the way things are

Posted on November 10, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #166: New Delhi: In the office they’re saying, he’s been here all morning but he’s gone now – you just missed him, as if that helps, and there’s this gesture that seems to indicate the empty space where he was; the empty room, desk, chair. I’m held by that space, I want him to be here, but he’s not. Somebody is making a call in the background but can’t get through right now so he must be at that somewhere-else place but he’s on a motorbike so maybe he’s on his way back here. Nothing extraordinary, it’s just that this motorbike guy is the one who signs the rental documents and we can’t go any further until he comes.

There’s the Indian head movement; an affirmative shake of the head that indicates a yes-I’m-sure, but deep inside that affirmation there’s a no-I’m-not-sure. I’m captivated by the swaying head gesture and want him to do it again. So I repeat the question that requires his answer and there it is; a headshake that is a vertical nod and a horizontal shake from side to side. It seems it could go either way… Yes, so have a seat, relax, see how things go.

I can’t sit down, too many possibilities, step outside and stand in the doorway. Look out across the busy road and up and down the street, all these faces turn around, eyes looking directly at me. It’s a kind of flicker of awareness all along my field of vision. More faces turning towards me like windows opening. People, mostly men, standing in doorways like me, maybe also waiting for the outcome of a possible event, and not doing anything right now, leaning on walls, interested in the white guy just entered their surroundings…

For a while I get the look, investigated, then the faces begin to turn away and we all fall into this state of just being where we are. Heads all swivel around at the same time if there’s a loud noise… something that gets our attention for a moment. The ‘self’ always receiving data, taking in, responding, rejecting, avoiding things unpleasant. Looking for something pleasing, heads swivel back to where we were before, front facing, the default position; has anything changed since the last time I was here? Nope it’s pretty much the same as it was.

Watching the inbreath, the outbreath, there’s an alertness about the sensory function, the simple curiosity about sounds and things happening – an awake receptivity that stretches to include the next moment: the response to that seems to arrive before it happens and there’s a glimpse of the construct. Attention blows like the wind this way, and that way, filled with the activity of being.

I hear a text message on a phone somewhere near and somebody comes along to say he’s coming back from that somewhere-else place. But I’m concerned because sometimes the somewhere-else place slips away and becomes the ‘here’, the point of origin we come back to and go away from and the going-away becomes the coming-back and he has gone becomes he has been. But not wanting to get into that, things are stretched enough as they are; he’ll be here soon, In the meantime, staying with the way things are.

‘No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.’ [Thomas Merton]

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somewhere to be

Posted on November 7, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #165: New Delhi: I’d like it to be a windswept hut made of bamboo on a beach on an island, but we’re looking for a place to rent in South Delhi – a small house or a duplex. Right now I’m being driven around at high speed by the agent looking at houses, buildings, one after another which all seem to be part of the same interconnected vast network of habitations; neighbours pass through your room on the way to somewhere else. Arrive at another street, get out of the car, go inside, there’s a staircase, corridors and empty rooms, nothing here. Stare at the wall… a painted flat surface. Can I see us here? Not impossible, what are the criteria? Searching for the ‘right’ place – try to estimate ceiling heights… windows, doors, floors. Birdsong from a nearby tree enters the empty house in an irregular chord of strangely related notes… walk over to the window. Look at what’s out there; the agent talking about this and that, and all I can think of is what Hipmonkey said: there is no ‘out-there’ out there that’s separate from what’s in ‘here’.

Outside invades inside, I’m back in the agent’s car and we’re off to the next place, slooshing and splooshing through the crowded streets at breakneck speed, talking as we’re going (she does this driving thing for a living), her livelihood is set in this river of noisy, crazy traffic that’s consistently doing unexpected things. The urgency of it all going past too fast… I can’t look, it’s too much, avert my gaze to the side window instead, and see out there, the reflection of myself in the glass shop windows flashing by opposite, focus on the shadowy face looking back at me from one window to the next, somehow staying in the same position – it’s the world that’s rushing by, not me.

Trying (but failing) to understand the Buddhist term: sati-sampajañña, clear comprehension (the absolute clarity of understanding), whilst stumbling over all the indistinct, half-seen, misunderstood truths, and eventually I realize it means the clear comprehension of everything, including the confusion; the mistake, the mix-up, the puzzleheadedness. The fact that I don’t understand this is what’s causing this problem. Don’t ‘do’ anything with it… I see it now. An epiphany, revelation, insight; the experience of total confusion – random things just seem to fit, the recognition that all related parts and everything come together, anyway, according to their circumstances; parallels link parts of the story together with a kind of inevitability.

