maya & christmas

Posted on December 24, 2013 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas friends and fellow bloggers ~ Christmas 2013

————————-

Excerpts from: meta-narratives

flying time

Posted on December 14, 2013 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

————————-

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

here and there

Posted on December 11, 2013 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

Upper photo: Ancient freshwater lake on the surface of Mars – lettering removed with Photoshop clone tool [Source]

Lower photo: Kiki in Japan

Note: Excerpts included here from an earlier post: Landing on Mars

————————-

‘self’ is a sensory experience

Posted on November 26, 2013 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

————————-

Upper image replaced from the post: uncertainty

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

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

– G R A T I T U D E –

the ‘now’ moment

Posted on November 15, 2013 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

————————-

Source for lower image: Martin S. Gotfrit

limitations

Posted on September 24, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #12: Delhi Airport Departures: Time to go, I have to finish my coffee… hold cup to lip, tilt head back to drink the last drop, eyes sweep upwards with the movement, and there’s a man standing in the roof structure. He’s cleaning the window glass or doing something. I didn’t notice he was there. Nothing special, it’s just that if we were in Europe, there’d be warning signs, black and yellow tape, fluorescent high-vis vests everywhere, a restricted area below, we apologise for any inconvenience caused, and more staff with their hi-vis vests and hard hats asking the public to keep back. All the necessary precautions to comply with health and safety standards. Over here, the man just climbs up into the roof structure, holding on with his hands, dressed in navy-blue overalls and he does have a hard hat but no more than that. And nobody feels there’s any danger. People are sitting in the coffee shop below and it works okay, relax no problem.

Fine with me too, I like the pragmatic way things are done, intelligent, improvised solutions; repair and maintenance developed to the level of aesthetics, extraordinary to the point of being innovative. It’s a relief to not have the same old limitations imposed on us that we live with in the West: security procedures, systems that back-up systems to protect against liability. What’s left unsaid is that the systems, designed to protect us, create the perceived threat in the mind. Precautions against a hypothetical danger lead to what is thought to be a real danger in present time. A created anxiety, unintended folks, but there you are, we’re really living on the edge here. No need to WORRY… thanks to professional security systems installed at your request, it’s all being taken care of.

Things are not what they seem. The world is an illusion, maya, look in the mirror: consciousness embodied in human form but what I see, more than anything else, is a face, an identity – can this really be me? Wow, a fascination with the concept of self, everybody looking at each other as mirrors of themselves. A lifetime spent chasing elusive sensory yearnings; nothing seen beyond the basic mechanisms of being human. Getting free of it for a moment is enough to understand how it works: mind gets caught up in identifying with the activity. The magician is not tricked by his own magic. Take away all the associated systems, the action is carried out, the maintenance man does his job and what’s so surprising about that?

I take a photo of him just before leaving for the flight departure gate. He has a narrow leather belt, I didn’t notice before, and secures this around his waist and round the roof supports as he climbs up or down to the next section. Then he unclips the belt and works freely. He’s obviously skilled. I can’t imagine there’d be on-the-job training for this kind of profession. More likely it’s an inherited thing; he’s descended from a lineage of South Indian toddy palm climbers, elevated in palm tree branches high above the ground considering questions of a philosophical nature. Time to get on the plane and prepare for the long climb up to 37,000 feet. Strangely comforting to know that when I’m 2700 miles over the horizon, and descending at Bangkok, the maintenance man will still be clambering around in the roof structure at Delhi, simply doing his job.

————————-

‘Thus the illusioned soul identifies with the temporary body and everything connected to it, such as race, gender, family, nation, bank balance, and sectarian religion. Under this sense of false-ego (false-identity) the soul aspires to control and enjoy matter. However, in so doing he continuously serves lust, greed, and anger. In frustration he often redoubles his efforts and, compounding mistake upon mistake, only falls deeper into illusion.’ [The Heart of Hinduism, Maya; illusion]

Lower photo from Wikipedia Commons

constructed reality

Posted on August 31, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD♯06: Bangkok: Standing outside the house in the shade of a large tree, waiting for the taxi to the airport. The brightness of the sun is tremendous, colours are vivid, the world is a high resolution Photoshop enhancement. After the eye surgery I feel like a nocturnal creature, squinting in the daylight, a quiet presence behind sunglasses. I have an attachment to darkness, I’d like it to be dark, dull and rainy today but instead it feels like I’m in a television studio. The light penetrates everything. There are no real seasons in Thailand, no markers in the calendar to say where we are in the annual cycle. The weather is the same every day. Night comes at 6pm, instant darkness, then at 6am, instant daylight and each day is pretty much like the one before. The days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. The whole thing is just one very long, continuous day, and night is the blink of an eye.

