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]

Delhi: Arriving at the breakfast table like a ship docking in the harbor. Sliding in to coffee and bagels. Spread peanut butter on toasted bagel, then slices of banana. A piece of it held between finger and thumb comes into vision for a moment and it disappears somewhere below my nose, as head tilts forward in a teeth/tongue snatch, chewing, chewing and swallow. The world enters my body – gratitude (“give us this day our daily bread…”). Transfiguration of flesh, blood and bones, hair and fingernails grow.

Hands and face wash – hot soapy water dribbling down bare arms, drops off at the elbows in two puddles on the floor… sudden déjà vu, memory of an unreasonable fear. Must have been a childhood scolding. Bend down and dry it all up, headache like a cue ball colliding with the inner walls of the skull. Always like this, in every new instance, reassembling the parts of who I am, and nothing seems to fit; searching for a ‘self’ to be satisfied with – or dissatisfied with, or upset, or angry, confused, depressed, gloomy or sad.

I’m drawn back across the years to how it must have been at birth. Sudden embodiment in a separate physicality, immense sound, trauma of coldness that has no name, the shock of air entering unopened lungs. All the early events from there on that are internalized; unexpected fear, huge sensations – everything happening without language to give it form so it cannot be understood. All the hurt and pain deeply embedded in who I am today.

My life is conditioned by these energy imprints, which are as present now as they were “then” – the past doesn’t exist, ‘clock time’ doesn’t cover it. There is only the karma of circumstances contained in present moment awareness.

I’m so glad to know this, if I didn’t have the PHN headache condition, I wouldn’t feel as motivated to look everywhere for a cure, and thus begin to uncover the mystery. A handful of meds swallowed with a swig of bottled water and in a short while, everything begins to fall into an easing… long sigh of outbreath. I cannot find language that fits the moment.

The melancholia of winter. It takes a while to notice the sun shining through the kitchen extractor fan. Around this time, the shadow cast by the next-door building moves away. I can go up now to the roof terrace and sit in the sunshine… footsteps on concrete steps, flip-flop, flip-flop, flip… disappear up the staircase. [First published January 24, 2017]

“Advaita (nonduality) does not mean “one” in the sense of eliminating all differences. The differences are present in the one in a mysterious way. They are not separated anymore, and yet they are there.” Bede Griffiths (1997)]

First published October 23, 2020: Bangkok: Awake in the darkness before 6 am, sit up in bed and take a meditational posture I invented myself. I can get the body up into the folded legs position, seated on two pillows on top of each other which sink into the mattress. This way I can hold my position comfortably just above the level of the bed, kinda floating there with the knees supported by rolled up edges of quilts pushed into the gaps. It takes a moment or two to get it feeling right… then there is only the breath.

Breath entering the body… feel the impact of incoming air in the nasal passage, “Breathe in slow-ly, breathe out lo-ng”. The breath hurries away, then comes back again as if it has forgotten something – searching all through the body, then it withdraws. Breath enters the body again, this time like a gust of wind, blows everything all over the place. Withdraws in a moment and it’s gone.

Vivid sweeps of colour and a curious light illuminating the space perceived behind the eyes. Mind is aware of the headache that’s always here, otherwise mesmerized by the form and function of the body, only slightly held in this limited temporality; thin skin of eyelid lizard-like slides over surface of smooth eyeball and that strangely seen light entering my darkness; just this…

Birdsong in the trees outside tell me it’s near daybreak, sensory processes perceive the world, aware that it’s an upside-down reflected hologram the brain and optic nerve make sense of – understood but impossible to see it as it is. Or is this how it is… in its as-it-is-ness? Was this world here before I was born? Something wrong with the question, duality. Everything just going on as it is now, without that person called ‘me’ in it. There’s an anonymity about this that’s quite liberating; birds in the trees and all the other random events taking place as they are now, here in this thin slice of time, revisiting the discussion; all that was said, received, held, seen, nurtured.

Then, a window opens. There’s a visitor arriving from somewhere, thousands of miles from here and in a great expanse in time. He appears in the form of a small boy, bowed head, string showing round the neck at the collar; latch-door key kid, scruffy uniform, bleeding at the knee. Teacher in a controlling voice says, ‘You have to think about what you’re doing before you do it, okay?’ Small boy nods, says ‘yes Miss, and shuffles out of the room to go and see the nurse about the knee. Teacher was talking about mindfulness decades before it came to be what it is today. For me, as an adult it remained something unlearned, but bearing a familiarity and intuitively known when it became conscious.

Daylight is here and I’m now lying on the bed, thinking about the small boy as he was in a state of anxious urgency every day and for many years to come. No one at home for support, forgetful and undecided because of the struggle to ‘get it right’ and nobody to reassure him that yes, you can leave book-work and use intelligent guesswork. The built-in reasoning of mind in these circumstances is enough.  

