Tag Archives: awareness

ends and beginnings

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OLD NOTEBOOKS: The Delhi to Bangkok journey: TV drama going on as I’m packing, I see it, stop and watch: intense dialogue, close up on faces, directors’ exercise in portraiture. Carry on with my packing, gathering things from here and there – then the TV catches my eye again, sit to watch, and the credits come up… is that the end already? But it’s not the end it’s the beginning. An extremely long intro to an old series of The Walking Dead… oh no, morbid curiosity, and too much for me. The scenes of zombies being stabbed in the head are too similar to the stabbing pain of the PHN headache I live with.

But anyway, it’s okay today, taken my meds, and time I wasn’t here. Dress up in the clothes of who I think I am. Passports, ticket, fiddle with the key, open, close the door. I am the person who lives here – note to mind. Bye-bye to house, into the taxi and away.

Wheeled luggage through airport hallways and corridors… check-in desk for Bangkok, and check it all through to Chiang Mai; transit time in Bangkok is one hour – note to mind, beware of misleading signage in Bangkok, arrows don’t seem to point in the right direction to the Transfer Desk.

For a moment, future time invades the present, and I feel I’m already gone, but it’s just that mild urgency of airports, and ‘the journey’ which is forever ‘here’ and never ‘there’.

Flight number, gate number, passport number, visa details, watched by hidden cameras, facial recognition software, security procedures: ‘Passengers are reminded not to leave baggage unattended at anytime.’

I am part of a network of beginnings, middles and endings, always leading on to the next journey. Jettison clutter of the mind, travel lightweight, be minimalist. Watching the signs above and mindful of body movements, there’s only the walking.

Watching the duality of steps below me, left, right, left, right… flooring surface beneath spins underfoot. The way, directionality, as if held in one long continuous moment leading to the imaginary place of arrival, like the vanishing point in a perspective drawing doesn’t actually exist.

And there’s something about the flow of faces I see, pulling their luggage, holding their children. I can see the unique identity of each person as I pass, as they must recognize the same individuality when they look at me. But somehow we’ve all become blank, there’s nobody here

We are all in transit; on the way to (or coming back from) somewhere else… a glimpse of the nothingness situated at the centre of everything the Bardo of the in-between. The ‘me’ I live with is not a substantial thing – sometimes not there at all. Present time is more connected with the past, where we arrived from, than with the future where we are going to, a place of speculative conjecture and hypothetical likelihoods, stumbled-upon in following the here-and-now. First posted June 30, 2017

‘Awareness could be said to be like water. It takes on the shape of any vessel that contains it. If one mistakes this awareness for its various temporary forms, life becomes a ponderous plodding from one moment of desire, from one object of the mind, to the next. Life becomes filled with urgency and the strategies of fear, instead of lightly experiencing all these forms, recognizing that water is water no matter what its form.’ [Stephen Levine, Ondrea Levine: Who Dies]

Photo: Barges travelling from Holland to England, taken from the window of the aircraft from Aberdeen to Amsterdam.

third person singular

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Delhi/Chiang Mai (Skype call): The whisper of a felt-tip pen on paper: shashee shashee shoo shoo shoo… otherwise, silence in the room. M is drawing a picture, colouring in, and this is a Skype call to Thailand – the picture and sound quality so good, it’s almost real. Sadly, though, it’s not real and you’d expect more animated conversations from a 10-year-old girl, but that’s not how it is right now. She stops what she’s doing for a moment and asks me: When you come here Toong Ting? I tell her in about one month from now, mid-September, not long. But it has no meaning, social media is not real, the Skype call only proves I’m not there. M calls me Toong-Ting, she’s my Thai niece and English is a 2nd language for her so, understandably, conversation runs out sometimes. It’s hard to look for words all the time. Skype calls are a fun thing to do but there’s a limit to the novelty of it… looking at a talking head, a portrait of a person with lips moving – it’s not the same as actually being there.

So she’s drawing a picture. No talking now, she’ll show it to me later, just the sound of the artwork taking place, and all I can see is the parting in her hair, the top of her head moving slightly with the movement of the pen. I have nothing to contribute here, just be the recipient of this drawing, be the voice coming through the speakers. I am he who isn’t here now… third person singular (‘he/she/it’); I am ‘it’, the face in the video screen. I am ‘him’, the object pronoun – him over there in India somewhere, 2000 miles away from here, and not able to help with her English homework.

I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with this… what do uncles do? I don’t have much experience, no children of my own. What do I have to offer, a West/East migrant, living in somebody else’s world? Why am I here? M often asks me that, ‘WHY?’ It’s her favourite question. Toong-Ting, why you go away from Inkland (England)? Why you come to Thailand? I usually say something about travelling for a long, long time in different countries, then getting married to Jiab. She’s always interested in the bit about getting married and all kinds of very carefully structured questions follow on from there. Now it’s ended, everything has been asked already. ‘I’ have been placed forever in the third person singular; I am ‘he’ who married her Auntie.

