grounded

Posted on September 13, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #91: Delhi: The laptop crashed. Not once, many times. I had to take it to the technician and he said he wasn’t sure if he could fix it but anyway it would take a few days. Doesn’t speak English well, confusion, then there was the weekend too, another two days to wait and see, catastrophic feeling arising: Oh no! There’s something wrong, it feels like an illness, a kind of death; ‘All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become separated from me.’ I’m offline, the blogging world goes sailing by and I’m marooned on a desert island. Standing on the beach waving, shouting, jumping up and down, trying to get the attention of passing ships but they don’t see me. What to do? Sit at the desk among all the unplugged cables where the computer used to be. Write with a pen on a pad of paper – doodle and draw pictures instead. No focus in my life, no screen to look at. No need to be at the desk… why am I sitting here?

Get up and walk around; phone in pocket, go upstairs and walk on the roof terrace. It’s a sort of walking meditation path, jongkrom. Up and down, thirty five paces from end to end. Fifteen-hundred paces equal one mile, I need to walk the path 42 times to cover a mile – quite often I lose count and forget… the mind wanders. Basic mindfulness is about remembering what it is you’re supposed to be doing. Returning to the action itself, looking at the feet touching the earth one by one: left then right. The human body, this place I inhabit; it seems strange. I was a child once, learning to walk. How did it feel? Getting myself up here in the vertical position, stumble and fall – world goes sideways, get up again, walk… fall down. Try again, learning how to live my life. Seeing it all through the eyes of a person called ‘me’, a localised experience in a world of fifty million square miles of land space to walk on, and one of seven billion people on the planet. I’m the guy in the street; the ‘you’, the ‘me’. I am a single cell in an organism so vast it’s inconceivable.

Thirty five paces to the end, turn around and walk back. The brick floor looks like an abstract painting, take some photos, back to the walking. How does it feel? This sensation of stepping out from the past into the future but never getting there. Always in transit, housed in a kind of wobbly, thud-thud-thud, rubberoid, physical experience of present time that’s just rolling along. Awareness sees the ground spinning towards each foot like a treadmill driven by my walking… hamster in its spinning wheel. A fun thing to do, hamster’s idea of meditation. Everything happens in the movement towards a place I think I’m going; an arrival point that’s one among many, fixed end to end and disappearing into the perspective. I am the vanishing point; no beginning, no end, always only a part of the continuum. The seed sprouting from the earth is not how the story began, there was another tree before that…

Phone rings, Hello? It’s Jiab saying she’s on the way home with a laptop borrowed from the office. Relief floods through me – aware of the craving; that which is always seeking engagement. I understand what attachment is, so good to see it like this. I’m glad the laptop was taken away… glad too that another one is coming back. The walking has a new kind of ease. Electrical energy of Mind is grounded through footsteps touching the earth.

‘The purpose of walking meditation is walking meditation itself. Going is important, not arriving. Walking meditation is not a means to an end; it is an end. Each step is life; each step is peace and joy. That is why we don’t have to hurry. That is why we slow down. We seem to move forward, but we don’t go anywhere; we are not drawn by a goal. Thus we smile while we are walking.’ [Thich Nhat Hanh]

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9/11/2014 “the big lie”

Posted on September 6, 2014 by tiramit

A Buddhist Reflection: I’m trying to find a way to write this post to fit with how I’ve been writing it these last two years [2013 and 2012] and not get caught up in the greater catastrophe that 9/11 has become in the 13 years since it happened. It’s impossible to think about the event and not include the possibility that there’s more to this than meets the eye. The realization weighs heavily on us. The sadness and grieving now is that the big lie is here, situated amongst the ordinary things in our world; lives being lived, sleeping, eating, busy with work, women bearing children, raising families, birth and death.

