High Altitude Sunset

Posted on July 31, 2012 by tiramit

Bangkok-Delhi flight: A glance around the departure area at the gate for the Delhi flight, children running around. It’s a weekend flight; plane is going to be full of kids. Okay, ready for boarding, I have a gold card (frequent flyer) and can board early. It gives me time to get things stowed away and squeeze into my seat. Not a lot of room in economy class. I’m in an aisle seat. Keep shoulders in to avoid getting hit by people with large bags. The line moves along slowly and children are on the same eye level as me, seated in my aisle seat. They look at me – first close encounter with a blue-eyed foreigner, all part of the experience, the plane has their attention

“Crew at your stations,” we’re all set to go, one boy crying – boys cry more than girls, the voice is very loud; nothing is the way I want it to be right now so leave me alone and don’t bother me, okay? But we’re soon on the runway then takeoff, engine sound increases and as plane lifts off from the ground, all the children’s voices are combined in one small exclamation: WOOOOOO-OOH!… are we flying yet? Yes! And there’s a straining of necks to look out the window to see if it’s true, ground disappearing below. Jumping out of the seat belts, a stewardess raises her voice. After that everything quietens down.

And the various services start, the food and the drinks come and go; children running up and down the aisles chased by a parent, brought back to their seats and they run off again – it’s the game, playfulness. We’re in the Hindu world here, mostly, on this plane flying to India – thinking of the Hindu concept of a world created by Gods in play. This high altitude sunset glow going on and on, and I’m sitting there looking out the window at this eternal sunset, when the stewardess leans over and pulls down the shade: Plap! Goodbye sunset. The opportunity to fully experience flying through time and the eternal sunset is not available right now; we have to watch the movie instead, okay? Yes, so that’s all right with me, no mustn’t have a tantrum about it, I’m not a kid anymore.

Some time later we land at Delhi airport, get out of the plane and set off on the long walk to immigration, children laughing, playing and running wildly along the miles of beautiful autumn-coloured carpeting.

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‘Everything is impermanent. Nothing has a “self-being” of its own apart from its time. All of us are actually part of the same current. My sense of self is composed of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting—all of them being temporal processes, different forms that time takes. If the flowing current includes everyone and everything, our normal understanding of time as something external to us is misleading. Often it’s convenient to distinguish things from their time, but that is the relative truth. According to the ultimate truth, things can’t really be distinguished from their temporality, and when they are nondual then time is really not different from eternity. The eternal present always stays the same—it’s always now!—even as it always changes.’ [David R. Loy ‘Money Sex War Karma‘]

The Dhamma Moment

Posted on July 29, 2012 by tiramit

Listening to the Ajahn giving a Dhamma talk, listeners seated on the floor, the chanting; this is an event that goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha and it fills me with awe to consider that moment then is actually this moment now. These days, I don’t have the chance to be present in the Dhamma hall very often and I listen to the Dhamma on audio files, CDs [link to: Forest Sangha download/ listen]. There are some talks on youtube and I was watching one recently about ‘non-self and reincarnation’. Something clicked for me there. It was an instant of insight but the video got stuck in buffering, unfortunately, and I had to wait. The long pause somehow intensified this quickening, but when the video resumed I found the immediacy had passed. I downloaded it later and studied it again but it was like holding on too tightly to something that’s gone.

If I’d had a transcript of the Dhamma talk to read while watching the video, I wouldn’t have lost the place. And anyway, listening to a talk is sometimes too fleeting for me, I usually try to make notes that I can refer to later. I’m interested in how to make an accurate simultaneous transcript of a Dhamma talk from an audio file using voice recognition software – can it be so finely tuned? I remember seeing musicians sitting in the audience at an orchestral performance listening to the music and reading the score (the musical notation sheet) at the same time. Listening, backed up with reading, is essential in any learning situation. There’s also writing and discussion. All of these are required in order to study the subject. Listening on its own is not enough.

