cruel pillows [part two]

Posted on February 6, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Delhi: You may know already about my permanent headache caused by PHN on right side of the head and I’m a Buddhist so I can’t appear to be too grouchy about it. I can walk around gently balacing this headache, do my shopping and as long as things are simple and easy, I’m okay. I’ve been researching the kinds of pillows available in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It’s an on-going search because of my disturbed sleep at night. And it’s not easy in Chiang Mai a country town, where the staff are trained to smile, look nice and be elegant, but they don’t actually know anything about the product: I want to buy the softest pillow you have please?.

The sales girl shows me a pillow and poses beside it as I give it a little squeeze with my hand and she smiles. It’s not soft enough, try the next one, squeeze it, and sales girl, elegant, posing gives me a little smile again and I’m beginning to feel, get me out of here, there’s a headache coming on. I try every pillow they have in the shop and the sales girl is tiring of the instant smile when I squeeze; but I buy one because she was so good at posing beside the product. Get back and crash out with a bad headache. My side of the bed is full of pillows tried, discarded, there’s no space for any more.

Eventually I find one in Delhi and this pillow is so good! I take it with me everywhere; a totally soft pillow placed in my suitcase on top of everything. It’s also a good way of holding a whole lot of loose items tight in an oversized bag because the pillow expands into all the corners when you squeeze it in and zip up the bag tight. So, fling in loose items like pens, cables, adaptor plugs, knowing that the expanded pillow will hold everything in place and get to the other end, take out the pillow and everything’s like a screen-shot of how it was when you were packing at the last minute.

So I took it with me to Switzerland then all around the UK and back to Bangkok. One morning, early, Jiab puts the pillow into the washing machine. I see my pillow pegged out there on the washing line and I’m in a state of shock! Yes, she says, pillows can be put in the washing machine and I have to go out to look at it a few times hanging there in the hot sun, but it it wouldn’t dry out enough so I had to improvise something else that night and was tossing and turning for hours… cruel pillows. It was dry by the end of the next day but when I tried it that night, it was lumpy.

So I found another one in India, a crafty- artisan place, wild cotton filled fragrant pillow, I was assured. I tried it one night and it was great, so good to rest the head and feel normal. Then a couple of days later, I went for an afternoon nap – the headache is always better when it gets laid down. And, lying on my side with ear planted deep into the soft cotton, I was just drifting off into sleep when I hear something moving inside the pillow! An insect? A tiny lizard? Something struggling to get out from the weight of my head for some reason. The thing is you get insects and ‘things’ in the strangest places here, and not impossible that, when the pillow was being filled maybe some cotton-habitat creature ended up in there. So I opened it up, scissors at the stitching at one end. Spread everything out on the floor. No insect, no small creature… maybe it scuttled away unnoticed, aha! freedom, didn’t see it, but I did find some leaves and a bit of a small branch. Well, getting that all cleaned out and stuffed back in again was not easy and there was quite a bit left over. Never mind, stitched it up again with needle and thread, Then the final fluffs of cotton removed and got it back into its pillow case, slightly slimmer and looser, slowly lowered my head on it and it was wonderful, even better than before. So good!

I’ve suggested to Jiab we open up all the hard pillows in my collection and take out some of stuffing but so-far she’s unconvinced…

cruel pillows [part one]

Posted on February 4, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: DELHI: I just remembered this expression: “a bull with a headache.” It comes from Scotland, where large Men drink whisky all night, then one staggers through to the breakfast room in the morning and is demonstrably angry with everything, then one goes off to work in the wild, wet, wooly Northern landscapes of my distant memory.

Now I live in Asia which is really nice, gentle and warm and I’m a Buddhist and all is well in my world, except I’ve got a headache – all the time. A Buddhist with a headache? What to do, I have wondered many times. For me it’s an opportunity to be conscious and aware of what I’m doing all the time, because the headache is likely to get bad at any time. And I’ve thought too about what we’re doing here in the blogging world… our consciousness/awareness of our ‘world’, in a sense, is what we’re writing about, really, one way or another. Even if a lot of space may be taken up with trying to express how we get to that point. Even so, it’s an all-inclusive thing, isn’t it? And sometimes what we write is not as important as the spaces left where there’s nothing written. No point in asking why the ‘world’ should be (or shouldn’t be) like this. Or even try to identify it and analyze it – as you’ll see if you keep reading this – I’m just trying to make friends with my headache, in a round-about way, not too direct… see how that goes. I’m not expecting it ‘to be’ anything, at times I try to anticipate what it’s likely to do next, wondering how it’s getting on.

