context & content

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AsokBTSBangkok: Near Asoke, downtown, on my way to the eye hospital for an appointment at 3.20pm. I have a lens implant in the left eye and the surgeon is going to take out the stitch that’s been in the eye for 2 weeks. Today’s the day… dum-dee-dum, sing a song and forget about that (resistance to the thought of needles and eyes). A space in the mind opens up for a moment, and I take refuge in there, calm abiding; if a feeling is not present, I am not aware of it. Thoughts return, the fragility of things; eyeballs and eardrums, taste buds and nerve endings, vulnerability, perishability, finely tuned, limited lifespan. Get involved with my surroundings; crowds of browsers in the Asoke shopping area, a wealth of attractive objects. There was something I was supposed to get but I’ve forgotten what it was; new input replaces existing memory. How much time before the eye appointment? The memory comes back again… somewhere else, the needle-and-eye situation is happening to some other person, not me. Abide in the space of no-thought, remembering about the thing I’m looking for that I’d forgotten (I’ll remember what it was later), and just contemplating the empty space where it used to be.

It’s not just forgotten, it’s not there at all; replaced with a kind of consciousness I can’t identify, an awareness of the seeking? Seeking leads to the sense that something is missing, the suffering caused by wandering in a created world of being lost. The mind that seeks is restless, searching for things endlessly but never finds what it’s looking for. Always, always reaching out for something beyond the here-and-now: the sense there’s got to be something that’s better than this. There’s a place somewhere else where I’ll find the thing I’m looking for… but how will I recognize it if I don’t know what it is… ho hum, depending on the belief there’ll just be some kind of extraordinary familiarity and recognition? Somebody wise said: ‘What we are looking for is that which is looking…’ The mind that sees this relentless searching sees that other mind that seeks this; two minds. What am I seeing? Mindfulness and the curious situation of just seeing the seeking – and there’s no object. Seeking non-objects means seeking the seeking itself; seeing ‘the seeing’, the situation before the question arose, the motionless space in which everything exists; context and content.

Walking through the doors of the eye hospital as if in a dream, wait in the waiting area for my number to be called, then into a cubicle. Lie down on the bed, stare at the ceiling and the nurse bathes the eye with antiseptic eye-drops every 5 mins for 30 mins, then into the surgeon’s room. Lean back and more eye drops, anesthetic this time. I sit facing the opthamologist, a lady, place your chin here, she says and there’s a kind of binocular device for seeing into my eyes in an adjustable stainless steel structure with chin-rest and my head is held in the steel frame. I tell her I’m nervous, Painless, she says, it’s painless… and smiles at me reassuringly. I hear a sound like plucking violin strings, pizzicato, in the upper registers, ‘ting, ting’. Am I really hearing this small musical sound? I catch a glimpse of the surgeon’s tiny cutting tool as it releases the cords of the held stitch. She says it’s over… can’t believe it.

Sometime later that day, I remember what it was I’d forgotten in the Asoke shopping area*. I’ll have to leave that until I come back for the next operation on September 20th.

‘… eternity is realized at the cessation of striving for any event, looking for nothing’ – not looking for anything? …. Not looking for anything reduces the constant searching for it, so you can discover it was there all the time…’ [David Loy]

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*I wanted to buy a jar of Chyawanprash at the Indian market near Asoke
This post contains references to the Betty Edwards text: ‘The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain‘ and the text ‘The Path of No-path: Śaṅkara and Dogen on the Paradox of Practice’ by David Loy.

passive voice

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IMG_0083aBangkok: No taxis available at the airport, and all trains into town are seriously crowded. I am one of a very large number of individuals caught in the rush on a Friday evening. Somebody said later it’s because all the international schools start again on Monday. No other way, it’s decided for me, okay, I accept, I am subject to the system, the public transport system and I have no control over it. I am being ‘taken’, it’s about the process, rather than any particular person controlling the process. I could create a Controller in my imagination like the bosses, the management and blame it all on them/him/her/it, but it’s better to not do that…. There’s not a ‘self’ in the equation – the deed is done but there is no doer, using the Passive Voice language function to express the Buddhist Truth of no-self (anatta), and I came across an interesting post about this the other day [Link to: Just A Little Dust].