I came across something in a webpage about how we listen to a speech given by a public speaker and in the first 20 minutes people can only remember about half of what was said. After that, recall drops off further. It may be that listening to a Dhamma talk is different from listening to ordinary talks because the words of the Dhamma are likely to have an impact greater than the normal functioning of the short-term memory. It goes directly into long-term memory – deeper in a state of knowing? I’m not sure about this but the problem is it’s not immediately ‘remembered’ unless you make notes and discuss with others about what they can recall.

For this reason, reading the Dhamma talk is possibly better than listening to it although doing both is best. When I read it, the pace of involvement is controlled; I can read, make notes, then go off and do something else and come back later. I have the option of re-reading and even if it ends up that I don’t, just the possibility that I can do that has an effect upon my ongoing understanding of the text. It appeals more to a contemplative understanding that takes place over a longer period. This is partly because I’m used to the idea that a written text is a considered piece, it has been constructed in a different time; it may be written and rewritten in early drafts before reaching its finished state. Our reading attitude to a written text is conditioned by this kind of experience. It’s what we’re used to.

The transcript of a Dhamma talk is quite different. It has the appearance of a planned, structured piece of writing but it started off as a long utterance; a flow of words, without preparation, recorded and edited from an audio file. And it’s this quality that’s really quite special and uncommon in the world of publications today: the spontaneity of understanding, as it happens, written in words on the page. The reader experiences that heightened sense of meaning while reading parts of it, and it’s not due to a contrived technique in the use of words by the author or an editorial team of experts, it comes from the Ajahn, in the here-and-now. It is the Dhamma moment.

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[image: Luang Por Piak in* Vimutti Monastery]*

nothing in itself

Posted on July 24, 2012 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Silence all around in the heat of the afternoon, save for the sudden ‘crack’ of roof tiles expanding in the high temperature. Birds and insects for the most part quiet, an isolated single syllable: ‘chirp’ sound, then quiet again. I look up, anorexic chicken is standing in my open doorway because it sees me sitting inside. It’s thinking maybe some food will get flung out of the door because this is what usually happens. The cranium darts forward in an inquiring sort of a way and it watches me with one eye then maneuvering around in stages to watch me with the other eye and I used to think this was funny and cute but now I realise, sadly, that no matter how much loving-kindness I could extend to that creature transfixed in its observation of me, it is motivated by food, only; there’s just the process driving itself and not much further on in evolutionary terms than its dinosaur ancestor. So I make the single sound: ‘SH!’ that I learned from Jiab’s mum and it’s gone.

I’ve got the fan positioned just right in the room, seated on the cushion, body getting grounded – all internal processes and organs settled, gravity helps. It takes about five minutes. Thought movements start to get slower and it’s possible to monitor the situation and bring attention to the breath. Then it drifts off and I have to bring it back again to the breathing pattern and focus on that for a while.

And there are times when it seems like there is only this continuing present moment, kind of surging through from the past and into the future in one constant movement – like standing at the bow of a small ship plunging through the waves, rising and falling; moving forwards but no landmarks in the sea to say you are going anywhere.

When I look around for the landmarks to gauge my progress, and try to picture it in my mind, that sensation of standing at the bow of a small ship fades away and that’s how I learn not to push aside the experience and put in a constructed ‘self’ in its place, with the thought that ‘I’ am doing this. ‘… impossible to be aware of an experiencer because it is always the experience itself that momentarily occupies that space.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’] So the sensation of being on the ship returns and around it there is periodically the experience of moments of nothing – and that’s not ‘nothing’ as in ‘not much happening’, but ‘nothing’ in itself. It seems like a worthwhile thing to focus on this for the time being.

‘Nothing is after all just nothing. It cannot be a place that resembles an idea of nothingness. A place involves area, or extension. It is defined by coordinates and boundaries. It is not nothing. It is room. Nothing has no room, nor can anything be located within nothing. Nothing cannot have an inside or an outside. It cannot destroy, swallow, or terminate. As nothing, it can have no energy or effect. As nothing, it cannot be a thing, a realm, a state, or anything. It is absolutely nothing to fear. It is nothing to hope for.’ [Robert Thurman]

The focus finds a comfortable place and I just let it sit there for a while then, as the afternoon dwindles away, squirrels get argumentative, great hosts of squabbles and a periodic shrill chattering fills the air.

