relinquishment

Posted on February 8, 2013 by tiramit

North India: Early morning light, people wrapped in shawls, long scarves bound around the head and tied under the chin. Dark faces, eyes looking out and they see me for an instant through the window – eye contact. I’m on a tourist bus, just passing through this small township, on the way to somewhere else. I think they see me as one of those who live in maya, not in the real world; living in a dream, and they might laugh to themselves; I’m naïve, dependent on support mechanisms that I pay for with an impossible wealth. It’s true; I’m in awe of them and, for me, their reality is unreachable. I don’t know anything about the actuality of their lives. My ongoing practice of ‘self’ consciousness reflecting upon itself is maybe something that comes naturally to them.

Inside the dark interior of their houses, I see shadows moving in the dim light of old-style incandescent 25-watt bulbs in unsteady current, candles, oil lamps and small burning fires. Domestic items, pots and plates, carefully placed outside on the ground and I feel they should be inside. A pregnant woman glances at me for a momet with deep eyes and there’s something supernatural about it. I look away. The houses all look like they’re only partly built. Bare brick walls and there’s one incomplete upper floor, or some part of the house seemingly under construction. I ask the tour guide and she tells me it’s because you don’t have to pay tax if your house is still being built. These half-built houses are everywhere; a family living on the ground floor and upstairs bare brick walls reaching up like pillars with no roof, just the sky. There’s an underlying uneasiness about it all, it seems to me; inadequate shelter, no protection, and a fierce tenacity of holding on to life.

There are others in more hazardous circumstances, street people and those with no dwellings at all, the dispossessed. Beyond that the sadhus, bearded men with matted hair in yellow robes, white pigment smeared across the forehead, incense and candle-wax – hovering in a kind of other dimension – a living statement that all that is born, ends. It ceases. We die because we were born. That’s how it works. There’s birth and death in every moment. It’s so obvious, but I can’t see it.

I don’t want to see the cessation of anything; I want to hold on to what is good but it falls away to nothing and I start looking for something else to replace it. Chasing after things I want, and running away from other things I don’t want, creates the illusion that this is what life is about. I’m tossed around in the experience of having this, and rejecting that. And even the quiet space that just comes along by itself sometimes; the neutrality of neither this nor that – even in that place I’m dissatisfied. It’s a kind of nowhere thing.

I’m subject to praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute, gain and loss [Eight Worldly Dhammas]. All I can do is react or respond; and I cannot seem to see that everything that happens now is the result of something that happened at some earlier time when I was reacting or responding, just as I’m doing now: vipaka-kamma, resultant kamma. This is what comes of it. And it’s so obvious, all I have to do is allow the cessation to take place but I can’t see it.

Dukkha, suffering is looking for certainty in something that is, by its very nature, uncertain; running from one thing to the next, looking and looking, and pretending the uncertainty is not there. The Ajahns say, stay with it until you see the cessation. Everything comes to an end. This is what it actually is… the letting-go of it, giving it all away, relinquishment….

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‘I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging;  I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness;  I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying;  All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become  otherwise, will become separated from me.’ [From: The Five Subjects for Daily Recollection, Chanting Book]

Photo: From the Buddhist Sites Tour album

somewhere over the rainbow

Posted on February 5, 2013 by tiramit

Bangkok-Delhi flight: Something happens to interrupt the dream… it wakes me up and I remember I’m on the plane. It’s a window seat, clouds outside and a huge horizon – the curvature of the earth. Here in the confines of economy class, the large man next to me wears a short-sleeved shirt and has hairy arms, the passenger in front has extended his seat all the way back, and it’s like his head is in my lap. I feel I’m part of the South Asian population already. Stewardess announcement: ‘raydee and gentermens…’ Thai, mispronunciation of the L and R consonant and a plurality problem, ‘.. ensure window shades are up, armrest is down, fold away table up, and chair forward… If I think too much about it, I get lost with the instructions. ‘And this concludes our fright service…’ Reminds me of a flight to Jakarta once; and the last part of the stewardess announcement: ‘… and the penalty for dlug tlafficking is death, thank you.’