‘… in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.’ [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X]

The big lie needs to be brought into the light where it can be seen clearly because the tendency is for things that look like they should be hidden to stay hidden. So many things hidden and nothing revealed in the official 9/11 investigation in 13 years, except that it’s been proved there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, Osama bin Laden was captured, killed and body thrown in the sea. The parallel ‘Truth’ investigation, however, continues to come up with more and more scientific evidence revealing the big lie. It’s this that has convinced me I need to know more about what really happened, painful though it may be. Yesterday I spent 5 hours looking at the video: September 11 – the new Pearl Harbour. It’s in three parts (link below) and if you watch it, you’ll come out the other end a different person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOnAn_PX6M

Whether the truth comes out or not, or to what extent, is not as important as dealing with the strong possibility of it being true. What effect does that have on me, how do I feel about it? The following is an excerpt from, ‘A Buddhist Reflection on the Tragedy of September 11’ by Ajahn Jayasaro, published in 2001:

“As Buddhists, we devote ourselves to learning how to maintain clarity of mind, fundamental compassion and intelligence, as a constant inner refuge. It is not so difficult to be clear about issues which don’t personally affect us, or those which provoke no strong feelings. The real challenge is to be awake even in the midst of a hurricane of emotions — when we are hurt and betrayed, angry and afraid. Clarity of mind means that when things get rough we can still receive the blessings of the principles we uphold. Inner clarity is thus the ground in which the dignity and meaning of life can grow.

An inner refuge does not come easily. It can only be brought about by a thoroughgoing commitment to this life education, a training of the way we live internally and externally. Buddhist teachings are seen then, in summary, not as dogmas to be believed in (or rejected), but tools to be made use of. We use the teachings to understand ourselves and our experiences in life, to understand other people and the world we live in. Then basing ourselves on that understanding, we seek to create as much authentic happiness and benefit for ourselves and others as we can.”

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Source for header image: Rob Clark/Institute – From my roof on 9-11

future in the past

Posted on August 20, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #88: Delhi: In a taxi with Jiab heading out to the domestic terminal. The taxi driver said yesterday he was going to pick her up at 2.00pm – future in the past, now it’s 2.30pm and she might miss the plane. No problem, he’s intending to make up the time, he says with foot on the accelerator the whole way. We’re going so fast it’s like we’re on the edge of linear time. Everything is a blur, the “now” I experience at this moment was the future for me when I was in the past… this thought repeats over and over. Driver ignores the built-in audio system that tells us when he’s going over the speed limit; a recorded voice message can be heard in the car, which says, ‘you are going too fast!’ Innovative idea… needless to say we have to listen to this voice repeating: ‘you are going too fast!’ all the way out to the airport. Driver overtaking everything, nearside, offside, hand on the horn, and the penetrating little voice coming unexpectedly: ‘you are going too fast!’

Jiab, with her conditioning in Bangkok traffic, is maybe more used to this kind of thing than me. I’m adhered to the seat, doing my utmost to bond with the structure of the vehicle. It’s like I’m not going through these streets, these streets are going through me. There’s an alertness locked in place you could call mindfulness but it’s more like an urgency, and struggling a bit with the idea that the driver is doing all the wrong things, this shouldn’t be happening. Round a sharp corner and we swerve to avoid a small motorbike coming straight at us on our side of the road; that motorbike guy is doing all the wrong things too. Then there’s a great show of outrage at the traffic lights, because of a man on the back of a motorbike holding a vertical panel of pressboard that’s 5ft x 4ft (see photo) and the motorbike can’t go fast because of wind resistance… pedestrians running about in the traffic risking life and limb – everybody’s doing all the wrong things.

Yeh, well, it’s my perception of this that’s all wrong, of course. The people out there obviously feel they’re doing the right thing, and I’m the one who’s got it wrong. How to see it as they do when gravity seems to disappear at times? Focus on the breath, don’t look in the direction of travel, and I find a small island of calm abiding… ah yes, this is the way it is, extraordinary and exhilarating. Enjoy the show, I’m in a speedboat, everything seems fluid, things merging with other things and entering into everything else. The velocity of this vehicle rushing through the streets washes aside other vehicles as waves do in the sea; everything is like flotsam; how we normally receive experience is so near to universal unity, it’s the same thing.

