generosity is letting go

Posted on December 7, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #31: In Buddhist countries, babies are taught when they are about six months old to put food into the monk’s alms-bowl. The whole family applauds as the sticky rice drops from that little hand into the monk’s bowl. The kid gets the idea early on: when stuff leaves your hand, you get this happy feeling. It feels good to give.

Everything the Buddhist monk receives is a gift, an offering; the monk is a mendicant, and lives entirely on the generosity of others: ‘Our bodies are fueled by the food that is offered to us. In fact, scientists say that all the cells of the body are replaced every seven years, so any (monk) who has been ordained for that long has a body that is completely donated. If it were not for the accumulated kindnesses, efforts, and good will of countless hundreds and thousands of people, this body would not be able to sustain itself. Kindness is the actual physical fabric of what we think of as ‘me.” [Ajahn Amaro, ‘Generosity in the Land of the Individualist’]

Generosity is cultivating an inward disposition to give, a glad willingness to share what we have with others. Give it away, we have more than enough. Ease the discomfort of being driven to fulfill that urge to ‘have’, to ‘possess’, a hunger created by always wanting more. All of it is gone when you’re generous. Brainstorm the word ‘generosity’ and you come up with loving-kindness, compassion, empathy, well-being, freedom. You find gratitude, grace, honour, motivation, encouragement. Generosity is everything. It’s nature is to share, recycle, circulate; it can only be given, never taken.

Generosity, is a mental, emotional letting go; releasing the tenacity of holding on to things; all that baggage we burden ourselves with is removed in one single act of generosity. Generosity means not holding to the self-concept, the separateness applied to things that are really ‘in context’. Seeing it all as process, ever-changing; a connectedness with the outer world. Generosity leads to wisdom – the truth is without bias. The cultivation of generosity directly debilitates greed and hate, and facilitates the kind of mind that allows for the eradication of delusion.

‘There was a seeker and a wise man. The wise man had a most incredible jewel and the seeker was absolutely amazed by the jewel. He asks the wise man if he would give him the jewel. And the wise man gives it to him. The seeker is very excited and afraid that the old wise man is going to change his mind, so he hastily says goodbye and goes off. A short while after that he comes back, approaches the wise man with great humility and respect, lays the jewel down in front of him on the ground and says he’d like to make a trade. He’d like to exchange this jewel. And the wise man asks him what he wants to exchange it for. The seeker says he would like to exchange the jewel for knowledge of how to gain the sort of mind that could give up a jewel like that without a second thought.’ [This story appears in Khanti – Patient Endurance]

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Sources include: Dana: The Practice of Giving

Excerpts from an earlier post: More Than Enough

Upper image is from the Wat Pahnanachat collection

cold denial of winter in the north

Posted on December 5, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #30 Delhi: Gone are the barefoot days of summer, the short-pants and silly Tshirt. It’s cold now. Ah, that warm memory; sunny weather and things that don’t matter. If I’m going around dressed like a clown, how can I take life seriously? It’s okay here except it gets hot like an oven for three months of the year, peak temperatures at 46°C and higher. Now, though, our world is sliding down slowly into the chilled foods section of the supermarket, colder and colder – still warm during the day, but cold at night. Temperature dropping and I’m struggling slightly with this shut-in feeling, like maybe I’m ill or something? There’s got to be some reason for this heaviness, burdened by the weight of clothing.

Dark grey skies in the morning seen from this old house, through these large single-glazed windows, loose fitting and drafty, high ceilings, marble tiled flooring and small electric heaters on wheels that run across the smooth surface. It’s good enough for rented accommodation, single storied; a large roof window in the middle of it where I set up my drawing board. Nice overhead light but when it’s raining the sound is deafening and in this cold weather it’s as cold inside as it is outside. I wear a scarf indoors, a wooly jumper, and pause to consider the novelty of socks… wiggle the toes.

