POSTCARD # 485: Bangkok: This time next week I will have arrived in Northern Europe. There’s the countdown of course but that’s just going by itself, I live in a kind of corridor between here and there. I’m aware of a sense of ‘separateness,’ it’s not something new to me, more like it’s that British island-mentality. There’s a tentative belief in ‘self’ but now I’m seeing only the lack of it, and lifetimes used up with searching for completeness, sadly. More and more I’ve stopped looking for it. These days I’m a homeless person in UK, staying in Buddhist monasteries on the way – washing dishes and sitting meditation. Staying in hotels, staying with people I’ve met in Buddhist groups, friends, of friends, kalyanamitra. And the anchor point is my cousin who receives the junk mail from my bank and patiently puts it aside. He is my identity in the North of Scotland, and for that, I am truly grateful.

I really don’t feel comfortable in Northern Europe. I’m the Western cultural migrant assimilated in the East (resistance is futile), these last three decades in Thailand. I have user ID, password; there’s a connectedness with the East, although I’m still carrying the weight of Western thinking. All these years attempting to get away from that heaviness of thought, that which built the construct I grew up to believe in, stately and tall constructed of welded metal, concrete, brick and iron embedded in stone. But it came to nothing, all of it demolished in a day’. ‘Melted into thin air… the baseless fabric of this vision… we are such stuff as dreams are made on…’

My last foothold was a little old house in East Anglia, but about ten years ago it was sold. A printout of the email from the lawyer signed, enveloped, stamped and sent by DHL to England, 4000 miles away. My signature, exposed for all to see; idiosyncratic squiggle recognised by law as being ‘me’ saying ‘yes I agree to the foregoing; I relinquish, renounce, I have read and understood the above-mentioned.’ Box ticked, it’s all yours… sayonara, goodbye little house that sheltered me for 36 years, my small cave, burrow in the side of a hill. Somebody else is living there now… somebody more suited to a 24/7 commitment to the house.

It would have to be mortgage repayments, more than likely, and I didn’t have that obligation because the house was mine by Deed of Gift from my Great Aunt L. The cottage was a ruin of course and I had endless bills for repairs but I was ‘free’ of financial commitments, relatively speaking. This led to that quality of ‘unbinding’– I’m thinking of the Buddhist word: dhukka (suffering)…” an important concept in Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, commonly translated as ‘suffering,’ ‘unhappiness,’ ‘unsatisfactoriness,’ or ‘stress.’ It refers to the habitual experience of mundane life as fundamentally dissatisfactory…” so, what I’m saying is living in the cottage for 36 years was the ‘unbinding’ – I was liberated from ‘suffering,’ not permanently of course but I learned so much from the experience.

Note, dated: OCTOBER 10, 2012: Today is the last day. Getting ready for the flight to Thailand… that familiar feeling of departures is in the air. Yesterday was a day of hoover and broom and the place is now totally clean, pity I’ll not be here to appreciate it. Everything gets a major clean-up a couple of days before I go. It’s always like this; then, on the last morning, I have breakfast, wash out my coffee cup, place it on the edge of the sink; wash my breakfast plate and leave it to dry in the dish-rack – it’ll have plenty time to dry…. The house is locked up, sealed like a time capsule; I am in a taxi and gone. The house remains as I left it, exactly like this, for countless days and nights and afternoons and early mornings, sun peeps in the window, nobody at home; all through winter, all through Spring and then one day I come back, open the door, break through the spider webs, trip over the mountain of junk mail and enter into this same moment enclosed here now. Same cup sitting on the edge of the sink, same plate in the dish-rack. And the whole house slowly wakes up, I’m given a hug by the armchair next to the fireplace, but

now I know I’ll never be back there again. Stirring the ashes of a fire gone out, still holding on to a life I think I wanted… it was as if I were just ‘passing through,’ nothing is permanent. The generosity of letting go, relinquishment, renunciation.

Back in the days of the Buddha, nirvana (nibbana) had a verb of its own: nibbuti. It meant to “go out,” like a flame. Because fire was thought to be in a state of entrapment as it burned — both clinging to and trapped by the fuel on which it fed — its going out was seen as an unbinding. To go out was to be unbound. Sometimes another verb was used — parinibbuti — with the “pari-” meaning total or all-around, to indicate that the person unbound, unlike fire unbound, would never again be trapped: [Thanissaro Bhikhu: “A Verb for Nirvana” © 2005]

The posts for each year 2012 thru 2015 are now available as eBooks on Amazon. The plan is to continue publishing the remaining year-books from 2016 thru 2022. And all will be done and available by the end of December 2022. It will then be the end of our ten-year anniversary, and time for us to consider how much further we can go with things… is there a retirement home for WordPress bloggers? A time also to reflect on the decade we will have shared together here, so now, some acknowledgements and a little history of how the Blog began, and evolved and is what it is today.