The final part of the Woody Allen movie I was watching before I went to sleep is still showing on the screens. I don’t have the sound plugged in, just looking at the actors fumbling around like serious, grown-up children. The ‘I’ metaphor is an image projected on a screen; reassuring in the midst of our existential anxiety. Consciousness plays the game of hide-and-seek, concealment and obscuring – if consciousness is revealing itself, it means it’s also obscuring itself and things appear to be what they are not. Woody Allen has a cartoon face, he was born with it, that was/is his destiny. I plug-in the sound to see what it’s about – the idleness of it is immense, samsara, conversations of no consequence unravel here during the time it takes from departure point A, to arrival point B at the speed of 600 miles per hour.

Watching other people looking around, heads spinning left and right, down, up, coordinating body movements; going along the aisles and coming back to their seat, holding on to chair backs as they go, simply occupied with the physicality of being in the limited interior of this aircraft, mesmerized by the phenomenon of individuality. There’s not anything beyond the mind’s perception of itself as the leading actor in this movie; the assumption is that, one way or another, everything coming through the sense gates and into the mind is about ‘me.’

‘Infinite being playing the game of limited being. The limited being is a construct we’ve taken on; it’s like this because the infinite being that we are isn’t bothered by limitations and permits everything with infinite love…’ [David Bingham, Conscious TV]

Plane tilts over and makes a left-hand turn. Sunlight comes in through the cabin windows on the right side and sweeps around the interior as the plane changes direction, circles around and goes into descent. It’s as if it were a flying house, spinning around on its axis (We’re not in Kansas anymore, says Dorothy to Toto. We must be somewhere over the rainbow.’) Audio switched on; music for arriving. Slow calm triumphant music has a kind of congratulatory sound; the final approach; our journey’s end. And the digital map of the world shown on the monitor has the illuminated flight path BKK/DEL as a diagonal line about 30 degrees North East with the small icon of the plane now circling over New Delhi – population 16 million, including rural/urban seasonal migrants. A few moments later: BUMP BUMP wheels touch down on runway. Population increased by one planeload.

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‘I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens’ [Woody Allen]

uncreated

Posted on February 2, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Sitting at my desk and there’s somebody drilling in the floor of the apartment upstairs, just above my head. Renovations are going on up there. There’s been a lot of banging and drilling these last few days but this sound is incredible. It’s a hammer drill drilling through hard concrete; the sound is vibrating through the structure of the building and if I lean my elbow on my desk heavily, the vibration is conducted through the elbow and bone structure of my arm, to cupped hand holding my jaw, clenched teeth and the skull is vibrating in resonant frequency. I’d really like that sound not to be there and it takes a moment for the thinking mind to create a background to this event. Maybe I should go out for a walk somewhere. Is there somewhere I can hide away?

Then a child starts crying, it’s small voice going on in a seemingly inconsolable way. I can hear mother’s voice there as well. Yes, I’d be upset too if I was woken up by this kind of noise… and there’s a resentment about the noise building up inside me; a very large complaint-mode beginning to take shape. In an instant it’s formed. Who is responsible for this? I’m looking for somebody to be at fault here, who’s to blame for this? I come from a society conditioned by blaming; searching for the scapegoat. Blame it on somebody – or blame myself, that’s just as effective: I should never have taken the lease for this place…. Then that whole emotional thing just disappears as quickly as it arose.

I hear a plane approaching; it’ll fly over in a few seconds. We’re in the flight path here – departing flights, from Chiang Mai airport, flying quite low and heavy with fuel. Some are very large passenger jets that go to Singapore and this must be one of them. In a moment, the immense sound is present; everything in the apartment, and outside too, submerged in a collosal din. This is like an epic disaster movie! I can hear the hammer drill and the child crying but it’s as if I’ve gone deaf, the sounds are so faint. The thinking mind is quiet, only the presence of this noise; a great chasm opening up in the fabric of reality, getting wider and wider and the receiving of this whole experience.

