context

Posted on May 8, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #126: Delhi: Jiab went to Jaipur and sent me this pic of a cow walking past the Hanuman Ji Temple. This lovely cow seems so unconcerned, passers-by too; harmony, things just moving along. All kinds of beings going on their way, dressed in this body given to us – not perfect maybe but this is not a perfect world – and I’m saying that because of waiting here in the hospital drinking bottles and bottles of water before I have the ultrasound scan of the abdomen. Anyway no urine pressure yet, the nurse says with a frown, and tells me to drink more water.

So I’m sitting on the hard chair in the corridor watching the strangest people go by. There’s an Imam dressed in white with long grey beard, ancient men in strange costumes I’ve never seen before – could it be Afghanistan? There’s an Arab lady dressed in black, head to toe with a slit for eyes to see the world through. All kinds of amazing beings… and I suppose I must look pretty strange to them too.

Then I receive the pic of the cow on my phone… wow! There’s something about India; this enlarged context, the all-inclusiveness. The first thing you notice is how it looks from the outside rather than what’s inside, the context is where the thoughts are situated, the content is what the thoughts are about. In India the diversity is tremendous; language, culture, behavioral protocol. People can’t easily share thoughts, that ordinary intimacy is not there in the way we know it in the West.

Anyway, I’m still having this problem, and think maybe if I walk around a bit that’ll help create urine pressure. I have to go to the pharmacy section to pay the bill for some medicine so I’ll do that. Ask how much it is, and it’s 294 Rupees, so I give the man a 500 note and he asks me if I have smaller change – this is always an issue in India – so I have a look and manage to dig out all the small notes I have to give him 300 rupees, I get my 6 rupees change and the man looks pleased, I paid the amount in full and the fact that I have no small change left, is not his concern – how could it be? What to do? Only the 500 note and the rest are thousand notes. I have only a few tens but this is not a good situation to be in, nobody has change for large notes.

Go to the canteen and buy a bottle of water for 15 rupees, I give him 20 rupees and he asks me if I have the 5 rupees… here we go again. So I can’t find the 6 rupees anywhere – where is it? Lost deep in my bag somewhere. Okay never mind about the 5 rupees, keep it. Mumbling and unhappy about all these hoarders of small change, go sit in my place and gulp down the bottle of water. Still no urine urge, have to drink more water, go back to the water guy and give him my last 20 rupees, assuming he still hasn’t got 5 rupees change. He gives me the bottle for 10 rupees in lieu of the extra 5 rupees I paid last time!

Suddenly my faith in the world is restored, and immediately I have this urgent need to go see the ultrasound nurse. She admits me and there’s that cold slithery thing moving around the lower abdomen. But it’s done, next stop is the toilet and all is well.

“The Dalai Lama once said that the things he found most surprising about Westerners was their self hatred […]. In Tibet, he said, only the village idiot feels self hatred.” [Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

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it can happen any time

Posted on May 6, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #125: Delhi: Taxi at Bangkok 5 am to the airport, first flight to Delhi. Travelling with Jiab who’s busy with meetings about the Nepal earthquake. I came along to Delhi because M is busy in Chiang Mai, and it’s a high stress situation, not only the earthquake but also my BP is still high and I thought the Indian doctors might provide a second opinion. The Delhi doc was very nice, so good that everyone speaks English here, and he put me on a new set of medication; let’s see what happens. So it’s back to the snarl of traffic further complicated by the construction of an overhead metro and underground train system – enough to give anyone high blood pressure. You go through a very crowded place, with lots of people you don’t know, so you tend to close in a little bit; lots of things going on and you can’t process it all. You can imagine taking a horse into a railway station and it would go crazy because horses have feeling and impression and there’s just the overwhelm. Somehow we’ve gotten used to this; the world we create. I am a theatre of processes, transitions… going along with what is assumed to be true. The construct is everywhere, staring back at us. And yet it can simply disappear in a matter of days – as in the Nepal earthquake. The media, TV and newspapers, a filter through which we see things… is this the received wisdom of hundreds of thousands of years? Self-evident; something we can see. There’s no mystery about it. Maya is a beguiling concealment – a kind of enslavement… the world as duality. Necessary to decontaminate ourselves from the media, move away from that noise. Looking for the karma that uncreates all bad karma… when this is, that is. When this is not, that is not. Jiab will be busy with Kathmandu plans for the whole of May and to allow time for other work to go on. Then she will go there for June; organize labor, seek out ‘the bare-foot technician’. Rebuild the construct, the world we live in. I’m going to be stuck in Delhi for the hot season, waiting for an extension to my Indian Visa. Then I have to apply for a new UK passport (no pages left). I shall mostly be pacing the rooms, outside temperature 40°+C (hopefully air-conditioned if the electricity holds out) Time for considering the construct, I need to have a project, maybe collating the posts into a book. A friend told me his father was in ICU for 17 days then expired last night… it can happen any time. ‘… we have no way of knowing from within the waking state, whether or not it is a dream, just as we have no way of knowing from within the dream itself, whether or not the dream is real. However, we are not in the waking state any more than we are in a dream. We are Awareness and the waking state appears in us as does the dream state.’ [Rupert Spira] ————————-

