nine lives

Posted on March 3, 2018 by tiramit

POSTCARD#302: Chiang Mai: Long ago in the Swiss mountains, there was a cat who lived in the Buddhist monastery, Dhammapala. It had no name, just arrived there one day, and stayed. It answered to the name: ‘Cat’, would walk definitively across the carpet; tail pointing in the direction it came from, pad, pad, pad, pad, and sit in the lap of his favourite monk, seated on the cushion there with crossed legs. Not however, during meditation times because the community agreed it was too distracting, other restrictions too but ‘Cat’ accepted all, dozing during the day and prowling in the woods at night.

On this day, I came across him on a small table in the sunshine. ‘Cat’ was often there, looking exactly like he appears in my old illustration of him. The same cat, the identity of Mr. Cat animated in the image – he ‘exists’ even though long gone in the decades since then. It’s as if one of the nine lives is used up being the likeness I see here and others who knew him see too.

It’s not impossible, by the way, that other people who have or used to have a black cat might see the identity of their cat in this image. What they see is ‘Tiddles’ or ‘Cutiepie’ – or as my blogging friend Sunny and her husband tell me, it’s their ‘Daisy’. Sadly, Daisy is elderly now and needs to be looked after, a lesson for all of us that there is an end to it all, and the clear comprehension of those final days are filled with immense peace. This is how it is, everyone, everywhere seems to know of a black cat like Mr. Cat, or the one image of Mr. Cat embodies all the others held in memory.

On this particular day, sitting on the garden table, the eyes look at me… ready to engage but ready to vanish back into the realm from whence he came. Hesitates to see what the next moment will bring, pause, click, screenshot… and I decide to back away, to step out of his space. I hadn’t intended to do that, it just started to happen and I followed through – maybe the deference arose with the thought that Mr. Cat was an extension of the monks’ awareness – those who might have extraordinary powers… all kinds of things.

I see his presence regarding me walking backwards and becoming a smaller and smaller object in his vision until the distance between us swallows up the encounter. His remoteness disturbed by an intrusion of everything seeming to happen at the same time. And for me, the nine-lives metaphor thus transits to include this other meaning; cats appear and disappear becoming cats in the lifetimes of all the other black cats I’ve known in say, more than a half century?

North of Scotland, Grandfather’s farm, a different place and time…. I was a boy and it must have been my first meeting with the cat species. Not the cute and cuddly kind, these were the cats whose presence kept the rats out of the old barn. Don’t go near them I was urged, not friendly creatures. There were eleven of them, my aunt said she knew there were, as we were walking along in the cleared snow path on a moonlit night – she would count them every night. Into the barn and my aunt would ask me to point the beam of the torch I was holding so she could see where to carefully place the large heavy dish of steaming food on a level place in the straw where it couldn’t be knocked over; oat meal cooked with sour milk filled to the brim, mixed with potato peelings, bits of all kinds of leftovers and horrific things, to my mind, being only seven.

The wild cats never came to eat the food while we were there (while I was there, I realize now), and my aunt would ask me if I could see them in the fearsome jagged shadows in the torchlight, long hanging cobwebs from roof beams. We’d stay still and look in all the corners – where are they?

There look!
Where?
Can ye no see them child… there!

And there they were, just out of reach, behind a volume of straw. I couldn’t actually see them, in fact I don’t remember ever seeing them anywhere on the farm in daylight. No, these were invisible cats; we could only see their eyes, white, reflected almond shapes in the torchlight. No body forms seen, crouched there in the blackness, waiting for that noisy child to leave. Fascination for me, held by my aunt, asking if I’d noticed that one of the cats had only one eye.

I saw it once, the one-eyed black cat, and I’m not sure if it was black – everything in the realm of the scary barnyard cats was darkness and black. But I saw it one night… my tireless aunt guiding my attention from one pair of luminous, broken-mica eyes, to the pair above that and above that, to the left a bit… now there, can ye see it? (Said in a whisper), and I saw it, one eye separated from its partner, alone in the blackness of no form.

