the forever window

Posted on March 25, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#57: Bangkok: Early evening, M asks what kind of walls I’d like to have in the house she’s building for me. It’s the Minecraft game, everything created from virtual terrain, mountains, sea, sky and a square sun. She looks up from the iPad window and turns to me with enquiring lift of the eyebrow (a nine-year-old veteran). I say well, how about stone – walls are made of stone, aren’t they? It’s an unimaginative answer lacking in conviction – not paying attention properly. I ask what the choices are. She taps the screen to show me: gold, lapis, and you could have diamonds. Generosity. But I’ll just have the stone, please – keep it simple (thinking to myself is she going to come out soon from this digital dream she’s fallen into? Come out, it’s late and you have to do your homework. Be mindful and attend to things in the real world?) But there’s no ‘real’ world here. M says, what kind of roof you want in your house, Toong-Ting? (It’s her name for me) and I’m drawn into the discussion again. You like floor tiles Toong-Ting? I say what I’d like, and that looks nice (trying to reach her by telepathy, please, please emerge from the iPad window soon and think about the homework always in arrears!) For a moment it seems like she’s going to close the iPad but no, it goes on: why do you want that one? This other one looks nicer, does it look nice to you Toong-Ting?

I find answers that fit each question, but there’s no end to it; I know now the point of the exercise is to indulge expansively in this great wealth of choices. We have to try them all. No such thing as a final choice. The iPad is a forever window, a deep lake of astoundingly rich colours that’s difficult to surface from after you’ve fallen in – everything else in ‘real’ life is sadly dull. M dives into the forever window simply because it’s there. The containment of it is the context. The question answers itself, no need even to ask, cause becomes effect, timelessness without end.

Then for a moment she emerges from the dream, a flicker of alertness in her eye. Quickly, grab the opportunity! Act out a continuation of playfulness and joy, extend the interest to our surroundings and she decides to follow. Good, yes! It’s like guiding someone dismayed by sensory overload. Now let’s close the forever window for a while, shall we? Life is the same as it was but it’s quite nice out here. Fetch the school bag, heavy with stuff, reach inside and pull out a scrumfled homework book from the tangle of scraps of food wrappers in there, bits of tissue, and an overall blueness from a pen that flooded its ink inside the bag, a long time ago. My fingers are always slightly blue after visiting M’s bag; I go wash my hands while she considers her homework.

They have to make a simplified pop-up book page; the double page you open and a whole scene pops up. Wow, we never had homework like this when I was a kid! The teacher has given her a model of the folded-out paper mechanism she has to copy. A small spark of interest. Can do by myself now, Toong-Ting, she says, goes over to the sofa and pulls a large cushion over her head: but I have to think it first… stays under the cushion for quite a long time and I’m beginning to think I should ask if she’s okay under there. But next time I look M has cut and formed the folded-out bit with a scissors, glued on the picture that’s supposed to ‘pop up’ and it works – yaay! Well, not brilliant, but homework is not supposed to be a fun thing, it just gets ‘finished’. It’s done, put it away, now where were we? A voice says: may I borrow your iPhone, Toong-Ting?

‘We have a duty to befriend those aspects of obedience that stand outside of our house and shout to our reason, “O please, O please, come out and play.” For we have not come here to take prisoners or to confine our wondrous spirits. But to explore ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and light.’ [Hafiz: ‘We Have Not Come To Take Prisoners’]

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a kind of subjectivity

Posted on March 20, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#56: Bangkok: I’m the one that got away, the escapee, the spiritual refugee. I followed the road that led away from the place I was born and never went back. The link with ‘home’ is broken and even if I could get it reset there’s no connection now. Somehow it fits with the history of where I came from; of war and battles lost and won, victory, defeat, the pibroch, the dirge lament, death like a flood sweeps away a sleeping village; the kamma of immense grieving, Celtic calamity, the catastrophe, the ruins, the mourning, s’affliger, generations of the dispossessed, and all the elders are gone.

Is integration the opposite of disintegration? If so, I came from a world in disintegration, I stowed away on a ship, sailed over many horizons and by happenstance got shipwrecked on a strip of land in the South China Sea. I am the Western urban migrant, assimilated, integrated here, got the password, userID and blessed to find the Buddhists in Thailand. A sense of connectedness, although it hasn’t been easy these 30 years, carrying the weight of Western thinking, causes and conditions from early times, likes and dislikes. And, being the only foreigner in the family, I’ve learned to go along with the preferences of others when it comes to food. As it was this morning, for example, faced with Korean kimchi at 10.30 AM because somebody thought it was a good idea to go to the Korean food buffet downtown, and if it were up to me I’d have chosen something less exotic so early in the day, but Jiab thinks our niece, we call M, needs to eat something substantial so maybe she’ll like this. Okay go for it.