Jiab is ok about it, she’s from Thailand where it’s blue sky every day and this dullness is quite interesting for her; comes over to me with her sleeve rolled up and holds out her arm for me to look at: ‘see?… it’s that thing again, what you call it?’ I say ‘goose bumps’ (supplier of English vocabulary), look closely and sure enough, the skin is reacting to the cold. Different though from my experience of childhood in 4° below zero in Scotland most of the winter; memories of a snow drift against the side of the outhouse, frozen until the springtime. I am the escapee. It’s so dark there, they use special lighting to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), ‘winter depression’ and set up mirrors to reflect the sun: heliostat skylights. People are skilled in staying cheerful, shut inside small rooms for a third of the year, blazing coal fires in the hearth.

The gloomy ponderings of winter; the closed concept around things, setting boundaries around what is really open space. And it doesn’t have much meaning to the folk who live there if you say that nothing is permanent, all things arise in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions…. ah well, ho hum: one thing leads to another, is that it? Yes, well so what? There comes a time when it’s all been kind of said before and words run out.

I try to be alert, sensitive to what’s happening now… switch off the video in the head; be mindfully aware of the present. I want to deny the presence of winter, stay unattached and free, switch on all the lights in the house. It feels warmer and there’s a 300 watt halogen bulb in the standing lamp I can sit under to read a book and it feels like summertime, still…

‘… something like a level, a dimension, realm or sphere of truth, or a reality, things as they are. `The all-encompassing space’ (Trungpa Rinpoche), the element of space contains everything, contains all existence. This is the wisdom of the dharmadhatu. This word `wisdom’ means, perhaps, `gnosis’; it is knowledge which is nondualistic, knowledge which is completely one with the thing it knows, complete understanding, complete absorption into that knowledge…’ [Francesca Freemantle]

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seeing with alertness

Posted on November 29, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #29 Delhi: Large birds of prey slowly circling above; they make a sound like the mewing of cats. I’m on the roof terrace, watching them. They’ve seen something and I’m curious to see if I’ll witness the dramatic plunge to Earth to catch the prey. Reminds me of a time I was in Pondicherry, South India, walking through a quiet district in the French-speaking Tamil part of town. Not much going on, turn a corner and on the other side of the path there’s this mother hen fussing around agitatedly with her brood of little chicks: chee-eep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep. And the hen is making loud cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck noises, strutting around, strangely fast, unusual body movements; it was like a dance – didn’t look right somehow. The mother hen was dashing about and jumping backwards and forewards and the little chicks were falling over themselves trying to keep up with her. Wow, what is going on here? I stopped to watch.

Then suddenly there was this huge SWOOP down from above. A movement of the air and a large bird of prey with outstretched talons ‘falling’ from sky to earth in a great wide arc; at its widest point, so near to the ground, going at a tremendous speed. I saw it further down the road sailing back upwards in the momentum of its fall, and up in this large curve then winging it’s way back into the higher altitudes. Amazing… an almost silent whoosh of feathers and outstretched talons just in front of me. But it missed the target! It didn’t get what it was after, the mother hen had saved the chicks with her strange dance. And it’s possible that my being there, having just turned around the corner at exactly the right instant, had caused the bird of prey to misjudge the distance to its target; the kamma of the moment – a fortunate turn of events for these cute little chicks. Mother hen and her happy brood went on with their day: cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep… story with happy ending.

It really cheered me up – the feeling that everything is right in the world! It helped me a lot too with a problem I was having with an irate person in the office who’d gotten the idea that I was at fault concerning something I’ll not go into right now. Not easy but it only lasted a short time. She was wrong, and I was completely sure about that but there was no hope of convincing her; so it was just a case of dodging the angry remarks fired at me like heat-seeking missiles. The strange thing about this was, the missiles were not hitting the intended target. It was intense but I was not emotionally harmed. I was able to see what was going on and be one step removed – not unaffected by it of course – but the fierce eyes, the anger, the voice did not cause injury: the missile misses its aim and all that’s felt is the wind of it as it goes by.

