transparency

Posted on November 8, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#101: Bangkok Suwannabhume Airport: Looking out from the interior of this coffee shop into another interior; the glittering glass-paneled B concourse, and through that glass window to what’s out there; blue sky, a concrete horizon and planes taking off. I am contained in a transparent interior, inside a larger interior, contained in a reality construct, the steel and glass of this moment. It’s the same place I was in last time, and the time before that (the ‘Mango Tree’ coffee shop, near gates B1-B6, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods). We started coming here a year ago and Jiab comes when she’s travelling on her own… sends me phone-pics of fruity drinks and ice creams she consumes after the photo is taken. This is my departure lounge; the Delhi flight leaves from this coffee shop, rather than gate C5, which is simply the entrance to the plane. A kind of applied personification in an airport vastness, anonymity and incidental eye contact with a few individuals. I see their birth, their death, their merging in a sea of people all on the way to/from somewhere else… going or coming. We’re all just passing through.

Long columns of us waiting to be X-rayed, instructed and directed by officials guiding us into and out of security portals like water passes through rocks and stones in a continuous flowing stream. No resistance to it… the coldness of regulations; a physical sensation in a body that’s somehow become transparent. I notice how the energy feels rather than how I can ‘be’ negatively energized by it. Everything is so much not what we think it is, there can’t be any assumptions; just letting it take place and being okay about it is enough. Disengage from thinking it should be something other than what it is, and everything that’s currently bothering me about that disappears for a moment – long enough to be able to see it’s possible to let go of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts completely… the peace that’s in that.

Surveillance cameras protrude into the space I’m in and suck out all data, send it to a room containing video screens, dark and gloomy, where security people with bulged-out eyes scan the images of the crowd, zoom-in, zoom-out. I feel I’m being looked at, studied… I’ve just been jostled slightly, pockets rifled. I can’t see them but I know they’re there. This whole thing is a performance, there’s a sudden urge to do a song-and-dance act. Maybe it’s a more serious drama production; Japanese Kuroko stagehands, dressed in black, appear on stage with the actors and rearrange the scene as the play is going on. They’re there for everyone to see but become invisible. The mystery of how we can be unaware of things in plain sight – mesmerized by politicians, illusionists’ sleight-of-hand; everybody acting out the story of their lives without questioning it, improvised dialogue according to the karma of causes and conditions.

Coming near to the end… the last camera, passport stamp, thump! And I’m suddenly through the barrier, blinded by the lights of the glitzy duty-free, gold Rolexes, impossible jewelry and stumbling towards my place in the coffee shop. Waiting for the flight to be called, the great leap up into the sky. A heightened feeling, a quickening, I know all this is happening – mindful alertness, awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware…

“The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn’t have without them.” [Suzanne Segal, Collision with the Infinite]

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‘… awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware’ – reference: Is Awareness Aware Of Itself?

all of the above

Posted on November 2, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#100: Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Look out the window and there’s the wing of the aircraft I was looking at when we were on the ground and taxiing for takeoff – reassuring to see this part of our plane structure out there, seemingly holding us stable in this strange void, moving at 600 mph, in a great whoosh above the surface of the planet. The wing seems to extend into the clouds, like the perspective of a highway leading off into the sky. A curious illusion, although no more curious than the illusion that’s all around; world as a projection of the senses, everything tailored to fit and unbelievably believable… I can see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, and taste it. It looks real but it’s not there; it’s only ‘my’ perception of it, a mirror reflection of the world – I need to remind myself it’s like this, the illusion is so compelling. I am the ‘self’ that inhabits this body, appearing in the being-ness appearing in ‘me’ and part of the whole thing, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end….

