Tag Archives: conscious experience

hidden in plain sight

Posted on by

9

img_0006bPOSTCARD #234: New Delhi: Traffic comes to a standstill, fierce displays of male feathers in ritual acts of outrage, shouts and gestures through wound-down windows. Eyes sparkling with diamonds of malice… but even this settles down. Things aren’t ‘held’, the silence of no-thought is possible. At least for me in the back seat of the car, disengaged, conscious only of sensory awareness in a body/mind world. It’s not meditation; I just have to remember to not be caught in thought stuck in the traffic jam of Mind.

Particularly these days of push and shove, and the fierce, blunt Donald Trump intrudes with his collection of body-slam syllables that make up a name which rhymes with: bump, lump, rump, thump, sump. The strategy of devil’s-advocate one-liner tweets, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”, make it necessary to wake up and feel the urgency of mindfulness – this politician has extended reach. Be aware of puzzle-headedness. Stay poised, balanced and alert.

Otherwise, in forgetfulness, I may go back to stir the ashes of defeat; return to that place of locked-in conditioning, reading pedagogy of the oppressed, the myth of freedom and other demons itch like a skin irritation you have to scratch. Isn’t it remarkable that outrageous remarks, in-your-face disregard and proud indifference wins the Presidential race… what does this tell you? Pre…tty scary. I need to remove myself from here, forget I ever knew such a thing was possible. Turning a blind eye? No, it’s not that. What I’m scared of is the unspoken denial, “I see no ships”, (Horatio Nelson turns a blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen). People know they’re expected to turn a blind eye – not turning a blind eye is to be labeled conspiracy theorist. I try to stay free of what all this means, meditation is about the skill of staying with the feeling of all the tugs and pulls of it demanding attention, but undisturbed and steady – just letting the mind unstick itself.

In the East the world is an illusion; a discussion point that goes back at least three thousand years. There’s only the quality of experience, nothing else. Gone is the ground beneath our feet, there never was anything there in the first place. The opposite of how it is in the West where we are embedded in the illusion, overlay upon overlay, believing it’s real and uneasy, of course, about the intuitive feeling that it’s not. As a rule, politicians speak with forked tongue; doctors say there’s something wrong with you, take this medicine. There’s no one else to turn to, so we’re feeding the craving of the mind with consumables to quell the fear… but it’s never enough.

Thus we arrive at the core of the illusion itself: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” (Adolf Hitler, große Lüge). A sleight of hand (this must be when I pretend to not see it), and before your very eyes, ladies and gentlemen, the Truth is hidden in plain sight… now you see it, now you don’t – those not turning a blind eye fall into a yawning chasm wherein everything is sucked away not held on to with tenacity of grip, as with all things inexorably lost, Amen.  Or, a better idea, you can disappear off the grid and become a Buddhist.

The traffic is moving now, engines starting up, and we are on our way. I console myself with the thought that there’s a possibility DJT will root out the bad guys hidden in the woodwork for decades, albeit for the wrong reasons, he and his cronies will just take their place, but somewhere in there we will stumble upon a revelation and things take a turn for the better…

 

these days of illusion

Posted on by

26

e39f71_4f5a5a5ab85244aa87fb261af997e524POSTCARD #233: New Delhi: There’s an alertness in listening to the story, subject-object narrative, and I find I’m not caught in thought about what’s past or what’s future, knowing and recognizing how I feel, what I think, and who (and to whom) I have been who I am, who I was in former times and in quiet holy places, where it is always a historical here-and-now, anywhere and anywhen, over endless horizons of time.

A slight sense of foreboding these days where any serious applied thought seems to have gone right out the window, unless it’s got to do with greed or personal gain in some way. Thus we’re driven by nothing sensible to think about, craving for something, anything of substance. Hand-held remote glued to fingers in a multi-channel TV state of anything’ll-do, but finding nothing except the urge to find something that’ll fill that overwhelming sense of ‘lack’. Despondency of ungratified longing, dukkha; world-weariness and I see the only way out is to go in.

