fragments

Posted on January 14, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #41: Chiang Mai: Awake with the sound of birdsong and the first signs of daylight. A kinship with all beings. We breathe the same air, experience the same kind of heart beat – the tastes, the smells, light, sound, body sensations and consciousness. Suddenly a thought arrives, a memory of something that happened a long time ago; not important, like an aspect of another thought that got overlooked somehow – now seen in a different way, simple and easy to be with. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, bare feet on cold floor; not completely awake, contemplating the start of the day and it takes a moment to notice this thought is still here. I have the feeling that I understand more about it now than ever before. Quickly! Get up, search around for a pen, I’ll have to write it down in my notebook before I forget.

In the next few minutes, the thought seems to expand, occupies my whole attention. It’s as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. Even as I’m going around doing early morning things, the thought remains – like a stationary object. A feeling of meaningfulness, a sense of amazement with the functioning of the mind; watching to see what it’ll do next, where’ll it’ll go after this. What’s it like? Getting to know it, like a child understands a thing directly. Got keys, wallet and down in the elevator, still thinking about it. Out on the street and walk to the main road. Aware of mind phenomena and looking at that thought in particular; the fragility of non-grasping and allowing things to be un-held. Where did it come from, where was it before it arrived here? Somewhere in The Great Space, fragments of it dispersed in actions not yet taken… am I creating the thought by noticing it?

A tuktuk stops, I get in, we accelerate along the road; wind in the face, noise all around. The present moment is an accumulation of pieced-together thought-items; bits of language imagery from environmental-input and memories of past-time brought into present-time, projected into future-time. Time is a human measurement: applied time. Reminds me of something I read in a book written by somebody wise, saying that TIME is just God’s way of preventing everything happening in the same instant. In one microsecond, the entire history of the world, up to the present and off into the future… watch it as it flies past.

Pause for a moment. Traffic lights at the intersection and everything stops; a curious extended, stretched-out moment – just the circumstance itself. It takes a conscious effort to get it started again. Is conscious awareness moving from one moment to the next? If so, is this the next moment yet? Are all the fragments of the next moment combined sufficiently in the endless stream of things so that I can now say definitively, THIS IS THE NEXT MOMENT? And all of a sudden it’s the past again. There’s only one moment, always has been. One long moment that includes immensely distant things. A single passing thought lasts a thousand years. Its parts so remotely scattered, a great ocean of nothingness invades the space between things. No easily seen reference points, objects get forgotten about eventually and all that remains is the idea that, a long time ago, I think I was searching for something but I can’t really remember. Anyway, I was never able to find it – still distracted sometimes by the idea that I might stumble upon it by chance one day, but otherwise at peace with everything the way it is.

‘The fact that we can never “fully know” reality is not a sign of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is “incomplete,” open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of Becoming.’ [Slavoj Žižek]

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structures

Posted on January 9, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #40: Chiang Mai: Watching the construction of a new condominium next door that’s been going on for 6 months or more. It’s like a story: Once upon a time there was a construction site. Then there was the first floor. Now they’re up to the fifth floor and the structure is above the tree tops. I can see the workers, including women workers wearing wide brimmed hats, sitting there creating the metal reinforcement of the support pillar. They’re doing it by hand; twisting flexible metal wires around the vertical and horizontal parts, like you tie a plastic bag closed with a plastic cable tie. Not moving around too much, aware of the flimsy platform they’re on. No safety measures, other than the mindfulness of being careful.

There are another two condos being built on the other side. A constant coming and going of cement trucks through the narrow streets, and all around the clangs and bangs of construction site sounds. Noisy but I’m attracted by the creativity of it. These large structure were once an idea in an architect’s office and I can see the plans and diagrams that were drawn on draftsman’s paper coming to life in three dimensions. Throughout the day, I stop what I’m doing and go over to stand by one of my windows and maybe watch the huge crane lifting things up from the floor below and placing them on the new floor above. Then to the other window and see what’s happening there. The workers are active the whole time; rural/urban migrants from another strata in society, pluralism. Where they come from you could buy 5 acres of land with the money paid for one small unit in the condo they’re building here. What they get from this is an income, and there’s stablity, their children can go to school here, an opportunity to break out of the mould, social change is generational.

