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/

Kiki

Posted on June 26, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: Kiki came to stay with us for a few days. Her owners went to Calcutta on business. Kiki is a black Cocker Spaniel, 10 years old in October this year and people say if you multiply a dog’s age by seven, you get the equivalent age in humans; so she’s like an oldish lady now. Kiki was born in Thailand, moved to Japan with her Japanese owner, then to Bangladesh, Vietnam, back to Japan and now she’s in India. A much-travelled small dog, Kiki has her own immigration documents, a kind of doggie passport. I first met Kiki in Bangladesh 4 years ago and it’s a bit sad to see she doesn’t remember me at all. But she’s older now, seen a lot, she’s slower and can’t be expected to remember everything. Kiki comes towards me with her little pink ball held in the mouth, drops it in a practiced way so that it rolls towards me. I pick it up and throw it and she runs to get it, but after about four throws she has to stop and have a rest.

We are given Kiki’s things in two small bags, food, blanket, toilet equipment, ball and her owners say bye-bye Kiki! and leave. Kiki spends a long time sitting at the patio door looking out, waiting to see if they’re coming back. But they’re not coming back; I try to engage with her, I try to speak with her in a kind of doggie-speak, cute high pitched baby chatter. But it’s not working very well because most of the time her owners speak to Kiki in Japanese. Kiki just looks at me, looks at Jiab, responds in a friendly way, but there’s a distance. Jiab and I are just the faces of this moment; she knows we are the carers. Kiki has had carers speaking to her in Thai, Bengali, Vietnamese and Japanese and, anyway, she’s limited because she’s a dog…. Now she’s just wondering which one of us, Jiab or me, is the one to whom she will be answerable; which one is the main provider of food and taker-out-for-walks? And it’s a new experience for us too, we don’t know much about looking after dogs. So I’m wondering how this’ll go, and thinking Kiki probably has that figured out already; the pros and cons of this situation, a naïve, abundant provider of tasty scraps from the table?

So we’re eyeballing each other like this, a certain curiosity and interest in the air and Kiki is totally black like a photographic negative, I can’t see any face, only a strip of pink tongue hanging out. I’d be staring at her intently looking for a face then I discover it, see the black eyes, black nose and aware, all of a sudden, that Kiki is looking back at me! An encounter. Quite a lot of licking; affectionate doggie wetness – I put her food in the dish and there’s great excitement but she doesn’t eat, just sits there looking at it. I’m thinking maybe she doesn’t like it… but then she turns around and looks at me, face to face, eye-contact, quite a meaningful moment. A recognition; is it about gratitude? I say something like, go on then Kiki… and she starts to eat, tremendous crunching noise, her bowl-shaped dish amplifies the sound, and the scrape and clatter of the dish sliding on the hard floor as it gets pushed along by a long black nose. Maybe the hesitation at the start was her saying: look, I’m sorry, this is going to be noisy, okay? Same thing with water, I’m sitting at the desk quietly and there’s this huge shlooshing, splooshing sound.

The ‘face’ of Kiki got to be more and more of a significant element in our communication – no expression, quite plain, just a kind of awareness: non-verbal gazing at each other. At one point I say to her: where’s your ball? and she immediately starts running around looking for it. I realise then that her Japanese owners must say that in English. So I get down on the floor and we are both looking under the sofa and the chairs. In the middle of all this, we look at each other, I’m on my knees, at her level. I say to her: I don’t know where it is… hold that gentle look for a moment: I don’t know… consider the enigma of our shared existence. There’s something about this that gets my attention, she just looks. I come closer and look again at her dark face placed in a dark wooly body. There’s a little movement of the head. I look under the sofa she’s sitting next to and there is the ball! Difficult to reach because it’s behind the bar but I can just get it, flick it out and Kiki runs off across the room chasing it. She catches it and comes back to me, drops it and I have to throw it again….

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nothing cannot be anything

Posted on June 12, 2013 by tiramit

Delhi: There’s a needle in my arm. Strange how the body accepts this intrusive object and the antibiotic fluid coming through it that enters the blood stream. Veins have a plasticity like something synthetic we recognize from the world of manufactured polymer substances. But human tissue is better; you can make a hole in it and it repairs itself. You can cut it, stitch it up, remove parts of it and replace these with other parts that fit. The human body is a miracle. The pain of this needle, though, has a directness, increasing, then easing off, over and over, dukkha, there’s no getting away from it.