And it’s as if it were a light shining in darkness of mind (suffering is caused by wanting it to not be like this), thought processes maintain themselves hesitantly for an instant and fade away. Unless I consciously reach out for the next thought item, there’s nothing to think about in here (what ease there is to be found in that…), just a transparent curtain, through which I see a transparent stage, set in a transparent theatre. All the actors, transparent with background seen shining through, backlit and everything filled with light. Dazzling sunbeams in a snowy white blinding of the eyes. We cannot see we are filled with God because we are filled with a concept of God. World crashes into my small consciousness and reflected out again in a micro imploding ‘big bang’… oneness of time and space so utterly present the past tense has disappeared completely, taking the future with it.

Was the ‘Big Bang’ of all big bangs in fact caused by another big bang before that? And so on, and so on; big bangs inside other big bangs, consecutively reducing, smaller and smaller like Petrushka dolls fit inside one another until we reach ‘the nothing’? Is it that the origin of cause/effect stretches back so far, everything falls into the vacuum caused by it not being there during the time taken to find a good answer to the question? Or I could say, and it seems reasonable to me, the origin of it was/is neither existence, nor non-existence, the matrix – the quality of darkness because there is no light of sensory perception.

Here in India, to cut a very long story short, Brahman (God) is the original cause and the world we see around us is the effect. It leaves me thinking if there’s a context wherein I find myself  – yes or no. Without the cause, the effect no longer exists. Everything is real when seen with Brahman but false when seen independent of Brahman. Those of us who are unable to grasp the meaning of Brahman are living in illusion māya. It says a lot, really, about the way things are, these days of illusion, delusion and a glitzy casino owner for President…

Header image: painting by Jill Lewis

 

night and day

Posted on by

9

img_0125bPOSTCARD #232: New Delhi: Awareness expands to include landscapes of President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s hate/fear, bully/victim and finding the middle ground in these conditions of duality is not an option these days, it’s absolutely necessary. Urgency of the imperative; ‘I’ have to find a place of equanimity here; mindfulness is a requirement, awareness rather than ignorance (ignoring). I am aware of the ‘me’ I live with; the tug-and-pull, push-and-shove… me as the observer of the ‘me’ I think I am, as revealed when I’m drawn towards beautiful objects placed to catch my attention or to repulse me; encountering obstacles, uncomfortable circumstances and giving way to situations, which I recognize as simply aspects of the human condition. I am that which is observing the thoughts of ‘me’, cool and at ease. I listen rather than just hear. I watch rather than see. I think rather than have thoughts – as more and more of us are doing nowadays, I am consciously engaged, night and day, in the revelation of it.

The everyday ordinary human experience – no more, no less, but said with compassion for those trapped in extreme difficulty and adversity hard to believe. Every aspect of the human experience examined and identified by the Buddha two thousand five hundred years ago and passed down through the generations as the Teaching on the Eight Worldly Dhammas we have today. The constantly changing forms of: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disgrace.

All that I love and all that I hate become an insatiable craving for gratification deemed to be rightfully ‘mine’ in view of the suffering endured to get here – then it changes again, and we are held in the never-ending cycle of rebirth, of grasping for that we cannot quite reach; the same Teaching can be applied today as it was in historical times; the structure of the condition as disease, diagnosis, cure and treatment. Awareness of the suffering inherent in the human state that we are all subject to; compassion for those in fierce denial of lies and fabrications created by perceived enemies, stonewalling obstructionists built into the social cultural default, all the scientists and psychologist witchdoctors who manipulate conscious experience to fit with consensus reality. Embracing also all of us who are trapped in this illusion, convinced that it’s real.

Truth hidden in plain sight, layers of disinformation; genuine plans for world peace prevented by tactics of endless war. The containment of wealth, greed, hatred and delusion. Cool calm acceptance and understanding of this protective barrier – not a passive allowing, more a patient endurance (khanti). Seeing through their constructed facades of truth as if it were exposed for all to see. It’s enough to register the fact that this is ‘seen’, and publish articles so others can free themselves from conditions of adversity. It’s all we can do at this time. It’s enough to know we are not caught by the hook of negativity and confused misunderstanding, or perversely immersed in the proliferation of not having things the way we would like them to be – rather than that, seeking freedom from all unwholesome states of mind.