The seat next to me is empty – sad to think my Thai niece, M, aged 10, who has accompanied me on so many other journeys is not able to come along this time. M’s school holidays are over… parting of the ways, she goes back to school, I go back to Delhi, stopover in Bangkok – another long journey in the air. Stewardess comes by, looks at me (who you are at any moment is determined by whom you’re talking with). I ask her about the empty seat, she says nobody will sit there now, so I can spread out my notes and papers over two seats. It’s strange not having M beside me anymore. This empty space where she used to be, this solitude, aloneness or loneliness. No chattering conversations and statements presented with the alertness of a small bird; intelligence like a receptor opens, data enters and triggers the creativity of constantly making one thing into another thing. The energy of her artwork; scissors-clipped paper-craft objects held together with Scotch Tape and ‘Fluorescent Color Glitter Glue’. And the performance; playing with words, gestures and the dreamlike ‘self’ function; playing a part in a story in her head so well she believes she’s the character being acted out – being a somebody, then being a somebody-else.

Flitting from one self to the next, her presence is a self-reflexive act. No difference between the self-construct and acting the part, it’s just there; an all-inclusive, ‘all of the above’ experience of awareness receiving itself. A total act, ‘theatre’, illusion, samsara… just immersed in the story of it all. The ‘world’ is a constructed/collapsible experience – unfolding, enfolding, no holding – automatic pilot, nobody driving the plane.

‘… the question was raised: “Why can’t we know this secret of the universe?” And the answer given was very significant: “Because we talk in vain, and because we are satisfied with the things of the senses, and because we are running after desires; therefore, we, as it were, cover the Reality with a mist.”’ [Swami Vivekanada, Maya and Illusion]

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enigma

Posted on August 26, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #89: Delhi: Why is it that the back of somebody’s head is so much like a closed door? I’m standing in a line of people in the food store waiting with my purchases for my turn to pay at the check-out. It’s taking a long time and I’m wondering if I’m feeling a bit miffed about that, yes or no – anyway there’s this quiet awareness, curious and interesting. When I see the back of somebody’s head I immediately want to turn that person around with a hand on the shoulder and see who it is…. Hi there! How’re you getting on? But, can’t do that in the food store check-out line, of course, we’re all strangers and each of us isolated in this slightly tetchy discontent about having to wait… what’s happening down there? This is our predicament, looking at the backs of people’s heads in front of us, all the way down to the front. I’m moving my head from side to side, trying to see past all the other heads. But all the way down the line, other heads are doing the same thing and my line of vision is blocked by somebody else’s head moving from side to side because the head in front of them is in the way too. Funny to see all these sideways wobbling heads. I have a quick look behind me and everybody is having to do the same thing to see past me… no laughing matter, there’s a grumbling in the air.

Stand quietly, feet apart, evenly balanced and look at the back of the head of man in front. There’s a kind of frontality about the head. The face is on the front, of course, eyes look forwards, incoming data is received mostly from the front – ears are on the sides, but sideways functioning is limited. No sensory receptors on the back that have the function of sensing what’s going on in the world. Any backwards movement is blind, no rear-view mirror… trucks reversing out with that automatic beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep sound.

The human body is like a picture painted on a flat cardboard cutout. The whole back of my head and body is one large blind spot; a not-seeing that I know is there. Turn away, and suddenly the thing I was looking at is gone! Ignorance is a kind of ignoring – it has intelligence. I have the ability to overlook things, watch TV every day, and have ‘preferences’. I choose to be unconcerned about wars created by politicians. Prefer to be mesmerized by the reflected screen-glow of the digital device...searching for an object and never finding it. Move on, click something else, the appearance of reality holds my attention for a moment, then click on the next one. Am I really the ‘me’ I think I am? I can see that the ‘self’ is a construct, but the truth is hidden from me because there is no solid enduring self that sees it like this.