The headache arrived last September as a result of shingles on the right side of the head, here’s the link: PHN, but it might give you a headache reading about that, so why don’t I just introduce you to the headache itself? Think of a motorbike helmet that holds your head tightly, a snug fit … that’s it. Now there’s this cloud of intense feeling that, as yet, doesn’t have a name, it’s just energy. As long as it remains anonymous, things are okay – reasonably okay, the only thing is that what you have is this hair-trigger-sawn-off-shotgun-crash-helmet of a headache, minding its own business and nobody’d even know it was there.

So, the lesson is, be careful about what you think! Now, in some foolish un-mindful moment, I might say to myself: Do I have a headache? I can’t feel it now… and BOOM it demolishes my head. So naturally I get to know not to do that, not to ‘name’ it, identify it, or try to make it into something. And, important, I have to learn about this mechanism that can be held in the default STOP position. It’s the: please-don’t-go-there thought; that split-second, small, even tiny, space before the thinking process is engaged and what was really, absolutely, going to happen, by some miracle, doesn’t.

It cannot be stopped sometimes, of course, and you find that the forewarned intuitive snap feeling it’s about to happen means it just happens anyway and there’s devastation all around as you reach for the meds that are opiates anyway so you’re kinda hovering on the edge of a Edgar Allan Poe nightmare most of the time when you overdose on them.

This is how it is, predictably unpredictable so you have to be ready for it to happen any time. If it takes place at night, probably the best way of explaining the feeling of it, when dosed up to the eyeballs with sleeping pills, but still the headache remains and you’re awake for hours, it’s this: pillows appear cruel – have you ever thought of pillows being cruel? Probably not, well I know everything there is to know about pillows, in my research since this headache came to stay with me last September. Really, what I don’t know about pillows is just not worth knowing.

But that’s a whole different story…. [See: part two]

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About this picture: This is the missing head, a screenshot taken from a YouTube video, which shows the head briefly at the end of the clip: https://youtu.be/MjRf-b8Ezis

The whole story is, it’s an ancient Buddhist sculpture, which at the time of the top photo, was at the Beijing World Art Museum and being made ready to be sent to Kaohsiung in Taiwan where it will be reunited with its head.

Its head was stolen in 1996 from the Youju Temple in Hebei Province. The sculpture, made of white marble, is around 1,400 years old. The body is 1.59 meters tall. The head was obtained and offered by a private collector in 2014. Repairs will be made before it is put on public display in 2016. Twenty years after it was removed. The museum has selected another 77 relics for the exhibition in Taiwan.

The Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council approved the body be sent to Kaohsiung for a three-month Buddhist Cultural Relic Exhibition jointly held by the administration and the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Memorial Hall, before the complete statue is sent back to Hebei. It symbolizes the possible reunification of Taiwan with China.
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becoming

Posted on January 30, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: DELHI: I have this headache that lives with me now; wake up in the morning and it’s there… dreamy half-formed images like wings of birds fluttering around in front of the headache then I see it’s becoming something and try to correct it so there’s no ‘becoming’. As soon as I do that, there’s no headache – wonderful except, I fall asleep again; the mind assumes, since there’s no becoming, no subject is focused upon, no actual thing (nothing) happening, this must mean sleep; okay, goodnight. Zzzzz….

Wake up again, and stumble out of bed, the whirr and buzz of the mechanism of headache that still hasn’t managed to become anything yet is taken into the hot shower. Then dressed in scarf and warm clothing because it’s cold here in North India this time of year. Downstairs from the third floor holding on to the hand-rail in an almost spiral staircase makes you dizzy to look at it and balancing the head as best as possible in a stable position because now the headache has become a snooker ball rolling around and crashing into the walls inside a sphere at the top of the vertebral column.

Stone steps with shiny-soled slippers that slip. Spinning around, everywhere in the mind thoughts arise; there’s always a subject searching for an opportunity to ‘become’ something. Is this what holds beings in the cycles of rebirth? Curious idea; a possibility… so it must be to do with non-becoming – allowing it all to ‘become’ without anyone ‘becoming’ it. Let’s see, how does that work? Stop here for a moment and think about this.