Gain/loss, status/disgrace, censure/praise, pleasure/pain: these conditions among human beings are inconstant, impermanent, subject to change. Knowing this, the wise person, mindful, ponders these changing conditions. Desirable things don’t charm the mind, undesirable ones bring no resistance. His [or her] welcoming and rebelling are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, he [or she] discerns rightly, has gone, beyond becoming, to the Further Shore.

AN 8.6 Lokavipatti Sutta: The Failings of the World

Thanks to Jill Shepherd for the Sutta reference

astonishment

Posted on by

34

pigeons3bPOSTCARD #231: New Delhi: Trumpets blare, the sharp impact of it hits immediately, a cloud of birds fly up in a flutter of uncertainty. Trees splash outwards in branches, twigs, leaves, blossom and seed. Astonishment… how could this have happened? Eyes open wider and wider, like a camera aperture opening so far it exceeds structural integrity, implodes, buildings collapse in controlled demolition made to seem like a natural disaster, the ground beneath us opens up in sinkholes. Words explode into fragments of meaning… thus, the un-expect-ed-ness of this unnerving turn of events.

Curtains open on the First Act. Enter, stage right, the President of the Disunited States, Hollywood version of narcissistic Third World dictator, well-dressed gangster with his carefully balanced coiffure and infrastructure of war, catastrophe, greed, hatred and delusion – a victorious returning to power, with paid-for breathless wave of applause. Financial Advisors grab all the wealth stolen by the Bank (who knows, maybe it’s the same family), memories of Geo Dubbya, the fall of the twin towers, the war in Iraq and weapons of mass distraction. Fear, lies and distrust in Government. How can I find stability in all this, how to let go of this dark uncertainty?

But I understand how everything fits together today up here on the roof terrace with flowering plants in the sunshine, birdsong and a clear blue sky. I can see the compelling, driven-greed in the world. I can see how to be free of it too. People are caught unknowingly in all kinds of habitual, seek/find instant gratification. Everything, everywhere, consumerism, schooling, television, the media encourages this hunger that doesn’t lead to satisfaction but to an even sharper edge to appetite. These are the ways of the enemy.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron” [H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920]

_________________________

Photo by Melinda [melindaruck.com]

artifact

Posted on by

27

createimageprop-aspxPOSTCARD #230: New Delhi: From somewhere deep in Antiquity (2nd-1st century BC) the Indo-Greek created a likeness of the Buddha saying, okay, this is who he was, and this is what he was like. Before that there was nothing; a stupa marked a place where he had been and what he had said there, but no actual identity, no story of how it began, what the cause of it was – always the echo of ‘and what was the cause of that?’ (repeated endlessly) prevented the writer from saying, ‘it was something like this, you know?’ because, even before it begins, the story requires the listener to gently comply with the constraints of a starting point… “Once upon a time” (and this is as good a place to begin as any), so we fall into the story, become the story – we believe in the story because we are ‘the story’, we are ‘personified’, we are assimilated, a simulation, without even thinking about it.

Immersed in the commonly held belief in personification (‘I’ have to believe in it to get it to work), it seems to me that even God is a personification, I believe, I believe in “It”. The model of ‘the creator’ applied in multiple forms (everything is invented), based on a frame of reference inherited from artisans in generations past who built it, shaped it, fashioned it based on an earlier model they’d had then, dating back to well-before-that-time and everything so distant that even the words seem to get smaller and smaller in a perspective vanishing point location, and this, we can say, was the point where it disappeared completely.

Then, from a faraway place beyond the place where it was last ‘seen’, somehow brought back across the centuries into the bright light of modern times, eyes blinking in the dazzled befuddlement of it; historical and ancient – the meaning contained in words cloned from an ancient artifact, cloaked in strangeness, dynamic and eloquent.