It started as a discussion between Tavaro and Tiramit in 2011, driving by car from London to Kandersteg Buddhist Monastery in Switzerland. In the beginning, Tavaro had the skills in WordPress and he was (is) the Master. Tiramit the learner, quickly gathered speed and eventually went on alone. Before that there were discussions on all kinds of things, the name of the blog; early titles included ‘BudInTransit,’ the idea of travelling here and there and anicca the Buddhist term for impermanence. The subtitle “Postcards from the Present Moment” first arose at this time. As for the title Dhamma footsteps, it suggested a child learning to walk. Also as adults, each new writing/reading was a step in the dhamma, towards a clearer understanding of dukkha and an end to suffering.

The collection was intended as a Buddhist journal, presenting a series of short written pieces, ‘posts’ on the Dhamma Footsteps blog [dhammafootsteps.com], and the dhamma is everywhere, starting at the end of 2011 and moving on to 2012. The idea at that time was about how the present moment is always with us, the here-and-now. In the past, the here-and-now becomes there-and-then, of course but is significant that ‘there-and-then’ also refers to the here-and-now in the future – no other designation for future time… language never got around to inventing a future form because future doesn’t exist, except in the realms of imagined content – the same can be said of the remembered past. So, there-and-then in both the past and the future becomes here-and-now in present time which it always was, and is.

The posts then became the ‘post cards’ thus, “Postcards from the Present Moment;” the Buddha’s teachings applied as day-to-day events in a stream of consciousness. Each entry is an analysis of these short events (cittas) noted in the course of a day, or in an instant, an analysis of causally linked mind moments in the paticcasamuppada, Dependent Origination. This kind of investigation into the nature of mind and being is accessed through the practice of meditation. The simplest of things carry meaning. There is mindfulness, meditation, and careful analysis of awareness, moment by moment in the expanded present moment.

Special thanks also Chadarat for technical support. Also, to Manish Jain for extended technical support and inspiration. He is with me now… I would also like to thank all my co-travellers who have been following my blog and occasionally sharing their own experiences in the comment section. As a gesture of gratitude to you, I am sharing an eBook from 2013 for free/ no-cost, in PDF format. You can simply download it from the eBooks section on my blog or please click here to reach that page. That’s all for now.

Postcard# 484: Bangkok: Thinking about the order things take, first this, then that, now it’s near to the getting-ready-to-go time and I have my flight schedule; departure BKK 01 September: 23:40pm. Arrive Amsterdam: 06:35 am. Then from there, another flight to the North of Scotland. I see it in the mind’s eye, although there’s not much to see, because the entire flight will be in darkness, from Bangkok departure 01 Sep., teetering on the brink of a new day that has not arrived yet – and will not be seen to arrive until an hour before we get to Amsterdam, and a small glimmer of light.

All flights to Europe leave Bangkok around midnight because of connecting flights coming in from Japan and the West coast of US. I will be situated in the C class section of the plane, cushioned, carpeted, right up to the ceiling and over the cabin space – in case we lose gravity and I feel like walking barefoot upside-down on the ceiling. I have a clear picture of it; there we are in darkness until some light gets in, at the edges of the window screen – somewhere over the Northern edge of the planet, and I want to see the early dawn rising and the curvature of the Earth. But not allowed to raise the small window screen because people are sleeping or watching video. Me? I’m watching a movie in my head,based on what I see in the half light, people’s silhouettes waiting in line to use the toilet. These are the constraints of air travel.

Take off the headset and watch the video; intense dialogue without sound. Close-ups on faces, an exercise in portraiture. I watch it while going on with a search through the image files in my phone, gathering things from here and there – copy and paste back in one large folder.

The screen catches my eye again, sit to watch, and the credits come up… is that the end already? But it’s not the end it’s the beginning! An extremely long intro to the story itself. Go back to the image files, what’s this? A photo of words written on the back of boarding pass stub. What did I write there… doesn’t seem to make sense?