Time disappears, people are startled to discover they have aged… wake up one day to discover they’re old – life has gone. Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and woke up with a very long beard. The story is based on an Orkney folktale about an inebriated fiddler, late one night on his way home, hears some wonderful music and discovers a group of magical beings dancing in a circle. He plays his fiddle with them for a while and continues on his way home. When he arrives he discovers fifty years have passed; people have died, his daughter is middle-aged, her children are grown up. We don’t see the true nature of the world. Reality is thought to be what is out ‘there’, perceptions based on received sensory data input: what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell – and what we ‘think’ it is. What we recognize as a particular colour, is seen by an insect as ultra-violet, by a snake as infra-red. Who are we to say our view of the world is exactly what it is? The ground appears to be solid, terra firma even though the planet is spinning around, hurtling through outer space at thousands of miles an hour. Things are not what they seem to be.

A bright pink and white taxi approaches the house, enters the driveway and fills my vision. Bags inside, door slam, reverse out and we’re gone.

————————-

‘… there are no colors in the real world… there are no textures in the real world. There are no fragrances in the real world. There is no beauty; there is no ugliness… Out there is a chaos of energy soup and energy fields. Literally. We take that and somewhere inside ourselves we create a world. Somewhere inside ourselves it all happens.’ [Sir John Eckles, Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine 1963]

redefining the question

Posted on April 13, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: 04.00 hours. Awake at some time of darkness that’s neither night nor morning, getting some coffee and toast ready for Jiab going to the airport for the Gujarat flight at 06.00. Car comes, she gets in, bye… door-slam and she’s gone. Stars shining in the dark sky, then I come inside and look at a Google map of India with Gujarat there on the coast of the Arabian Sea – so that’s where it is… really not that far from Europe. Then take a look at the wiki map (shown above) of the Buddhist routes going out in all directions from North India in the time of Emperor Aśoka the Great, 273 BCE to 232 BCE. It looks like an explosion of consciousness that took place in North India, and spreading out from there; North, South, East, West, along the Old Silk Road directions. It goes West as far as the South-East Mediterranean countries; arriving there in pre-Christian times. Not impossible that the Buddha’s Dhamma had an influence on the Jesus Teachings. Maybe that’s why I had this strange recognition of it, déjà vu, when I first went to Wat Pah Nanchat. Studying Buddhism revealed fragments of an innate knowledge.

Text comes in, Jiab: ‘boarding soon’. It’s a two-hour flight, Delhi to Gujarat. Looking at the map again, I notice wiki uses the word, ‘proselytism’, but it can’t have been like that. There’s no doctrine of God-worship in Buddhism, ‘I believe (I believe) in God (there’s no real Teaching other than belief for me to study). In Buddhism (and Advaita Vedanta and the Tao), the separate ‘self’ is an illusion, ‘a cluster of memories, thoughts, habits and conditioning’, maintained due to this basic human tendency to hold on to stuff. It’s not about that, it’s not about our origin, our Creator or what we are made of, it’s about how the whole thing works. It’s a 2600 year-old teaching about learning how to see what our hang-ups are, and easing the burden. It’s not about living for our(selves): seeking, acquiring and hoarding, it’s about generosity, relinquishment and giving it all away*. It’s about mindfulness and the way things exist, rather than what exists. It’s about realities that fit into our world today, exactly as it was in ancient times. The Buddha anticipated modern physics: all matter is energy; beings exist as “bundles of energies” (five khandhas). It’s not about ‘self’, it’s no-self, anatta, it’s about consciousness, viññāna, and the big question: what is consciousness?

I go through to the bedroom to lie down for an hour or so; still not yet dawn. Watch the breath, conscious of the sound of the ceiling fan above me in the shadows, constant spinning cycle that somehow says something about the weight of the rotary blades. It looks like how it sounds: a spinning propeller of an old fashioned aircraft – consciousness of the visual image. Always there’s consciousness of something: consciousness of the smell of coffee and a crust of toast in the kitchen, the taste of it; consciousness of the soft bedding I’m lying in. There’s consciousness of thought and then there’s consciousness of no-thought – including my perception of it. Consciousness without an object, the still mind, unsupported consciousness – unconditioned? The non-dual perspective is that it’s like this anyway…. So it’s without an object in the sense that it is different from the basic functions of interacting with the world through sensory organs: eye, ear, nose, skin, mouth and mind; different from the state of being conscious of what’s going on in the body/mind organism, phassa, as a result of responses to the world outside. Not consciousness of… just consciousness itself – what is that? No answer… is this the kind of consciousness that’s needed to find the answer to the question or to redefine the question, maybe, or whatever… is it the true self?

