over there

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chaop-nontPOSTCARD#51: Delhi: Jiab left for Bangkok this morning and in the afternoon I get a text message saying she’s over there now; it’s a 4 hour flight, no jet-lag and it’s warm and nice. Later I’m up on the roof terrace and she calls me on Skype, laughing and talking… checking out, meanwhile, how she looks in the little window in the Skype frame; eyes anchored in the same position as she’s turning her head from side to side. I’m holding my phone screen like I’m inside a mirror looking at her sitting in that same room I was in just a week ago. What time is it there? 1½ hours ahead, so I’m in another time zone, one I know quite well, a kind of back-to-the-future thing. I have to think about it for a moment… the ‘now’ I experience at this moment was the future for me when I was there in the past. Pause for a moment, let’s see… there is always only ‘now’, past-time and future-time swirling around it in a vortex. I need to get some distance from it, so I think in these terms: I, as the subject, see ‘it’ as the object over there somewhere. The world is ‘seen’ and the one who sees it, curiously absent at the actual moment of seeing, is currently processing the image, and trying to locate the ‘now’, which by this time, seems to be lost somewhere in the past (or the future).

Senses interact with the outer environment, the brain conjures up the colours, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings; these inner landscapes of the mind, and I don’t usually even consider that the reality behind the dreamscapes of the senses is in any way different from what I think it is. The 7 basic colours in the spectrum created by the human brain may be sourced in a field of colours nobody has ever seen; all the subtleties between a white opalescence that’s nearly turquoise, and black that’s not a colour in itself but an iridescent purple.

I’m thinking of these exotic birds up here on the roof terrace, perched on the electric cables at eye-level and looking at me – outrageously coloured, orange, black purple, way off the scale of normality. What is it with these birds? Do they fly in and out of this unseen world we’re talking about here; into that reality where ordinary speech frequencies sound the same as the arbitrary shrill whistles, trills and pings of birdsong; an ocean of intoxicating tastes and fragrances, and a vast range of tactile sensations? You could say it’s totally out of this ‘world’.

We have to filter all this exotic disorder or we’d go insane, get it into a simple format so we’re all watching the same movie: ‘oh, I see what you mean.’ It’s an objectified reality; the world is a concept understood by the mechanism I call ‘me’. The snag is though, the constructed ‘self’ has it’s own momentum and I need to be mindful about engaging with whatever it is that’s invading sensory awareness at the time. Let it pass through like a river in a landscape, and be mindful of the tendency to fall into the dream, into the fiction I’ve created; a pleasing kind of hypnosis or an exhausted state where I find I’m subject to conditions seemingly situated in the reality I created ‘over there’. I need to be mindful that, to become me, I have to think ‘me’. The ‘me’ that I think I am depends on me ‘thinking-it’ into being. Be able to release from this tendency and mindful of the times when I forget to be mindful…

Our objective experience consists of thoughts and images, which we call the mind; sensations, which we call the body; and sense perceptions, which we call the world. In fact we do not experience a mind, a body or a world as such. We experience thinking, sensing and perceiving. In fact all that we perceive are our perceptions. We have no evidence that a world exists outside our perception of it. We do not perceive a world ‘out there.’ We perceive our perception of the world and all perception takes places in Consciousness.’ [‘The Transparency of Things’, Rupert Spira

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Photo image by KP: Chaopraya River at Nontaburi, seen from the Tree House Restaurant

a patch of sunlight

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IMG_0540POSTCARD#50: Delhi: It’s cold here, fingertips touch the keys tentatively, unwilling to make contact. Feeling chilled all the time and can’t seem to get comfortable with this February weather. I just arrived from Thailand, my bag, still unpacked, contains the blue sky and sunshine of white shorts, sunglasses, T-shirts and rubber slippers. Wow it was hot there; I’m reluctant to let go of that nice feeling.

