somewhere to be

Posted on November 7, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #165: New Delhi: I’d like it to be a windswept hut made of bamboo on a beach on an island, but we’re looking for a place to rent in South Delhi – a small house or a duplex. Right now I’m being driven around at high speed by the agent looking at houses, buildings, one after another which all seem to be part of the same interconnected vast network of habitations; neighbours pass through your room on the way to somewhere else. Arrive at another street, get out of the car, go inside, there’s a staircase, corridors and empty rooms, nothing here. Stare at the wall… a painted flat surface. Can I see us here? Not impossible, what are the criteria? Searching for the ‘right’ place – try to estimate ceiling heights… windows, doors, floors. Birdsong from a nearby tree enters the empty house in an irregular chord of strangely related notes… walk over to the window. Look at what’s out there; the agent talking about this and that, and all I can think of is what Hipmonkey said: there is no ‘out-there’ out there that’s separate from what’s in ‘here’.

Outside invades inside, I’m back in the agent’s car and we’re off to the next place, slooshing and splooshing through the crowded streets at breakneck speed, talking as we’re going (she does this driving thing for a living), her livelihood is set in this river of noisy, crazy traffic that’s consistently doing unexpected things. The urgency of it all going past too fast… I can’t look, it’s too much, avert my gaze to the side window instead, and see out there, the reflection of myself in the glass shop windows flashing by opposite, focus on the shadowy face looking back at me from one window to the next, somehow staying in the same position – it’s the world that’s rushing by, not me.

Trying (but failing) to understand the Buddhist term: sati-sampajañña, clear comprehension (the absolute clarity of understanding), whilst stumbling over all the indistinct, half-seen, misunderstood truths, and eventually I realize it means the clear comprehension of everything, including the confusion; the mistake, the mix-up, the puzzleheadedness. The fact that I don’t understand this is what’s causing this problem. Don’t ‘do’ anything with it… I see it now. An epiphany, revelation, insight; the experience of total confusion – random things just seem to fit, the recognition that all related parts and everything come together, anyway, according to their circumstances; parallels link parts of the story together with a kind of inevitability.

It’s an all-inclusive world, the ‘self’ comes with the software. I’m playing a role integrated with one whole consciousness – dimensions within dimensions – acting the part; being this person living in these rooms, being that person in those rooms, finding my way through this curious illusion, looking for words to describe that it’s a construct through and through. No way out, I know because I stopped looking for the way out a long time ago. In the 30 years of learning how to get along here in Asian society, I think I’ve let go of that remembered fiction about where I come from – migrants from Europe have experienced this in North America since the 17th Century. Long ago I learned, involuntarily at first, to be at home with other people’s preferences and relinquish my own choices, in time forgetting how I figured out how to be comfortable with it. So when there’s an opportunity to have a place of my own, I return to the old default, surprised to see it’s still there, and how shall I do this? Let’s see, the bed goes here, the table there, and my chair…

‘We are members of a vast cosmic orchestra in which each living instrument is essential to the complementary and harmonious playing of the whole.’ [J. Allen Boone]

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Note: ‘there is no out-there out there…’ sourced in the Hipmonkey site (What the bleep do we know – 3rd video down)
Photo: fishermen’s shelter, Krabi, Thailand (from M’s collection)

transfiguration

Posted on November 2, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #162: New Delhi: November in North India is the best time. The heat has gone and our orange tree is heavy with fruit. When the first basketful is picked we have to keep it with loving kindness for a few days in a place that’s separate from the tree. This is to allow the tree to forget about its lost fruit. Our curious seasonal change is like a brief springtime that occurs as we’re heading towards winter. It’s suddenly pleasantly warm like an early English summer, plants flower, and the bougainvillea on the roof terrace (Jiab calls them ‘bookend-villas’) transforming with more and more new blossoms.

