the journey to get there (1)

Posted on July 6, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#78: Delhi: I open the door and step out into the sunshine, shading my eyes from the brightness of the sun, look down for a moment, and a shadow flits across the paved stone area at my feet. What is it? Look back up quickly – it’s a squirrel running along the electric cables. I see it as it leaps into an overhanging tree branch… yaay! The branch sweeps downward with its weight and sails back up again as the squirrel leaps to the next branch and disappears in the foliage. The action suggests joyfulness, a celebration, and this is how I’m feeling right now because today, 6th July, is my birthday – 24,455 revolutions of the planet Earth since the day I was born. I’m a silver-haired old guy acting like half his age. It’s also the day I go back to UK, a happy coincidence; returning to the place I was born on the day of my birth.

Two flights to get there: Delhi/London/ London/Inverness, and 10½ hours flying time. The prodigal son archetype, you could say, but I’ve been away too long. More than 30 years living in other people’s countries. Now I’m a stranger in my own home; everything is different, just the déjà vu of it all; a familiarity I can recognise but cannot identify with. I stay in hotels and everyone thinks I’m a foreign tourist who speaks English really well. I’m astonished at being able to understand what people are saying and feel like I shouldn’t be listening. The intrusion of other people’s conversations is sometimes shocking! This must be what it feels like to be a spy – and dressed like this in these old UK clothes I’ve kept all these years in the wardrobe.

Looking through everything last night, I find an old jacket, try it on for size, it seems small, must have shrunk. Try on another one and it’s shrunk too! I ask Jiab how a jacket can shrink just hanging in the wardrobe for a few years, and she says, ah well… And these shoes! Try them on, hard enclosures seem to clutch at the feet, toes unfamiliar with the hollows in the leather they used to occupy… unwillingly they find their old places. This is who I used to be. Walk across the room, clip-clop, clip-clop, feet imprisoned in shoes, look at myself in the mirror. Who’s that? It’s me, acting the part, ‘self’ is the performance. The actor who long ago became somebody else, and forgot who he was. Inside one pocket, there’s an old plastic bag tied in a knot, difficult to undo. Inside are some British pound coins, thick, heavy and important looking. A single Pound coin looks like gold, like it came from a treasure chest and could be worth a fortune, but it’s not enough to buy a cup of coffee. We have to have handfuls of these ‘gold’ pieces just to buy ordinary things. The weight of them causes jacket pockets to go out of shape, holes in the lining.

It’s really so different from here in the East, the humble unassuming Rupee and small Thai Baht coins that jingle lightly and can buy so much. There is the Buddha’s teaching on greed, hatred and delusion, but right now I don’t want to think about anything other than standing in my Delhi doorway here, watching to see if maybe another squirrel will come running along the electric cable and jump into the trees. And somebody says the car is here to take me to the airport. This is it then, walk across to the gate, clip-clop, clip-clop, hard shoes on paving stones. My bag shoved in the back, into car and we’re off. All strength to the adventure…

“Consider the trees which allow the birds to perch and fly away without either  inviting them to stay or desiring them never to depart. If your heart can be  like this, you will be near to the way.”   [Zen Buddhist teaching]

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… to be continued (image: dreamstime.com)

‘the world is the mind’

Posted on July 2, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#77: Delhi: There’s nobody here. Step right out of myself and look in, peep through the windows, knock on the door, ring the bell… anybody home? Try the door handle, it’s not locked, go in… hello? Walk through the empty rooms; the teapot is warm, teaspoon in the sink. Evidence, somebody lives here – look, there’s the laptop on the desk, a brightly illuminated screen. It’s a Google map of India. Click on the little yellow man and place him in a location to get ‘street view’. There he is standing on the surface of the planet. We are in Delhi, presently facing South and on our right, 4000 miles away in a westerly direction is London, 4½ hours behind Delhi time. Keep going on from there over the Atlantic and we come to New York, 3500 miles further on, and 9½ hours behind Delhi time. Further west, over the mountains and many horizons, arriving in San Francisco, another 2500 miles, and 12½ hours behind Delhi time. On we go in a westerly direction until time comes to an end in a zigzag line in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s the International Date Line. After that it’s officially a different day. Continue from there, and we come to Japan, and Seoul, Korea, and South East Asia, then Bangladesh and I’m in Delhi again, back to the time zone I’m in now, except that it’s yesterday… it’s not, of course, it’s the same day, it’s always the same day.