It’s an all-inclusive world, the ‘self’ comes with the software. I’m playing a role integrated with one whole consciousness – dimensions within dimensions – acting the part; being this person living in these rooms, being that person in those rooms, finding my way through this curious illusion, looking for words to describe that it’s a construct through and through. No way out, I know because I stopped looking for the way out a long time ago. In the 30 years of learning how to get along here in Asian society, I think I’ve let go of that remembered fiction about where I come from – migrants from Europe have experienced this in North America since the 17th Century. Long ago I learned, involuntarily at first, to be at home with other people’s preferences and relinquish my own choices, in time forgetting how I figured out how to be comfortable with it. So when there’s an opportunity to have a place of my own, I return to the old default, surprised to see it’s still there, and how shall I do this? Let’s see, the bed goes here, the table there, and my chair…

‘We are members of a vast cosmic orchestra in which each living instrument is essential to the complementary and harmonious playing of the whole.’ [J. Allen Boone]

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Note: ‘there is no out-there out there…’ sourced in the Hipmonkey site (What the bleep do we know – 3rd video down)
Photo: fishermen’s shelter, Krabi, Thailand (from M’s collection)

familiarity of places I’ve been

Posted on November 5, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #164: New Delhi: The rental agent calls to say she’ll pick me up at 11am to look at a few houses. I’m glad to be going out because packing for the move is difficult; the attachment to possessions is so strong it’s like they’re being pulled from my grasp by the sheer force of having to move from here – I hold on tight, fingertips clutching the surfaces but it’s slipping away… no choice. It’s a last minute thing, there’s a moment of familiarity, remembering this in other places I’ve been, doorbell rings, put much-loved object into the box marked ‘Give Away’ and get up from the cluttered room. That’s the letting-go, the final goodbye… walking away, the rental agent is here, get keys, step outside, close door behind me. Into the car, chatting with the agent, and we’re off.

I visit a house in a popular area… crowded. Walk up the path, open the door, go in and there’s a feeling of the previous tenant everywhere. In my state of recent relinquishment it’s like this is still their surroundings and it’s me that’s the potential new owner of their life … walk into the living room – the ‘living’ room? Suddenly I’m in someone else’s life – feel like I stepped out of my own life and into someone else’s by mistake – who am I? The world is how I/you perceive it, he/she, perceives it. We/you/they look into each other’s lives. A window opens into another realm inhabited by someone else in the network of interconnected lives. It’s just a slightly different angle on a world that’s seen, felt and understood, but through the same sensory awareness mechanism we all have.. a kaleidoscope of different coloured lights. The only difference is the ME that feels it, thinks it’s different from all the other ‘MEs’ walking around thinking they’re different too

Now there’s this feeling I’m looking for a place to ‘be’, the sense of a presence interlacing with the transparency of the presence of others. Observing the motion of the body in a sort of surprised way seeing that it can do it by itself. Gently stumbling around these empty rooms – looking for a place to sit down but can’t find anywhere because there’s no furniture. Well, isn’t this nice, says the agent, and I’m thinking, I’m tired, maybe this’ll do, maybe here I can invent another life I’ll be happy with.

‘Pretending you’re not “it” is exactly the same as “it”‘ [Alan Watts]

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post inspired in part as a result of a dialogue with Sonnische
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

transfiguration

Posted on November 2, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #162: New Delhi: November in North India is the best time. The heat has gone and our orange tree is heavy with fruit. When the first basketful is picked we have to keep it with loving kindness for a few days in a place that’s separate from the tree. This is to allow the tree to forget about its lost fruit. Our curious seasonal change is like a brief springtime that occurs as we’re heading towards winter. It’s suddenly pleasantly warm like an early English summer, plants flower, and the bougainvillea on the roof terrace (Jiab calls them ‘bookend-villas’) transforming with more and more new blossoms.