More writing on crumpled up bits and pieces of smoothened-out paper, I remember fragments of imagery and a story appear in the mind so fast I could not keep up with the pace of it, but no notebook pages to write on, so… scribbling it down on scraps of paper, on the backs of till receipts in my wallet, jacket pockets… reduce the size of handwriting to get it all in the space, then take a photo of it and zoom in to see. These are the constraints of one whose memory is all shot to pieces. 

I perceive the world as a solid tangible thing, I see, hear, smell, taste, touch and due to basic repetition, I believe this to be so. But long ago – I forgot when it was exactly – I understood it as a hologram… outer and inner, subject/object split as One; all of it, holographic. It couldn’t be more obvious, enclosed in this small space in a winged aerodynamic flying missile, that is separate from, yet connected to the planet Earth, which is seen from outer space, shining with shades of blue, a holographic image. If that is so, all neighbouring worlds, seen to be dead planets, could be teeming with life and we can’t see it because our sensory mechanisms are not compatible with their operating system, so to speak. In the same way, those other-world populations are seeing their holographic extension of themselves, and our world is a dead planet?
It’s an idea for an SF story… the way it is, so clear to me now, there’s the image of a journey that leads from ‘here’ to ‘there’, or ‘there’ to ‘here’ whether you’re coming or going the route we take is an elevated highway in the sky, we’re in a long silver night coach with the moon and stars. Occasional air turbulence suggests small bumps on an otherwise very smooth road surface – sufficient to tip me over and fall asleep, with not even the sense that we’re going anywhere… just the noise of the engines and hiss of the air.
At one with the urgency of speed, aware of the immense engine sound that could be deafening, but sound-proofed and hidden; acoustically obscured and this bubble-like enclosure built over it, designed within the dynamics of flight … the same plane flying to and from the same route all of its working life, and the ‘to’ becomes the ‘from’… no end, no beginning. Maintenance crews service the parts whenever it lands – both ends of the journey. From the engines’ point of view, everything is stationary… it’s the world that moves.

POSTCARD # 483: Bangkok: The days are running out… quick, close that door! Too late, some have escaped. Down two steps and off they go into the garden. How many do we have left? Only twenty days left? Less than three weeks. Twenty days, and counting, before the flight to the North of Scotland, the great catapult into the sky – up and over… where everything is just the same, except it’s quite different.

Up until now, I’ve not been able to think about arriving, It’s the in-between thing, the flight time, itself. The actual process of getting there, but not seen as something with a beginning and an end, it’s a sort of neither here-nor-here, period of twelve hours.

Now seeing it, not as something I’m getting started, more like something’ I’m leaving behind (“But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! Robert Burns ). No, no, something more cheerful than that. I look out the window and see the far and distant shore slipping away… terra firma is slipping away, there’s a feeling I could be on an old sailing ship, clouds and air currents cause turbulence of the waves and jolts of hard contact with the swell of the sea. Then the announcement: Passengers have to fasten their seat belts and remain seated.”

Better to think of dropping the desire to control, and I’m reminded of Ajahn S saying, as long as the world is experienced as ‘me’ and ‘it’, there will always be views and judgments about ‘it.’ I’m aware of the ease to be found in releasing control and allowing ‘it,’ that ‘something’ to be a part of it all. ‘There is,’ is a non-dualist statement, but it’s not saying ‘There is that out there’; instead, it is allowing the dualistic consciousness to relax until we no longer interpret the situation as, ‘I’m here and that’s there’.

“We hold the mind open so that its dualistic tendency can be relaxed and we let go of all the defences, the projections, denials, and fascinations.” Then we come to ‘there is.’ ‘There is suffering (dukkha).’ This has to be understood, not in the intellectual sense, but gnostically, seeing its origins in the desires, aversions and attachments, which are usually built into the personality way of seeing things.”

This feeling of being in the middle of nowhere is a good place to forget what’s been and what’ll be. And I’m saying this in readiness for the actuality of it, I haven’t left the surface of the planet yet – and the science of it that comes to mind: we are spinning at 1000 mph, not what we could say is ‘stable’ in any way. Better to think of it all as ‘unheld.’

It’s the investigation; layers reveal themselves bit by bit until there is only that which is beyond the dualism of experience. See where that gets us. It’s not easy, but the kind of effort required is not impossible. I see how it’s done, and returning to this in the posts that remain before 1st September arriving 2nd September 2022.