M tries the kimchi and tells me: not spicy, Toong-Ting, her name for me (see the M posts). She’s waiting for a response… I taste it, blood red and trailing strands of human skin and tissue – a vampire thing? But there’s nothing wrong with kimchi really, I’ve had things far more out-of-this-world than that. I nod with approval and give her a smile I think is convincing. But M can see kimchi doesn’t quite hit the spot. She comes over and tells me quietly they have ice-cream here too. Yeh… well, ice-cream at 10.30 AM? If I said I didn’t like that either I’d lose all credibility. So I say, Nice! Do they have caramel/toffee? Thirty years further on in the journey and I’m eating ice-cream with a nine-year-old. I’m amazed that she likes me… maybe she responds to this quality of improvised simplicity I’ve developed, anyway it’s a privilige and quite wonderful how things have gotten very much easier since M came into the world. She corrects my Thai pronunciation (the tones), has a continuous chattering bird-like dialogue with me and discovers useful-to-know things about my phone I never knew were there. M is an empath – no words for it, it’s a kind subjectivity. Maybe because she’s a child in a bilingual situation and has to find the easiest route to understanding others, or maybe all children are like this and because I never had any children of my own, it seems special to me.

Being part of her world means there’s less of the holding on to ‘self’. Anyway, there’s less of an emphasis on individuality here in Thailand, things are shared, a largely Buddhist population. And my ‘self’ is so totally different from everyone else’s self, it’s not appropriate to be imposing my ‘standards’ here, creating supporting statements to prove what I’ve already decided is the correct way of going about things, and convinced about this simply because my continuing engagement with it somehow seems to confirm it has objective reality. In the East, the ‘object’ is not the goal. The starting point and the answer are revealed in the interaction with the context of the question – inductive reasoning, it takes longer, it’s more revelatory, exploratory, open-ended.

M runs off to look at what kind of drinks they have. Comes back and tells me about one she thinks I like but can’t pronounce the name, I ask her how do you spell it? Never mind she says, can she borrow my phone? I give her the phone, she’s always ‘borrowing’ my phone. M runs off to the drinks section again and comes back immediately; she’s taken a photo of the drink, shows me: Chrysanthemum tea, wow! A difficult one to pronounce. Nice, I’ll have that. M is gone for a moment then returns with a glass of iced tea held in both hands, places it on my table without spilling a drop; loving-kindness, she steals my heart away…

‘There is ultimately no individual self or soul (jiva), only the atman (universal soul), in which individuals may be temporarily delineated just as the space in a jar delineates a part of main space: when the jar is broken, the individual space becomes once more part of the main space.’ [Gaudapada] source: Non-Duality America (Link to original)

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Lower photo: M‘s Pic of the Chrysanthemum Tea dispenser

windows

Posted on March 14, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#55: Bangkok: Coming in from the airport in a taxi with my Thai niece. I call her M, nine years old (soon be 10) and playing Minecraft on my iPhone all day. Glass window opens into another reality, digital trees, cubed terrain, oceans and snowscapes in a gravity reduced space. ‘Look, Look, Toong-Ting’, she says. Since she was an infant, M has called me Toong-Ting; holding on to her baby talk of the past and now it’s somehow cool to call me that. I lean over to see what’s going on in her window: building an ice palace with Lapis and Gold entranceway while playing the ‘Let it Go’ soundtrack from the movie, ‘Frozen’. I listen, ask questions, sing along and we exchange views – limited because English is a second language. When there’s nothing left to talk about, she returns to the Minecraft world and I hover in space waiting for the next question to arrive.

I am the support system, resource person, back-up plan. We came by plane from Chiang Mai this morning and the day has passed us by like this; M absorbed in her Minecraft software and the outside world seen from a sequence of moving vehicles we’re in, time and space transforms around the moment. Clouds in high altitude sky of 30,000 feet, mountains of buildings in the urban landscape and M emerges from the dream from time to time to pull me into the depths of the inner world she’s in – let’s see what she’s doing there… we dialogue about it, laugh, and she disappears further into subterranean caves, while I swim up to the surface again. There’s only a short time for me to look at the page I’m reading… sometimes only a few seconds before the next request arrives: “Look Toong-Ting, look, look…” I take a deep breath and dive into the water again. In the intervals between these visits to M’s world, I’m having to be mindful and speed-read my text like pieces clipped from a larger flow of words; one piece jumps out more than anything else:

A man is searching for God but gets frustrated in his effort, throws a stone into the water and a fish sticks its head out, says: ‘You think you’ve got problems? I’ve been swimming in this river my whole life looking for water, dying of thirst and cannot find any water to drink.’ The man says, ‘But the river is filled with water, there’s not a spot in the river where there is no water. Just open your eyes and you’ll see.’ And the fish says, ‘same with you; you’re surrounded by God. God is all around you and within you. Yet you say you can’t find God…’ [Sant Rajinder Singh: “The Love of God Is All Around Us”] (Click here for the original source: Holy Notion/ God and the Self)

Our taxi arrives at the house, get inside and M runs around discovering the familiarity of the last time we were here. Later in the day we’re in a corner of the room where she has her playthings scattered around. Everything lying in disarray after a particularly large creative frenzy of cutting out and the sticking of things with glue, scotch tape, adhesive coloured paper and bits of old Christmas decorations, recycled. And when every additional use these items might be put to is thoroughly exhausted, M moves to Minecraft videos on my laptop: “Look Toong-Ting, look…” she says.

I position myself so I can see the screen, participate when I’m needed, and otherwise pleasantly distracted by the surroundings; the world suddenly thrust into a clear, enhanced three-dimensional presence. Objects become somehow… known? All our bags and things just lying where they got dropped, extensions and extrapolations of the environment of rooms, the furniture, the plants and trees outside. A momentary happiness, bien-être, no words for it…

‘… the Truth and the way leading to it are often indicated by what they are not rather than what they are… in the Upanishads, ‘neti… neti’, meaning ‘not this… not this’, the reality of appearances is rejected. In Christian theological language, referring to what things are not is called the ‘apophatic method’, also known as the via negativa.’[Ajahn Pasanno & Ajahn Amaro: The Island – An Anthology of the Buddha’s Teaching on Nibbana]

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where I’m calling from

Posted on October 26, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #19: Chiang Mai: M came to visit for the day, my Thai niece aged 9yrs, and her mum brought a bag of pa tong ko (Thai donuts) she got in the Saturday market. And just before we ate them all I remembered to take a photo [click this link for recipe]. But I’m getting ahead of myself, it began quite early this morning. I open my eyes and there’s a sound, a Skype call – where’s the phone? Stumble out of bed, follow the sound… phone has slid down the side cushion on the sofa, singing and buzzing in there; hello? It’s M, hello? Her video appears – hello, hello? I can see the top of her head, she’s watching a YouTube video at the same time as skyping me.

Where are you now Toong Ting? She calls me Toong Ting, a remnant of her baby-talk days. I tell her I’m in the condo, arrived last night from Bangkok; this is what it looks like, where I’m calling from, then slowly move the camera-phone around so she can see the interior of the room.

What you do there? She speaks English like text messaging – maybe social media is how she learned? I tell her I’m not properly awake yet and that’s why my hair is all mussed up.

What’s mussed-up mean? I tell her that I was sleeping, just woke. But it’s difficult to hear what she’s saying, I need to adjust the volume control. Where’s the clicker? Can’t see well with these glasses, I’ll have to hold the phone so I’m able to see her face on the screen then put it to my ear to hear her voice – she’s laughing because there’s my big ear in close-up, filling her screen. Laughter…

Why you do that Toong Ting? The conversation lasts about a minute. She asks me, Can I come stay with you today, mummy go out, OK? I say yes; see you soon, bye-bye.

Shower, dressed, wash dishes, tidy up and in 1 hour, ping-pong! door opens, M is scooting down the corridor, running around the rooms and jumping on the sofa: yaaaaay! Her mum gives me the pa tong ko and some of M’s items in a bag and other food things, asks if I’m sure it’s okay… yes, of course, and there’s the handing over of responsibility with a few last words of caution to M and bye! Mummy is gone.

We put everything on the breakfast table, and taking the photo of the pa tong ko reminds me about the problem with the phone-camera earlier, with the sound – not finding the volume control and I tell her about this – can she fix it for me? M holds the phone in her small hands then clicks the little button with a tiny pointed finger.

I feel heavy and clumsy by comparison. She tells me I need to change the ringtone… so let’s choose one together, okay? There’s a long list, the names read like a poem; apex, beacon, by the seaside, chimes, crystals, night owl, playtime, presto, radar, radiate, stargaze, summit, twinkle, waves and we go through them all, one after another, like a strange inter-related melody; a breathtaking journey through the diverse world of heavenly and celestial, twinkling ringtones.