I go up to the roof terrace and the yoghurt bowl is sitting on the table in the shade because the kitchen is too cold for it now – yoghurt is made without any artificial warmth, just room temperature itself. The milk is boiled, allowed to cool to about 45°C (113°F). The bacterial culture is added, and the warm temperature has to be maintained for 4 to 7 hours. I sit at the table next to the small bowl, feeling I ought to be quiet as this liquid is changing its form, bacteria active, fermentation. It needs some respect and privacy… I shall not look at it. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not, because after November it’s too cold for yoghurt – except that a Japanese friend said she’d managed to make it by placing the bowl on the Wi-Fi router (horizontal type), covered with a plastic box all night, and ready in the morning. Interesting idea, yoghurt made with Internet signal.

As it happens, seasonal change for us coincides with a change in accommodation. We’re moving to a different part of Delhi. It happens once every three or four years, living in rented houses for intervals of time, watching the paint slowly peeling off in the heat and letting it all be as it is. No agitation about anything that needs fixing because, just at the edge of vision, household items are ready for the next move, poised… the choreography of the dance step/transfiguration, the great leap, percussive scatter of objects landing. Wake up in somebody else’s house with all your own things looking out of context… everything that’s old has been forgotten in the confrontation with the new, that’s not yet been gotten used to. Perception takes it all in, files it away in a new folder, a new reference point: ‘this’ is what we shall call reality for now… before that happens there’s the transition, looking for things:
‘Where’s the coffee filter cone?’
‘In the box.’
‘Which box?’
‘The one in the room.’
‘Which room?’
(no answer)
sound of footsteps walking off in search of it…

The separate self is not an entity; it is an activity: the activity of thinking and feeling that our essential nature of pure Awareness shares the limits and the destiny of the body and mind. [Rupert Spira]

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Thanks to Non-Duality America for the Rupert Spira quote

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

the way it unfolds

Posted on October 21, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #158: Chiang Mai: The tuk-tuk driver outside the Shangri-La Hotel charges me too much – he thinks I’m tourist staying at the hotel but I’m not, I’m visiting the tailor in the lobby. So I agree to the tuk-tuk price, not overly concerned, and he starts up the 2-stroke engine; key-turn ignition, a few revs of the throttle and I climb in. He edges out into the road, and in a flash of passing vehicles makes a fortuitous U-turn in fast-moving traffic so suddenly it takes a moment to see we’re facing the opposite direction, speeding away in a swirl of noise, vibration and acceleration. The outside world invades my space, rushes through a hot wind, no walls, no windows, no glass, except the driver’s windscreen up front and for a moment I’m drawn to that. But the accelerating jolts as he overtakes vehicles in front throws me back into a kind of La-Z-Boy sprawl across the double seat where it’s more comfortable, holding on to my possessions in case they get blown away in the gusts of air. And, at least, this way I can see out, under the overhanging flaps of the stretched canvas roof, blowing in the wind.

Everywhere you go in central Chiang Mai the old canal is on your right side. It forms a square, and to go from south to north the one-way traffic has to go round three sides of the square. Water fountains, huge ancient trees and the remains of a 700 year-old wall that encloses the old city inside the square. It all looks the same, all these journeys connected end-to-end, thinking of it as a repeat pattern, the total itinerary, past lives spent here and there, divided and subdivided into periods and instants of looking out at the world flying by thinking: ‘where are we now?’ But not recognising anything and in the blink of an eye back to being busy with thinking. Everything fits together, including my perception of it – the way it unfolds is the way it is.

The tuk-tuk stops at the traffic light and driver switches off the engine to save gas. All of a sudden it’s quiet; the tick-tick and creak of hot metal, smell of tarmac. Here I am in this laid-back position as if lounging in a fifteenth century market stall waiting for customers. Bamboo poles and the roof is thatch, enclosing the space I’m in; contained in the greater space all around. People walking by the wall, fifteenth century bricks sagging and curved like a slow moving wave that’s formed with the gradual sinking of foundations.

Same ‘now’ as it was then; seven hundred years in the past, it wasn’t any different for the people who lived then, returning, as I do, to this same reference point; ‘me’ the human being, eyes looking out ‘there’ at the world. All that remains is the emptiness of the moment; the sound of the engine, the vibration and the pressure of the bench I’m sitting on. There’s skin, hair; there are arms, legs, a head and eyes, ears, nose and tongue. I am a sensory-receptive organism. Just the warm air in my face and things rushing by.

