Tag Archives: anicca

melodic intervals

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IMG_1030bPOSTCARD#69: Chiang Mai: Tuktuk gets stuck in traffic, comes to a stop, driver brakes and switches off. The large sound of the 2-stroke engine is gone with the flick of a switch. Suddenly it’s quiet, only metallic creaks and random traffic noises. The outside world enters my space – inner merged with outer – no walls, just a canvas roof supported by metal poles bolted to an engine with wheels and a seat. It’s like camping when we were kids, inside a tent, domestic activities in the open-air. Gentle winds blowing through, reflected heat from other vehicles and the slightly surprising presence of tarmac. City infrastructure – experiencing it for the first time… the world has always been here, I’ve just been busy with the concept of it and didn’t notice.

I hear my phone and search for it in the bag… listening, but it’s not mine, ringtone is totally different. It’s that kind of high frequency awareness I seem to have these days, the melody playing in the sound of air-conditioners, ceiling-fans and anything that whistles and sings. Then I hear this single word, ‘hello?’ coming from somewhere behind me in the column of stationary traffic. I turn to see; it’s a girl sitting on the back of a motorbike, holding a phone to her ear. A conversation begins, quite loud, but I can’t make sense of what she’s saying – not that I’d want to… anyway she’s speaking in Thai, which is difficult enough and also, I notice, she’s eating an ice-cream cone at the same time: “wah ee ah in ai-eem ah” no words, it seems, just incoherent mumbling. So, well I’m vaguely curious about this, thinking how can she expect anybody to know what she’s talking about with a mouthful of ice-cream going at the same time? Her boyfriend (driver of the motorbike) says something to her, and he’s eating an ice-cream too: “oo ap ai ao a-lai ab?” mouth open trying to let the coldness out. Coping with a large bite of ice-cream, he speaks with lips protruding in a singsong, bird-like way, all-vowel articulation – a kind of breathy thing. She replies, and it amazes me… they can understand each other perfectly well.

It’s like the mating dialogue of exotic animals in National Geographic. I listen and realise I can also understand some of what they’re saying (see below). No consonants in Thai, no sharp sounds like /s/ /sh/ /ch/ /t/ /d/ /k/ that require lip, teeth and tongue coordination and thus difficult (impossible) to articulate without an explosion of strawberry vanilla ice-cream from the mouth. The Thai language doesn’t have that problem; it’s mostly vowels, like an arrangement of melodic intervals, five tones: rising, falling, high, low and middle. Listen for the tones and you can always understand what’s being said (if you’re Thai). Words are not spoken, they’re sung. Thai is a tune played on the acoustic wind instrument that is the human vocal tract.

Tuktuk driver (a lady) keys the ignition; other engines start up like the clearing of throats. Gears engage and there’s movement in the column of cars, a kind of careful jostling for space as everybody gets ready to go. Things start to speed up, we’re all moving as one, then spaces open in the traffic. At some point, the motorbike roars up behind me and overtakes – girl on the back, speaking on the phone again, boyfriend in front with ice-cream cone held in his teeth, gives throttle to the machine and they accelerate away…

‘All we know of a thought is the experience of thinking, all we know of a sensation is the experience of sensing, all we know of a sight is the experiencing of seeing, all we know of a sound is the experience of hearing…. And all that is known of thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling is the knowing of them. And what is it that knows this knowing? Only something that itself has the capacity to know could know anything. So it is knowing that knows knowing.’ [Rupert Spira]

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 Notes on the ice-cream pronunciation: She says: “wah ee ah in ai-eem, ah” (wàt-dee kha gin ai-dtim kha: “hi, [excuse me] I’m eating ice-cream”) สวัสดีค่ะกินไอติมค่ะ And he says: “oo ap ai ao a-lai ab? (pôot gàp krai ao a-rai krab: “who are you talking to, what does he want?”) พูดกับใครเอาอะไรครับ ?
Excerpts included here from an earlier post: castles made of sand

flying away

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Phkt2POSTCARD#68: Phuket: We’re leaving today. Packing the bags takes up most of the early morning and M doesn’t say anything. Very soon we’ll check out, say goodbye to our rooms and never be back. The enigma of the hotel room, a location in time and space inhabited for a short time then it’s gone. Furniture is used; marble floor walked on – years and years of housekeeping staff have swept, swabbed and polished this floor. Such a beautiful thing ignored, M sits with me. Internet connection not good, no iPad – flying away in her mind already. Jumps up and goes over to the thin lace curtain at the window, pulls it around her narrow body, extends a leg and points her toe – looks along and down at how the folds of fabric fall like an exotic gown to the floor, then spins around in a twirl and skips away to somewhere else in the room.