Am I down yet? Which floor am I on now? Having to be careful about not slipping, how many landings are there? I’m losing my sense of direction. But this idea gets my attention: active thought arises from somewhere in the midst of a great cloud of inactive thought. I can decide to not-become a thought just allow it to ‘become’ by itself.

So it’s possible to be focused on two parts of a thought at the same time… there’s a kind of transparency about it, a ‘becoming’ but no one who ‘becomes’. There’s no become-ee; a headache but no ‘headache-ee’ – it doesn’t belong to ‘me’. There’s awareness of the headache, but no awareness of to whom it is happening, there must be a larger awareness that includes this – an awareness of one thought that includes awareness of another. There’s something that allows me to consider this; I’m seeing it from somewhere else.

Yes this must be it, I’m at the ground floor now, and these stairs are difficult I get lost in them every time – don’t know if I’m going up or down. The mind searches for this awareness in some place completely unknown. Where is it? The space that’s unattached: the space-in-between. This takes me to another awareness that’s quite distant from the headache. It’s like it’s happening somewhere far away.

The mind is the canvas on which our thoughts are projected and is part of consciousness. Our body is a holographic projection of our consciousness. [B. M. Hegde, cardiologist and former Vice-Chancellor Manipal University]
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Source for header picture. Note: this was developed from an earlier past titled ‘non-becoming‘. the structure of it is almost exactly the same, only difference is I had no headache in those days. So I was inspired to apply the same strategy in dealing with the headache I have now and it’s been quite succesful.

the buddha today

Posted on January 28, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: The images of Gautama the Buddha we have today portray him as a person from the educated class, someone we might recognize as not unlike many of us who have the ability to see ordinary life at a distance, without any immediate financial concern about things in general because we live in a society that takes care of itself (as it was for Gautama before he left the palace). Or maybe we’re desperadoes, adventurers with a special genius and exceptional skill and energy that creates equanimity in times of brinkmanship and it’s the sheer confidence in our ability that allows us to see this truth; the suffering of the ordinary worldling is caused by wanting things to be different from (other than) what they are, and never managing to reach the desired state.

There is another a form of Buddhism that reaches the ordinary people of India through the Ambedkar conversion from the socially oppressed Dalit caste to Buddhist, in the hope of a better life. This has become a political issue and some would say the Buddha was an activist attempting to create social change – I think most would agree that, sadly the politics of the situation has confused the Buddha’s original teaching. The Ambedkar Buddhists are the fifth largest religion in India. The Dalit Buddhists I have met, those with university degrees at doctorate level, are actively searching for a way of integrating those parts of the Buddha’s original teaching.

In the West, people have to structure their lives around employment. Their innate ability to be happy is exploited by commercial strategies and a fleeting, temporary happiness has come to be built-in to the system. People can’t escape from that unless they step out of the social momentum they’re in and this means there’s the risk of losing everything. So they’re trapped in the system.

As Pankaj Mishra says: “Buddhism has always attracted the elite of whatever society it has traveled to, partly because you need to have traveled through a certain experience of materialism in order to arrive at the sense that there is something problematic about desire and longing, how they don’t lead to happiness, and more often than not lead to unhappiness. If you are still struggling to fulfill your fantasies of wealth, power, status, Buddhism is less likely to appeal to you.” [‘An End to Suffering’ Pankaj Mishra‘]

Maybe we are seeing some similarities here reading this while stretched out on the sofa with an iPad at this very moment, giving some thought to the situation of Gautama leaving his comfortable home and stepping into the unknown, in search of a spiritual life. In Thailand there’s the option of living in the monastery for a period of time in order to follow the spiritual path. In fact you can spend your whole life there. This kind of choice is held in high regard by Thai society. In the West we are in one way or another committed to our earning capacity. There is virtually no spiritual option of this kind in the system – other than self-study and the support from nearby Buddhist monasteries. A Google search for Theravada monasteries in USA and other parts of the world will explain that anyone is welcome to share in the one meal of the day, free of charge, the activities, Dhamma talks in the monastery and accommodation can be arranged.