How did it come to have only one eye? A volley of questions and speculations from me, for my aunt to consider… and she just said that if I stopped asking over and over, she’d tell me. A long time ago, that cat used to have two eyes like the others, and it went missing for days and weeks and months maybe, so long that she thought it must be dead. Then it came back one winter’s night for the plate of cooked leftovers, completely thin like a skeleton but otherwise looking as if it had always been there. My aunt noticed, as she watched it from a distance, that one eye had been torn out, so it must have been fighting with another cat. These animals have the determination to survive, no matter what.

All of that swallowed up in passage of the years and decades since then. Now after thirty years in Asia, where cats are never allowed inside the house, I sometimes see a cat-shape out there in the yard in the darkness, glimmer of streetlights. It turns its head and two eyes reflect the lights of the house – not the marginalized, one-eyed warrior cat. Must be one of these invisible cats of innumerable lives reborn in this instant, awareness includes that living being, then it’s gone almost as soon as it arrived.

grown-up children

Posted on February 24, 2018 by tiramit

POSTCARD#301: Chiang Mai: I got back to the apartment in the afternoon, slightly deaf and the feeling of being shipwrecked. It was the immediate sense of the journey that brought me here, the tuk-tuk, lady driver’s alertness and skill in what was for me a sudden urgency of speed. And those of us who don’t know the Thai tuk-tuk, it is a three-wheeled vehicle with a low canvas roof and no walls. The sound of its 2-stroke engine enhances the sensation of the whole vehicle entering into the passenger’s body/mind consciousness in a strange embrace, and it’s this, only this, that prevents you from falling out. That’s how it was for me; like gale-force winds, the whole outside, rushing through the inside, and everything on either side shielded from view because of low headroom and overhang of canvas roof. So the only place to look is over the driver’s shoulder, through her small windscreen and thus captivated by the directionality of the journey hurtling through a wormhole in space/time, and plunging towards a vanishing point that looks like it never arrives.

Definitely, it would have been easier without the large cork notice board I was clutching, fingers adhering desperately to this ‘thing’ measuring 47½ inches by 31½ inches, that wanted to be a sail in a sailing ship. Perhaps buying it in that discount place slightly out of town (and taking it back in a tuk-tuk because no car available) was a foolhardy idea, now it was tugging in the wind, and I’m seeing the very real possibility of it escaping my fingers and flying away like a kite without a string. But it didn’t, we reached the place, and tumbled out on to terra firma. The board and its sudden flatness, placed on its narrow end, up in the elevator and into the room.

Why this sail-like notice board, uncomfortably dwarfing nearby objects which shuffle out of the way to make room for it? Well, I could fix it on the wall with a hook, but right now it’s good just standing and leaning against the wall. I can move it around and pin things on it with a small box of pins I got at the discount shop. What things get pinned? Drawings that would be otherwise hidden, animated scribbles, and things developing more and more into what we can say is Art.

Let them see the light of day! Exhumed skeletons from long ago and far away, when and where I was an artist, intending to be an easel painter, studied 4 years in art school, exhibitions and all of that. Then one day my investigations led to a dead end, a place where everything was called into question, Creative Block… one’s own worst enemy. So I gave up, became an anarchist, conceptual tight-rope-walker, then stepping into the light, a teacher and the world of respectability. Anyway, the path led me to where I am now – that was decades ago and I’ve carried this sense of incompleteness all that time. So now, thanks to voices of encouragement from blogging friends, and my Thai niece M aged 14, I’m beginning to see that there is a way out of this conundrum.

Bring them out of hiding, pin them on a board: I had planned it only this morning. I have a printer so, cut, crop, say it’s finished, print and pin it on the board. Rediscovering these old plans for pictorial adventures and voyages long forgotten, pin them on the board as they are. With that, no tugs and pulls, push and shove, everything becomes neutral, non-intrusive random thought mechanisms that function at the edge of a dream pull me into the gentle whirr and flicker of thinking-about-things.