This post contains excerpts of a talk by Ajahn Succito. Also excerpts from a video sent by SeeingM

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

change in plan

Posted on May 3, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #124: Bangkok: Ah well, life’s like that, we made a last minute booking after M went to Koh Krabi and Jiab and I got a flight to Bangkok. No traffic on Sunday so we were at the house before we knew it. The plan is Jiab goes to the Bangkok office on Monday, leaves for Delhi Tuesday and goes to Kathmandhu in a few days to organize the rebuilding, after the earthquake, using local staff. ‘Bare-foot technicians’, on-the-job training, they get paid quite well, mostly clearing rubble and then re-establishing infrastructural stuff. It could take a long time. For a more up-to-date account of how things are check out garyhorvitz’s blog: Kathmandu Komment, Everything is Everything and more recent posts.

I’ll go back to Ch’Mai and continue with care-taking duties of M until 16th May then back to Delhi. If I stop and think about it, I find I’m starting to take a position against it, locked into the suffering and looking for some kind of punishing way to develop the problem – a grasping reaction, I have the cause but no effect. Let the mind unstick from it, the karma of cause/effect/ flowing like a torrents in a river. Present time contained in the here-and-now of where I am, as if it were contained in a book I’m reading… open at the page where I was, re-enter at the same place and time when I was last here. I am a character in a story about a world seen through clouds of thoughts thinking thoughts embedded in this self I recognise as ‘me’.

How am I to inhabit what remains of this lifetime, feels like I’m at the end of the railway track, can’t go any further, step down from the train and there’s this open view out to sea.

“Lal Shabaz was wandering through the desert with a friend as evening began to fall. The desert was terribly cold, so the two pilgrims began to gather wood for a fire. With their pyre neatly constructed, they realized they had no way of igniting it. Lal Shahbaz’s friend suggested that he transform himself into a great bird and fly down into hell to collect coals for a fire. Lal Shahbaz considered this a wise suggestion and flew away. After many cold hours Lal Shahbaz returned to his friend empty-handed. Puzzled, he asked why he had not returned with fire to keep them warm. Lal Shahbaz replied, “There is no fire in hell. Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, their own pain, from this world.” [William Dalrymple]

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upper photo: a Thai mythological creature guarding the gates of a Buddhist temple.

lower photo: a Buddha Rupa unharmed in the Nepal earthquake

With thanks to Gary Horvitz ~ G R A T I T U D E ~

you can only experience something if you’re separate from it

Posted on May 1, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #123: Chiang Mai: We’re on the second day at Doi Ang Khang, not far from the border with Myanmar. Living in a created log cabin structure built on a hill. It’s possible to walk up to the main hotel building because it’s not far but there’s a public vehicle, song-taew that M likes to go on, so we have to call for it every time. M gets on first then I clamber aboard. She laughs: Toong Ting, the whole thing goes down – paloomph – when you get on! Ah well, it’s nice to be noticed… it’s because I‘m heavier than most Thai people. Jiab gets on and the suspension of the vehicle hardly alters.

We start going up the hill and at the top get into another vehicle that takes us all around an amazing wild garden titled Suan 80, created by the much revered King of Thailand on his 80th birthday, at the time of writing he is 87. The whole of this area was planned and created by the King and is titled The Royal Project. M runs and skips along the ascending pathways through exotic flowers and fields of vegetables. The simplicity of it. While Toong Ting lumbers along stopping at places where you can sit down, M runs back and asks if I’m okay, then runs off again.

