every picture tells a story

Posted on December 29, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #182: Bangkok: Some kind of cute little long-tailed dove-like bird has built a tiny nest in the ceiling fan we never use that’s outside on the porch; formerly the porch was where compulsive smokers would sit and flick ash into their ashtrays. Then smokers became less and less, dwindled away, became non-smokers like everyone else or joined la résistance, an underground movement. The fan hasn’t been switched on in years, the ashtrays were removed and everything was renewed, painted and no one ever went out there again.

So the birds decided it must be for them. We’re now standing behind glass doors, watching a bird arriving with small twigs held in the beak and squeezing through the bars with the structure of twigs to create a small nest base inside the metal guard. The process strikes a memory of another post in this blog from our time in Switzerland [Birds on the Balcony 1] about pigeons nesting on our balcony up there on the 7th floor. I had no camera and made a sketch of it.

The nest was in the old Christmas tree bucket we’d just put out on the balcony after Christmas had been and gone. Some of the bells and everything still dangling from the branches, the faded coloured paper of Christmas-Past… a forgotten thing. So the bird(s) just went ahead and built a nest in the abandoned tub. Strange really because the wrappings were intact, it was as if it were a continuation of a pagan rite. After a while two eggs appeared, which became two living beings with wings – and I saw the whole thing; their getting fed from the beak of the parent bird and the flapping of little downy wings. The birds on the balcony were the main focus of my attention for a long time. I feel I know such a lot about rearing birds, I’ve been through the whole thing.

Early on I realized they build their nests near human habitation because the proximity to humans is a good thing; humans chase away crows. And it was then I knew I had a part to play in this little family situation, patron and benefactor, and sure enough, security system… I had no time to prepare.

One day, I was looking out at the two cute little baby birds all huddled up in there, parent bird off to get food leaving me in charge, and suddenly I become aware of a black shape in the centre of my vision. It didn’t immediately click in my brain that it was a huge crow because maybe it’s so black, mysterious and a peculiar invisibility, a photographic negative, something that’s not supposed to be there, glinting a kind of deep purple and blue… a being materialised out of the unknown. And I’m kinda, speechless; hypnotized by it’s presence.

It slants its head with long pointed beak in the direction of the baby birds and makes a hop in their direction. I fall out of my chair, knocking over a few things in the scramble to get to the balcony door; collisions with the furniture: then a primal roar: ‘AAAAAHHHHHH!’ and wild flailing of arms, fling open the sliding glass door and the crow was gone, two little birds happy and safe, barely aware of the interruption.

My relationship with the birds became quite bonded since the visit of the crow and I felt a certain sadness when they both got their flying sense and left the balcony. Now another opportunity arises to see the beginning, and not the end….

Beauty is not caused, it is.
Chase it and it ceases,
Chase it not and it abides.
[Emily Dickinson]

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hypothesis

Posted on December 26, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #181: Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Here today and gone tomorrow or here today, next week tomorrow, time warp in an itinerary that is only continuous interchanges. Shrill announcements in Chinese, nine tones, so much air needed to get it all to sound clear, they’re almost shouting. Pain in the head, swallow medicine with a glass of water. Small tables seem to leap up and strike me with food, stabbed by cutlery and glass in the mouth, at night soft pillows try to smother me. Now sitting in an airport coffee shop with M my niece and she says, Look Toong-Ting there’s a mosquito on my chocolate brownie! And I need a moment to figure out what she just said, M looking into my disbelieving face, almond shaped eyes, black pupil almost fills the space. So I lean over to her small plate and M points cautiously with her little finger and there is a mosquito sitting there, or standing there (do they have knees?) on the edge of her brownie. I look at it closely. Do you see it Toong-ting? It’s a boy mosquito. This intrigues me… so small, the genetalia would be hypothetical – how can she tell? Where is this conversation going? Girl mosquitos drink the blood, she says. I shoo away this rude boy mosquito, and ask M if she would like me to go buy her a new chocolate brownie instead of that one that’s been walked upon by a boy mosquito? No she’ll just not eat the bit where the boy mosquito was standing. And she’s eating with a spoon so that looks possible; yes she carves away that chocolate brownie so what’s left is the tiniest cliff teetering on its own in a sea of white porcelain plate with crumbs of its relatives scattered around.