If so, it’s not what I thought it was: ‘…this true self is also the fundamental source of all attachment to being and becoming… attachment to the allure of this primordial radiance of mind that causes living beings to wander indefinitely through the world of becoming and ceasing.’ [Luangta Maha Boowa]

If it’s not that, then it goes beyond words: ‘When all phenomena are done away with, all means of speaking are done away with as well.’ [Upasiva’s Questions (Sn 5.6)]

It all needs a larger context. Some time later, another text comes in, Jiab: ‘having breakfast in the hotel’. It’s 08.30 and she’s nearly 600 miles away….

‘Consciousness cannot be known by mind. The mind is an object. It doesn’t know anything. It is itself known by Consciousness.’ [Rupert Spira – Link to: Spiritual Artwork]

————————-

“If a monk abandons passion for the property of consciousness, then owing to the abandonment of passion, the support is cut off, and there is no base for consciousness. Consciousness, thus unestablished, not proliferating, not performing any function, is released. Owing to its release, it stands still. Owing to its stillness, it is contented. Owing to its contentment, it is not agitated. Not agitated, he (the monk) is totally unbound right within. He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’ [Bija Sutta: Means of Propagation” (SN 22.54)]

*This post contains excerpts from: ‘Beyond The Dream, Tao Te Ching7: Selfless‘

Lower photo image: Central Asian monk teaching East Asian monk, 9th century fresco

space and thoughts

Posted on February 26, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: It’s that Sunday morning feeling again; so silent, the neighbour’s dog feels uneasy about barking too loudly – maybe there’s nothing to bark at. Sadly, it walks to its place on the balcony and looks out… nope, still nothing happening out there. No intruders on the property, no people anywhere to be seen. The world is asleep… the zzz, zzz ZZZZZs, slow breathing of sleep; the no-work-today comfort zone. No need to get up until early afternoon. Sleeping off the excesses of the night before; dinner started at 10pm and the party went on until sometime after two o’clock in the morning.

I didn’t get to sleep until late but it wasn’t because of partying, it was the neighbour (not the ‘dog’ neighbour, the other one). These people decided to have a medium/large social event last night – verging on the mildly-obstreperous. The noise and kerfuffle became kinda abstract to me, drifting in a coma of half-sleep, sounding not like people having a party, more like a party among the animals at the zoo; two or three hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) trying to get comfortable in a room too small for them – getting up and sitting down again and disturbing each other in the process, smashing small breakable things, reversing into corners and making squelchy sounds along the side of the wall with their great weight squidging around awkwardly. Slightly frenzied but not ‘losing it.’ A bit farmyardish too, with yelps and howls, crowing chickens and meowing cats and geese and ducks; somebody with hiccups. On the other side, the dog barking on the balcony – dogs of the mind bark – and the whole thing reached a kind of pandemonium of people talking over each other in a flowing jibberish of words, scraps of music mindlessly playing in two different places, punctuated with the odd crash, squeak and shout. Other percussive noises, the smell of beer floating out into the air and a cloud of cigarette smoke from men standing outside the house, speaking on the phone, lengthy shouted monologues in a language I don’t understand.

It’s really noticeable that the mind grabs at something immediately; velcro fastening, unpleasant rip as it comes apart, so you leave it attached: Yep, I could get really angry about this… There is nothing pleasant about this feeling at all, no reason for it to be there other than simply the desire it has to adhere-to, and ‘be’ something. It’s ‘birth’ in the Buddhist sense. No matter how mindful I am, there’s that driven brooding thing, the scenarios of outrage. I concentrate on letting the mind untangle itself from the problem; just letting it get on with it; it goes away for a while. Then it comes back again and eventually I move through to the front room, wrap myself in a blanket, sit on the cushion, and get ready to remain there until it’s over – watch the breath…

See where the mind leads, where it goes how it reacts to ‘me’ trying to hold it, how it is able to concentrate and how it does that. A bit like getting to know it as if it were a stranger, rather than thinking it’s ‘me’ and I can control it. It really is undeniably noisy next door, it needs attention and I give it what it needs and what’s left over gets focussed on the struggle to be in a state of peace – not a placid thing, mostly it’s like swimming in dangerous waters, but knowing that as long as mindfulness is maintained, there’s no threat at all from the carnivorous species of the deep. Just letting them be there. Anger/distress is a passing mental state, same as everything else, nothing special.