Absent from present time, there’s this long journey that lies ahead… I’m already on the plane. And now I’m arriving at the destination, going around in that place and here and there, everything is squeezed into just three weeks. Then the long return journey, exactly the same as it was going out only the other way round, and glad to be back again. Wow! How was the trip? …no I haven’t left yet, I’m just flying around in the world in my head. Got a ticket with my name on it, date of departure, passport valid – confirmed, registered, subject to limitations, and causes, and conditions, and the operating system that’ll take me there. I am ‘taken’. It’s about the process, no Controller, it goes on automatic pilot. There’s no ‘self’ in the equation – the deed is done and there is no doer – using the Passive Voice language function to express the Buddhist Truth of not-self (anatta).

Sounds are heard, food is tasted, and the chill wind of the southwest monsoon is felt upon the skin. And there’s nobody there that feels it unless I put together an identity composite in Active Voice: ‘I feel the chill’ – ‘I think, therefore I am’. It has to be a strongly assertive statement because the sense of ‘I’ has arisen simply through thinking it’s there and when I stop thinking about it, it’s not there. There are only the Five Khandas. Necessary to have conviction, believe it’s there. *‘I believe for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows, I believe that somewhere in the darkest night a candle glows’. Not impossible. Language tells a story, creates a fiction that I can get lost in; only partly aware that it’s a constructed thing and most of the time I’m clinging to a concept of selfhood, maintaining an assumed identity that’s dependent on updates and new software. Selﬁng is grasped-at, held, identified-with. Consumerism insists ‘self’ is a religion, but the world is seen to have moved on just a little bit, always, and all this is included in its diversity in the process of becoming something else.

‘Consciousness doesn’t ‘see’ or ‘experience’ a world through a mind, but rather the world is the mind (in the broadest sense of the word) that is ‘seen’ or ‘experienced’ by Consciousness.’ [Rupert Spira, The Ever-Present Seamlessness of Experience]

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Excerpts from an earlier post passive voice based on an idea that arose from a post found in: Just A Little Dust

*Note: ‘I believe that every drop of rain that falls….’ is a quote from the song “I Believe” (1952) composed at the start of the Korean War.

now here & nowhere

Posted on April 25, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#63: Chiang Mai: Going home in a tuk-tuk with M sitting beside me, small body-mass pressed against my side. The urgency of speed, kinda scary, canvas roof, no walls and immense sound of 2-stroke engine fills our space. Impossible to hear what she’s saying, M indicates that she wants to borrow my phone. I pull it out of my pocket, hesitate. Is it okay to play with a slippery glass-like instrument like this in a speeding tuk-tuk? It might fly away into the great-rushing-past-outside world, anicca, necessity of mindfulness – she should hold it tight. Small face looks at me silently… don’t make a thing out of this Toong-Ting. I press it into her small hands. Hot, prehensile fingers grab, grasp and clasp the phone. Go to settings, clear away unwanted windows with the swipe of a tiny finger and launch multiplayer Minecraft.

So fast! I’m kinda surprised she’s managing to get Internet, 3G signal reaching us here in a tuk-tuk racing through the streets of Chiang Mai – or maybe we’re in it, like a fish is in an ocean of water. Everything out-there passing by in a blur, feels like a totally crazy speed, why all this rush? I can see over the driver’s shoulder, through his windscreen and it’s like travelling through a wormhole in space-time; the actual here-and-now – everything outside of this is in a different reality. Everything on the ‘in’ side of it locked down tight, my arm around the slight presence of M, taking up such a small amount of the space on the seat, legs sticking out, and Minecraft’s digitally created landscapes of mountains and seascapes appear in the little window of the phone in her hands. She’s now in player-hosted servers with visiting players from all countries in the world. How do you say this Toong-Ting? She spells out: G-A-V-I-N. I tell her it’s a boy’s name, ‘Gavin’, probably English (who’s this Gavin guy, I wonder). I see name labels moving around the landscapes, Japanese and Italian names; Spanish, German, Norwegian – players I assume are about the same age as M. I see boy’s names and girl’s names, all here at this very moment – and, where is ‘here’? Good question: now here and nowhere, depends on the context… spatial and temporal qualities. Space and time are not separate, I read in a post recently [See note 2, below]. This is (always) where we are at.