I’m struggling with mind states that do more harm than good. Years spent busy with the traffic of thought, intensity, uncertainty and believing simply that this is NORMAL – this stress is how life is supposed to be lived. No instruction, advice, no indicators; it never occurred to me that maybe I should stop pretending I have control over what happens and just let it be… a lifetime of small events that I couldn’t do by myself – it’s simply taken out of my hands. Okay, give up control and I’m carried along in the wave… am I simply selecting the data that fits the theory? Mindfulness of the question is enough for the present time.

Otherwise pretty much immersed in thinking about what other people did and failed to do and should have done but didn’t and the true purpose of life is seemingly missing… thus finding my way out from the complex untruth created by those with whom I had placed all my trust. But I’m past that now, can see through it; karma being as it is, it’s not impossible that in some future time there may even be a quality of gratitude for so-called elders’ ignorance (their ignoring). This is the human condition.

A small bird appears out of nowhere, lands on a thin tree branch, The tree branch takes its weight, swings low and springs back up – bird folds away its wings, looks around, experiences the swing of the branch. Do trees know the birds are there? Does water know the shoals of fish that swim through it; is the blue sky aware of flying flocks of migratory birds… then the thought arrives: you can only experience something if you’re separate from it.

“There are forms, shapes, colors and so forth, but there is no thing there. There is solidity, and no self-existent reality. All there is is the quality of the experience itself. No more, no less. There is just seeing, hearing, feeling, sensing, and cognizing. And the mind naming it all is also just another experience.” [Ajahn Amaro]

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Upper photo: The Border point with Myanmar (Burma). Middle photo: Thai Script tells us this is Garden 80. Lower photo: The road continues on the Myanmar side; same terrain, different country

everything is a metaphor

Posted on April 29, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #122: Chiang Mai: Jiab suggested we hire a car with driver and go to Doi Ang Khang, the mountain, for some fresh air and hill walking – beneficial for health for someone in my condition. Do I want to do this? Ask a question, and the answer comes with it – as if it were part of the question. The answer is in the asking. So off we went. M sitting beside me in the car and I had my passport in my jeans pocket. She felt the hard square shape: What’s this Toong Ting? I said it was my passport. M knocked on it with the knuckle of her finger:
Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Hank…
Hank who?
You’re welcome.
It’s playing with the idea that Thais cannot pronounce properly the ‘th’ sound in ‘Thank You’. Then another one:
What kind of dessert do ghosts like?
I don’t know.
Ice cream (I scream).
That led to the pronunciation, and difference in meaning between ‘dessert’ and ‘desert’. For example, the whole central part of Australia is mostly a vast area that consists of nothing but custard and bananas and blobs of ice cream, fruit and currants.

It was a four-hour journey, pretty scary steep incline of roads and sharp bends kept us alert. Also gulping of air to get rid of the ear pops until we finally got to the top, into the hotel room and M runs through all the space, jumps on the three beds and into the bathroom. Mirror takes up the whole wall. I see her looking at herself – not satisfied. Ah well, we don’t usually fall in love with our reflected image, there’s always something judgmental – things that are always not as good as they could be (the Buddha’s teaching on Suffering Dukkha). The antidote is alert watchfulness, mindfulness, sati; mindful of being mindful, remembering to remember to remember. Learning how to learn.

Lunch came and before we could start to eat, M had to take a photo of it and send to her friends. It’s an amazing thing that we use the wonders of technology to send an image of somebody’s lunch over the Internet; a created postcard sent and instantly received. Then the actual lunch is eaten and gone forever. Except that M wouldn’t eat enough, and Jiab said something about she was too thin. I could feel the hopelessness in M, like… please don’t tell me this again! So I said I thought M looked nice, thin, elegant: What does elegant mean Toong Ting? I said she looked like a movie star, beautiful… then after that I kinda regretted saying it because she started acting strangely. We got back to the room and she’d hardly look at me and at the same time cuddle up against me. But it was soon forgotten when we got out and started the walk up the mountain.