The others are busy packing away bathroom things; nothing remains for me to do here. Sitting in the upholstered chair, see how that feels…. breath enters like a wind gusting in, withdraws. It comes back, blows through then it’s not there again. A great emptiness opens up, I might easily fall into a joyful state and believe that this is “it” but everything changes, anicca, everything changes. It’s about the on-going experiential response – what else could it be about? Skin, muscle, flesh, and these mysterious organs held by ligaments bonded into a skeletal structure. I am the context for the outer content. The whole investigation is one that is open to following where the mind leads, see where it goes, how it reacts. Conscious awareness of how the mind is able to concentrate and to what extent – passageways of insight open in an instant and are gone.

Then later in the breakfast room, M selecting food items from silver dishes, everything done in a dream, eyes glazed over; watching a movie in her head, a story about what’s going on around her. Holding her big white plate so it’s level, places it with mindfulness on the table, descending like a UFO landing. Sits next to me – I feel her presence/absence. She likes the hotel silverware flashing like swords. Takes the large fork and stabs a sausage as if it were trying to escape – that wriggling sausage can’t get away. Begins a vigorous sawing motion with knife held in the right hand, breakfast table moves with the vibration, coffee nearly spills from the cup. Cuts off less than 1/4 inch, lays down knife, fork transferred to the right hand like a weapon in battle… stabs the tiny portion of sausage and the trapped morsel travels up to the mouth. I count more than 20 chewing movements, up/down up/down, masticated beyond belief. She’s lost interest, forgotten about it. A few other nibbles and the rest of it is left untouched.

IMG_1004Wait in the hotel lobby, look at people we don’t know, will never see again, then into the van and away to the airport. Through the crowds, check-in, departure gate, boarding and we’re in our seats. The takeoff sends me to sleep, I have a short dream: gentle voices of friends talking, I hear my name mentioned with loving-kindness… it occurs to me that I’m dead. Wake up suddenly and ask M, beside me, did she say something? No answer, playing with her prince and princess dolls on the fold-down table. Silence, one held in each hand – relationships, a dialogue, events taking place in the mind…

‘The world outside is our consciousness…. It is not something separate and distinct. The object and the subject of perception inter-are. Without subject, there is no object; without object, there is no subject. They manifest at the same time. To see means to see something. The seer does not exist separately from the seen; they manifest at the same time. If you imagine that the seer is independent and goes out in order to see the seen, that is a mistaken perception.’ [Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Buddhist Understanding of Reality”]

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Upper image: Phuket island seen from the Southern viewpoint. Lower image: Chiang Mai seen from the air.
Notes from Ajahn Munindo’s talks included here.
– G  R  A  T  I  T  U  D  E –

now here & nowhere

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HuayKaewTuktukPOSTCARD#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

tuktuk mirror

 

mourning the loss of spring

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yellow blossom2POSTCARD#61: Chiang Mai: Looking at all these posts written by my blogger friends about springtime in the Northern hemisphere and something stirs in me… that urge for seasonal change, I want to be there. No seasons in Thailand, every day is pretty much like the day before. Time disappears, days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. The whole thing is one very, very long day – night interrupts the flow, hardly noticed, and goes unremembered like the blink of an eye.

New leaves bud, grow, turn brown, fall and get swept away all through the year. There’s no autumn, no winter, no snow, no hibernation, no spring returning. The same bright light day after day, everything is awake all the time, and there’s an exhaustion about it. Necessary to take a rest in the afternoons, find my place bookmarked in the dream… I remember the silence of no ceiling fans. Natural AC, always a chill in the air and the sky a curious indistinct grey, sometimes, neither one thing nor another. It suits the transitory way of things, anicca.

I am a hoarder of old notes and among these there are references to spring in Switzerland, enthusiastic words written by a younger ‘me’ about buds beginning to appear on that yellow shrub that’s always the first to have colour around lac de Genève. Birdsong and smells of growth or greenness, leafy fragrances, moss and pebbles and the presence of the lake, lying there on its side like some vast mysterious being.

