Tag Archives: awareness

terrestrial ocean

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New Delhi: It’s colder here at this time of year. No fans, no ACs, people have their windows open and you can hear the neighbours’ TVs, the clatter of dishes, cooking pots go: ‘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; outside there are louder shouts of voices, and more commotion. But I’m falling asleep, it’s because of living in Japan where there are multiple small earthquakes constantly… hmmm, the idea of death just going to arrive one day, any day, 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 its 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’… the news is there already. First published November 12, 2013

 ‘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

the familiarity of place

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New Delhi: The rental agent calls to say she’ll pick me up at 11am to look at a few houses. I’m glad to be going out because packing for the move is difficult; the attachment to possessions is so strong it’s like they’re being pulled from my grasp by the sheer force of having to move from here – I hold on tight, fingertips clutching the surfaces but they are all slipping away; familiarity of place, doorbell rings, put much-loved object into the box marked ‘Give Away’ and get up from the cluttered room. That’s the letting-go, the final goodbye… walking away, the rental agent is here, get keys, step outside, close door behind me. Into the car, chatting with the agent, and we’re off.

I visit a house in a popular area… crowded. Walk up the path, open the door, go in and there’s a feeling of the previous tenant everywhere. In my state of recent relinquishment, it’s like this is still their surroundings and it’s me that’s the potential new owner of their life … walk into the living room – the ‘living’ room? Suddenly I’m in someone else’s life – feel like I stepped out of my own life and into someone else’s by mistake – who am I? The world is how I/you perceive it, he/she, perceives it. We/you/they look into each other’s lives. A window opens into another realm inhabited by someone else in the network of interconnected lives. It’s just a slightly different angle on a world that’s seen, felt and understood, but through the same sensory awareness mechanism we all have.. a kaleidoscope of different coloured lights. The only difference is the ME that feels it, thinks it’s different from all the other ‘MEs’ walking around thinking they’re different too

Now there’s this feeling I’m looking for a place to ‘be’, the sense of a presence interlacing with the transparency of the presence of others. Observing the motion of the body in a sort of surprised way seeing that it can do it by itself. Gently stumbling around these empty rooms – looking for a place to sit down but can’t find anywhere because there’s no furniture. Well, isn’t this nice, says the agent, and I’m thinking, I’m tired, maybe this’ll do, maybe here I can invent another life I’ll be happy with. First published November 25 2015

‘Pretending you’re not “it” is exactly the same as “it”‘ [Alan Watts]

transfiguration

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New Delhi: November in North India is the best time for me. The heat has gone and our orange tree is heavy with fruit. When the first basketful is picked, we have to keep it 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…

First posted November 02, 2015

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]

déjà vu & familiarity

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New Delhi: We find ourselves in short-term lodgings just six weeks before it’s time to leave the country – all things are transitory and, uncertainty is the only certainty. Return to cheap rental days, and goods and chattels taken up the steep staircase, key in lock, open door, enter… so here we are. Belongings brought in, boxes and cases placed on the floor, on chairs, on any place handy, where there’s room – anarchy of packaging disassembled becomes an orderly system… catastrophe in reverse, clatter, bash, crash. Hoover, sweep, dust, clean; everything in the quiet interior held by these walls, ceilings, floors, for decades, re-energized. Sponges and cloths in water, squeezed out, wiping surfaces of furniture there to serve, in furnished accommodation; old paint painted over with new colour. Shadows of past lives seen for a moment then gone.

Like playing a video backwards, we end up at the beginning of our six weeks here; kitchen suddenly populated with cups and plates, forks and knives and spoons and things. Switch the kettle on. Empty spaces in closets, doors wide open, clothing leaps up from suitcase, as flat-pack garments shaken out, become animated beings, hang themselves on hangers. Drawers slide open, folded things inside, and slide closed. Everything seemingly peopled, inhabited, tenanted, yet there is no presence.

A cup of tea or coffee, sit or stand and look around, or feel how the room feels; déjà vu of familiar objects in unfamiliar surroundings. Shoes lying in the hallway by the door as if the owner has suddenly flown away, like the absence of the clown in a room full of laughter; missing from reality, or not back yet – or “coming soon”, and returns somewhere in another life becoming this, or being that, like an actor becomes the part he plays so well, there is no actor.