The first stop was the pagoda, one hundred and ninety steps up and down. I couldn’t quite figure out why it was there, except that everything is a metaphor. Trees wrapped in coloured cloth, auspicious meanings I understand only because I’m expected to understand (to be continued)

“our world and the beings in it in all their diversities are but the illusive manifestations of mind. While the illusion is taking place, it is “real”, but its essence is unreal like a dream. Therefore regard all phenomena as insignificant, similar to a dream, and rest your mind in this perspective in the moment.”[ The Seven Points of Mind Training of Atisha]

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The Atisha quote comes from a comment by Ben Naga in a recent post

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

‘return to go’

Posted on April 25, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #121: Chiang Mai: I have an appointment with the doc about my blood pressure. It goes all right, arm placed in the tightening strap, BP is reduced slightly, get more pills and come back in 10 days. Downstairs and out; we have a slightly complex schedule today and I have to say there’s a small anxiety in me that’s saying maybe we can’t get it all done; M’s mommy is coming to pick me up in the car outside the clinic, then we’re going to the airport to meet Jiab coming from India. I get a call from M: How are you feeling Toong Ting? And I say yes I’m fine, where are you now? There’s a silence then M says: I’m in the car. I keep forgetting she doesn’t know locations… I ask, are you near? There’s a dialogue with mommy in Thai then: about 10 minutes from where you are. Okay I’m waiting outside the clinic bye-bye! Anxiety again about waiting there for an unknown period

Car arrives and I get into the back seat with M, mommy in the front, driving. I always have to get in the back with M – she insists. Jumps past the large arm rest in the ‘down’ position that divides the back seat to make space for my large body mass. A small smile as if to say you’re welcome, then the shuffling of play objects out of the way and debris of food wrappers on the floor and lately ‘the book’ she’s reading placed on the armrest. It’s her world, it’s where she spends a number of hours of every day going to and from school, and then stopping at restaurants to get fast food because Mommy has to work every day – there’s nobody at home to cook. I get in the back seat and there’s a sense that this is where M lives.

We get to the airport and have to drive around and around because there’s just nowhere to park. Anxiety returns. When it’s near the time I get out and meet Jiab, help her with her bags, car comes by and we’re in. Jiab has to sit in the front with mommy because M doesn’t allow her in the back – in fact there’s an immediate small resentment when Jiab speaks to me with some affection. Same thing when we stop at a Japanese restaurant Oishi Shabushi, I have to sit next to M. This is a place where there’s a moving belt of small plates of food and you have about an hour to eat as much as you want for a set price. The haste and urgency of it encourages M to eat a lot. The rest of us are required to show enthusiasm. So, once again I eat too much and we stagger out to the car park and drive back to the condo.

It’s obvious to me, with this high BP and expanding waistline I have to overcome this anxiety and try to get back to normality, the middle way, the Path; ‘return to go’ as they say in the monopoly game. Get back there and start again.

To be able to be unhurried when hurried;
To be able not to slack off when relaxed;
To be able not to be frightened
And at a loss for what to do,
When frightened and at a loss;
This is the learning that returns us
To our natural state and transforms our lives.
[Liu Wemin, 16th Century]

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small journeys

Posted on April 20, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #120: Bangkok/ChiangMai flight: it just happened by itself, we got on the plane and it took off, M said na boowa (boring) and spent most of the time reading her book, 400 pages, a detective novel. It’s the largest book she’s ever read, and now 2/3rds the way through, I’m amazed and I can’t find anything to say, so I have to read my book too: Rabindranath Tagore: ‘The Religion Of Man’, a series of lectures at Oxford in the 1930s, in which he insists on a higher Self – must have been ground-breaking in those days. Looks to me, now, like wishful-thinking although there are so many examples of folk songs and ordinary utterances; I’m more or less convinced. He was popular in Oxford because of his high class (Brahmin) lineage. I ask M about her detective story and receive such a complicated narrative it’s difficult to follow: okay, yes that’s interesting, so we can talk about this later.

We get landed and mommy is waiting to receive us, a big hug, into the car and we’re away. Stop for lunch on the way and I can see M has this hang-up about having to eat… she’s not hungry but mommy has this anxiety about it, so we have to go eat. M performs the best she can and I eat until I’m full… required to set a good example, although M can see through that – it’s a game we play; a secret we have. Back in the car and they drop me at the condo. A world alone just me and the pills I have to take for high blood pressure and the silence of no questions from M. I fall asleep and dream about all kinds of dialogue with M even though I know she’s not here. Wake up in the darkness and it’s the same as if she were here, watching a YouTube video and when I ask her a question, she doesn’t answer… just a presence.