It’s like the world extends only as far as the immediate surroundings of where I’m currently situated and it takes a little time to reassemble things if I move 2000 miles to somewhere else. There’s the tendency to hold on to nice things and I’m particularly reluctant to let go of it this time because the visit to Delhi is only for a couple of weeks, then I go back to Thailand again. So I’m in transit, not really ‘here’, and that’s why I’m making the excuse that it’s not necessary to unpack my bag.

My bag is an extension of ‘me’, it’s my identity, part of the self-construct I’ve created, the same as everyone else’s sense of ‘self’. I feel a fondness for my bag, a familiarity and a connection with that small volume of folded clothing, flattened garments, papers, books and various computer cables, that’ll be zipped up tight, X-rayed and pushed back into its space in the aircraft baggage section along with all the other bags, and away we go back to the sunshine. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I’m stuck here in the cold for a number of days.

When it’s warm enough I go up on to the roof terrace, to the place where the sun shines through between the buildings and there’s a patch of sunlight where I can sit  on my chair. The chair is in the same place it was two months ago and for a moment there’s a kind of presence about that empty chair… déjà vu; the ‘self’ that was there at that time is gone completely, no familiarity with it – yet I remember being here quite clearly. Now I’m sitting in the warm sunshine, recreating a ‘self’ that suits this time and place, for this duration, knowing that soon it’ll be gone too. Phenomena are as they are for a short time and disappear; it’s as if the appearance of everything has the quality of a pencil sketch, a pleasant unfinishedness.

I look at things, and they’re gone – it’s the time needed to process the thought. Objects are experienced not in present time but just as they’re slipping into the past; everything is always seen in hindsight. Conclusions arrived at after the event. Nothing remains. The day I die will be an ordinary day. The moment after I’m gone will be no different from any other. It’ll be like a pause in the middle of a sentence… the focus on the object slips away, the next moment will just be the next moment and things will go on as if nothing happened. The fragility of the world held for an instant then it’s gone, only the space where everything used to be and the silence left behind…

‘Usually when we hear the teaching on not-self, we think that it’s an answer to questions like these: “Do I have a self? What am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist?” However, the Buddha listed all of these as unskillful questions. Once, when he was asked point-blank, “Is there a self? Is there no self?” he refused to answer. He said that these questions would get in the way of finding true happiness. So obviously the teaching on not-self was not meant to answer these questions. To understand it, we have to find out which questions it was meant to answer.’ [Thanissaro Bhikkhu: ‘Selves & Not-self: The Buddhist Teaching on Anatta’]

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magha puja day 2014

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OB-SC487_0308ai_H_20120307120048POSTCARD#49: Delhi: It’s Valentines Day today and by coincidence it also happens to be a special day for Buddhists; Magha Puja Day, the full moon of the third lunar month. On this day, 2500 years ago, 1250 enlightened monks came from different places in India to pay respect to the Buddha. No mobile phones in those days, of course, so how did they get it organised? Maybe it was telepathic, all these monks had been ordained by the Buddha himself and it had only been 7 months since the Buddha had had the experience of enlightenment – a time when everything must have been vital and immediate. The arrival of the monks was thought to be a key event in the development of the Dhamma teachings and this was when the Buddha gave the “Ovadha Patimokkha” discourse: the three principles of the Teachings: do good, abstain from bad action, and purify the mind.

On Magha Puja Days in Thailand there’s the circumnambulation ceremony, walking clockwise three times around the temple holding flowers, incense and a lighted candle. For me it’s a time to sit on the cushion for a while, if possible outside in the moonlight. A time to consider what it must have felt like to be present in that ancient gathering. The great circle of the full moon in the dark sky of 2500 years ago illuminating everything, and the assembly of monks seen in its mysterious silver light. That moonlight would have been the same as the moonlight we experience today. The function of seeing is the same now as it was then. And for those monks sitting in the moonlight so long ago, the associated consciousness that arose through the act of seeing was the same consciousness arising that is always arising; consciousness of an ever-present flow of sensory data from outer to inner. They would have contemplated the truth that ‘I’ am a mind/body organism and an inseparable part of the whole that appears all the way through time – everywhere it’s the same moment. For those monks sitting in meditation all those centuries ago, the sensation of the breath in the nasal passages, a coolness of air gently present, would have been no different from how I experience it now. They would have contemplated the breath in this way; watching the in-breath, the out-breath, and the awareness that arises with that feeling was the same awareness I experience here and now.