Looking down at the top of her head, hair combed from a parting in the middle, pulled out in two separate directions, woven into tight plaits on either side, and it’s as if she knows I’m looking at her: Remember this number Toong-Ting: 19122, she says. I consciously remember the number, repeating it to myself… In a moment she asks me what the number was. I tell her, 19122 and ask what it was for, by the way, but she doesn’t answer… having to have things explained to me by a 9 year-old girl who speaks English as a second language – must be a password or login name. Sad really, these days there’s not the dialogue there used to be, ‘I’ am not here, anatta, a suspended state, waiting for the next question. What’s this mean, Toong-Ting? M spells out: B-R-O-S and I tell her it’s a boy’s server, he’s American probably, he’s black and I think she knew the word ’bro’ already. Obviously interested in this and next thing she’s in with the BROS, their mountains and volcanic lava, burning fires.

Then there’s a little wail – she gets disconnected. It feels to me like a catastrophe, but for M it’s no big deal, she changes to a different player-hosted server with new players – or maybe some of them are they same ones who just got here from the same sites we were all in earlier. And while that’s loading, a quick glance at the blur of what’s out there rushing by us, then she starts to sing a song from the movie: Frozen: ‘Let it go, let it go….’ I join her in the song. We sing together, Tuk-tuk driver laughing with his eyes in the rear-view mirror….

‘Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only’. [Nisargadatta]

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Notes: 1) The Nisargadatta quote above comes from a post I read recently but cannot find now. If you happen to know which one it is, please let me know – thank you! 2) Gratitude to: KM Huber for her post: No separation of Space and Time Here and the space-time observation. 3) Mr. Tawat the tuk-tuk driver usually waits at the same place at the end of my road every day. He has taken me on other journeys, you can see other pics of his tuk-tuk here and here and also below

assumed identity

Posted on March 29, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#58: Chiang Mai: Arrived in the early evening and out through the exit tunnel into the airport corridors. Turn the first corner and we’re looking back through a large window at our plane with passenger bridge attached. M says, in her 9-year old voice: take a photo of it… put in your blog Toong-Ting (she calls me that). There’ll be a time when M takes a direct editorial role in this blog… so I take the photo and here it is now. A large reptilian mouth sucking out the contents of a passenger aircraft that has a painted face, intensely happy smile, and it seems okay about what’s happening. M is silent for a moment as she considers the elasticity of this strange stretched metaphor. Then we continue along the corridors to get our bags from the luggage belt. I put everything on the trolley with M sitting on top, push the wheels through the glass doors, opening as we approach and we’re in Arrivals. Her mum is waiting for us, pleased to have M back.

Bags in the car and we’re off. Heavy traffic on the way into town and M, still silent, looking out at it all considering, maybe, how one thing can become another, tells me that cars have gender: boy-car and girl-car. It’s the look of the ‘face’ of the car – that kind of ‘grin’ created by the front bumper and radiator grille. She sees it as the face of a boy or a girl or, if she can’t decide which it is, it must be a katoey, effeminate gay male, third gender, or whatever – she giggles a bit, it’s okay in Thailand. I ask her to identify a boy-car for me, just to see if I can recognise its ‘maleness’ – although I’ve always thought of cars being male. She points at one: that’s a boy-car Toong-Ting (see left pic). I want to say… how d’you know that? But this kind of challenge to her reasoning might be too much, so I’m just going along with it. She asks if I can identify the gender: you tell me, Toong-Ting, it’s a boy-car or girl-car, okay? I have a feeling I’m going to get this wrong… let’s see, there’s one that’s got really male characteristics, I point to it and say that one is a boy-car. No, Toong-Ting it’s a girl-car… looking at me like, how come you can’t see something as obvious as that, hmm?

M spends a lot of time on the road, going to and from her school, a long way from her house. I think she probably knows the brands of all kinds of cars now, maybe not the names, just a familiarity with their appearance and long ago decided some were boy-cars, some were girl-cars, and those in-between were katoeys. As we’re going along I take a photo of the back of a car and show it to her so she can study it in detail: boy or girl? (see pic below) She says she can’t really tell looking at the back of it, can’t see its face, but thinks maybe it’s a girl-car, because she remembers that she decided at some earlier time, that particular make of car was a girl. It’s a case of remembering which is what (or what is which?) or what she had already decided it was when she first saw that make of car.