‘… impossible to be aware of an experiencer because it is always the experience itself that momentarily occupies that space.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’]

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Note: excerpts from an earlier post titled ‘applied Knowing’

changing the past

Posted on October 10, 2015 by tiramit

[This post is written in response to a Time Machine Challenge from Linda, at Litebeing Chronicles.] October 10, 2015, Chiang Mai, Thailand: I’ve had this intense headache and neck pain since the beginning of September. Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN), nerve damage caused by herpes zoster, and trying to come terms with the fact that it could be like this for the rest of my life – what does that mean? Now the pain is cushioned, I’m on Neurontin 100mg x 3 per day and they say this drug changes my attitude to pain. But at the beginning there were intervals when homeopathic remedies had an effect and the pain was gone for a time. The relief was overwhelming; how could the pain just disappear like that? I needed to know. The inclination was to turn towards it, questioning – rather than turning away in defence… finding some relief in switching off the default sense of: this pain is happening to ‘me’… and suddenly finding there’s no ‘me’ the pain is happening to.

In that heightened state of mind I’d get on to my meditation cushion, carefully… any slight movement and the headache returns. And it’s as if I’m sitting at the edge of the sea, beach sand beneath my folded legs. An incoming wave of thought enters, swirls around for a while then spins away with the outgoing tide – nothing remains. There’s not anyone engaging with these thoughts. Shortly after that another wave comes crashing in; incidental mental conversations scatter on the beach sand… things of no consequence, attention-seeking chatter of the mind dwindles away as it recedes, and it’s gone; returning to the silence of no thinker, falling into a landscape of pain-free, ease and gentleness.

What strange karma could have led to this? Present time conditioned by past experience, yet there’s also the possibility that the past can change according to how it is perceived in present time. Returning to old memories with such vivid clarity that it all seems quite different – I recreate an object in memory according to present circumstances. Reopen a remembered event that’s troubled me for decades and, for the first time I see it in a kindly way. Either it was ‘me’ that got in the way and that’s what caused the problem, or it was somebody else’s ‘me’ that obscured the issue. Forgiveness and compassion for the way we’re all caught (everyone is), trapped in thought and driven by the suffering of ‘self’ wanting things to be different, other than what they are. I’m aware of circumstances I’d not noticed at the time and that past event becomes redefined in the process of reviewing the situation.

The past is a remembered ‘now’. There’s the scary familiarity of bad memories – but it’s not as it was before; same story but somehow seen clearly and portrayed differently… a new production of an old movie, there in the altered past, seeing the present moment as a kind of back-to-the-future thing. Kindnesses and sorrows over the denial and avoidance – how could it be like this? It’s an acceptance in a no-choice situation, a giving-way-to-it action; passive understanding that there’s got to be a willingness to relax the resistance and allow everything to pass through, unheld…

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]

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Thanks Linda! Look out for the next Litebeing Chronicles entry in this series October 11 by Sue. Note: excerpts from earlier posts included here. Photo: The moving walkway to the domestic terminal Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok)

stowaway

Posted on September 30, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #154: Delhi: For a few days now my bag has been lying on the bed while I search around for the clothes I’m taking with me on the trip to Thailand. The lid is hinged back, wide open like the beak of a baby bird in the nest. When the bag is filled to capacity (cases are always filled to capacity) it’ll close its mouth turn over on to its upright position and be wheeled away to the car, off to the airport, the check-in desk and into the cargo of the plane… a capacity inside a capacity.

At this time though, the case is still unpacked and maybe I should not leave the cover of it open like this in case there are small creatures in the air that decide to fly into the bag and come with me to Thailand – like the time we were living in Switzerland and Jiab came back from a long trip to South America and the last stop was Peru. From Jorge Chávez Airport in Lima, she had three connecting flights, many delays and more than 24 hours travelling before she was back in Switzerland in the evening. Totally exhausted, she opened her in-flight bag to take a few things out and went to sleep immediately. I didn’t move the bag, left there lying open and went to sleep too – if I had closed the bag, then the stowaway wouldn’t have escaped into the room, or when it did, there’s a chance we’d have seen it….