Through the subjectivity of human experience, that special Magha Puja event of the gathering of the 1250 monks is suddenly brought into present time. The ‘now’ that happened then is the same ’now’ happening as I write this, 2500 years further on in linear time. The entire history of the world is like a very, very, very long moment. The ‘now’ moment is, of course, always present and, although I may think of that gathering of monks 2500 years ago as happening in the ancient past, I have to remember that a moment experienced at that time was a moment happening in present time for those who were there.

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“Refrain from doing evil,
 cultivate that which is good; 
purify the heart.
 This is the Way of the Awakened Ones.” [Dhammapada v. 183]

‘The first stage of cultivating the way is refraining from following all that is evil. It is about learning to say ‘no’ to ourselves when we need to. As a result, we discover later we can say, ‘yes’ without losing ourselves. If we don’t recognize our unwholesome impulses for what they are, we might think the bad stuff is only in other people. The second stage of cultivating the way is developing that which is good. Even if it is only a small moment of goodness, don’t dismiss it. The third stage is purifying our effort of the taint of ‘me’. Even when we have completely finished redecorating a room, the smell of paint fumes remains. Though our practice might be getting stronger, the sense of self-importance could be getting stronger too.’ [Ajahn Munindo, Friday 14th February 2014 – Magha Puja]

valentine palindrome: 14/02/2014

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IMG_0532bPOSTCARD#48: Bangkok Airport: Man wearing a bright red shirt leans backwards with hands behind his head just as I take the photo and it looks like a heart shape. Sitting in a coffee shop at Concourse B waiting for the 8.40 pm flight to New Delhi, decided to take the photo of the interesting curved shaped roof structure and didn’t see the heart-shape till I arrived in Delhi. A happy coincidence… and Valentines Day is special this year because of the palindromic sequence of date, month and year: 14/02/2014. Coming into Delhi from the airport, in the midst of pretty fierce traffic, I thought how nice to have this kind of numerical valentine and a day of love in a city that’s normally bristling with displays of proud male plumage and all things unloved. Then, looking through the image gallery in my camera phone, I discovered the photo – a gift, there in all the noisy traffic, a reminder to see beyond the tightly controlled mind state experienced in the driver’s seat.

The contemplation on loving-kindness, metta, begins with a focus on myself, my own well-being, and using that as a point of reference, I can extend it to others: “Just as I wish to be happy and free from suffering, so may all beings be happy and free from suffering!” Then I extend the thought of loving-kindness to a person for whom I have love and respect; and to those who are close to me. Extending then to those who are indifferent and to those disliked. It’s about the necessity of cultivating feelings of kind consideration to others; a conscious act of generosity rather than abiding with the unconscious default holding and keeping things to myself.

Arrived at the house, good to be back after two months away. Unpacked and found the Buddha’s Words on loving-kindness: the Karaniya Metta Sutta.

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech,
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied,
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm and wise and skillful,
Not proud or demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
 Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born
May all beings be at ease!
Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world:
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.

[Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha’s Words on Loving-Kindness (Sn 1.8), translated from the Pali by The Amaravati Sangha]

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[See also the Buddhist teaching on The Four Sublime States: Contemplations on Love, metta, Compassion, karuna, Sympathetic Joy, mudita, and Equanimity, upekkha, by Nyanaponika Thera]

 

‘now’

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BkkTaxi3POSTCARD#47: Bangkok: So profoundly stuck in this traffic jam it feels like time has stopped. It’s not today; it’s yesterday – same taxi, same traffic jam. I raise my head from the book I’m reading and look out at the world. No sense of having moved further on, the back ends of vehicles and bits of buildings. This is a continuation of the same day and the interval that happened in between, dinner, 8 hours sleep; it was a daydream. Look at my watch, same time, same place I was in yesterday. The same people (probably) all headed in the direction they go in every day. Look down at my book again, eyes scan the text… where was I? Remembering my place by association with events taking place around me. The sounds of the gear stick shifting through its worn engagings and the accelerator pedal, the brake, then the gear stick again… parts of the story seem related to parts of the journey. The words I’m reading are flickering around the interior of this cab. Parts of sentences and interesting phrases get wrapped around the objects in this small space.