I’m telling myself this of course too late for it to be to be acted upon. I had to take the long way round; wasted years disappeared, searching for motivation in situations that offer comfort, shelter, gratification, everything thrown to the wind. Stumbling and crashing through the successes and failures of many lives, and coming to India more than thirty years ago – there to be suddenly awakened to the whole story”. It took me a very long time to grow up, and even now at the age of 73 years, I feel like an adolescent. Maybe I stayed young and it’s the world that got old…? I continue to return to these windows that open in memory. There must be a larger awareness that includes this, here-and-now… an awareness of one thought that includes awareness of another. There’s something that allows me to consider this, I’m seeing it from a somewhere-else place.

Photo by Sue Douglas

First published July 1, 2012. [Note: The original post attracted a lot of attention, 74 likes and many comments, some of which continued 5 years later. I learned so much from them … it’s worth taking a look, I’ve included some of these at the end of the post.]

I didn’t know about Advaita Vedānta when I was a child and only recently discovered there were people like Alan Watts (and others) writing about non-duality in the Christian context, [link to part of the Alan Watts’ essay: This Is It]. Now I’m convinced it is important to focus on the fact that there is something at the heart of Christianity. The uncomfortable feeling that’s followed me all these years – that somehow, I missed the point of the Jesus Teaching – all this has gone when I think of the Advaitist aspect of the teaching. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle I just stumbled upon, coming from an Asian perspective, an inductive knowing and that’s how it works.

The reason I didn’t see it before is because the Western concept of God, having human attributes (similar to the Advaitist idea of Ishvara), contradicts the rational scientific view. Accepting something that’s scientifically impossible, just because it’s written down in the Bible, doesn’t make sense. It’s like a myth and that’s why Christianity never had any reality in the West. What’s needed is to take it all a bit further.

‘… when human beings think of Brahman, the Supreme Cosmic Spirit is projected upon the limited, finite human mind and appears as Ishvara. Therefore, the mind projects human attributes, such as personality, motherhood, and fatherhood on the Supreme Being. God (as in Brahman) is not thought to have such attributes in the true sense.’

In Western countries, people are wandering around without a map. There’s the shopping mall and that’s all. How to let go of the individual ‘self’ if everything in the system is aimed at getting you to hold on? Looking for the way out by browsing possibilities will take a lifetime. The distractions built-in to window shopping behaviour are designed to keep you ‘shopping’ and prevent you from finding the way out too easily. By the time you get there you’ll have forgotten what it was you were looking for.

‘The Advaita Teachings are pointers, offered at the level of the audience, so to some people Jesus would talk about “a mansion with many rooms” and to other people he would say: “(heaven) is within.” (And) without understanding Advaita and the way pointers are adjusted depending on the audience, (most) Christians haven’t a clue what Jesus was talking about.’

Those who didn’t fall into the shopping mall trap just took the belief ‘thing’ to pieces to see what it was made of. That’s how it was seen that there was/is no substantial “self” in the centre of consciousness. It’s an operating system that keeps all working parts in the state of ‘oneness’. We are, right at this moment, God itself, and we can rejoice in that – if we can break out of our individual identity….’ If someone had been able to explain it to me like this when I was a child, the challenge to find out what it could mean would have been enough motivation for a lifetime.

‘When you fully understand that which you are and cannot not be, there is nothing to do to be

…………..
Check out the comments section in the original post in the link below

First published October 4, 2012: UK: I’m in a rush-hour train coming into London, standing in an integrated mass of human bodies all supporting each other. I’ve got a belt to hold on to above my head which is fortunate because the train is shaking about on uneven tracks, noisy and exhilarating. This really is the whole experience of train travel…. Then it settles down to a smoother pace and I’m focused on the closeness with other people; smell of wet raincoats and a forest of arms reaching up to hold on to roof belts, blocking the view. Somewhere nearby, a voice suddenly shouts out: ‘I’M ON THE TRAIN’ – a man speaking on his phone…

‘I think, therefore I am’ [cogito ergo sum] More than two thousand years before that, the Buddha noted the inherent problems in this kind of thinking: “I am the thinker’ lies at the root of all the categories and labels of conceptual proliferation, the type of thinking that can turn and attack the person employing it… “Do I exist?” – It depends on what you mean by “exist.” “Do I have a self?” – It depends on what you mean by “self.” Thinking driven by definitions like these often falls prey to the hidden motives or agendas behind the definitions, which means that it’s unreliable.’[Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

