the way it unfolds

Posted on October 21, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #158: Chiang Mai: The tuk-tuk driver outside the Shangri-La Hotel charges me too much – he thinks I’m tourist staying at the hotel but I’m not, I’m visiting the tailor in the lobby. So I agree to the tuk-tuk price, not overly concerned, and he starts up the 2-stroke engine; key-turn ignition, a few revs of the throttle and I climb in. He edges out into the road, and in a flash of passing vehicles makes a fortuitous U-turn in fast-moving traffic so suddenly it takes a moment to see we’re facing the opposite direction, speeding away in a swirl of noise, vibration and acceleration. The outside world invades my space, rushes through a hot wind, no walls, no windows, no glass, except the driver’s windscreen up front and for a moment I’m drawn to that. But the accelerating jolts as he overtakes vehicles in front throws me back into a kind of La-Z-Boy sprawl across the double seat where it’s more comfortable, holding on to my possessions in case they get blown away in the gusts of air. And, at least, this way I can see out, under the overhanging flaps of the stretched canvas roof, blowing in the wind.

Everywhere you go in central Chiang Mai the old canal is on your right side. It forms a square, and to go from south to north the one-way traffic has to go round three sides of the square. Water fountains, huge ancient trees and the remains of a 700 year-old wall that encloses the old city inside the square. It all looks the same, all these journeys connected end-to-end, thinking of it as a repeat pattern, the total itinerary, past lives spent here and there, divided and subdivided into periods and instants of looking out at the world flying by thinking: ‘where are we now?’ But not recognising anything and in the blink of an eye back to being busy with thinking. Everything fits together, including my perception of it – the way it unfolds is the way it is.

The tuk-tuk stops at the traffic light and driver switches off the engine to save gas. All of a sudden it’s quiet; the tick-tick and creak of hot metal, smell of tarmac. Here I am in this laid-back position as if lounging in a fifteenth century market stall waiting for customers. Bamboo poles and the roof is thatch, enclosing the space I’m in; contained in the greater space all around. People walking by the wall, fifteenth century bricks sagging and curved like a slow moving wave that’s formed with the gradual sinking of foundations.

Same ‘now’ as it was then; seven hundred years in the past, it wasn’t any different for the people who lived then, returning, as I do, to this same reference point; ‘me’ the human being, eyes looking out ‘there’ at the world. All that remains is the emptiness of the moment; the sound of the engine, the vibration and the pressure of the bench I’m sitting on. There’s skin, hair; there are arms, legs, a head and eyes, ears, nose and tongue. I am a sensory-receptive organism. Just the warm air in my face and things rushing by.

‘… impossible to be aware of an experiencer because it is always the experience itself that momentarily occupies that space.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’]

————————-

Note: excerpts from an earlier post titled ‘applied Knowing’

not alone

Posted on October 17, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #157: Hat Yai: The 15th day of the 10th lunar month, October 12th, was the annual Respect for the Dead day in Thailand. Facebook busy with the exchange of photos showing the preparation of food offerings to the Dead and the large social events that took place in the temple grounds afterwards. Communities sharing the food they made in their own homes and ‘offered’ to the boowa in the temple’s cemetery area where the ashes and remains of the ancestors are kept. The people of the old world built a narrative around the enigma of death, life and the whole question of why we are here. It explains the mystery in a way everyone in the community can understand, something consciously shared. It also explains it to me, a westerner, 30 years in Asia, having one foot in both worlds – maybe I’m more asianized these days. With this awareness of death, I find I’m not alone anymore, all of a sudden… wow! In the West we somehow forgot there was anything we were supposed to know about life and death so we stopped looking. Forgot about the subjective world and spent most of the time browsing internet pages about quantum mechanics instead.

It’s not that we just don’t talk about death, we pretend it’s not there. Death is what happens to other people… something obscure, like spirituality; words cloned from an ancient artefact wrapped in the strangeness of another age. Jesus, Mohammed, Shiva, Buddha discovered the truth was inside, a seed germinating from ancient beginnings. They and all the revered persons in the history of the world were teaching people to find it for themselves (comes with the software). It’s not about having somebody else do it on our behalf.

But conjurors, alchemists, science developed and the Object elbowed its way into our lives, shoved Subjectivity out of the way, and we started to focus on what’s inside, thinking it’s out ‘there’. Instead of the actual experience, I’m listening to a story about what’s happening, watching a movie in my head; inventing a self that’s satisﬁed sometimes, or dissatisfied other times, a self that is incomplete, unfulfilled, searching for the truth and what’s real, and failing to see that it’s the searching that maintains the state of being lost. Thinking I am the only one that’s me, or is that just a thought thinking it’s me? And when, in the peace and quiet emptiness of the moment, there is no hungry ‘self’, no driving urge to have, to possess, to be… it’s possible to see that this world of suffering can be brought to an end.