It feels good in here, inside this metal shell that’s holding me cushioned in a womb-like environment, bent over the book in my lap and looking outside from time to time. The experience of the ‘now’ moment is the same ‘now’ moment everybody else is experiencing… a hesitant, preoccupied ‘now’, maybe, for many of us; teetering on the brink of wanting things to be different from what they are. The traffic is hard to believe. Skillful avoidance of the tendency to hold on to the thought it ‘shouldn’t be like this.’ Look around the interior of the taxi, devotional flowers hanging up front in the windscreen and up above I see the painted marks of a holy person’s blessing on the underside of the roof. Grey/blue seating, a public space, registration numbers for the driver and the vehicle. A photo of the driver with his name in English.

We don’t have a conversation. I say: rod tid… (bad traffic eh?). And he says: yeu! (too much). We’re comfortable with the silence after that. For him, it’s a pointless journey to nowhere in particular – no problem; it’s often like this. Pause for a moment and watch the in-breath, the out-breath; mindfulness. A moment’s reflection and meditative contemplation in a Bangkok taxi… this is how it is for him. After I get out, somebody else will get in and off to the next place. When he gets there it’s the same as the place he just left. Where are we now? There’s a huge map in his head. City traffic is like a river, it gets into all the corners and any place where there’s space for it, finding its own level and passing through the hundreds of miles of its landscapes as it makes its way to the sea.

Like a boat on the river going with the current, the ‘now’ feels like it’s not moving. Only when the trees on the riverbank are seen is there a sense of movement, of moving through time. The ‘now’ is experienced in this present time as it has been for millions of years. I can imagine a time in what I would call the ancient past, but a moment experienced then happened in present time; it was ‘now’. A prehistoric being may have been sitting on a rock or a branch, exactly where I’m sitting, inside this cab… looking around – just as I’m doing now – and the ‘now’ experienced then would have been no different from the ‘now’ experienced at this moment.

‘The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth…in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future… Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.’ [Hermann Hesse: ‘Siddhartha’, Chapter 9]

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connectedness

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DurakitPOSTCARD#46: Bangkok: Sitting in a taxi that’s stuck in traffic and I see these buildings through the window, take the photo thinking, wow! I can write a post about that. The floating staircases look like they were put in as an afterthought. Somebody came up with the idea and sketched it out on the back of a beer mat. Creativity. Things are linked in the mind – the symbol of a bridge, everything is connected. It all fits. Taxi still stuck and I’m searching around in the memory for something, through the staircases and corridors of no-words-to-describe-it, looking for a starting point. How to begin? A small insight comes along; it’s the karma of circumstances.

That’s why, who, where, what, which, when and how I came to be here in Bangkok, strange as it may seem, having started off in such a far-away place over the mountains, over the sea… the Northern part of the world, near to the Arctic region. Up there, the polarities of shady darkness and never-ending light inspire one thing above all: the desire to get on a plane to a sunny place in the Southern Seas and never come back. So that’s what I did.

When I came back I discovered thirty years had passed, the Rip Van Winkle effect – look in the mirror, hair gone white. Most of the people I knew are dead. It had been so long I’d forgotten the ‘me’ that used to be there. I gave some thought to the ‘me’ left behind in the sunny place in the Southern Seas, went back over to check on that but it wasn’t there either. All these hours and days over the years, looking out the windows of an airplane and the world coming in through these eyes but seeing it like it’s not ‘me’ personally that it’s happening to, more like it’s an extension of what’s out there.