Which one you like Toong Ting? I’d like to make a choice but it’s like a kind of hilarious madness to me, they’re all good… M makes her choice and I’m wearing my glasses to see how she’s doing it. It’s this that causes her to quit the ringtone selection as the discussion moves round to my recent eye operation.

What the doctor do? M comes close to my face and looks at my left eye, carefully, then looks at my right eye. She’s a bit scared of the thought of it, yet kinda fascinated when I tell her about making a hole in the eye and sucking out the lens shloooorp! then putting in the new lens folded over to get it into the hole and it’s made of plastic, so it opens out flap when it’s inside and lies down flat.

I see her small face and almond-shaped eyes absorbing the story into consciousness. It’s a mirror I can see myself in. The ‘I am’ feeling – the sense of ‘I-Amness’. All the way through one’s life, the constant. It’s the same today as it was when I was 9 years old. Absolute subjectivity.

‘Consciousness veils itself from itself by pretending to limit itself to a separate entity and then forgets that it is pretending.’ [‘The Transparency of Things’, Rupert Spira]

We take other photos of the rest of the food things brought by M’s mum and here they are:

1. (below) Kao nyaow: glutinous rice cooked in banana leaves

2. (below) Ground nuts, the original version of the salted peanuts we buy in a can. They’re actually a purplish-green colour.

3. (below) Thai kanom: a glutinous rice paste flavoured with panyan

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References to Absolute Subjectivity taken from a Ken Wilbur video: Subject becomes object.

The title of this post: ‘where I’m calling from’ is taken from a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver

just this

Posted on July 9, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: 05.30 hrs., ‘… down the long and silent street, the dawn, with silver-sandalled feet…’ daylight creeps into the rooms and it’s my birthday today! I suppose one’s birthday is something to be possessive about: ‘my’ birthday. I was born on this day quite a long time ago in the North of Scotland and now I’m here in the silence of a Chiang Mai morning in the North of Thailand. Open all the windows and a breeze blows through in all directions, curtains and fabrics that haven’t moved for a month in the stillness of this interior, ﬂutter and ﬂap against the walls – a sheet of paper flies off my desk, lands on the smooth floor tiles and slides away. It feels like the world outside is inside; all of a one-ness and this mind/body awareness (that is ‘me’) spreads out from here, through the trees, up and into the dome of the sky as far as the eye can see.

Skype call from Jiab in Delhi, happy birthday, and in the video window I can see our room, the place I usually inhabit. Jiab is at the desk where I normally sit. It’s still dark there, daylight here. Two people talking with each other but often occupied with the tiny image of themselves that appears in the Skype window, lower right. Eyes are sometimes directed away, how does my hair look? Jiab tells me the story about how she was born on the night of the full moon and so her actual birthday is not always on the same day. The family lived in an old forest area in the South of Thailand. Jiab remembers her father saying it was the light of the full moon that guided him through the trees to bring the midwife to their house. And a phone-call from M, happy birthday Toong Ting! She calls me that because she’s my 9 year-old niece. Toong Ting, when you go to Inkland? She asks me this, meaning ‘England’ but I like ‘Inkland’ (the place that makes ink?), so I tell her I’m going to Inkland on Saturday 13th, but it’ll be Sunday 14th by the time I get there. We have a discussion about the time difference thing and M knows about this, having visited Japan earlier this year. Only 9 years old, but she has an understanding of the world and systems that’s so much in the present moment it takes my breath away.

Children teach us about birth and the great mystery. About 10 years ago, there was an episode from a BBC series on the human body that showed a woman giving birth – so vivid, I suddenly felt this immediacy of it happening to me: the blinding light, echoing sounds; the coldness, the impact of air entering the nasal passages? Revisiting the birth experience. Emerging into the world, the first total sensory consciousness sweeps through and the body/mind organism is turned inside-out. That TV film left me quite transformed… Now it’s later, many years later, and there’s ‘me’ and this old body, getting settled on the cushion for a 30 minute meditation sit on ‘my’ birthday. These are the same body parts, regenerated, expanded in a lifetime, worn a bit smooth, puckered up at the edges. Skin, muscle, flesh; soft rubberoid plasticity, and these mysterious organs held by ligaments bonded into solid bone. The whole thing maintaned by the tremendous heat and energy processed from food, the fuel for the engine. And there’s the fluidity enclosed in bubble-like spaces, gurgling away all the time. The breath enters the body as a kind of wind, gusting in and out. It comes back and blows everything all over the place, withdraws in a moment and it’s gone again. Mind mesmerized by the form and function of the body, seemingly trapped in this limited temporality; cause/effect – then for an instant, seeing the truth of the Five Khandas. Thin skin of eyelid slides over surface of smooth eyeball and the dimly seen light entering my darkness; just this…