Taxi arrives at the terminal, I get the bags onto trolley, Jiab jumps out, bye-bye… then I’m into the same taxi, and going back the way we came, same cacophony of noise, same breakneck speed. Get to the house and the whole journey was so quick, there and back again, it was like I’d never left. Give the driver 500 Rupees, and it’s too much I know, but I’m in a state of astonishment. Inside and crash on the sofa for an hour. A text message rouses me; it’s Jiab saying she’s in Ranchi, about 800 miles away.

“According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.” [Deepak Chopra, ‘Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles’]

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‘Future in the Past is used to express the idea that in the past you thought something would happen in the future’ For a grammatical explanation of Future in the Past, click here. ‘The “now” I experience at this moment was the future for me when I was in the past…’ developed from an idea in Silentlyheardonce. This post contains excerpts from an earlier post ‘Going Too Fast”. Special thanks to Mindfulbalance/Observing everything, for the Ajahn Amaro quote that inspired the idea: ‘I’m not going through these streets, these streets are going through me.’

surfing on the edge of dawn

Posted on August 12, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #86: Delhi 05:00 hours: When I open the glass doors to the garden, the temperature outside is the same as it is inside. This is such a novelty for me, having recently arrived from Northern Europe where there’s always that early morning chill separating outer from inner. Over here, it’s all of a oneness. I want to drag my mattress and bedclothes through, spread them out on the paving stones here and lie down with my pillow. Then I could gaze up at the tall trees in the early morning sky and listen to the birds. A birdsong extravaganza, surfing on the edge of dawn… why this wild party and glorious singing? What’s going on? Such an accumulation of voice – is this what we call God? …somehow, it doesn’t cover it, ‘god’ is just a word, man-made. The actuality of it is as far as the eye can see, daylight spreading over the curvature of the planet and an immeasurable sense of sky.

Impossible to understand the totality of it, of course, the mind is a filter, selecting the data to suit the software, and this may be a sound-realm on a scale only birds are aware of. In the darkness they can hear the sound of the other birds over there on the other side of dawn, where it’s already light, and that’s the signal to engage in this shared event. It’s like a football stadium crowd performing “the wave.” A movement in time that’s always present in the here-and-now – same at every location. Light-colour-sound, daybreak and birdsong are inseparable. It fills the air for about 20 minutes then disappears. At the next place in time and space, the birds respond to it there; the Mother Ship – applause, celebration, rejoice, and it moves on. Incredible mystery… it’s the movement of the planet, I need to remind myself, the rotation of the Earth at more than 1000 miles per hour, and always happening like this, of course. The dawn chorus is always being experienced in some part of the world. Continuous birdsong since whenever birds first populated the planet…

From this location in North India, it’s shifting away Westerly, in the direction of the Middle East and on to the Mediterranean countries. The birdsong of Palestine, of Israel, Greece, then Florence, Portugal. Over the Atlantic Ocean, isolated flocks of gulls rise up from the water’s surface, calling and mewing in the golden sky. On from there to the Eastern Seaboard of the US, across the forests, rivers and mountains of the continent and out over the Pacific.

It does not appear or disappear.
It is not born and does not die.
It is neither constructed nor raised up,
Neither made nor produced.
It is neither sitting nor lying,
Neither walking nor standing still,
Neither moving nor turning over,
Neither at rest nor idle.
It does not advance or retreat,
Knows not safety or danger,
Neither right nor wrong.
It is neither virtuous nor improper.
It is neither this nor that,
Neither going nor coming.

From the Lotus Sutra

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Photo: Birds in sunrise sky/ID 7756984 Xdrew/ Dreamstime.com

over the horizon

Posted on July 29, 2014 by tiramit

‘Through our eyes, the Universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the Universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the Universe becomes conscious of itself.’ [Alan Watts]

POSTCARD #83: London – Delhi flight: Clouds cover the landscape, with openings here and there where I can see the ground below. England is a patchwork quilt of very small fenced enclosures, little houses built with brick and stone that last for hundreds of years. Concrete bulwarks along the coastline, the idea of the sea engulfing the land is psychological. A united Kingdom huddled together on land space so small it’s almost not there at all. Travel across from East to West and in a few hours you come to the sea again. Geographical aloneness, an island mentality, the idea of ‘self’, marooned, I am contained, separate from everything, surrounded by water, the world is out ‘there’. Not much room, just enough space for everything, a smallness, memories are close by and everything is near at hand. The buildings and the land were all here before I was born and will be here after I’m gone. Children learn about the everlasting ‘soul’ living in an objective world; belief in a ‘self’ yet… seeing only the lack of it, a lifetime spent looking for an answer to this puzzle – it must be… over the horizon somewhere.