I go up to the roof terrace and the yoghurt bowl is sitting on the table in the shade because the kitchen is too cold for it now – yoghurt is made without any artificial warmth, just room temperature itself. The milk is boiled, allowed to cool to about 45°C (113°F). The bacterial culture is added, and the warm temperature has to be maintained for 4 to 7 hours. I sit at the table next to the small bowl, feeling I ought to be quiet as this liquid is changing its form, bacteria active, fermentation. It needs some respect and privacy… I shall not look at it. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not, because after November it’s too cold for yoghurt – except that a Japanese friend said she’d managed to make it by placing the bowl on the Wi-Fi router (horizontal type), covered with a plastic box all night, and ready in the morning. Interesting idea, yoghurt made with Internet signal.

As it happens, seasonal change for us coincides with a change in accommodation. We’re moving to a different part of Delhi. It happens once every three or four years, living in rented houses for intervals of time, watching the paint slowly peeling off in the heat and letting it all be as it is. No agitation about anything that needs fixing because, just at the edge of vision, household items are ready for the next move, poised… the choreography of the dance step/transfiguration, the great leap, percussive scatter of objects landing. Wake up in somebody else’s house with all your own things looking out of context… everything that’s old has been forgotten in the confrontation with the new, that’s not yet been gotten used to. Perception takes it all in, files it away in a new folder, a new reference point: ‘this’ is what we shall call reality for now… before that happens there’s the transition, looking for things:
‘Where’s the coffee filter cone?’
‘In the box.’
‘Which box?’
‘The one in the room.’
‘Which room?’
(no answer)
sound of footsteps walking off in search of it…

The separate self is not an entity; it is an activity: the activity of thinking and feeling that our essential nature of pure Awareness shares the limits and the destiny of the body and mind. [Rupert Spira]

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Thanks to Non-Duality America for the Rupert Spira quote

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

evening flight

Posted on October 24, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #159: Bangkok/New Delhi flight: My frequent flyer card gets me an upgrade thus I carry my pain with mindfulness and step behind the curtain folds where the grass is always greener. Glasses of champage on silvered trays among the apple juices and orange juices – I don’t indulge, impossible, these days of heavy-duty neural pain killers. Look out at the sky, strange flesh-coloured clouds above a dark horizon I don’t recognize. It could be a different planet. Sounds so shrill and pointy-ended I have to wear earplugs squashed into the contours of the auditory passage and pressed in by fingertips. Members of the public seem alien, sentient beings but complex individuals; somehow I can’t identify with them; I just never noticed how weird things were before…

There was the transformation, something else existed before I found I was in a low gravity world, a pharmaceutical weightlessness that allows me from time to time to contemplate the intrusive pain growing inside me like a tree, branches and twiglets with buds opening; it’s there but I can’t feel it – there was a time when I didn’t have this condition… hard to believe. Sensory impingement, even through dark glasses, light hurts as the last of the sun’s rays enter cabin windows, sweep around the interior in the steep ascent of the aircraft and the course setting for Northwest.

Every day and each circumstance is an opportunity for acceptance. A child is crying, front-left. I’m in an aisle seat, the sound piercing through insulation of the meds like a medical probe penetrating internal organs, deeper and deeper. I try tilting my head in small increments to alter the directional frequency of received sound but it’s not working – inconsolable. Fighting against it creates a narrative, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” trying to open to the experience, extending, retracting… then the hum of the aircraft engine sends the child to sleep.

Dinner served and earplugs removed, I’m watching my video (Tomorrowland), good quality earphones and about three of a total four hours flying time remaining – then it happens. In the glimmer of video screens and forever trays of drinks offered by slim shadows of airline staff, a fairly large group of people block the passageway on my left. They’re flying together, look like the same family, all are tall have large physiques, bearded men, women wide at the bottom end, and they’re ordering items from duty-free with handfuls of US currency sprouting like leaves on a tree with many limbs. They can’t count out the amounts correctly because it’s too dark. I feel my irritation flare up in all the disorder and stewardesses’ strobe-like torch flashings. Then a mistake in the change, or something goes wrong, so all the items that were purchased and placed in overhead lockers have to be taken out and checked again.