I don’t want it to be there, vibhava-tanha, I want to disconnect it from the plastic tube leading to the upside-down bottle suspended from the hook above my head. It feels unnatural; it shouldn’t be like this…. Lying here on the bed looking up and counting the drips that fall into the receptor that fills the tube; one drop every 4 seconds and that’s the rate of the fluid flowing down the tube into my pierced blood vessel. It’s a full bottle, and there are others I have to take after this one… treatment for an intestinal infection – nothing really extraordinary in a country like India, in the hot season, when all kinds of bacteria thrive. Caused by drinking water from a filtered system that didn’t filter. Organisms survive the filtering system; bugs everywhere in this intensity of 43°C.

I need to find a way of getting through this period of invalid status and prolonged boredom of a plain room with hospital fittings, plugs and sockets in the walls, hospital furniture and a TV screen I’m not interested in. Dissatisfaction with things; clicking the buttons that control the position of the hospital bed; down/up and up/down. Lying here with eyes closed, listening to the metal trash bin; it makes a satisfying percussive sound when the cleaner presses the pedal with his foot, lid springs open and strikes the wall next to it Clang! He releases the pedal and the lid closes: Flumpf an airtight trash bin with plastic bag liner. Crash! Flumpf! again and it’s joyful and funny.

I need some joy here, there are men in dark navy uniforms in the room; cleaners with large grey floor mops that look like they’re soaked in muddy water swabbing the tiles; smell of Dettol stings the eyes. Muddy grey mops and dark navy uniforms seem out of place in an environment of lemon yellow, soft pink walls; pastel shades and shiny chromium fittings. The muddy grey mops are a bit scary also, because I’m sensitive to things that appear dirty, having fallen into this sickness as a result of drinking water from a filter machine installed at home that allows dirty water to come through.

‘We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto…’ The doctor said always drink boiled water in the hot season, organisms are present in the water, filter or no filter. I feel some frustration with the company that sold me the water filter: ‘it shouldn’t be like this’… but we don’t live in a world of ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t – western theory applied in an Indian context. We expect it to work, and it doesn’t. Western systems are deductive and life is inductive. Organic growth has no beginning no end. How to understand that, what to do? Don’t make it into a structure. Let it be nothing.

So I can lie here on the bed with my eyes closed and the cleaners expect me to be like this because I’m a hospital patient. And in this curious public place, enter meditative contemplation, watching the breath, the rising and falling of the chest. Allow the thoughts that arise to fall away and be replaced by others that I allow to fall away and allow everything to fall away and cease, as far as possible – just the effort of trying to do this leads to a quietness in the mind; spaces of no thought. There’s some peace to be found in this activity. And from here consider nothingness, just nothing, no thought. It’s not an idea of nothingness, that’s a concept. Nothing cannot be anything. Nothing cannot be located anywhere in time or space; no before, no after. If it is truly nothing, it can have no cause or effect. I can’t work towards some mind state in future time when I’ll see what ‘nothing’ really is, it has to be now, it’s always ‘now’. Nothing cuts through, penetrates, and dissolves everything. It’s just nothing.

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‘One must have a mind of winter… (to behold) the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ [ Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man]

Photo image: http://www.jeffzinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/poor.jpg

before the story begins

Posted on April 30, 2013 by tiramit

Delhi/Bangkok flight: People don’t normally go to Thailand for their holiday in the middle of the hot season – highs of 40°C – mad dogs and Englishmen… No passengers, plane is nearly empty, fortunate for me with this back pain I’ve had for more than a week now. I set off on this journey knowing that really the last thing I’d want to be doing is getting into the overcrowded economy class section with no room to move. But the good kamma of plenty room today, I can position myself in the chair so there’s no discomfort and able to quietly contemplate the clouds in the sky. Everything seems so still, not really comprehending the phenomenon of travelling at 500 mph – 1 mile in seven seconds? I count to seven: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 and one mile further on. Hmmm, it feels like everything is stable and down-to-earth; stewardess smiles sweetly: something to drink sir?… I feel I’m a bunch of time-stretched-out spaghetti strings, going most of the way back to the point of departure.