The whole world is a hypothesis – that’s the hypothesis. I’m reminded of something I think I heard somebody tell me about already, it’s only the females who go for the blood, hmmmm, typical, the males hang out in coffee shops and eat chocolate brownies. Then it’s boarding and we’re passing through apertures in walls, holes in the fuselage and sitting in 43H&J. I stow away the hand-carry bags in the locker above, a volume inside a volume, and M selects the aisle seat, sits quietly and perfectly straight, long-necked and graceful, looks around to the back with a fleeting glance that scans for detail all around the inside of the plane, right down to the front, her small eye beams flash through the interior between seats and all through the crowd unnoticed, absorb all data, processed to the brain to see if anybody looks interesting.

Meanwhile I’m sitting with my knees squashed up against the seat in front trying to find the optimum position of comfort – Thai planes are made for little people – ask M if I can put my leg in the space on her side and she agrees and seems pleased to have it there, a fallen tree trunk occupies part of her space. Asks me if I want to put the other one in as well, so I do that, one leg folded on the other and she’s fascinated by the size anomaly, but it’s too much. People will think I’m taking advantage so I take one out and fold it up against the seat in front like the mattress on a bed settee when it’s closed… it’s only a 50 minute flight

She continues looking around, stands up to look at where her seat belt is at, with head spinning nearly 360 degrees, long black hair sweeps around like curtains, then settles into her seat with the thump of her small weight and ‘click’ goes the fastener of her seat belt. These days, M is being an individual, self-contained ‘self’. She’s nearly twelve – and at that age you’ve got to know what you’re doing … I’m thinking it’s a bit sad that the crazy playfulness is gone. There’s just this beauty and sweetness and I don’t know where it comes from. M tells me to fasten my seat belt. I feel that soon it’ll be M taking care of me on these flights.

“A king heard the sound of a lute and it delighted him, so he ordered them to bring that sound. The servants brought him the lute, not the sound, and they had to explain to the king that the sound has no independent existence, but is created by the separate strings, box and arch, all elements acting simultaneously. Just as the king cannot find the sound of the lute, we can not find our self. “ [Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya]

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With thanks to to inaendelea @ the closed room for the end-quote
~ G R A T I T U D E ~
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all in the blogosphere

the road

Posted on December 22, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #180: Chiang Mai: For most people in the Christian world, the Christmas festival has jingle-bells, santaclausisms and the Jesus Teachings are embedded in this but that’s okay. Somehow the essence of it got assimilated in the warmth of our Christmas-shopping and why not, it’s all-inclusive isn’t it? For a reason that seems odd and perplexing to us, somehow the two go together; spending money and generosity means exercising the purchasing muscle… and it feels like there should be more to it than that but we’re not willing to say there’s anything wrong with it because we’re all in some way compromised. A tacit approval of consumerist behavior integrated into our lives. The essential part of our spiritual Truth got shifted out of the way and consumerism came along in its place.

The Truth of the Jesus Teaching can be applied today of course in the same way as it has been for centuries. What’s missing is the gnosis (knowledge) part of the teaching. The instructions on seeing the constructed nature of appearances and the stepping-through the illusion of our world to discover the non-duality between God and ourselves:

‘His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”  <Jesus said, > “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it (113).”’ [Nag Hammadi Manuscripts].