The ‘self’ is absent. Sounds are heard, food is tasted, the chill wind of September is felt upon the skin. And there’s nobody there that feels it, unless I consciously put together an identity composite, in which case I feel the chill (Active Voice). Language tells a story, creates a fiction that I can get lost in; only partially aware that it’s a constructed thing and most of the time I’m clinging to a concept of selfhood, an assumed identity. Thankfully, in the Passive Voice, there is no doer, things are done; the cognitive process is about ‘how it works’ rather than ‘what it is’.

The world is seen – I had an eye operation recently and what I didn’t expect was that it turned out to be an opportunity to contemplate this phenomenon of the experiencer. There’s the experience of visual stimuli entering the eye through a lens created by means of an industrial process and somehow the ‘me’ part of it is not there like it used to be. The lens inside my left eye is made of plastic, there’s a particular clarity in the colours, the quality of light and a fascination with the way plastic surfaces refract the light; plastic food wrapping, mineral water bottles, car windscreens. It’s all very new and quite interesting – maybe because I still have the ‘old vision’ in the untreated eye, something to compare it with.

I can see the world through the old eye as well as the new eye. It’s like the linguistic ‘voice’ can be both passive and active and I’ve understood it mostly in the active form; the process of selfing is grasped at as an entity and identified with – a controlling thing. In the West it’s a ‘belief’. My difficulty with anatta has been extricating myself from the Judeo-Christian conditioning that assumes the existence of an eternal soul. I notice Thais don’t have this problem. Even after 30 years in the East, I still struggle with my Western conditioning; an everlasting identity, the idea of it still lingers; a shadow of reality. A couple of hours and I’m at Morchit BTS near Chatuchak standing in the rain and D comes to get me in the car. The thought arises, the car is driven but there is no driver….

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 ‘Where water, earth, fire, & wind have no footing; there the stars don’t shine, the sun isn’t visible. There the moon doesn’t appear. There darkness is not found. And when a sage, a brahman through sagacity, has realized [this] for himself, then from form & formless, from bliss & pain, he is freed.’ [Bāhiya Sutta]

 

plasticity

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190320131769Chiang Mai: Holding the inverted eye-dropper bottle close to the eye, head back and squeeze a drop… it goes in, blink, and overflows, trickles out of the corner of the eye down the cheek like a tear drop and falls into the ear. I wipe it away with a tissue – the action triggers a memory, something emotional. I have new vision now, eye surgery for cataracts. The left eye is done, the right eye will be operated on next month. I’m seeing everything with such clarity; hard to believe the natural process of seeing that I’ve taken for granted all these years now involves a plastic lens. I see the world refracted through a man-made device and it doesn’t make any difference – well it does make a difference, of course, it’s very much better. My glasses don’t do anything any more; in the good eye the lens distorts vision, in the bad eye it enhances some things but it’s dull, blurred and yellowish in colour. I’ve had an overhaul – like taking the car to the garage to have new parts fitted. Or it’s how the system gets updated, the latest version is now installed. I feel renewed.

There’s this plasticity about the human body (and mind) that allows all kinds of changes to take place. I’m a Buddhist and I’m inspired by the thought that things can adapt, evolve, move on. It feels like there’s no such thing as getting stuck with anything or any state of mind, because we can learn to ‘unstick’ from it. In the same way, we can study a new subject; we put our minds to it, get interested in it and learn how it works. If I’m stuck with something, I’m attached to that thing in a strange kind of way; a locked-in response to adversity – more of a driven, unaware action than something done knowingly, mindfully. It’s a deluded attachment to habituality and I’m inspired by the very real possibility of working towards being free of this; acting always in awareness, seeing clearly.