So I was feeling a bit like the little chicks who escaped the sharp talons of the Great Bird of Prey. My mind was transparent, a large empty space; nothing there – no target. Just this freshness, clear comprehension, and seeing with alertness, yet detached from it, knowing it’s Mind that’s the real threat. It’s understood in a moment and after that the system does it by itself; it’s not a ‘mine field’, it’s a mind field. When I think of it now and see these birds of prey suspended in the air, they’re harmless. When I’m not thinking about the threat, it’s not there. The birds hold my attention, their patient observing …

‘Mindfulness is what keeps the perspective of appropriate attention in mind. Modern psychological research has shown that attention comes in discrete moments. You can be attentive to something for only a very short period of time and then you have to remind yourself, moment after moment, to return to it if you want to keep on being attentive. In other words, continuous attention—the type that can observe things over time—has to be stitched together from short intervals. This is what mindfulness is for. It keeps the object of your attention and the purpose of your attention in mind.’ [Thanissaro Bhikkhu, ‘Mindfulness Defined‘]

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Note: The above was developed from an earlier post: Skilful Avoidance

‘self’ is a sensory experience

Posted on November 26, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #28 Delhi: Thinking about things in the darkness. Stories come and go, pondering over this and that, and the awareness of being caught up in the thinking thing gets included in the meanderings – searching for a way out. If I start thinking about how to stop thinking, the mind gets busy looking for a solution; finding something and comparing it with other reasons why I can’t stop thinking. Thinking has its own momentum, takes time to slow down; that’s the nature of the vehicle I’m driving. Letting it all fizzle out until it can go no further and everything evaporates for a moment.

In that instant there’s no thinking and the mind is alerted… an empty space opens up; a great mirror showing Mind looking at itself – the awareness of being aware. Silence and emptiness, held on ‘pause’. There’s the desire to be actively thinking, and I see the invitation to be involved with thought but pay no heed, it’s just part of what the software does.

The breath coming from the nostrils, so faint and light it stirs only the tiniest thing; a single strand of hair. No other sensory input the mind needs to be engaged with; no sense object activates the chain of events and all that remains is the mind’s cognitive function. There’s a curiosity about this: The ‘self’ is a sensory experience; the experiencer is an experience – there is only experienc-ing. What is it? Consciousness is the sensory organ of the the universe. By seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, the universe experiences itself. [See below: Note 2.]

A wave of thoughts comes rushing in, stays for a moment and goes out again, as if in another reality. I see it as an observer watching from some hidden place. Then the observer disappears and only the awareness itself is left there. Another wave of thoughts comes rushing in, forms appear and disappear and in their place, a sequence of obscured mental events, each one linking with the next; small bursts of electronic energy explode then it’s quiet, and again more explosions, like a fireworks display, arising and falling away. Fainter and fainter. Some time later sleep comes and the whole world disappears…

“… stopping the mind, stopping the flow of thoughts that are proliferating, stopping the flow of moods that get drawn into either attraction or aversion. We return to a clear center, to awareness.” [Ajahn Passano, on Becoming And Stopping.]

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Upper image replaced from the post: uncertainty

Note 1. This post is developed from an earlier post (click here: the thinking thing)

Note 2. ‘The self is a sensory experience’ arose from a dialogue with Truthless Truth last year

– G R A T I T U D E –

filled with emptiness

Posted on November 22, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #27 Delhi: It’s like this sometimes… nothingness, the state of there being not anything to attach to at all – like when you switch off the TV suddenly and there’s this absolute silence. Reality comes crashing in, everything is filled with emptiness, boundaries and walls collapse and, for a moment, it all falls into a state of awe…

Scenes from the past flicker across the mind for a few moments then pass and, one by one, are replaced with empty space – the kamma of emptiness inherited from earlier times, maybe – it’s not the kind of thing you’d notice. I should make a note about it in my diary. A regeneration of empty spaces from the past invading other places where events are situated. The kamma of emptiness may return again in a future time and out of nowhere, all of a sudden, there’ll come this feeling of nothingness again and I’ll say to myself, how about this déjà vu familiarity? Where did this nothingness, out-of-nowhere feeling just arrive from?