POSTCARD # 482: Bangkok: Getting the mind right about the forthcoming visit to Scotland, leaving Bangkok on the 1st September, and looking forward to the journey. I shall carry my headache on board like a piece of cabin luggage, it has to be attended to, no different from being down on the ground. A few hours of sitting, occasional sleep then wakened by stabs of head-ache. This is the way it has gone on other flights. Swallow the meds and support the head with one hand, as if it were separated from the body, 5 kilos, 11 pounds (Wiki) feeling its weight by holding the chin in hand, with elbow placed on the supporting arm rest, and bone conduction allows the hypnotic hum of engine noise into the ear mechanism, cranial cavities and vibrating skull containing headache, lulled into ‘airplane mode.’

Long journeys by air are kinda liberating… I don’t have to think why I’m “here” in an existential sense, I’m here because it’s on the way to somewhere else. As a young man, I used to like being on these narrow UK trains travelling the North-South route, 600miles… you can book a window seat, look out the window, and watch the landscape go by in great gulps.

The problem is, on this airline journey, I have to get psyched up for the approaching destination. People are unpredictable over there… they don’t call it the Wild West for no reason. I’m used to the orderly civic responsibility of the Thai public. The threat of exploding bombs and terrorism is not used to hold society in its place – no X-ray machines when you enter public buildings. No pressing of horns in the traffic jams. No rules, they just did it. It’s like this, people just comply with the rule. Is it because Thailand is a Buddhist country? They use Anjali in a smaller way than in India. They are quiet, smiling, staying inside the parameters of their mind/body space. They are respectful, courteous – definitely not assertive. I’m not saying it’s all sweet and nice, and I hear some foreigners complain about this and that, but it’s their expectations that’s the problem… and that takes me back to ‘the approaching destination’ at the end of the journey. I shall just have to pretend to be the same as everyone else and hope for the best.

Getting there, the wide-eyed gaze of not much sleep, and time difference (6 hours back) leads to an enhanced familiarity with the present moment. Whatever, whenever, and wherever, I am a mirror reflection of the world out there, knowing there is no ‘out-there’ out there that’s separate from what’s in ‘here’. The present moment is everywhere I go, even in the unlikeliest of places. I keep bumping into it, the ubiquitous presence of the here-and-now. “Oh… what’s this?” Sometimes I don’t recognise it, seen in a cloud of unknowing. Is this the present moment or is it a cloud of unknowing? It could be I’m thinking it’s something it isn’t. In a different set of circumstances, I see it’s my relationship with it, the ongoing ‘whatever’ of it. So, I accept the present moment as it is, whether I am aware of it in its ‘as-it-is-ness’ or not, an all-inclusive experience of the awareness I’m thinking it’s something it isn’t, or the cloud of unknowing as the present moment.

I should not speak lightly of “The Cloud of Unknowing,” a Fourteenth Century anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English (The Cloude of Unknowyng). A spiritual guide on contemplative prayer, telling us the way to know God is to: “abandon consideration of God’s particular activities and attributes, and be courageous enough to surrender one’s mind and ego to the realm of “unknowing”, at which point one may begin to glimpse the nature of God.”

It’s a book I’ve carried around on many overseas trips and never managed to finish. There’s something about the above quote that reminds me of things the Buddhist monks have told me years ago, in my naïveté, or I heard it in a Dhamma talk or in a book I read. There is the “unsupported consciousness,” and the process of investigating the mind, you do it alone, maybe a bit like tightrope walking if you choose to have it like that. Or it is an intuitive direction you take with the guidance of a trusted teacher.

“… to cultivate equanimity, you have to be really patient. Patience is both an active and passive mental state; activity being the effort to just hold attention on and bear with conditions, whilst passivity is to let things work on us until our struggle with them and our denial of them is finished. Then the origin of suffering has been abandoned and the cessation of suffering has been realised.” [From: Gnosis and Non-Dualism, Ajahn Sucitto]

In this quote, I was held for a moment by Ajahn’s ‘passive patience’, allowing everything to take its course, including how everything is likely to not be at all passive in my allowing of it. It triggers something like the Inductive way of thinking, vague and confusing for the unprepared, Western mind. I find it difficult sometimes, other times it’s self-explanatory. Eastern cultural traditions are inductive, including the Buddha’s teaching. The ‘meaning’ is not deduced, it’s ‘induced’, revelatory. It is open-ended and exploratory. We begin with observations, start to notice patterns and there’s an idea of what it is, and by studying the observations, we ‘arrive at’ a conclusion, a summing-up. I got around to seeing it this way, eventually. What has helped is all these years living in the East, teaching classes in English, and marking students’ essays in Thailand and Japan.