‘Each and every mental and physical process (namarupa) must be observed as it really occurs so that we can rightly understand it in its true nature. That right understanding will lead us to remove ignorance (avijja). When ignorance has been removed, then we do not take these mind-body processes to be a person, a being, a soul or a self. If we take these mind-body processes to be just natural processes, then there will not arise any attachment. When attachment has been destroyed, we are free from all kinds of suffering and have attained the cessation of suffering.’ [Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw]

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‘…down the long and silent street, the dawn, with silver-sandalled feet…’ taken from ‘The Harlot’s House’ by Oscar Wilde. Upper photo image taken from the WPN archive. Lower photo image: dreamstime. Gratitude to Rory and his post for the inspiration: http://beyondthedream.co.uk/2013/07/05/tao-te-ching-28-keep-to-the-feminine/

loving-kindness to animals 2

Posted on May 24, 2013 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Going to see the cows with M and we meet the first one. I ask M about pulling on the rope tied through it’s nose and if she thinks that would be painful? M tells me it’s like pulling your hand and she pulls me along by holding on to my finger: ‘Like this Toong-Ting’ – laughing, Toong-Ting as a reluctant cow… I can hear the voice of (her auntie) Pa K, who lives here, a down-to-earth farming person; and I guess M must have asked Pa K the same question and she’d shown her, as M shows me now. I’m also aware that M sees me a bit like a grown-up child, because I’m a foreigner and have such naïve views about things. For us Westerners, the simplicity of rural life is attractive, but we’re not able to see it in the long term, or accept the hard work that’s necessary to be able to live like that. Also having to accept basic truths like killing animals for food and all that… yes, well, I don’t discuss this with M. We just go on through all the wet ground towards the other cows in the distance.

There was another time I came here to visit the cows, and met the little cow with the bamboo bell around its neck: clacka-clacka sound when it’s eating grass – strange grass-eating rhythms. We stop and look at it, and it looks at us. Such a miniature creature, it looks like a calf, and comes towards me with cautious movements, swinging head in motion with the way it walks. It raises it’s head and points a snuffling, sniffing wet snout in my direction; bits of grass and green stained mouth. Large snorts. Then it extends a long tongue and sticks it in it’s nostril (how do they do that?), comes a bit closer and there’s quite a bit of sniffing of the air around me. This cute little cow is curious about me due to a certain familiar milky smell coming through the pores of my skin? It’s not smelling the others who are with me like this… Thais don’t drink much milk so I’m thinking, hmmm, here’s 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 recognition of this milky smell, a familiarity: I am an upright, standing-on-it’s-hind-legs member of the species – a cow person? A bit disturbing… I’m conscious, all of a sudden, that humans are carnivores and there’s this unpleasant conceit about being at the top of the food chain that’s bothering me right now.

Later, reflecting on this 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 and – we are the cow’s babies! I notice cutting up vegetables is a bit of a sacrifice too; 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 and that’s kinda weird…

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.

Contemplating the eating of meat helps me to see the true extent of my delusion driven by a voracious appetite for all consumables. Things I feel drawn to consume surround me – non-food items; ideas, concepts, ‘mind’ hungers for mind object. Consciousness is clouded over by habitual ‘mind’. Remove habitual ‘mind’ and there may be something like a deluge of reality comes in and with it comes a satisfactory understanding of the mystery 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).

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Sections originally posted in loving-kindness to animals 1 and re-posted here.

the holding-on habit

Posted on May 21, 2013 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Sitting in the house with M, it’s been raining and the farmyard is a plethora of muddy things. M is inclined to stay indoors and that’s how it is today, a day of uncertainty, the catastrophe of failed projects, unfinished paper structures, and fooling around with the camera phone. M is tired with the stories in her 9 year-old world. Some excitement and interest when: clacka-clacka, the sound of the cow with the bamboo bell around its neck, energetically chomping the grass that grows around the house – all this thick lush grass in the wetness. The other cows, four altogether, have been brought home because it’s the end of the day and soon they’ll be herded into the cowshed and closed in for the night. I ask M if she’d like to go out? We can get the big umbrella and go look at the cows? But this is not a good question to ask right now.