What remains to be considered, completed, prepared, and made ready in this tiny slice of time? The process is just a process – things are done but there is no do-er. One event is naturally linked to the one it’s most likely to link with, and that linked to the next and on it goes, round and round as in the Buddhist Chakra wheel turning. Wheels within wheels turning, turning, and we don’t see it unless it’s interrupted, held, examined as subject/object; this is that and that is this: an effect following a cause which in turn causes the effect to become a cause affecting the next event (Spooky Action At A Distance). All of the above, altered, shaped to fit and assimilated into the whole… the forever turning.

Somebody in the TV room is fiddling with the remote. A news program broadcast in a language I don’t understand. Another channel, different language, same news. So many languages in India, all giving me the same news but each is a different version of it. Recognition when we reach the English News – newsreader skilled in face acting; flickers of faces within faces, shifting around features to create emphasis, to insist, to infer, to imply, to suggest, to offer a whole portrait of compelling meanings I may believe to be true, or not. First Posted November 2, 2017

Even the sense of ‘I am’ is composed of the pure light and the sense of being.
The ‘I’ is there even without the ‘am’.
So is the pure light there whether you say ‘I’ or not.

[Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That]

Thanks to: thisunlitlight.com for the nisargadatta quote.
Thanks to:https://spookyactionatadistance.blog/ for the short text on cause/effect
photo: berti buffy on the buddhist tour

a future un-lived in

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New Delhi: Sunday morning, early, everyone deeply asleep. A dog barks, forming a single sound isolated in the quietness like the frog haiku: “The old pond, A frog jumps in: Plop!” The echo reflected off the walls, window glass, ting! For a moment I feel like I’m not here, invisible. This is how it’ll be after we move away from here and the house is to be demolished as soon as we leave, the house agent says. A new apartment building will take its place. How does this feel? Hovering at the edge of vision, large men with jack-hammers, iron picks and shovels, restless, waiting for us to go.

There are huge profits to be made renting out apartments in this area. Our old house is wasted real estate. For us, the tenants, of course we suffer the loss. The entire space we inhabit right now will disappear completely, only the Frangipani tree remaining; leaves covered in masonry dust until the monsoon winds blow, then the rains come and wash the leaves clean again. I try to picture it; we move out and the same day demolition begins; roof is off before lunchtime, walls come down in the afternoon, trucks drive away with all the rubble and there’s nothing but empty space… birds fly through.

Long after this, maybe we forget our old house has been deleted from memory files, and try to remember what it was like being here… unsupported imaginings, totally gone, no evidence here of the building we used to call home – nothing to back it up. Is death like this? This is the end; a future un-lived in, present time has no materiality. I see myself here in an almost invisible house, standing on the second floor with vestiges of walls, floor crumbling away, and I’m just floating up there.

The vanishing of it also somehow associated with darkness, I can’t see anything; for example, entering a darkened room, and have to search for the light switch on the wall, at the door frame b by practiced palm and fingertip reaching over the cool wall until it gets to the switch click. In the other rooms it’s more difficult to find the switch and I’m often stuck there groping in the darkness but no light switch to be found. I close my eyes as if that might help, trying again and again. How can this be? Am I comfortable with the thought I don’t know, and knowing I don’t know? Yes, it was there, but it’s not there now.

No resting place, all is movement, a composition of joined-up pieces which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle makes a picture, then broken up into pieces and back in the box, lid closed. Next time it’s opened and put together, a different picture appears and different players. Transition of moving parts everything has changed again. Not ‘here’ for long enough to say much, just passing through. Sorry, can’t stay, got to go now. But wait, not yet… we’re here until the end of September. This short time we’re in right now is only one moment in countless tiny instances, citta moments, and in larger chunks of time, a sequence of images form movement like the ‘stills’ creating continuity in the old 35 mm celluloid film shown in the cinema, the Moving Picture Show.  First posted August 27, 2017

Anicca (Impermanence), a core Buddhist doctrine stating all conditioned things (physical/mental) are transient, constantly changing, and subject to decay, arising and passing away moment by moment, a fundamental truth revealing the unstable, unsatisfactory nature of existence and the absence of a permanent self, leading to liberation (Nirvana) when truly understood.

an evening flight

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Bangkok/New Delhi flight: My frequent flyer card gets me an upgrade thus I carry my head pain with mindfulness and step behind the curtain folds where the grass is always greener. Glasses of champagne 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 (PHN)… 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.