And when that comes around I may have forgotten about this moment where I am now – but if I remember, I’ll see it from that new location and say aha! this is the result of that empty space then; I made a note about it in my diary, let’s see…. And finding the handwriting on the page, I’ll remember the circumstances at the time, knowing that was the cause of my present recognition of it in this place where I am currently seeing the world. It somehow seems easier seen in the past, in hindsight, after the event – all that, and everything has passed, has been experienced, and there’s a sadness about it now; gone forever. I can split into two and look back on the event, reflect on that from where I am now, divided between here and there. I can look into the future and predict events that may occur and what that’ll be like… See it all as something happening ‘out there’ at different points in linear time. But wherever I’ve been in my mind, the return to ‘now’ takes place; the reel winds me in, there’s always the coming back to the point of reference, the present moment. It’s always now.

Maybe sometime next month I’ll be somewhere else, and next year in some other place – eventually it’ll be in a future time, distant but not too far away, and I’ll be lying in a bed with clean white sheets, hospital equipment and the people I see will all have names I seem to remember when they were children. It won’t matter, nothing will matter because I’ll be travelling through memory, revisiting times gone by: how did that come about? When did that happen… how long ago was it? Who was there and why am I remembering this now? And the answer will be that it had it’s origin at this specific point in time because I can see it writ; faded handwriting on the page in the diary, and I’ll reflect on the quality of that moment, this moment here now. Gratitude.

‘It is not that enlightenment will occur “when the time comes,” for “there is no time right now that is not a time that has come.”’ [The Path of No Path, David Loy]

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a kind of ignoring

Posted on November 19, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #26 Delhi: Putting in eyedrops and I’m not used to it, eyelid reacts just as the drop is coming, blinks before the drop hits the eye, face is wet with eye-drop fluid. Try again… drip. Same thing happens. I’ve just started a two week schedule of eye-drops because of a dryness in the eyes after the recent operation. Hoping it’ll get easier and learning how to not-react, to resist the body’s automatic knee-jerk response to whatever it is that’s coming into the eye. There’s this natural tendency to reject, to refuse, to say ‘no’. The mind has it figured out but the body is still unconvinced.

It’s something like a deliberate not-seeing; the not-wanting-to-have-anything-to-do-with-it thing. Not wishing to engage; a kind of ignoring. It’s denial… “Who me? … in denial? I’m not in denial!” (denial of denial). I’m not going to pay attention to what you’re saying about me ignoring you. Pretending it’s not there and maybe it’ll go away? Ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome [see note1 below] The ‘self’ illusion itself, is a trancelike state. Even though it’s really obvious, people are conditioned to ignore basic truths that conflict with the habitual way of doing things. ‘We don’t look at things, we overlook things’ [Alan Watts].

Ignoring the truth about climate change, seemingly unconcerned about what kind of future we’re passing on to future generations. Ignoring deeply held misgivings about wars created by politicians, weapons of mass ‘distraction’, slipperiness, underhandedness, cunning ploys and guile. Ignoring the 1st Noble Truth of Suffering; tolerating the suffering permits a sort of attachment to it? Or maybe we are genuinely searching for another way to live our lives, but we’re sidetracked by Television, consumer goods, and fall into the world of ‘choices’ and ‘preferences’; burdened with these dependencies. So we might say: NO, this is not it at all… go to the doctor, tell him about it and he says take these pills, something to get us back on track – education cleverly teaches children there’s only one option: consumerism, and to engage with that you need to learn about career, job, debt, house, rent, marriage, car, bills… It’s doesn’t say WHY (ignore that question). Consumerism is what people believe in; consumerism is ‘God’.

Try another eye-drop… head back, look at the ceiling. The eyelid flutters, blinks involuntarily, and an eyelash deflects the intrusive drop, fluid trickles down the cheek like an actual tear drop and falls into the ear. I wipe it away with a tissue – this action triggers a memory of something emotional – why am I crying… trying to do something I can’t, and don’t know why. It’s the squeezing of the bottle between thumb and forefinger, a small intense muscular action, that’s in conflict with the feeling of vulnerability. Reluctantly I see, in close-up, the bubble of the drop emerging from the point of the bottle and glance away from it, anticipating the tiny impact on sensitive eyeball… splish! I have to learn to look elsewhere – a skilful ignoring – and focus on something like the ceiling fan, a light bulb, the flaking piece of plaster in the corner of the cornice.