I’m holding an unbelievable pain/stress crisis from exploding. The squeezing-past-each-other in crowded aisle means I get pushed by large rear-ends of women in custom-made denim jeans who feel they’re small and invisible. Then the little girl starts to cry again and I see the cute child, mouth a round black hole, arms and legs extended, a miniature version of the FAT PEOPLE who are her immediate family. The wail of distress breaks the sound barrier; child is carried up and down the aisle by different uncles, aunties, then a very harrassed mommy, upper body kinda jogging up and down the aisle gets the child to sleep. Every time mommy turns around I receive a buttock shove in the head. The silent pressure that’s inside my head, asylum-straight-jacketed, cannot be contained anymore… it goes, restraints bursts wide open, and the relief is huge… large outbreath. How did I do that? Time stretches out of shape, vertigo, where are we now? Good question, flying at 600 mph. Pressure returns, I attempt to recreate the scene and do it again – the mind forgets, it goes on and things settle down towards the end. We arrive in Delhi, nice landing and a few minutes early.

‘Surrender is the most difficult thing in the world while you are doing it and the easiest when it is done.’ [Bhai Sahib]

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changing the past

Posted on October 10, 2015 by tiramit

[This post is written in response to a Time Machine Challenge from Linda, at Litebeing Chronicles.] October 10, 2015, Chiang Mai, Thailand: I’ve had this intense headache and neck pain since the beginning of September. Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN), nerve damage caused by herpes zoster, and trying to come terms with the fact that it could be like this for the rest of my life – what does that mean? Now the pain is cushioned, I’m on Neurontin 100mg x 3 per day and they say this drug changes my attitude to pain. But at the beginning there were intervals when homeopathic remedies had an effect and the pain was gone for a time. The relief was overwhelming; how could the pain just disappear like that? I needed to know. The inclination was to turn towards it, questioning – rather than turning away in defence… finding some relief in switching off the default sense of: this pain is happening to ‘me’… and suddenly finding there’s no ‘me’ the pain is happening to.

In that heightened state of mind I’d get on to my meditation cushion, carefully… any slight movement and the headache returns. And it’s as if I’m sitting at the edge of the sea, beach sand beneath my folded legs. An incoming wave of thought enters, swirls around for a while then spins away with the outgoing tide – nothing remains. There’s not anyone engaging with these thoughts. Shortly after that another wave comes crashing in; incidental mental conversations scatter on the beach sand… things of no consequence, attention-seeking chatter of the mind dwindles away as it recedes, and it’s gone; returning to the silence of no thinker, falling into a landscape of pain-free, ease and gentleness.

What strange karma could have led to this? Present time conditioned by past experience, yet there’s also the possibility that the past can change according to how it is perceived in present time. Returning to old memories with such vivid clarity that it all seems quite different – I recreate an object in memory according to present circumstances. Reopen a remembered event that’s troubled me for decades and, for the first time I see it in a kindly way. Either it was ‘me’ that got in the way and that’s what caused the problem, or it was somebody else’s ‘me’ that obscured the issue. Forgiveness and compassion for the way we’re all caught (everyone is), trapped in thought and driven by the suffering of ‘self’ wanting things to be different, other than what they are. I’m aware of circumstances I’d not noticed at the time and that past event becomes redefined in the process of reviewing the situation.

The past is a remembered ‘now’. There’s the scary familiarity of bad memories – but it’s not as it was before; same story but somehow seen clearly and portrayed differently… a new production of an old movie, there in the altered past, seeing the present moment as a kind of back-to-the-future thing. Kindnesses and sorrows over the denial and avoidance – how could it be like this? It’s an acceptance in a no-choice situation, a giving-way-to-it action; passive understanding that there’s got to be a willingness to relax the resistance and allow everything to pass through, unheld…

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]