Each page of the world turns over and there’s another, and another. We’re all grown-up children, every song that’s sung, spoken in rhyme, is done in a spontaneous leap of words that, falling to the floor, arrange themselves, themselves.

See the Art page in this blog. Note: photo taken in a quiet moment at the red light

not anything

Posted on January 28, 2018 by tiramit

POSTCARD#298: Bangkok: 3:30 am: Almost awake in the darkness of a warm insect-click, whispering night; dreamscape/ language interface and a question arises… floats in air motionless, then ascends, as light as a feather. Which way will these air currents take it? Something about the usual way I perceive my surroundings is different. The pronoun ‘I’ becomes ‘him’ over there, engaging in active thinking… looking for words to make sense of it all. Curiosity shifts, rolls over and retrieves the word ‘pain’.

By this time, the session with the Pain Clinic yesterday has returned to memory and now I’m nearly awake – so the big question is… has the headache gone or not? Focus attention again on the location of that pain, as a particular point on the headache ‘map’… is it there? Push myself up in bed, swing legs over the side, soles of feet on cool flooring. No, the pain I feel is where the needle went in, and all around that, is a totally pain-free zone. It worked!

I want to fling open the bedroom door and go running up and down the stairs, but I can’t do that because we have a 5 weeks old baby in the house… it’s a long story. Compassion for those having no understanding of the Buddha’s teaching on the Noble Truth of Suffering – Suffering? Not for me, no thanks, it sounds awful. I want to be happy. There they go hungering after that happiness, and trying to keep it all in balance, the tipping point, verging on total disaster.

Systems developed from the recognition of the kind of suffering that’s caused by resistance. Seeing myself fighting against it, as it’s appearing in present time, sometimes hating it, and holding on in some way to a temporary pain-free state, short-lived because unknowingly I’m pulled away by a yearning for something else and the round-and-round of wanting things to be different than the way they are.

I’ve learned that the best way to keep your balance in these investigations into the way things are, is to not want anything, and not seek anything, because there’s ‘not anything’ there – not ‘nothing’, not ‘anything. If I can see it like that, the holding-on thing is not getting in the way. What I’m left with is a contemplation of the question rather than looking for the nearest-match answer. We can’t know what it is in the conditioned realm; beyond the point of no return, and there are no words for it. In the end maybe, all that remains is the word ‘it’ – there’s a metallic click-sound to it as that too is cut off, extinguished, the cessation of the conditioned world. This is as far as it goes in Theravada Buddhism – other Eastern teachings may have more to say about ‘it’.

‘The real is not something, it’s not anything. It’s not a phenomenon. You can’t think about it, you can’t create an image of it. So we say unconditioned, unborn, uncreated, unformed. Anatta (not-self), nirodha (cessation), nibbana (liberation). If you try to think about these words you don’t get anywhere. Your mind stops, it’s like nothing. … if we’re expecting something from the meditation practice, some kind of Enlightenment, bright lights and world-trembling experiences, then we’re disappointed because expecting is another kind of desire, isn’t it?’ [The End of the World is Here, Ajahn Sumedho]

a window opening

Posted on January 20, 2018 by tiramit

POSTCARD#297: Bangkok: 6pm: A coffee shop near to Banglampoo, plugged into an iTunes track, when another sound breaks through; someone calling my name – there’s a man coming towards my table. I stand up too quickly and the headache stabs me, one earbud yanked out, and the phone spins away on the other one still attached, falls off the surface and hits the table leg; crash, bash.

Reaching for phone suspended on-cord-pulled-tight, thus thrust into real time, all-around sound… a face without a name appears. Mind-rush-through-memory-files, searching for nearest match. A hand extends into my space: ‘I saw you in the window!” he says, by way of explanation. It’s Jim! Remember me? How’re ya doin’ pal? – How long has it been? I shake his hand held out for handshake, warm firm grip.

Yes, it’s Jim, same face, older, threads of hair combed carefully over a bronzed skull with brown age spots on smooth old skin held at the corners like curtain folds beneath which, enquiring eyes look out… an unfinished sentence. Recognition starts to kick in, laughter – good-looking teeth, I see a row of white back molars, and for an instant, the smile seems to go all the way round 360 degrees, so that the upper half of his head becomes separated from the lower.