“You should live as islands unto yourselves, being your own refuge, seeking no other refuge; with the dharma as an island, with the dharma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.” [selected from the Buddha’s final words]

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Note: some parts of an earlier post included here: https://dhammafootsteps.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/the-way-out/

a sense of sky

Posted on January 19, 2016 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: There’s a sense of sky, thoughts like clouds drifting through the vast space in the head… but I really don’t want to call it anything; giving things names gives them an identity and what happens next is, I become the ‘happy’ feeling. Feeling “happy” creates a ‘self’ where there wasn’t one before – “I” want to be happy, and don’t want to be ‘sad’, or unhappy. So maybe everything was okay before that ‘happy’ word arrived.

Something deeply understood by every human being in the world is the thought: ‘I am the only one that’s ‘me’, somehow ignoring the overwhelming fact that 7 billion people feel the same way. These days I’m returning to my old notebooks written when I was first discovering Buddhism, it’s this sudden PHN physical condition that’s throwing things all over the place and I need to remember how it all began. It really feels like the best thing to do is return the focus to that sense of sky, nothingness, no-thingness, and anatta, ‘no-self’, nobody at home…

How does it work? For me now, ‘no-self’ describes it well; it’s all just an operating system, same as Windows 10, Mac OS X El Capitain, and a determined and purposeful search to find out exactly where and how this ‘no-self’ exists will yield nothing, because “non self” doesn’t substantially exist – there isn’t any ‘thingness’ about non-self. No substance to it. In fact, ‘no-self’ is just another way of saying nothing substantially exists anywhere. There’s a wonderful fragility, a transparency about the world.

So the Buddha discovered this by way of his own research, 2500 years before Quantum physicists started to come up with empirical evidence that nothing substantially exists. Same thing in so many words. I started to investigate this further, because the question is, if there is no “self”, who or what “sees” there is no “self”? It’s an interesting direction the Dhamma takes that seems to hold my attention. I asked a monk about it in Thailand: ‘If everything without exception is “non self” including the “I” that’s investigating this, then who or what is there to see it’s non self… where does it all lead to? Without hesitation the monk just looked at me calmly and said “enlightenment.” That kinda stopped the conversation for a while …

The process of conceptualising is just a process – no person there doing it. just a process of how one thing is naturally linked to the next thing it’s most likely to link with, and that in turn linked to the next and it goes around like a wheel turning; the extreme point is suffering and unknowing (ignorance: the act of ignoring) and continues on from there following links that the Buddha showed us how to see. It can happen in a millisecond or in a slightly longer extended time… and that’s when we see it. There is a way out, of course, and that happens around steps 6,7 & 8 in the 12 step cycle. I’m not going to talk about that specifically here, check out the link below. So the main thing is all of these cycles, all these other behaviours that go on in life, have no ‘self’ in the background somehow pulling the strings. I find that remembering this helps me in dealing with pain; the pain is not happening to ‘me’ – there is no ‘me’ it’s happening to… just a series of processes. I allow it to pass, in the same way as ‘it’ is raining, wait for it to end… all things do.

“When Hanshan got up from his seat and walked around, he did not see things in motion. When he opened the window blind, suddenly a wind blew the trees in the yard, and the leaves flew all over the sky. However, he did not see any signs of motion. He understood what the text spoke of as, “Streams and rivers run into the ocean and yet there is no flowing.” [Han-shan Te-Ching (1546 – 1623)]

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Note: The source of the Han-Shan Te-Ching quote is the Mindfulbalance blog, post titled: Present in the midst of change. I’m grateful to the researcher for finding this wonderful group of words.
For the cycles of causality follow this link to the Buddha’s teaching on Dependent Origination (Paticcsammupada)

high altitude pain

Posted on January 15, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #187: Bangkok/Delhi flight: The journey is by way of a series of crowded corridors connected like tubes in a telescope, one inside the other, becoming smaller and smaller, reduced to squeeze us into the self construct; the way we are and the lifetimes lived with it. The ‘me’ in the body, the voice in my head, the narrator telling the story. This is how it is… and already there’s a sense of distance from the world (‘this’ was). Keep moving, we pass through security as if it were the eyepiece of the telescope, examined through a lens; cameras watch us standing in line. We are subject to causes and conditions… shoes off, gentlemen remove belt, anything in your pockets Sir? Take off watch please. Enter the X-ray cubicle, stand with legs apart, arms extended, wind blows clothes aside and hair ruffled. I’m suddenly aware the viewer behind the lens can see everything underneath clothing. Shoes on, thread belt through loops, pick up watch and things. Collect computer from tray put it back inside bag and get organised. Step out of there, aware, balanced, easy breathing and it’s okay right now (except piercing high frequency air-conditioning sound, waiting for pain to arrive but it doesn’t come), sensory mechanisms function without my involvement. Continue with the slow foot shuffle (high pitched voices, mysterious kerfuffle), but we’re all moving along here. I’m like an antenna receiving data; seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognitive functioning receptor, waiting for things to happen.