In the morning I woke up to this blat-blat-blat sound coming from the mezzanine upstairs, so I went up to have a look. Step by step and cautiously, there was a table light that had been on all night. Something was inside the shade – a very strange winged insect banging itself against the light bulb. When it stopped and lay resting on the inside of the shade I could see it was a hard shelled beetle-like creature that folded its wings up inside its shell… hmmm this thing didn’t come from Europe, I’d seen something like it in India. I went down to the kitchen and found an empty glass jar with a screw lid and came back upstairs; it was flying at the light bulb again, blat-blat-blat. When it stopped for a rest, I manouvered it into the jar, got the lid on and took it downstairs. A kind of greenish square-shaped thing with a pointy end, about three quarters of an inch in size and sort of flat, like a spade.

I tried to get Jiab to wake up to look at it, but she was not interested in that, totally asleep and it wasn’t easy. A very bleary-eyed, jetlagged look at what I held up in the jar for her to see brought only puzzled silence. After some consideration she said: Insects should not be in the house, and collapsed back on the pillow. So that was it, much later we discussed how it could have got here and decided it must have come in through an open window on her last day in the hotel in Lima and landed on the contents of the open bag. She closed the lid on it unknowingly, went to the airport and thus it stowed away on the flight to Europe.

I studied the insect in the jar for a while then took it to the balcony, unscrewed the lid and gave it its freedom in the warm spring air. Watched it fly off down to the bushes and grass below. Who knows? Maybe it found distant members of a species once related, twice removed, reproduced and now there’s a hybrid genus developing in that part of Europe waiting to be discovered.

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” [Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss]

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Photo by M, showing her bag (upper left, light blue with pattern) being loaded on a domestic flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok

pasta in the past

Posted on September 23, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #152: Delhi: Video call from M, my Thai niece, she’s showing me her new glasses… they make her look so grown-up, hard to believe she’s only 11 years old. I remember when she was little, using English words and that creative playfulness: ‘pasta in the past’, something she learned about the word ‘pasta’ having its origins in China and brought to Italy by Marco Polo in the 13th century. So it became pasta (in the past) – as in pasta/ presenta/ futura – but it was also from the movie ‘Frozen’ where the main character (Elsa) sings the song, ‘Let It Go’ and there’s the line ‘the past is in the past…’ (click here for 9 second link) and M was singing along with a video of it as, ‘pasta in the past’, either because that’s how she heard it in some other animation, or she thought it was funny, or both… I can’t remember.

The wisdom of this childlike intelligence that seeks/finds creative solutions to problems – I must have had in my own childhood, over many horizons, long ago and far away. All the ups-and-downs; all the dramas embedded in our history that make us who we are now and form the characteristics of our future time. Births, deaths, marriages; I have a fragile, old, yellowed newspaper clipping of an obituary column that describes my grandfather who came from the Orkney Islands in the North of Scotland and was drowned in a fishing boat in the Moray Firth before I was born. The unseen cause/effect of emotional catastrophes enduring for decades; we’re unknowingly driven to take responsibility for things over which we have no control, thinking (or believing) that by chance we might stumble upon the key to unlock it all; the karma that’ll undo the karma that led to this.

M asks me: Toong Ting, you feel better now? How about your Chingo? (Shingles)… I tell her, yes, I’m okay now, thanks. She looks at me, Did you go to the hospital? (we go to the outpatients section of the local hospital rather than a private doctor) Yes, I went to the hospital, showed the doc my skin rash, looked really yukky, told him about the bad headache all the time. Did you eat the medicine Toong Ting? Yes… we take medicine, we don’t eat medicine, and she knows this but can’t be bothered to make the change from the Thai translation: kin ya

I took homeopathic medicine towards the end of the three-week frenzy of stabbing pain, then the recovery and falling into a huge landscape of pain-free, ease and gentleness. Altered state, revisiting old memories with such vivid clarity it all seemed quite different – I thought the past was irredeemable but it’s not. The past changes according to how it is perceived in present time. And I’d been so firmly attached to the endless thinking-about-thinking, watching the same old rendition of the story I’d assembled over the years.

My world was transformed, ideas and perceptions started to change; a fierce face appears in a kindly way, the scary familiarity of events unfolding but portrayed differently… a completely new production of an old movie. Kindnesses and sorrows, things I’d not noticed at the time become redefined in the process of mindfully remembering the situation. It’s as if I’m seeing my missing grandfather coming back to life; a rebirth happening here and now – in the same way this video call from M is happening now, although she is 2000 miles away. Toong Ting?, M asks, when you come to Thailand? I tell her it’ll be 29 September, that’s next Tuesday… Okay, bye! Everything comes full circle again.