Their stamina humbles me, I’m a foreigner living in their country, my life style is so distant from theirs. I wonder if they have times when they get fed-up with it all? Are they as dissatisfied as I am? Would they understand how I sometimes pause in the writing of a piece, reflect on how much my original idea has changed since the beginning of it, and what I’d really like to do is take the whole thing to pieces and start again? Probably not, and I’m trying not to give up on it because this is already the third revision. In the West we can’t think of constructing without deconstructing. In the process of learning how to build things up, we learned how to knock things down. Click the remote and we’re watching a different movie; basic truths were disassembled overnight. Postmodernism arrived and everything came to pieces – nothing to hold on to. A world that’s always a work in progress, no final ‘finished state’.

New possibilites arise and one of these is the thought that maybe I’m not seeing the real world at all, what I’m seeing is something created in the mind; something ’seen’ in the way I want it to be. I can change the world to get it to fit when it doesn’t seem right according to the image I have of it – so how can I be sure I’m not simply thinking up a theory and creating supporting statements to prove it? My continuing engagement with it somehow confirms its reality… but is it really real? The question is the answer, it’s open-ended, exploratory – inductive reasoning. The solution is revealed in the process of examining the question. No subject/object dualism. Instead of trying to impose a structure on Nature, things take place subjectively. Finding the way that has a starting point inside, not outside; something I recognize in the interaction with the question.

Around noon, all the noise and clatter suddenly goes quiet. Lunchbreak. From my window I see the workers sitting in groups and some lying in makeshift hammocks strung across the scaffolding supports in the cooler shaded floors: zzzzzzzz… the world is a kind of analogy, a figure of speech – the metaphor and reality. No final conclusion, forever on-going….

‘… houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,  are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place  is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.  Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,  old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth  which is already flesh, fur and faeces,  bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.  Houses live and die: there is a time for building  and a time for living and for generation  and a time for the wind to break the loosened pane…’ [The Four Quartets, East Coker, T. S. Eliot 1943]

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thralldom

Posted on January 3, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #39: Chiang Mai: Coming up to Chiang Mai from Hat Yai was done in two stages, with the stopover at Bangkok, as we did going down. It was the same thing, the other way round. Everything already seen, but occuring in reverse order and the hassle and stress we experienced on the way down got cancelled out on the return journey. Like a video on fast-rewind, it stops at the beginning not the end and the memory of ever having gone or been away is erased.

A short trip, six days only. The point of it was to visit Jiab’s youngest brother and his wife and their new-born baby – a truly amazing child with a wonderful smile. It was a bit like the Three Wise Men following the star to the stable where the baby Jesus lay in the manger – not really like that… there was Jiab and her sister, me and M, who is 9 years old and dismayed by lack of internet, sadly playing the same old games on the iPad and not interested in being in a rubber plantation, with its curious waftings of latex smells. I was quite blown away with the experience of being surrounded by rubber trees – I knew that rubber came from trees of course but it was sort of bizzare somehow… trees made of rubber?

Now back here in Chiang Mai and friends have sent pics of the monks blessing everyone for the coming year. These quiet humble events are meaningful in a way I’ve not seen in the Church and all the gusty hymn singing, great heaviness of acoustics and out-of-sync organ suggesting a fearsome power and immensity. What my Sunday School teacher taught me was that “God made the world,” and I wrote that down in my little exercise book but had absolutely no understanding of it; an imponderable, a Zen koan: God made the world…

But who made God? The world and God are two separate things, one of them made the other, therefore seeing this from a place created in the mind for the purpose of looking for God and finding only a complexity of half understood truths. In the end, I stopped worrying about it; there is no God (in that way of thinking) and decades later the whole thing vanished – with it went the concept of ‘self’. Liberated from ‘the thralldom of the senses’. Quite an ordinary epiphany, like one might be sitting in a quiet room with furniture and objects and light coming in through the window then suddenly a letting-go moment takes place and ‘I’ no longer have the burden of ‘my’ thoughts about ‘me’. Released from the subject/object duality. God is not ‘out there’, but ‘in here’. God is subjectivity, conscious awareness.