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 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 harassed 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 – nothing said nobody harmed, just the measured giving way to it. The relief is huge… large out-breath. How did I do that? Time stretches out of shape, vertigo, where are we now? Good question, flying at 600 mph. Pressure returns, in defence, I attempt to recreate the climax of what just happened and do it again but… the mind forgets, it goes on and things settle down towards the end. We arrive in Delhi, nice landing and a few minutes early. First posted October 24, 2015

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

the forever window

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Chiang Mai: Early evening, M asks what kind of walls I’d like to have in the house she’s building for me. It’s the Minecraft game, everything created from virtual terrain, mountains, sea, sky and a square sun. She looks up from the iPad window and turns to me with enquiring lift of the eyebrow (a nine-year-old veteran). I say well, how about stone – walls are made of stone, aren’t they? It’s an unimaginative answer lacking in conviction – not paying attention properly. I ask what the choices are. She taps the screen to show me: gold, lapis, and you could have diamonds. Generosity. But I’ll just have the stone, please – keep it simple (thinking to myself is she going to come out soon from this digital dream she’s fallen into? Come out, it’s late and you have to do your homework. Be mindful and attend to things in the real world?) But there’s no ‘real’ world here. M says, what kind of roof you want in your house, Toong-Ting? (It’s her name for me) and I’m drawn into the discussion again. You like floor tiles Toong-Ting? I say what I’d like, and that looks nice (trying to reach her by telepathy, please, please emerge from the iPad window soon and think about the homework always in arrears!) For a moment it seems like she’s going to close the iPad but no, it goes on: why do you want that one? This other one looks nicer, does it look nice to you Toong-Ting?

I find answers that fit each question, but there’s no end to it; I know now the point of the exercise is to indulge expansively in this great wealth of choices. We have to try them all. No such thing as a final choice. The iPad is a forever window, a deep lake of astoundingly rich colours that’s difficult to surface from after you’ve fallen in – everything else in ‘real’ life is sadly dull. M dives into the forever window simply because it’s there. The containment of it is the context. The question answers itself, no need even to ask, cause becomes effect, timelessness without end.

Then for a moment she emerges from the dream, a flicker of alertness in her eye. Quickly, grab the opportunity! Act out a continuation of playfulness and joy, extend the interest to our surroundings and she decides to follow. Good, yes! It’s like guiding someone dismayed by sensory overload. Now let’s close the forever window for a while, shall we? Life is the same as it was but it’s quite nice out here. Fetch the school bag, heavy with stuff, reach inside and pull out a scrumfled homework book from the tangle of scraps of food wrappers in there, bits of tissue, and an overall blueness from a pen that flooded its ink inside the bag, a long time ago. My fingers are always slightly blue after visiting M’s bag; I go wash my hands while she considers her homework.

They have to make a simplified pop-up book page; the double page you open and a whole scene pops up. Wow, we never had fun homework like this when I was a kid! The teacher has given her a model of the folded-out paper mechanism she has to copy. A small spark of interest. Can do by myself now, Toong-Ting, she says, goes over to the sofa and pulls a large cushion over her head: but I have to think it first… stays under the cushion for quite a long time and I’m beginning to think I should ask if she’s okay under there. But next time I look M has cut and formed the folded-out bit with a scissors, glued on the picture that’s supposed to ‘pop up’ and it works – yaay! Well, not brilliant, but homework is not supposed to be a fun thing, it just gets ‘finished’. It’s done, put it away, now where were we? A voice says: may I borrow your iPhone, Toong-Ting? First posted March 25, 2014