“… death is as near to him as drying up is to rivulets in the summer heat, as falling is to the fruits of the trees when the sap reaches their attachments in the morning, as breaking is to clay pots tapped by a mallet, as vanishing is to dewdrops touched by the sun’s rays …” [Visuddhimagga, Mindfullness of Death]

————————-

Photo: Jiab’s community in the shared meal after the ceremony

changing the past

Posted on October 10, 2015 by tiramit

[This post is written in response to a Time Machine Challenge from Linda, at Litebeing Chronicles.] October 10, 2015, Chiang Mai, Thailand: I’ve had this intense headache and neck pain since the beginning of September. Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN), nerve damage caused by herpes zoster, and trying to come terms with the fact that it could be like this for the rest of my life – what does that mean? Now the pain is cushioned, I’m on Neurontin 100mg x 3 per day and they say this drug changes my attitude to pain. But at the beginning there were intervals when homeopathic remedies had an effect and the pain was gone for a time. The relief was overwhelming; how could the pain just disappear like that? I needed to know. The inclination was to turn towards it, questioning – rather than turning away in defence… finding some relief in switching off the default sense of: this pain is happening to ‘me’… and suddenly finding there’s no ‘me’ the pain is happening to.

In that heightened state of mind I’d get on to my meditation cushion, carefully… any slight movement and the headache returns. And it’s as if I’m sitting at the edge of the sea, beach sand beneath my folded legs. An incoming wave of thought enters, swirls around for a while then spins away with the outgoing tide – nothing remains. There’s not anyone engaging with these thoughts. Shortly after that another wave comes crashing in; incidental mental conversations scatter on the beach sand… things of no consequence, attention-seeking chatter of the mind dwindles away as it recedes, and it’s gone; returning to the silence of no thinker, falling into a landscape of pain-free, ease and gentleness.

What strange karma could have led to this? Present time conditioned by past experience, yet there’s also the possibility that the past can change according to how it is perceived in present time. Returning to old memories with such vivid clarity that it all seems quite different – I recreate an object in memory according to present circumstances. Reopen a remembered event that’s troubled me for decades and, for the first time I see it in a kindly way. Either it was ‘me’ that got in the way and that’s what caused the problem, or it was somebody else’s ‘me’ that obscured the issue. Forgiveness and compassion for the way we’re all caught (everyone is), trapped in thought and driven by the suffering of ‘self’ wanting things to be different, other than what they are. I’m aware of circumstances I’d not noticed at the time and that past event becomes redefined in the process of reviewing the situation.

The past is a remembered ‘now’. There’s the scary familiarity of bad memories – but it’s not as it was before; same story but somehow seen clearly and portrayed differently… a new production of an old movie, there in the altered past, seeing the present moment as a kind of back-to-the-future thing. Kindnesses and sorrows over the denial and avoidance – how could it be like this? It’s an acceptance in a no-choice situation, a giving-way-to-it action; passive understanding that there’s got to be a willingness to relax the resistance and allow everything to pass through, unheld…

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]

————————–

Thanks Linda! Look out for the next Litebeing Chronicles entry in this series October 11 by Sue. Note: excerpts from earlier posts included here. Photo: The moving walkway to the domestic terminal Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok)

deities in the hall of mirrors

Posted on October 6, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #156: Chiang Mai: I arrive in the hospital waiting area with the pain, this intrusive stabbing pain in the head and neck, postherpetic neuralgia, a permanent headache; sounds worse than it is – could be I’m getting used to it. There’s a flat screen TV and a coffee place, maybe I should order something? I have the iPhone to fiddle with, get busy with that… not interesting. Okay so try thinking about something else, but at this particular moment, there’s nothing else to think about – only the pain all around the right side of my head and neck. Think of something… thought itself is a free app I have the option to download on the mind/body device (namarupa) but even though I don’t have to download it, some of it seems to be here already, appears involuntarily. I hear the thoughts, the ‘voice’ inside the machine shouting out: Hey! the pain is happening to ‘me!’ It’s not happening to you, or them, or him, or her, it’s happening to me! The pain is ‘mine’, I am ‘possessed’ by it. Everything I love and hate, everything I love to hate – it belongs to ‘me’… it’s ‘my’ enemy!