There’s a connectedness. No ‘me’. The temporary self-construct that used to be ‘in here’, a tentative sort of half-existence, has gone. Gone is gone. No ‘self’, anatta, nobody at home. Elvis has left the building. I am a metaphor of ‘me’ looking out of the window of a moving vehicle going away to, or coming back from a place called ‘home’ in Bangkok at the present time but next week I’ll be in Delhi again and looking at ‘home’ from that location. I know that three weeks from now I’ll be in Chiang Mai in that place there called ‘home’, hang out for a while, contemplate the space I’m in, then after that, no plans…

Is there anything I can call a real home? (hold that thought)… there’s a memory of something being ‘home’ when I was a kid. I remember long nights and short days, aunties and grannies wearing comfortable wooly cardigans, porridge in a cracked bowl, coal and wood fires, a black-and-white sheepdog – and incidentally, the rural/urban thing about Asian cities, cows sitting on the pavement, goats nibbling and chickens pecking around, the sound of a cockerel in the distance; all this reminds me of the farmyard scene where I was brought up. There’s a familiarity about it

Fond memories, pictures in the gallery of the mind, and yes I’d like there to be a real home, but for a very long time now there’s been only a series of temporary homes – all good, I share my life with Jiab and we’ve gotten used to the way things are. In each place I have my favourite chair, books, and all the things I need. It works okay except sometimes I might spend a long time searching the bookshelves for a book I’m sure is there then realise it’s not in these bookshelves, it’s the other bookshelves, about 2000 miles away. So I have to let that one go, although I can see it there in the mind’s eye…

I feel dispersed, an okay sort of feeling. It suits me well to follow the Buddha’s Teachings: homelessness, non-attachment, no-self. Whether there is a ‘self’, yes/no, is best not thought about too much because saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it is, in itself, identifying ‘self’’. Words identify things, language has a default mechanism that allows me to select what ‘I’ want it to be (also what I don’t want it to be) and the resulting attachment to all that I love and hate. I see it happening, stay mindful about where the exit is located, and open the heart/mind citta to the world as wide as possible.

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‘I place the word “Jesus” into my heart, and in a magical instant all those wordless, intangible sensations I have come to recognize as His Presence fill the room, as if that word was a seed dropped into the planter of my heart, which took root, and produced an entire orchard.’ [Excerpt from the post: Trending Towards Holiness]

–   G   R   A   T   I   T   U   D   E   –

gridlock

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Bkktaxi4POSTCARD#45: Bangkok: The traffic is incredible – beyond credible, the French word incroyable comes to mind. I get in the taxi, tell the driver where I want to go and he sets off in exactly the opposite direction to where I’m going. Disconcerting… it’s like when you ignore the GPS and its voice keeps on telling you to: ‘please take the next U-turn where possible’. But doing a ‘u-ey’ (yooee, Aussie slang for U-turn) is no good when the whole city is one huge U-turn, interconnected with diversions and u-turns within u-turns. Diversion signs posted everywhere; alternative routes because this is the ‘Bangkok Shutdown.’ All roads leading to Thai Government Ministries are blocked by demonstrators… a protest campaign to force the government out of office before the February 2nd elections. A bit scary but no signs of violence here… I feel secure enough. Strange how the Thai population is able to accommodate these dangerous protests and life goes on pretty much as usual.

The taxi is now going along at walking speed through a crowded area. It’s the lunch hour, people rush out from offices and factories to get something to eat from the local traders. But there’s hardly any room, cars are occupying every space and there’s nowhere for pedestrians to walk. They filter through the flow of slow moving vehicles like water trickles through the stones and boulders in a stream. I try to get a good photo of it but it doesn’t make visual sense, everything is too close, I’d like to try making a cut-paper collage and paste pieces of images of traffic in a kind of jigsaw effect. Maybe it’s something I’ll do after this – at the moment I’m in this collage. I’m part of it, looking through the windscreen, past the passenger head-rest in front and seeing in between a building and a pedestrian footbridge overhead. Out there, there’s a small patch of blue sky, maybe 30 miles away and I can see a passenger jet ascending into the air.