Consciously watch the breathing and the mind settles. Soon there’s the quiet space of no thinking. Watch the breath for a while but then, after a moment, something triggers thought again. A story starts up and I remember Lisa’s post, Doing Nothing Out of Anger: ‘…we have to get the story of it going in our head’. Without the story, it doesn’t happen. Usually you fall into it and it’s more to do with convincing yourself it’s like this, rather than it actually really being ‘this’. But there’s the small space just before it locks in and I can see that this is the last opportunity to consciously let go of the story-building, and be aware of the unchecked habituality that’s there for no good reason.

I read something about this in Rory’s blog/Tao Te Ching 12: The Inner World: ‘It’s been estimated that we think around 60,000 thoughts each day… probably over 90% of them are simply recycled from yesterday and the day before…’ Thoughts about absolutely everything – most of the world is inside your head. No wonder the space of no-thought is such a novelty to discover, no stories unfolding. Training the mind to consciously monitor the randomness, yoniso manasikara, contemplate the act of thinking with focus and concentration.

Mind settles again in the space of no thought, no end, no beginning, everything is always in present time, no past, no future… then, in the mind’s eye, I’m with my mother in the Care Home, holding her hand and she stops breathing, I see the moment she dies and it’s like her last teaching to me: this is how you die son, just watch me… and I see her move from the present into the past – forever.

A long time spent coming to terms with the fact that all of that is now irretrievably in the past; there are memories but if I don’t start the thinking process, there’s nothing there. Sometimes finding myself cast away on a small island of thought with stories like this, then the peace returns, sound of the aircraft. No thought, not trying to find it, not engaging with the story of it. We’re all just seeing ‘the seeing of it’. There’s something about the human reaction to the world, sensory organs mostly positioned around the face, so the head moves in response to functions of eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin and mind – the mind and stories, the ubiquity of the story.

The story is everywhere and it’s necessary to see the input clearly and the habituality. As far as possible let there be no reason for Mind to step in and take control, create the story of ‘me’; someone at the receiving end and the whole subject/object duality starts up. Without that there’s just the sensory receptors and our shared world. There isn’t anything else to be done; only to ‘see’ the reality – seeing the seeing; awareness of the awareness; knowing the knowing. ‘I’ am not creating it. Awareness has somehow sidestepped that. Seeing the events without the story.

On a journey like this, you somehow think that, at the destination, that’ll be the end – no more stories. But you arrive and there’s just another set of stories going on and we’re always only part the way through whatever story it is – same as what’s going on with everyone, everywhere else in the world, all at the same time.

Landing at Bangkok, yawn and swivel the lower jaw to release trapped air in the cranial passages; ears go ‘pop’ and a whole new 3D sound enters…. didn’t realize how cotton-wooly it was before. Ah well, so which gate are we coming in at? There’s a long walk to the domestic terminal and the next flight to Ch’mai…

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dimensions of pain

Posted on April 24, 2013 by tiramit

I WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM to find I’m shipwrecked on the sofa, notes and papers strewn around, a cold cup of coffee – how long have I been asleep? Turn to look at the clock, then the pain; lower back pain, oh… aaah! Yes, I remember now, I’ve been disabled for a few days and situated on the sofa mostly: pain is bad – I must have done something ‘bad’ to deserve this… the tendency to criticize oneself for having the pain, perpetuating the kamma of causes and conditions. I need to correct this frequently. Another thing is that I’ve had the pain often enough to know there’s a difference between the pain itself and the act of resisting it; also the attachment to wanting it to go away: I-don’t-want-it-to-be-there…. Profoundly desiring it to not-exist, vibhava-tanha, but I’ll not find any peace in attempting to gratify that need – although I may persist in trying. What to do? There’s nothing I can DO about it, except try to get comfortable and see how that goes. It’s a no-choice situation and, strangely enough, things start to improve as soon as I stop trying to do something about it…