Idiosyncratic humanness caught in an unexpected circumstance. Waiting, but not that suspended state of waiting for the thing I’m waiting for; more like just waiting with the waiting. Being with the gentle in-breath/out-breath, the temperature of the air, the feel of the body standing there, and an easy observation of everything that’s happening. Balance, openness – poised between things in a place of emptiness. It’s all just moving along. There’s a gentle questioning of events as they arise… what’s this now? The moment transforms itself, observing the curiosity of it, mindfully placing one foot after the other, slowly and carefully, on stepping-stones that lead out into the river and over to the other side.

Let the water settle and you will see moon and stars mirrored in your being. [Rumi]

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Upper image, ‘Not to be Reproduced’ (La reproduction interdite), a painting by Magritte 1937. excerpts from an earlier post: a sea of people. For the insight into ‘waiting’, special thanks to Zen Doe and The Path of Waiting – G R A T I T U D E –

future in the past

Posted on August 20, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #88: Delhi: In a taxi with Jiab heading out to the domestic terminal. The taxi driver said yesterday he was going to pick her up at 2.00pm – future in the past, now it’s 2.30pm and she might miss the plane. No problem, he’s intending to make up the time, he says with foot on the accelerator the whole way. We’re going so fast it’s like we’re on the edge of linear time. Everything is a blur, the “now” I experience at this moment was the future for me when I was in the past… this thought repeats over and over. Driver ignores the built-in audio system that tells us when he’s going over the speed limit; a recorded voice message can be heard in the car, which says, ‘you are going too fast!’ Innovative idea… needless to say we have to listen to this voice repeating: ‘you are going too fast!’ all the way out to the airport. Driver overtaking everything, nearside, offside, hand on the horn, and the penetrating little voice coming unexpectedly: ‘you are going too fast!’

Jiab, with her conditioning in Bangkok traffic, is maybe more used to this kind of thing than me. I’m adhered to the seat, doing my utmost to bond with the structure of the vehicle. It’s like I’m not going through these streets, these streets are going through me. There’s an alertness locked in place you could call mindfulness but it’s more like an urgency, and struggling a bit with the idea that the driver is doing all the wrong things, this shouldn’t be happening. Round a sharp corner and we swerve to avoid a small motorbike coming straight at us on our side of the road; that motorbike guy is doing all the wrong things too. Then there’s a great show of outrage at the traffic lights, because of a man on the back of a motorbike holding a vertical panel of pressboard that’s 5ft x 4ft (see photo) and the motorbike can’t go fast because of wind resistance… pedestrians running about in the traffic risking life and limb – everybody’s doing all the wrong things.

Yeh, well, it’s my perception of this that’s all wrong, of course. The people out there obviously feel they’re doing the right thing, and I’m the one who’s got it wrong. How to see it as they do when gravity seems to disappear at times? Focus on the breath, don’t look in the direction of travel, and I find a small island of calm abiding… ah yes, this is the way it is, extraordinary and exhilarating. Enjoy the show, I’m in a speedboat, everything seems fluid, things merging with other things and entering into everything else. The velocity of this vehicle rushing through the streets washes aside other vehicles as waves do in the sea; everything is like flotsam; how we normally receive experience is so near to universal unity, it’s the same thing.

Taxi arrives at the terminal, I get the bags onto trolley, Jiab jumps out, bye-bye… then I’m into the same taxi, and going back the way we came, same cacophony of noise, same breakneck speed. Get to the house and the whole journey was so quick, there and back again, it was like I’d never left. Give the driver 500 Rupees, and it’s too much I know, but I’m in a state of astonishment. Inside and crash on the sofa for an hour. A text message rouses me; it’s Jiab saying she’s in Ranchi, about 800 miles away.