‘We have a duty to befriend those aspects of obedience that stand outside of our house and shout to our reason, “O please, O please, come out and play.” For we have not come here to take prisoners or to confine our wondrous spirits. But to explore ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and light.’ [Hafiz: We Have Not Come to Take Prisoners]

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alert 2

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First posted September 8, 2012: GVA Switzerland: First dawn light and a black crow, last phantom of the night, flies in from the lakeside with louder and louder calls until it passes below our 7th floor balcony and the sound gets fainter as it disappears behind the building, then into the distance … CRAW … CRAW. I’m sitting here, alert, and listening to that sound until nothing can be heard at all. No object to activate ear consciousness. It’s the Sunday morning GVA sleep-late feeling; only the zzz zzz zzz ZZZs coming from all the apartment buildings around. Look out the window, nobody about, streets are empty. I listen for the slightest sound but there isn’t anything… only the act of listening. It’s a novelty for me because I’m used to the hub-bub of Asian cities. Awareness poised, waiting for some object to come into range of the receptors. Without an object, awareness goes on forever. I can hear some sounds that are very far away, therefore I have an idea of ‘faraway-ness’. Beyond the range of receptors there is the great empty dome of sky, the void, suññatā1, spreading out around all things and present in all things

Attention drifts away and a series of incidental thought episodes appear; an anthology of short stories, then it’s all gone again in a moment. The empty space returns, the interval; why this pause? What is this still point where there’s no thought?

‘… (the) still point is not in the mind, it’s not in the body; this is where it’s incapable of being expressed in words, ineffable. The still point isn’t a point within the brain. Yet you’re realising that universal silence, stillness, oneness where all the rest is a reflection and seen in perspective…. personality, kamma, the differences, the varieties … are no longer deluding us because we’re no longer grasping at them.’ [‘The Way It Is’, Ajahn Sumedho, page 123]

The period of pause lasts as long as it takes for the next thought to arise and the tendency to create an identity for it, but before that happens there is this state of nothing. A non-event is taking place; everything gradually stops shifting around, settles down; time begins to stretch out and it all moves incredibly slowly. I forget and attention wanders again.

A pigeon flutters in, comes to rest on the balcony rail, folds away its wings, and there’s this small sigh. Quite a deep bird-sized sigh, filling its lungs with air, releasing it and a little ‘bob’ of the fat round body: ah, that’s nice….it looks at me with extended neck curiously then gets involved in preening feathers in strangely revealing postures.

I hear Jiab in the back room, doing things. She arrived from Phnom Penh yesterday. Not jet-lagged, she says, but we do have to do the laundry at this unusually early time in the morning. The laundry room is in the mezzanine of the building, so off we go, very quietly, one step at a time, downstairs, 6:00AM, past all the sleeping doorways of other people’s apartments, carrying the laundry in bags and trying to be really silent because the whole thing is a bit like being in a graveyard.

Then Jiab wants to sneeze… Oh no! It’s held for a moment then escapes. A surprisingly loud short sound like the bark of a small dog. The noise of it echoes around the tiled corridor and staircase, the window glass panels vibrate for a moment; metal rails hum in resonance and there’s the echo of it all through the stairwell. Dynamic. The silence is shocked by it! We spend some time after that trying to control the intense laughter as we go quietly down with our heavy bags.

1suññatā: (Śūnyatā) the absence of inherent existence in all phenomena.

‘Alert to the needs of the journey,
 those on the path of awareness, like swans, glide on, leaving behind their former resting places.’ [Dhammapada verse 91]

the seen

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February 21, 2015 New Delhi: Birds fly low between the buildings, suddenly see me sitting at a desk in the sunshine on the roof terrace and swoop straight up into the sky… not expecting me to be there – usually there’s nobody around on these rooftops, the human domain should be down below. I’m in their flight path and feeling a bit uneasy about that, move my chair out of the way… avoiding collision with bird flying at 30 mph.

But they seem to have communicated with each other about it somehow – is it possible? No birds pass through after that. I’m looking out from the roof terrace level with the treetops, birds flit, zoom, dart, leave no tracks in the sky. Perch on a branch for a moment, flick their head in my direction – aware of my presence, and away without warning in unexpected directions; ‘up’ is not necessarily up and neither is down – ground level is not the reference point.