The man on the phone continues with his loud conversation, surrounded by people with grim faces who don’t speak. He disregards us completely, asserting himself in this space that everybody is squeezed together in, caught in the dis-ease of ‘deadly tedium’. We are struggling over this intrusion of the man and his phone but holding our composure with patient endurance. Folded newspaper in front of the face to avoid eye contact (this was before mobile phones), we are managing to ignore each other completely. Turn the page of the newspaper, fold it back skilfully without untoward touching and have a casual glance all around, as I’m doing it, just in case there’s anything that needs to be noticed, looked at or ‘seen’. No, everything is as it should be; newspaper held like demure fan that masks the face, and doing the crossword: 7 across: Four letters, ‘It may follow something _ _S_. Meanwhile the man talking on his phone is saying the line is breaking up because we are going through a tunnel.

I am committed to a world of consumption of goods and services. I want to have more of what I like and less of what I don’t like. I’m not interested in things that are neutral, they are meaningless (it’s a pity really, because the neutrality of feeling is the Way To Go). I am therefore in a chronic state of dissatisfaction because I never get what I really want. Okay, but as long as we’re mindful, it can be manageable? Well, it’s allright for some, you might say, for those of us who have recently returned from somewhere colourful and bright, light and cheerful, sun shines all the time; smiling Thai faces and their polite behaviour. But isn’t it just that they have a more cheerful kind of dukkha over there?

There’s a passenger announcement: ‘…delays at Croydon and Blackfriars due to congestion’. Then entering Liverpool Street: ‘… this train will not stop at Liverpool Street because of “flooding” at the Eastbound station (flooding?) and will continue on to Aldgate where passengers can take the train back and enter from the Westbound station which is unaffected and we apologize for any inconvenience.’ I have to ask other passengers what the announcement was about and surprised to discover everyone is friendly; the shared burden of these times of hardship and emergency – something conditioned by World War II?

I get there finally, near the end of a long list of Anglo-Saxon place names, and walking along with the South coast tourists in the pleasant harbour area of a town near the sea at Eastbourne. I’m looking for the office of an agent I have to visit and the phone in my pocket is ringing, who can this be… Hello? Jiab, she’s in Peru; hard to believe. She wants to know, can I get some of these wipes that are good for doing polished wood, and get a few packs, please? I have to take them with me when I come to Thailand. I hold up the phone high in the air so she can hear the Eastbourne seagulls all the way over there in Peru; a great swirl and echo of Northern seabirds singing in the wind, like cats mewing in the air.

 ‘It’s because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond transmigration, beyond the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destination.’ [DN 15 PTS: D ii 55 Maha-nidana Sutta: The Great Causes Discourse]

Note: This blog is now posting twice a week

First published December 5, 2012: New Delhi: It’s the middle of the night, it’s cold, I’m in bed and covered with a mountain of bed covers. Can’t sleep, just lying here thinking about things in the darkness. All the stories of my life come and go, click the channel-changer and there’s another one. I remember this, yes… so, he said that… and I said this… and then what happened? Click the channel-changer again and I’m somewhere else. It’s the thinking thing, continually pondering over suppositions, this and that and when I ask myself how to stop thinking the mind starts to look for a solution, drawing conclusions from known facts ad infinitum and I’m thinking again. It’s my Western cultural inheritance – separate from God, we are created by Him – studying the ‘object’ and logical, applied, deductive reasoning. Here in the Eastern context, it’s more like a gradually accumulating lake of inductive reasoning; the ‘whole’ is a pre-existing pattern composed of its parts. I can ‘feel’ my way into it and see where that takes me.

So, I stop thinking. There’s an awareness of the cold air on my face, sensory response vedanā; the mind engaged with the other senses tuned to reception from the outer world like satellite dishes search for a signal. When there’s no thinking, there’s an empty space where the thoughts used to be. I’m aware of the desire to be actively thinking, I see the invitation to be engaged with thinking – same as other forms of ‘wanting’ and mindfulness kicks in. But it occurs to me this is the Buddha’s teaching about the origination of the world: ‘Dependent on the eye & forms there arises eye-consciousness. The meeting of the three is contact….’(phassa) and I’m back into thinking again.