This is too weird; I manage to swallow a headache pill with a swig of water. How is it possible, running into each other like this after a decade or more in old Bangkok? He tears a piece off my paper coaster and writes his phone number on the back in large emphatic numerals. Sorry but he is on his way to somewhere else right now but I have to remember and give him a call. We shake hands again and he’s gone in the crowd.

Running into someone I know from decades ago; small world, I suppose – now I’m resident here until who knows when. My coffee cup balanced unevenly on a torn coaster, and in the centre of my vision, the other part with his phone number written on it. Should I call him tomorrow? It’s been so long, so much water gone under the bridge. What to say? Tell him about my headaches? Nope, that’s a whole discussion in itself. I pay the bill; get up and out into the huge sound of evening traffic.

All kinds of changes since I’ve been away, a proper place for pedestrians to walk, these streets seem to have moved into gentrification. Either that or I’m becoming part of recent history. My old buddy Jim would remember how it used to be, streetlights with bare wires twisted together in junction boxes, broken paving stones and the infrastructure of the city poking through into ordinary reality.

There’s always been a particular care in Thai behaviour, but these days there’s a civic responsibility that wasn’t there before. Streetlights show the patina of small slippered-feet-shuffle over smooth sidewalks. The handrails on pedestrian over-bridge, polished and worn smooth with Thai palms, fingertips, sliding along – I feel I’m part of them, holding on.

Should I call old Jim? Would it be relevant to him, me saying that I just moved back to Bangkok after a great number of journeys between here and Delhi, North India? Nope, that’d only confuse things; he would assume I’d been here all this time. Why go anywhere else, he’d ask. We are refugees from the West embedded in Thai society, gratitude to the population who just move over and make space for us.

What is it then? Under what circumstances do our paths cross here in this part of town after nearly 3 decades? Maybe it’s nothing, no reason… a window opening onto karmic flows, and for a moment we can see the functions of our relationships with each other – always a ‘birth’ of some sort in the creative unfolding, and then it moves on.

I should tell him, a child was born downstairs from us, 22nd December 2017, like something biblical. The baby son of Jiab’s nephew, I held the tiny being in my arms, a haze of soft black hair. We never had a child of our own; maybe we can borrow this one for a while. Recognition of body heat, breathing, moisture of mouth, the small weight. Eyes slide open at the sound of my voice, a blue glaze of filminess. Could be an ancient artifact – the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself: anicca dukkha anatta.

a trumped up story

Posted on January 7, 2018 by tiramit

POSTCARD#296: Bangkok: Passivity is killing the endgame (thanks Kismet) this is it exactly. Watching CNN reporting on POTUS’s latest scandalous remarks ignites a fire within and I can’t seem to break free of how ‘bad’ that is; thinking for a moment there’s safety in apathy: Ah well, here we go again. Sticking with it, falling for the overwhelm, rolling thunderous clouds of imponderable thinking. Thus the history of my own rumble and tumble… starting up all that again? A flash of justified outrage illuminates the room – fans the flames. This is a bizarre form of entertainment, we’ve seen the Punch & Judy show before of course, we know how to sidestep the action/reaction.

And suddenly we’re among the crowds in a market place, 17th Century England. Hungry for performance, anything’ll do, follow the noise: it’s over there, over there! Outrageous, disgraceful behaviour gets everyone’s attention… the trick is to have them all hate you, and in the push-and-shove, jeer, boo, a sleight-of-hand in that unseen instant, and suddenly things appear to be other than what they are. Derisive laughter at disbelievers, Mr. Punch in the spotlight, brazenly facing the uproar and law and order doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal. Then, as all this is taking place, the same kind of concealed actions change the scenery, Kuroko on stage, switch it all around and bit by bit, we start to get hooked on the drama, as we do in a Netflix series binge-out.