134003511_14241612739041nThen examined, agreed-upon, regarded-as, and said-to-be the original, correct, true and embedded thus: the wisdom of the East meets the modern Western world. Immediately becomes ‘history’ and seen to be an accurate rendering, handed down from mother to daughter, father to son, identical to, or as near-to-as-possible the same as it was then and always had been since as long ago as anyone can remember (by word of mouth) the actual archetype.

So immensely detailed and complex that, even today, it is impossible to engage in any kind of discussion about anything, without the correct intermediary being present (or, if not, sent for), the structure of class/caste/social behavior being as it is; an unquestionable system of who does what, where, when, why and with whom, and how it’s all being done is supervised by somebody wearing a suit, or a long-sleeved shirt and shiny shoes, seated on a chair (while everyone else is standing), and he’s carefully copying everything down in a notebook.

No beginning, no end… the skill was, and always had been, to discover the answer formed as a question, and nobody thought it was necessary to create a likeness, besides, what’d he look like? There was nothing to go on…

Upper image: painting by Jill Lewis
Lower image: photo taken on Feb. 17, 2015 shows a Buddha statue on display at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, Afghanistan. The museum, founded in 1919, has survived three decades of war and now opens to the public after refurbishing. (Xinhua/Ahmad Massoud)

light in the darkness

Posted on by

19

img_0050POSTCARD #229: New Delhi: The photo on the left is from our Thai social network, continuing sad imagery mourning the death of the King. The allegory of light in the darkness is significant in many countries in the world. Here in India at this time of year there’s the festival of Diwali – the date is calculated according to the position of the moon and the Hindu lunar calendar. This year (2016) Diwali occurs on 30 October, one day before Halloween on 31 October which would have had the same lunar date in ancient times.

The Diwali festival is observed by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, celebrating the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, knowledge over ignorance and hope over despair. In the days prior to the festival, it is traditional for business contracts to be completed, homes to be cleaned and anything unfinished must be brought to a satisfactory close.

The Halloween festival in 21st century Western society marks this lunar event with a playful portrayal of the spirits of darkness and evil coming back to life. At a glance, it would seem to be the opposite of the Diwali festival. Halloween is about dressing up like the dead who wander the streets, knocking on doors and seeking hospitality from the living. Whereas, Diwali is about lighting up your home with candles, color and brightness, exchanging gifts, wearing new clothes and receiving guests.

In both cases, however there is this imagery of a light in the darkness. For the Halloween festival (Celtic Samhain), the dead emerge from darkness into the light and remain here for 24 hours then disappear, a time of great significance in pagan religions of the West. Similar mythology for Diwali surrounding Amāvāsyā, and the dark moon lunar phase, the period when the moon is invisible against the backdrop of the Sun in the sky.

Diwali and Halloween both take place on a ‘cross-quarter day’, the halfway point between a solstice and equinox – a time of seasonal change marked by the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year. For the ancients in both East and West, the invisible moon became part of a spiritual teaching; the unity of opposites, life and death, and why things are the way they are. Spirits were (are?) a tangible presence, benign or hostile, and gather at this time of year when food and drink are shared among the living and offered as a gesture of appeasement for the dead.

Here in New Delhi on Diwali night, people light up diyas (lamps and candles) inside and outside their home, and participate in family puja (prayers). There are also huge firework displays, which recall the celebrations believed to have taken place in the legend of Lord Rama and his wife Sita returning to their kingdom in northern India after defeating the demon king Ravanna in 15th century BC.

Significant also for all Thais, although Diwali is not celebrated there, this lunar event marks the passing away of the much loved monarch Bhumibol Adulyadej at the age of 88, the world’s longest-serving head of state and the longest-reigning monarch in Thai history, serving for 70 years, 126 days.

———————–

silence

Posted on by

29

img_0042cPOSTCARD #228: New Delhi: I have developed prehensile palms and soles of feet to walk like a gecko upside down on the ceiling. Vertigo of spiral staircase (going up is easier than coming down), and up to the room at the top of the stairs where I’ve put into action a plan, carefully considered all through these months since February. This will be my quiet place, doorway open to the sunlit terrace, the roof is the sky, birds fly through, inhabit my world.