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Thanks Linda! Look out for the next Litebeing Chronicles entry in this series October 11 by Sue. Note: excerpts from earlier posts included here. Photo: The moving walkway to the domestic terminal Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok)

rooms

Posted on October 4, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #155: Chiang Mai: Home is three rooms on the third floor in a condominium. Arrived in the evening, up in the elevator, unlock the door and enter. Lights on, blinded for a moment, drop everything, close door. It’s airless, windows closed – how long was I away? Must have been the end of August? A scatter of things left at the doorway as I stumble around absorbing the environment, trying to recreate the last time I was here, searching for familiarity in the furniture… things, objects which carry meaning. Anjali to the Buddha statue, books on shelves… and I find the memory of it all is displaced by present experience, as I step into a new time. Sensory data, the smell of detergent products (the cleaners came). It’s so quiet here, open curtains with a great sweep, sliding back screens, open the windows with a bang (unintentional), birds outside flutter and chirp and there’s the mountain air. Crash around the apartment, disturbing the space held by these rooms, what is contained is squeezed outside and new air enters. My shoes are lying in the hallway as if the owner has flown away, bathroom door flung open. It’s like a catastrophe in reverse – everything is suddenly peopled, inhabited, okay, this is where I live.

Router is flickering green lights, switch on laptop, available networks… okay I’m online. What else is here? Clothes hanging in the closet, whose are these? Looks like they fit me, must have been ‘me’ in a former life. Case lying on the bed, its cover open so wide it looks like the extended mouth of an opera singer reaching the high note… the emotionality of arriving at the final destination. All my clothes coming out, folded to a flatness like envelopes and layered, they feel cold from the aircraft. Flat-pack systems, I have to reassemble according to numbered diagrams and the hologram arises like magic; a sense of ‘self’ in these surroundings, clothed and cloaked in suitable disguise; everything needed for this temporary mode of being.

Head spinning with the varying ear-popping air pressures and momentum of the great storm that brought me here, the travel industry, largest network in the world. Taxis, escalators, miles of corridors, two planes, Delhi/ Bangkok/ Chiang Mai, everything is linked with everything else. Who runs it all? … is there a God? Inappropriate question right now, the spinning flow of it is just moving along by itself, I jump on as it’s going past, join the other passengers already there, get my seat, fasten seat belts and we’re all swept away like flotsam and jestam taken by river currents.

So now I’m here, j’arrive! Let’s see now, what’s in the fridge? Onions with long shoots growing in the darkness. Soy milk not yet past its sell-by-date and some dry oats that seem to be okay. Plenty coffee. Good! I can do grocery shopping tomorrow. Time to reverse in, switch off engine, lights flash in acknowledgement, and be horizontal for 8 hours…

“As wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,
Always, for ever and new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed.”
[Ovid, Metamorphoses]

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stowaway

Posted on September 30, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #154: Delhi: For a few days now my bag has been lying on the bed while I search around for the clothes I’m taking with me on the trip to Thailand. The lid is hinged back, wide open like the beak of a baby bird in the nest. When the bag is filled to capacity (cases are always filled to capacity) it’ll close its mouth turn over on to its upright position and be wheeled away to the car, off to the airport, the check-in desk and into the cargo of the plane… a capacity inside a capacity.

At this time though, the case is still unpacked and maybe I should not leave the cover of it open like this in case there are small creatures in the air that decide to fly into the bag and come with me to Thailand – like the time we were living in Switzerland and Jiab came back from a long trip to South America and the last stop was Peru. From Jorge Chávez Airport in Lima, she had three connecting flights, many delays and more than 24 hours travelling before she was back in Switzerland in the evening. Totally exhausted, she opened her in-flight bag to take a few things out and went to sleep immediately. I didn’t move the bag, left there lying open and went to sleep too – if I had closed the bag, then the stowaway wouldn’t have escaped into the room, or when it did, there’s a chance we’d have seen it….

In the morning I woke up to this blat-blat-blat sound coming from the mezzanine upstairs, so I went up to have a look. Step by step and cautiously, there was a table light that had been on all night. Something was inside the shade – a very strange winged insect banging itself against the light bulb. When it stopped and lay resting on the inside of the shade I could see it was a hard shelled beetle-like creature that folded its wings up inside its shell… hmmm this thing didn’t come from Europe, I’d seen something like it in India. I went down to the kitchen and found an empty glass jar with a screw lid and came back upstairs; it was flying at the light bulb again, blat-blat-blat. When it stopped for a rest, I manouvered it into the jar, got the lid on and took it downstairs. A kind of greenish square-shaped thing with a pointy end, about three quarters of an inch in size and sort of flat, like a spade.