“According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.” [Deepak Chopra, ‘Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles’]

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‘Future in the Past is used to express the idea that in the past you thought something would happen in the future’ For a grammatical explanation of Future in the Past, click here. ‘The “now” I experience at this moment was the future for me when I was in the past…’ developed from an idea in Silentlyheardonce. This post contains excerpts from an earlier post ‘Going Too Fast”. Special thanks to Mindfulbalance/Observing everything, for the Ajahn Amaro quote that inspired the idea: ‘I’m not going through these streets, these streets are going through me.’

the hide-and-seek game

Posted on August 7, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #85: Delhi: The house seems different; everywhere there’s the sound of Thai voices like the songs of birds echoing off the walls, ceilings and tiled floor. Guests in the spare room, girlfriends of Jiab here for a visit. They are greng-jai with me (reluctant to impose themselves) knowing I’ve had to move some of my things out of the way to allow space for them. I try to convince them, mai pen rai khap, no problem. I don’t mind having to use the bathroom on the roof… there’s a bathroom on the roof? Yes, it’s a partially built second floor, just the stairwell and the bathroom up there (see photo). There are also two thatched shelters to create shade in the hot season so that it’s cooler in the rooms below.

Hot, though. I can feel it as I’m going up with my bathroom things, but there’s a fan in there. Close the door and I’m in this personal space. Only one small window I can’t see out of. Feels like I’m hidden away from the world… birds sit on the roof, wondering where I’ve gone. Trees and the sky wait for me to come back. There’s a small mirror on the wall, I see my own face looking back at me, always the eyes are held – the awareness that looks out of the mirror. Is this my “self”… is this it? I feel like I’m “it” in the hide-and-seek game: Do you want to be “it”? No, not me thanks, I was “it” last time. Then I decide to volunteer, okay, I’ll be “it”, the one who has to stay at the designated base, close my eyes and count to 100, while everybody runs away to hide.

Commence ablutions, run the shower, get under the showerhead, hoping for cool water but it’s hot. Fierce sun shines all day on the outside water pipe that connects to the water tank on top. So I’m standing there waiting for the hot water to be used up and the cool water that’ll come from deeper down the water-tank. Sure enough, the cool water starts to come through… nice. Then it gets too cold, a gust of cool air from the fan whips up the cool temperature. It becomes icy for a moment – sharp needles – jump back from the shower to let the cold water run through, then under the showerhead again. The cool water starts to be replaced by surface tank water, which is warm, nice, and then it’s scalding hot – woa! Jump back from the shower again, dry off and open the door.

The world outside opens it eyes… ah, there you are. Towel around the middle for decency’s sake and step out. It’s possible to dry off in the sunshine – stand in the doorway of the bathroom to brush my teeth, shoosha-shoosha-shoosha… stop for a moment and look again at the face in the mirror. Is this the same “it” who played these hide-and-seek games so long ago? Is this the seeker? Looking out of these eyes in a reflection of itself, and seeing a world that’s separate from the sense of “me-ness” situated inside this body. We see each other like mirrors of ourselves, even though there’s no self to speak of, nobody at home. The closer I look, the more it’s not found. The enigma of stuck-ness…

Laughter of the Thais coming up from below, I go downstairs and make my way through them all… cognitive hybrid who speaks their language like a simpleton – they say I speak it well, this is why I never learned to be fluent. Really no need to ‘be’ anything, living in both worlds…

“You will never find it, because you are it. Therefore, seeking it is the denial of its presence. In seeking it, you compel it to seem as if hidden or lost. It is You that does not alter, You, Awareness. You are that for which you long and your longing is this very presence of love coupled with a thin veil of belief that it is absent, that it is an object that can be lost and found.” [Rupert Spira, All We Ever Long For]

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over the horizon

Posted on July 29, 2014 by tiramit

‘Through our eyes, the Universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the Universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the Universe becomes conscious of itself.’ [Alan Watts]

POSTCARD #83: London – Delhi flight: Clouds cover the landscape, with openings here and there where I can see the ground below. England is a patchwork quilt of very small fenced enclosures, little houses built with brick and stone that last for hundreds of years. Concrete bulwarks along the coastline, the idea of the sea engulfing the land is psychological. A united Kingdom huddled together on land space so small it’s almost not there at all. Travel across from East to West and in a few hours you come to the sea again. Geographical aloneness, an island mentality, the idea of ‘self’, marooned, I am contained, separate from everything, surrounded by water, the world is out ‘there’. Not much room, just enough space for everything, a smallness, memories are close by and everything is near at hand. The buildings and the land were all here before I was born and will be here after I’m gone. Children learn about the everlasting ‘soul’ living in an objective world; belief in a ‘self’ yet… seeing only the lack of it, a lifetime spent looking for an answer to this puzzle – it must be… over the horizon somewhere.

