New Delhi: Sitting in the garden these cool days, and the world, as it’s seen, suddenly falls into an enhanced version of what it is. Alice in Wonderland says things are not what they appear to be. The presence of my cup and book, my phone and a pen, just lying there on the garden table, extensions and extrapolations of the environment I’m in – the ‘self’ that I am, at this time. Everything I see becomes unfamiliar, yet known – uncanny recognition of every-day things, strangely out of context here, but also fits quite well in these surroundings of birds, sunlight shining through the trees and a pattern of moving shadows through layers of leaves.

A momentary easing… the ‘beholder’ sees beauty through the glass of eyes to the world out there and the self, as ‘me’ in here, disappears completely – a flow of words just tumbling out and I’ve got to get it all written down… if not, it will vanish. It’s the writing of it that gives it life (of course), the quickening. Words snatch at a direction, fractals of the original instance. Too huge, I cannot see the whole pattern, only what is here and now.

Then, it all falls into a vortex of shattered ends and beginnings as the focus shifts to headache mode – It’s part of me these days… take meds, wait for it to pass, allow healing, nurturing.

And now it is later. Fragments of imagery of the story appear in the mind so fast I can’t keep up with it. Scribbling it down on scraps of paper, and rewritten on the back of till receipts found in wallet, pockets. The back of my boarding pass… reduce the size of handwriting to get it all in the space, then take a photo of it and zoom in to see. A flow of utterance, stumbling incoherent urgency, activates extensions, developments, and completions… and I arrive at an ending. It changes the beginning (I thought it might), and there, it’s done. Refined, defined, in the form it takes, chunks of language jigsaw together, trim the edges and placed.

Extreme minimalism… the story contained is edited out. The Absolute is in all things, omnipresent and there’s nothing that it’s not a part of. I have to ponder this for a moment; where is it not? There’s no ‘nothing’ and no ‘thing’. Gone is… even the word ‘gone’ is gone. [First posted June 16, 2017 titled “More than words”]

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. [Meister Eckhart 1260 – 1328]

Amsterdam – Delhi flight: KLM passenger jet, Boeing 777-200, rapidly moving into the darkness of an evening already turned to night. No view from the cabin window, it’s a nocturnal blackness from here on. I try to picture it, high above the clouds, a sliver of waxing crescent moon reflected in the silver streak of thinning atmosphere – too fast for the human eye to follow. The tarot pack Fool contemplating the sum total of everything as nothingness or ‘somethingness’. Up here there’s nothing to compare with the speed of the aircraft, we see only what is inside our bubble of contained ‘here-and-now,’ and inside that, our ‘there-and-then’ in a past or future time, awareness of how it is, simply that.

Laptop fits exactly on the small fold down table. Wi-Fi on board and I’m focused on the relative speeds of this aircraft travelling West to East at a speed of approx: 500mph in the same direction of the Earth’s rotation which is approx: 700 mph, West to East. The aircraft can never catch up with the speed of rotation of the earth but their speeds are close enough, and if we could see the land below, there would be the sense of it all being almost stationary, a phenomenon I have noticed in relative speeds of aircraft and their surroundings.

Words appear in the mind and tumble out onto the page in structures which only need a little rearranging – the mechanism of transferring thought into syntactical forms which one can normally trust just happens by itself. But in the time that it takes to write it down, everything has moved on. Not possible to describe it… language doesn’t stretch that far – it seems as if the world is an illusion. It’s not what it appears to be, no, nothing is what I think it is…if it’s not that, then, what is it? Make a list of what it’s not, and everything on the other side of that must be what it is. A feeling that’s wordless and indefinable, or one could quite easily say God is the sum total of everything that exists.

Thought as stories of past and future created in the mind. Knowing this brings it all to a standstill for a moment… awareness of how it is, simply that. Then something triggers thought again and the narrative requires me to ‘believe’ in it before it begins. I’m teetering on the brink of what it could be, still contained inside that little space that’s neither here nor there… do I want to get swept away by this story, when I’m quite comfortable being here? It’s telling me I have to engage with it, become it… yes, but I’m also able to stay here in the space where it hasn’t happened yet.

Mindfulness of non-becoming. See how that feels, here with the hummm of the engines, and air pressure white-noise, shooshing sound and everything is always in present time. Passengers are lost in movies, transfixed by headphones and screen, sound & color, or asleep, seatbelts fastened in the shadowy gloom as we fall through the latitudes and on towards Delhi and home – thinking about things in the here-and-now, located in the there-and-then, which refer to events taking place somewhere out there in the thin air. First posted June 2, 2017

‘Only by liberating oneself from the thralldom of the senses and the thinking function – both of them servants and not masters – by withdrawing attention from “things seen” to give it to things “unseen” can this awakening be accomplished.” [E. F. Schumacher, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, p.79]

Chiang Mai: Arrived in the early evening and out through the exit tunnel into the airport corridors. Turn the first corner and we’re looking back through a large window at our plane with passenger bridge attached. M says, in her 9-year-old voice: take a photo of it… put in your blog Toong-Ting (she calls me that). There’ll be a time when M takes a direct editorial role in this blog… so I take the photo and here it is now. A passenger aircraft that has a painted face, while a large reptilian mouth is sucking out the contents of the plane.