The Jesus Teaching is immersed in a oneness of spiritual teaching all of which say something happened, in a particular geographical location. An event (or events) took place, somewhere in the region stretching from Israel and the Mediterranean through to North India, a distance of about 3000 miles. There was an ancient highway there, a road not unlike the East/West route in the early days of the expansion by American pioneers – except of course along the way, there were already communities and townships, and here and there a populated place hundreds of years old or more. This road, formed through the necessity of trading, had become part of what was called the Old Silk Road trading route stretching all the way from the Pacific side of China to the Mediterranean Sea.

We can quite accurately imagine the people living there then – some of them traveling on the Road as a livelihood because it had always been there. Facilities were set up alongside for travelers, rooms and all kinds of industries and businesses were connected with it. There’d be talk about politics, marriages, births, deaths and there was the Mystery, whatever name it was called in one place and different in another.

Others would discern the truth, discuss and explain aspects of it and an understanding of the Mystery evolved; refined learning, study and excellent teachers instructing students: it’s not about worshipping someone else doing it on your behalf, the Truth is within, you can do it by yourself. This Truth, though, was thought to be subversive by the power structures, and in that sense there’s no difference between then and now.

It is interesting that all the world’s religions arose here in this same region: the three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and those related. Also the Brahamanic religions Hinduism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta and those related. We could quite reasonably propose that something took place here long ago that changed the world – maybe more than one event, enlightenment had become possible. All sorts of discoveries happened in the vicinity of this route… as long as the width of America coast to coast – the impact of it spread everywhere and all through time.

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Note: excerpts from an earlier post: Maya & Christmas
Image source: Dhamma from Phra Ajahn Jayasaro: ‘Teachers who have gained insights in the dhamma have confirmed that no matter what difficulties one has to endure, the results of the practice are worth the effort.’

words

Posted on December 19, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #179: Delhi/Bangkok/ChiangMai flight: It’s four hours flying time overnight, travelling West/East, same direction as the rotation of the planet. Arriving in a different time zone, and it’ll be morning when we get there but still night at the point of origin – flying away from something that’s not happened yet, a directionless experience, darkness, an invisible route that leads to its destination without any sense of getting there. Falling into occasional sleep with the sound of the engines, the hiss of the air… it feels like we could be flying sideways or in a slow rotating movement. Wake up with no time for anything, gather up my things and leave the plane.

Transit time at Bangkok for Chiang Mai is precise, speeding along moving walkways. Standing people coming towards me or going along with me, behind and in front. We’re all in transit to or from the domestic terminal; entering-into, and getting-lost-in long halls of steel and glass mirrors, holding on to signs as indicators in the mind. Noticeably more Chinese than Indians, the geographical switchover…

This is where the road takes two directions. Instead of the Hindi I’m used to all around me, there’s Standard Chinese (Hànyǔ), spoken by Southern Chinese tourists on their way to or coming back from Chiang Mai. A language of soft syllables and unexpected melodic intervals, a kind of tumbling down of words scattered on the floor. And blending through it all is the unobtrusive birdsong that is Thai, a language that sometimes enters a different frequency of intonation; sounds are simply known to be there and barely pronounced.

Through the gate and boarding the Chiang Mai plane, passengers already here in transit from Singapore. Find my seat and Chinese Singaporeans mostly Mandarin speakers (Singdarin) all around. They can get along reasonably well with the Chinese tourists from Southern China visiting Chiang Mai – listening and watching, interested in their shared roots, aware of the ancestors and historical meanings contained in language. Words cling to things, insist on their identity.

Indian Sanskrit is found all the way through Thai. Spiritual meanings found in Chinese are mostly assimilated and they’ve called it their own. In English we lost most of our conscious history but words are like acrobats, they name, describe, improvise; a metaphor just falls into place quite often, or like glass beads of different colours on a tablecloth gathered up, strung together with a little rethreading of the sequence and it’s a necklace.