Date: 26 March 2001. Spring has sprung and just yesterday morning around 6am I suddenly noticed there wasn’t any birdsong and how could that be, what happened and why so dark? But it was because it’s all one hour earlier than the clock says (daylight saving time) and birds don’t change their watches.’

And another note about going to teach an English class in zone industrielle, Date: 10 April 2001. Yesterday was a bright sunny day and about 11 am, in the garden outside the building, I noticed the cherry trees with buds and tiny bits of bright pink. At 12.30pm, class was over and when I came past the same cherry trees, the buds were totally open and blossoms everywhere. It’s like Spring suddenly happened in just over an hour…

In the same way, it can disappear in an hour and I’m mourning the loss of spring… then that changes too. Everything is impermanent, including the idea that everything is impermanent – steel embedded in concrete, seemingly permanent, demolished by a man with a jackhammer in a single afternoon. But we don’t want to believe it, reluctant to accept that the world is so fragile, touch it and it falls to pieces – almost as if it’s not there.

Seen from the apartment here on the third floor, level with the tree tops, these exotic yellow and black squirrels jump around as if they had wings. Tremendous long leaps and landing: crish-crash! Branches spring back, rise up with the weight like uncontrollable laughter, high in the tops of slender trees, boughs bending to take the mass of one small body chased by another. Always having to catch up, never getting there, I follow them dashing through the foliage, my eye leaps in the field of vision – where are they now? The “now” moment slips from my grasp, I focus on it and it escapes. A new moment arrives, or is it the same one continuing from before? World without end….

‘…linear time melts in the now, self-dissolving, fading into space; 
days and dates fade away; months, years and eons dissolve; 
the one and the many vanished, sacred and profane both clarified;
 the delusive ground of samsara and nirvana clarified in its innate spaciousness. Even “spaciousness”, as an intellectually contrived entity, dissolves.
 Whatever we have practiced, however we strive, is useless now,
 and intellectual gall exhausted, what a great marvel is the sky.’ [Longchenpa] source

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Photo: View from 3rd floor window and the trees where the squirrels play, yellow blossom appearing now it’s the hot season

 

fragments

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tuktuk1aPOSTCARD #41: Chiang Mai: Awake with the sound of birdsong and the first signs of daylight. A kinship with all beings. We breathe the same air, experience the same kind of heart beat – the tastes, the smells, light, sound, body sensations and consciousness. Suddenly a thought arrives, a memory of something that happened a long time ago; not important, like an aspect of another thought that got overlooked somehow – now seen in a different way, simple and easy to be with. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, bare feet on cold floor; not completely awake, contemplating the start of the day and it takes a moment to notice this thought is still here. I have the feeling that I understand more about it now than ever before. Quickly! Get up, search around for a pen, I’ll have to write it down in my notebook before I forget.

In the next few minutes, the thought seems to expand, occupies my whole attention. It’s as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. Even as I’m going around doing early morning things, the thought remains – like a stationary object. A feeling of meaningfulness, a sense of amazement with the functioning of the mind; watching to see what it’ll do next, where’ll it’ll go after this. What’s it like? Getting to know it, like a child understands a thing directly. Got keys, wallet and down in the elevator, still thinking about it. Out on the street and walk to the main road. Aware of mind phenomena and looking at that thought in particular; the fragility of non-grasping and allowing things to be un-held. Where did it come from, where was it before it arrived here? Somewhere in The Great Space, fragments of it dispersed in actions not yet taken… am I creating the thought by noticing it?

A tuktuk stops, I get in, we accelerate along the road; wind in the face, noise all around. The present moment is an accumulation of pieced-together thought-items; bits of language imagery from environmental-input and memories of past-time brought into present-time, projected into future-time. Time is a human measurement: applied time. Reminds me of something I read in a book written by somebody wise, saying that TIME is just God’s way of preventing everything happening in the same instant. In one microsecond, the entire history of the world, up to the present and off into the future… watch it as it flies past.

Pause for a moment. Traffic lights at the intersection and everything stops; a curious extended, stretched-out moment – just the circumstance itself. It takes a conscious effort to get it started again. Is conscious awareness moving from one moment to the next? If so, is this the next moment yet? Are all the fragments of the next moment combined sufficiently in the endless stream of things so that I can now say definitively, THIS IS THE NEXT MOMENT? And all of a sudden it’s the past again. There’s only one moment, always has been. One long moment that includes immensely distant things. A single passing thought lasts a thousand years. Its parts so remotely scattered, a great ocean of nothingness invades the space between things. No easily seen reference points, objects get forgotten about eventually and all that remains is the idea that, a long time ago, I think I was searching for something but I can’t really remember. Anyway, I was never able to find it – still distracted sometimes by the idea that I might stumble upon it by chance one day, but otherwise at peace with everything the way it is.