Conscious awareness is everywhere. In the blogging world, for example, it’s what we’re talking about or describing all the time, one way or another, in our different locations, circumstances and in our various states of mind and body. Sometimes there’s an instant understanding of what conscious awareness means but it’s beyond words. Sometimes awareness is there but I think I can’t see it. Thinking I can’t see it, is another mind moment that exists temporarily in awareness. The mind doesn’t create awareness, mind is contained in the awareness. Other times there’s the simple knowing of it and a feeling of quiet purpose in every step, every move.

‘Only by liberating oneself from the thralldom of the senses and the thinking function – both of them servants and not masters – by withdrawing attention from “things seen” to give it to to things “unseen” can this awakening be accomplished.” [E. F. Schumacher, “A Guide For The Perplexed”, p.79]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: Being here

evenness of 2014

Posted on December 31, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #38: A village near Hat Yai: Here in a house surrounded by trees above window height on the ground floor and in the daytime everything is seen in a translucent green light. It’s an old rubber plantation, with some palms and huge banana trees. Now it’s night and I’m pretty well seeing double having been staring at words all day. Struggling a bit to stay awake to see the coming of New Year – thinking the number 14 is somehow nicer than 13 and also the number 2014 has a pleasant evenness about it? But maybe I’ll go to sleep, it doesn’t seem right to be awake when all the small creatures in the forest are either asleep or being strangely nocturnal and kinda scary in their stealth. I feel a bit obvious here with all the lights on in the house.

Cannot see well, the spellchecker rejects all the Thai and Pali words and onomatopoeias and my spelling innovations; and when it doesn’t know a word I’ve been clicking the ‘Add’ option so much it’ll render the spellchecker obsolete eventually. It’s getting difficult too because small insects attracted by luminosity of screen are walking around in my vision seemingly dotting the letter ‘i’ and crossing the ‘t’ or making an ending to a word that isn’t there. Cannot understand how they get through the mosquito mesh on the windows. I notice that the larger insects stop flying around when you put the lights out because they bump into things, it takes them a few moments to stop where they are, anywhere’ll do and just immediately go to sleep. I’ll do that too, have to call it a day and shall set this Post so it’ll go out at midnight, and it’ll be the New Year then, Thai time: +7hrs GMT. So, all that remains is for me to say thank you friends and fellow bloggers for visiting me here in the year 2013, and best wishes for 2014. Metta, Loving Kindness, may your year be one of Mindfulness and Letting Go

– HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ONE AND ALL –

patient understanding

Posted on December 29, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #37: Chiang Mai/Hat Yai journey: The Chiang Mai flight to Hat Yai was discontinued just before our departure date, so the journey had to be made in two parts; the first flight to Bangkok the second to Hat Yai – a bit frustrating, yes, but that’s how my Western thinking can be fixated on the way things ‘should’ be, and not how they are. This is Thailand and no upset, just the sense that people were a tiny bit miffed about it. Then we discover the baggage can’t be checked through either, it means we have to collect everything from the luggage belt at Arrivals when we get to Bangkok then to Departures and check in again for the next flight. There were a lot of bags, and we had little M with us who is 9 years old and she’d have to be guided through the crowds safely. I felt I was beginning to lose it at that point but still no reaction from the others, just a kind of ‘no comment’ attitude and the sense of something being ‘held’.

I go along with the way everyone else is doing it; chai yen yen (keep a cool heart) chai ron mai dai (being angry is no good). Patient understanding, putting up with it quietly; othon, in Thai, it’s about accepting things as they are and not fuelling the fires. There’s a cultural tradition of this kind of inhibition of anger in public. It’s a big no-no. Why? Because when people really lose their cool they can go crazy. The word in Thai is baa, a kind of madness; political demonstrations with crowds running into a hail of bullets and not stopping until the cease-fire. So, we don’t want to go there. Thais have acquired the skill of abiding in the suppressed anger state so that the feeling can be allowed to pass and there’s sufficient clarity of mind to see what action can be taken.