All we have are words; there are no actual people here in our WordPress blogging world. No ‘you’, no ‘me’, just words and a dialogue. Friendships that go on for years. There are times when I hear something in the words, a familiarity in a voice I recognize. I can’t see you or hear you. I can’t touch you and will never meet you in the normal sense of the word. I just know you’re there (or ‘here’), or somewhere nearby and coming back later. Whatever language is yours, words are the same, arise from and return to a shared, received consciousness. Wherever you are it’s ‘here’ for you, and I’m ‘here’ too. Greetings, it’s the season of good will. Fare well, go with a clear, easy composure and abide peacefully.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness. [Wayne Dyer]

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enfold/unfold

Posted on December 15, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #178: Delhi: The way things are in the new place is still unfolding, and the memory of the old place, sadly enfolded, objects wrapped up, tucked away in boxes and closed, sealed with lengths of parcel tape in rolls… prrrrrp-stick! The sound of it went on and on: prrrrrp-stick! prrrrrp-stick! I had to get out of there; the prrrrrp-stick was giving me a headache. When I came back, the rooms were emptying fast; a change in acoustics, the sound of a handclap creates an echo… household objects vanishing at the same rate as large sealed boxes appear – rooms starting to vanish, the void begins to emerge through the windows, floor gives way and everything falls in, turns inside out and soon, every single thing is gone, floors swept… nothing remained at all. Our world, enfolded in packaging and placed in a truck, driven away and we left from the empty house… never saw it again.

Sad to leave that place. I was not there when it happened. When I got back, the new setting began to have a familiarity; I expected it would. The same thing in a different context, but something entirely new was starting to unfold, a ‘holomovement, indefinable and immeasurable’ (David Bohm). The world as we see it, is only part of a movement enfolding and unfolding. And there’s the paper-folding exercise with a sheet of paper, folding it many times and marking it in some way, making holes in it, cutting the corners off and opening it out, unfolding the whole pattern. ‘Enfolding and unfolding is the primary reality, and the pattern is secondary’*. Moving to a new house with a complete set of household items means the same characteristics are seen in a new arrangement and this strange familiarity, a transition, continues unfolding until you start to re-cognize it. This becomes the place where you are now, the place where you wake up every morning and gradually it becomes home.

The whole nature and appearance of things transforming, evolving, taking new shape, and the metamorphosis that moving-house entails, everything we might think it is or think it’s not, or could have been, might have been, or would have been nice if it weren’t for that something else that’s always impossibly difficult… all that is simply part of it too and contributes to the whole transfiguration. The extent of it would seem like it could break me to pieces if I tried to comprehend it in all its parts, and there’s a dependence on a subjective ‘self’ constructed out there in the world of objects, like a chess piece you can have control over, move around, and say, ‘this’ is mine, this is ‘me’, cushioned against the immensity which is held in awe.

I am infinite like space, and the natural world is like a jar
I am like the ocean, and the multiplicity of objects is comparable to a wave
I am like the mother of pearl, and the imagined world is like the silver
… I am in all beings, and all beings are in me. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.’ [Ashtavakra Gita 6.1 – 6.4]

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*Excerpted from “Unfolding Meaning”

non-objects

Posted on December 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #177: Delhi: Everything is new in this house, familiar things from the old house still wrapped up in boxes bearing the company’s logo. Now browsing around the rooms and the cupboards here and there, looking for something I need. Moving around the guys who work for the shipping company without getting in their way, looking on shelves, looking and looking for this thing and not finding it. Finding other things, but the thing I’m looking for remains unfound. I go into the bedroom, open a cupboard door. Door latch goes click look inside; things I recognize everywhere but not what I’m looking for… wait a minute, what am I looking for? Pause for a moment and realize I’ve forgotten what it was.