Somewhere far away from not ‘being’ but being busy doing things. Somewhere distant from the default settings the world of money and power depends on. The system hijacked the Jesus Teachings and now there’s no place in society for a contemplative spiritual life. Nothing to encourage children to look beyond sensory gratification and see through perception because it works better to have an unknowing population addicted to television and consumer goods. Living with an intensity fueled by greed, hatred and delusion, instead of generosity, loving-kindness and insight. The worship of self rather than selflessness.

In a discussion with one of the monks at Aruna Ratanagiri Monastery in UK the question came up, what does the word ‘contemplation’ actually mean? Contemplating contemplation… the state of mind where everything is seen as an awareness of present experience, circumstances which can’t be explained in any terms other than what they are. Thinking stops and the mind opens up to experience as it is – not as it’s verbalised. Sometimes language just gets in the way. Like waking up after a good night’s sleep and there’s the solution to the puzzle I was thinking about before I went to sleep. No words, no memory, no markers in the mind for thought to attach to and somehow everything falls into place.

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows. [Wislawa Szymborska]

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The header image source: Aruna Ratanagiri Monastery.

Poem source: superaalifragilistic, View With A Grain Of Sand.

The Alan Watts quote source: Zen Flash, Through our eyes the Universe is perceiving itself

– G R A T I T U D E –

arrivals – departures

Posted on July 25, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD #82: South East England: Somebody I know died. There was a ceremony, the monks came, chanted blessings and now she’s gone. All that remains is her absence, her empty rooms, her pictures on the walls, objects chosen, placed on shelves and now there’s no one here who made the choices. Sadness… her clock-radio still starts at 8.00 in the morning and the bedroom is suddenly full of classical music. Empty bed, bedclothes made up neat, tidy and not slept in. Nobody in the house can bear to change it. My task is to pull away the bed from the wall, find where the cable leads to the socket, and disconnect it. Orchestral music spinning around the walls and ceiling as I search for the socket. It’s next to the skirting board I can just reach it… click, the music is gone. Push the bed back in place and contemplate the silence. A nice, quiet room with morning light coming in through the windows. She was a musician who became a Buddhist, then was a Buddhist Chaplain visiting hospices and caring for dying people, until she finally reached that stage herself.

Memory is all there is… faded like an old sepia tint photo. The enigma, the empty space where that person used to be. There’s ‘nothing’ left here, it’s not ‘something’, it’s not ‘anything’. Try to see past the words, concepts in the mind and there’s nothing remaining, only the holding-on to whatever it is that was defined in words but was never really there in the first place. Language is a tool for explaining how it appears to be, what it resembles, what it’s like… a wonderful shared software that names things, identifies feelings, etc. Poets and artists are compelled to use words and there are others, spiritual advisors, who refer only to cessation. Truth is inexpressible, no words for it; a ‘nothing’ that carries the feeling of no-thingness and brings with it a great sense of release, of peace, of rest, of ease and gentleness. I no longer have the burden of my thoughts. I let it all in, let it all out and everything fades away, ‘melted into thin air … the baseless fabric of this vision… we are such stuff as dreams are made on…’ [The Tempest]

A lifetime is a story told. Details accumulate and it appears to have form and direction as it goes on, but only when the end comes near does it have a context. The route by which I arrived at this point becomes somehow, explained – it was the right way, the best way to come here and everything I did in my life seems to fit together now I’m at the end. A curious reversal… I’m on the way to get here and yet seem to be able to look back on the journey and know how it came to be as it is. Buddhist cause/effect is an illusion, sequenced in linear time. In the totality, everything is ‘now’, an ‘everywhere-shared instantaneity’ and each moment is simply a shift in focus.