With the pain swirling like a dense, dark cloud around my head and neck, I step carefully over to the TV that nobody is watching. There’s a remote, so I can flip through the channels and see where that gets me. Bend down to get the remote and the storm of pain happening to ‘me’ is there again, overwhelms everything, too much, for a moment I give way to it… and it’s then I notice there’s a space of somehow being detached from the pain, it’s something that’s not felt anymore, enough of an easing back from it to see the pain is an appearance, like everything else.

Sit down in front of the TV. Focus on the remote, press the buttons… so many channels. Some channels I recognise, then up into higher and higher numbers; places I’ve never been in before. Almost all of the channels are hazy or white-noise then I break through into a place that’s loud, clear and colourful. A Korean game-show, dubbed in Thai. It’s as if the storm of pain is all around but outside of this curious place – I’m safe in here. The scene unfolds, all the characters are lipsticked and painted with cosmetics like grotesque clowns, with amazing hair and impossible teeth, an embodiment of consciousness deeply obscured in layers of ‘self’. Man created God in his own image; a mirror reflection of the ego.

It’s a serious competition about trivialities; guests make appearances, have to tell anecdotes related to the question to gain points. They gaze at each other and see themselves as their own reflections; deities in the hall of mirrors – adults dressed to look like ‘cute’, children (kawaii), a real live dream-world; and the winning of the prize! Lights, colours music, the reward, congratulations, created laughter, spontaneous and heartening applause…

Just then, the nurse calls my name, I have to go and see the doctor. I get up from the chair slowly and take my pain away from the transparency of this kind of joyful TV state that’s doing its best to cultivate a desire for everything that is pleasing and a loathing dislike of everything that’s displeasing, perhaps unintentionally encouraging the hating of it, the not-wanting-it-to-be-there inverted craving, that contributes to the intensity of driving the economic machine… a kind of mental captivity; never seeing that the business of the actor is in the nature of appearances. The art of the illusionist, the politician…

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. [Robert Louis Stevenson]

————————-

Photo showing a product that creates a lower eyelid bulge. Source

rooms

Posted on October 4, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #155: Chiang Mai: Home is three rooms on the third floor in a condominium. Arrived in the evening, up in the elevator, unlock the door and enter. Lights on, blinded for a moment, drop everything, close door. It’s airless, windows closed – how long was I away? Must have been the end of August? A scatter of things left at the doorway as I stumble around absorbing the environment, trying to recreate the last time I was here, searching for familiarity in the furniture… things, objects which carry meaning. Anjali to the Buddha statue, books on shelves… and I find the memory of it all is displaced by present experience, as I step into a new time. Sensory data, the smell of detergent products (the cleaners came). It’s so quiet here, open curtains with a great sweep, sliding back screens, open the windows with a bang (unintentional), birds outside flutter and chirp and there’s the mountain air. Crash around the apartment, disturbing the space held by these rooms, what is contained is squeezed outside and new air enters. My shoes are lying in the hallway as if the owner has flown away, bathroom door flung open. It’s like a catastrophe in reverse – everything is suddenly peopled, inhabited, okay, this is where I live.

Router is flickering green lights, switch on laptop, available networks… okay I’m online. What else is here? Clothes hanging in the closet, whose are these? Looks like they fit me, must have been ‘me’ in a former life. Case lying on the bed, its cover open so wide it looks like the extended mouth of an opera singer reaching the high note… the emotionality of arriving at the final destination. All my clothes coming out, folded to a flatness like envelopes and layered, they feel cold from the aircraft. Flat-pack systems, I have to reassemble according to numbered diagrams and the hologram arises like magic; a sense of ‘self’ in these surroundings, clothed and cloaked in suitable disguise; everything needed for this temporary mode of being.

Head spinning with the varying ear-popping air pressures and momentum of the great storm that brought me here, the travel industry, largest network in the world. Taxis, escalators, miles of corridors, two planes, Delhi/ Bangkok/ Chiang Mai, everything is linked with everything else. Who runs it all? … is there a God? Inappropriate question right now, the spinning flow of it is just moving along by itself, I jump on as it’s going past, join the other passengers already there, get my seat, fasten seat belts and we’re all swept away like flotsam and jestam taken by river currents.