There’s intelligence in her playfulness, a reality in her personifications that challenges my usual insisting there is no ‘self’, the Buddha’s Teaching on anatta: ‘self’ is an illusion arising from the 5 Khandas. I feel I’m holding on to something I should let go of, with M going around happily applying the attributes of ‘self’ and gender to all kinds of things. She can create an identity and let it go, because it’s one among many. She can escape the entanglements of ‘self’ because she plays with a multitude of ‘selves’, like waves in the ocean and an ocean in all the oceans of the world. Everything in the universe is Self. The ‘self’ I believe to be ‘me’ is an assumed identity – there is no ‘self’, everything I see is ‘me’.

‘Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. Lila indicates a spontaneous sportive activity of Brahman as distinguished from a self-conscious volitional effort. The concept of Lila signifies freedom as distinguished from necessity.’ [Ram Shanker Misra, The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo]

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Above pic shows M’s katoey-car

Note: “Everything I See Is Me” was inspired by a post in the Hip Monkey site

a kind of subjectivity

Posted on March 20, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#56: Bangkok: I’m the one that got away, the escapee, the spiritual refugee. I followed the road that led away from the place I was born and never went back. The link with ‘home’ is broken and even if I could get it reset there’s no connection now. Somehow it fits with the history of where I came from; of war and battles lost and won, victory, defeat, the pibroch, the dirge lament, death like a flood sweeps away a sleeping village; the kamma of immense grieving, Celtic calamity, the catastrophe, the ruins, the mourning, s’affliger, generations of the dispossessed, and all the elders are gone.

Is integration the opposite of disintegration? If so, I came from a world in disintegration, I stowed away on a ship, sailed over many horizons and by happenstance got shipwrecked on a strip of land in the South China Sea. I am the Western urban migrant, assimilated, integrated here, got the password, userID and blessed to find the Buddhists in Thailand. A sense of connectedness, although it hasn’t been easy these 30 years, carrying the weight of Western thinking, causes and conditions from early times, likes and dislikes. And, being the only foreigner in the family, I’ve learned to go along with the preferences of others when it comes to food. As it was this morning, for example, faced with Korean kimchi at 10.30 AM because somebody thought it was a good idea to go to the Korean food buffet downtown, and if it were up to me I’d have chosen something less exotic so early in the day, but Jiab thinks our niece, we call M, needs to eat something substantial so maybe she’ll like this. Okay go for it.

M tries the kimchi and tells me: not spicy, Toong-Ting, her name for me (see the M posts). She’s waiting for a response… I taste it, blood red and trailing strands of human skin and tissue – a vampire thing? But there’s nothing wrong with kimchi really, I’ve had things far more out-of-this-world than that. I nod with approval and give her a smile I think is convincing. But M can see kimchi doesn’t quite hit the spot. She comes over and tells me quietly they have ice-cream here too. Yeh… well, ice-cream at 10.30 AM? If I said I didn’t like that either I’d lose all credibility. So I say, Nice! Do they have caramel/toffee? Thirty years further on in the journey and I’m eating ice-cream with a nine-year-old. I’m amazed that she likes me… maybe she responds to this quality of improvised simplicity I’ve developed, anyway it’s a privilige and quite wonderful how things have gotten very much easier since M came into the world. She corrects my Thai pronunciation (the tones), has a continuous chattering bird-like dialogue with me and discovers useful-to-know things about my phone I never knew were there. M is an empath – no words for it, it’s a kind subjectivity. Maybe because she’s a child in a bilingual situation and has to find the easiest route to understanding others, or maybe all children are like this and because I never had any children of my own, it seems special to me.

Being part of her world means there’s less of the holding on to ‘self’. Anyway, there’s less of an emphasis on individuality here in Thailand, things are shared, a largely Buddhist population. And my ‘self’ is so totally different from everyone else’s self, it’s not appropriate to be imposing my ‘standards’ here, creating supporting statements to prove what I’ve already decided is the correct way of going about things, and convinced about this simply because my continuing engagement with it somehow seems to confirm it has objective reality. In the East, the ‘object’ is not the goal. The starting point and the answer are revealed in the interaction with the context of the question – inductive reasoning, it takes longer, it’s more revelatory, exploratory, open-ended.