I don’t know to what extent the government is really affected by these demonstrations; it’s the ordinary people who have to take the immediate pressure. But I’m a foreigner here and there’s all kinds of stuff I don’t understand. One thing I don’t understand is how everyone is able to keep their cool, no sounds of car horns at all; drivers maintain an outward calm. The Thai othon (khanti patient endurance), a Buddhist control of anger through the cultivation of mind, based on compassion for all living beings. But how does that sit with the fact that authority figures may be taking advantage of this willingness to comply. This putting-up-with-it thing is allowing all the political skullduggery to go on unchecked…

Bangkok celebrates Chinese New Year from 31st January (10% of the Thai population are of Chinese descent); a 15-day holiday period is coming up when people take time off to go around the city and upcountry visiting family members. How will the traffic be, I wonder. How about the Thai capacity to stay calm in difficult circumstances? Will the political leaders go on pushing until it explodes?

There’s a distinct feeling that, for the time being, everyone is just waiting quietly to see what will happen

‘In daily life we experience suffering more often than pleasure. If we are patient, in the sense of taking suffering voluntarily upon ourselves, even if we are not capable of doing this physically, then we will not lose our capacity for judgment. We should remember that if a situation cannot be changed, there is no point in worrying about it. If it can be changed, then there is no need to worry about it either, we should simply go about changing it.’ [The Dalai Lama]

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leaving

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IMG_0500POSTCARD#44: Chiang Mai: Time to close this chapter of the story. I’m leaving soon for New Delhi, transit in Bangkok for some days. The flight departs at 16.20 and before that there are things to do in the apartment: a basket of laundry to iron; ironing table set up and I’m standing there. Pointed end of the iron smoothens its way among the creases, sailing through mountains and valleys of fragrant laundered cloth, leaving a warm, flat plain of patterned textile in its wake. Place the heavy iron on its metal stand and there’s that pleasing little sound: clink-clink… then pick it up again to do another part of the garment. Doing the front, the back, the shoulders, the collar – place it on its stand again: clink-clink. Ironing is such a peaceful thing, the hot smoothness of it, all these landscapes of wrinkled cotton eased away.

Pictures unfold in the mind, a memory appears, the story begins. It’s wintertime, I’m in Kamakura, Japan, snow everywhere and the colourless luminosity of reflected light inside the dark interior of my cute little house (everything is small in Japan) high up on the slope of a hill, in the precincts of Zuisenji temple. The ironing table set up by the window; just enough room if I move carefully, laundry basket placed at hand and on the corner of a small table, a pile of folded ironed things. The brightness of reflected light outside illuminates what I’m doing. A time of sleepy afternoon days, the clink-clink sound of the iron at intervals intrudes gently into this comfortable silence.

There’s a small slooshing sound of someone walking through the snow – look out the window; a blinding whiteness, a photographic negative. Black tracks of footsteps on the path leading to the steps to the temple. It’s a lady walking with great care, taking smaller steps than Japanese ladies usually take. She is dressed in a long dark maroon coat and indigo coloured costume down to the ankles, feet in wooden geta slippers secured by a small V-shaped thong passing between the first and second toe over tabi, white stockings specially stitched for the purpose, and the entire foot encased in transparent galoshes with pretty floral designs. Holding her hand is a little girl about 8 years old, and it just happens that as I’m looking at the girl and her small white face, alert eyes, she turns to look at me… a faint smile, a moment of intelligent understanding; she sees me, a gaijin, framed in my window at eye level with the street: a foreigner lives there, in a house the same as ours… or maybe there are no words for it, just some kind of recognition, an enigma suddenly cleared away and knowing this.

How did life turn out for her? I feel sad that we only had the shared experience for that instant. Maybe it’s the remembering of events like these, returning many years later; a moment recalled, a thing that was puzzling for a long time suddenly understood, somehow – beyond words. These small moments of understanding, overlapping each other and it could be the more I’m aware of it, the more conscious experience includes the possibility of revelation. And this is the reason why there’s always a fascination with the remembered moment; an event or an accumulation of events that make sense… somehow. Language doesn’t stretch that far; the whole thing just carries meaning.