We arrive at Bangkok, wait for the luggage at the belt, I get it all on to two trolleys, with little M sitting up on top of the bags and we make our way through the crowds to the elevator. Up to the second floor and enter through security and the baggage X-ray machines to the check-in desk again. There’s not much room and a large congestion of luggage trolleys. Tense pale faces, no anger, only the difficulty that people are having suppressing it. Sweat forming on the forehead, no expression, a tight smile when required, a mutual understanding and a calm appearance. Tread carefully, the fear of becoming angry makes the whole thing kinda fragile.

Recent political demonstrations highlighting the underhanded manipulative strategies that take advantage of this cultural quietness are an example of there being suddenly a legitimate reason for everything to go totally irrational. In this case, organised public protest against a Prime Minister who was put in place by a group of behind-the-scenes bad guys; a situation not unlike the period of George Dubya, the 43rd U.S. president. Both leaders were puppet-like, inarticulate, and the public fell into a kind of embarrassed silence; how can our leader appear to be so hopeless like this? This odd acceptance allowed the controlling group to manipulate events behind the facade. It was tolerated for a while due to the cultural ‘holding’ behaviour, then it exploded. These public protests pull things back into balance because Thais value peace. Anarchy and lawlessness are a scary alternative – almost like insanity. There will be stability, but only for a short time, it seems. Sadly, it’s likely to break out again. An impossible cycle…

We get on the next flight, take-off and up into the clear blue sky again; out there, where there are no problems, the beautiful great curvature of the Earth. One hour and fifteen minutes later we descend into Hat Yai. The outer arrivals section full of Thai muslims in colourful head scarves and matching costumes, children running around. Into the car and out on the great North/South highway that connects Thailand to Malaysia and all the way South to Singapore.

“In essence, the process of division is a way of thinking about things that is convenient and useful mainly in the domain of practical, technical and functional activities (e.g., to divide up an area of land into different fields where various crops are to be grown). However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e. to his self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.” [David Bohm]

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The David Bohm quote above comes from The Ptero Card Post: I Fall to Pieces

– G R A T I T U D E –

Upper photo: Don Muan airport Bangkok

Lower photo: part of the whistle-blowing anti-government demonstration passing through the Siam Paragon shopping area in Bangkok

maya & christmas

Posted on December 24, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #36: Chiang Mai: Going around town in a tuk-tuk, seeing all these new shopping areas getting built and a huge shopping mall opens here soon called MAYA – a Sanskrit word meaning illusion. In Thailand the word maya is applied to the lifestyle of movie stars who have everything money can buy and their lives are thought to be unreal. In an intelligent way, everybody knows what maya is and what ‘reality’ is. But in the shopping mall context maya is presented as an attractive idea; it’s appealing, even though it’s an illusion, we’re partly agreeing with it; complicit in its being there. We might say well, okay it’s an illusion, but what’s wrong with that? Nobody wants to see it as calculated corporate planning to create a market for consumer goods… that would destroy the pretty illusion. Nobody wants to know that the local population, sons and daughters of rural/urban migrants, and naïve hill-tribe folk are likely to be swept away in the wave of purchasing choices. Unseen, built-in strategies contained in an imported Western model that doesn’t suit this culture… and we’re not willing to say there’s anything wrong with it because we’re all in some way compromised.

A kind of tacit approval of consumerist schemes embedded in our lives that has resulted in our losing so much of our inherited cultural traditions. The Christmas festival is layered over with the maya of santaclausisms and the Jesus Teachings are nearly lost in it. It’s as if the essential part of our spiritual Truth got forgotten along the way and consumerism came along in its place. It’s a mystery really, why it should be like this, but for some reason the early Church disapproved of the gnosis (knowledge) part of the teaching. Out went the pragmatic instructions on seeing the constructed nature of appearances and the stepping-through to discover the non-duality between ourselves and God. ‘His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”  <Jesus said,> “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it (113).”’[Nag Hammadi Manuscripts].