This is how it is without her…

“It cannot be gain-said that we can never realize things in this world from inside, we can but know how they appear to us […] the sky and the earth are born of mine own eyes, the hardness and softness, the cold and the heat are products of mine own body, the sweet smell and the bad are of my own nostrils” [ Rabindranath Tagore. “The Religion of Man”]

being

Posted on April 17, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #119: Bangkok: The Thai new year came and went and it happened I had to go for a medical, nothing important I thought, but the doc said I had high blood pressure and gave me all kinds of pills to take. Anyway, when M got to hear about it, I became her patient and she’d arranged something on the porch, a comfortable chair and low table for my laptop, thermos and books. There’s also a ceiling fan out there so it was nice to just sit in the garden and simply ‘be’ there with the birds and the squirrels and ‘be’ a human (‘being’ as a verb), just being human.

Trying to focus on the infinitive form of the verb ‘to be’, the strange thing is, when I catch up to the present tense: ‘I am,’ it immediately becomes the past tense: ‘I was,’ (a moment ago). Chasing the elusive present time, a mind function identifying a miniscule speck of familiarity in a vast universe of an expanded present moment stretched beyond belief. And in the time taken to process it, the present moment immediately moves back into the past. It feels like everything happens after the event. Impossible to comprehend, words cannot reach…

Birds fly in all directions; the numberless beings in the world, and M enters my line of vision, carefully carrying a small plate of fruit, places it on my table and asks me how I’m feeling. Looks at me with her small oriental face, her eyes shine – consciousness is limitless so it can take this form. She does a spontaneous twirl and runs off with a hop and a skip … still partly a child. M isn’t the individual ‘I’, she’s the ‘I’ of everything that ever was – no particular self, she has a great number of selves, spends her days multitasking identities. A fictional character dressed in a costume that lasts a lifetime, playing a part in a narrative contained in an anthology of short stories. And the book is shelved in a vast library categorized by subject and author, most of which we have all read at some point in former lives.

Can’t help thinking somehow I missed the point of it all in my own childhood. A shadow of regret; life was only attraction, aversion, indifference: I don’t want that, I want this – something thought to be deservedly earned because I’ve been having such a hard time trying to obtain it… always, always, out of reach. Believing in the user illusion; the things we cling to (the clings we thing to). And the Church days; pray for peace and experience struggle. Pray for understanding and discover confusion. Pray for patience and encounter unbearable endurance. I never thought there could be something wrong with the question. Belief in the impossible and denial of the obvious. ‘God’ is not an object, ‘God’ is the subject…

The entry point is time evolving, developing, mushrooming out in all dimensions; the effect becomes the cause of the next effect and next cause in events that seemingly merge from a ‘before’ to an ‘after’. The bigger picture is that of a great river enfolding/unfolding and the presence of a sense that all of it remains to be seen.

“…we do not experience a succession of nows. This present now is the only now there is. The now in which the body was born is the very same now in which these words are appearing. It is the only now there ever truly is. [Rupert Spira]

there is no memory

Posted on April 14, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #118: Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Early morning and we have a flight to catch. Some urgency in getting M organized, her bag with tinkling-bell/woolly-teddy-bear appendages and putting on these brightly coloured shoes. Then down in the elevator, along the corridor and all the doors that open different ways… obstacle course. Is it a pull or a push? M says it’s a plush. I simply assume they should all be the same but Western standards don’t apply here (not necessarily a bad thing). There’s a tug, an unyielding shove but we get most of them right, out in the street and the taxi is waiting.

No time, bags flung in and we’re careering through the quiet streets at a surprising speed. Fortunately no rush-hour traffic, it’s a public holiday, Thai New Year (Songkran) and we’re at the airport; suddenly there… it feels like some kind of space/time anomaly has taken place. X-ray machines, no queue at check in, boarding pass issued, more X-ray machines and we’re in Departures with more than an hour to spare.

There’s an old 80s song: ‘…and you may ask yourself, well… how did I get here?’ (Talking Heads). I’m as bewildered as anyone would be at this time in the morning, whatever it is that brought me here. In a larger sense, karma, causality – even though time cannot be excluded, in a manner of speaking. The flight is called, and the announcement that elderly passengers and families with small children are invited to board first. M says: Toong Ting? We can go now, it’s our little joke, because M and I qualify on both counts… so hand in hand we line up behind the wheelchairs. It’s as if I’m being led by M, not the other way round, and in a moment we’re walking down the ramp, on to an empty plane. Enough time to get the bags stowed away and into our seats before the great sea of passengers pours in.