Somewhere far away from not ‘being’ but being busy doing things. Somewhere distant from the default settings the world of money and power depends on. The system hijacked the Jesus Teachings and now there’s no place in society for a contemplative spiritual life. Nothing to encourage children to look beyond sensory gratification and see through perception because it works better to have an unknowing population addicted to television and consumer goods. Living with an intensity fueled by greed, hatred and delusion, instead of generosity, loving-kindness and insight. The worship of self rather than selflessness.

In a discussion with one of the monks at Aruna Ratanagiri Monastery in UK the question came up, what does the word ‘contemplation’ actually mean? Contemplating contemplation… the state of mind where everything is seen as an awareness of present experience, circumstances which can’t be explained in any terms other than what they are. Thinking stops and the mind opens up to experience as it is – not as it’s verbalised. Sometimes language just gets in the way. Like waking up after a good night’s sleep and there’s the solution to the puzzle I was thinking about before I went to sleep. No words, no memory, no markers in the mind for thought to attach to and somehow everything falls into place.

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows. [Wislawa Szymborska]

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The header image source: Aruna Ratanagiri Monastery.

Poem source: superaalifragilistic, View With A Grain Of Sand.

The Alan Watts quote source: Zen Flash, Through our eyes the Universe is perceiving itself

– G R A T I T U D E –

arrivals – departures

Posted on July 25, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #82: South East England: Somebody I know died. There was a ceremony, the monks came, chanted blessings and now she’s gone. All that remains is her absence, her empty rooms, her pictures on the walls, objects chosen, placed on shelves and now there’s no one here who made the choices. Sadness… her clock-radio still starts at 8.00 in the morning and the bedroom is suddenly full of classical music. Empty bed, bedclothes made up neat, tidy and not slept in. Nobody in the house can bear to change it. My task is to pull away the bed from the wall, find where the cable leads to the socket, and disconnect it. Orchestral music spinning around the walls and ceiling as I search for the socket. It’s next to the skirting board I can just reach it… click, the music is gone. Push the bed back in place and contemplate the silence. A nice, quiet room with morning light coming in through the windows. She was a musician who became a Buddhist, then was a Buddhist Chaplain visiting hospices and caring for dying people, until she finally reached that stage herself.

Memory is all there is… faded like an old sepia tint photo. The enigma, the empty space where that person used to be. There’s ‘nothing’ left here, it’s not ‘something’, it’s not ‘anything’. Try to see past the words, concepts in the mind and there’s nothing remaining, only the holding-on to whatever it is that was defined in words but was never really there in the first place. Language is a tool for explaining how it appears to be, what it resembles, what it’s like… a wonderful shared software that names things, identifies feelings, etc. Poets and artists are compelled to use words and there are others, spiritual advisors, who refer only to cessation. Truth is inexpressible, no words for it; a ‘nothing’ that carries the feeling of no-thingness and brings with it a great sense of release, of peace, of rest, of ease and gentleness. I no longer have the burden of my thoughts. I let it all in, let it all out and everything fades away, ‘melted into thin air … the baseless fabric of this vision… we are such stuff as dreams are made on…’ [The Tempest]

A lifetime is a story told. Details accumulate and it appears to have form and direction as it goes on, but only when the end comes near does it have a context. The route by which I arrived at this point becomes somehow, explained – it was the right way, the best way to come here and everything I did in my life seems to fit together now I’m at the end. A curious reversal… I’m on the way to get here and yet seem to be able to look back on the journey and know how it came to be as it is. Buddhist cause/effect is an illusion, sequenced in linear time. In the totality, everything is ‘now’, an ‘everywhere-shared instantaneity’ and each moment is simply a shift in focus.