Complex emotions, M is suffering a disappointment. We took her to the bookshop in town. There was a book about science with a ‘SUPER SCIENCE KIT’ in a large box that went with it. The thing is, it was really too advanced for M but she became convinced she had to have it. So we got it, came back to the house and I started to look at the instructions. Opening the box and assembling the pieces of the kit, test tubes and small pieces of plastic equipment – all that goes okay, but following the instructions to carry out the experiments, has no meaning for her. She simply doesn’t know where to begin and I can’t explain because of our limited communication. She tries to enter a created story with a ‘pretend’ thing but science doesn’t work like that. Somebody thoughtfully removes the difficult SUPER SCIENCE KIT and all that can be done now is damage repair. M is quiet. I ask her if there’s anything I can do, and she says, ‘… no, is OK, Toong-Ting.’ (Toong-Ting is M’s pet name for me.) I suggest we read a book or play with the iPad… then I remember there’s no Internet and some of her apps don’t work. That’s part of the problem. ‘No, Toong-Ting, is OK,’ she says.

So I sit with her, everything is dull and meaningless – I can feel it too. M makes small, whimpering sounds like her digital kittens on the iPad. She’s holding my arm, cuddled up in a small ball next to me, eyes closed and face hidden away, struggling with the uncertainty of her world. Thai children are taught othon [khanti] patient endurance – or it could be an inherited character trait. I don’t have any children of my own, so no experience; having M in my world is an opportunity for me to learn. What I notice is, there are no tears or tantrums that I’d expect (from Western children). Here, it’s more like a locked-in holding. I’m available, ready to support, but I can’t do much to divert her attention. It’s the holding-on habit and what this is about is just allowing for these moments of not knowing that we’ve all got to get through, somehow, and the uncomfortable feelings that go with it. Just letting them go…

I’m affected by the mood, it’s really tense, but can sit quietly without making a ‘thing’ out of it. The self is a sensory experience. The experiencer is itself an experience. Consciousness is the sensory organ of the void. There can be nothing separate from this, except the ability to think about things. The question, then, is: what is thought? And thinking about thought, itself, leads only to the empty space where the question used to be…

Some time after that somebody finds a small bottle of food colouring in the kitchen and I show M what happens when you put a tiny drop of it into a test tube of clear water. The violet colour is like a tendril of descending smoke curling around the inside of the test tube and her whole attention is focused on this extraordinary event; the world is opening up again… wow! how to develop this? The uncertainty of the moment has vanished and suddenly everything seems full of wonderful choices….

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‘What effort should I make? Should I do something about this situation or simply watch my mind?’ Such moments of not-knowing are precious. Uncertainty does not have to be seen as failing. In fact we might lose something important if we are in a hurry to push past it. The actuality is I don’t know what to do and there is not necessarily any fault in that. If, however, I’m completely caught in the momentum of wanting to escape suffering, I may miss the truth of the situation, as it is, and learn from it. With the confidence that comes from our commitment to precepts we can afford to trust in being patient and aware of ‘not-knowing’, and the uncomfortable feelings that come with it. Feel the force of the momentum of wanting to get away from it, to ‘solve it’; stubbornly refuse to be drawn along. We can experiment with waiting until the feeling of being driven subsides and quietly listen to what intuition suggests we could do.’ [Ajahn Munindo, Dhammapada v. 276]

[Note: There are references here to, ‘the experiencer is itself an experience’, taken from an Internet source I can no longer find. If anyone knows the origin of it, please let me know, thank you!]

Upper Photo: My pic of M taking a photo of me. Lower photo: The cows coming home

persistence of the dream

Posted on May 14, 2013 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Here in a house surrounded by trees, it’s nearly one year since I was last in this place [Link to earlier post: ‘nothing in itself’]. Birdsong and mostly quietness; only a faint noise from the road reaches us here, drifting in according to wind direction. And the sound of two puppy dogs yap-yap tied up on long leads, getting bathed by being dragged along the concrete path, pulled under the garden tap and held there as long as possible (they’re so small you can do that), then untangling the leads is the difficult part. They soon dry off in the hot sun. The chicken population chirp-chirp of last year has disappeared from this world, some eaten by carnivorous nocturnal creatures that watch from the edge of the clearing. Most are eaten by carnivores who live in the house – thus the truth of farmyard life is revealed. A new population of chickens pecks the ground chirp-chirp where the others once pecked, and who’s to say they’re not the same ones reborn? A piebald kitten miaow goes around seeking attention, miaow. Four cows; three have bells tingaling, tingaling, tingaling around the neck and there’s one with a bamboo bell that goes clacka-clacka. Three of the animals are digniﬁed and silent; there’s one that goes moo-aaaah, feeling a bit hard-done-by, maybe. I don’t know if it’s the one with the bamboo bell; that’s just the way it is, no obvious connection; no reason for it – or for anything. There’s just this multiplicity of loosely related phenomena that has the characteristics of a farmyard scene. It’s like this right now because it’s nearly evening, and everything’s going: chirp-chirp, yap-yap, miaow-miaow, tingaling-tingaling, clacka-clacka and moo-aaaah. Sun turns orangey, pinkish purple, sinks rapidly below the horizon – no twilight. Approaching darksome night mystery, and wild nocturnal carnivores wait in stealth at the edge of shadow. Insects zzzzzling and large moths surround the porch light that’s left on till morning.