After an extended period of study and contemplation, one simply ‘wakes up’ to the Truth of it; the reality that surrounds us all the time; Brahman, the Oneness, the God state that’s here and now. You’ll notice I’m presenting the Jesus teachings as an instance of the Advaita experience, sourced in the Upanishads [I wrote another post about this, link to: Jesus and Advaita Vedanta]. I’m also including the Jesus Teaching in a oneness of spiritual teaching centred in that geographical region where the three Abrahamic religions arose: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the connection with Brahmanic religions and Advaita Vedanta. Others related to this include Buddhism and Jainism. That region, from North India through to Israel and the Mediterranean, a distance of about 3000 miles, say from New York to San Francisco? I see it like a highway of knowledge, wisdom and information. All of it coming and going along the route many centuries before Jesus was born and many centuries after. All the world’s religions arose here.

Somewhere in this context lies the actuality of our Jesus experience; only traces of it remain – enough to know there is this huge feeling of goodwill towards all beings in the world and the universe.

Merry Christmas friends and fellow bloggers ~ Christmas 2013

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Excerpts from: meta-narratives

static electricity haiku

Posted on December 21, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #35: Chiang Mai: How to explain Static Electricity to a nine-year-old who speaks English as a second language? M my Thai niece, jumps in surprise when I’m handing her some coins and it happens: ZAP! Looks at me, like I just played a trick on her or something: “What’s that Toong Ting?” (for some reason she has called me Toong Ting since she was a baby) It’s electricity, fai-fáa sà-tìt ไฟฟ้าสถิต in Thai. M looks suspicious of me, “Yes but what is it?” she says. Okay so that still doesn’t make sense; I say it’s like a small spark… What does spark mean? So I start to speak about positive and negative electric charges inside our bodies, and eyes glaze over… losing the audience, I’m not making a very good job of the explanation, say it’s like lightning in the sky and make a big gesture with my arms. Thinks about that for a while, this has her attention… Yes but why? I tell her it’s like this strange thing that happens in the cool season, you unexpectedly get zapped when touching a doorknob – like an electrical charge, and sometimes it happens when you touch nylon clothing – it happens during the cold dry season. In countries like Thailand that are hot and humid most of the year, you notice it more than in cold countries. But this doesn’t really answer the question either, so we look it up in Google. There are all kinds of examples of it, still kinda hard to understand, I decide it has to be more like an experiential thing, learning from the feeling of it.

It reminds me of the haiku written by my friend Andosan, in Japan. ‘Static Electricity’ is a haiku seasonal word seidenki 静電気 and it’s thought to be quite charming – maybe because it’s quite mild in Japan, less of a shock than in the Western world. Usually experienced when buying something from the station kiosk, receiving coins or touching hands. Contact between people creates this small spark, it’s a surprising, instantaneous, friendly and communicative thing. It creates a link between people; a moment when we can’t explain something and share this small event that we can’t get any further with than “What was that?” A glance down at the coins held in the fingertips, conscious awareness; the mysterious feeling of the spark somehow becomes the physical reality of the coins in the hand.

[Haiku translation: I receive small change/ and I am very surprised/ I have been given/ static electricity]

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Haiku by Tatsuhiko Ando

where there is no christmas

Posted on December 18, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #34: Bangkok: No snow here, of course, winter is just a slight coolness that happens once a year. It lasts about a week. There’s no Christmas either because it’s a Buddhist country. I am the only thing resembling a real christmasee here. Christians in Thailand amount to 0.7% of the population. Yet there are Christmas carols playing in all the malls, and also in the supermarket where I was this morning: ‘… the ho-lee bible says, mary’s boy-child, jee-sus christ, was born on christ-mas daaay…’ twirling around the fruit and vegetables and frozen food section. Gift-giving as purchasing incentive, the season of goodwill has a place here even though the population are 95% Buddhist, 4% Moslem. Thai society is joyful, they like to share everything. They like playfulness – the word in Thai is sanuk (fun), everything has to be sanuk and if it’s not, it’s mai sanuk (seriously boring) and that’s bad style. I was downtown yesterday, saw the yellow duck wearing sunglasses stuck on the red taxi, took the photo. The Thais recognise the 25th December as a happy event but it’s also an ordinary day. People go to work, government offices are open, mail gets delivered, transport systems are normal, it’s all open for business, same as usual.