Why does it have to be like this? There’s something about the question/answer relationship that’s always gently considered, without directing it too much. Trying to understand what this sort of thing might possibly be is enough to begin to know it – no need to go any further. More to do with indirect action. Death must be the true meaning of the ‘past tense’. Standing here in her room, the tidy bed, empty wardrobe, eyes move towards the window, look out at her overgrown garden. Birdsong, and the light of this particular time in the morning. Colour and images form, conscious awareness is the same for me now as it was for her then, standing as she was, in this same place….

“For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. Our life is endless, in just the same way that our field of vision has no boundaries.” [Wittgenstein”]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: sense of release. Also Michael’s post: Special Effects, thank you for the word: instantaneity. Upper photo: Edinburgh airport, waiting for the flight to Gatwick

– G R A T I T U D E –

the journey to get there (2)

Posted on July 10, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#79: Aberdeen Scotland: Wandering through these streets and lanes looking for my childhood; searching for something that’ll tell me what it was like more than 50 years ago as I walked along the route to school in all kinds of weather. The present time as it was in the past, brought forward into the ‘now’. All the shops have gone, been demolished, rebuilt and everything has become something else. Only civic amenities and urban architecture remain, paving stones, cast iron lampposts, doorways and gates. An iron gate hinge embedded in stone but no gate – is it something I passed on my way to school? Do things like this survive at below-zero temperatures for 50 freezing winters? Not impossible, everything is made of granite here, indestructible. Following my footsteps as a child, along these same streets that were old even then. There’s an unusual shaped crack in a paving stone that looks like a tree, strange familiarity, a passing recognition – the kind of thing a child would notice, head down and leaning against the wind.

Is it the same wind now, after all these years, flowing like a river from its source to the sea estuary and every single part of it moving always in present time everywhere along its length? The scale of it is so immense, a whole lifetime can seem like a day, an hour, a moment – and did I glance down at this tree-like crack in the paving stone when I was a child and react in the same way I’m doing now, thinking… how strange, it looks like a tree! What is it that makes one thing seem to be something else? Is this the recollection of a physical feature, or a memory of the perception of it? Remembrance of things past, former lives… it feels like yesterday, the nearness of it. It feels like now – or somewhere on the journey to get there.

There’s also a feeling of far-awayness, the day before yesterday I was on a flight from Delhi, transit in London to Inverness. Jet lag and bewilderment, scanned by X-ray machines, identified, processed, held in aircraft cabin pressure for 10½ hours and transported 4000 miles to the Northern hemisphere. Then placed on the ground and having to quickly reassemble the parts of who I am in this new context. A visit to the tribal elders, then into Aberdeen to revisit these childhood days. Coastal winds, cloudy skies – and when the sun comes through, the heat is intense. Raincoat on, raincoat off again, I don’t really feel I’m connected with the pattern of things here after so long in the East, sun shines all the time and years go by but it’s just like one very long day. Thought processes are without substance, fade away, and if I don’t reach out for the next thought, there’s nothing there. There’s a memory of how it was when I was a child here in the North of Scotland, I’m holding that in mind but when I let go… it’s gone. The wind blows and a feeling comes back again that triggers a memory, then it’s carried away with the sound of seagulls and the smell of the sea…

‘… a sense of existing right now, a sense of life looking out your eyes, and life feeling through your senses into this experience, this space of the room, this place. It’s like we are a sense apparatus for raw life, raw consciousness, which feels through us as instruments with five or more senses. What is sensed registers in awareness — this knowingness of existence, this knowingness that is existence itself…’ [Mukti, adyashanti.org]

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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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