Metaphors like ‘clouded vision’ describe tanha, habitual craving for something thought to be deservedly earned because of the endured hardship seemingly required to get there, unaware that one gets lost in the getting-there and there’s no end to it. Because I don’t normally understand things as they truly are, usually it’s how they’re seen habitually, I choose to see everything according to what’s already known; apperception, understanding newly observed data in terms of past experience. Before I get stuck in the delusion that it’s unavoidably like this, an opportunity arises to escape the cycle at Step 7 vedana in the paticcasamuppada (Cycle of Dependent Origination). Interrupt the causality sequence, go to the door leading to the emergency exit, aware that in the Buddhist sense of ‘no-self’, the habituality of mind’s perception of itself as the central actor in its own world, personality-view (sakkaya-ditthi), is the root of the problem. Step out of the cycle and I’m free…

Then later that night, walking to 7-eleven to get a few grocery items and I leave my glasses at home because they don’t help – I’ve worn glasses for most of my adult life and this is the first time I’m going out without them and at night time too. It’s been raining, there’s the glare of car headlights, and street lights reflected in large puddles. Only a short walk and arriving there, I notice some of the tiles on the floor of the lobby forecourt at the supermarket are shiny, glossy, and these must be new ones, replacements for the ones that were damaged? Why am I seeing this? I cover the good eye and look at the tiles with the old eye, no it can’t be seen, but I can see them with the good eye. It’s a repair I’d not have noticed before. People must think I’m acting strangely, better move along. So many discoveries about the world, and I’m stumbling around like this, seeing everything for the first time…

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‘Instead of starting with a perception or a conception of anything, the Buddha established a way based on awareness, or awakened attention. This is an immanent act in the present. It is sati-sampajañña, an intuitive awareness that allows the consciousness to be with the present moment. With this attention, you begin to explore personality-view (sakkaya-ditthi) in terms of the perceptions you attach to as yourself.’ [Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem of Personality]

Upper photo: Interior of Chiang Mai songteaw (public transport vehicle). Lower photo: Night Market, Chiang Mai

 

the beholder

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ploenchitBKK3

Bangkok: The world seems different, everything suddenly seen in clear three-dimensionality. Reflected light, rich, deep colours and a strange familiarity, objects in the environment become somehow known. I’ve seen these things so often before but now seeing them with an expanded awareness. It sounds visionary, you could say revelatory but it’s the result of eye surgery, rather than insight… nonetheless quite astonishing. I have this clarity in one eye only, vision in the other eye is like an old yellowed photo, dull and indistinct. The operation on that eye will be in October, back to the Rutnin Eye Hospital in Bangkok. The surgeon makes a hole in the eye and puts in a tool that uses ultrasound to emulsify the lens. The lens becomes liquid and is sucked away, then a plastic foldable lens is inserted in the place where the natural lens used to be. That’s it, done. Local anaesthetic is enough, or general if you feel claustrophobic about the covers over the face. After the op there are different kinds of eye-drops that go on for about three weeks and it feels a bit itchy but that’s all.

I’m amazed that it’s possible to do this; the plasticity of the human body, parts can be taken out, replaced; systems are deconstructed, reconstructed, subject to change. It all supports the idea of anatta: no abiding self. There’s an underlying flexibility about the mind/body organism namarupa. One example of this is that I have a very refined piece of plastic in my eye instead of a natural lens. And, looking at the world, I find an affinity with clear-wrap, cling-film, transparent plastic food packaging – the way the plastic surface refracts the light. In this strong sunlight in Thailand, I notice the reflections on chrome and glass – the clarity is sparkling and beautiful. Also these enhanced colours, reds mostly, and an overall bright clear blueness in the white areas. It has the quality of an iPad screen, retina display, high density pixels merge into one – an extraordinary brightness.

Faces of friends and family are seen as if for the first time. I notice small expressions now I didn’t know were there, maybe because everybody is looking at my new eye, intense Thai faces examine my new eye, and I’m looking back at them looking at me, seeing subtleties in their features that I’ve never seen before. It’s all quite new, a curious reality.