Mindfulness and being calm. Earlier today, I downloaded 11 hours of Tibetan Healing Bell Chimes and as I’m writing this now I’m already on hour 5. It’s playing quietly in a different window; sweet random sounds, intentional wind chimes; the IS-ness of it. Meditation practice means I can gently ease back from the intensity the mind creates for as long as it takes to see what’s going on; this action feels right – I’m able to emerge from ignorance into the knowing. A wonderful emptiness or the wholeness of it? A great peace in the space of the mind.

‘The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’ (link to downloadable pdf)]

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Note 1: I discovered that, in fact, the ostrich doesn’t bury its head in the sand when there’s danger, it’s digging a hole and covering the egg with sand and, seen from a distance, it just looks like that’s what it’s doing.

Note 2: ‘If You Are Having Trouble Getting The Drop Into Your Eye: Lay on your back, and place a drop in the inner corner of your eyelid (the side closest to the bridge of your nose). Tilt your head, open your eyes slowly, and the drop should fall right into your eye.’

Note 3: ‘slipperiness, underhandedness, cunning ploys and guile’ taken from Ajahn Sucitto’s ‘Parami: Ways To Cross Life’s Floods’

Note 4: Listening to 11 hours of Tibetan Healing Sounds in Zen Flash

Note 5: Reference to: ‘career, job, debt, house, rent, marriage, car, bills, children…’ taken from blogpost: What Do You Want? by Jack Saunsea

Note 6: Upper image taken from the series: “Only In India”

the ‘now’ moment

Posted on November 15, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #25 Delhi: Traffic stops. A great noise of beeping horns and eventually we can see it’s caused by cows crossing the road. Unusual to see cows being herded in the middle of the city – there must be a cowherder at the end of the column driving them, and others to clear the path through the traffic. The cows do seem a little anxious now, hurrying along. Usually they’re relaxed – placid is the word. I see them sometimes, sitting at the side of the road, cars moving around them, or they’re at rest on a traffic roundabout, ruminating, gazing out at the world.

The presence of the bovine mother, with its horns and all its wet-nose, smooth-hide, cowness, creates a kind of out-of-context NOW moment for me, a foreigner in this part of the world – although really, it’s ‘now’ all the time. ‘Now’ is not located anywhere in particular in time or space, it is always ‘now’ – the whole thing is ‘now’. The cow with its long eyelashes and good-looking face, just uncompromisingly ‘there’, is part of the environment and events taking place in the flow of occurrences, always in the present moment. I’m kinda blown-away by the immediate here-and-now reality of traffic flow around a seated cow, like a river moves round the boulders in a stream of tiny moments linked together, a seamless whole; cause becomes effect, what happened before it becomes what happened after that, and out into every available space in the city. It’s everywhere at the same time.

Usually I don’t see it; caught up in the thinking process; watching a movie in my head, driven by the requirements of a constructed ‘me’ and seeing the world in these terms. THINKING ABOUT THINGS so much, I don’t pay attention to the ‘now’ moment, the small period of pause that occurs… that empty space where nothing is happening, just before the next thought arises – a kind of non-event. Focus on it and everything stops shifting around, gradually settles down; time begins to stretch out in a vastness, reaching out over the horizon on all sides. Surrounding traffic is somewhere down below, locked-in, waiting for the cows to pass through.

This lasts as long as it takes for me to forget what I’m doing, attention wanders, and a passing wave of thought spins me off in the thinking process, the automatic default that brings me back to the functioning of the mind-body organism. The “self” getting in the way, feeling it didn’t quite have what it should have had, wanting this, happy with that, glad there are signs of movement at last and the ‘now’ moment is changed to something else. We’re on the road again, the cow obstruction has gone. Revving car engines, horns beep-beep, jostling for space. Car bodies like brightly coloured Lego pieces fit together to create a form, then immediately separate themselves and become a different form; join with other forms and larger constructs fit together with surrounding pieces. Traffic roars, screaming horns, it all begins to spread out, moving as one, then it’s quickly dispersed into separate units, more acceleration, and we’re away like a wave rushing back out to sea. The speed is breathtaking….