I’m drawn to these strange moments when there seems to be no thought at all. The mind just stops, allowing the immense sound to exist. There’s mindfulness of ‘self’ continuing as it always does but there’s no connection with it. I can be aware of this automatic self, just go along with what it’s doing as if it were something separate. The applied thinking mind; just seeing it and everything that arises, ceases.

The totality of aircraft noise recedes and hammer drill sensory impingement returns. Crying child remains unconsoled and for a little while I give way to the raging fire of emotion again. The thinking mind is engaged: a kind of intensly gridlocked traffic of thoughts driven into near collision with other thoughts and backing up and trying to find a way out of this cramped condition.

Then I step out from it. There’s a pause and in the small space that exists I remember the Ajahn talking about sati-sampajañña, saying consciousness is a natural function, it is ‘uncreated’, there is no sense of self associated with consciousness. Outside the thinking mind there is only the uncreated. I look around for the pause… it’s still there, a curious extended, stretched-out moment when there’s just no thought at all….

It’s getting easier now, the child is not crying anymore. When the drilling stops, the silence is overwhelming. Mango trees outside my window; sunlight on leaves, branches move slightly as tiny squirrels leap around in playfulness.

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the whole nine yards

Posted on January 30, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Somebody gives me a lift downtown and she’s upset about the traffic, shouting at the other drivers, voice echoing around in the acoustics of our small vehicle, really letting it all go. She’s a local person and this kind of pressure-valve release is weird, like a bad dream; road rage is the same everywhere, I suppose. We’re accelerating down these narrow sois (small streets) lined with parked cars, pedestrians everywhere, sudden braking and lurching around corners, then reversing all the way out of there because there’s an obstruction. I’m sitting in the back seat, she’s twisted around peering through the rear window, as she negotiates reverse gear, so I get to look at this tense face, complaining about how these drivers all come from the hills; they don’t know anything about road courtesy; the whole nine yards …

Maybe she’s just having a bad day – correction, she is having a bad day. What to do? I can get upset about how upset the driver is, or I can just watch the road on her behalf – two options. I opt for watching the road; the mindfulness thing, and immediately I’m into this kind of alert awareness of everything that’s happening. I’m discovering this (or maybe I always knew) instinctive preparedness that just seems to engage: life is fragile and tenuous. At the same time struggling a bit with the other option: Hey! what’s all the fuss about? Smile and pretend it’s not happening. But there’s just no getting away from it, and this fully switched-on-headlight of fierce alertness is locked in and focused.

Part of me is asking what is going on here? There’s awareness, conscious awareness and then consciousness itself – so this is it, the big question… what is consciousness? Turn the mirror around like that, and consciousness sees itself; there’s a duality and we return to the default reality of ‘me’ in here and ‘that’ out there. It’s this thing about mirrors again; ‘I’ become the subject of what is being mirrored: you can see for yourself, it’s saying, this is proof of how it is… right? But I choose to take refuge in awareness of the danger, rather than do the ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing. I can take sati-sampajañña, awakened awareness, as my refuge. The inclination is to be awake, to be watchful, all sensory receptors are switched on full blast; any little sense of ‘me’ as a person is a distraction. So this is the way to go, I stay with that and there’s a clear knowledge that it’s not a ‘created’ mind state. It’s something Ajahn Sumedho would call the Unconditioned [see link below].

We get to the destination and I’m very glad to get out of the car, ‘thanks for the lift!’ Wow, life, as we know it, returns – it puts on its appearance of comfortable familiarity. Amazing, how does it do that? It really is such a fine balance, we are just on the edge of all this disappearing, all the time! And with conscious awareness the system is more inclined to go directly with what is really happening than run for safety in some kind of ‘pretend’ world. I wonder, though, what happens to people who’ve never bothered to look beyond the reality of the fictional ‘self’. It would require a lot of last minute revisions; could it all be done in time? Maybe it’s possible.