Why does it have to be like this? There’s something about the question/answer relationship that’s always gently considered, without directing it too much. Trying to understand what this sort of thing might possibly be is enough to begin to know it – no need to go any further. More to do with indirect action. Death must be the true meaning of the ‘past tense’. Standing here in her room, the tidy bed, empty wardrobe, eyes move towards the window, look out at her overgrown garden. Birdsong, and the light of this particular time in the morning. Colour and images form, conscious awareness is the same for me now as it was for her then, standing as she was, in this same place….

“For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. Our life is endless, in just the same way that our field of vision has no boundaries.” [Wittgenstein”]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: sense of release. Also Michael’s post: Special Effects, thank you for the word: instantaneity. Upper photo: Edinburgh airport, waiting for the flight to Gatwick

– G R A T I T U D E –

the jitensha metaphor

Posted on June 24, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#75: Delhi: We bought an exercise bike from a Japanese lady who was leaving Delhi. It was a surprisingly large heavy thing with horns (NOVA fitness 700u). The delivery guys carried it into the spare room and that’s where it lives now. Jiab called it the jitensha – Japanese for bicycle:じてんしゃ remembering the bicycle she used to have when we lived in Japan. It got stolen – a sad story. So this big jitensha became the reincarnation of the one that was lost long ago. We started a routine of using the exercise bike and ‘jitensha’ became a verb, ‘to jitensha’, as in: are you going to jitensha? Jiab is Thai, and English is an improvisation, she speaks the language like playing a musical instrument. Everything is fun and it is such a lovely onomatopoeic word: ji-ten-sha… jitensha-jitensha-jitensha-jitensha, like the action of pedal crank, spinning chain wheel and everything about our jitensha is metaphorical; cycling through time in the present moment, situated firmly in the here-and-now, and the real sensation of going someplace but there are no wheels.

I get on the jitensha first thing in the morning. It’s the hot season, ceiling fan spinning, sleepy in the darkness and I wake up whizzing through streets and pathways of the mind, wind in my face and my eyes closed. Always downhill, no need to balance or steer or pay attention to where I’m going, there’s only this pleasing familiarity with the bicycle state of mind. Usually a four or five mile jaunt, not too hard, upper body swinging side to side with the pedaling movement, bare feet in pedal straps. Nothing else to do or worry about, thoughts arrive and depart, leaving fragments of things that form into something new, a memory of an event that happened long ago. Ah yes, I remember that… hold it for a moment then let it go. Now this, now that, things of no consequence. Focus on each one as it appears and disappears somewhere in these great landscapes seen rushing by.

Maybe it’s the blood circulation, a pleasing rush, and slight pressure behind the eyes seems to drive the thinking process. The intensity of making things into other things and the world out there is seen from the point of view of ‘me’ in here… the metaphorical self. I am on the receiving end of all this, I am the face in the mirror – look, that’s me. I think, therefore I am… a passing view of self and the hollowness of it all. Let it go and it’s gone, “the closer you look, the more it’s not there”. And then I’m inside a curious extended, freeze-framed thought moment, the all-inclusive presence of it and a sense of immensely distant things. No reference points and nothing left to think about. I’m not aware the thoughts have gone, just know they’re not there anymore. All that remains is the activity of Mind, not familiar with the ‘unthinking’ state and trying to fill the empty space with something, anything. Then that’s seen too, it falls away, and the jitensha spins off towards the horizon…

‘Wherever you go, you carry with you the sense of here and now. This is what distinguishes any present experience from memory. It reveals that space and time are in you and not the other way around. Most people are not acquainted with the sense of their being but only with the knowledge of their doing.’ [Wu Hsin]

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The Wu Hsin quote comes from the superaalifragilistic blog/ Behind The Mind: The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin – G R A T I T U D E –

mourning the loss of spring

Posted on April 10, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#61: Chiang Mai: Looking at all these posts written by my blogger friends about springtime in the Northern hemisphere and something stirs in me… that urge for seasonal change, I want to be there. No seasons in Thailand, every day is pretty much like the day before. Time disappears, days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. The whole thing is one very, very long day – night interrupts the flow, hardly noticed, and goes unremembered like the blink of an eye.