‘The human body is not a frozen sculpture fixed in space and time. The human body is a dynamic bundle of energy, information and intelligence that constantly is renewing itself and is in exchange with the larger field of energy, information and intelligence that we call the universe. In fact if we could really see the human body as it is, not through the artifact of sensory experience, you would see it to be much more exciting.’ [Deepak Chopra, ‘The Basics of Quantum Healing’]

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Source for lower image: Martin S. Gotfrit

a terrestrial ocean

Posted on November 12, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #24 Delhi: It’s colder here at this time of year. No fans, no ACs, people have their windows open and you can hear TVs, the clatter of dishes, cooking pots, ding, and bits of other people’s conversations. A child crying, a dog barks, somebody calling a person’s name in a language I can’t understand. It dwindles down as everyone settles in for the night, silent breathing in all the labyrinths of rooms and apartments that surround us here; people asleep on the floor, in beds, in cots, in hammocks. That’s how it was last night, then just after midnight, there was an earthquake.

Jiab wakes up, gives me a shake, ‘earthquake’ she says (Jiab is a linguistic minimalist). It takes me a moment to realize the house is trembling, bed is shaking, floor is like a sheet of tin stretching out from here to everywhere, connected with all other houses in the community… and the uneasy sensation of it undulating slightly; a flexibility, like the surface of the sea – a terrestrial ocean. Voices of neighbours outside, shouts and kerfuffle.

After a moment it settles down and the urgency passes. Trying to be mindful but I feel like I could go back to sleep maybe, just lying there, waiting to see what’ll happen. Then there’s another tremor, and we’re back into the unstable feeling again; louder shouts of voices, and more commotion outside… hmmm, the idea of death just going to arrive one day, anyday, could be a Tuesday, for example, or a Thursday, yes, nice if it were a Thursday.

Falling into a half sleep; there’s that Donovan song ‘Jersey Thursday’… did he mean the pullover or the island? Another tremor rocks the bed slightly and the gentleness of it helps me to drift off a little bit more. The day I die will be an ordinary day, nothing different about it. The moment after I’m gone the next moment will come along; that’ll take place, and there’ll be the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year.

No more holding on to ‘me’, the identity; who’s who or which is ‘what’ and ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘why’… particularly WHY? How to answer that? It’s M’s favourite question, she’s only 9 years old and has this curiosity about everything. Well, it’s just the way it is, you know? It’s all happening for it’s own sake, the inevitability of circumstances – things moving along of their own volition and whether they continue or discontinue doesn’t seem to be a question. (M looks at me: ‘… yes, but WHY?’) It’s like a story that I may think will, one day, come to an end… the final curtain: THE END, but it starts again and the period of ‘ending’ becomes a defining characteristic of it all: it ends sometimes and then it begins again. More like an epic anthology of short stories: ‘as old as we are able to imagine’ and going on forever, the panchatantra, the great cycle of it is always there. All the way out of this tiny space and knowing I’m an integral part of the whole universe.

It’s 4am, can’t sleep, get up and go through to the front room. Start up the laptop and google ‘earthquake’… amazing, the news is there already: ‘Four earthquakes (in Delhi) within a period of 4 hours, measuring 3.1 (12.41am), 3.3 (1.41 am), 2.5 (1.55am) and 2.8 (3.40am) on the Richter scale respectively. No reports of any casualty or destruction of property received so far.’ [reports: NDTV]

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Upper image by Manish Jain spiritualartwork.wordpress.com

the forgotten thing

Posted on November 9, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #23: Delhi: There’s something cozy about having to have the lights on in the daytime; skies are quite dark, a curious colourless light. Feels nice, just pottering around in the house wearing indoor slippers; walking along the corridor to get something in the kitchen, flip flop flip flop flip flip… I arrive there and can’t remember what it was I wanted. Strange, how a thought can simply vanish like that, leaving only the context of it. Walk back down to the living room and as soon as I’m there I remember what it was, ah yes… there’s something about this action that seems to retrieve the memory. Walk back along to the kitchen, and, goodness me, I’ve forgotten again – pause for a moment… there’s no memory of it at all.