The driver… well I dunno, but she was pretty good. Somebody told me later she did a training course in driving emergency vehicles, so maybe that’s it – life for her is just one continuing emergency. That’s OK too….

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‘… We take that which is aware of the conditioned realm, sati-sampajañña, awakened awareness, as our refuge, rather than trying to find or create a condition that will give us a false sense of security. We are not trying to fool ourselves, to create a sense of security through positive thinking. Our refuge is awakening to reality, because the unconditioned is reality. Awareness, awakeness, is the gate to the unconditioned…. You can’t take refuge in your thoughts or your perceptions. That’s just the way the conditioned mind functions. It can’t help it. It can’t do anything other than that. You can only take refuge in awareness. All the problems are resolved right there. Of course, the conditioned mind thinks that awareness is nothing; it not worth anything – but it’s everything….Whatever assumptions you have about yourself, no matter how reasonable they might be, they are still a creation in the present. By believing in them, by thinking and holding to them, you’re continually creating yourself as a personality.’ [Ajahn Sumedho, ‘The Problem of Personality’]

backstory

Posted on January 27, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Skype call from P in the North of Scotland, walking through a shopping mall interior, holding up his phone camera in front of him and I’m able to enter into a view of the world at this moment, about 5500 miles away. It feels like I’m really there; a chromium steel, tiled and glass environment with Starbucks and everything is recognizably ‘the mall’. People wearing scarves and hats, thick clothing – it’s below freezing outside that building. Light from the mall windows fading out to zero white, pixelated edges of electric blue and turquoise suggests air so cold it’s like an ice-cream headache, chilled nasal passageways and cranial cavities. I’m thinking of ice-rinks, peppermint and menthol. Words come out with vigour in great gusts of steamy vapour.

I lived there in a former life – long ago and far away. The sharp clear air, constant wind, and winter daylight lasts only a few hours; it was a world without colour. Cold, wet, windy and the mind is saying: ‘No, I don’t like this. I want sunshine, I want warmth,’ the samsara of wanting it to be different from how it is. And eyes looking through the gap between hat and scarf, out into the world but inwardly removed and seeing the sunshine in some fictional landscape created in the mind. I didn’t know anything about the Buddhist perspective on Suffering, dukkha nirodho ariya sacca, at that time, just ‘driven’ by a sadly dysfunctional family and nameless hunger that arises from the feeling that there has to be something better than this.

So, one thing led to another, and it’s a long story, but eventually I discovered it’s not ‘me’, it’s just the way it is. I can have loving-kindness, mettā, for the created ‘me’ and lighten up about that. I don’t get seriously into it any more, now there’s that distance from my constructed identity. It’s been with me all those years, wow, like something historical: ‘This is the house that Jack built.’ And now I’m here in South East Asia; not too hot at this time of year, warm like a Mediterranean summer; rubber slippers, shorts and a T-shirt. The quality of light is amazing, colours of things are outstanding, as if lit from within – a Disney cartoon – papaya fruit is an amazing fluorescent, magic-marker orange; green trees against blue skies and the whole thing feels like it’s been photo-shopped. The air is warm like a soft quilt cover wrapped around the shoulders, with no weight, so you feel this lightness – ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘ by Milan Kundera, worth reading if only for the title.

But all this coming to an end very soon, less than a week to go before the time comes to go back to Delhi and the colder climatic conditions of the North. Not able to flop around in thin cotton clothing any longer… nope. This time next week I’ll be socked and shoed and trousered, and scarved and coated, hair-combed, passported and ticketed and transported to the North of India in a passenger jet, but that’s not happened yet so there’s time to reflect on that difference and get ready for the adjustment.

