this is making it into an issue. It’s a control thing, it’s about the so-called ‘me’. ‘I’ am the problem because, in fact, there’s nothing here; a body-mind mechanism that can process and transform data, the Five Khandas, that’s all. Nobody at home, no ‘self’ anatta, no-thingness. Only namarupa responses, natural processes and the feeling of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ arises due to the curious nature of sensory experience – this game of hide-and-seek, and the flip-side of concealment is revelation?

Maybe so but first things first, at this point in time I’m having an acute bout of speed-bump nausea and the small discomfort of it is in the centre of consciousness. Some basic sense informs me it’s a mistake to try to reject it or think it shouldn’t be there, I’d be better to get around to accepting it; the 1st Noble Truth, a deep acceptance that causes the ‘holding’ to ease off and there’s definitely something about this teaching; if you can understand it, the suffering disappears. The first time I came to see it, all kinds of habitual ‘holding’ that had bothered me for years just fell away. Gratitude to the Ajahns in Thailand for their guidance. It seems to me now though, there’s still something I’m not getting here? I’d been thinking that all the Theravadin masters are teaching, in their tremendous intensity and detail, is mindfulness about what you’re doing and the skill of letting-go. Beyond that there’s nothing said except the reference to it as the ‘deathless’.

‘When meditators practise correctly and have the discernment to see that quality (of deathlessness) as it really is, the result is that they can withdraw their attachments from all things — including their attachment to the discernment which enters in to see the quality as it really is. The practice of all things good and noble is to reach this very point.’ (Ajahn Thet)

Non-duality teachers talk about pure consciousness in the sense of something tangible; they’re saying there’s something ‘there’. The ‘I’ that is arising is the ‘I’ of everything. Theravadin Buddhists, on the other hand, are saying it can’t be like that; it’s emptiness – if you think there’s something there, it’s a handle to hold on to and the whole thing is about letting go, not holding on. So, today I’m thinking it’s helpful to have the stability of that ‘thing’ and I’m holding on; I want there to be something in that space, a sense of familiarity, it’s a known place and the sick feeling can be happening in an awareness that’s much larger than the confines of the cramped ‘self’. No little ‘me’ having to cope with it, the speed-bump nausea is not ‘mine’, no ownership, it’s not personal.’ It’s about learning how to be a totally open presence, aware of the way the ‘self’ perpetuates itself – on all levels and not buying into that.

A short while after that, thankfully, we get out of the narrow streets, small intersections, and onto the open space of a smooth, flat, easy highway in one long straight route across to the airport….

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the way out

Posted on January 1, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: 06.00hrs and it’s still yesterday in the West, internet is slow and unpredictable, busy with the millions of people over there wishing each other well for 2013, sending messages, sharing images, ‘liking’. World is populated with beings preoccupied with devices that can render the ‘self’ as an actor that ‘I’ choose to project to others; mind reflects upon itself in its own world, is aware of its perception of itself as subject in its own blissful states. Other times seeking to escape from the perceived emptiness surrounding the idea of ‘me’ being separate from the world; go that route and, in the end, there can only be an experience of total aloneness – it can’t be that way. But here, some people find God, superimpose a personification on that emptiness. Others just go along with it anyway, what else is there… we’re all on the road to nowhere, yes, I could be convinced, enough to comply with the economic system the politicians try to assure me is real even though I know it’s just based on a concept.

So, taking it on face value, like this I know the whole thing could so easily fall apart, it’s so very fragile but somehow it doesn’t – there’s that collective holding-on thing. The God mechanism is there whether I believe in it or not and I may go on being controlled by circumstances or I can decide to investigate, examine it. What’s going on here? I see everything in the world, through consciousness but I can’t see consciousness itself because I am that consciousness, there’s a subjectivity about everything. Then, when I see things and other people out there in the ‘world’, I’m suddenly an individual again, a self, separate from the world. ‘I’ engage with everything, subject to inherited kamma and actions create more kamma, mostly of no consequence, possibly laying foundation for another state of being at some future time? And from that ‘distant’ place, this place ‘here’ is seen in hindsight, as if it were a former life – this is how it began?