Hand passport to officer, look at the camera, facial recognition, the self I inhabit… this is who I ‘am’ (the same as everyone else ‘is’). The officer stamps twice, thump… thump (the sound of it), walk through and out to the duty-free extravaganza (piercing light enters neural pathways), suddenly blinded for a moment in the reflected glow of gold watches, jewelry, the made-up lips and eyes in vivid, max-pixel pictures, videos of popular celebrities, cosmetic dentistry, facial alterations, images in unflawed focus and good-looking lighting; commonplace works of art, masterpieces of trivialities. I could use the television analogy; I’m watching this channel and all the other people are watching their channels – and if there were separate channels for every single being in the world, that would be the correct analogy.

We’re in another tunnel sloping downwards, becoming smaller at the end where painted ladies wait, show me where I have to go; turn right into an even smaller tube with seats on either side of a corridor, and I’m in my numbered seat. It’s made to measure, low ceiling, knees touch the seat in front, elbows touching the guy next to me, hairy arms. It’s like being on a bus at night, except less space. No view from the window, can see only the blank video screen at eye level, 18 inches in front of me… everything is too near and a feeling of blackness. Try to read my book on the Kindle but the words appear strange, three-dimensional, as if embossed on the screen, the lines of text are not straight; flowing in a gentle curve. Then I feel the pain behind my right eye like a sharp steel knife entering my head, and pushed right up to the hilt. Gasp! The painted ladies bring me a plastic glass of water. Searching in my pockets for the meds…the huge pain has reached its max, the steel blade withdraws; a devastation of everything, catastrophic, frantic looking for something to hold on to, or let go of, and it all tips over like a building falls on its face in slow motion, desolation, wreckage and some relief as I see it’s not happening to ‘me’ – it’s not ‘my’ pain, too big for that, much too big. It’s the force of pain on its own, like the huge wind blows, the vast rain falls, a storm at sea. Swallow two capsules, lie back, close my eyes and the curve I was seeing earlier becomes the curve of a thick dark smoke rising up from my head, swirling up through the paper-thin structure of the plane, the sky above and space all around.

Relaxed with the seat back, pain gone and all that remains is the sound of the engines at 600 mph and altitude 38,000 feet. The mind makes a ‘story’ out of it, a stretched sense of reality that includes the video I’m watching in the darkness. Memory allows all kinds of out-of-context events to be there and acceptably part of it.

Landing, bump… bump, long lumpy runway to get to the airport buildings, then the clamber and struggle for overhead baggage, push, shove. Intrude, squeeze as they do here, full body contact with total strangers, and out into a tunnel again, more tunnels becoming wider, wider then a corridor and out onto the miles of ochre coloured carpet with patterns of planets and stars. High speed moving walkways and we’re in India.

“God is a mythical word, a mumbo-jumbo word that is the invention of the priesthood. Actually, to ask whether God exists is absurd. God is existence, the very isness. When we say God exists we create something out of the word God, then God becomes a thing. But God is not a thing, nor is God a person, he is pure existence. The word is misleading because the word personifies. It is better to use the word existence. The totality of existence is God.” [Osho]

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Photo: Free internet image
Quote: Source, God is Existence itself – Osho

evening flight

Posted on October 24, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #159: Bangkok/New Delhi flight: My frequent flyer card gets me an upgrade thus I carry my pain with mindfulness and step behind the curtain folds where the grass is always greener. Glasses of champage 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… 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.

Every day and each circumstance is an opportunity for acceptance. 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 in custom-made denim jeans 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 harrassed 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, and the relief is huge… large outbreath. How did I do that? Time stretches out of shape, vertigo, where are we now? Good question, flying at 600 mph. Pressure returns, I attempt to recreate the scene and do it again – the mind forgets, it goes on and things settle down towards the end. We arrive in Delhi, nice landing and a few minutes early.