IMG_0221b‘The fact that we can never “fully know” reality is not a sign of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is “incomplete,” open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of Becoming.’ [Slavoj Žižek]

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the ‘now’ moment

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IMG_0246bPOSTCARD #25 Delhi: Traffic stops. A great noise of beeping horns and eventually we can see it’s caused by cows crossing the road. Unusual to see cows being herded in the middle of the city – there must be a cowherder at the end of the column driving them, and others to clear the path through the traffic. The cows do seem a little anxious now, hurrying along. Usually they’re relaxed – placid is the word. I see them sometimes, sitting at the side of the road, cars moving around them, or they’re at rest on a traffic roundabout, ruminating, gazing out at the world.

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

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

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

hornpleaseRedFort

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

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Source for lower image: Martin S. Gotfrit

a terrestrial ocean

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D-NDcropPOSTCARD #24 Delhi: It’s colder here at this time of year. No fans, no ACs, people have their windows open and you can hear TVs, the clatter of dishes, cooking pots, ding, and bits of other people’s conversations. A child crying, a dog barks, somebody calling a person’s name in a language I can’t understand. It dwindles down as everyone settles in for the night, silent breathing in all the labyrinths of rooms and apartments that surround us here; people asleep on the floor, in beds, in cots, in hammocks. That’s how it was last night, then just after midnight, there was an earthquake.

Jiab wakes up, gives me a shake, ‘earthquake’ she says (Jiab is a linguistic minimalist). It takes me a moment to realize the house is trembling, bed is shaking, floor is like a sheet of tin stretching out from here to everywhere, connected with all other houses in the community… and the uneasy sensation of it undulating slightly; a flexibility, like the surface of the sea – a terrestrial ocean. Voices of neighbours outside, shouts and kerfuffle.

After a moment it settles down and the urgency passes. Trying to be mindful but I feel like I could go back to sleep maybe, just lying there, waiting to see what’ll happen. Then there’s another tremor, and we’re back into the unstable feeling again; louder shouts of voices, and more commotion outside… hmmm, the idea of death just going to arrive one day, anyday, could be a Tuesday, for example, or a Thursday, yes, nice if it were a Thursday.

Falling into a half sleep; there’s that Donovan song ‘Jersey Thursday’… did he mean the pullover or the island? Another tremor rocks the bed slightly and the gentleness of it helps me to drift off a little bit more. The day I die will be an ordinary day, nothing different about it. The moment after I’m gone the next moment will come along; that’ll take place, and there’ll be the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year.

No more holding on to ‘me’, the identity; who’s who or which is ‘what’ and ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘why’… particularly WHY? How to answer that? It’s M’s favourite question, she’s only 9 years old and has this curiosity about everything. Well, it’s just the way it is, you know? It’s all happening for it’s own sake, the inevitability of circumstances – things moving along of their own volition and whether they continue or discontinue doesn’t seem to be a question. (M looks at me: ‘… yes, but WHY?’) It’s like a story that I may think will, one day, come to an end… the final curtain: THE END, but it starts again and the period of ‘ending’ becomes a defining characteristic of it all: it ends sometimes and then it begins again. More like an epic anthology of short stories: ‘as old as we are able to imagine’ and going on forever, the panchatantra, the great cycle of it is always there. All the way out of this tiny space and knowing I’m an integral part of the whole universe.

It’s 4am, can’t sleep, get up and go through to the front room. Start up the laptop and google ‘earthquake’… amazing, the news is there already: ‘Four earthquakes (in Delhi) within a period of 4 hours, measuring 3.1 (12.41am), 3.3 (1.41 am), 2.5 (1.55am) and 2.8 (3.40am) on the Richter scale respectively. No reports of any casualty or destruction of property received so far.’ [reports: NDTV]

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Upper image by Manish Jain spiritualartwork.wordpress.com

uncertainty (mai nae)

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IMG_0141POSTCARD #13: Bangkok: Raining heavily at the airport, poor visibility on the highway into town. Traffic moving steadily through the downpour, a large spray of water hits the windscreen, sploosh – like driving through a car wash. Reminds me of Scotland, wild, wet and windy; weather is unpredictable. You expect it to be one thing but it’s something else instead; uncompromising in its insistence that it is what it is – and not what you think it is. Thai language/cognition is like this, so different from the West; making assumptions based on the Western model doesn’t always get you where you want to be.