M is silent for a moment as she considers the elasticity of this strange stretched metaphor. Then we continue along the corridors to get our bags from the luggage belt. I put everything on the trolley with M sitting on top, push the wheels through the glass doors, opening as we approach and we’re in Arrivals. Her mum is waiting for us, pleased to have M back.

Bags in the car and we’re off. Heavy traffic on the way into town and M, still silent, looking out at it all considering, maybe, how one thing can become another, tells me that cars have gender: boy-car and girl-car. It’s the look of the ‘face’ of the car – that kind of ‘grin’ created by the front bumper and radiator grille. She sees it as the face of a boy or a girl or, if she can’t decide which it is, it must be a katoey, effeminate gay male, trans-gender, or whatever – she giggles a bit, it’s okay to talk about that in Thailand. I ask her to identify a boy-car for me, just to see if I can recognise its ‘maleness’ – although I’ve always thought of a car as male being male. She points at one: that’s a boy-car Toong-Ting. I want to say… how d’you know that? But this kind of challenge to her reasoning might be too much, so I’m just going along with it.

She asks if I can identify the gender: you tell me, Toong-Ting, it’s a boy-car or girl-car, okay? I have a feeling I’m going to get this wrong… let’s see, there’s one that’s got really male characteristics, I point to it and say that one is a boy-car. No, Toong-Ting it’s a girl-car… looking at me like, how come you can’t see something as obvious as that, hmm?

M spends a lot of time on the road, going to and from her school, a long way from her house. I think she probably knows the brands of all kinds of cars now, maybe not the names, just a familiarity with their appearance and long ago decided some were boy-cars, some were girl-cars, and those in-betweens were katoeys. As we’re going along, I take a photo of the back of a car and show it to her so she can study it in detail: boy or girl?  She says she can’t really tell looking at the back of it, can’t see its face, but thinks maybe it’s a girl-car, because she remembers that she decided at some earlier time, that particular make of car was a girl. It’s a case of remembering which is what (or what is which?) or what she had already decided it was when she first saw that make of car.

There’s intelligence in her playfulness, a reality in her personifications that challenges my usual insisting there is no ‘self’, the Buddha’s Teaching on anatta: ‘self’ is an illusion arising from the 5 Khandas. I feel I’m holding on to something I should let go of, with M going around happily applying the attributes of ‘self’ and gender to all kinds of things. She can create an identity and let it go, because it’s one among many. She can escape the entanglements of ‘self’ because she plays with a multitude of ‘selves’, like waves in the ocean and an ocean in all the oceans of the world. Everything in the universe is Self. The ‘self’ I believe to be ‘me’ is an assumed identity – there is no ‘self’, everything I see is ‘me’. First posted March 29. 2014. Check it out for additional gender photos taken by M.

‘Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. Lila indicates a spontaneous sportive activity of Brahman as distinguished from a self-conscious volitional effort. The concept of Lila signifies freedom as distinguished from necessity.’ [Ram Shanker Misra, The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo]

Chiang Mai:Going home in a tuk-tuk with M, nine years old, sitting beside me, small body-mass pressed against my side. The urgency of speed, kinda scary, canvas roof, no walls and immense sound of 2-stroke engine fills our space. Impossible to hear what she’s saying, M indicates that she wants to borrow my phone. I pull it out of my pocket, hesitate. Is it okay to play with a slippery glass-like instrument like this in a speeding tuk-tuk?  It might fly away into the great-rushing-past-outside world, anicca, necessity of mindfulness – she should hold it tight. Small face looks at me silently… don’t make a thing out of this Toong-Ting. I press it into her small hands. Hot, prehensile fingers grab, grasp and clasp the phone. Go to settings, clear away unwanted windows with the swipe of a tiny finger and launch multiplayer Minecraft.