Flight leaves on time, uneventful journey, I ask M if she’s okay, it must be really boring for kids, not being able to see above the high passenger seats. I look down at her small face, and don’t see M, I see her grandmother who died three years ago. M says she’s okay and I get up from the seat; go along the aisle to the tiny toilet at the very end of the plane, a kind of perspective shaped endspace inside the tailpiece of the fuselage. Curious experience, everything is tailored to fit; we live in a bespoke world. Just enough room to turn around see myself in the mirror, believing in this mirror reflection of myself that takes the place of that which is aware. Who am I? No answer required, no seeking, no wanting or needing. Just being with the question.

Back to the seats and M is still there of course. In no time at all we’re landed, bags picked up from the belt, on to the trolley out of the airport, into the car and the family take over from there. I can relax when we get to the house, M is busy changing clothes and getting ready to join the thousands of people out in the streets for the water throwing games. Just before she leaves, M comes to my room with a small bottle of auspicious scented fluid mixed with water and pours a little on my arm and rubs it in, Happy Songkran Toong Ting, runs out the door.

‘There is no memory. There is only the act of remembering.’[Nyanaponika Thera]

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Photo above shows the Songkran water party at Silom (see this link). M is standing on the left

The Nyanaponika Thera quote is sourced in Cabrogal’s post: Meeting the Mahathera

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

too much

Posted on April 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #117: Chiang Mai: Walking to school with M and we pass this 30 foot high sculpture of a cat with a moustache and a small handbag… too much. That’s how it looks to me, thinking of the many poets who died for love of the metaphor – and is this a monument to their too-muchness? But that’s only how I see it, a European living in Thailand. I ask M if she knows what it’s supposed to be? And look down at this small person walking beside me, backpack bouncing slightly always out of sync with the motion of her walk. She tells me something at length, but I can’t hear properly, so acknowledge with hmmm, really? Wait to see if there’s a follow-up response, but we’re focused on going to school and besides, we’re in this public place.

It’s too much – me being here, walking with this eleven-year-old Thai child holding my hand, and she with her Thai cultural behavior. When I ask M if I’m walking too fast, because she’s so small maybe I should slow down? She says, no Toong Ting, is okay and places her cheek against my forearm as we’re walking along in the heavy traffic, no pavement … it’s that too-much thing again. She’s on the inside all the way until we get to the main road and turn right. Then I need to change hands so I’m on the outside shielding her against the traffic and little M is on the inside. Three people on a small motorbike go past us, looks dangerous – but I’d be wrong to say that’s too much; it’s ordinary low budget. For them, it’s just right. What’s too much is that I think it’s too much, and my views and opinions are not relevant here.

A few people recognize us, smile; night shift security guards salute… too much; I’m not sure how to react when I’m being saluted at. We get to the school; other kids are there, the familiarity of it. M takes her shoes off, waves bye-bye and enters the building. I set off back the way we came, my too-much reaction is unavoidable and have to struggle to see it just as a reaction. For the Thais it’s different, there’s this built-in sense of ‘too much’; food is too spicy; too many colours in a room interior… that’s what they call ‘too much’. The word is bprung dtàeng, ปรุงแต่ง. There’s the mind form of it too; thinking too much, ‘conceptual proliferation’ the Buddhist term papañca. Human beings are like this; the reaction to follow thought is as automatic as the eyes see, nose smells… thoughts proliferate.

“It is quite amazing to watch as the mind takes the simplest thought, jumps on it, and runs off in all directions. Just as the ear hears without any effort (and in fact it takes a lot of effort to make the ear not hear), the mind proliferates effortlessly, and it takes a lot of effort and/or training to hold this tendency in check. It’s the unbidden “going” of the mind to so many different subsequent thoughts that is important, rather than the diverse places it goes […] By becoming masters of the directions in which our thoughts proliferate, we can achieve freedom. The Buddha recognizes that the mind’s tendency towards Papañca is unavoidable, and instead of fighting the inevitable, he teaches us how to ride (and tame) the tiger.” [Leigh Brasington]

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