If A Tree Falls …

Posted on July 21, 2012 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Exotic red Hibiscus flowers and butterflies as big as birds. A zizzle of insects in the night and numerous coconut palm trees just standing around contemplating the situation: if a tree falls in the forest …. Does the world continue to exist when I close my eyes? Was this world here before I was born? Hard to believe it was, everything just going on as it is now, probably, farmyard animals, birds in the trees and all the other random events taking place as they are now, experienced from here on the top floor of the house where the treetops are level with the roof terrace and higher.

There was a time when I wasn’t here – not born yet. I can understand that, so it means I can understand what the world is without that person called ‘me’ going around, being myself, and there’s an anonymity about this observation that’s quite liberating. I am in it, that’s all – no more, no less – and undeniably, the present moment is all around the place, spread over the surfaces of the things I see, as soon as I look at them. It was there when the dogs got tangled up in the leash a short while ago – it can be inexplicable! Not always, but I keep bumping into it, the present moment is all there is. And it is as it is whether I am aware of it in its as-it-is-ness or not.

Sometimes it gets stuck, like a failed internet connection. The internet room at Hat Yai Airport was closed when I was there, all the computers covered with dustsheets and a sign written in felt tip pen explaining the reason why. And in the center of this Thai message were the words, in English: “could not make a connection” copied from the message on the browser – okay, everybody can go home now. Is this what Death is like? The unexpected occurs – it does that sometimes, fatal error – quit all programs and try restart. It doesn’t work; just another aspect of the ‘as-it-is-ness’, probably yes, whatever.

Systematically eliminating the idle chatter of the mind as it arises leads to a state of mind free of all the tugs and pulls. Everything that comes to conscious mind can be thought of as recognition of the object; bare attention, continued awareness applied to everything in the environment and the various happenings of the day.

It’s really nice to be in this pleasant rural remoteness and So What if I’ve been trying to get a connection all day? I’m an optimist, hoping for the best, without clinging to the idea there’s a problem about that. Meanwhile, the world and everything is just going on, the original state, always there. Death arrives one day and it’s that letting-go thing again.

“… how much more harmoniously the days are passing compared with those when we gave in to the slightest stimulus for interfering in the world by deed, word, emotion or thought. As if protected by an invisible armour against the banalities and importunities of the outer world, one will walk through (the) days serenely and content, with an exhilarating feeling of ease and freedom. It is as if, from the unpleasant closeness of a hustling and noisy crowd, one has escaped to the silence and seclusion of a hill top, and with a sigh of relief, is looking down on the noise and bustle below. It is the peace and happiness of detachment which will be thus experienced.” [“The Heart of Buddhist Meditation” Nyanaponika Thera]

Loving-Kindness to Animals 1

Posted on July 18, 2012 by tiramit

I was on a cliff path by the sea, in the North of Scotland, cold and windy, and there were all these nesting gulls making a terrific high-pitched screaming sound. Suddenly this large gull flew past my head, so close I could see its eye looking at me as it passed. I felt its body heat, was aware of the complexity of its massed intestinal organs, lungs, heartbeat and all this in just that ‘gull’ moment caught zooming through the air. Some piece of it’s time zone made an impact on me – an unexpected contact with a living creature in nature that you don’t normally have. It was protecting its nest, I was the predator, a wild animal on two legs; an egg thief coming to steal away its offspring.

I hurried on out of the nesting area, chased away by the gull, and spent some time in thought about the carnivorous relationship I have with the animal world. A friend told me about these two girls, twins in fact, who had their 15^th birthday and their parents asked them what they would like to have as a birthday gift. After some discussion – twins always have to agree on birthday gifts – they decided they would like to ‘liberate’ a lobster. I saw on a webpage that scientists believe lobsters can live to 100 years but the normal life span is about 15 years. I’d not heard of the Lobster Liberation Front before. Mum and Dad said OK to the plan and they went around all the storage areas where lobsters are kept for consumption in sea food restaurants, chose a lobster, bought it, put it in a bucket went out to sea in a boat and set it free.