I tried to get Jiab to wake up to look at it, but she was not interested in that, totally asleep and it wasn’t easy. A very bleary-eyed, jetlagged look at what I held up in the jar for her to see brought only puzzled silence. After some consideration she said: Insects should not be in the house, and collapsed back on the pillow. So that was it, much later we discussed how it could have got here and decided it must have come in through an open window on her last day in the hotel in Lima and landed on the contents of the open bag. She closed the lid on it unknowingly, went to the airport and thus it stowed away on the flight to Europe.

I studied the insect in the jar for a while then took it to the balcony, unscrewed the lid and gave it its freedom in the warm spring air. Watched it fly off down to the bushes and grass below. Who knows? Maybe it found distant members of a species once related, twice removed, reproduced and now there’s a hybrid genus developing in that part of Europe waiting to be discovered.

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” [Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss]

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Photo by M, showing her bag (upper left, light blue with pattern) being loaded on a domestic flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok

immediacy

Posted on August 26, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 146: Delhi: The early flight from Bangkok arrives in Delhi mid-morning local time. It feels like everything that brought me here has vanished; a curious missing piece of time, the four hours of travelling, and before that the Thai departures, the check-in desk, and before that the taxi that took me to the airport from my house in the darkness of very early morning, more like the middle of the night – all that has gone, the past is like a half-remembered dream.

I suddenly wake up in the middle of a Delhi traffic jam and it’s really confusing to be in this bright daylight after the darkness of the aircraft cabin. The transition into this reality so rapid, the split-second required for it to take form is… missing, yet an awareness of it having taken place remains – or the feeling that something just happened, whatever, and having to allow for the curious delay in the time it takes to recognize what’s going on. Suddenly there’s the blare of car horns from behind and vehicles overtaking as the driver adjusts to avoid a motorbike coming towards us on the nearside (why’s that man driving on the wrong side of the road?).

There’s an alertness, anticipated danger, preparedness… the car is buffeted around, rock-and-roll, accelerated, braked, jerked, vibrated and three lines of speed bumps one meter apart cause the vehicle to jolt six times. Then it stops. There’s an obstruction up front. Horns continue to blare and protest. What to do? The one-way system in Delhi is unrelenting; it can take a very long time to get back to where you want to be. So when the driver sees a gap in the flow and makes a smooth wide U-turn straight across four lanes of traffic, I feel like breaking into applause as we speed away in the opposite direction.

A few short turns through streets I’ve never been in before and we arrive at the house. Me and my suitcase of compressed, flat-pack clothing, ‘self’ assembly; get into the bathroom, shower, put on new clothes, and become someone else, an assumed identity. Step into the room: So, how was the flight? Yes okay not too crowded. Suddenly aware of having to speak in codes, chunks of language created by air forced through vocal cords squeaks like the reed of a wind instrument, and rolling articulated back throat cavities, deep volumes of sound, gasp and split bits of wet air that whistle and chirp for an instant in tongue, teeth and lip. Thought associates words which insist on naming things, integrate pieces of the jigsaw puzzle; a picture emerging as I speak, yet changing constantly according to the way the parts fit together.

Objects have that strange familiarity, rush towards me like old acquaintances… remember me? There’s a book on the desk, open it at the page where the marker was left the last time I visited. Return to that place but can’t recognize anything. The ‘now’ moment is here and in all other locations at the same time. All I can do is dig up a few artifacts from recent history before I have to go on again; the point of origin is so distant, I’d never find the way back to the beginning …

“The intimacy and immediacy of the now… is our only security. It is utterly vulnerable and completely secure. No harm can come to us in the now, no sorrow and no death. All our longing longs only for this.” [The Intimacy and Immediacy of the Now, by Rupert Spira]

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looking out and looking in

Posted on August 14, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 143: Delhi-Bangkok-Chiang Mai flight: The flight from Delhi arrives at Bangkok a bit behind schedule so we have to move along quickly to the transit desk and transfer to the domestic terminal for the next flight to Chiang Mai. In-flight bags on a small trolley, and we’re zooming along on the moving walkways in this celestial structure of steel and glass. As yet, passports are unstamped, les frontaliers, the no-man’s land between country borders. We’re unregistered, no identity, invisible data.