Right now, I’m thinking of the anonymity of air travel. Up there at 38,000 feet, we’re all having this experience alone. Airline staff have a practiced way of receiving passengers without disturbing their solitude of the sky and clouds. Stop wandering in the conceptual realms, hold back on the tendency to make sense of things, or turning them into understandable thoughts. Whatever happens, abide in the open, unattached state.

I think for a moment that that’s what I’m doing, but pretty quick, I have to accept that no, I’m not. Wow! Nothing is what I think it is. I’m not being with what is, instead of that, I’m doing a story about ‘what is.’ As Ajahn S says, the passive form is a process of being open, so that the dualisms; the defences, and the justifications of self-view actually stop.

Usually we are the ’doer,’ we are ‘doing’ things, figuring things out. Here we have to ‘be’ rather than ‘do’. Can we just be with what is happening, opening to our feelings and perceptions without the need to control, understand, or do something with it? We have to get beyond the level of doing things in order to have that sense of furtherance. [Ajahn Sucitto, “Gnosis and Non-Dualism,”]

Coming near to the end now. The above is so much like the inductive form we discussed earlier. I intuitively know how it’s done – so now there remains the ‘doing’ of it, the allowing of it. I’ll write about that later as I discover more examples of the deductive/inductive.

Note about The Cloud of Unknowing: I’ll return to this later, intending to take the book with me on the UK trip. Note about the image: One of the Eighteen Arhats (or Luohan) depicted in Chinese Buddhism as the original followers of Gautama Buddha (arhat) who have followed the Noble Eightfold Path and attained the four stages of enlightenment. They have reached the state of Nirvana and are free of worldly cravings. They are charged to protect the Buddhist faith and to wait on earth for the coming of Maitreya, an enlightened Buddha prophesied to arrive on earth many millennia after Gautama Buddha’s death (parinirvana).

POSTCARD # 481: Singapore: Compassion for those caught in the conundrum of chasing forever-ness – pushing their luggage trolleys, carrying their children, headed for Departures. We are all caught up in the flow, part of the great exodus, on-the-run from what we don’t want, towards what we do want, but never quite getting there, and moving on to somewhere else, then somewhere else. An urgency of thought, searching for an understanding of the way things are, finds that something is not quite right… what is it? Even trying to define it is not satisfactory. This is how it gets triggered – the Buddha’s First Noble Truth from two thousand five hundred years ago, arrives in the here and now of present time: “There is suffering.” It’s a universal reality… not just little old me, fretting over this and that.

Going through the airport security portals; laptop out of the bag, and take off your watch. Remove your shoes put them in the tray then on to the moving belt, shoes get X-rayed. ‘Excuse me sir, show me what you have in your shirt pocket.’ It’s a sheet of capsules, my medicine for the headaches, the tinfoil sets off the metal detector. Jumping through the hoops, getting dressed again and down the narrower and narrower tunnels leading to the seats. Where are we? Look at my number (aisle seat is less claustrophobic). Sit down, seat belt fastened, experience the elongated flying bus with wings. Look out the window as far as I can see, at the small patch of blue sky.

[1st Noble T.] There is Suffering (Dhukka), in the most general sense, encompassing all kinds of slightly distressed states and [2nd Noble T.] it is caused by craving (Tanha); wanting things to be better than they are or different than what they are, or more beautiful, more comfortable, more bearable, less painful, less irritating, less disturbing and a whole range of undesired, unhappy conditions of the mind. But in simply knowing there is a reason for it, a cause, [3rd Noble T.] we find there is a solution to the problem. (Nirodha) This is the key to the locked door… for an instant the suffering is gone! The door is thrust open, sunlight enters the darkness of where I’ve been. So now I know how it works! [4th Noble T.] If I tackle the cause, I can put an end to suffering, by way of the Eightfold Path (Magga).