New leaves bud, grow, turn brown, fall and get swept away all through the year. There’s no autumn, no winter, no snow, no hibernation, no spring returning. The same bright light day after day, everything is awake all the time, and there’s an exhaustion about it. Necessary to take a rest in the afternoons, find my place bookmarked in the dream… I remember the silence of no ceiling fans. Natural AC, always a chill in the air and the sky a curious indistinct grey, sometimes, neither one thing nor another. It suits the transitory way of things, anicca.

I am a hoarder of old notes and among these there are references to spring in Switzerland, enthusiastic words written by a younger ‘me’ about buds beginning to appear on that yellow shrub that’s always the first to have colour around lac de Genève. Birdsong and smells of growth or greenness, leafy fragrances, moss and pebbles and the presence of the lake, lying there on its side like some vast mysterious being.

Date: 26 March 2001. Spring has sprung and just yesterday morning around 6am I suddenly noticed there wasn’t any birdsong and how could that be, what happened and why so dark? But it was because it’s all one hour earlier than the clock says (daylight saving time) and birds don’t change their watches.’

And another note about going to teach an English class in zone industrielle, Date: 10 April 2001. Yesterday was a bright sunny day and about 11 am, in the garden outside the building, I noticed the cherry trees with buds and tiny bits of bright pink. At 12.30pm, class was over and when I came past the same cherry trees, the buds were totally open and blossoms everywhere. It’s like Spring suddenly happened in just over an hour…

In the same way, it can disappear in an hour and I’m mourning the loss of spring… then that changes too. Everything is impermanent, including the idea that everything is impermanent – steel embedded in concrete, seemingly permanent, demolished by a man with a jackhammer in a single afternoon. But we don’t want to believe it, reluctant to accept that the world is so fragile, touch it and it falls to pieces – almost as if it’s not there.

Seen from the apartment here on the third floor, level with the tree tops, these exotic yellow and black squirrels jump around as if they had wings. Tremendous long leaps and landing: crish-crash! Branches spring back, rise up with the weight like uncontrollable laughter, high in the tops of slender trees, boughs bending to take the mass of one small body chased by another. Always having to catch up, never getting there, I follow them dashing through the foliage, my eye leaps in the field of vision – where are they now? The “now” moment slips from my grasp, I focus on it and it escapes. A new moment arrives, or is it the same one continuing from before? World without end….

‘…linear time melts in the now, self-dissolving, fading into space;  days and dates fade away; months, years and eons dissolve;  the one and the many vanished, sacred and profane both clarified;  the delusive ground of samsara and nirvana clarified in its innate spaciousness. Even “spaciousness”, as an intellectually contrived entity, dissolves.  Whatever we have practiced, however we strive, is useless now,  and intellectual gall exhausted, what a great marvel is the sky.’ [Longchenpa] source

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Photo: View from 3rd floor window and the trees where the squirrels play, yellow blossom appearing now it’s the hot season

strange familiarity

Posted on April 5, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#60: Chiang Mai: 05.00 hours and there’s a problem with the internet. I have the about:blank page, a blinding white screen illuminating everything in this dark room. Things unexpectedly quit, don’t reload and I’m stuck because I can’t connect, the flip-side of that happily engaged state. The created ‘self’ has it’s own momentum… help!-help! – how to undo this bewilderment? Step back, get the bigger picture, zoom in, zoom out. How’s it working? Not good. But there’s a small obstruction-free space in this scenario, thank goodness, I remember a sense of pleasant abiding that supports it all. A long time ago I was keeping house for a Buddhist monk who had health problems. It was a cottage in a field in the middle of the English countryside. Theravadin monks are not allowed to touch food unless it is offered, so I’d go into town, do the shopping, prepare and offer the food before noon. The monk would chant the Anumodana blessing, birds singing in the trees outside, and we’d eat. It was a nice time, we’d talk about the Dhamma, go for walks sometimes and a lot of time was spent reading… yes, reading happened often – partly because his computer was really old and the internet connection extremely slow.