A curious reality, the forgotten thing is associated with the idea it’s a lost object and it’ll turn up later, but when it does, how will I recognize it (if I don’t know what it is)? Let it go and the thought has gone, taking with it the thinker of the thought… thoughts without a thinker [Mark Epstein]. Conscious experience is filtered through the conceptualizing process. Without that, there’s no ‘me’; there’s nothing; a state of no ‘thing-ness’. It’s not the object, it’s the space it’s in; this ‘something’ within which things seem to exist, then unexist.

Shortly after that, I remember what it is I’m looking for; the eye-drop bottle – I have a schedule of eye-drops to take because of the eye operation. Walk back to the kitchen repeating the words: eye-drop bottle, eye-drop bottle, eye-drop bottle, and there it is sitting on the counter in plain sight – how could an object like that become invisible? Back to the living room where I’m distracted by other events for a while and when I look for the eye-drop bottle later on… can’t find it, oh no (this is giving me a headache). Then it’s there, sitting in the place where it was placed, an existential presence; nature morte avec bouteille d’oeil-baisse, “Still Life With Eye-Drop Bottle”. It holds my attention now – have I taken the eye-drop already, or not yet, and feeling my eyes for moisture, trying to remember…

‘The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.’ [R. D. Laing]

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Upper image: floating small candle boats on the Ganges river, taken from last year’s visit to the Buddhist sites

synonyms for startled

Posted on November 5, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #22: Delhi: “amazed, astonished, astounded, surprised…” looking for a word in the Thesaurus that describes the experience – but language doesn’t stretch that far. Diwali fireworks’ festivities are going on even though it’s after 22.00 hours and we’re just wondering how much longer before the fascination for fireworks fizzles out. I go for a look to see what’s going on outside. People in front of their houses, crouched over and busy with fireworks set up on the pavement; random explosions, fire crackers like machine-gun fire. It’s a war zone with no bullets, children laughing and running around in the smoke and glare. Fireworks displays are quite beautiful seen from some distance away, but here at ground-zero, the high volume, bang-whoosh-crackle is alarming; a struggle to be calm.

Back inside the house with all the windows closed because of the smoke and Jiab is talking about the Buddhist upekkha teaching: balance, equanimity, the state of being calm in the midst of difficulty; equilibrium, or eequeeleeblee-um, as she says – a Thai articulation. This kind of balance leads to freedom from passions, desires, likes or dislikes. Sounds nice and I go through to sit on the meditation cushion for a while to see if I can discover this balance, be with my reactions to the sudden noises and focus on the nature of what’s actually happening.

Watching the breath in this way, things seem to be getting quiet, and I’m just getting settled into this sitting meditation when suddenly there’s a colossal explosion, BOOM… so loud it sets off a car alarm down the street. The glass, brick and concrete of the room resonate like a huge drum. Startled, is not the word – it’s the nearest thing to jumping out of your skin I’ve ever experienced – automatic response. Confusion in time… what happened first? Was it before it happened that it seemed like I saw, in the darkness of mind-space, this amazing bright sky-blue colour appearing behind something like panels of intense black, falling away – parts of the structure that had been holding it contained – falling away in pieces, collapsing, and more and more of this lovely sky-blue colour is revealed.

The word: bardo comes to mind; the blue light of the skandha of consciousness in its purity, the wisdom of the dharmadhtu, luminous, clear, sharp and brilliant. I’m not saying this is what happened to me, it was more like a totally unfamiliar state, the mind doesn’t know what to do – what does it resemble, what’s it like, how can it be categorized? I’m amazed, astonished, astounded, surprised; looking for a word to describe it, but there’s not anything. Fireworks chase away the demons; papañca, proliferating thought, conceptualizing and the constructed ‘self’. The impact of it happening propels it all right out of here – bang!

‘… the Brahma-viharas are the great removers of tension, the great peace-makers in social conflict, and the great healers of wounds suffered in the struggle of existence. They level social barriers, build harmonious communities, awaken slumbering magnanimity long forgotten, revive joy and hope long abandoned, and promote human brotherhood against the forces of egotism. The Brahma-viharas are incompatible with a hating state of mind…” [Access to Insight]

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