I want to see the picture she’s making. Wait Toong-Ting, she says and takes the iPad off its stand, walks around the room with it. I’m disorientated and getting a kind of vertigo with all the blurred movement, and just about to say something about it, when she puts the iPad down somewhere and goes away. I see a bit of upholstery and a corner of the ceiling… this must be the sofa. I can hear a clatter/clunk sound and then scissors cutting paper. I call out, hoping she can hear me: what are you doing now? But she doesn’t answer… focused on the cutting – long, extended scissors work. What can it be? M comes back, looks in my screen, smiling a bit, secretive face, eyes wandering off-centre to the tiny window in the corner, watching herself, her posture, her hair – is this how it is to be… ‘seen’?

You want to look Toong Ting? Some more hesitation, then she holds up a heart shaped paper with the words: ‘Love You’, done in colours. There’s no ‘I’ pronoun, and a reversed ‘y’ – its tail going the wrong way. So much more than I’d thought, so much greater than how I feel about myself. The generosity of it takes my breath away. Later Jiab helps her to stick it on the bookshelf with scotch tape; they take a photo and send it to me in an email. First posted August 16, 2014

“The self has no form. You cannot grasp it, you cannot see it, you cannot really define it. You can never say, “Ah, there it is”, (because) you are the consciousness, the perceiving. You are ‘it’. You can never see it as an object, external to yourself. It’s the essence. You are not what is seeing, you are the seeing.” [Eckhart Tolle – source: My Inner Medium]

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Upper image: photo of M in the park last year. Lower image: M’s drawing, stuck in the bookshelf. Thank you to My Inner Medium for the Eckhart Tolle quote  – G  R  A  T  I  T  U  D  E –

self is not an entity in itself

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OLD NOTEBOOKS: ‘It was as if lightning coursed within my chest. The impact lasted for a while, and for the next few weeks whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not.’ [‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life’].

The Dalai Lama, in the sixties, reflecting on the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, phenomena being dependent on conceptuality and his discovery that the “I” exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body; not an entity in itself.

The Buddha identified no-self, [anatta], nobody at home, no self anywhere, anywhen, nowhere, now-here. The world is a construct, look, see, glimpse the nothingness situated at the centre of everything [śūnyatā]. Most people flinch at the thought, because in the West we are taught that the self is real. We are to hold the Self in high regard, a mutual propping-up of the illusion. Everywhere we look, our self-concept looks back at us like a mirror reflection. Our whole environment supports the fictional self, made to measure, tailored to fit, we live in a bespoke world. The Self we know as the body and mind is thought to be not something we ‘are’ so much as something we ‘possess’, I am ‘me’ and this is ‘mine – the opposite of what we are talking about here.

About the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, there was a time, some years ago, I was alone in the Nontaburi house and I wrote a Post about the illusion: “The house is surrounded by trees, leaves filter a green light all around. There are birds, squirrels, lizards all kinds of critters. I see something move out on the path… is it a bird, dropped down from a branch to peck at something? There, it moves again – just a hop and it’s a few feet further on. I sit very still, don’t want to frighten it away. I see it now, sitting still, not moving. 

After a long time waiting for it to change position, I decide to slowly get up and see what happens when I do that. But it’s still not moving… maybe it’s injured. I come closer… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf curled into a shape, and blown by the wind across the surface of the path.  

Step back and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a short gust of wind blows the leaf. The animation of it is absolutely convincing, but I see it now as a leaf, not a bird. How disconcerting, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not.” In the same way, the mind is going around as if it were a bird, but it’s only a leaf in the wind. And we have the idea then that the “I” is a concept, not real. Compassion for those caught in the predicament of believing in the self, I was similarly held, looking for Truth in a battleground of untruths.The assumption is that if ‘I’ am my body, I am my feelings, I am my consciousness – then everything else is out ‘there, and if I’m in ‘here’, disconnected from everything out ‘there’. I’m isolated, alone, anxious – projecting a perceived self that I know, somehow, is not real. I need to resolve this issue of fearful uncertainty so I have a very busy life, work 5 days a week and spend time with friends at weekends. Together we go out and around looking everywhere for indications that align with that ‘Self’ held in high regard, visiting public parks and places of interest, taking ‘selfies’ with a nice background. ’Is everybody in the picture?’ Smile please… click! Everyone comes to see the image on the screen; let’s take another one… click! We all seem to be happy doing this, but there’s still that dissatisfied feeling, seeking a way to have whatever it takes to confirm the identity of that Self (held in high regard). This introspective state of mind allows another kind of ‘self’ to enter the picture, seeing the ‘self’ that is seeking. The seeking ‘self’ turns its attention to the seeing ‘self’ and is, at once, seen.