Once a day he’d start up this big, heavy, old Dell laptop and check his emails. It could take an hour… slow is not the word – death-like in its slowness. He told me with some eagerness that it was possible to read a page and a half of his book in the time it took the computer to load an image. For me it was about letting go of ‘self’ and what’s left after that? Only the strange familiarity of objects, sequences of events, karma of reoccurrences, and expecting things to happen when they’re nowhere near ready. Maybe it was easier to go along with that in those days. We had no idea about speed, bandwidth or anything.

In the really early days of the World Wide Web, I remember staring into the blank screen, waiting for the page to load and this wasn’t a frustrating thing at all. It was understood that things took a long time, the duration was really part of the experience – it was miraculous when the page finally opened. It was like, wow! I am now in a library in Wisconsin or New Zealand or South Africa or wherever, I see I’m in some room on the top floor maybe with the sun coming in the window and a view of a landscape outside. I’d feel like I was actually there… and isn’t that amazing! So it seemed to me at that time, then in Bangkok, Thailand nearly 30 years ago.

And the familiarity of the old dial-up connection; that strange piercing sound like the noise of an old iron gate swinging open and closed. Somewhere in mid-swing the tone would change, there’d be this alternating two-tone sound – and this is how it was for us, in the cottage in the field, when the monk’s computer would stir into life, he’d place the book he was reading gently aside, look into the screen, like the whole thing unfolding in slow motion. Select an icon, click that and wait for another 2 minutes for the next page to load. No problem, he’d reach for his book, find the place… continue reading.

‘When we come to practice we don’t know what we don’t know. After a while, the ego mask starts to crack and we begin to know what we don’t know. With some diligent practice, we might have a break through and for a moment or so know what we know. And if we continue with this wondrous work, we might stumble back to not knowing what we don’t know.’ [Wild Fox Zen]

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assumed identity

Posted on March 29, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#58: Chiang Mai: Arrived in the early evening and out through the exit tunnel into the airport corridors. Turn the first corner and we’re looking back through a large window at our plane with passenger bridge attached. M says, in her 9-year old voice: take a photo of it… put in your blog Toong-Ting (she calls me that). There’ll be a time when M takes a direct editorial role in this blog… so I take the photo and here it is now. A large reptilian mouth sucking out the contents of a passenger aircraft that has a painted face, intensely happy smile, and it seems okay about what’s happening. M is silent for a moment as she considers the elasticity of this strange stretched metaphor. Then we continue along the corridors to get our bags from the luggage belt. I put everything on the trolley with M sitting on top, push the wheels through the glass doors, opening as we approach and we’re in Arrivals. Her mum is waiting for us, pleased to have M back.

Bags in the car and we’re off. Heavy traffic on the way into town and M, still silent, looking out at it all considering, maybe, how one thing can become another, tells me that cars have gender: boy-car and girl-car. It’s the look of the ‘face’ of the car – that kind of ‘grin’ created by the front bumper and radiator grille. She sees it as the face of a boy or a girl or, if she can’t decide which it is, it must be a katoey, effeminate gay male, third gender, or whatever – she giggles a bit, it’s okay in Thailand. I ask her to identify a boy-car for me, just to see if I can recognise its ‘maleness’ – although I’ve always thought of cars being male. She points at one: that’s a boy-car Toong-Ting (see left pic). I want to say… how d’you know that? But this kind of challenge to her reasoning might be too much, so I’m just going along with it. She asks if I can identify the gender: you tell me, Toong-Ting, it’s a boy-car or girl-car, okay? I have a feeling I’m going to get this wrong… let’s see, there’s one that’s got really male characteristics, I point to it and say that one is a boy-car. No, Toong-Ting it’s a girl-car… looking at me like, how come you can’t see something as obvious as that, hmm?

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

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

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

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