So now I’m here, j’arrive! Let’s see now, what’s in the fridge? Onions with long shoots growing in the darkness. Soy milk not yet past its sell-by-date and some dry oats that seem to be okay. Plenty coffee. Good! I can do grocery shopping tomorrow. Time to reverse in, switch off engine, lights flash in acknowledgement, and be horizontal for 8 hours…

“As wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,
Always, for ever and new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed.”
[Ovid, Metamorphoses]

————————-

stowaway

Posted on September 30, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #154: Delhi: For a few days now my bag has been lying on the bed while I search around for the clothes I’m taking with me on the trip to Thailand. The lid is hinged back, wide open like the beak of a baby bird in the nest. When the bag is filled to capacity (cases are always filled to capacity) it’ll close its mouth turn over on to its upright position and be wheeled away to the car, off to the airport, the check-in desk and into the cargo of the plane… a capacity inside a capacity.

At this time though, the case is still unpacked and maybe I should not leave the cover of it open like this in case there are small creatures in the air that decide to fly into the bag and come with me to Thailand – like the time we were living in Switzerland and Jiab came back from a long trip to South America and the last stop was Peru. From Jorge Chávez Airport in Lima, she had three connecting flights, many delays and more than 24 hours travelling before she was back in Switzerland in the evening. Totally exhausted, she opened her in-flight bag to take a few things out and went to sleep immediately. I didn’t move the bag, left there lying open and went to sleep too – if I had closed the bag, then the stowaway wouldn’t have escaped into the room, or when it did, there’s a chance we’d have seen it….

In the morning I woke up to this blat-blat-blat sound coming from the mezzanine upstairs, so I went up to have a look. Step by step and cautiously, there was a table light that had been on all night. Something was inside the shade – a very strange winged insect banging itself against the light bulb. When it stopped and lay resting on the inside of the shade I could see it was a hard shelled beetle-like creature that folded its wings up inside its shell… hmmm this thing didn’t come from Europe, I’d seen something like it in India. I went down to the kitchen and found an empty glass jar with a screw lid and came back upstairs; it was flying at the light bulb again, blat-blat-blat. When it stopped for a rest, I manouvered it into the jar, got the lid on and took it downstairs. A kind of greenish square-shaped thing with a pointy end, about three quarters of an inch in size and sort of flat, like a spade.

I tried to get Jiab to wake up to look at it, but she was not interested in that, totally asleep and it wasn’t easy. A very bleary-eyed, jetlagged look at what I held up in the jar for her to see brought only puzzled silence. After some consideration she said: Insects should not be in the house, and collapsed back on the pillow. So that was it, much later we discussed how it could have got here and decided it must have come in through an open window on her last day in the hotel in Lima and landed on the contents of the open bag. She closed the lid on it unknowingly, went to the airport and thus it stowed away on the flight to Europe.

I studied the insect in the jar for a while then took it to the balcony, unscrewed the lid and gave it its freedom in the warm spring air. Watched it fly off down to the bushes and grass below. Who knows? Maybe it found distant members of a species once related, twice removed, reproduced and now there’s a hybrid genus developing in that part of Europe waiting to be discovered.

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” [Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss]

————————-

Photo by M, showing her bag (upper left, light blue with pattern) being loaded on a domestic flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok

before already

Posted on September 27, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #153: Delhi: Getting things organized for the flight to Thailand, I go through my files and find this photo taken at Delhi Airport Departures last time I was there. Unfamiliar with this kind of airport signage: STOP/ LOOK/ GO, I’m lost for a moment in the what-came-first directionality, then I see it’s meant to be for vehicles approaching from the left. The driver is supposed to stop at the word STOP, then drive to the word LOOK, then he is ready to GO. Curious incongruities for me, an observer at the window on the third floor of the passenger terminal, I feel like a tiny speck in a huge transparent glass and steel building. A time/space anomaly, I’m reminded of something somebody said; part of a conversation with a married couple I know, in Chiang Mai. German husband and Thai wife – she doesn’t speak German, he doesn’t speak Thai. They use English to communicate, husband speaks it with traces of Thai pronunciation, and wife has a slightly German accent. We’re having tea together and I’m the only native speaker in the room so I naturally start to facilitate their searching for words, then realise I don’t have to do that, of course – English is their link language and over the years they’ve worked out their own system.

Their dialogue is a hybrid of grammar forms improvised as they go along. We’re getting ready to go out and husband says to wife, Where my blue socks. Wife tells husband: in the ironing basket… (mumbling quietly to herself in Thai: he can’t find anything because he doesn’t look properly). As he’s walking off to the laundry basket husband says, why you can move things without telling to me, and she follows it up with, I tell you before already. I lose track of the conversation then, thinking… before already, huh? Is it a point in time somewhere before ‘already’ happened? Or is it that she already told him about the socks, and that was before something happened that’s not referred to here.