M runs off to look at what kind of drinks they have. Comes back and tells me about one she thinks I like but can’t pronounce the name, I ask her how do you spell it? Never mind she says, can she borrow my phone? I give her the phone, she’s always ‘borrowing’ my phone. M runs off to the drinks section again and comes back immediately; she’s taken a photo of the drink, shows me: Chrysanthemum tea, wow! A difficult one to pronounce. Nice, I’ll have that. M is gone for a moment then returns with a glass of iced tea held in both hands, places it on my table without spilling a drop; loving-kindness, she steals my heart away…

‘There is ultimately no individual self or soul (jiva), only the atman (universal soul), in which individuals may be temporarily delineated just as the space in a jar delineates a part of main space: when the jar is broken, the individual space becomes once more part of the main space.’ [Gaudapada] source: Non-Duality America (Link to original)

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Lower photo: M‘s Pic of the Chrysanthemum Tea dispenser

passing through 1

Posted on March 9, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#54: Chiang Mai: Situated at the top of a column of words (at the time of writing), light and easy, a feeling of no-thingness, the world is here but no serious attachment to anything. Emptiness of space in the place where “I” have not yet arrived and the sensory mechanisms that give the world meaning for me are still offline. Look at the altitude app, it says 1043 ft. above sea level, add 180 feet for the height of a 7 floor building and my location is identified. I am standing with my bag here on the top floor of said building, waiting for the elevator down… everything goes down from here. Doors open, step in with my bag on its little wheels, doors close, and down we go. It’s a small elevator space with large mirror. Is this good or bad; the witchcraft of mirrors. Study my reflection, hmmm… look into my eyes and see my eyes looking back out at me – slightly scary, stop doing that. Elevator stops at the 3rd floor, doors open, nobody there… a volume of 3rd floor air enters, doors close. We go down again, floor numbers on the indicator decrease as we descend further. Look at my reflection like a friend standing next to me. Examine the teeth in a large wide grin; watch myself holding this grimace, weird guy. Try to be normal; this is how I’m seen in public. Elevator reaches the ground level.

The people in the lobby are engaged in a conversational event that started before I got here and there’s a pause in the dialogue as I step into their space. Eyes look… do we know you? Smile, show teeth, no cause for alarm folks, just passing through. Walk out the main door and lift my bag down the steps. Street restaurants, the smell of exotic cooking, noise and clatter, a child cries, bicycles creak, rubber wheels on hot tarmac, a motorbike fills the place with sound. I have the feeling that I’m now situated at the top of a column of bones, ligaments, tissue, fluidity, and looking out of two holes in the skull that bond together into a single screen monitor – just the edges seen and the side of the nose. If I focus on something in the environment, through sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, there’s a curious ‘entering’ takes place… the outside world invades totally, no boundaries, and my whole head disappears* (funny how it does that) and there’s only the world, with me in it, headless. Everything switches back to normal view, when I want it to, and back to watching my feet appear and disappear on the ground below, one at a time: left, right, left, right. My bag following behind, rumbling along on its little wheels, slippers flip-flop on soles of feet…

Looking for a passing tuk-tuk or some means of public transportation that’ll take me to the airport. Reality check: am I at peace with myself? Is there an easefulness or am I busy thinking about things? How am I feeling? Allow the software to do its job; the facility of reflecting on how all this is going so far. Outer noise and heat find a way through the senses and have an effect on the mind/body organism in its ambling walk down the road – that stumbling gait, typical of lanky Western folk. Pleased to know how it feels and I can be aware of the sensation without making it into something I love or hate. Letting the events of the mind go unheld; give it all away, the great generosity of relinquishment. Be kind to myself, the ongoing practice of learning how to live my life. Tuk-tuk arrives, get in, wind in my face….