The world becomes a big hungry, greedy, grabber of things – a devourer, a multi-mouthed feeder of objects presented by way of the five (six) senses – isn’t that what they’re there for? But seeing the need to tread carefully here, I let go of all things hateful, burning hot thoughts scald the tongue, lip, and fingertip. For everyone else, let go and run for your life. I’m looking for the way to stay alert, camouflaged from fearful imagery, allowing only sleep to find me.

The glow of the city at night turns the sky orange, up here on the 7th floor of my hotel, looking out the window and down there at the trucks reversing back up the hill, round the corner at the top. It takes a moment to see it’s because they missed the sign that says the road’s closed… here comes another one. There’s something about this noise of high accelerated reverse gear… a nightmarish absurdity. Yet fascinating how the drivers are able to do this at speed. Well, everything is as it should be, the seemingly obvious really has no other meaning. It’s all a trumped up story… yes, but beware, thievery abounds – mindfulness is a necessity.

“Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.” [Daisaku Ikeda]

Image above linked to the story of the Buddha, reinterpreted by 12th Century Christianity, having arrived there by way of Hebrew, Persian and Arabic legends.

it seems

Posted on December 22, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD#295: New Delhi: Received this photo from a friend and at first glance it seems like a full moon in the sky. Then I can see it’s a street light seen from above and some distance away. Curious illusion, I was drawn to it for a moment; the memory of seasons of darkness revisited and inside each of us the light of the universe shines. Nostalgia for winters so long ago, the seasonal snowy days and nights don’t exist for me any more, the sun shines nearly every single day.

Something to be thankful for, some would say, to be away from the cold, but exhausting for me now, it seems, the permanent headache starts in the morning. I put up with it for as long as possible before going on the meds because they slow me down over the course of the day and by nightfall I’m like the Walking Dead. Then sleep and a few hours free of it in the early morning, before the cycle kicks in again. Otherwise comfortably at home here in our Japanese friends apartment. They went back to Japan for the holidays, taking with them their little dog named Noina – the name of a Thai fruit, Custard Apple in English (see below).

That’s what I notice particularly about this apartment lacking its usual inhabitants, the presence of a little dog who is not here. I like the words, ‘it seems’ as if she’s here. There’s something cautionary about ‘it seems’, there’s the appearance of it but we know it’s not real – walking the tightrope of mindfulness. Anyway, I’m picking up on some of Noina’s doggie-world context here. She used to come to investigate me, very timid, looking from a safe distance with silent eyes. Listening and nose searching the air for olfactory smell-data – never barks unless someone is at the door and such a small sound comes out, only one isolated yap, voiced warning. The quietest dog I’ve ever known.

It’s the silence she’s left behind. I keep thinking she must be in one of these rooms somewhere listening, tuned into the doggie wavelength. But she’s doing all that in Tokyo now, 3630 miles away. It’s where she came from, and here’s the thing, Noina is not at all what she seems to be, there’s a remarkable story to tell.

Noina was rescued from a breeding kennel known as a “puppy mill” that raises dogs in cramped, crude, filthy conditions. She had had four litters of puppies, all sold for high prices in pet shops, and was so weak, no longer any good for breeding. Who knows what would have happened to her then. That’s not all, Noina had been attacked by a much larger dog in the cramped kennel space and the lower part of her front left leg bitten off.

Her new owner, Aya Chan, found her in the kennels as part of an investigation into cruelty to animals in these puppy mills, and decided to take her away. That was more than two years ago, and now Noina is very well looked after as this photo shows – the missing leg you can’t see, unless you know the story.

We’re here until Friday morning, then to the airport, a flight to Bangkok, and Chiang Mai. More than once, in my forgetfulness, I’ve started to look for the return flight info, but there isn’t a return flight, this is a one-way ticket. The letting-go, farewell India after a stay of six and a half years, older and wiser and sadness too; it feels a bit like leaving the family. All of it swept up in the embrace of the Christmas season, end of year clearance, closure and Jiab’s new job In Bangkok starting 2nd January 2018.