It’s always the journey to get there… after I get to where I think is ‘there’, there’s another ‘there’ to get to, and all of it leads back to ‘here’, an ‘everywhere’ place made up of everywhere else… then it’s extending away again. It can only be the journey itself, not the destination – the Path is the goal, this is where we live. Isolated scenes from parts of the surroundings seen flashing by as we’re soaring along the high speed walkways; smooth as swans gliding on the surface of a lake. Two thousand miles of transportation corridors from Delhi to here, flight corridors connected end-to-end, through which we travel in the sensory cloud of transient ‘now’ consciousness looking out and looking in. There is nowhere that consciousness isn’t present. Consciousness is everywhere, so vast – indeed everywhere is included in consciousness, “And the deep lane insists on the direction”, an extended corridor projected out towards the designated destination where everything in the perspective it creates seems to disappear in a vanishing point.

An incidental episode of familiarity comes along… the déjà vu of cups of coffee taken at these restaurants, bars where they have wifi. Have I been here before? Must be the last time I came through, or was it the time before that? Was I going – or was I coming back, transit to New Delhi? I spoke with some people there, if I happened to meet them now, I wouldn’t remember. No time this time, we’re at immigration, passport stamp thump! through to security, take off my belt, shoes, my watch. Laptops out of bags and put them into the tray together with my phone to go through the X-ray machine.

Just then, the phone rings… reflex movement to reach for it, but it’s too far and the security officer shakes her head… let it go through. Phone ringing happily as it rumbles on its rollers into the machine. I pass through the X-ray, muffled ringtone continues then lovely ascending increased volume as it comes out the other side. I want to pick it up but people are waiting, a bit harrassed; there’s the putting-on-of-the-belt and shoes. Security officials seem unmoved by the tremendous ascending 4D heavenly ringtone, probably happens all the time… eventually I get the phone. Hello?’ It’s M, my Thai niece: Where are you now Toong Ting? I tell her we are boarding the plane in a minute and will be in Chiang Mai in about one hour. Silence for a moment, then she says: I make choc-o-late-cake. Clearly punctuated percussive articulation, she speaks English as a second language. I tell her, oh nice! and try to explain how the phone got X-rayed as she was calling me, but she can’t find anything to say to that… attempting to find a link with something else it could be related to, mind travels away with this information. No time to discuss, we have to go now, bye. Speedwalking through to the Departure gate and they’re boarding just as we get there; processed, find seats, strapped in and ready for take-off… engines roar, climbing again up into higher altitudes.

You hide me in your cloak of Nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of Being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles [Rumi]

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before the beginning

Posted on August 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 142: Delhi-Bangkok flight: We are reading the newspaper, sharing parts of the Bangkok Post. Jiab also has the Thai newspaper and other pages spread over the seats and folded into the magazine pocket. Comfortable environment; the aircraft furniture, cushions, colourful papers and books. It’s a pleasing, at-home feeling; this is our space – looks like a hotel room, not an aircraft. There’s the hmmmm sound of the engines and shhhhh of the air, not unpleasant. Soft pale daylight coming in through the window, and out there, the blue sky above the clouds stretching on and on, curvature of the planet… it all seems so strangely still.

Stewardesses come with the drinks trolley, five or ten minutes go by and the sky, the horizon of clouds remain the same. It feels like the aircraft is stationary, suspended in space, no landmarks, no indicators of time, no beginning and no end. If I say there is a beginning, I create linear time. Encapsulated inside this aircraft there’s the duration of time – there was a beginning (we got on this plane at Delhi), and there will be an end (we get off the plane at Bangkok). But outside the cabin window there’s only the vast present time – the continuing ‘now’ phenomenon enfolding and unfolding, transforming from the past into future in one continuous surging-through movement that cannot be explained. What a strange mystery it is; future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, ‘now’ falls back into yesterday… something ‘remembered’ because it’s gone now.