Some years ago I had abdominal surgery (abominable abdominal surgery – no joke) two operations, 6 months apart. Just enough time to recover from the first before getting ready for the second. More difficult the second time around, because I knew what was coming. The first time it was unplanned, an emergency, severe abdominal pain, straight into the emergency room in a Bangkok hospital and admitted right away; something sinister and twisted in the large intestine. So I sign the no-liability form and get operated on the next day. The surgeon tells me after I come round, he’s removed two tumors together with a length of intestine – doesn’t tell me how much, I didn’t ask, and he also says he’s my closest friend; nobody else has ever left their handprints on my intestines!

Colonic cancer, I was lucky. In both operations the post-surgery period was dramatic. After the anesthetic had worn off, the pain arrived suddenly, right there in the centre of my physical being – absolutely no getting-away from it. The immensity of it occupying all the space and I’m backed into a corner. No escape, the only way I can go is forward, step into it. No choice, but dropping the resistance to the pain caused a moment of ease to arise, just before being swept away in the pain… wow, how did that happen? Clutching at straws: an insight, a tiny one, but it made a huge difference. There was desperation all around but just enough of an easing in the pain to tell me that whatever it was I’d done was good so how to do that again?

This back pain is the same kind of thing, but less intense, not erratic and scary. So I can allow it to be there. In contemplation of it, I see there are the other systems of the body all around the pain, normal stuff, just quietly ticking over. There’s sufficient space to distance myself from all the immediate responses to this pain; the obsessions and fears, mostly a conjured-up conceptualizing where, in different circumstances, like intense joy, it would lead to everything being compellingly interesting. And, in the same way, when I have intense pain I’m subject to fear and wild imaginings: ‘your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.’ [On Joy and Sorrow by Kahlil Gibran]

Conceptualizing is an automatic default that returns always to that same starting point: the ‘self’. Unless something propels it right out of there (like what happened to me in surgery) there’s nothing beyond this, no real insight into finding the way out of pain. But what the Ajahns told me about the Buddhist teaching is that the mind is not self. Mind is the sixth sense – everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think. The mind sense usually leads to a consciousness of how everything is coming in from the outer world through sensory experience and that default to the sense of self: hey, this must be happening to ‘me’. With insight, the mind sense can bypass that, and then the pain is not happening to anyone – there’s no ‘me’ engaging with these thoughts. Instead there’s an awareness of the thinking process with no attachment, mostly abiding in a state of mindfulness and careful receptivity, sati-sampajañña; just looking to see what it might be. There’s a kind of alertness about the sensory function, and the simple curiosity: what is it? Just being open to what this could be, is enough to understand how it works…

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Photo image by Louk Vreeswijk, New Zealand Collection

strange familiarity 1.

Posted on April 19, 2013 by tiramit

‘…(it) is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method — you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment… the sudden realization that all is as it should be…’ Osho

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New Delhi: Emerging from these long dark tunnels of constructed thought, blinking in the bright light of the present moment – it’s always the present moment, no matter what you call it; today, yesterday, tomorrow – it’s just knowing it is, that’s all. And even if you’re living in a dream where it’s always tomorrow, the present moment catches up with it and becomes now again – then it’s gone: ‘…now we are in the concept of now’ [Moojie]. Thinking about ‘now’ in the darkness of 05.00 hours at my desk; laptop feels hot and it’s a slow internet connection… just this large white open space where the page should be. In the tab it says, untitled and in the toolbar it says, about:blank, unstated presence. I have to wait for it, balanced on the edge… anticipation of it filling my vision with colour…. unfulfilled. Yet there’s something that I actually like about this, an emptiness that triggers the letting-go thing. I used to get caught up in that stressed feeling but today there’s a great easefulness spreading through the neck, shoulders and facial muscles. If I’m not feeling totally tensed up, waiting for something that I feel ‘should be’ loading faster than it is, there’s just this sense of letting things be as they are. It’s like a deep inbreath, filling the chest cavity from top to bottom, and the long outbreath becoming a ribbon of road in a landscape, reaching out there to a vanishing point on the horizon.