Why bother with beginnings, so distant and removed from this time and place. There’s only what there is now; no past and no future – time is a construct. I’m here situated in the East, 7 hours ahead of London, 12 hours ahead of New York, 15 hours ahead of San Francisco and then time measurements come to an end somewhere in the Pacific ocean, so it’s called a different day, of course. Continue in that direction and I return to the time zone I’m in now, except that, supposedly it’s the day before yesterday. It’s not, of course, it’s always the same day, only present time exists. Always present time and the way out of this puzzle is here, nirodha, Third Noble Truth.

“… the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving. (the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha) “— SN 56.11 (dukkha nirodho ariya sacca).

Daylight coming through the windows, I hear the monks chanting downstairs and go to the small balcony, to see. Down below there are about thirty people from the hotel opposite kneeling, receiving blessings for the New Year – and two large baskets of donated food, dāna generosity. Four monks in pale tangerine robes facing the small group and the sound of Pali verses created in the Buddha’s time 2600 years ago…

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– Best wishes for 2013 fellow bloggers and thank you for dropping by in 2012 –

habituality of former lives

Posted on December 25, 2012 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: 07.00 hours, alarm rings…. It takes a moment and then I remember I’m in the Chiang Mai apartment, arrived from Delhi last night. Heavy curtains over the window; a darkness I’m not used to. It’s quiet here, the sound of monks chanting anumodana on the edge of hearing… takbat. A motorbike whizzes by in the distance; nothing else. Senses are alert, listening, feeling, searching for a way to ‘become’ something that will establish ‘me’ in this place, at this point in time and all the clutter and stuff that’s associated with that. But I can’t fall into habitualities right now, I’m distracted by these new surroundings and keep returning to the minimalism of no thought. There’s an opportunity to leave it all in the impersonal state of not becoming.

I go to the window to see the monks, through the empty rooms as yet uninhabited; space/time occupied with the moving of its integral parts – chapters from a book about tenants moving into a new apartment, the ending hasn’t been written yet and the beginning is a continuation of what happened before. Future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, and ‘now’ becomes yesterday – here we are in the awareness of this moment, the means by which we arrive at this point in time remains a mystery. More chanting, open the curtain and all the windows. Three monks in orange robes and a small group of kneeling Thai tourists from the hotel opposite. Ah yes, many people are on holiday today and it’s quiet like this because it’s Christmas day 2012, I’d forgotten about that – here in a Buddhist country where, really, Christmas is just an ordinary day.

Jesus and all the other great teachers in history were really saying the same thing. In the peace and quiet emptiness of the moment there is no hungry ‘self’, no driving ‘urge’ and it’s possible to see that this world of suffering is a self-created delusion. We are continually re-born into this state due to the habituality of former lives; trying to get what we want or to get rid of what we don’t want, thinking that this is how to get it right. But still caught in attachment upadana; the desired state belongs to ‘me,’ the act of possessing it requires that there has to be an ‘I.’ Everything I have, everything I want, all of this is ‘mine.’ Even that which I consider to be ‘my’ enemy, this is also ‘mine.’ Thus creating a self that is incomplete, unfulfilled, I’m searching for the truth in this and fail to see that it’s the searching that maintains the state of being lost.

In the same way belief in an external creator creates attachment and unthinking devotion to this returns me to the same point of entry, again and again. It’s not about taking refuge in the Jesus or Buddha of the mind. It’s about sila, samadhi, pannya: virtue/ mindfulness of present time/ and the applied intelligence that goes with it. Slowly waking up to this awareness of reality….

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‘If those who lead you say to you, “See, the kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.’ [Selected Sayings of Jesus from Gospel of Thomas, Nag Hammadi manuscripts]