I am a vegetarian, mostly, it’s a sensitive area. The fact that I sometimes eat animal products is not something I like to think about. There was one time in rural Thailand I was walking with Jiab in the fields around her home, and she takes me to see the little cow they have there. It has a bamboo bell around its neck: takata-takata. We stop and look at the cow, and it looks at us. A miniature creature, it comes towards me with cautious movements and swinging head in motion with the way it walks, raises it’s head and points a snuffling, sniffing wet snout in my direction; large snorts, extends long tongue and sticks it in it’s nostril (how do they do that?), comes a bit closer and quite a bit of sniffing of the air around me – not in Jiab’s direction. This cute little cow is curious about me due to a certain familiar milky smell coming through the pores of my skin? Thais don’t drink much milk so I was thinking, wow! here is proof that the (Western) body releases a noticeable odour of milk. I know this little cow has never been near to a Western person before in its life. The smell was familiar; a naïve recognition of an upright, standing-on-it’s-hind-legs member of the species – a cow person?

But we are carnivores. And there’s this unpleasant conceit about being at the top end of the food chain bothering me now while eating a breakfast of grains, nuts, fruit and cow’s milk. Jaws move in a slightly circular motion; down up, down, up, down, grind, grind, and swallow. I’m an animal too. I consume the environment, whether it’s other animals, fish, vegetables, eggs, milk – we are the cow’s babies (there’s a thought!). And cutting up vegetables is a bit of a sacrifice really; every time I start to cook food there is the opportunity for this kind of contemplation. Vegetables and fruit may not have the obvious characteristics of sentient beings but we may eat their reproductive organs along with everything else [link to: Buddhism and Beef].

There’s a couple of lines of text somewhere in an essay by Tan Ajahn Buddhadassa, that I cannot find at the moment; it’s about consciousness of all the things we eat, bits of animals, poultry and fish and how all their ghosts will come back to haunt us in the end. Pretty scary, nowhere to run, everything we are: mental, physiological, flesh, blood, and bones is a composite of what we have eaten, internalized. And it extends back through the generations to the beginning of time. The cellular substance of what we are is a genetic composite of all kinds of animal fats and enzymes and there’s just no getting away from it.

So, it has to be about being aware of the reality of it all. Contemplating the eating of meat helps me to see the true extent of my voracious appetite for all consumables. Things I feel drawn to consume surround me – and I mean, here, non-food items: ‘mind’ hungers for mind object. Consciousness is dominated by habitual ‘mind’. Remove habitual ‘mind’ and there may be something like a deluge of reality comes along and with it comes a deluge of understanding. Somewhere in there is an explanation for the fact that people eat animals.

When Acharn Mun was at the end of his life, weak and lying in a village in NE Thailand, a very large number of his followers began to assemble. He asked the bhikkhus to take him away from the village because the villagers would have to kill many animals to feed those people. They took him to a nearby town where there were market places and various kinds of prepared food could be easily obtained. Shortly after that Ajahn Mun passed away.

‘From the day of my ordination I have never thought of harming (animals), let alone killing them. I have always extended my loving-kindness to them, never neglecting to share with them all the fruits of my merit. It would be ironic if my death were to be the cause of their deaths (‘The Venerable Phra Acharn Mun Bhuridatta Thera, Meditation Master’, page 201 – 202).