There’s something obvious about this, the mind is one of the six senses and functions like a receptor in the same way as the others do, except that it also has the purpose of ‘guarding’ the entry point; sense object activates the chain of events and mind has an intuitive, cognitive function; it is capable of discerning the object, like a security system. The exact nature of the cognitive mind holds my attention. I experience the absolutely empty space of no-thinking and either there’s not any sensory input the mind needs to be engaged with, or the apparent emptiness is caused by the mind’s awareness of being aware. There’s more of this empty space. Thoughts come in and go out again and the mind is watching the whole process. Sometimes I’m here as an observer, watching from behind the curtain. Other times the observer disappears, and it seems like only the mind itself is left there. That disappears too and, in its place, a sequence of momentary mental events, each one linking with the next as if it were electronic activity. It’s like a small fireworks display, arising and falling away. Some time later sleep comes and the world disappears.
[Note: This blog will be posting twice a week for as long as the review of older posts continues]

November 3, 2012: Bangkok: [Note: Continuing the series of early posts on the beginning of a sense of what Buddhism is. There is no direct reference here, this is one of the very early posts, the blog was barely one year old]
I’m in a downtown area, standing under an umbrella, trying to hail a taxi; heavy rain here and the traffic is going slow. A taxi pulls up, bright yellow and green, open the door and get in. There’s that strong smell of krating daeng (red bull), and jasmine flower garlands. I see a Buddha rupa and various auspicious objects everywhere. The taxi is old-style, well maintained but at the end of its days. The same could be said of the driver; ‘Loong’, meaning ‘uncle’, a respectful term used with any old man. In fact, he’s more like great-grandfather, smiling, childlike and ancient.

The most noticeable thing about him is he’s got no teeth and insists on grinning all the time. He’s likeable, asks me all the usual questions and it turns out his daughter lives near to where I live in Bangkok and that’s a talking point. He brings his attention to driving the car and I’m wondering how this is going to turn out, but it seems to be good enough. So, I settle back and look round the interior of the cab because it is crowded in here. Blessings and charms are painted on the ceiling, a great profusion of strings of beads, amulets and decorative hanging things tinkling and clanking from the rear-view mirror, and it takes me a little while to notice that the dashboard is covered with all kinds of toy objects stuck on with adhesive. The dog with the nodding head, and they all have moving, swinging heads, like this; coiled spring necks and crazy grinning faces that wobble slightly with the vibration of the engine but roll around madly every time his taxi makes a sudden movement, a touch on the brakes, an abrupt acceleration. It’s quite mesmerizing.

I’m just taking it in here, all these wobbly heads and various swinging objects in the middle of the windscreen; a part of the journey I didn’t expect. I get in his taxi simply to travel from point A to point B thinking that he just takes me there – and he does that but feels it necessary to surround his passengers with… something, what is it? I know some Thais who would feel uneasy in here, seeing a connection with phi (superstition). I don’t engage with that stuff and thinking it’s like this because, for him, it’s just boring and pointless; there’s no reason for this journey or any journey, and this is a kind of anchor. Somebody else will get in, after I get out, and that person will tell him to go somewhere else and off he goes. When he gets there it’s the same as the place he just left, and all other places. Traffic in the city is like water in the river; it gets everywhere, into all the corners where there’s space for it.

Every passenger who gets in has a directional goal-orientated intention; this old driver is not part of that, even though he is very much present. For him it may seem incidental in a profound sort of way; just wandering all over the town in randomness and along the way he’s arrived at the concept of all these wobbly heads, I suppose. It’s suitable because it’s meaningless, like everything else. His taxicab is like this because he’s in a place where it’s always ‘now’. Most of the cause/effect, time-bound, goal-directed thinking is just not there. Apart from control of the vehicle, which he must know completely, he is free; he’s not going anywhere because he doesn’t need to go anywhere; there’s nothing he needs. He just takes other people where they want to go and there’s just the emptiness of it.

In the Hermann Hesse novel: ‘Siddhartha’ (chapter 9), Siddhartha speaks to Vasudeva, the ferryman, about a lesson the river teaches, that time does not exist. “The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth…in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future… Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.” He talks about listening to the ‘voice of the river’ and I’m wondering if it’s something like this that Loong is experiencing after a lifetime in the timelessness of this huge city.

Loong drops me where I want to go and it’s still raining. I get all the stuff done I was going to do and a few other things too and after a couple of hours I’m in some other part of town in another taxi. We’re stuck at traffic lights and I see this taxi go by with the same wobbly heads on the dashboard; amazing coincidence, considering there are 10 million people in this city – it’s Loong! And he doesn’t have a passenger. Quick decision, I pay off the taxi I’m in, the lights are still at red, jump out and run through the rain to Loong’s taxi. Open the passenger door and jump in – surprise, surprise! There’s wild laughter, and Loong’s great toothless mouth and all of it suddenly feels like a continuation, I was here all the time; I never got out of his cab the first time; the interval that happened in between was a daydream.

So, we set off back to my place and he’s happy about that because he gets to visit his daughter who lives nearby. I hear him explaining things to her on the phone. He’s too old to be driving, really, and as he’s doing that, I have a chance to revisit the strange and interesting timelessness that Loong’s taxi seems to contain.