So, I’ll be going around for the next few weeks, looking at my surroundings and considering the phenomenon that I am experiencing this. Can it really be so? ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ (Margaret Wolfe Hungerford). The expression always seemed a bit mean and divisive to me, ‘I’ think it’s beautiful but ‘you’ might think it’s not; beauty becomes a matter of opinion… In Buddhism, the ‘beholder’ sees the world and identifies the self, ‘me’. If ‘I’ am inside the body, in ‘here’, I must be separate from everything else out ‘there’, isolated, alone, anxious – wrong view a fundamental error. The attachment to a perceived self and craving for it to become real, creates suffering. Language has a naming function, creating an apparent identity. Anything that is stated is always missing the point because of these characteristics of language. Better to think of it in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is: ‘… the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving. (the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha)’ [SN 56.11 (dukkha nirodho ariya sacca)]

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Photo image: Skyline at Ploenchit Bangkok.

layers

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IMG_0041Bangkok: Falling out of the sky, jet-lagged and inert. A 12-hour flight from London; they gave me an upgrade to business class, nice. More space, better everything and a larger seat. Able to stretch out in the prone position, yes but also a huge selection of videos so I watched movies for 12 hours and no sleep. Now in a state of hypnosis here at the house, lying on the sofa in another time zone. Early morning in Bangkok and I’m watching the FOX channel. There’s only one English language channel on TV in this place so it simplifies things: NCIS, Bones, The Bridge and others. The stories merge into one all-inclusive narrative, a complex and improbable plot. Good-looking actors in expensive cosmetics play characters that migrate from other crime series into this one, the central story, all roads lead to one end, catching the bad guy, variations on a crime scene theme. The pace of it is intense, camera shots hold for about 3 seconds then change. Background audio has a percussive, mechanical sound then it’ll switch to something calm; a picture of domestic reality, beautiful interior, elegant lighting, lovely fabrics – I wish I had a room like that. Slow piano notes played meaningfully, like steps taken through the memory of something that happened once. I’m lulled into acceptance; the way it unfolds is the way it is. I become the story.

I could switch off the TV but there’s a reluctance; a pleasing attachment, something that appears more difficult to let go of than it is. Resisting the emptiness, the deep knowing there’s nothing there that triggers the reaction to fill the empty space with a self-construct, or an image, a movie celebrity, a child’s doll, the sphinx, the totem pole, dependency on a perceived creator. I mute the sound, allow the engagement with it, following the story as it transforms, watching the present moment until it changes – how did that happen? I didn’t notice it take place, only after it occurred. There’s the sense of something applied. Consciousness seems like an unconnected series of screenshots, a random sequence of events; things without substance appear and fade away. Rest in this fictional state… it’s just the way things are. Mindfulness is at the base of it all, in every way. Sleep shuts off the system; down through the layers, comfort, familiar surroundings. Crash out on the sofa in flickering TV light…

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‘Like fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world.’ [David Loy, The World is Made of Stories]

recognition

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HarnhamLakePOSTCARD ♯05: Harnham Monastery, Northumberland: The monastery is situated on top of a small hill; guest accommodation is down the road a bit. I walk up to the main building for the one meal of the day; sunshine, a cloudless sky, and I meet one of the monks at the door. How long has it been, more than two years? He looks different. Faded brown/tangerine robe, shaved head, exposed face, features looking at me. The whole presence of a person, eyes in the centre of a field of vision – it seems like an immense identity just living here quietly… my perception of how things are, looking back at me. Recognition is a selective thing, matching moments of experience with what’s in the files inside the folder marked: THE MEMORY OF OTHER THINGS SIMILAR TO THIS – select/match, the mind-body organism default. It’s not what it is, it’s only what it appears to be.

Chanting, food, wash dishes and walk back down to the guest accommodation again. Huge daisies on the edge of path, everything is swelling up in blossom on top of this solitary hill and the panorama of Northumberland landscape all around. Unknowingly, I’m manipulating my perception of things to see the world as I want to see it without any real understanding of why I’m attracted – a huge habit of indulgence that I think is simply normal. I don’t understand desire, I just respond to the experience of it. Now on top of this hill, looking at a lifetime of seeking after what I want and rejecting what I don’t want without really knowing why. There’s this experience of dissatisfaction at the base of it all… normally I’m pretending it’s not there. It’s a hunger – a hunger for what? Caused by what? Is there a way of ending this hunger? There’s a name for it. It can be identified. Dukkha, (suffering), the First Noble Truth. Knowledge enters and ignorance is pushed out. I couldn’t see it before; too much thinking about how much I dislike the idea of suffering, an obstacle is created by my aversion to it; the desire for it to not be there. Strategies of avoidance, and lost in experience, agreeable/disagreeable. Caught in the momentum of seeking gratification or holding on to unhappy states of mind believing that this is my reality. The deluded self, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. This is the obstacle – the only reason it’s there is that I linger with the idea of it….