Close the door: click, and go away. The act of closing that door, the click sound, seems to bring closure to the search – there’s a sense I discovered it’s not in that cupboard so I can take that off the list and check out other places But wait a minute, that’s not it. No, what I discovered was that I’d forgotten what it was I was looking for… when that cupboard door is opened, a strange vacuum sucks away the identity of things in the mind. It comes as a shock. I’m focused on the empty space where it used to be… insisting on something that’s not there, non-objects. Seeing the awareness of seeking, as if there were two minds: the seeing mind sees the mind that seeks; a restless, searching for things-that-got-lost mind. Then this seeking mind notices that it’s been seen, and there’s a shift, the awareness of non-objects… awareness of ‘awareness’ itself. The motionless space surrounding everything.

No idea what I’m looking for, trying this and that to figure out how I will ever recognize it if I don’t know what it is. All memorable characteristics and every single thing about it gone. Reluctant to give up the search, I’m there in the midst of the most remote possibility some time after that, noticing some familiarity shouting out at me… why is that object seeming to seek my attention? Pick it up and remember the thing; seeking seen in a created world of being lost.

I know that nothing has ever been real
Without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come toward me, to meet and be met. [Rilke, ‘Love Poems to God’]

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Photo: pink meditation cushion among the shipping cartons
Note: excerpts from an earlier post titled: Seeking

sunlight on a rooftop

Posted on December 9, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #176: Delhi: Senses interact with the world outside and brain functions create a range of colors inside, as well as sounds, smells, tastes and feelings to fill the dreamscape of the mind – watching a movie in my head about sunlight on a rooftop in an urban area in North India, and this pale tangerine bougainvillea plant so clear and so much in focus it almost hurts. I have to take a photo of it.

The pain in my head that’s part of me now is somehow more at ease in these reflected surroundings, completely warm and comfortable, temperature today max: 26°C and min: 12°C. The rooftop is a place of ordinary things, unexceptional, like the one in the other house, but it’s got a smooth concrete floor, I place my palm on it… warm in the sunshine.

Through sensory awareness it’s possible to know something about how sensations are experienced by everyone, everywhere, how they understand their surroundings. Their responses to the objects of the senses, how they feel about what they look at, what they hear, or smell, taste, touch and mind (emotional) responses.

All of that is the same for me here and now, in the sunlight on a rooftop in India, as it is for everyone else. It’ll be the same for people in the near future, as far as we know, and those who lived in the past. I’m connected with the outer world in consciousness, in the same way all other beings are. As I look at this bougainvillea plant, the conscious experience of what is seen is the same for me as it is for everyone.

Consciousness that’s beyond words, so neutral and at peace that we aren’t aware it’s there. The attention given to any part of it is the karma of that event in time; the observer becomes actively engaged and it becomes a ‘thing’, part of the whole flow of everything passing through that includes the karma of how it came to be there, along with everything else.

All life is a single event: one moment flowing into the next, naturally. Nothing causing everything. Everything causing everything. [Wu Hsin]

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unseen

Posted on December 6, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #175: Geneva, Switzerland: Expecting things to be more or less exactly on time… or exactly on time with the precision of a Swiss watch. Allowing for as long as it takes to buy an all day ticket to maximise on the duration; time stamped by the machine just before the tram arrives… doors swing open and enter. Everybody programmed to believe they’re doing the right thing at the right moment – seems as if everything is like this; a fascination with the accuracy of the schedule and so many other things pass by… curiously concealed. We are unaware of the actuality, the feeling of being a human being – life itself, vanishing as we speak, an everyday sort of miracle of experience passing by… now it’s gone.

And it’s just this, the ordinary sense of things moving along in a comfortable way; we take it for granted so much it goes unnoticed. It’s this I miss the most – the normality – so often falling into the mind-state of wanting things to be different than what they are. Do I believe the neurologist witchdoctors when they say it’ll be okay in the end? Yes, nightmarish, because there’s this lady doctor with her pins and needles she intends to stick into my head, prick… can you feel zees? Prick… yes/no? (French/German accent) Yaow! Okay, try here: prick, Yaow! Is zat more painful zan zee first one, or not? TRY IT AGAIN! Focused on her needle so much, she forgets the closeness to my ear and it’s like she’s shouting. I jump, keep still please! I hear her breathing with assertiveness, confidence, I’m in her hands… she’s attempting to map out the route of the nerve. Then, after many punctures, and happy with what she has found, she tells me: ok you take a deep breath now and, as I do that, she pushes the long shaft of her needle into the scalp – I hear the point scraping across the bumpy surface of the skull. She depresses the plunger, starts to void the syringe; it takes a long time, the scale of it seems as if seen in close-up, huge like an approaching express train in a tunnel… high-pitched scream.