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

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deities in the hall of mirrors

Posted on October 6, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #156: Chiang Mai: I arrive in the hospital waiting area with the pain, this intrusive stabbing pain in the head and neck, postherpetic neuralgia, a permanent headache; sounds worse than it is – could be I’m getting used to it. There’s a flat screen TV and a coffee place, maybe I should order something? I have the iPhone to fiddle with, get busy with that… not interesting. Okay so try thinking about something else, but at this particular moment, there’s nothing else to think about – only the pain all around the right side of my head and neck. Think of something… thought itself is a free app I have the option to download on the mind/body device (namarupa) but even though I don’t have to download it, some of it seems to be here already, appears involuntarily. I hear the thoughts, the ‘voice’ inside the machine shouting out: Hey! the pain is happening to ‘me!’ It’s not happening to you, or them, or him, or her, it’s happening to me! The pain is ‘mine’, I am ‘possessed’ by it. Everything I love and hate, everything I love to hate – it belongs to ‘me’… it’s ‘my’ enemy!

With the pain swirling like a dense, dark cloud around my head and neck, I step carefully over to the TV that nobody is watching. There’s a remote, so I can flip through the channels and see where that gets me. Bend down to get the remote and the storm of pain happening to ‘me’ is there again, overwhelms everything, too much, for a moment I give way to it… and it’s then I notice there’s a space of somehow being detached from the pain, it’s something that’s not felt anymore, enough of an easing back from it to see the pain is an appearance, like everything else.

Sit down in front of the TV. Focus on the remote, press the buttons… so many channels. Some channels I recognise, then up into higher and higher numbers; places I’ve never been in before. Almost all of the channels are hazy or white-noise then I break through into a place that’s loud, clear and colourful. A Korean game-show, dubbed in Thai. It’s as if the storm of pain is all around but outside of this curious place – I’m safe in here. The scene unfolds, all the characters are lipsticked and painted with cosmetics like grotesque clowns, with amazing hair and impossible teeth, an embodiment of consciousness deeply obscured in layers of ‘self’. Man created God in his own image; a mirror reflection of the ego.

It’s a serious competition about trivialities; guests make appearances, have to tell anecdotes related to the question to gain points. They gaze at each other and see themselves as their own reflections; deities in the hall of mirrors – adults dressed to look like ‘cute’, children (kawaii), a real live dream-world; and the winning of the prize! Lights, colours music, the reward, congratulations, created laughter, spontaneous and heartening applause…

Just then, the nurse calls my name, I have to go and see the doctor. I get up from the chair slowly and take my pain away from the transparency of this kind of joyful TV state that’s doing its best to cultivate a desire for everything that is pleasing and a loathing dislike of everything that’s displeasing, perhaps unintentionally encouraging the hating of it, the not-wanting-it-to-be-there inverted craving, that contributes to the intensity of driving the economic machine… a kind of mental captivity; never seeing that the business of the actor is in the nature of appearances. The art of the illusionist, the politician…

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. [Robert Louis Stevenson]

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Photo showing a product that creates a lower eyelid bulge. Source

pain/resistance

Posted on June 9, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #133: Scotland: Overnight flight from Delhi to Heathrow, train from Euston station and I’m in Glasgow. Can’t recognize anything, it’s been years. I feel like a foreigner… then later having breakfast at the hotel, 7am and sitting by the front window, watching everybody on the street going to work. Hats and coats and it’s cold out there; the happiness of the people in Thailand, sunny and bright… just not here. Reminds me of the following post, written when I had a part time job teaching English in Geneva, Switzerland – migrant workers employed in the factories and light industry going to work by bus in the early morning:

(originally dated August 22, 2012) I’m on the bus, going to an early morning class in the industrial zone. As we get near, the bus is stopping at every stop to pick up people employed in the factories. Migrant workers from East Europe; men and women speaking a language unknown to me. Thin, sad, serious faces; reminds me of Van Gogh’s drawings of the miners in 19th Century.