Some time after that, the page loads but I don’t notice it because I’ve wandered through to the kitchen and standing there considering the cavities and space above and all around and this strange familiarity (?) of the body/mind conscious state present here, in itself, since birth. Jiab comes through, says quietly: what you doing in here? And we talk for a bit about this thing called existence, connectedness with everything and all living beings… sharing it with others – like sharing a meal with guests, a basic sense we all have, just the feel of the air and the experience itself…. Jiab says: let’s make the breakfast then, shall we? And it changes to something else, another episode, and a different story… cessation, THE END, no layers or filters. Just trying to understand what that sort of thing might possibly be, is enough to begin to know it; to know that all that’s left are events and situations immediately associated with mind states as they arise – the result of kamma created in earlier times. The mindfulness (and whatever it takes) to allow it all to unfold, to be here and to pass away, annican, no holding….

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‘Thus everything lingers only for a moment, and hurries on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of the summer, the animal and man after a few years; death reaps unweariedly. But despite all this, in fact as if this were not the case at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything were imperishable. The plant always flourishes and blooms, the insect hums, animal and man are there in evergreen youth, and every summer we again have before us the cherries that have already been a thousand times enjoyed. Nations also exist as immortal individuals, though sometimes they change their names. Even their actions, what they do and suffer, are always the same, though history always pretends to relate something different; for it is like the kaleidoscope, that shows us a new configuration at every turn, whereas really we always have the same thing before our eyes.’ [The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer]

Photo: Steam clouds at a Power Plant in NZ, by Louk Vreeswijk

This post is inspired by: LIFE AS IMPROV.COM what is meant by now and the Moojie video at the end. Also: AWAKE AND FINDING PURPOSE.WORDPRESS.COM The spiritual path. And the fisherman and the businessman.

inevitability of circumstances

Posted on April 17, 2013 by tiramit

A LONG TIME AGO I had the idea to write a book. It was 1983, I’d just started travelling around Asia and all this colourful, exotic stuff around me, I’d never seen before. So I started making notes. That was okay but I got stuck with it; no story-line, no plot and, for a while, I thought the story could be a kind of unfolding of events as they went along… but this was too wide, I needed to narrow things down a bit. Too complex, it’d give me a headache. I kept on making notes, anyway, believing that a story would reveal itself in the course of time, but it never did and I never figured it out. Years went by and I just carried on with more and more notes. Now I’ve got five A4-sized ring folders of typed notes I managed to print out from an old hard drive just before it finally crashed about 10 years ago, and I’m scanning these back into text files bit by bit. Also there are all these little old notebooks full of scribbles I have difficulty deciphering today – it’s like they were written by somebody else. I’m telling you this because this is how the blog came into being. The posts are developed from these old notes; you could say, altogether, this is the book I never wrote.

The difference is there’s a distance now that wasn’t there then. There’s no obvious author, thoughts without a thinker, it’s very much more indirect than it was. There are these faded old notes written by the younger me, on yellowing paper, etched into the surface with a dried-out ball-point pen and I don’t remember half of it. Now they seem to be a bit reckless, stepping into that magical world of heightened feelings that generates a kind of gripping intensity: the experience itself… what’s this? what’s that? Things had to be written down quickly before they’d disappear and I’d not be able to remember, suddenly – wow! gone, they’d vanish and all I’d have were the fragments of their being there.

Of course, it was stress all the way; trying to hold on when holding-on wasn’t needed. The urgency of it going past too fast, whole scenarios flashing by like buildings seen through the windows of a moving vehicle and you see this shadowy reflection of yourself in glazed shop windows, looking out from a taxi or bus or car and always in the same position: the point of reference… Then I started to slow down, one thought-moment, then another thought-moment – we can’t have two thoughts at the same time – thinking is the linking thing. And eventually I arrived at an understanding that this is what the process is; a mindful effort to experience consciousness of the real live situation as it’s going along. Haphazard things that before just seemed to fit in as happy coincidences, came to be more like a recognition that all things are related anyway; similarities that link parts of the story together in a kind of inevitability of circumstances.