[link to: Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta Thera, Wiki]

[link to: Image source]

Listening 1

Posted on July 15, 2012 by tiramit

South India: Birdsong. A small wave of tiny notes. Sitting on the cushion under a thatched structure built on the roof. Focus on breathing, soft warm air, it’s the end of the night. Dawn light coming up. The birds near to me are surprisingly loud, so much energy from such a small body, such a tiny breathing system. There are these silent intervals, to take a bird-size breath of air, I think, then a long musical ‘verse’, and another silent interval for breath; the ‘song’ moves on to the next verse and so on. The regular pace of these silent intervals contributes to the pattern of the verses. Birdsong is a ballad, a story about something that goes on and on; more than enough; an abundance. It blows away the scarcity of my small mindedness. I can see why they call it ‘The Dawn Chorus.’ Sky is full of sound, a huge chord played on an instrument with a great number of strings

Listening consciousness and sound object are one and the same thing, there’s an affinity with birdsong. Maybe it’s about acoustic resonances of the bird cranium being all of a oneness as far as we other living creatures in the world are able to perceive it. And, part of it too, are the echoes in the spaces between things: reflective surfaces, tree trunks, branches, walls, the air, clouds. Sympathetic resonances create multiple frequencies like the echo it makes on the underside of my thatched roof. And now it’s gradually diminishing; no grande finale, just a musical occurrence that takes place every day and gets forgotten about as soon as the sun rises in the dramatic way it does, expanding into our lives and everything becomes secondary to that main event.

Other sounds become heard; ordinary household noises, miscellaneous gentle ‘clatter’ from houses through open windows. Dishes clink, aluminium pots make that dull ‘ding’ sound. A shout, partial sound of a goat. child cries, cock crows, dog barks, a bicycle bell, street trader’s call, a car horn honks. Something clinks, and it goes on, individual recognisable sounds all appear in consciousness exactly as they occur, no end to it. Each has its own space, situated in its place in a clear sequence, one after the other.

I’m thinking there’s something about it that suggests a composer could create an orchestral symphony out of this? But it doesn’t work that way, I realise. It’s not the ‘actual’ sound I’m listening to, it’s the ear consciousness function that is set to rationalise the flow into an orderly pattern of ‘virtual’ sound. Each unit of sound has a place, according to how the consciousness function selected it, unknown partial sounds are replaced by known sounds, ear consciousness triggers a process so the object is placed according to the ‘closest match’ that can be found in the filing system.

The actual sound space I’m surrounded by may well be a tremendous complexity of pieces of things; an ocean of permutations. There’s some insight into what this amounts to but I know I’m not even taking on anything resembling the scale of it. I seek stability from this chaos: the ‘self’ shapes the randomness of the universe into a manageable chunk and I can settle with that thought.

‘In the normal way, attention shifts from one thing to another. Surprising events grab the attention: other chains of thought wait to be finished as soon as there is a gap. So there is never any peace. This is efficient in using all available processing capacity, but what does it feel like to be … in such a system? I suppose it feels like most of us do feel – pretty confusing. The only thing that gives it any stability is the constant presence of a stable self model. No wonder we cling to it.’ Dr. Susan Blackmore [link to: Science tackles the self ]

[Link to: Listening 2]

rope seen as snake

Posted on July 12, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Nontaburi, Thailand: Alone in a house surrounded by trees. Leaves filter a lovely green light all around; birds, lizards, squirrels, I see something move out on the patio… is it a bird, dropped down from a branch to peck at something? There, it moves again – just a hop and it’s a few feet further on. I sit very still, don’t want to frighten it away. I see it now, in the same position, not moving. After a long time waiting for it to change position, I decide to slowly get up and see what happens when I do that. It’s still not moving – maybe it’s injured. I go out on the patio and walk up to it. Ahhh… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf, blown by the wind across the patio surface.

Go back inside and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a gust of wind blows the leaf. The animation of it is absolutely convincing, but I see it now as a leaf, not a bird. How strange, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not. The teaching about the rope and the snake; a piece of rope lying on the ground is thought to be a snake. It’s an analogy of ‘self’ seen in consciousness + name-and-form: I recognize that the rope is a rope, not a snake, and can see how the illusion occurs. Or I may not see it and be convinced it’s a snake… maybe for a long time – a whole lifetime preoccupied with a ‘self’ that isn’t there.