But today there’s another form of transitional suffering hanging around, a sense of something suspended, isolated, uneasy – why should it be like this? And I start to think it’s the fact that I don’t know why it’s like this, that’s causing the uneasiness. ‘A riddle, wrapped up in an enigma’ [Winston Churchill]. Uncertainty, impermanence, the Ajahn Chah teaching, ‘Not sure’ [mai nae]; poised on the edge of something – a kind of alertness?

This mass of suffering is to do with the upcoming trip to Scotland in about a month from now… and here we are high up in the clouds, on the way to Singapore for a holiday, Jiab and I and our niece M who is now 18. It reminds me that my own departure date to UK is getting nearer and nearer. This brings up a whole range of feelings I haven’t thought about in a long time. Revisiting memories of my less-than-perfect functioning in a dysfunctional family, growing up without a father, a very young mom, more like an older sister than mother, and sharing life with a younger sister, the other chick in the nest.

Living in a household of women and feminine things, the adolescent male falls out of the nest, discovers it can fly and leaves that place there and then. I’ve been away from the North since that time, never went back to stay. I’ve been here and there in the South of England and in Thailand for 38 years – where did the time go?Living in someone else’s country, a permanent foreigner. Now there’s a feeling that it’s been so long since I was in the place where I was born, my ‘home,’ I’ve become a foreigner there too. The loss of my Northern heritage was all my own doing of course, and there’s the regret, remorse and guilt, a burden of suffering I’ve learned to live with all these years. Perhaps visiting it this last time (?) will bring it to a close.

Arriving in Singapore at night, coloured flashing lights, buildings are huge architectural sculptures and everything looks like a celebration. It’s a young person’s city, parties, happy times. Meanwhile I’m engaged with remembered instability, insecurity, vulnerability and there’s this ‘mai nae’ (not sure) out there, neither this nor that.

We sit in a cafe the next day, next to the window and have a scone with butter and jam – oh no, it’s so British! It starts raining, then the sun comes out, then it’s raining again and the AC is so cold… this feels like British weather! I start to realise I’m attached to the historical Thai time-warp, remote from internationalism. I don’t know how I will cope with the cold reality of Scotland. The urgency of thought seeks the safest place to be, the midway point and holding the balance; a place of equanimity in the midst of uncertainty, find a calm abiding there. Allow the suffering to be here – there’s nowhere else for it to go. Let it in. It’s the willingness to allow it a place of its own, that leads to an immediate sense of release, inside and outside… understanding the way things are.

But there’s now the feeling that the Scotland scenario remains an unfinished story. There is the death of ‘self,’ of course, and I can say the self that was lived in Scotland came to its end a long time ago – if it’s an unfinished story, it’s because I’m still holding on to it… time to let the ghosts of that go. The self that I am now, is transparent in the Buddhist sense. Mostly it’s not there at all. Everything that is associated with this body will have its death however, at the end of my allotted time. Other than that, there is the actuality of ‘forever-ness,’ (the unconditioned) things (chittas) evolve, they reform, (annican), become other things in the vast oneness, and there is no ending.

“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.

[DHP. Verse 153 – 154, A Dhammapada For Contemplation]

Photo: Jiab’s pic of the Financial District, Singapore, taken from the Tourist Cruise Boat

POSTCARD # 480: Bangkok: The world is functioning everywhere at the same moment. The here-and-now taking place in all other locations at the same time as it is for me right now, in this place… population of the world, 7.753 Billion (2020). Overwhelmed by the immensity of it in terms of ‘Self,’ “the vast myriad of things seen as independent entities” [Buddhadasa Bhikkhu]. “When the mind contains unknowing (avidyā) it inevitably experiences all things as being ‘self.’ It’s not that we make a deliberate effort to consciously establish a self. The ‘self’ is merely a condition that arises when there is grasping and clinging in the mind.” Attempting to grasp an impossibility, and it just gets more and more impossible.

Characteristic proliferation of mind when confronted with an immutable truth; when I understood that the Macular Degeneration AMD in my right eye is a permanent condition and I’d have to have the injections in the eye once a month for the rest of my life, I was reminded of a comment by blogger Jude: “… the mind is creative no matter what the stimuli. Imagination, let loose like a racehorse, goes careering off then is yanked back unwillingly and all kinds of fearful things arise, created by the struggle.”

How to have mindfulness so I can catch that creative awareness before I get hijacked by how bad it seems? But this is the classic “End Of Days” scenario (not the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, no not that one,). It’s the bit where mindfulness steps in and I stop having the injections in the eye, because there are more important things to be considered before the arrival of death itself.