‘Human beings have a reflective quality that steps back from experience and says: “I don’t like this. It shouldn’t be this way. Stop it!” The aim of the spiritual path is to fully understand that the main problem of life is not that the government is unfair, that one isn’t getting enough money, that there is hunger, violence, pain or sickness, not even that one isn’t loved – but the feeling in the reflective mind of being bound down by these circumstances. Once we have clearly understood the mind, we can experience patience, equanimity, and release – even in predicaments that can be difficult or unpleasant.’ [Ajahn Sucitto, ‘Making Peace With Despair’, from the volume: ‘Peace and Kindness’]

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*Reference to: ‘On Having No Head’ by Douglas Harding

– G R A T I T U D E –

getting attention

Posted on February 26, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#52: Delhi: There was a time when I wasn’t here – not born yet. The world just going on as it does without having anything to do with that person called ‘me’. I didn’t exist then. There’s an anonymity about this that’s quite liberating. Thinking about it here in the car, looking at the world going by, same world that was out there before I was born. I’m on the way to pick up my Thai visa for the Bangkok trip this weekend – heavy traffic and stuck behind a truck. I take a photo of it simply because of the way all the words and colours insist I look at it, shouting out at me, trying to get my attention. Is it this kind of attachment to ‘self’ that causes ego-rebirth? A whole truck is suddenly reborn in front of me, identity smeared over every part of it, saying: ‘I’ am here; this is ‘my’ place! It has to be allowed for; make space for it in all the honking, hooting/tooting and scenarios of outrage where everybody really wants to be somebody. Press your horn to announce your presence. Do it loudly, you think a lot of yourself.

Mindfulness of conflict, resentment and holding a grudge; loving-kindness, compassion, metta-karuna. I’m a long-term outsider, now more than 30 years of living in other people’s countries. It means there’s a distance between ‘me’ and how things are done. As far as possible, the ‘I’ is understated, indirect, a release of the tenacity of ‘grip’ on how I (personally) think things should be. Thus I discover these days, local people look at me and I become invisible. They can’t get me to fit into their social scale, eyes glaze over. I unexist for them. I understand it to be that easing off from holding on to identity, almost to the point of letting go completely – the Buddha’s teaching on anatta, no-self. Extraordinary in my case because the I-am-not-here thing happens twice, two cultural settings: India and Thailand. I’m invisible in both countries, just my name on the lists of foreign residents, photo attached; ‘me’ in dress shirt, formal expression, hair combed, ‘smile please!’ I take out the ID I carry with me here and look at the photo, stamped, authorized, signed, registered, watermarked. It’s my identity, but is it ‘me’?

I’m not convinced. Is it proof that I exist? …em, it’s a picture of a man who looks like me, having his picture taken. All I have by way of proof that I exist is the subjective experience of it and the present moment that is undeniably everywhere, in the unlikeliest of places. The ubiquitous presence of now, I keep bumping into it, oh… what’s this? The present moment seen in a cloud of unknowing. Or I’m thinking it’s something it isn’t. Or I accept the present moment is as it is, whether I am aware of it in its ‘as-it-is-ness’ or not.

Other times it’s seen as if standing at the bow of a small ship plunging through the waves, rising and falling, just on the point of leaving the past and surging into the future, but not there yet – never reaching that point. All the surrounding clutter and stuff of the mind is pushed away by the waves and the movement of the ship passing through. Long intervals between things… why this pause? How come there’s nothing to think about? What happens when the thinking thing stops – what happens after that? But the question just leads to more thinking. No answer, no question, stillness – a state of mind that’s free of all the tugs and pulls. Slow down, stop. Contemplate the body and mind; breathe in/breathe out, there is heartbeat, consciousness of the mystery: out there/in here…

‘…looking for the first time at homemade movies taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence… But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.’ [The autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov: “Speak, Memory”, page 1]

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a patch of sunlight

Posted on February 17, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#50: Delhi: It’s cold here, fingertips touch the keys tentatively, unwilling to make contact. Feeling chilled all the time and can’t seem to get comfortable with this February weather. I just arrived from Thailand, my bag, still unpacked, contains the blue sky and sunshine of white shorts, sunglasses, T-shirts and rubber slippers. Wow it was hot there; I’m reluctant to let go of that nice feeling.

It’s like the world extends only as far as the immediate surroundings of where I’m currently situated and it takes a little time to reassemble things if I move 2000 miles to somewhere else. There’s the tendency to hold on to nice things and I’m particularly reluctant to let go of it this time because the visit to Delhi is only for a couple of weeks, then I go back to Thailand again. So I’m in transit, not really ‘here’, and that’s why I’m making the excuse that it’s not necessary to unpack my bag.