The self we self-create exists in a distorted reality, each of us as selves at the centre of our own universe. We act in our own self-interest, or as groups of like-minded ‘selves.’ It results in a conflict of interest between those whose lives and interests are, in fact, interdependent. Those of us who have let go of our selfish-selves, are part of a larger network of others, whose pains and pleasures and interests we share.

In a wider context there are scholars and spiritual leaders who say the awakened state is the state of no self. No self is the aspect that pervades all of reality. We are in a totality of consciousness, you can say we are part of God, therefore there is no individual self. When our soul merges with God there is no self – one drop in the ocean.
I am inspired by these speakers and professors and shall continue to listen to their words. In the meantime I’ll go on with the Buddha’s teaching and the ’nuts-and-bolts’ of how the process works, develops, evolves.

‘The deconstruction and reconstruction of the sense of self is necessary to become aware of the most deceptive of meta-narratives: the one we normally do not perceive because it is our ordinary, everyday reality – the ‘real world’ we take for granted but in fact is constructed.’ [David Loy: ’The Great Awakening’(4) 

This post contains sections from two earlier posts:

Rope Seen As Snake

Thoughts Like Clouds.

Also excerpts from a talk by Ishwar Ji Puri

And a paper by Jay L Garfield “Why No Self”

no more than this

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Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Sitting on the plane with M beside me, my Thai niece, and her coloured T-shirt, funny hat; her iPad mini and her 9-year-old vision of the world. I’ve been watching her use these Kiddy’s applications; cute kittens with large eyes and she shows me how they respond to your voice; all kinds of stuff. We can make fruity ice-cream drinks, waffles and cup-cakes with different kinds of toppings and M insists I have an opinion about what kind of toppings to have – lemon or strawberry? It’s important! M asks me in basic English; only the key words: What you like, Toong-Ting? So, I choose a lemon topping. When it’s finished we eat the cupcake by tapping a finger on the screen. The name Toong-Ting is part of her former baby language she doesn’t use any more but, somehow, M decided to keep it as my name. She selects things in this unique way because English is a second language. Maybe it’s easier to say Toong-Ting than my actual name, or she likes the idea of being cute (I think it’s this).

And so, the time is taken up with M asking me about various things like this. I engage with her on these points and in the intervals, when she’s busy with the iPad, I’m simply aware of our physical presence. There’s really not anything left to think about… mindfulness, waiting for the next question. In the silence there’s a curious emptiness, just a quiet awareness, bhavanga, the space in-between; not reacting to stimuli, there’s nothing happening. Just being here; the knowingness of it. My responsibility is to take care of M; to respond to her small requests in a way that’s in tune with her way of thinking and her use of English. That’s all. We are linked in our present-time mutuality and there’s nothing else coming into consciousness from the outside world unless it’s something very interesting or something we need to be careful about. Right now, here in the aircraft seats, it’s all very bland and neutral. Somehow, I seem to have sidestepped my own mental activity; the usual state of affairs of the mind, the way the ‘self’ attempts to perpetuate itself is seen; there’s only this, being here…

Then the cup of coffee is served and M says I should have the powdered creamer in the packet that comes with it: ‘Why you not put that in your coffee, Toong-Ting?’ and she looks at me with these almond shaped eyes and little face… so I put the powdered milk in, even though I normally take black coffee. She watches me open the paper packet and pour it in, her eye level is much nearer to the brim of the cup than from where I’m seeing it. I lean over, we watch this together, powder dissolving in the cup in small clouds and imploding movements. I never really noticed it before… children are here to teach adults (I read in a blog recently?). M tells me to try it and see if it tastes nice. I try it and say yes.

Looking out the window, down on the land below, there’s the surface of the planet; swirling movements of rivers and patterns of vegetation, land shaped by many hundreds of years of the wind and climate, and it looks like the powdered milk dissolving in the coffee. Liquid in a small plastic cup 38,000 feet above what’s seen on the surface of planet below; macro/micro, the oneness, all things have the same characteristics. ‘Look, look at this, Toong-Ting!’ and I have to look again at something else M is doing and make a comment about that. We discuss it for a while, then back to considering the powdered milk in the coffee and I’m feeling this same continuing state that’s empty of thought. I know that M is going to ask another question soon so part of my attention is occupied with being ready for that with a clear mind; metta, loving kindness. I’m a passive passenger transported on an aircraft, aware of the immediate surroundings; a gentle bumping of the plane, the hiss and hum of the engines. Just a sort of space I am occupying right now, no more than this… First posted May 10, 2013

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‘Bhavanga literally means “factor of life”; bhavanga is usually translated into English as “life-continuum”. The bhavanga-citta keeps the continuity in a lifespan, so that what we call a “being” goes on to live from moment to moment. That is the function of the bhavanga-citta.’ [Introduction to the Abhidhamma]

Photo Image: Flowers growing in a Thai temple in Buddhist India

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]