I explain to the taxi driver where I want to go, saying there are two ways to get there: he can go on the tollway but better to take the turn that gets us on to vipawadi. We come to the place to make the turn, but the driver doesn’t go that way; we pass it…. It takes a moment for me to see what went wrong: he’s thinking the vipawadi turning is the way I don’t want to go, not the way I want to go. All it takes is one small slip in the logical sequence of the language and I get the opposite of what I intended. Ah yes, well, sometimes it’s like that. No holding on unduly to things you expect to be ‘right’ when they prove to be otherwise. After two decades in Thailand, I suppose I’m used to it; a familiarity with not quite knowing what to expect. ‘…many problems are the result of us expecting that there should be a solution.’ [Ajahn Tiradhammo]

Thai semantics are a bit elusive, the language doesn’t stretch the way you’d expect it to. Anticipating reactions to a request, statement or question – not the best way to go. A structure created by words to explain a concept and the assumption is that the listener understands what I’m saying in the way I mean it to be understood, but it doesn’t work like that. Words are just reference points; they’re sort of out there, ready to be shared with everyone. People interpret them in the way they understand it best. Usually it’s the meaning I’m hoping for, but not always. I try to be minimalist, the complexity of it reduced as far as it’ll go. Allow the selected words to carry the meaning and if it’s misunderstood, try to find an indirect way to approach the problem by letting go of the idea that it’s somehow ‘wrong’. This is ‘the land of smiles’, a cultural  tendency to not confront the issue – we become so focused on the ‘should’ we forget the ‘maybe’. The journey takes the time it takes, through the floods and downpour, but we reach the house okay, of course. The sky clears. Rainbows, green leaves in the trees drip crystal drops… soon after that the rain stops.

‘We can easily get caught up in thinking that life should conform to some definite plan. But by keeping a close connection with the truth of uncertainty we can soften the resulting frustration and negativity when the plan doesn’t unfold the way we think it should. We may even gain a clearer understanding of the real nature of plans: mere concepts about possibilities, rather than concrete programmes of actualities. Then whenever we find ourselves having to make plans we do it in pencil with an eraser in hand, and with the clear understanding that many other possibilities are available as well.’ [Ajahn Tiradhammo]

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‘mai nae’, in the Thai language, means ‘uncertain’ – the living expression of the fundamental Buddhist teaching of anicca, or impermanence [Ajahn Tiradhammo]

plasticity

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190320131769Chiang Mai: Holding the inverted eye-dropper bottle close to the eye, head back and squeeze a drop… it goes in, blink, and overflows, trickles out of the corner of the eye down the cheek like a tear drop and falls into the ear. I wipe it away with a tissue – the action triggers a memory, something emotional. I have new vision now, eye surgery for cataracts. The left eye is done, the right eye will be operated on next month. I’m seeing everything with such clarity; hard to believe the natural process of seeing that I’ve taken for granted all these years now involves a plastic lens. I see the world refracted through a man-made device and it doesn’t make any difference – well it does make a difference, of course, it’s very much better. My glasses don’t do anything any more; in the good eye the lens distorts vision, in the bad eye it enhances some things but it’s dull, blurred and yellowish in colour. I’ve had an overhaul – like taking the car to the garage to have new parts fitted. Or it’s how the system gets updated, the latest version is now installed. I feel renewed.

There’s this plasticity about the human body (and mind) that allows all kinds of changes to take place. I’m a Buddhist and I’m inspired by the thought that things can adapt, evolve, move on. It feels like there’s no such thing as getting stuck with anything or any state of mind, because we can learn to ‘unstick’ from it. In the same way, we can study a new subject; we put our minds to it, get interested in it and learn how it works. If I’m stuck with something, I’m attached to that thing in a strange kind of way; a locked-in response to adversity – more of a driven, unaware action than something done knowingly, mindfully. It’s a deluded attachment to habituality and I’m inspired by the very real possibility of working towards being free of this; acting always in awareness, seeing clearly.