KHouse daisiesReturning again and again to the same starting point means these unhappy states of mind are reinforced more and more. Recognition is not informed by ‘clear knowing’, it’s seen through the clouded prism of unawareness, avidyā not-knowing (ignorance). What’s required is mindfulness, applied recognition, Right View, and the undoing of all the little knots tied in memory, habitual reactions over many lifetimes. Bit by bit, letting it all go…

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‘If we have faith in the Buddha’s teaching and are inspired by the great teachers, we can direct our interest into not just avoiding suffering, something we have spent a long time doing, but finding a skilful way of directing our attention towards recognising it, here and now. What is this ‘self’? How is this ‘me’ and ‘mine’ manifesting itself here and now?’ [Ajahn Munindo, Entering the Monastery, 22 July 2013]

– G  R  A  T  I  T  U  D  E –

suspended disbelief

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StACaPOSTCARD #04: St Andrews, Scotland: It’s a sharp bright light, different from the sunshine of South East Asia, comes at a lower angle; the sunbeam seems to shine straight into my eyes. Quite blinding in the early morning, I’m dazzled and have to shade my eyes to look up at the ruins of the nave of St. Andrews Cathedral, against the Northern sky. A great emptiness, 12th century mediaeval folk saw it as the ‘Glory of God’, projecting a ‘self’ onto empty space and if there was an intuitive sense – a normal inquiring mind – that something about this is not quite right; the sense of lack, unconvinced, doubting – could it really be God? If it was like this, they were living in fear of their own natural thinking processes and reasoned that it must be because ‘we are all sinners’ and the Church is there to ‘save’ us. Religion was/is power; the Church of Rome, then the Scottish Reformation claimed all the wealth of the Cathedral of St Andrews. Not much in history about the spiritual life of those who lived in that place, studied, prayed, meditated; their compassion, or loving kindness…

I see the door arches and passageways, people walked through here and lived their lives, breathed this air. How was it then; the existential reality of these 12th Century Britains? Conscious experience was the same in mediaeval times as it is today: outer object triggers inner recognition/desire. Example found in the Old Testament: Adam sees the apple: I want that… Dependent origination (paticcisammupadda) in an Old Testament format: there’s an apple out there and I want it but there’s conflict in the mind, associating a fictional self with a normal response; sorry this apple belongs to someone else and you can’t have it. How to resolve this? The response to the apple is normal, the process of human consciousness must be universal – there was never any time when people didn’t react/respond like this. Today we can apply understanding; how does the process work? In those days, no other way to understand it, you have desire for the apple, you are a born sinner, believe in God, and have your sins forgiven… and that was it – no other instruction. Thank goodness I discovered Buddhism.

It’s daylight until very late at night here, a long twilight going through to dawn the next day – really no darkness at all. The morning gathers momentum and we’re flooded with sunshine, day after day, everybody stumbling around in a state of astonishment, suspended disbelief. The sense of being on an island doesn’t seem to be here in Scotland, we are not held, contained, more like we are dispersed, all the way to the Northern region; Orkney, Shetland, Faroe Islands, the Arctic Circle and beyond…

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Ignorant of their ignorance, yet wise in their own esteem, these deluded men, proud of their vain learning, go round and round like the blind led by the blind [Mundaka Upanishad 18]

a small island

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050POSTCARD #03: London: Writing this on the new iPhone I bought in Apple Store, Covent Garden. Takes some getting used to. The keyboard is tiny; index finger placed on the letter key blocks out the whole letter – fingers too thick. The letters ‘O’ and ‘P’ are difficult, and when I type ‘M’, I hit the backspace instead. Jiab can do it okay, she has fingers as thin as flower stalks. Maybe I’ll give it to her…? A friend fixed me up with a blue-tooth keyboard and small projector (Optima). I’m using the image on the wall like a screen. Uploading the post to WordPress is possible with wordpress mobile but only with a good Wi-Fi connection. Interesting to work in miniature like this – there’s something about the smallness of it that suits things here in UK.