Things go dead and I don’t feel the many small injections that follow after. It’s done in ten minutes, excess fluid dampening my hair, trickling down my neck and the doc says to let the skin absorb it. So I lie on the left side, let it be like that, wet neck, head on pillow and for a jetlag instant, sleep arrives, crash… light is switched off – alerted suddenly by the blackness, crash, back here again, the world returns. Instead of the headache there’s this anesthetized skull-stuffed-with-cotton-wool feeling, like a loud party going on behind a wall that’s built inside my head and I already have the party hangover but can’t feel it because that’s behind the wall too.

So, nothing to complain about but when I sit in a meditative way, it’s like a loud electronic buzzing sound that masks everything. I feel I can’t get there; I’ve lost it, there’s a missing piece… seek/find; caught in the search mode – how will I know it when it returns? What does it look like, what does it feel like to be okay again? Or maybe it’s like this – right here and now in a darkness, indistinct, unseen…

I am the taste in the water, the light of the sun and the moon, the sound in the ether, the ability in man, the fragrance of the earth, the heat in the fire, the life of all that lives, the strength of the strong, the intelligence of the intelligent, and the original seed of all existences. [Bhagavad Gita]

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Photo: a suspended art form above the estuary at Bel-Air Tram Stop, Genève

somewhere in a former life

Posted on November 30, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #174: Geneva, Switzerland: People, hovering around the exit door on the 18 tram to Carouge, faces look at me incidentally, I sometimes see one I think I know from times gone by in the metallic click over smooth rail joints, and the gentle jigging motion of the tram as it is now, and so it was then, travelling under an assumed identity, peripatetic teacher of English, here and there on trams every day, passing through security, a practiced conversationalist, and into rooms in banks behind closed and thickly felted huge metal soundproofed doors, gold taps in old bathrooms. Are these the same francophone faces now? Not those emerging from soundproofed rooms and stepping into their black tinted screen limos with drivers holding the door, no, just the ordinary folk you see every day now and then but never talk to, maybe a passing gesture, a nod of recognition?

Now I’m back here nearly two decades later. Do I see those same individuals looking at me with a nod of recognition held in a moment paused, seeing me looking at them in the same kind of way… a hesitation almost: hmm, est-ce que je vous connais monsieur ? (do I know you sir?) Look into these eyes for a penetrating instant with the flickering expectation of acquaintanceship… and in the midst of finding maybe I can’t quite recall what it is exactly, realise with some shock that it’s the awareness of – what is it? The nearness of death? Is this what I see looking back at me? Death, the answer to that question about what didn’t happen here? The past tense disappeared; everything I did in the 8 years I lived here was/is unfinished, and cannot and will not ever continue. It died?

I was in a life here. Now I come back from the dead, the Ghost of Christmas Present, not to ungracefully haunt all these innocent bystanders with more foreign talk and raconteur. Not to upset these slightly-known people with faces turned toward me, stepping onto or getting down from the 18 tram to Carouge two decades ago, and even now turned to glance at me a second time with their elegance of wispy threads of golden hair combed carefully over a bronzed skull with large dark brown skin spots, vapourised and paperised faces, traces of soft skin held nicely like curtain folds at the corners, beneath which these old eyes look out like an unfinished sentence… Je m’excuse mesdames et messieurs, I’m not here to disturb you with things that never took place, but to close those thick soundproofed doors that seem to swing open by themselves somewhere in a former life.