I’ve been living in other people’s countries for more than 30 years; met Jiab on the way. She still identifies with her Thai cultural context. I’ve nearly forgotten mine. I used to go back to the family home up there at the top of the world and most people couldn’t remember me; all the elders’ hair going grey, and greyer then white, Now I go there for funerals and people just don’t know me at all. I’m a foreigner there and a foreigner everywhere else. I’m more into the Thai world than any other culture – they see me as a kind of cultural hybrid.

There’s a shrine in Jiab’s family home; a structure of tiny ornate tables placed one on top of each other, in a hierarchy of size. The larger ones are at the bottom and smaller ones placed on top and even smaller ones placed on top of them. It’s built up to about five levels. An ascending, perspective effect as things recede above eye level with candles and an image of the Buddha on the topmost table. It’s the one where he’s protected by the hooded snake god Naga, extending Cobra neck hood and curved over the head of the Buddha forming a kind of umbrella (there was a rainstorm at the time of approaching enlightenment). Above that, framed on the wall, there’s a row of these faded old sepia photos of Jiab’s ancestors. There they all are, looking down at me. I feel their gaze because I’m not just a cultural hybrid in their eyes, I’m from a different planet too. I sometimes feel they need to look at me more carefully than they look at other visitors to the shrine. So I just let them do that, it’s a kindly gaze, without the burden of thought, comfortably dwelling in a state of wakefulness, and understanding things in their actuality.

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Photo (upper) Iceland wave, Peter H. Photo (lower) Chinese temple BangPah-in, Elaine H

how it seems (1)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by tiramit

I SEE THE WORLD through a built-in selection process that reflects and supports the default state of mind; it’s like fish cannot see the water they swim in; so obvious, yet… but I can get it to fit, more or less, according to my likes and dislikes and fall deeper into the dream. I make it into something good or bad or whatever and the fact that I can’t see it – well, it just does that. I call it reality. How I perceive the world is dependent on causes and conditions that were here before I was born; you could say it comes with the software. I think I’m an independent being not affected by anything or not affecting or influencing anything else. I can’t see this is a work of fiction and it’s all being monitored by the ongoing needs and requirements of an entity I created; a ‘self’ that has no real substance. I’m dismayed, of course, by how it all gets swept away in randomness; subject to the kamma, unknowingly created at some earlier time.

‘… It’s because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond the cycle of the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destinations.’ [Tanha Sutta: Craving” (AN 4.199)]

The outer world just rolls along, as it does, in all its diversity, and totally neutral. Whether there’s belief it’s this or that, makes no difference; it’s just how it seems. The devastating emptiness of it all means the population is driven to get and do and attain and protect and defend. It’s a battlefield. To avoid and deny, to have fear and anxiety and be controlled by authority and feel threatened with the flimsy nature of existence, although the absolute fragility anicca, is the beauty of it. But the population can’t see it like that. They are clutching at straws but don’t see it like that; don’t see they are maintained in an unknowingness of the world like penned animals are by the farmer, well intentioned though he may be, in order to cultivate a special kind of hunger, upadana tanha (clinging and craving) – and the economy depends on this. The greater the craving, the faster the turnover of stock and the Western style of God together with governments and the corporations are simply involved in farming the population.

I can understand why the Buddha was thinking the Dhamma was too subtle and there was no point in teaching it because no one would understand. I can see how, in those historical times of feudal hierarchy, it would have seemed impossible to create social change…. and is it any different now? It seems just as impossible for people to understand today. I wonder if I really fully understand it myself. I’m no different from other people, this is our shared suffering. But the Buddha changed his mind about it being too subtle. He said there is a way out and we can find it in the framework of the Four Noble Truths. The teaching has survived 2600 years. Understanding replaces misunderstanding; ignorance is pushed out. There’s a simple curiosity and this quiet state of at-ease knowingness….