We’re in a tiny hotel room, just enough space for everything. The streets outside accommodate pedestrians on the pavement, and a narrow road allows the big black taxicabs to rush by. Could be a claustrophobic feeling if you think about it too much, compressed, economy of space provision. Don’t think about it. Japan is the same, squeezed into a little country. It is a small island, travel across from East to West and you come to the sea again – I am marooned. Geographical aloneness. The world is out ‘there’. I remember the separateness; the belief in a ‘self’ but seeing only the lack of it, and nearly a lifetime is taken up with looking for the answer to this conundrum – seeking. Now coming back from Thailand where I’m living in somebody else’s country, an outsider, and finding that it’s been so long since I was in the UK, where I was born, I’ve become an outsider here too. Can’t relate to this culture; holding on to a UK identity and there’s really not anything to support it, just my attachment. Most people I knew then are gone, I’m a homeless person, staying in hotels, staying with people I met in Buddhist groups, friends, and at Buddhist monasteries on the way.

Pretty nearly everyone here is an outsider, a visitor. So many different languages: Italian, Japanese, French, South American and others – where are the English people? It’s the holiday season, maybe they’re in someone else’s country too, being outsiders there? All the staff in hotels, restaurants and shops are East Europeans. Visitors come here and what they see is a system run by other visitors to England. A picture of England; a picture of reality – when was it not like this? Buildings and statues of eminent Victorians, a solitary man standing alone, high up there on a plinth, pigeons sit on his head. Splendid isolation, tourists take pictures of each other standing next to the man’s name carved in the stone of the base of the statue’s plinth and up above he’s there, looking out at other statues. I feel I should know who he is, I’m British, I should know… but you’d have to have studied history to know that. I can’t remember, it couldn’t have been important to me. All I see here is a monument to ‘self’, the grandeur of it escapes me. But it was important to the people of that time; statues, ornate buildings, the opulence and wealth of the Empire recorded in history. Such a great achievement, such a small country. This was. Can’t help reflecting on the fact that it’s all a fiction created by the storytellers of the day about a reality somewhere else, far away – samsara, stories from a small island.

‘There is a path to walk on, walking is being done but there is no traveller. There are deeds but there is no doer. There is no self. The thought of a self is an error and all existences are as empty as whirling water bubbles, as hollow as the plantain tree. There’s a blowing of the air but no wind that does the blowing. There is no self, there is no transmigration of a self; there are deeds and the continued effect of deeds…’ [Ramesh S. Balsekar, ‘Advaita, the Buddha and the Unbroken Whole’]

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Optoma projector on gorilla tripod keyboard and iPhone

nothing extraordinary

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photo-1POSTCARD #02: London: There’s a crowd standing around the entrance to the Underground Station. It looks like an emergency, police cars pulled up on the pavement, and an area is cordoned off with white tape stretched across entry points to the station entrance. All traffic is redirected and pedestrians can’t get through either. A policeman gives me directions to the Underground station entrance on the other side; so reassuringly calm, I’m made to feel convinced there’s nothing unusual about this situation of flashing lights, bulletproof vests and loud crackling voices on the police audio system. Pay no attention if there’s a slight urgency in the air and the world seems like it’s falling apart, it’s all being taken care of…

Strange circumstances, we all think, realising what we are expected to do is adjust to it, stay within the familiarity of ‘self’ mode, conventional reality. Mesmerised by strategies to keep the population from mass hysteria. No, really, everything is perfectly allright sir… and I feel a hesitation; it wouldn’t be polite to ask the policeman what’s actually going on here, to take up any more of his time with awkward questions – no, and thank you, you’ve been so nice about this, thank you very much – very English. You hear the word ‘thank you’ constantly; THANKYOUs are everywhere, staying with how it appears to be; nothing extraordinary here, no, no… but I sense something catastrophic; a great yawning chasm opening up beneath my feet. Things are clearly not allright and there’s this sudden desire to be absent, distance myself from this location ASAP.