Heavy rain last night woke me up, and the room is cold this morning. Don’t need any fans, no air conditioning and without the slightly deafening sound of these machines it’s strangely quiet in the house. I’m noticing noises coming from the neighbours; a clatter of sounds enters through the open windows. Screen door opens, and there’s an interval of time to allow someone to enter, then screen door closes again. I get up to see who came in… but there’s nobody there, it’s not this house – it must be the house next door. Somebody else’s cutlery; plates go clink, voices echoing off the tiled floor and cement plaster walls… in which house? A dog barks, a child cries; it feels like everybody out there is in here.

I can feel chilled air in my ears; in the tiny inner surface of the eardrum. There’s a coolness in nasal passageways, emptiness of mouth cavity, tongue stuck in the wetness of the upper palate. The surface of the eye is cold. The body is a sensory organism in the environment of this room; four walls, the ceiling. The smooth wall surfaces holding the enclosed space like a 3 dimensional photographic negative of the room. The shape of motionless space within which things exists. Open the door and the volume of the room escapes. This is how it was when the sound of the rain woke me up this morning in the darkness. I went to sit on the cushion and the whole thing suddenly came crashing into consciousness as if it had been waiting all night for me to wake up.

‘… have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.’ [Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet #4]

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flying time

Posted on December 14, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #33 Delhi-Bangkok flight: Travelling at hundreds of miles an hour but it feels like the aircraft is standing still. A curious sensation, there’s nothing to indicate we’re moving, only this pleasing hmmmmm of the aircraft, and shhhhhh of cabin air pressure. Daylight enters into the small space of my window seat, a fold-down table, colourful papers, books and everything has the familiarity of being in a small room, brightly illuminated with a warm, happy, sunny light. I’m unaware of travelling across the sky in a passenger jet that observers in a different location might see as a streak of light. In another location they might see the aircraft seemingly suspended. I’ve seen it like this, sometimes, in the car going to the airport; a plane is taking off and if you’re coming towards the ascending aircraft, it looks like the plane is just hanging in the air. It’s this same feeling now, only I’m in it – a strange illusion; the various speeds all around are synchronised and the impression is that everything has stopped. I feel like I should hold my breath…

It’s an illusion… isn’t it? Einstein’s Theory on Special Relativity; everything inside this enclosed capsule is relative to itself. I’m up here, looking out the window and trying to understand this experience… soft, pale white-blue sky above the clouds stretching over the curvature of the Earth. After five or ten minutes, the horizon of clouds is still the same – it feels like we haven’t moved. Suspended in the air and the Earth is spinning on its axis below. The plane is going in an Easterly direction, parallel to the Earth’s rotation, like a boat on a river going in the direction of the current and there’s no sense of movement.

There’s an awareness of space below, an awareness of space all around and the vastness of the situation. Awareness of breathing; the in-breath and the out-breath. The action of releasing the out-breath seems associated with the direction the aircraft is travelling in. It appears to move the entire environment perceptibly forward in a very small way. A sense of something having passed by, I saw it for a moment as it slipped into the past. There’s an awareness that a thought was there and the awareness that it’s gone now, forgotten – no awareness of forgetting, only the awareness of the awareness.

The ‘now’ moment is like the boat on the river going downstream with the current, it’s only when the trees on the riverbank are seen that there’s an idea of relative speeds. I can distinguish things from their time, a local sense, there’s a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, but I can’t separate myself from time. Time is what I am, together with everything in the context of this aircraft. I remember the past but I’m remembering it now – I see into the future but I’m seeing it now. I am what space and time are doing here and now.

I get up and walk along the aisle and notice that walking in the forward direction (the direction we are travelling) is easy, swimming with the current, like walking downhill. Walking back to my seat (opposite to the direction we are travelling) is like swimming against the current; walking uphill. Then sitting in this small window seat, with the familiarity of my breathing, focus and mindfulness as we career headlong through space at 600 mph. The environment of the plane, the presence of noise and proximity of engines… powerful beyond belief.