Mind creates a structure to explain time, otherwise how could we understand the enigma of how the past has ‘gone’ and the future has not arrived yet? Hovering on the brink of the smallest pause before it gets here; the empty space of not-knowing what it is, and held like this for an instant. We are time itself – how to understand that? It’s as if I were standing at the bow of a small sailing boat floating with the current flow, the sense of moving forwards but no shoreline, nothing to judge which direction the boat is going in, or the distance from (or to) something or anything – nothing to say where we’re going or where we are.

I glance down the aisle at my fellow passengers; Japanese staff based in India, they’ll transit at Bangkok and go on to Tokyo. Wealthy Indian tourists heading for a shopping experience in Bangkok… are they aware we’re presently suspended in timelessness? Probably choosing to not think about it – never arriving, always on the way to get ‘there’ (but where are we going?). Mostly choosing to focus on whatever is happening ‘now’, and creating a story about that. Focus on my presence here in a seat contoured to fit the human body, tight squeeze, enough space for legs and knees with an inch of space from the seat in front – beyond that I can see into the business class section… always the grass is greener. I am one of perhaps 300 passengers receiving services from the staff; a baby bird, beak wide open, help… feed me, please.

Before the beginning there were no beginnings or endings; there was only the eternal Always, which is still there – and always shall be. There was only an awareness of unflawed oneness, and this oneness was so complete, so awe-striking and unlimited in its joyous extension that it would be impossible for anything to be aware of something else that was not Itself.” [Disappearance of the Universe page 122]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: flying time

multiplicity

Posted on July 23, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 138: London/Delhi flight: Travelling by plane at night is a directionless experience, an invisible route that leads to the destination without any sense of the journey, just the sound of the engines and hiss of the air. I fall deeply asleep and wake up to daylight coming in through the cabin windows. We’re here, missed breakfast, no time for anything, quickly gather up my things, ready to leave the plane. Next thing is I’m in the huge emptiness of Indira Gandhi airport, miles of ochre carpeting, and zooming along moving walkways towards the queue at immigration. Get in line with everyone else, get comfortable with this, it could take some time.

Hello Delhi, nice to be back here, mid-morning in a different time zone, and just the ongoing continuity of it, as if I’d never been away… familiarity of bearded men, turbans, a mysterious woman with exotic nose rings, gold bangles jangle and flick of movement that adjusts folds of sari, consoling tired children with nanny; the whole clan goes everywhere together. In this place I’m glanced at, averted gaze slips away, a foreigner travelling alone, a partially visible stranger from a place of no sunlight, colorless eyes, pale pigmentation, like those creatures who live deep below the surface at the bottom of the sea.

The uncompromisingly here-and-now of it, no disappearing from or disappearing into – a dream and yet not a dream. Letting go of the experience in the North, only the memory of that extraordinary feeling there during the retreat in Scotland. The feeling I’d connected with something specific but now I forget what it was exactly. A scrap of paper in my pocket with somebody’s email on it, remembering… there was the old house, the people who were already there and the sadness when they left before I did. Then the others who came after me – I remember them all – and how they were the ones who said goodbye when it was my turn to leave.

Each one carrying this ghostly sense of familiarity, archetypal resemblance, the uniformity of distinct types. Faces I think I’ve seen before… there was a man who looked so much like Larry King (from Larry King Live), at first I believed it was him. Others reminded me of family members – I recognized Great Aunt B. from East Anglia, passed away long ago… wonderful to ‘see’ her again. And someone exactly like my old Uncle D. Everywhere I looked I saw the elders, all dead and gone now. So good to return to the memory that they were here once like me, I was inclined to think of them as being real. “Who am I? Am I you? Him? He, she, it? We, you, they?” So much of a multiplicity, sometimes it’s just seen… we are all of a oneness.

Thump! Passport stamped, out through the crowds and sudden heat, intense light switched on like a television studio. Shym is waiting with the car, bags in and we’re off into the noise and blare of Delhi traffic, reversed mirror image of the world I just left. Changing the sim card in my phone, changing channels, watching a different movie.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not

[Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief]

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