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castles made of sand

Posted on January 22, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Traffic congestion at the intersection and everything comes to a standstill. The tuktuk driver makes some remark, I ask him what he’s saying and out comes a whole string of words I think I can’t understand. Then I start to recognise a few familiar vocabulary items and can reply with the same kind of observation. He laughs and says this thing I’ve never heard before: jai yen-yen (heart stay cool) jai ron mai dai (heart hot – not okay). So what now? He looks around to see if we can do a U-turn; not possible, we have to wait and see, and he switches off the engine. Sit back, relax, silence, it’s strange to be suddenly quiet after the large sound of the 2-stroke engine stops with the flick of a switch. Seems like another world; sitting on a sofa in someone’s living room, decorative chromium bars – an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor on wheels? The driver has photos of his family stuck above the windscreen, and decorative flower garlands swaying in this slight wind. No walls, a canvas roof and the outside world enters my space, like it’s always been here; the inside merged with the outside. Birds could fly through… it’s odd, just metallic creaks and the sound of other engines turning over. The smell of fuel, tarmac; this is somewhere in some part of town. Ah well, I’m glad it’s not too hot, we might be here for a while.

I could send someone a text message …reach for my phone – then resist the urge. Okay, so, what’s the plan? All things are now directed here: the Plan; an habitual thing from long ago, frequent updates, always in line with current changes. It’s a comfortable space I create in the mind and that’s okay but sometimes I feel compelled to have a plan about the Plan. Then a plan about the plan about the Plan. The Plan is an end in itself, detached from its location in some future time, it’s now placed in present time – more like a plan for the present moment. We’re always only part the way through anything, anywhere, anyway and never at the end – we just don’t know what happens after that. Nobody ever came back from What Happens After That to say what it was like… we just don’t know.

Nothing is permanent, anicca, but the intervals between change may be immense; it doesn’t change for a very, very long time – then it does. I have a vision of it coming to an end one day… there goes the world, collapsing like a dead star, all matter reduced to an atom… all gone in a flash. Or maybe it’ll be slower; bits start to fall off and you hardly notice. And there’ll come a time when the System and all who sail in her will begin to fall in on itself like great empires do that have spanned the centuries; in the end, become too unreal and like castles made of sand and all things subject to collapse, tumble to the sea – nothing is permanently permanent – eventually. But it depends how you choose to see it, of course. In a different kind of temporality, it would just arise again and pick up where it left off; a continuous unfolding transformation and that’s how it is, even as we speak.

Something happening up front, cars beginning to move, the driver switches on the engine and it starts up immediately, a few turns of the throttle and we’re suddenly not there anymore, away in an exhilaration of speed and noise….

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‘For many lives I have wandered, looking for, but not finding the house-builder who caused my suffering. But now you are seen and you shall build no more. Your rafters are dislodged and the ridge-pole is broken. All craving is ended; my heart is as one with the unmade’ [Dhammapada v.153-154]

the ‘I’ metaphor

Posted on January 19, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Contemplating birdsong here in this place, next to a wooded area and a very large tree in the early morning and there’s a male Koel bird on a branch somewhere repeating its call: ko-el, ko-el, ko-el! a two-syllable utterance, at measured intervals, getting louder and louder each time, reaching its peak and the bird stops for a breath. It starts again from low volume working up to high volume, The sound, ko-el echoes around in the spaces between the hard branches and trunks, the layers of foliage and around in the air into my space here in the room: ko-el, ko-el. The end of the sound –el collides with the beginning of the next sound in the sequence: ko- and for a moment it becomes more like: el-ko-el-ko-el-ko, smoothly presented in a unity the bird knows so well and I’m just discovering it.

The preception of the sound shifts back to ko-el, ko-el, contained in this space. And in the space contained in all the other rooms in this building, the corridors and passageways, as I go down to street level; the elevator and front lobby. The ko-el sound can be heard everywhere in the building. I know, of course, it just seems like the ko-el sound is contained in the building, it’s an illusion. In fact the ko-el sound and the whole building are contained in space; space holds all, there are no boundaries, no beginning, no end. The ko-el sound can be heard all along the street too.