‘Our awareness is like the air around us: we rarely notice it. It functions in all our waking moments and may even continue in sleep. Usually we are caught up in the content of our awareness, preoccupied with what we think, feel, and experience. Becoming aware of awareness itself is Receptive Awareness, very close to the idea of a witnessing consciousness. Resting in receptive awareness is an antidote to our efforts of building and defending a self: the assumption that there is “someone who is aware” falls away. Self-consciousness falls away; the distinctions between self and other, inside and outside, perceiver and perceived disappear. There is no one who is aware; there is only awareness and experience happening within awareness. We learn to hold our lives, our ideas, and ourselves lightly and rest in a spacious and compassionate sphere of awareness that knows, but is not attached.’ [Insight Meditation Center, Chapter 27: ‘Receptive Awareness’]

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Note: Excerpts from other posts on the experience of flying included here: Suspended Stillness, High Altitude Sunset, Meditating at 600 mph, somewhere over the rainbow

here and there

Posted on December 11, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #32 Delhi: 05.00 hrs. Power cut, lights out and the laptop screen darkens a little as it goes on battery. I can hear the generator outside starting up with a polite cough hmm-hmm, clearing its throat like a car engine throttle, then into the familiar, thud-thud-thud-thud…. This happens nearly every day, same old thing. Other generators in the neighbourhood start up too and in a short while it’s like a fleet of helicopters have landed. I can go on at the desk for a while, the internet is still connected because the router is on the backup line – but it is noisy. Go lie down on the sofa, try to absorb the sound rather than feel it’s disturbing… the acoustics of the room, the darkness is pleasing, watch the breath, and listen to the quality of this particular noise.

Thinking of Kiki, now on the ANA, Delhi/Japan flight. Kiki is the little black dog, a cocker spaniel, who stayed with us for a few days in June [Link]. She was here last night with her owners to say goodbye, then to the airport. It’s a 10 hour flight, so Kiki is still flying. She is out ‘there’ somewhere in the high-altitude darkness. I can ‘see’ Kiki in her doggie crate in the cargo hold, and the plane zooming along like a streak of light at 600 mph. I like to think of her facing the direction of travel; long spaniel ears flapping in the wind, hair ruffled and tail blowing around behind.

It’s as if it were a Skype call, the location is seen, hard to believe, but there’s a picture of it in the window. The environment of the aircraft is the same there as it is here; the air there is not much different from the air here. Okay, it may not be exactly as I’m seeing it in the mind’s eye, but how different could it be? The image seems so clear, maybe because it’s a bit unusual to think of a cute dog flying to Japan… it’s like she’s not far away at all. There’s the mmmmmm of engine sound, the ssssssss of cabin air pressure, and I’m in a house in New Delhi surrounded by the noise of thudding generators. Conscious experience is pretty much the same for me and Kiki at this moment, distance is the only difference. I can ‘see’ her small black shape, lying there quietly or maybe she gets up and turns around and lies down again, gets comfortable at 28,000 feet above the surface of the planet. I can picture it, she’s ‘there’… and she’s also here.

Reminds me of the Curiosity Rover landing on Mars in August, last year. And the world paused for a moment… where is this place that wasn’t there before, but I seem to have a consciousness of it now? Mars? Awareness goes off in search of this new location, natural human reaction, there’s an idea of something very distant; yes but also quite near. It is ‘here’ – in the same space of consciousness where we all ‘exist’. It’s somewhere in the known universe; in the sky obviously, and the mind looks for a way to incline towards that place, move in that direction. I can see a part of the sky through my window, in the early morning light, go over and have a look: Mars is out there somewhere. And I know Kiki is in the sky too – a very clear feeling, a kind of ‘seeing’.

Shortly after that all the lights come on at the same time; generators shut down, one by one. Power cut is over, back to normal. The silence seems close, as near as my face and a sense of great distance. Over ‘there’ is the same as right ‘here’, it’s all a oneness leading down from my door and out into the world as far as the eye can see.