Climbing down again and up with more boxes and bags, an electric kettle, cups and teaspoons. Playing a sound track on speakers, it sounds so different here, in the new acoustics. Sit in the doorway to listen, intervals of birdsong, voices of neighbours below in their homes, windows open to the world we all are contained in. Wash floor, wipe windows, boxes of acryllic paint, Cadmium Red, Bleached Titanium.

I shall be an Easel Painter, energised by how much the weather has changed here, suddenly it’s cool like an English summer. Air con shut down, ceiling fans switched off, and windows open wide. The hearing mechanism dulled by the usual hum and click of background noise 24/7 we live with in order to have our artificial temperature. But the hot season is over, ears strain to receive the sound of these machines, and it’s not there… only this shocking and shocked silence.

Surprised how everything that’s outside the dwelling comes inside; in through the windows, the doors and apertures of the skull, into our rooms and down through our corridors, into our corners, arriving in these enclosed spaces where only the Hoover has recharged the air these months of heat. A cool breeze moves the curtains as if an unseen presence just passed by.

Somebody’s ring tone somewhere; pause… voice says hello? Dialogue in a language I don’t know – the quietness of not having to be being pulled into it. Stillness of mind, ease of breath, calm and sitting on floor cushion with folded legs

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” [Virginia Woolf, The Waves]

 

today is every day

Posted on by

23

img_0072bPOSTCARD #225: New Delhi: All these highways, routes, directions connected end-to-end. My itinerary links up in a network that reaches all parts and locations in time and space, everywhere in the world – no end, no beginning. Here-and-now awareness, or wandering in fabricated thought, a game of hide-and-seek where the flip-side of concealment is revelation and returning to the familiarity of present time, it becomes ‘now’ again.

Or I’m thinking about the concept of ‘now’ seated here in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, looking out my window at a landscape of connecting routes flashing by, and engine noise, vibration, bumps and jolts of road surface. Or trying to get emails on my phone but there’s no Internet right now. Try again later… where are we now? Glance at the taxi’s GPS, our point of present location on the map moving in tiny increments across the screen.

Time divided, subdivided and sliced into multi-channel TV programs, compartmentalized, locked down tight – the totality of it impossible to define. The impossibility of finding a way out of constructs framed in words: who, what, where, when, and why. Language gives everything names, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… different ways of describing present time. It’s always today, no matter if I call it yesterday, tomorrow or next week – today is every day. And even if I’m living in a make-believe world where it’s always ‘somewhere else’, all of that is included in present time too, ‘today’ occurring forever and always in rotations of the planet Earth. More than 1000 miles per hour of yesterdays, todays and tomorrows experienced in countless generations of endless time.

The illusion of solidity and grounded-ness created in awareness, the conscious state experienced in a soft body-mind organism that can process data. The feeling of I, me, and my, is the ‘I’ of everything that has ever been. A connectedness with all that is outside and all that is inside. A ‘world’ shared with all living beings as if it were a meal for a great number of guests at a huge table. Talking about all that we all love and all that we hate. All they create, all they destroy and all the words of politicians vanish into thin air, all conflicts are resolved eventually and it’s our mutuality, the fundamental sense of the feel of the air. Just holding in mind the scale of how vast this kind of love might possibly be… is enough to begin to know it.

Looking back again at my screen, still no Internet – a spinning cursor in a frozen background space, the unstated presence, the ‘is-ness’. An easefulness spreading through the face, the scalp, the head, the neck, shoulders and arms. A whole-body experience contained in this small space; metal, plastic, electric-spark-gasoline-fueled internal-combustion engine on rubber wheels, and blur of unseen things in window light passing through the interior of the taxi, small red light showing the fare so far. Time to pause, take a deep breath in, filling the chest cavity from top to bottom, then the long breath out, unfolding like a long ribbon of road in a landscape, reaching out there to a vanishing point on the horizon.