Back upstairs again and I am in this space, the space is in me. I can say ‘I’ am here, meaning the fictional ‘self’arising from the five khandhas, the mechanisms that filter conscious experience received through the senses. And the ko-el sound reaching my ear convinces me that if there is sound, there must be somebody in here hearing it – and that’s ‘me.’ The belief in self is backed up by sensory data input through ear, eye, nose, mouth, feeling sensations and mind. I can hold on tight to this belief that I am ‘me’ but there’s really nobody there. I can let go of it. It’s a metaphor; it’s saying conscious experience ‘is’ individual identity – a figure of speech, a kind of analogy. Not real. The emphasis on it being the same as the object of comparison pushes the whole thing over the edge and it ‘becomes’ the object. In fact the conceptual metaphor is a tricky business….

My Western conditioning still struggles with the anatta teaching, and the misleading statement: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ [René Descartes] isn’t helpful. It’s like the opposite of what Buddhists know to be true. If Descartes had been a Buddhist, he might have said: ‘I think, therefore I am a thought construct’ …but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? What I think I am is not what I am. Thoughts think themselves, dependent on conditions arising from other conditions which are dependent on other conditions; peeling back the layers of onion, like this, to discover there’s nothing in the center; just empty space (again). It’s the ‘I’ metaphor; a structure created by words to explain a concept. In the mind’s eye we can leave the body behind, soar up into the sky and leap up into the heavens. It’s a figure of speech. The self is not contained in me, ‘I’ am contained in ‘self’ – the universe – everything, no subject/no object.

The ko-el sound shifts to some other location and it must be because the bird has flown to a different tree, further away. Later in the day I hear it again, coming from some distant place and after a while I don’t hear it anymore….

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‘…the anatta teaching is not a doctrine of no-self, but a not-self strategy for shedding suffering by letting go of its cause, leading to the highest, undying happiness. At that point, questions of self, no-self, and not-self fall aside. Once there’s the experience of such total freedom, where would there be any concern about what’s experiencing it, or whether or not it’s a self?’ [“No-self or Not-self?”, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 8 March 2011]

the non-personal self

Posted on January 17, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Death is a failed internet connection. Three o’clock in the morning, unable to sleep so I get up, stumble through in the darkness and start up the computer. The brightness of the screen is blinding. But no internet, and no matter how much I think there should be a connection, it’s just not there. Consciousness operates in terms of subject and object; to be conscious I have to be a separate entity, a subjective being situated here. And the object, the internet – my friend, is part of this assumed ‘self-ness’ I’ve been accustomed to see in everything, still held by the conditioning of my childhood. But my friend is not there, and it is a death in that sense.

Stubborn and resentful, I go back to bed, and for quite a long time, mind continues rummaging through the disarray of its files and references; I see, with mindfulness, there’s a sense of it being a bit put-out; can’t sleep, the dream-state is set in the context of my being awake. It’s been like this, for as long as I can remember – there’s a created ‘self’ everywhere, it has it’s own momentum blindly searching for situations that offer pleasurable gratification (or gratification in displeasure), and not much more than that. I can see what this is about, but lose sight of what’s beyond ‘self’ in the attempt to grasp an understanding of it.

Same old thing. There’s something about this that’s so clear and obvious yet, again and again, when I look for it, it’s not there – the direction to take is unknown; the means by which I get there, as yet, uninvented; I study it as an object, and it’s the created self again. Up till quite recently I’ve been thinking in terms of anatta (no-self), an undefined nothingness, and now starting to think there’s also a desire to ‘not-exist’ involved here – the way I’m doing it. So if the ‘I’ construct isn’t what this is about, what is it, then? I can change the pronoun from ‘me’ to ‘it’ and that gives me distance, somehow there’s an ‘it’ there that recognizes ‘itself’ everywhere….

Head leans back and enter into a huge yawn, yaaaaawn… so deep and large, …aaaawn… and reaching optimum yawn capacity, coming to an end, and there’s a distinct ‘click’ noise in the ear. The hinge of the lower jaw – is it supposed to do that? This holds my attention for a moment, wetness around the eyes, nasal passages blocked up and fuzziness. There’s the beginning of a thought related to something I was puzzling over and a little picture of it is somehow revealed, a solution to the problem… I have to get up and find a reference in my notebook, mark it with a bookmark, come back, collapse on the pillow and drop off into deep sleep completely.