And these ominous birds of prey circling high above… I’m thinking I want to take a photo if one comes near. Take out phone camera and stand in the middle of the roof, point it at the birds. They’re too far away… no, wait, there’s one coming towards me. Take a few photos as it comes closer. It seems curious, coming over for a look – nearer and nearer; our eyes meet in a strange encounter, it knows it’s being looked at and I’m on the edge of being hypnotised by it watching me here in the centre of this pool of intense vision, like a spotlight moving over the landscape.

Are these smaller birds aware of the predator – is this why they move so quickly? All this and more; an extraordinary alertness, joyful, immediate. They’re in a different kind of temporality. Their world is forever the same moment here-and-now taking place in all other locations and everywhere at the same time. I’m in slow motion, don’t see it, burdened with human mechanisms of sensory perception and lost in thought. I have to consciously look for the way to get back to ‘here’… telescopic sights of mindfulness on crosshairs of past/future that focus on the ‘now’, the point of reference – discovering I don’t have to try to create it because the present moment is already here, always present… it’s the mind that goes away.

Traces of these last thoughts vanish. If I don’t reach out for the next thing to think about, there’s just the stillness of the event itself; a transparent curtain through which there’s a transparent stage in a transparent theatre and all the actors with the illuminated background shining through from behind.
“…sound does not exist, separate from our hearing; sights do not exist, separate from our seeing; tastes do not exist, separate from our tasting; smells do not exist separate from our smelling [….] our projection of an “external world” — of objects “out there” which we then interact with via the sense-organs of a seemingly individual bodymind — is a claim that can never be experientially verified.” [Elizabeth Reninger, “If A Tree Falls In A Forest …” – Bishop Berkeley Meets Laozi]

goodbye the wind

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September 2, 2017: Delhi: This is the last whole month in the house, everything now coming to an end at the end of September. Goodbye this room, floor, ceiling, these walls, aperture of window looking out on to small garden, and beyond to the park where these exceptionally tall trees have given us so much shade from direct sunlight. Goodbye trees, goodbye everything deeply green, tree roots and wide leaves in this warm humidity, growing even as we speak.

And always a rustling of the wind, I follow the movement of large branches lowering, rising, and see how the whole mass of foliage shifts in accord with the continuity of movement… the air displacement itself a manifestation of the wind. Where’d it go… have you seen the wind? A wind narrative that never comes to an end, a wind becoming animate intelligence, an unseen form, disconnected from everything. A wind that’s present in all places at the same time, a wind that enters into and out of all things as if it were something autonomous, an invisible entity rising and falling away, form and formlessness in a causality of change and movement.

There’ve been times when it was at its peak and I’d watch from the shelter of this window… sudden velocity of wind strikes the pane of glass against its frame, Bang! I fall back in a moment of shock and fear, as if it were a living thing! The whole garden in a massive transition of wind becoming foliage; metaphor becomes reality, magician, voodooist, witch, wizard of a wind in a nightmare of dancing trees, wild and waving, with a sudden pliability hard to believe.

Everything out there and in here gives form to the insane energy of a wind that enters everywhere and into every single thing. Blows out gusts, sucks in voids, spins it in a vortex and swooping down as if inquisitive about something, filling up all the spaces below there, then suddenly out and up, high in the sky where only birds engage with it.

The sudden sound of it when a huge broken-off bough appears, as if it were something alive, tumbles through the foliage in a rush of leaves whispering in thousands of voices that seems to crash like waves upon a beach, and rises up again in a great sigh of leaf-whispering. Waves upon waves of masses of clustered notes break upon the shore, becoming less and less in an ordered succession of movements.

Goodbye the wind that quietly gusts its way through the mind, my awareness of it rises as it rises, I’m more alert when it’s loud, and when it’s quiet again I feel more at ease. But only for a moment, another small wave of it becomes a parallel thought flow to a story in the mind; it never rests… swooping shadows plunging deep into patterns of foliage over and over.

“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 its glory, of its magnificence.”
[Alan W. Watts]