There is the body, the heat, the cold, the hard, the soft, and the thinking mind starts to drift. Let it go where it wants; a sense of travelling behind it, follow it, be curious about where it goes. Disengage from the attachment, just enough to feel safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, flying around dangerously and ricocheting off the walls and ceiling.

There is Rupert Spira’s example [Link below] about a room filled with people. ‘I’ am the space in the room, the people are my thoughts and images, bodily sensations and world perceptions. All kinds of people in the room, large, small, kind, unkind, intelligent, unintelligent, loud, quiet, friendly, unfriendly, etc…, each doing their own thing. But what they do or say has no effect on ‘I’, the space of the room. The space is there now and it will be there when the people go home. The space, is/was there before the building was constructed and will be present after it is demolished, it’s always present.

Now it’s later, the morning after. Am I the only one awake? So quiet, the electric hiss of the computer seems loud. It may have been on a morning like this, in those historical times, that Siddhartha Gotama, the prince who became the Buddha, woke up in the rooms in the palace, where the endless parties had taken place, surveyed the devastation of spilt drinks and furniture tumbled over, and seen the true reality of the event… he just knew, this is not where it’s at. Left the palace, gave away everything he possessed and set off across the landscape…

————————-

‘Our objective experience consists of thoughts and images, which we call the mind; sensations, which we call the body; and sense perceptions, which we call the world. In fact we do not experience a mind, a body or a world as such. We experience thinking, sensing and perceiving. In fact all that we perceive are our perceptions. We have no evidence that a world exists outside our perception of it. We do not perceive a world ‘out there.’ We perceive our perception of the world and all perception takes places in Consciousness.’ [‘The Transparency of Things’, Rupert Spira]

wake up

Posted on February 17, 2013 by tiramit

There’s a book by Jack Kerouac titled ‘Wake Up’, the story of the Buddha in the style of the ‘beat’ way. I used to have it on my bookshelf in the house in East Anglia and one day the electrician came to the house to fix some circuits and his young assistant picked up the book; a young guy, long hair sticking out, wearing shorts and running shoes, tattooed legs, said he’d heard of the Buddha and also Kerouac and that was pretty cool. So we had a little discussion about this. Later on I noticed the tattoo on his leg, there was something familiar about the flowing calligraphic style and then I remembered: Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ in Tibetan script. I asked him about it and he was pleased that I’d noticed it; said he got it recently, didn’t know much about what it was, really, just looked good. And I told him, it was nice, and we looked at it for a while; him spinning his leg around so I could read it all, leg hairs and the indigo coloured inks. I said that I’d read somewhere this six syllable statement contains the essence of the entire teaching of the Buddha, according to Tibetan tradition. ‘Cool,’ he says. There it was, the innate consciousness in nature, activated by mysterious Sanskrit sound frequencies in harmonic resonance, tattooed on the leg of an electrician’s assistant in East Anglia.

Kerouac begins with the statement: ‘Buddha means the awakened one.’ Buddhism is the wake-up call; it’s built-in – comes with the software. There’s the quality of being aware; receptive to the whole thing. The sensation of sunlight on my skin, of how the body senses the outer world, and everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think. The mental faculty senses the larger consciousness, looking to see what that might be. It’s not the thoughts, the thinking process, or the identity of ‘me’ engaging with this. It’s anatta, what’s outside of all of that; an awareness that includes everything. And I can find it coming out through all the layers created by the mind. Just trying to understand what it takes to see what that sort of thing could be.

This holds my attention in a particular kind of way. It’s a kind of alertness, an ongoing investigation into the present moment and everything about the sensory function and the cognition of it is there too. It’s triggered by a simple curiosity: what is this? And the attitude of careful listening, I am the awareness inside of the object outside, awareness is both and everywhere is here, everything is this; as far as the eye can see.

‘Thus Tathagata, He-Who-Has-Attained-to-Suchness-of-Mind and sees no more definite conceptions of self, other selves, many divided selves, or one undivided universal self, to whom the world is no longer noticeable, except as a pitiful apparition, yet without arbitrary conception either of its existence or non-existence, as one thinks not to measure the substantiality of a dream but only to wake from it; thus Tathagata, piously composed and silent, radiant with glory, shedding light around, rose from under his Tree of Enlightenment, and with unmatched dignity advanced alone over the dreamlike earth as if surrounded by a crowd of followers, thinking, ‘To fulfill my ancient oath, to rescue all not yet delivered, I will follow out my ancient vow. Let those that have ears to hear master the noble path of salvation.’[Jack Kerouac, ‘Wake Up,’ 1955]

————————-