So there’s now this quiet familiarity, and it’s more relaxed. Being free of the great rush that lasted all these years, I reckon I’ve arrived… yes, that’s it, the purpose in life has been achieved. I can see, though, there’s also something here that tells me it could be that I’m just experiencing normality. Isn’t this just ordinary reality? Isn’t this, in fact, the place where ‘normal’ people abide all their days, and what’s been happening is I’ve been practising brinkmanship, acting slightly mad all these years and have only returned to ordinariness? Ah well, whatever… I’m pleased because how could you not be? How much better and more mindful it is now compared to how it was then. And, okay, the transformation from that to this maybe makes it seem like something more than it is. Well, ho hum, it could be that the release from that samsara is all that can be achieved in one lifetime and just being happy with small miracles is all there is – nothing else needs to be done. So I go on here in this quiet place with the pleasantness of simple things and every day seems quite wonderful.

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Upper Tarot image of the Fool: http://tarot-lovers.com/the-fool-detail.shtml

Lower Tarot image of the Fool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Dodal_Tarot_trump_Fool.jpg

seemingly continuous

Posted on March 25, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: 05.00 hours. Darkness of early morning. I can hear a motorbike some way off, coming nearer, and voices talking loudly. They’re shouting to be heard over the sound of the engine. The motorbike passes below my balcony on the third floor, sound fills the room, and I realize it’s the driver with a friend on the back having a converstation as they are going along. Curious acoustics here in this narrow street; concrete and glass buildings face each other. The sound of the two voices disappears quickly past my windows and moves on further down the street, contained in the little capsule of their moving world. I hear it again, faintly now, and fading into the distance.

Strange dream-like event; receiving pieces of an animated conversation moving past me at 30 mph. Then it’s gone from my auditory awareness and (I assume) is being heard by other people further along the street. There’s something here about consciousness creating a sense of continuity; like how you string beads on a necklace and it appears to be one whole piece. A continuous stream of individual events taking place and, in the context of the body, it appears to be one, on-going connected reality – an illusion. When I wake up in the morning, it takes a moment, and everything is a development of the night before.

It must have been the motorbike that woke me up; windows wide open all night in the hot air, with just the mosquito mesh separating me from the world outside. Only 20 miles to go, straight up in the sky, before you reach outer space; no gravity, the universe (where did I read that?). Wow! outer space is so near, half an hour’s drive to get there, if there’s no traffic problem. So, what does that feel like? I suppose it feels pretty… precarious, balanced on the end of a flagpole fixed on top of a monument – the absolute verticality of it… quite scary. The only thing that gives me any sense of stability is the ‘self’ I’m inclined to depend on sometimes? No wonder there’s this tremendous attachment to it; can’t let it go, irretrievably lost in thought; I am contained in this body, stumbling around in this small area I inhabit, on the surface of the planet. I am a bit uncomfortable with the reality of what exists only 20 miles above my head. And go through life assuming that all there ever is, or all there ever can be, is ‘me’; the experience of a created self.

I hear a sound, and think: if that sound is out ‘there’ then I must be hearing it in ‘here’: the subject/object duality: ‘I’ am my body, I am my feelings, I am my consciousness and everything else (that’s not ‘me’) is out ‘there.’ In here, I’m me, I have a personality, it’s myself. And Bert0001 refers to it as: the ‘my’ in ‘myself.’ A distinct feeling of focus that disincludes other evidence – it’s all about me. Fortunately, I can understand and know that the idea of a self just seems to be there, seemingly continuous – a kind of mirage. Delete the ‘my’ from ‘myself’ and I’m free of all the tugs and pulls of likes and dislikes, emotions are not ‘my’ emotions, they’re just emotions; things that happen – liberated from the papañca, proliferating concepts, and concocted thought trying to make something real that’s just not real at all.

I’m glad to be awake early, leaving this place tomorrow and I’ll have to pack bags and get ready. Why can’t I just walk on to the plane not check in any bags at all, only passport, ticket and the contents of my pockets? Why bother with luggage? Ah… if only life were so simple.