So fast! I’m kinda surprised she’s managing to get Internet, 5G signal reaching us here in a tuk-tuk racing through the streets of Chiang Mai – more like we’re in it in the same way fish are in an ocean of water. Everything out-there passing by in a blur, feels like a totally crazy speed, why all this rush? I can see over the driver’s shoulder, through his windscreen and it’s like travelling through a wormhole in space-time; the actual here-and-now – everything outside of this is in a different reality. Everything on the ‘in’ side of it locked down tight, my arm around the slight presence of M, taking up such a small amount of the space on the seat, legs sticking out, and Minecraft’s digitally created landscapes of mountains and seascapes appear in the little window of the phone in her hands. She’s now in player-hosted servers with visiting players from all countries in the world. How do you say this Toong-Ting? She spells out: G-A-V-I-N. I tell her it’s a boy’s name, ‘Gavin’, probably English (who’s this Gavin guy, I wonder). I see name labels moving around the landscapes, Japanese and Italian names; Spanish, German, Norwegian – players I assume are about the same age as M. I see boy’s names and girl’s names, all here at this very moment – and, where is ‘here’? Good question: now here and nowhere (anagram), depends on the context… spatial and temporal qualities. Space and time are not separate; I read in a post recently. This is (always) where we are at.

Looking down at the top of her head, hair combed from a parting in the middle, pulled out in two separate directions, woven into tight plaits on either side, and it’s as if she knows I’m looking at her: Remember this number Toong-Ting: 19122, she says. I consciously remember the number, repeating it to myself… In a moment she asks me what the number was. I tell her, 19122 and ask what it was for, by the way, but she doesn’t answer… having to have things explained to me by a 9-year-old girl who speaks English as a second language – must be a password or username. Sad really, these days there’s not the dialogue there used to be, ‘I’ am not here, anatta, a suspended state, waiting for the next question. What’s this mean, Toong-Ting? M spells out: B-R-O-S and I tell her, Brothers it’s a boy’s server, he’s American probably, he’s black and I think she knew the word ’bro’ already. Obviously interested in this and next thing she’s in with the BROS, their mountains and volcanic lava, burning fires.

Then there’s a little wail – she gets disconnected. It feels to me like a catastrophe, but for M it’s no big deal, she changes to a different player-hosted server with new players – or maybe some of them are the same ones who just got here from the same sites we were all in earlier. And while that’s loading, a quick glance at the blur of what’s out there rushing by us, then she starts to sing a song from the movie: Frozen: ‘Let it go, let it go….’ I join her in the song. We sing together, Tuk-tuk driver laughing with his eyes in the rear-view mirror…. First posted April 25. 2015

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

Chiang Mai: I have an appointment with the doc about my general state of health, being a ‘senior person’. It goes all right, a small mark on my inner arm where the needle went in, get blood pills and come back in 6 months. Downstairs and out; we have a slightly complex schedule today and I have to say there’s a small anxiety in me that’s saying maybe we can’t get it all done; M’s mommy is coming to pick me up in the car outside the clinic, then we’re going to the airport to meet Jiab coming from India. I get a call from M: How are you feeling Toong Ting? And I say yes, I’m fine, where are you now? There’s a silence then M says: I’m in the car. I keep forgetting she doesn’t know about explaining what her location is at this moment… I ask, are you near me? There’s a dialogue with mommy in Thai then: about 10 minutes from where you are. Okay I’m waiting outside the clinic bye-bye! Anxiety again about waiting there for an unknown period

Car arrives and I get into the back seat with M, mommy in the front, driving. I always have to get in the back with M – she insists. Jumps past the large arm rest in the ‘down’ position that divides the back seat to make space for my large body mass. A small smile as if to say welcome to my space, then the shuffling of play objects out of the way and debris of food wrappers on the floor and lately, careful about ‘the book’ she’s reading placed on the armrest. It’s her world, it’s where she spends a number of hours of every day going to and from school, and then stopping at restaurants to get fast food because Mommy has to work every day – there’s nobody at home to cook. I get in the back seat and there’s a sense that this is where M lives.

We get to the airport and have to drive around and around because there’s just nowhere to park. Anxiety returns. When it’s near the time I get out and meet Jiab, help her with her bags, car comes by and we’re in. Jiab has to sit in the front with mommy because M doesn’t allow her in the back – in fact there’s an immediate small resentment when Jiab speaks to me. Same thing when we stop at a Japanese restaurant Oishi Shabushi, I have to sit next to M. This is the kind of restaurant where there’s a moving belt of small plates of food and you have about an hour to eat as much as you want for a set price. The haste and urgency of it encourages M to eat a lot. The rest of us are required to show enthusiasm. So, once again I eat too much and we stagger out to the car park and drive back to the condo.

It’s obvious to me, being now a senior person with expanding waistline I have to be mindful of how things are and try to get back to normality, the middle way, the Path; ‘return to go’ as they say in the monopoly game. Get back there, to start again. First posted April 25, 2015

To be able to be unhurried when hurried;
To be able not to slack off when relaxed;
To be able not to be frightened
And at a loss for what to do,
When frightened and at a loss;
This is the learning that returns us
To our natural state and transforms our lives.
[Liu Wemin, 16th Century]

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