This small epiphany occurs after another curiously similar event took place in this quiet house. I’m alone here except for D who is a grad student, working part-time, and he also takes care of the place. I don’t see D much, he works night shift sometimes, sleeping in the middle of the day. The house is large and I’m never absolutely sure if he’s here or not. Usually he stays in his room so I’m used to not seeing him around. I just quietly go about the house, day after day, not making too much noise in case he’s sleeping and quite often forget about him completely.

Then, just the other day, I start to wonder what happened to him. I look in the car park and his car is not there. When did I last see his car? Two days ago, or longer than that? I go to look at his laundry – could be the same laundry that’s been there for a while… clothes without a person inside them – remembering the movie: The Time Traveller’s Wife. I have to stop for a moment and think, when did I see him last? Go up to his room, door is open, nobody there. Hard to believe, I assumed D was in the house but I’ve been alone the whole time. The leaf-seen-as-bird metaphor. Something I thought was there, wasn’t… thinking it’s one thing, then it’s not. The usual sense of ‘me’ suddenly gone… then it returns again. Everything feels light and transparent.

‘It was as if lightning coursed within my chest. The impact lasted for a while, and for the next few weeks whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not.’ [‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life’. The Dalai Lama, in the sixties reflecting on the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, phenomena being dependent on conceptuality and his discovery that the “I” exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body; not an entity in itself] Source: Emptiness and Existence:

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This post reblogged from July 12, 2012

Jesus and Advaita Vedanta

Posted on July 1, 2012 by tiramit

I didn’t know about Advaita Vedānta when I was a child and only recently discovered there were people like Alan Watts (and others) writing about non-duality in the Christian context, [link to part of the Alan Watts’ essay: This Is It]. Now I’m convinced it is important to focus on the fact that there is something at the heart of Christianity. The uncomfortable feeling that’s followed me all these years – that somehow I missed the point of the Jesus Teaching – all this has gone when I think of the Advaitist aspect of the teaching. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle I just stumbled upon, coming from an Asian perspective, an inductive knowing and that’s how it works.

The reason I didn’t see it before is because the Western concept of God, having human attributes (similar to the Advaitist idea of Ishvara), contradicts the rational scientific view. Accepting something that’s scientifically impossible, just because it’s written down in the Bible, doesn’t make sense. It’s like a myth and that’s why Christianity never had any reality in the West. What’s needed is to take it all a bit further.

‘… when human beings think of Brahman, the Supreme Cosmic Spirit is projected upon the limited, finite human mind and appears as Ishvara. Therefore, the mind projects human attributes, such as personality, motherhood, and fatherhood on the Supreme Being. God (as in Brahman) is not thought to have such attributes in the true sense.’

In Western countries, people are wandering around without a map. There’s the shopping mall and that’s all. How to let go of the individual ‘self’ if everything in the system is aimed at getting you to hold on? Looking for the way out by browsing possibilities will take a lifetime. The distractions built-in to window shopping behaviour are designed to keep you ‘shopping’ and prevent you from finding the way out too easily. By the time you get there you’ll have forgotten what it was you were looking for.

‘The Advaita Teachings are pointers, offered at the level of the audience, so to some people Jesus would talk about “a mansion with many rooms” and to other people he would say: “(heaven) is within.” (And) without understanding Advaita and the way pointers are adjusted depending on the audience, (most) Christians haven’t a clue what Jesus was talking about ….’ [link to Advaita Vedanta page]

Those who didn’t fall into the shopping mall trap just took the belief ‘thing’ to pieces to see what it was made of. That’s how it was seen that there was/is no substantial “self” in the centre of consciousness. It’s an operating system that keeps all working parts in the state of ‘oneness’. ‘We are, right at this moment, God itself, and we can rejoice in that – if we can break out of our individual identity….’ If someone had been able to explain it to me like this when I was a child, the challenge to find out what it could mean would have been enough motivation for a lifetime.