You can say it in Thai (bok gon laew*) but in English it suggests there’s an instant in time we are searching for but haven’t discovered yet. Miniscule shavings of time, events that last for 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second (note: 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years). The illusion of duration, I’m experiencing a before/already disorientation, the present moment constantly updating itself in an attempt to find out where we are now. Cause and effect are parts of the same event; ‘before already’ is a screenshot capture of karma particles (cittas) in the time construct we inhabit. Lost in translation, so vast it doesn’t matter any more.

One moon shows in every pool;
in every pool, the one moon.
[Zen Forest Saying]

————————-

*bok gon laew: บอกก่อนแล้ว say before already

pasta in the past

Posted on September 23, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #152: Delhi: Video call from M, my Thai niece, she’s showing me her new glasses… they make her look so grown-up, hard to believe she’s only 11 years old. I remember when she was little, using English words and that creative playfulness: ‘pasta in the past’, something she learned about the word ‘pasta’ having its origins in China and brought to Italy by Marco Polo in the 13th century. So it became pasta (in the past) – as in pasta/ presenta/ futura – but it was also from the movie ‘Frozen’ where the main character (Elsa) sings the song, ‘Let It Go’ and there’s the line ‘the past is in the past…’ (click here for 9 second link) and M was singing along with a video of it as, ‘pasta in the past’, either because that’s how she heard it in some other animation, or she thought it was funny, or both… I can’t remember.

The wisdom of this childlike intelligence that seeks/finds creative solutions to problems – I must have had in my own childhood, over many horizons, long ago and far away. All the ups-and-downs; all the dramas embedded in our history that make us who we are now and form the characteristics of our future time. Births, deaths, marriages; I have a fragile, old, yellowed newspaper clipping of an obituary column that describes my grandfather who came from the Orkney Islands in the North of Scotland and was drowned in a fishing boat in the Moray Firth before I was born. The unseen cause/effect of emotional catastrophes enduring for decades; we’re unknowingly driven to take responsibility for things over which we have no control, thinking (or believing) that by chance we might stumble upon the key to unlock it all; the karma that’ll undo the karma that led to this.

M asks me: Toong Ting, you feel better now? How about your Chingo? (Shingles)… I tell her, yes, I’m okay now, thanks. She looks at me, Did you go to the hospital? (we go to the outpatients section of the local hospital rather than a private doctor) Yes, I went to the hospital, showed the doc my skin rash, looked really yukky, told him about the bad headache all the time. Did you eat the medicine Toong Ting? Yes… we take medicine, we don’t eat medicine, and she knows this but can’t be bothered to make the change from the Thai translation: kin ya

I took homeopathic medicine towards the end of the three-week frenzy of stabbing pain, then the recovery and falling into a huge landscape of pain-free, ease and gentleness. Altered state, revisiting old memories with such vivid clarity it all seemed quite different – I thought the past was irredeemable but it’s not. The past changes according to how it is perceived in present time. And I’d been so firmly attached to the endless thinking-about-thinking, watching the same old rendition of the story I’d assembled over the years.

My world was transformed, ideas and perceptions started to change; a fierce face appears in a kindly way, the scary familiarity of events unfolding but portrayed differently… a completely new production of an old movie. Kindnesses and sorrows, things I’d not noticed at the time become redefined in the process of mindfully remembering the situation. It’s as if I’m seeing my missing grandfather coming back to life; a rebirth happening here and now – in the same way this video call from M is happening now, although she is 2000 miles away. Toong Ting?, M asks, when you come to Thailand? I tell her it’ll be 29 September, that’s next Tuesday… Okay, bye! Everything comes full circle again.

A monk asked Yueh-shan, “What does one think of while sitting?”
“One thinks of not thinking,” the Master replied.
“How does one think of not thinking?” the monk asked.
“Without thinking,” the Master said.
[Zen mondo]

————————-

the orange tree

Posted on September 18, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 151: Delhi: Wake up in the morning and it takes a moment before I remember who I am. There’s a sense of having to press START to get it going, then the pieces fall into place… some parts of the jigsaw are late in arriving, fit into position as the image appears; it’s somehow reassembling to become a different picture as the moments pass… becoming another new picture, and more and more pictures. Then there’s the remembered pain – head turning on the pillow, stare at the ceiling; must have had it all through the night, but… not as bad as it was? Gently sit up and see how that goes, balance the cranium on top of spinal column, get up from the bed and gently walk through to the front room as if tight-rope walking… start the day.