Upstairs in the half-dark of the guest bedroom, M can’t go to sleep. ‘I not go to sleep yet, Toong-Ting. You have to tell me a story’, she says, addressing me as Toong-Ting, in her 9 year old way of giving people and things in the World different names. It’s my responsibility, I’m the fictionist. Too late now to go find a story book from downstairs, and I try telling her that…‘Then you tell me your story, your own’, M says. This means I have to invent something… there’s just no getting away from it. So, in an inspired moment, I start telling her about all the birds here around the house and, when we leave next week, all the chickens and the rooster and the ducks and birds in the trees and the owls will come with us to the airport. They’ll have to take a taxi by themselves because there are so many of them but the driver can follow us in our car. They don’t have to check in any bags because they don’t have any bags, of course. They just get on the plane with us, perch on the seat backs and arm rests and fold-away tables and go: chirp-chirp, cockadoodledoo, quack-quack, woo-woo, tweet-tweet as the plane rushes along the runway, up into the air, flies away into the clouds, far far away until nobody on the ground can see it anymore. There’s a short pause and M asks me, ‘Leally (really) Toong-Ting? Why the birds go in a plane, they can fly by themselves?’ And, yes, there’s this unforseen logistical problem about the story, I realize – so, I begin my explanation for these circumstances then notice that M has fallen into the dream and is already asleep…

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‘If in this way I see one of these creatures withdraw from my sight without my ever knowing where it goes to, and another appear without my ever knowing where it comes from…; then of course the assumption that what vanishes and what appears in its place are one and the same thing, which has experienced only a slight change, a renewal of the form of its existence, and consequently that death is for the species what sleep is for the individual…’ [Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, Supplements to the Fourth Book, Chapter XLI: On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructability of Our Inner nature]

no more than this

Posted on May 10, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Sitting on the plane with M beside me, my Thai niece, and her coloured Tshirt, funny hat; her iPad mini and her 9 year old vision of the world. I’ve been watching her use these kiddy’s applications; cute kittens with large eyes and she shows me how they respond to your voice; all kinds of stuff. We can make fruity ice-cream drinks, waffles and cup cakes with different kinds of toppings and M insists I have an opinion about what kind of toppings to have – lemon or strawberry? It’s important! M asks me in basic English; only the key words: What you like, Toong-Ting? So I choose a lemon topping. When it’s finished we eat the cup cake by tapping a finger on the screen. The name Toong-Ting is part of her former baby language she doesn’t use any more but, somehow, M decided to keep it as my name. She selects things in this unique way because English is a second language. Maybe it’s easier to say Toong-Ting than my actual name, or she likes the idea of being cute (I think it’s this).

And so the time is taken up with M asking me about various things like this. I engage with her on these points and in the intervals, when she’s busy with the iPad, I’m simply aware of our physical presence. There’s really not anything left to think about… mindfulness, waiting for the next question. In the silence there’s a curious emptiness, just a quiet awareness, bhavanga, the space in-between; not reacting to stimuli, there’s nothing happening. Just being here; the knowingness of it. My responsibility is to take care of M; to respond to her small requests in a way that’s in tune with her way of thinking and her use of English. That’s all. We are linked in our present-time mutuality and there’s nothing else coming into consciousness from the outside world unless it’s something very interesting or something we need to be careful about. Right now, here in the aircraft seats, it’s all very bland and neutral. Somehow I seem to have sidestepped my own mental activity; the usual state of affairs of the mind, the way the ‘self’ attempts to perpetuate itself is seen; there’s only this, being here…

Then the cup of coffee is served and M says I should have the powdered creamer in the packet that comes with it: ‘Why you not put that in your coffee, Toong-Ting?’ and she looks at me with these almond shaped eyes and little face… so I put the powdered milk in, even though I normally take black coffee. She watches me open the paper packet and pour it in, her eye level is much nearer to the brim of the cup than from where I’m seeing it. I lean over, we watch this together, powder dissolving in the cup in small clouds and imploding movements. I never really noticed it before… children are here to teach adults (I read in a blog recently?). M tells me to try it and see if it tastes nice. I try it and say yes.