tube pic1Depending on a self that’s seemingly in ‘here’ creates the objective state – I am inside looking out through the eyes; seeing what’s going on out ‘there’ – a world separate from where ‘I am’. Duality. It’s an illusion, and part of this illusion is that the mind is maintaining the illusion. The policeman is maintaining the illusion, media, culture, everybody I meet reinforces the illusion because we’re all doing it. Even when I can see there’s no self to speak of – nobody at home – the mind is always telling itself there is a ‘self’ in here. And this is the situation; seeing past the ordinary self where there’s a ‘me’, a GPS locator: YOU ARE HERE. This is how it is that I arrive at the Underground entrance by way of the small backstreets, following the crowd. Then down two long escalators, deep under the ground, down and down to the depth of what feels like a ten storey building. At the very bottom of this is the tunnel and the track. Heavy old metal train careering in with a great whoosh of tunnel air, I get into the carriage and we’re off clattering through the blackness of the underground network, rattle-bang-clink, rattle-bang-clink, rattle-bang-clink….

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‘… the distinction between an ever-changing experiential response to the environment, and the concept of a reified continuous self living in an objective world,’ [Gay Watson, ‘I, Mine and Views of the Self’]

Upper photo: Newcastle Rail Station, lower photo: London Underground train

a kind of alertness

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100720131952POSTCARD #01: Chiang Mai: A slight breeze disturbs the wind chimes, tinga-tingaling… ting. An unfinished sequence of musical notes. It diverts my attention from these rememberings, one by one, rushing towards me like a single wave quickly covers the smooth beach sand for a moment then recedes. The wind chimes again: tingaling-ting… ting, a sense of something suspended, isolated, uneasy – butterflies in the tummy – why should it be like this? The fact that I don’t know why it’s like this, causes the uneasy feeling to be there, ‘a riddle, wrapped in an enigma.’ Uncertainty, impermanence, the Ajahn Chah teaching, ‘Not Sure’ [mai nae]; poised on the edge of something – a kind of alertness. I’m going to UK, it’s to do with that; leaving Chiang Mai tonight, only a few hours left. Flight to Bangkok, change planes and I’ll be in London on Sunday morning – 5½ hours in the past. Thinking about Inkland (England, as M calls it), a great flood of memories and the revisiting of these times. I’m not feeling sure about it; Inkland is such a ’proper’ place (compared with Thailand), not sure about being not sure and remembering other times when I was not sure.

Only two weeks in the UK and too many things to do; a sequence of events planned; connecting with trains often delayed, sometimes cancelled, and meeting people in places I don’t know. So many things dependent on so many other things. And so much of it is unresolved until it unfolds, piece by piece and fits together in the right order. A handful of printouts of train tickets and hotel reservations, it’s hard to keep it all in my head. I feel cramped, it’s time to finish off planning for this event – the event is already here, it’s happening now! Time to get ready to go to the airport. Tidy up this placet; the Zen of housekeeping, inner peace, do the ironing…

Hot iron on freshly laundered fabrics, comforting, homely, perfumed smells. It has a soothing effect. Ironing out all these little wrinkles, the silvery nose of the hot iron smoothens them all away, warm to the touch. Place the folded packets of clothing in the suitcase. Peace and flatness. Being mindful of the ‘not sure’ thing, it’s caused by my being not sure about it. As long as the uncertainty is out there somewhere, neither in nor out, it’s uncertain. So I know I have to embrace it, give it a hug, be open to it and allow the uncertainty to enter – there’s nowhere else for it to go. The willingness to let it in, leads to an immediate sense of release, inside and outside. Wind chimes go: tingaling again, joyful sound. Passport, ticket, wallet, I’m on my way. Goodbye house, anjali…

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