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”

POSTCARD#476: I wake in the morning, fuzzy headedness, the sound of the leaves in the trees rustling and whispering together… blustery winds. Dark sky out there, it’s going to rain. Small birds dash around searching for the place where small birds take shelter. The rain will be heavy, lasting for hours/days. It’s the season of green leaves sprouting in trees, hedges fill out and enlarge, and it’s a novelty for me even though I’ve lived here for many years. I come from the North of Scotland where weather events are not so overwhelmingly generous in such an abundance of plant growth.

Into the shower and pressurized water massages the *headache I live with  – lulled into a relaxed state, mesmerized by the sensation. I am a sensitive being these days, sharp penetrating light frequencies and high pitched squealing sounds activate the headache and it can take some time to recover. Usually I have to take extra meds which cushion the pain but shift me out there… living on the edge.

Step out of the shower and I’m deafened by the downpour on the roof. Sensory mechanisms function without my involvement. There’s just an alertness, waiting for things to arrive in consciousness. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognitive functioning held by this immense sound. An all-inclusive experience of awareness itself.

I’ve learned how to see pain in the context of the 4 Noble Truths and focus on ‘The Cause’ of it which I cannot control, but can stay in neutrality; in that small space that’s neither here nor there. Knowing this brings it all to a standstill for a moment, and this is how it is, the awareness of it, simply that.

Stories of past and future arise and the narrative requires me to ‘believe’ in the story before it begins. I’m hovering on the brink of what it could be, still contained inside that little space that’s neither here nor there… do I want to get swept away by an engaging story when I’m quite comfortable being here? It’s telling me I have to get into it, become it, *bhāva,

No thanks, I’m ok here in the space where it hasn’t happened yet, looking into that place in the mind where unfinished stories usually reside, and find instead a curious stretched-out present moment. The strangeness of it, wary and watchful… a trembling awakenedness of an immensity, just this.

Mindfulness of non-becoming. See how that feels here under the roof, with the deafening sound of rain, the distractedness of it, the here-and-now of it… like a nonstop, fierce applause, forever and always in present time, ‘the uncreated consciousness’. I’m merging with the sound, headache hiding in that place where headaches take shelter.

Stormy gusts intrude through doors and windows passing through downstairs rooms and corridors leading to other rooms and through the open doors and windows of neighbors’ houses, I can hear their voices, hear a door slam, see somebody rushing to take in the last of the laundry hanging on the line. Tall trees bending, branches dancing in the wind.

*title inspired by a discussion with Steve T.

*headache: Post Herpetic Neuralgia, Right Occipital Nerve. Seven years now and it’s not as bad as it was, maybe I’m used to it, higher threshold/tolerance *bhāva:  In Thai Buddhism, bhava is interpreted as the habitual or emotional tendencies which leads to the arising of the sense of self, as a mental phenomenon.

POSTCARD#475: Fragments of a thought pieced together from associated thoughts, memories of a past time brought into present time, together with things thought about in future time. Words can snatch at things, pin them down and try to get them to say what they are (What is this?), in the context of other things already identified in the mind. Any ‘new’ experience is assimilated and the actuality of it is filtered, obscured, cloaked. As Tommy G said, ‘words seem to give the mind a sense of knowing but in awareness knowing is before the word.’ Conscious experience is perceived in an instant, then framed in language and it becomes something else.

Pause for a moment and everything stops, just the circumstance itself – there is only one moment – only one, all the time. I wake up to it every now and then, there and then, here and now in this place and time, but it is always now, the present now, the forever ‘now.’

“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]

I write it in my notebook, and that holds it in time, meanwhile thinking seems to have jumped from the thing I’m thinking about to the next, and there’s only that instant to decide what this new thing is before it becomes something else. In the interval the mind is engaged in ‘thinking it’, everything moves on and I can never seem to catch up. Language is an overlay placed on reality, gives everything an identity, duality, ‘me’ and ‘you.’ Language tells the story, creates a fiction I get lost in. Nothing is what I think it is.

The present moment feels like it’s an immediate event occurring ‘now’, but there’s also a feeling that it comes from somewhere else. Time is a measurement I apply – applied time. Maybe this is something that has not happened yet… it happens later, gets reflected upon and what I think is ‘now’ is actually a moment of hindsight situated in future time.