Bus is getting crowded, I have a book to read: ‘The Noble Eightfold Path’ by Bhikkhu Bodhi: ‘The search for a spiritual path is born of suffering. It does not start with lights and ecstasy but with the hard tacks of pain, disappointment and confusion… for suffering to give birth to a genuine spiritual search, it must amount to more than something passively received…’

More stops, more migrant workers get on the bus. It feels like I’ve got to have my head down reading my book because there’s nowhere else in this bus to look without encountering another pair of eyes looking straight back at me; my shirt and tie, polished shoes. What they don’t realise is that I’m a foreign worker too: UK citizen resident in Switzerland. I know how it feels to live in someone else’s country. Okay, guys! I’m a teacher of English, and I’m on my way to teach your bosses, yes – but, as far as I’m concerned, we’re all the same here. And that’s how it is now, squashed up against the window glass; thin shoulders and arms pressing against me. Continue reading:

‘It has to trigger an inner realization, a perception which pierces through the facile complacency of our usual encounter with the world to glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot. When this insight dawns, even if only momentarily, it can precipitate a profound personal crisis. It overturns accustomed goals and values, mocks our routine preoccupations, leaves old enjoyments stubbornly unsatisfying.’

Urgent circumstances; this is about a level of suffering hard to endure and there’s just no getting away from it. A long time ago, I had an operation for colonic cancer and there were a number of confrontations with pain… unbearable, I had to give in to it. As soon as that happened, something unseen tipped the balance… for a moment there was the easing – I discover it’s the resistance to it that causes most of the discomfort.

What would it take for Bhikkhu Bodhi’s insight described here to be meaningful for these migrant workers? For them, it’s about holding on, not letting go; as long as they can withstand hardship, it will go on like this. They’re putting their small amounts of money together to send back home to support the family. They structure their lives around employment and the innate ability to be happy becomes a fleeting, temporary happiness found in consumerism, built-in to the system. People can’t escape from it unless they step out of the earning momentum they’re stuck in, and risk losing everything.

The bus gets to the terminus, stops, air suspension lets out in one long last gasp, and the bus lowers itself on to its structure. I get out with everyone else in this strangely remote place with factory smells and set off walking along the path to the industrial buildings in the distance. Behind me the bus starts up, a worrying moment, no wish to be stranded in this particular reality. I look back at it as it rumbles off on its little round wheels.

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Image: Vincent van Gogh  Drawing, “Miners”, Pencil on Paper,  Cuesmes: September, 1880, Kröller-Müller Museum.
Note excerpts here from an earlier post: ‘Choosing Liberation‘

change in plan

Posted on May 3, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #124: Bangkok: Ah well, life’s like that, we made a last minute booking after M went to Koh Krabi and Jiab and I got a flight to Bangkok. No traffic on Sunday so we were at the house before we knew it. The plan is Jiab goes to the Bangkok office on Monday, leaves for Delhi Tuesday and goes to Kathmandhu in a few days to organize the rebuilding, after the earthquake, using local staff. ‘Bare-foot technicians’, on-the-job training, they get paid quite well, mostly clearing rubble and then re-establishing infrastructural stuff. It could take a long time. For a more up-to-date account of how things are check out garyhorvitz’s blog: Kathmandu Komment, Everything is Everything and more recent posts.

I’ll go back to Ch’Mai and continue with care-taking duties of M until 16th May then back to Delhi. If I stop and think about it, I find I’m starting to take a position against it, locked into the suffering and looking for some kind of punishing way to develop the problem – a grasping reaction, I have the cause but no effect. Let the mind unstick from it, the karma of cause/effect/ flowing like a torrents in a river. Present time contained in the here-and-now of where I am, as if it were contained in a book I’m reading… open at the page where I was, re-enter at the same place and time when I was last here. I am a character in a story about a world seen through clouds of thoughts thinking thoughts embedded in this self I recognise as ‘me’.

How am I to inhabit what remains of this lifetime, feels like I’m at the end of the railway track, can’t go any further, step down from the train and there’s this open view out to sea.

“Lal Shabaz was wandering through the desert with a friend as evening began to fall. The desert was terribly cold, so the two pilgrims began to gather wood for a fire. With their pyre neatly constructed, they realized they had no way of igniting it. Lal Shahbaz’s friend suggested that he transform himself into a great bird and fly down into hell to collect coals for a fire. Lal Shahbaz considered this a wise suggestion and flew away. After many cold hours Lal Shahbaz returned to his friend empty-handed. Puzzled, he asked why he had not returned with fire to keep them warm. Lal Shahbaz replied, “There is no fire in hell. Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, their own pain, from this world.” [William Dalrymple]