A monk asked Yueh-shan, “What does one think of while sitting?”
“One thinks of not thinking,” the Master replied.
“How does one think of not thinking?” the monk asked.
“Without thinking,” the Master said.
[Zen mondo]

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improvisation

Posted on September 5, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 149: Delhi: Mall architecture, astonishingly playful buildings, concrete and steel monuments and shrines to maya (sanskrit: illusion) – in Chiang Mai they even named a shopping mall ‘MAYA’. The population welcomes the idea; step into the illusion… air-conditioned, bright and colourful. More and more of these in Bangkok, over the top – a lightweight upbeat city culture, low labour cost and construction projects are ongoing. Something hopelessly inevitable about it careering towards the relentless consumer culture of the West – except that in the East, people are more likely to ‘know’ when they’re stepping into the illusion. Cultural tradition, awareness and vestiges of spirituality; besides, everybody here knows that if somebody is in the market trying to sell you something, it means you have the option to negotiate a fair price… not so in the Mall, and that’s why so few people go there.

The Mall culture affects only a small percentage of the population (sounds like a virus) and, I have to say I’m sometimes part of that minority; the need for essential things for devices, bookshops and a good baker. To get to our mall we have to drive out of town and the three-building complex is situated in an undeveloped area – there’s a fourth building going up at the time of writing. Construction site workers’ community nearby, chickens and goats in a hot dry, dusty landscape. Come off the highway, through a great winding turn of rough unsurfaced road, potholes and puddles of water and into the short entry, manned by security – car examined, mirrors held underneath, look in the trunk, the engine. More security at the entrance, metal detector and security guards carry out a full body search before you get in the door.

It’s as if the whole concept of consumerism is subject to scrutiny; not as easy as it is in the West to simply be ‘pulled’ into the Mall like a magnet and disinclined to escape from the illusion. For many people the whole thing seems impossible to change, situated at the end of the consumerist food chain, as they are, and trapped in that predicament. No alternative, we have to purchase the product because we can’t create it ourselves – so far away from the artisan, so far away from doing things ourselves. People believe they can’t improvise… forgetting that the whole thing is improvised… language is improvised, life itself is improvised. All the systems that are in place were improvised to start with, and even though we may be subject to skillful marketing strategies, there’s still the innate ability to be creative, to improvise, to invent, to innovate, to find a way out of the illusion.

These carnivorous marketing creatures have to be gently pushed into the background in order to bring what’s really meaningful in life into focus. There’s a lightness, a floating in the air… the open-endedness of the human situation, groundlessness.

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” [Thomas Merton]

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photo: shopping mall Bangkok

tilt

Posted on August 28, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 147: Delhi: Phone rings. It’s a message from Jiab in Mumbai… image downloading, a photo taken from her car window. Reflections in the glass make it look like the yellow-top taxi is fusing into the back of the red bus. She’s stuck in a traffic jam; same here in central Delhi (on my way to Khan Market), rivers flowing through all the urban creeks and tributaries, as one vast river and this curious thought that it’s the same time at any point along its route. Or extended through every passageway in the city, as a mass of end-to-end steel/chrome-plated metal, creaking along like the glacier I visited a long time ago in Switzerland moving so slowly, the end of its 133 kilometer length is four hundred years older than its beginning.

Placing parenthesis around a block of time creates a beginning and an end, the world seen in a particular context… ‘my’ view of reality and the actual state of things out ‘there’ appears separate from me. I live in an illusion, riding around like a passenger seated in the vehicle of the body, input from data received through sight, sound, smell, taste, touch – and a mind that creates meaning based on memory files of similar events occurring in the past. There’s this identification with the thing-ness of things, thoughts, solutions and problems, reviewing, seeking, and memories of past times.

Yet, I can see the mind as an object; I am an organism contained in and created by the ‘world’, a body made of earth, water, fire and air. And if they’ve invented something that can break up the molecular structure of solid objects, concrete and steel, I find it impossible to believe, of course, more likely to disbelieve – but, given this all-inclusive subjectivity as the nature of the world, I’m inclined to believe it is possible, and everything tilts in an unexpected way.

Traffic seized up here in the approach to Khan Market, but the signal is still good so I take a picture and send it to Jiab in Mumbai, 1400 kilometers away.