Looking out the window, down on the land below, there’s the surface of the planet; swirling movements of rivers and patterns of vegetation, land shaped by many hundreds of years of the wind and climate, and it looks like the powdered milk dissolving in the coffee. Liquid in a small plastic cup 38,000 feet above what’s seen on the surface of planet below; macro/micro, the oneness, all things have the same characteristics. ‘Look, look at this, Toong-Ting!’ and I have to look again at something else M is doing and make a comment about that. We discuss it for a while, then back to considering the powdered milk in the coffee and I’m feeling this same continuing state that’s empty of thought. I know that M is going to ask another question soon so part of my attention is occupied with being ready for that with a clear mind; metta, loving kindness. I’m a passive passenger transported on an aircraft, aware of the immediate surroundings; a gentle bumping of the plane, the hiss and hum of the engines. Just a sort of space I am occupying right now, no more than this…

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‘Bhavanga literally means “factor of life”; bhavanga is usually translated into English as “life-continuum”. The bhavanga-citta keeps the continuity in a lifespan, so that what we call a “being” goes on to live from moment to moment. That is the function of the bhavanga-citta.’ [Introduction to the Abhidhamma]

Photo Image: Flowers growing in a Thai temple in Buddhist India

deductive inductive

Posted on March 10, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Small figure of M sitting at the breakfast table on a chair too low for her. The plate with her toast too high and elbows sticking out, takes a large scoop of grape jelly from the jar, carefully carries it, at eye-level, on the flat of her knife, wobbling-wobbling over to her toast, decends and lands on toast without spilling a drop. I’m kinda transfixed by this manoeuvre. We were playing a game where you have to say as many words as you can, beginning with a given initial letter. So it’s my turn; I watch her spreading the jelly over the toast and ask her to give me a word beginning with ‘S’ and immediately she says, ‘SpongeBob’, then continues spreading jelly on the toast. SpongeBob? I ask… and she says, yes (like, is there something wrong with that?) Pretty good, considering she’s only 8 and English is a second language.

Also that M is Thai and coming from a cognitive place that’s different from the rigid Western, logical, clearly-stated position, that-which-is-known. You could say the Thai way is remote from this. But M is a child, like any child, learning as she goes along. There’s the impact of SpongeBob to be included, same as it is with Western children but she’s got the advantage of having an inherited understanding that’s more intuitive, Eastern (inductive); feeling the way through and let’s not bother with objectives, goals and all that stuff, okay?

Westerners find it difficult coping without a given structure. It’s not LOGICAL. In the Western (deductive) behaviour, we almost always express things having a plan in mind; the idea of what we’re saying is right there at the beginning, clearly seen, and all the backup related to that follows after. Then there’s a conclusion at the end.

The Thais are sometimes shocked by the bluntness of this kind of thinking. Their way of expressing things is like the inverse of that, no real indication where it begins, plenty of general examples and there’s a conclusion in there somewhere but it’s difficult for us Westerners to find it because we didn’t understand how it started … it seems vague.

Hotel staff, tour guides, any situation where you’re asking for information at random: Excuse me, do you happen to know where I can …? This kind of question is an invitation for the Thai to lay out a tapestry of possibilities, together with additional info you might like to know.

Western visitors are baffled. The idea is that the solution to the problem is already there, an understanding of this is induced; the conclusion is inferred, arrived at: Yes! I see what you mean… the aha moment. There’s a skill in asking the question, of course, mindfulness, and that’s on-going for me, no expectations (that helps) and there’s a skill in the ability to be patient, appear interested while looking around for someone else who might know.

The West, separates God and the world. We are not Him, we are created by Him; a subject/object duality. The Eastern inductive reasoning understands the function of things through recurring patterns, a ‘puzzle made of its parts’. If there’s a God it must be ‘inside’ this, cannot be separate, it’s integrated. Not easy for me, letting go of the seeking for logical patterns of cause and effect that aren’t there. And I’m suddenly interrupted by M, who asks me if she can use the computer; she opens google, and finds a YouTube video of the Chipmunks singing Gangnam Style in cute squeaky voices: Op op op op, oppan Gangnam Style, Gangnam Style. Op op op op, oppan Gangnam Style…

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