‘When you fully understand that which you are and cannot not be, there is nothing to do to be what you are.’ [Jac O’Keeffe]

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I wrote another post about this: ‘Jesus and Churchianity‘.

Note (i): There are two references in the Upanishads: aham brahmasmi (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 1,4,10), and tattvamasi (Chandogya Upanishad 6,8,7), the instruction of Svetakatu by his father – very much earlier than the Jesus teachings. The 8th Century development by Adi Shankara is something for a later post. [link to ‘Christian Consciousness and Advaita Experience‘]

Acting the Part

Posted on June 3, 2012 by tiramit

I was in New York some years ago, in the car with WGM, stuck in traffic. A hot day in July, car windows open, air-con wasn’t working; exhaust fumes, hazy visibility. WGM was practising for his singing lesson and had a few song sheets with him in the car. He showed me an old one: the Julie Andrews classic, ‘The Sound of Music’. and all of a sudden, sang the first part of it, there in the car: ‘The hi-ills are alive, with the sound of music…” stage performance, vibrato, full voice, and the volume was amazing! It blew me away. Heads turned, people leaned out of their car windows and the great river of jostling pedestrians paused for a moment on the sidewalk. It was WGM’s 15 minutes of fame.

But he did that kind of thing all the time, an ability to find the paradoxical circumstance and play the part. WGM was an actor I’d met in Europe the year before and staying with him in a cramped apartment near Broadway with other actors, performers and ‘people’. Different from other shared habitations because they were all hustling for parts in videos, TV ads, movies, music, anything. Life is ‘theatre’. They were opportunists. Every step of the way was an opportunity to perform – life itself is the audition. The ‘self’ we create is the performance; we are acting a part, all the time.

In the apartment the phone was ringing constantly, theatrical agencies calling up to return a call from somebody in the apartment, “Can you get that?” and “Sorry, he’s not here, can I take a message?” The thing about this that made it different from other shared-apartment situations was that the phone link was really important to everyone there; the world of opportunity. And the phone calls from the agencies made it somehow part of the ‘public’ world out there. It felt like the whole world was calling this number all day and most of the night – the outside world coming in to the inside world. Another thing about it, the process of answering the phone was an opportunity for these multi-personality specialists to try out a different persona every time.

So when the phone rings whoever is sitting next to it answers, switching to a subtly different ‘voice’, with a different accent, quite believable and acceptable to the caller but interestingly ‘changed’ to those of us in the room. It was baffling to me at first because I couldn’t figure it out and partly because there’s a strange logic to this: the unknown caller at the other end of the line is ‘somebody else’, a person with his/her own identity – hence the created personality, character (game) seems like, well, appropriate? It made sense because, on a certain level, it’s all about ‘self’, anyway, and who you are at that moment is subject to change because who you’re talking with determines who you are. I can appear to be somebody in one situation, then ‘be’ somebody else in a different situation. The self illusion has flexibility. The whole thing is about acting the part.

The phone gets put down and immediately rings again. The same person answers it in another ‘voice’ – an identity that’s so different from the one he just used it’s hard to believe; hilarious, bordering on the schizoid. Since that time I’ve been aware of the ‘act’ of being alive. It contributed to the discovery of the Buddhist anatta (no ‘self’) and the habitual ‘self’ construct, projecting ‘my’ character, ‘my’ personality at a particular point in time and in specific circumstances changes all the time. It just happens naturally.

The skilled actor plays the part so well, the spectator thinks he is the person, not the actor. A layer of paradox: the actor being himself and simultaneously not himself reveals the ‘self’ construct. Or it could be that the ‘act’ is revealed completely to the spectator; a self-reflexive act that does not distinguish between the ‘self’ construct and acting the part, it’s just there; a total act, an actor/spectator encounter in metaphysical terms and, for the most part, it’s accepted as ‘theatre’, illusion, samsara and we’re immersed in the story of it all.