My bag is an extension of ‘me’, it’s my identity, part of the self-construct I’ve created, the same as everyone else’s sense of ‘self’. I feel a fondness for my bag, a familiarity and a connection with that small volume of folded clothing, flattened garments, papers, books and various computer cables, that’ll be zipped up tight, X-rayed and pushed back into its space in the aircraft baggage section along with all the other bags, and away we go back to the sunshine. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I’m stuck here in the cold for a number of days.

When it’s warm enough I go up on to the roof terrace, to the place where the sun shines through between the buildings and there’s a patch of sunlight where I can sit on my chair. The chair is in the same place it was two months ago and for a moment there’s a kind of presence about that empty chair… déjà vu; the ‘self’ that was there at that time is gone completely, no familiarity with it – yet I remember being here quite clearly. Now I’m sitting in the warm sunshine, recreating a ‘self’ that suits this time and place, for this duration, knowing that soon it’ll be gone too. Phenomena are as they are for a short time and disappear; it’s as if the appearance of everything has the quality of a pencil sketch, a pleasant unfinishedness.

I look at things, and they’re gone – it’s the time needed to process the thought. Objects are experienced not in present time but just as they’re slipping into the past; everything is always seen in hindsight. Conclusions arrived at after the event. Nothing remains. The day I die will be an ordinary day. The moment after I’m gone will be no different from any other. It’ll be like a pause in the middle of a sentence… the focus on the object slips away, the next moment will just be the next moment and things will go on as if nothing happened. The fragility of the world held for an instant then it’s gone, only the space where everything used to be and the silence left behind…

‘Usually when we hear the teaching on not-self, we think that it’s an answer to questions like these: “Do I have a self? What am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist?” However, the Buddha listed all of these as unskillful questions. Once, when he was asked point-blank, “Is there a self? Is there no self?” he refused to answer. He said that these questions would get in the way of finding true happiness. So obviously the teaching on not-self was not meant to answer these questions. To understand it, we have to find out which questions it was meant to answer.’ [Thanissaro Bhikkhu: ‘Selves & Not-self: The Buddhist Teaching on Anatta’]

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connectedness

Posted on February 5, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#46: Bangkok: Sitting in a taxi that’s stuck in traffic and I see these buildings through the window, take the photo thinking, wow! I can write a post about that. The floating staircases look like they were put in as an afterthought. Somebody came up with the idea and sketched it out on the back of a beer mat. Creativity. Things are linked in the mind – the symbol of a bridge, everything is connected. It all fits. Taxi still stuck and I’m searching around in the memory for something, through the staircases and corridors of no-words-to-describe-it, looking for a starting point. How to begin? A small insight comes along; it’s the karma of circumstances.

That’s why, who, where, what, which, when and how I came to be here in Bangkok, strange as it may seem, having started off in such a far-away place over the mountains, over the sea… the Northern part of the world, near to the Arctic region. Up there, the polarities of shady darkness and never-ending light inspire one thing above all: the desire to get on a plane to a sunny place in the Southern Seas and never come back. So that’s what I did.

When I came back I discovered thirty years had passed, the Rip Van Winkle effect – look in the mirror, hair gone white. Most of the people I knew are dead. It had been so long I’d forgotten the ‘me’ that used to be there. I gave some thought to the ‘me’ left behind in the sunny place in the Southern Seas, went back over to check on that but it wasn’t there either. All these hours and days over the years, looking out the windows of an airplane and the world coming in through these eyes but seeing it like it’s not ‘me’ personally that it’s happening to, more like it’s an extension of what’s out there.

There’s a connectedness. No ‘me’. The temporary self-construct that used to be ‘in here’, a tentative sort of half-existence, has gone. Gone is gone. No ‘self’, anatta, nobody at home. Elvis has left the building. I am a metaphor of ‘me’ looking out of the window of a moving vehicle going away to, or coming back from a place called ‘home’ in Bangkok at the present time but next week I’ll be in Delhi again and looking at ‘home’ from that location. I know that three weeks from now I’ll be in Chiang Mai in that place there called ‘home’, hang out for a while, contemplate the space I’m in, then after that, no plans…

Is there anything I can call a real home? (hold that thought)… there’s a memory of something being ‘home’ when I was a kid. I remember long nights and short days, aunties and grannies wearing comfortable wooly cardigans, porridge in a cracked bowl, coal and wood fires, a black-and-white sheepdog – and incidentally, the rural/urban thing about Asian cities, cows sitting on the pavement, goats nibbling and chickens pecking around, the sound of a cockerel in the distance; all this reminds me of the farmyard scene where I was brought up. There’s a familiarity about it