Birth and death, I remember seeing a TV programme about a woman giving birth – it was the first in a BBC series on the human body, about 20 years ago, I remember it was 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 breathing passages, inflating lungs? Revisiting the birth experience… emerging into the world,  the first consciousness of where we are now sweeps through, and the body/mind organism is removed from its inner world.

Seventy-five years go by, and even though the mind clouds it over with improvised explanations, and received knowledge, the body sense knows I don’t breathe the air, the air breathes me. I am not looking out through my eyes at the world, the world is looking in through my eyes and enters my inner being. As the Buddha has said, all sensory objects enter the physiological organism through the sense gates āyatana, and sounds are heard, food is tasted, words are spoken, things are done but there is no doer doing the deed – no Self in charge (anatta). The process itself selects the sound, or the sound selects the process, same with mind actions, the words, the thought, the concept appearing in the six external sense bases bāhirāni āyatanāni. That TV film left me quite transformed… awareness is aware of itself, “consciousness is outside the thinking mind, the uncreated.” (Ajahn Sumedho)

I’m saying there is no self but there is the small sense of self associated with a craving for ‘things’ that enter the physiological organism. This is the self that arises in the sensory world, driven by desire and bound by suffering. When I stop thinking about it, it disappears. Not so for most people I see. Everywhere I look the surroundings are populated by people with bowed heads, unable to face the world without their devices, their small window on the inner self. Stuck in the basic functions of interacting with the world of sensory stimuli. The deluded, not-knowing state, attachment to sensory events, caught in the vast myriad of things, beset with random karma…a tangled skein of thread, a woven nest of birds, a thicket of bamboo and reeds. “It is by their not being able to comprehend the dependent origination, that people are entangled like a ball of cotton, and not being able to see the Truth, are always afflicted by sorrow – born often into conditions that are dismal and dreary, where confusion and prolonged suffering prevail. And, they do not know how to disentangle themselves to get out.” [The Buddha’s words on Dependent Origination]

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Image Details: Five forms of the Buddha, in Wat Phra Soon Kaew, Phetchaburi, Thailand

POSTCARD #478 Suddenly I’m not thinking about this and that anymore, just sitting quietly here, aware of the in-breath/out-breath. It’s that wait-and-see thing… and when there’s an opportunity, look for a place in the middle ground. Find equanimity in the midst of uncertainty, the balance, the midway point, neither yearning for this nor not yearning for this… find a temporary abiding there.

There’s a plan taking shape; I go back to Scotland for a visit, long enough to see what remains of family. Now that the threat of Covid is over and over, and under and through, we are free to go where we will.

Almost nothing of my UK ‘self’ remains. I have a sister, the other chick in the nest. And a cousin who tries to keep the strands of family together. The others… all gone in the passing years. I remember mother, warm skin-to-skin palms in that cold air-conditioned room, where she came to her end.

Present time is more connected with the past, where we arrived from, than with the future where we are going to; a place of unconfirmed likelihoods, stumbled-upon in following the here-and-now to the there-and-then – a past tense form used to refer to future time.

This returning is likely to reveal some old faces. Always and forever, (the collective ‘we’) are in recovery from to overwhelm, our dwellings lost in the floods of ancient times – the timeless metaphor of Mind overcome in a tide of worries, fears, and things left undone. Sorrow, lamentation and despair; swept along by unrelenting events, surfacing and going under. But it’s an adherence that appears more difficult to unstick from than it is.

Remembering my life as it was then, extending in the mind’s eye, from that existence stretching into the future. Now here in the future foretold, where there is no ‘there’, there. It’s ‘here, and now (always), nothing remains of the past, only the conceptual wreckage of it revisited.

Access the power that immediately releases the tenacity of grip, the jaw clench, tongue adhered to roof of mouth…. unlock, unfasten, undo; the process of having to reassemble the parts of who I am in every new circumstance – inventing a self that’s satisfied at times, happy and sad, dissatisfied other times.

Arriving ‘home’ after 30 years or more, in the tradition of long distance train drivers, itinerant peoples, travelling salesmen, nomadic Bedouin, and outsourced peripatetic teachers of music in rural schools, there’s an immediate opening to the incidental, innovative, event. Start again on a new page.