Years go by, living on received sensory data and just taking it all for granted. Tiny molecules of experience passing through the organism in great rivers, and all of it goes unnoticed… until it malfunctions in some way. The buildings collapse, a natural disaster, illness – herpes zoster virus, shingles; permanent headaches. Through necessity I develop more of an investigative attitude to actions and reactions, monitoring the mind-body-world situation I am in, we are all, always, in… consciousness. Then the remedy, the simple homeopathic miracle and immediately some easing, enough to make the return to ordinary things seem possible.

Birdsong outside. A dog barks. Voices in the street. I go up to walk on the roof terrace. Look over the edge, the orange tree encroaching on our roof – see the first ripening orange this year. It looks out of focus because it’s arising out of the green it was before. Curious magic, the orange is changing colour as I stand here watching it in the early morning sunlight; object of consciousness becomes who I am – the ongoing transformation…

Beyond the mind there is no such thing as experience. Experience is a dual state. You cannot talk of reality as an experience. Once this is understood, you will no longer look for being and becoming as separate and opposite. In reality they are one and inseparable like roots and branches of the same tree. Both can exist only in the light of consciousness, which again, arises in the wake of the sense ‘I am’. This is the primary fact. If you miss it, you miss all. [Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj]

————————-

Lower photo: last year’s oranges

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj quote source: This Unlit Light

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

awesome selfie stick

Posted on September 15, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 150: Delhi: To start with, it felt like a small insect bite. The painful part was just out of my vision on the back of my shoulder – impossible to see it in the mirror, so I ask Jiab to come and take a look. She studies the mark on my shoulder and says, “it’s a…” (pause), silence for a moment – looking at it thoughtfully, “It’s a…” (can’t think of the English word). I find a small hand mirror and try to see my reflection in the large bathroom mirror. Twisted around, contorted and awkward, but still can’t see it so I ask Jiab to tell me what she thinks it looks like. She says, “peempo” (pimple) her voice is so close to my ear it’s like she’s shouting. Then, silence, focused on trying to squeeze it with fingertips… doesn’t answer my questions because one can’t squeeze pimples and speak English at the same time. I can hear her holding her breath, small sounds of effort: mmmnh… but I find it’s too painful; get the phone out of my pocket, go to the camera app and ask her to take a photo of it. She takes a close-up: click! Shows it to me… oh, I see! It’s not “peempo” (pimple), singular; it’s pimples, plural. Many of them… and then I’m aware they reach up under my hair too.

We go to see the doc, show him the unpleasant skin rash and tell him about the headache and neck pain all the time. He takes one look and says: herpes zoster virus, it’s Shingles – Jiab says chingo… in Thai they call it ngoo sawatdi (snake says hello again). The doc tells me it’s the chicken pox virus we get when we’re children that remains dormant in the body for decades, then “wakes up,” or reactivates. Why? Maybe because I just came back from four weeks in Scotland, fresh hilltop air, and must have lost the immunity to infection I’d acquired as a long-term resident foreigner in South Asia. Who knows… it just comes back.

This is how it is for me now, headache, pulsating on and off, all over the right side of the head and neck. Doc gave me ant-viral tabs, ointment and pain med, saying it’s a neural reaction to the skin lesions, and (interestingly) the nerves below the surface of the skin tell the brain there’s pain inside the body. This sets off major alarm systems and you feel it deep inside. I have to get around the fact it’s telling me all the wrong things about the location of the pain – stated also with a kind of urgency, like, Pay attention! This is serious… so I’m starting to worry it’s a brain tumor. And it’s not that, it’s actually in the upper skin layers.

Sometimes I sit on the meditation cushion and wait for quietness to come; thinking and thought has its own momentum, takes time to settle down, then the openness to the pain experience is just totally there for a moment. There’s the default sense of self: hey, this must be happening to ‘me!’ then an initial frantic search for an alternative that runs on automatic takes it out of the normal context. Mind does a bypass, and for an instant the pain is not happening to anyone – there’s no ‘me’ engaging with these thoughts. The awareness that a thought was just there, but now nothing remains except the awareness that I can’t remember what it was… and the sensation of pain, like the hummmm of an old fluorescent tube light that needs to be replaced.

‘The mind is the canvas on which our thoughts are projected and is part of consciousness. Our body is a holographic projection of our consciousness.’ [B. M. Hegde, cardiologist]

————————-