Ironing along the seams, the waistband, how good these garments look, just as they are, stitched art objects – clink-clink goes the iron. Pictures unfolding in the mind, a memory of an event is a story with a beginning, a middle, an end – although I might arrive in the middle and have to work it out from that entry point; searching for the ending of it so that I have some idea of what the beginning could have been – then re-order it so the story starts as it should (“… once upon a time….”). Language insists on a structure, I have to ‘story’ it (verb: to story), think about how to get it to work; what happened after that? Create a sequence of events. Listening to a story I’m telling myself as if it were being told to me by someone else.

Getting this place cleared up and ready now so that it can enfold itself quietly in hibernation while I’m away living in another world. Soon it’ll be time to jump into the taxi and off…

‘We are forever telling stories about ourselves. In telling these self-stories to others we may, for most purposes, be said to be performing straightforward narrative actions. In saying that we also tell them to ourselves, however, we are enclosing one story within another. This is the story that there is a self to tell something to, a someone else serving as an audience who is oneself or one’s self…. On this view the self is a telling.’ [Roy Schafer]

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appearances

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IMG_0488POSTCARD#43: Chiang Mai: It’s been a long extended morning, awake before dawn. My day began at 3 am – not a day, a night… correction, not ‘a’ night, just ‘night’, no defining characteristics. Night, as in: ‘the state of night.’ Night as an abstract noun, the darkness that envelops all beings in sleep, including a few birds, head-under-wing, perched on small branches in the treetops, level with my apartment on the third floor. All the lights are on here, dishes make noise, kettle boiling; cups rattle but there’s no coffee, and I can’t go out to get some because everything is closed… a long time to wait before the little supermarket round the corner is open. I sit near the window and look at the birds breathing,  their small chest movements sometimes visible.

A couple of hours reading friends’ blogs in the UK and the East coast of the US. And by the time it’s daylight, and Chiang Mai is awake, I feel like going back to bed. But instead, I’m walking along the road blinking in the sunshine. The air is warm like a soft blanket; no heaviness of winter clothing or hard shoes.  T-shirt, shorts and rubber slippers, everything light and easy. Noise and clatter, traffic, smells of food cooking. Everywhere you look it’s like a children’s picture book, blue sky and golden people who smile all the time. The world has been photo shopped, vivid, maximum-pixels. Everything appears as if lit from within, bananas are almost luminous; papaya fruit is a magic-marker orange. Too bright for me, I feel like an owl in the daylight, a nocturnal shadow… let me hide in the shade of my sunglasses; deep, cool, blue-green, cloaked in my dark, quiet space.

After the eye operation I’ve been disturbed by bright light. The doctor says the surface of the cornea is exposed, I have “the eyes of a twenty-year-old’ (wow). It’ll take a couple of years to adjust to the world. The sunlight in Thailand is bright like a television studio and I might have felt less sensitive about light, maybe, if I’d been living in the North of Scotland, where I’m from, and been the pale, indistinct, colourless being that I really am, with the pigmentation of a plant growing in the darkness – long and extended tendrils seeking out tiny sources of sunshine and taking on the glow of colour only when the growing tip finds its way through a crack and into a glimmer of light.

So I’m making my way along the small pavement, looking out for traffic hazards in this busy place and staying alert because of the rough paving underfoot I could stumble on – all kinds of obstructions and sometimes no pavement at all. A small temporary restaurant has arrived that wasn’t here yesterday, the owner just drives up in a pickup truck, sets up his stuff on the pavement, tiny tables unfolded and stools to sit on. It blocks the way, pedestrians cannot get past, have to step down on the road and walk out in the traffic, then back up on the pavement again. Can’t help feeling they ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed to do that… I notice though, that nobody here seems unduly affected by the inconvenience. Thais don’t impose their ‘preferences’ on a world that is for the most part neutral. It’s a Western thing to try to customize it according to what it ‘should’ be like, and engage with all the feelings conjured up by a ‘self’ that makes ‘my’ world into something good, bad or whatever.