Note: this post had its beginning in an email discussion with Ellen Stockdale Wolfe and her post, the light within, on Moonside. Upper photo, one of a series, this time by Berti Buffy’s son in west Germany. Middle photo a portrait of noina in Tokyo after the flight. Lower picture shows the Custard Apple fruit, called “noina” in Thai. See the coloring inside the fruit is nearly the same as Noina’s fur, and the similarity between the seeds and Noina’s eyes.

this too

Posted on December 16, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD#294: New Delhi: Getting ready now for a change in surroundings, mindfulness is not a choice but a necessity in these preparations for the last hop, skip, jump through the window leading to another reality. First is the enthusiasm (viriya), Right Effort and an attitude of gladly engaging in wholesome activities and virtuous actions. Thus I am here, candlelight, and seated on the meditation cushion, heavens above, earth below. There is foundation in this locality, weight; gravity prevents attention from flying away. A large bathroom towel wrapped over the legs and tucked under to keep out the cold. Blanket over the shoulders and upper body and head enclosed in the darkness surrounding flame flicker of a single yellow candle.

Respect for the the noise of neighbors in rooms nearby… a muffled clatter bang crash from next door doesn’t disturb me, watching the in-breath, out-breath, and this is how it is. Familiarity of place, not looking for anything, not trying to find ‘it’, or whatever, just sitting here. Cool air on my face, framed in the small opening at the top of a warmly wrapped body – and even if at times, attention is drawn towards a small enactment of accelerated thinking, it can be asked to leave here for the time being… this too is overseen by another awareness.

The fact that there is peace in the absence of stormy times, helps of course and seeing that, the sensation of peace becomes bliss. Even so, all this is seen by all pervading non-self awareness, and with that thought I find that everything has side-stepped the sense of ‘wanting’ this and that and the next thing – ‘I’ am not creating it, got nothing to do with it, ‘seeing-awareness’ remains as it is; awareness of the awareness. Seeing the seeing, knowing the knowing. It moves on as I return to the breathing.

Again and frequently there’s the enactment of thinking arising and turning now to how I see it in the mind’s eye; the last of our things packed and the flight to Bangkok leaves in the morning of Friday 22nd December. Getting through the airport congestion is of course a way of preparing passengers for the contained experience of air travel. Rows of seats with as much personal space as there’d be in an elongated flying bus, you could say. Walking with cabin bag on wheels following behind, through a series of corridors like tubes in a telescope, one inside the other, becoming smaller and smaller, reduced to gradually squeeze us into the self-construct; the way we are and the lifetimes lived with it. Finding my seat number, the ‘me’ in the body, the voice in my mind, the narrator telling the story saying, this is how it is… we are seated, please fasten your seat belts, a small window to see blue sky out there, above the clouds.

Landing at Bangkok and another flight into the early evening of Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand. Landing, exit, placed on the ground, carrying the medicated headache as if it were a luggage item at the belt. Taxi and we’re at the apartment. Hello everyone, put on the clothes of who I am here, become the person who lives in this location. Pick up the thread, the sequence of time unfolds by itself, events occur in the forward momentum I create by facing the direction I’m in. The identity I have is here-and-now, home is where the heart is… hold that thought, Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes fellow Bloggers for 2018.

Photo by Berti Buffy: An official at the Sri Harmandir Sahib (lit. “the abode of God”), also known as Golden Temple and the Darbar Sahib, is the holiest Gurdwara and the most important pilgrimage site of Sikhism – also an open house of worship for all men and women, from all walks of life and faith.

in the end there is no ending

Posted on December 11, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD#293: New Delhi: Packing has started here, the rental agreement comes to an end 18th December, and we stay with our Japanese friends until 22nd December, then it’s goodbye everyone, we’re on a flight to Chiang Mai via Bangkok. Gone from India with all our possessions, after nearly seven years here. Gone too from this sweet little apartment – I want to have something to remember it by… steal some cutlery or a bath towel? Can’t do that, relinquishment… accept that that part of my mind where it once was, is now claimed by new tenants who walk around these rooms, saying; well, this is nice, thinking for a moment, who lived here before we came? Territorial self kicks in and it’s gone, bearing a new identity.