Thus there’s always something about the question that’s gently pondered, not posed, but poised, considered…it has to be the right question, forever not quite decided upon; what might it be? The moment spent in contemplation of what form this sort of thing could possibly take is enough to begin to know it… or it begins to be known. A kind of indirect position so carefully arranged; or maybe it was like that as it fell into place, who can tell? Induced then deduced. Words don’t hold meaning for very long, the question gets forgotten about in the end (they usually do), or possibly it’s still there in the detached state, just not functioning as a specific inquiry now, more like a wide-openness that’s waiting for an answer in the same way as there are answers, lying in their own wide-openness waiting to be discovered. A kind of non-verbal alertness, a strange familiarity, a passing recognition that seems to go on opening and opening, and opening; déjà vu revisited. It was always here….

But if, transcending petty ego, all the world is known as life – as only living energy – then how can death arise at all? For one who knows the world like this, as only life, there is no death. In truth, there’s only deathlessness. [Upanishads]

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Photo: Watching the sun setting from the room on the 8th floor of the building at Pont-d’Arve, near Carouge

floating mountains

Posted on November 27, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #173: Dhammapala Monastery, Switzerland: I cannot seem to get a good photograph of it – as the sun appears over the mountain and lights up our small valley. Maybe a better photographer than me can try; there is a strange illusion on walks around the monastery. Mountains appear to be travelling through the landscape like great ships. Looking from a position high up on a steep incline, with tree tops near enough so you can follow their trunks down to the forest floor below, then looking up at the mountain top that appears above the tree line, which is still in the same frame of vision – and suddenly it looks like the mountain behind the trees has disconnected itself from the earth below, drifted away from its moorings; a gigantic gravity-free mass of rocky earth and vegetation suspended in the sky. I’m reminded of the floating Hallelujah Mountains in the Avatar movie; based on the Huang Shan mountains in China.

There’s a simple light-headedness about it, seeing these massive mountains drifting around in the air, I have that gravity-free feeling about everything I was formerly attached to in the mind. This is how it is; maybe all beings tend to be in a permanent state of ‘on hold’ because we’re earth-bound creatures attached by gravity to a spinning planet. Born with the received, deeply built-in default mindset that there is this holding-on thing we have to live with; it cannot be explained, it cannot be questioned – we can’t let go whatever happens. But today this usual uneasiness about letting go has vanished for me… just slipped away, the heavy pull of gravity is absent, missing, I feel released from a tremendous pressure; stepping easily over the snowy mountains of the mind. Leaping over the precipices, this freedom has always been here; I just didn’t notice it before. The mountains are liberated from their roots, groundlessness… it’s like this because everything we see, feel, smell, touch taste and hear is a perception, saññā . Things feel solid and appear to be real but they’re not ‘real’, there’s nothing to prove that there’s anything out there at all.

I came here once and spoke with a man who was experienced in hill walking and had been climbing for some years. He went into these mountains alone and started running and jumping over dangerous ravines to small footholds and making all kinds of joyful leaps but taking crazy risks and he got lost for most of the day. When he found his way back to the monastery he had a major epiphany about it all – realized he’d lost all normal sense of control. Gravity had gone from him for a while. I wondered how many mountain climbers really have a tendency to want to fly that they have to be rational about…

Normally we human beings assume the world ‘out there’ exists just as we perceive it (by way of eye, ear, nose, tongue and physical contact) but if we consider these sense organs, it must become apparent to us that the world ‘out there’ is really dependent on our particular modes of perception. For instance, the human eye limits conditions, by its very structure, the objects we see. It is well known that a bee can see, as a colour, ultraviolet but we have no idea what such a colour looks like nor, of course, can we find any words to describe it. It follows therefore that our sense organs being differently constructed from that of a bee (or any other non-human being), our world “out there” is not necessarily the world as it really is.’ [Phra Khantipalo, ‘Buddhism Explained’ 1965]