Rather than seeing it as it is, I’m looking for the ‘story’ that might be there, comparing it with other stories and understanding it all in stories that are composed of other stories. We create a working structure that we believe is nature rather than seeing Nature itself, in the same way as a ‘story’ is understood by a child.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not
[Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief]

POSTCARD #477 ‘It was as if lightning coursed within my chest. The impact lasted for a while, and for the next few weeks whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not.’ [‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life’].

The Dalai Lama, in the sixties, reflecting on the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, phenomena being dependent on conceptuality and his discovery that the “I” exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body; not an entity in itself.

The Buddha identified no-self, [anatta], nobody at home, no self anywhere, anywhen, nowhere, now-here. The world is a construct, look, see, glimpse the nothingness situated at the centre of everything [śūnyatā]. Most people flinch at the thought, because in the West we are taught that the self is real. We are to hold the Self in high regard, a mutual propping-up of the illusion. Everywhere we look, our self-concept looks back at us like a mirror reflection. Our whole environment supports the fictional self, made to measure, tailored to fit, we live in a bespoke world. The Self we know as the body and mind is thought to be not something we ‘are’ so much as something we ‘possess’, I am ‘me’ and this is ‘mine – the opposite of what we are talking about here.

About the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, there was a time, some years ago, I was alone in the Nontaburi house and I wrote a Post about the illusion: “The house is surrounded by trees, leaves filter a green light all around. There are birds, squirrels, lizards all kinds of critters. I see something move out on the path… is it a bird, dropped down from a branch to peck at something? There, it moves again – just a hop and it’s a few feet further on. I sit very still, don’t want to frighten it away. I see it now, sitting still, not moving. 

After a long time waiting for it to change position, I decide to slowly get up and see what happens when I do that. But it’s still not moving… maybe it’s injured. I come closer… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf curled into a shape, and blown by the wind across the surface of the path.  

Step back and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a short gust of wind blows the leaf. The animation of it is absolutely convincing, but I see it now as a leaf, not a bird. How disconcerting, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not.” In the same way, the mind is going around as if it were a bird, but it’s only a leaf in the wind. And we have the idea then that the “I” is a concept, not real. Compassion for those caught in the predicament of believing in the self, I was similarly held, looking for Truth in a battleground of untruths.The assumption is that if ‘I’ am my body, I am my feelings, I am my consciousness – then everything else is out ‘there, and if I’m in ‘here’, disconnected from everything out ‘there’. I’m isolated, alone, anxious – projecting a perceived self that I know, somehow, is not real. I need to resolve this issue of fearful uncertainty so I have a very busy life, work 5 days a week and spend time with friends at weekends. Together we go out and around looking everywhere for indications that align with that ‘Self’ held in high regard, visiting public parks and places of interest, taking ‘selfies’ with a nice background. ’Is everybody in the picture?’ Smile please… click! Everyone comes to see the image on the screen; let’s take another one… click! We all seem to be happy doing this, but there’s still that dissatisfied feeling, seeking a way to have whatever it takes to confirm the identity of that Self (held in high regard). This introspective state of mind allows another kind of ‘self’ to enter the picture, seeing the ‘self’ that is seeking. The seeking ‘self’ turns its attention to the seeing ‘self’ and is, at once, seen.

The self we self-create exists in a distorted reality, each of us as selves at the centre of our own universe. We act in our own self-interest, or as groups of like-minded ‘selves.’ It results in a conflict of interest between those whose lives and interests are, in fact, interdependent. Those of us who have let go of our selfish-selves, are part of a larger network of others, whose pains and pleasures and interests we share.

In a wider context there are scholars and spiritual leaders who say the awakened state is the state of no self. No self is the aspect that pervades all of reality. We are in a totality of consciousness, you can say we are part of God, therefore there is no individual self. When our soul merges with God there is no self – one drop in the ocean.
I am inspired by these speakers and professors and shall continue to listen to their words. In the meantime I’ll go on with the Buddha’s teaching and the ’nuts-and-bolts’ of how the process works, develops, evolves.

‘The deconstruction and reconstruction of the sense of self is necessary to become aware of the most deceptive of meta-narratives: the one we normally do not perceive because it is our ordinary, everyday reality – the ‘real world’ we take for granted but in fact is constructed.’ [David Loy: ’The Great Awakening’(4) 

This post contains sections from two earlier posts:

Rope Seen As Snake

Thoughts Like Clouds.

Also excerpts from a talk by Ishwar Ji Puri

And a paper by Jay L Garfield “Why No Self”