Gone is gone, but the PHN headache is with me again… a buzzing old fluorescent tube light that needs to be fixed but never gotten around to doing. Under the influence of powerful pain meds then, you could say, I’m writing to my future self about living here, in order to open a window on this thin slice of time, and revisit these rooms, the conversations and all that was said here, received, held, seen, nurtured… noticing the tendency for a particular memory to be displaced by the next moment of remembering… and on and on until sadly, the whole thing dissolves leaving no remainder.

But that hasn’t happened yet, events are still unfolding. On 26th December I go to the Pain Clinic in Bangkok to see the headache doc about a date for the next electrical pulsed needle into the right occipital nerve in the scalp. Until then, a malaise of discontent rules; flashes and flares in spurts and sparks nearly all through the day and waiting for me to wake up in the morning for the start of another day of jostling push and shove, tug and pull. Not writing much, only the wild lightning flickering of illegible words scribbled in notebooks, keyed in just before the crash and burn, and assimilated into the whole as it forms.

The present moment seems as if it is forever waiting in the transit lounge on the brink of becoming future time while engaged in contemplative pondering over the past. The present moment is always underway, and even if it feels like I have to hold it, tether it and adhere to it in single-mindedness, there’s no need because the present moment is inclusive of all of that too. I’m the one falling into and out of hypothetical mind states, spinning across the ceiling in speculative conjectures; a runaway from frightful things unforeseen – disaster movie showing it crashing through the restraints of planning; too much for the flimsy structure built to keep it in place… and I’m suddenly back in the present moment again.

We’re always only part the way through anything, anyhow and anyway at any time; here, there, or anywhere it’s always somehow incomplete, never reaching the end, letters I’ve written, never meaning to send – how could we reach that final completion and know what happens after that? Nobody ever came back from What Happens After That to say what it was like. All we can say is that the world, as we know it will come to an end eventually, collapsing like a dead star, matter reduced to an atom and gone in a flicker, a spark, pftt…

Or maybe it’ll be slower; bits start to fall off, clink, clatter, crash – you hardly notice it, and there’ll come a day when the Final Ending and all who sail in her begins to fall in on itself, as do great empires that have spanned the centuries, like castles made of sand, tumble to the sea eventually… but surprise-surprise, in another kind of temporality, the Final Ending rises with the waves on to the surface again and we can continue where we left off. It makes good sense to say that everything is subject to change, anicca and in the end there is no ending.

“We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.  This is true for the entire universe.” [Aitareya Upanishad (Inland Empire)]

Picture shows sun setting on the lotus temple, Delhi, a Bahá’í House of Worship

looking forward to getting back

Posted on December 3, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD#292: New Delhi: Saying goodbye seems to be happening more and more these days… ‘See-you later’, becoming less and less. No immediate future here, it’s the countdown to the last goodbye; leaving Delhi after seven years. Then ‘hello-again’ Bangkok looming on the horizon but somehow I can’t see it yet; stepping out of one life and into another. Less than three weeks to go, each new day dawns and takes the place of the day before; each hour replaces the one before it and the memory of what happened in the interim is gone as we tumble into the descent of ‘no-time’.

Looking forward to getting back, but resting in this place where it’s always today, even though it has different names; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., tomorrow becomes today as future time slides into present time, and consecutively each day occupies the place where the one before it was. As we get further along on the journey to get there, a whole new landscape deletes the one before and is itself layered over by successive landscapes in the grand scheme of things.

Hovering on the edge of the smallest pause where the ‘now’ is on the brink of falling into the past (the future form not arrived yet) and pondering the conundrum of how we can revisit the past and change it around so it’s less burdensome in the here-and-now, and long after the event, in the blinding white light of ten thousand leagues into the future, the karma of how that event blossoms.

Everything said and done in a spontaneous leap of words, arranging themselves as they fall: to whom is this happening… is there a self? Something wrong with the question, it’s suggesting ‘self’ is an object… out ‘there’ somewhere. ‘Self’ must be the subject, but when I search for it in a subjective sense, there are only the mind/body characteristics, otherwise nothing is there or here or anywhere.