Some time after this I hear the Tuk-kae lizard chuckling in a corner somewhere: tuk-kae-tuk-kae tuk-kae. And the Coucal, (whoop-whoop bird) (centropus sinensis) clambering around in the branches; whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop…

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‘Just as a monkey moving through the forest or the woods holds on to a branch, lets it go and holds on to another; in the same way what we call viññāṇa (consciousness) arises as one thing and ceases as another, by day and by night.’ [SN.II.95]

References in this post: Sue Hamilton: ‘Identity and Experience’

Photo: Buddhist shrine in Bhutan, collection Khun Pornchai

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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Photo: Carved doorway Wat Phra Kaew, Elaine H collection

how it seems (2)

Posted on March 1, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: Travelling across town, Shym is driving. He drives slowly and carefully, surrounded by vehicles honking their horns, cutting in on the nearside; they don’t like it that he’s driving slowly. But Shym remains calm – much ado about nothing – he’s an older man. Out there, fierce displays of male feathers in a ritual display resemble pure outrage, shouts and gestures through wound-down windows. If looks could kill… eyes sparkling with diamonds of malice, giving him ‘the daggers’…. Shym stays solidly as he is. Ah well, people, you can’t always get what you want. Sometimes you’re just stuck with it, you know? It’s how you respond to that unhappy state of ungratified wanting that determines the future for you; cause/effect – if you react with anger, it’ll lead to more anger. But these drivers seem to have gone way past that stage: up-to-their-eyes in the world of anger. Without their anger there’s no purpose in life. They thrive on the struggle; mythical realms of the Titans, and the Asuras, declaring a state of war that lasts an eternity. All this doesn’t phase Shym, at the correct time he slides the steering wheel slowly through his fingertips, indicators flashing clicka-clicka-clicka, telling the world, I am now turning right, and the car sweeps around like a large boat in a wide arc. The surrounding traffic forced to move out of the way. The response is plosive, to say the least. But, well that’s just how it is.

I’m sitting in the back, looking out through tinted windows, incognito, people can’t see me in here – a car wearing dark glasses. Nobody knows I’m inside, the voyeur, the invisible man, looking out at the world all around. I feel like I’m not here. Everything passing by outside the windows of the car; events come and go, arrive and leave. Things occur in random order and drift away without leaving anything behind, video images recorded on security cameras from various places in the 360 degree coverage, showing the car entering the car park, that I’ll never see. I say something to Shym and I hear my own voice in the acoustics of the car; the sound of it causes me to pause for a moment. Everything stops… it takes an effort to get started again. Before it happens, just this silent space. The body feels light and I’m seeing through it.

We turn into the car park. Parking attendant looks like ex-military, sharp uniform, whistle held in his teeth, a piercing blast, signals for us to go left but Shym indicates right. Outrage, more whistle blasts, and he comes up to the car, peers in through the tinted glass, hand cupping the space around his eyes to shade from the sun, I see a large bristly moustache and yellow teeth, the glass fogs up slightly and there are small bits of spittle from his hot breath and shouted words. But Shym gently points with an inclination of the body and politely insists that he’d prefer to go right, not left. More displays of warlike behaviour but I can see this is an act, it’s only how it seems to be. So we are allowed to go right, there’s no problem.

I’m amazed how this system works. All my assumptions are wrong. Attachment due to causes and conditions, that’s all. It’s like everything is a continuation of how things have been; inherited from some former time, or former life, the outcome of actions still hanging around due to tanha, attachments… velcro fastenings, super glue, magnets, welded bridge structures and all the mind stuff about wanting things to be like this or like that or wanting things to be different from what they are. The created ‘self,’ seeing the world according to likes, dislikes and preferences, obscures cessation; doesn’t see that things stay as they are only for as long as it takes. Then it all dissolves in a myriad of changes, disintegrates, crumbles away. We can’t hold on to anything. It all comes to an end.

[Link to: how it seems (1)]

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‘…when attention is drawn to the presence of the Knower, to that which knows and experiences, whatever that is, it immediately becomes obvious that there is something present that is conscious of the body, the mind and the world. As we do this, whatever it is that knows seems suddenly to become more present. It shines. In fact it is simply discovered to have been always present, but apparently eclipsed by our exclusive focus on the known.’ [Rupert Spira, ‘The Transparency of Things’]