Fond memories, pictures in the gallery of the mind, and yes I’d like there to be a real home, but for a very long time now there’s been only a series of temporary homes – all good, I share my life with Jiab and we’ve gotten used to the way things are. In each place I have my favourite chair, books, and all the things I need. It works okay except sometimes I might spend a long time searching the bookshelves for a book I’m sure is there then realise it’s not in these bookshelves, it’s the other bookshelves, about 2000 miles away. So I have to let that one go, although I can see it there in the mind’s eye…

I feel dispersed, an okay sort of feeling. It suits me well to follow the Buddha’s Teachings: homelessness, non-attachment, no-self. Whether there is a ‘self’, yes/no, is best not thought about too much because saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it is, in itself, identifying ‘self’’. Words identify things, language has a default mechanism that allows me to select what ‘I’ want it to be (also what I don’t want it to be) and the resulting attachment to all that I love and hate. I see it happening, stay mindful about where the exit is located, and open the heart/mind citta to the world as wide as possible.

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‘I place the word “Jesus” into my heart, and in a magical instant all those wordless, intangible sensations I have come to recognize as His Presence fill the room, as if that word was a seed dropped into the planter of my heart, which took root, and produced an entire orchard.’ [Excerpt from the post: Trending Towards Holiness]

– G R A T I T U D E –

thralldom

Posted on January 3, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #39: Chiang Mai: Coming up to Chiang Mai from Hat Yai was done in two stages, with the stopover at Bangkok, as we did going down. It was the same thing, the other way round. Everything already seen, but occuring in reverse order and the hassle and stress we experienced on the way down got cancelled out on the return journey. Like a video on fast-rewind, it stops at the beginning not the end and the memory of ever having gone or been away is erased.

A short trip, six days only. The point of it was to visit Jiab’s youngest brother and his wife and their new-born baby – a truly amazing child with a wonderful smile. It was a bit like the Three Wise Men following the star to the stable where the baby Jesus lay in the manger – not really like that… there was Jiab and her sister, me and M, who is 9 years old and dismayed by lack of internet, sadly playing the same old games on the iPad and not interested in being in a rubber plantation, with its curious waftings of latex smells. I was quite blown away with the experience of being surrounded by rubber trees – I knew that rubber came from trees of course but it was sort of bizzare somehow… trees made of rubber?

Now back here in Chiang Mai and friends have sent pics of the monks blessing everyone for the coming year. These quiet humble events are meaningful in a way I’ve not seen in the Church and all the gusty hymn singing, great heaviness of acoustics and out-of-sync organ suggesting a fearsome power and immensity. What my Sunday School teacher taught me was that “God made the world,” and I wrote that down in my little exercise book but had absolutely no understanding of it; an imponderable, a Zen koan: God made the world…

But who made God? The world and God are two separate things, one of them made the other, therefore seeing this from a place created in the mind for the purpose of looking for God and finding only a complexity of half understood truths. In the end, I stopped worrying about it; there is no God (in that way of thinking) and decades later the whole thing vanished – with it went the concept of ‘self’. Liberated from ‘the thralldom of the senses’. Quite an ordinary epiphany, like one might be sitting in a quiet room with furniture and objects and light coming in through the window then suddenly a letting-go moment takes place and ‘I’ no longer have the burden of ‘my’ thoughts about ‘me’. Released from the subject/object duality. God is not ‘out there’, but ‘in here’. God is subjectivity, conscious awareness.

Conscious awareness is everywhere. In the blogging world, for example, it’s what we’re talking about or describing all the time, one way or another, in our different locations, circumstances and in our various states of mind and body. Sometimes there’s an instant understanding of what conscious awareness means but it’s beyond words. Sometimes awareness is there but I think I can’t see it. Thinking I can’t see it, is another mind moment that exists temporarily in awareness. The mind doesn’t create awareness, mind is contained in the awareness. Other times there’s the simple knowing of it and a feeling of quiet purpose in every step, every move.

‘Only by liberating oneself from the thralldom of the senses and the thinking function – both of them servants and not masters – by withdrawing attention from “things seen” to give it to to things “unseen” can this awakening be accomplished.” [E. F. Schumacher, “A Guide For The Perplexed”, p.79]