Metaphors like ‘clouded vision’ describe tanha, habitual craving for something thought to be deservedly earned because of the endured hardship seemingly required to get there, unaware that one gets lost in the getting-there and there’s no end to it. Because I don’t normally understand things as they truly are, usually it’s how they’re seen habitually, I choose to see everything according to what’s already known; apperception, understanding newly observed data in terms of past experience. Before I get stuck in the delusion that it’s unavoidably like this, an opportunity arises to escape the cycle at Step 7 vedana in the paticcasamuppada (Cycle of Dependent Origination). Interrupt the causality sequence, go to the door leading to the emergency exit, aware that in the Buddhist sense of ‘no-self’, the habituality of mind’s perception of itself as the central actor in its own world, personality-view (sakkaya-ditthi), is the root of the problem. Step out of the cycle and I’m free…

Then later that night, walking to 7-eleven to get a few grocery items and I leave my glasses at home because they don’t help – I’ve worn glasses for most of my adult life and this is the first time I’m going out without them and at night time too. It’s been raining, there’s the glare of car headlights, and street lights reflected in large puddles. Only a short walk and arriving there, I notice some of the tiles on the floor of the lobby forecourt at the supermarket are shiny, glossy, and these must be new ones, replacements for the ones that were damaged? Why am I seeing this? I cover the good eye and look at the tiles with the old eye, no it can’t be seen, but I can see them with the good eye. It’s a repair I’d not have noticed before. People must think I’m acting strangely, better move along. So many discoveries about the world, and I’m stumbling around like this, seeing everything for the first time…

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‘Instead of starting with a perception or a conception of anything, the Buddha established a way based on awareness, or awakened attention. This is an immanent act in the present. It is sati-sampajañña, an intuitive awareness that allows the consciousness to be with the present moment. With this attention, you begin to explore personality-view (sakkaya-ditthi) in terms of the perceptions you attach to as yourself.’ [Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem of Personality]

Upper photo: Interior of Chiang Mai songteaw (public transport vehicle). Lower photo: Night Market, Chiang Mai

 

a kind of alertness

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100720131952POSTCARD #01: Chiang Mai: A slight breeze disturbs the wind chimes, tinga-tingaling… ting. An unfinished sequence of musical notes. It diverts my attention from these rememberings, one by one, rushing towards me like a single wave quickly covers the smooth beach sand for a moment then recedes. The wind chimes again: tingaling-ting… ting, a sense of something suspended, isolated, uneasy – butterflies in the tummy – why should it be like this? The fact that I don’t know why it’s like this, causes the uneasy feeling to be there, ‘a riddle, wrapped in an enigma.’ Uncertainty, impermanence, the Ajahn Chah teaching, ‘Not Sure’ [mai nae]; poised on the edge of something – a kind of alertness. I’m going to UK, it’s to do with that; leaving Chiang Mai tonight, only a few hours left. Flight to Bangkok, change planes and I’ll be in London on Sunday morning – 5½ hours in the past. Thinking about Inkland (England, as M calls it), a great flood of memories and the revisiting of these times. I’m not feeling sure about it; Inkland is such a ’proper’ place (compared with Thailand), not sure about being not sure and remembering other times when I was not sure.

Only two weeks in the UK and too many things to do; a sequence of events planned; connecting with trains often delayed, sometimes cancelled, and meeting people in places I don’t know. So many things dependent on so many other things. And so much of it is unresolved until it unfolds, piece by piece and fits together in the right order. A handful of printouts of train tickets and hotel reservations, it’s hard to keep it all in my head. I feel cramped, it’s time to finish off planning for this event – the event is already here, it’s happening now! Time to get ready to go to the airport. Tidy up this placet; the Zen of housekeeping, inner peace, do the ironing…

Hot iron on freshly laundered fabrics, comforting, homely, perfumed smells. It has a soothing effect. Ironing out all these little wrinkles, the silvery nose of the hot iron smoothens them all away, warm to the touch. Place the folded packets of clothing in the suitcase. Peace and flatness. Being mindful of the ‘not sure’ thing, it’s caused by my being not sure about it. As long as the uncertainty is out there somewhere, neither in nor out, it’s uncertain. So I know I have to embrace it, give it a hug, be open to it and allow the uncertainty to enter – there’s nowhere else for it to go. The willingness to let it in, leads to an immediate sense of release, inside and outside. Wind chimes go: tingaling again, joyful sound. Passport, ticket, wallet, I’m on my way. Goodbye house, anjali…

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