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[image link]

Birds on the Balcony 2

Posted on May 6, 2012 by tiramit

Switzerland, June: I wrote in another post [Birds on the Balcony 1] about pigeons nesting on my balcony up here on the 7th floor. The nest is in an old Christmas tree bucket with some of the bells and everything still dangling from the branches. The faded Christmas paper now getting dusty and sad, Christmas is long past but it is amazing, really, that the bird just went ahead and built a nest there. After that there was not just one egg in the nest but two and, to cut a long story short, the two eggs became two living beings with wings. I saw the whole thing; their development, their getting fed from the beak of the parent bird and the flapping of little downy wings. The birds on the balcony were the main focus of my attention for a long time. I feel I know such a lot about rearing birds, I’m sort of associated with the species.

At the time of writing this post, Jiab is away for a few days so I’m on my own. I’ve arranged my chair and table to be near to the window without getting too close to the parent bird sitting in the half filled bucket of earth, babies underneath. And if I’m moving around too much, it watches me with one eye then twists its neck completely round in a totally impossible way and looks at me with the other eye. How do they do that? So I sit quite still and watch.

I’m a part of the security system here – less danger from things like the crow population and the parent bird probably feels safe here, recognizes the right degree of proximity to humans because humans chase away crows and don’t chase away pigeons? So, it looks like I’m taking care of this little family situation and me and the bird are ok together.

More than that, in fact, I’m the great patron and benefactor, in this case, the saviour and I’ll tell you why. There was one day, I was sitting in my chair next to the pigeon nest with the two cute little baby birds all huddled up in there, parent bird off to get food and I’m in charge, just gazing out at the clouds. All is well in the natural world of animals, birds and baby pigeons safe and secure. But something was about to happen in the very next moment ….

I become aware of a black shape in the centre of my vision. Vision consciousness takes a certain amount of time to send the message and it doesn’t immediately click in my brain that it’s a large crow and looking so black and mysterious I cannot see it’s features, like a photographic negative, glinting a kind of deep purple and blue. Just arrived on the balcony rail, folding away it’s wings, here on the seventh floor where crows don’t usually go; just materialised out of the deathly world of nowhere. And I’m kinda, speechless; hypnotized by it’s presence.

It slants it’s head in the direction of the baby birds and makes a hop in their direction. And there’s a sort of slow-motion thing going in my mind; that’s a crow, yes …. ok, that’s it, then. Can’t get there quick enough to stop the inevitable, it’s nature. The birds are going to get eaten, swallowed up, can’t be helped. Fatalistic. Crow takes a few hops closer to the nest, and I’m transfixed – it’s all happened already, crow makes a few lunges and flies away with a beakfull of baby pigeons…

I suddenly ‘wake up’ and fall out of my chairs knocking over a few things in the scramble to get to the balcony door; hurt my knee in the collisions with the furniture: ‘No-oh!’ then a primal roar: ‘OAAAAAHHH!’ and by the time I get up off the floor and fling open the sliding glass door, arms flying around in desperation, the crow has gone. And the little birds are where they were, all happy and safe, barely aware of the interruption.

A relief, to say the least, but the shock of it remained for a while after. And, even though my relationship with the birds became more bonded since the visit of the crow and I felt like we’d been through stuff together, I started to notice I was getting off on things like: am I getting too attached to these cute little birds, I mean they’re just food for the predators? And was developing a kind of morbid view of the whole thing.

I tried to explain it to Jiab when she got back from Peru but it didn’t seem to have any impact. Instead, she said something about all creatures in the world, good or bad, being just as they are. That led me to read, again, the talk by Ajahn Amaro on ‘Forgiveness’ [link to: Forest Sangha publications, ‘Seeing the Way’ vol. two – 2011]

‘The act of wishing well to even those who do us harm is a recognition of our common humanity, our common nature as living beings. It is a recognition that carrying around resentment only creates greater division, greater disharmony, and greater discord and sows the seeds of greater suffering in the future.

“Those who are friendly, indifferent or hostile; may all beings receive the blessings of my life, may they soon attain the threefold bliss and realize the Deathless.”

[“Reflections on Sharing Blessings”, page 26 of the Chanting Book]