Some hours later I wake up for the second time. Senses switched on, eyes open, sounds enter, taste in the mouth, feet on floor, arms push upper body into sitting position. And there’s the notebook with the bookmark lying where I left it: ‘What had been realised in that moment was that self isn’t personal, it’s non-personal. And not only that, the realisation wasn’t personal. The realisation was simply something else appearing in what had been assumed to be my consciousness, and was realised to be the Self: absolute, timeless, radiant being.’ [Roger Linden, ‘The Elusive Obvious’, Conscious TV, July 17th 2008]

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how it is

Posted on January 14, 2013 by tiramit

‘All conditioned Dharmas are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows. Like dew drops, a lightning flash. Contemplate them thus.’

Chiang Mai: It’s late morning, getting near to noon and I have to go out and get something from 7-Eleven. Down in the elevator and it’s not far, along to the end of the lane, tall buildings on either side and the brightness of the daylight is astonishing as I step out of the shadow into the open space of the main road. Intensity of colour, noise, people and everything is undeniably what it is, no room for considering what it might be or might have been, a tendency we have – those of us originating in the indistinct climates of the northern hemisphere, colourless eyes and no pigmentation of the skin – to ponder like this over hypothetical situations, papañca, that proliferate without end.

This is the tropical, the equatorial, and all in uncompromisingly vivid maximum pixel, vibrant colour. This is how it is; clearly defined, good looking people with black hair and golden skin. And all with a will to go out there and get it done. We’re all in this together, including the pale foreigners, who live here with us for part of the year. This is the public domain, the shared environment, we are a large population accommodated in small houses and rooms and we like it like that. No allowances for personal space – what is ‘personal’ space? It’s structured to allow for large numbers of human beings who may carry with them their ‘personal’ space and other needs and requirements, their babies their infrastructural support systems, schools, hopitals, shopping malls, cars, motorbikes and everything as it is here and now, inherited from generations before us to whom we are grateful and pray for earnestly.

I’m having some resistance to the immediacy of it, I don’t want it to be like this; too bright, too public; I feel like an owl in the daylight, a nocturnal shadow, like I shouldn’t be here, cloaked in the darkness of my quiet space, buddhist vampires wither away. Same old story, just see this aversion without being overly attached to the thing. Have metta for the state of mind. There’s the getting into it; there’s the attachment, the ‘hook’ to get caught… or is it a ‘perch’ to rest on for a moment and look at the view… waves of samsara all around; I’m wanting ‘it’ to be ‘this’ and believing this is really how it is – the experience of being able to change the image in the mind’s eye, to make it be how I want it to be – a skill I learned as part of childhood conditioning. I can see the folly of it, the baseless fabric of this vision… all which it inherit, shall dissolve…’ it leads nowhere, exists for it’s own sake, momentarily and comes to nothing in the brightness. The sun shines through all parts of it; they become shadows, vapours and disappear.

It’s that ‘letting-go’ thing again. Why does it have to be like this? You could say there’s a kind of glue spread over objects and attention gets stuck on that. Seeing it like this means, of course, I recognise the possibility that there’s also a solvent that renders the glue unstickable, it doesn’t adhere and, there’s no need to remind myself to ‘let go’ because everything has been let go of already? There isn’t anything anyway that has the power to cause one to attach. It’s the mind that’s doing it. Stop creating it and there’s nothing there! I get what I need from 7-Eleven and back upstairs to the apartment, where it’s cool and quiet and shady.

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‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors,  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and  Are melted into air, into thin air:  And like the baseless fabric of this vision,  The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff  As dreams are made on; and our little life  Is rounded with a sleep.’ [The Tempest Act 4, Prospero, scene 1, 148–158]