How can I be sure things are what I think they are when I’ve only just started feeling my way through something not experienced yet? The vast present time – the continuing ‘now’ phenomenon enfolding and unfolding, transforming from the future into past in one continuous surging-through movement that cannot be explained. What a strange mystery it is; future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, ‘now’ falls back into yesterday… something ‘remembered.’

Mind creates a structure to explain time, otherwise how could we understand the enigma of how the past is ‘gone’ and the future has not arrived yet? Hovering on the brink of the smallest pause before it gets there, the empty space of not-knowing what it is, and held like this for an instant…

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

POSTCARD#474: I’ve been looking through my old notebooks, hard-to-read handwriting, scribbled in urgency many years ago – the stream of consciousness, where everything seemed to carry meaning. Not enough space to outline the vast wholeness. This was before our days of phone cameras and scanners. No internet, only books in the library, photocopies for a charge per page. It was all heavy and slow but this was normal for us, we didn’t know anything different. No email, no text-messaging, etc. Only letters folded into an envelope, lick-stick-on stamp… thump, and post in the mail box, then wait for days for a reply…

I left the West in 1982 and that’s how things were then, very different from the East. I used to like to select a postcard to send, a picture on one side; blue sky, a beach, palm trees and on the other side; space for the address, exotic stamps, and not much room left to write. Minimalist choice of words to express what you want to say to the other person, to read and reflect on the present moment and how it is there and then, compared with how it is here and now, in this different place and time. Then stamp… thump, post in the mail box, and there was no reply, usually. The postcard message is a statement… this is how things are. The present moment stretching out into the future and back into the past.

A prevailing sense of Self, of course, running through every part of the configuration – leading to unwholesome attachment to all kinds of unhappy mental states. That’s how it was in Northern Europe, the belief in the self was encouraged. We were not taught about meditation, and structuring the mind in order to see the ‘self’ is a fiction the mind creates. Instead we just muddled along and I could see something was not quite right, but most of the time I was living in a dream; the deluded not-knowing state and random karma: ‘a tangled skein of thread, a woven nest of birds, a thicket of bamboo and reeds…’ The thinking thing gets a hold, loves it, hates it; tries to control it, tries to figure it out.

But I found the way out, I was lucky enough to have a friend and got a few books that helped me understand. Also, meditation where the self is seen for what it is; it appears sometimes, holding on to Mind and Body and if  you don’t let it get attached, then it’s gone: “… the ‘I’ exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body, not an entity in itself (Dalai Lama).  So the Buddha, the Dalai Lama and other enlightened beings are saying, there is no self. That’s how it is if you’ve reached “… the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving. (the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha) “— SN 56.11 (dukkha nirodho ariya sacca).

For the rest of us still engaged in unhelpful attachment, it’s hard to let go of our years of conditioning. My difficulty with practising ‘no-self’ had been extricating myself from the Judeo-Christian conditioning that assumes the existence of an eternal soul. It still haunts me some nights but I’m okay about that now. I understand everything that arises, ceases. “All dharmas (phenomena) arise in dependence upon other dharmas: ‘if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist.’” In other words; if you can accurately remove the cause, then the suffering falls away.

Often it takes place in an unexpected way, the problem is gone and in its place an empty space – the strangeness of it, a luminosity and awareness of immensity. Sometimes it happens if I’m in a dangerous situation say, fast moving traffic behaving in a wild sort of way, I look into the mind and there is this stretched-out present moment! I’m excited and watchful. A trembling awakenedness, it’s like that place,” the zone,” that athletes refer to – not always reachable but I’ve been there, and understand better now, the meaning of the word, ‘śūnyatā,’ when the little sense of ‘me’ is gone and there is only consciousness.

There are different ways of understanding the word ‘consciousness’ and  describing the experience, Ajahn Sumedho calls it ‘unsupported consciousness, an awareness that’s different from the basic functions of consciousness,’ when you are interacting with the world; distant from the usual state of simply being aware of what’s going on in the body/mind.

And beyond all of that is the unsupported consciousness. It’s there that my curiosity is drawn. The thinking mind disappears, no boundaries, a non-conceptual experience… an omnipresent consciousness all through the centuries of present ‘moment-ness’ and there’s so much more to be said about this.