What is nothingness? Same thing again, the tendency is to think of ‘nothing’ as something, as an object – and that’s not it. Nothingness must be both subject and object… what’s happening? I am not here, incognito, perhaps concealed in a makeshift identity. I don’t really know, it all seems to vanish as each new day dawns and deletes the memory of the previous day, an hour replaces the hour before it and I can’t remember anything that recently happened.

Or maybe I totally ‘am’ here and from this point of view, the world is spinning around me, new landscapes take the place of what was there before… endless flickering cycle of daylight into darkness in the countdown of remaining days in Delhi. When the departure finally arrives, I picture it as the familiarity of airports, the journey itself, Hindi signage changed to Thai, same Sanskrit roots of words, similar culture, but a sense of being in a smaller place. Thai voices, unobtrusive, so quiet it’s hard to hear what they are saying… the inter-relationship of all and everything, same days different names. Adjustments to Default Voicemail after 22 December: “Sorry we are not here to receive your call…” The empty space of not-knowing exactly what it is, until it gets here.

“Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.” [Swami Vivekananda]

déjà vu & familiarity

Posted on November 25, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD#291: New Delhi: We find ourselves in short-term lodgings just six weeks before it’s time to leave the country – all things are transitory and, uncertainty is the only certainty. Return to cheap rental days, and goods and chattels taken up the steep staircase, key in lock, open door, enter… so here we are. Belongings brought in, boxes and cases placed on the floor, on chairs, on any place handy, where there’s room – anarchy of packaging disassembled becomes an orderly system… catastrophe in reverse, clatter, bash, crash. Hoover, sweep, dust, clean; everything in the quiet interior held by these walls, ceilings, floors, for decades, re-energized. Sponges and cloths in water, squeezed out, wiping surfaces of furniture there to serve, in furnished accommodation; old paint painted over with new colour. Shadows of past lives seen for a moment then gone.

Like playing a video backwards, we end up at the beginning of our six weeks here; kitchen suddenly populated with cups and plates, forks and knives and spoons and things. Switch the kettle on. Empty spaces in closets, doors wide open, clothing leaps up from suitcase, as flat-pack garments shaken out, become animated beings, hang themselves on hangers. Drawers slide open, folded things inside, and slide closed. Everything seemingly peopled, inhabited, tenanted, yet there is no presence.

A cup of tea or coffee, sit or stand and look around, or feel how the room feels; déjà vu of familiar objects in unfamiliar surroundings. Shoes lying in the hallway by the door as if the owner has suddenly flown away, like the absence of the clown in a room full of laughter; missing from reality, or not back yet – or “coming soon”, and returns somewhere in another life becoming this, or being that, like an actor becomes the part he plays so well, there is no player.

What remains to be considered, completed, prepared, and made ready in this tiny slice of time? The process is just a process – things are done but there is no do-er. One event is naturally linked to the one it’s most likely to link with, and that linked to the next and on it goes, round and round as in the Buddhist Chakra wheel turning. Wheels within wheels turning, turning, and we don’t see it unless it’s interrupted, held, examined as subject/object; this is that and that is this: an effect following a cause which in turn causes the effect to become a cause affecting the next event (Spooky Action At A Distance). All of the above, altered, shaped to fit and assimilated into the whole… the forever turning.

Somebody in the TV room is fiddling with the remote. A news program broadcast in a language I don’t understand. Another channel, different language, same news. So many languages in India, all giving me the same news but each is a different version of it. Recognition when we reach the English News – newsreader skilled in face acting; flickers of faces within faces, shifting around features to create emphasis, to insist, to infer, to imply, to suggest, to offer a whole portrait of compelling meanings I may believe to be true, or not.

Even the sense of ‘I am’ is composed of the pure light and the sense of being.
The ‘I’ is there even without the ‘am’.
So is the pure light there whether you say ‘I’ or not.

[Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That]