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” [Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie]

Note: excerpts from Eclipse by Pink Floyd

the world disappears

Posted on by

18

img_0019POSTCARD #224: New Delhi: Learning how to sleep without the pain meds and all those chemicals that used to help me so much before, but I’m just left there thinking about things in the darkness. Stories come and go, pondering over this and that, and the awareness of being caught up in the thinking thing gets included in the wandering. Searching for a way out, but if I think about how to stop thinking, the mind gets busy looking for a solution; finding something and comparing it with other reasons why I can’t stop thinking. Thinking has its own momentum, takes time for it to slow down, there’s the opportunity to allow it all to fizzle out. Everything evaporates for a moment.

In that instant there’s a no-thinking state, a great space opens up – an awareness of being aware. Silence and emptiness, held on pause. Then, somewhere on a different screen, the mind is alerted, there’s the desire to be actively thinking again, and an invitation to be engaged with it, but that fizzles out too. “Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”*

The outbreath from the nostrils, so faint and light, stirs only the tiniest thing; the movement of a single strand of hair could wake me. No other sensory input the mind needs to be engaged with, no sense object activates the chain of events and all that remains is the mind’s cognitive function. A curiosity about this stirs; ‘self’ is a sensory experience. The experiencer is an experience – there is only experiencing.

Another wave of thoughts comes rushing in, stays for a moment and goes out again. I see it as if there’s an watcher seeing it from some hidden place, aware of it. Then the watcher disappears and it seems like only the awareness itself is left there. Then the awareness disappears and in its place, a sequence of half-seen obscure mental events, each one linking with the next. Some time later sleep comes and the whole world disappears.

‘The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.’ [R. D. Laing]

————————-
Photo: Dhammakaya monk collecting alms by boat.
*Excerpt from Four Quartets T. S. Eliot
This post was rewritten from earlier posts

 

first light

Posted on by

30

img_3224bPOSTCARD #223: New Delhi: Awake at 3.30 am here in our place next to the park, soft warm air oxygenated by trees, and the silence of birds asleep among the branches. Then breakfast with Jiab who is leaving on an early flight to Odisha, ceiling fans, coffee and bagels in the electric light of night, darkness filling the wide-open windows facing the park. Mosquito mesh screens are all there is to prevent the outside world from entering the inside world where we are engaged in the normal breakfasting activity. It’s as if it were a dream, ‘clink’ of knife on plate, coffee spoon in cup… ‘ting’.

In a huge noise of arrival, the taxi is suddenly here; a great blaze of color and light. Back door unhinges, bags inside, bye-bye, door slam, sound of engine and Jiab is gone into the blackness… sound receding and I’m left alone to contemplate the silence.

Feeling more at ease these days, due to improved pain meds, able to move with some comfort but getting up and sitting down again is a problem so I stay in the same position pretty much, and think about what I’m going to do before doing it.

I return to the breakfast table, fall into a kind of passive reflective awareness of the body and its fractured structure. The default is to equate blackness with negativity, pain with guilt – but watching the breath entering and leaving, I find I can be focused quite easily on the alarming ‘clunk’ sound of bone halfway through the in-breath as the broken ribs adjust with the swelling of lungs… slowly coming to terms with the small panic that arises sometimes.

The X-ray clearly showed two ribs broken and dislocated, frightening enough and yet a comfort to know the reason for the disquiet – the things-not-being-quite-right feeling. Human beings are such enduringly fragile creatures, held together with sinews joining muscle to bone that just calcifies and mends itself. The contemplation of it fits with everything I’ve come to accept here, resident in Asia more than thirty years – innovative ideas held together with bamboo, string and rubber bands. Nothing is permanent, exists for as long as needed then relinquished and gone…

The ghosts that rise out of the night are always the crows, unseen and heard before first light – they must have night vision – fearsome unloved creatures present in the last vestiges of night. For this short time, the crows own the world, and then light breaks through. A few twitters and it comes into consciousness like a wave floods everything. A birdsong extravaganza, surfing on the edge of dawn – the totality of it may be a sound-realm on a frequency only birds are aware of.

A few hours later, ‘ping’ a text message from Jiab in Odisha, nearly a thousand miles away. Daylight is established and it is undeniably day. Everything that went before is forgotten.

“Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.” [Martin Heidegger]

————————-