Suffering a bit and thinking about this turmoil of having to adjust my expectations of the world according to how things appear to be and why bother with all that because things never turn out exactly as I want them to be – but the best is yet to come, really, because when I get to the little supermarket, the whole place has been demolished! It is totally not there. Doors taken out and nothing remains of the place that I recognize, just this very large, dark, dusty hole in the building. Some kind of major renovation. Hmmm looks like I’ll not get the coffee I came here for… but on the way back I see the temporary shop erected on the pavement is selling coffee. So I sit down and have one there.

‘For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. Our life is endless, in just the same way that our field of vision has no boundaries.’ [Wittgenstein]

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light-headedness

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IMG_0460POSTCARD#42: Chiang Mai: Don’t know why or how it can be like this, but there’s a sense of joyfulness, today – floating free. An easeful vertigo that’s comfortably not lost its balance. I’ve been looking at the building under construction next door, and seeing it expanding upwards daily. It’s like something sculptural. The floors and wall surfaces that will hold the enclosed space we recognize as rooms and corridors are not complete, just the shape of the space within which things exists, a 3 dimensional photographic negative in the mind’s eye. The builders do everything in negative form.

They’ve done one new floor since I last wrote about it [structures]. Bricks and mortar with foundations deep in the earth. So fast, almost like everything is made out of paper, no gravity, no heaviness, and we’re in the realm of birds and flying. The guy in the red shirt seems to be the one who always goes up first; climbing into the sky. I don’t know what his life can be like, maybe bonded to his job, burdened with hardships, and struggling with the contractor over pay… but how could he not feel good today, standing up there in the cool morning and looking out, blue sky as far as the eye can see.

These builders are the heroes of the story, men and women in their wide brimmed straw hats, faces covered with cloth to protect the skin from the sun and regulation hard-hats squeezed down over the straw crown. The big bankers and investors might open bottles of champagne when it’s finished, but they’re nothing compared with these ordinary folk on the scaffolding who climb up into the sky on their flimsy structures and boards and the building follows on up behind them. It’s as if there was a hook in the sky they attach their ropes to and from there, can haul the building up, suspended.

IMG_0462BBuildings are the mountains of the city and the created world. These builders are rural/urban migrants; they’re from the villages and the mountains themselves; mountain climbers who build the mountains they climb. And seen from where I am, on the third floor, this mountain/building next to me appears above the tree line and looks strangely separate from the ground below – I can’t see the foundation, there’s sky above and (I assume) sky below. It’s a floating building.

A strange illusion, I’ve seen it in Switzerland, on walks around Dhammapala Buddhist Monastery. When you’re high up there on a steep incline, with trees near enough so you can see the forest floor below, the mountain above the treetops looks like it has disconnected itself from the earth, drifted away from its moorings; a gravity-free mass of rocky earth and vegetation floating in the sky. Thinking of the floating Hallelujah Mountains in the Avatar movie; based on the Huang Shan mountains in China.

There’s a light-headedness about this because, today, I’m somehow free from attachment to things in the mind. Considering the possibility that one reason human beings tend to be in a state of ‘holding’ a lot of the time, is that we’re all earth-bound creatures; attached by gravity to a spinning planet and the default mindset is this holding-on thing – can be difficult to feel comfortable about letting go. But today I feel released from that pressure; climbing the mountains in the mind. This freedom has always has been like this. I just didn’t notice.

‘The Buddha taught that clinging was the ninth link in the chain of Dependent Origination. In that chain, craving led to clinging, and clinging to “becoming” (bhava), i.e., to continued stuckness in cyclical existence. There are two places where the chain of dependent origination can be broken: at the point where a pleasant feeling turns to craving, and at the point where craving leads to clinging.  We can break the link of craving through awareness of its dangers and insight into where it will lead us.  We can break the link of clinging by simply letting go.’ [Seth Zuihō Segall]

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