karma of circumstances

Posted on January 24, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #245: New Delhi: Arriving at the breakfast table like a ship docking in the harbor. Sliding in to coffee and bagels. Spread butter on toasted bagel, then honey and slices of banana. A piece of it held between finger and thumb comes into vision for a moment and it disappears somewhere below my nose, as head tilts forward in a teeth/tongue snatch, chewing, chewing and swallow. Wonderful, the world enters my body – gratitude (“give us this day our daily bread…”). Transfiguration of flesh, blood and bones, fingernails and hair grow.

Hands and face wash – hot soapy water dribbling down bare arms, coldness in the chill air. It drops off at the elbows in two puddles on the floor… sudden déjà vu, memory of an unreasonable fear, guilt. Must have been a childhood scolding. Dry it all up, headache like a cue ball colliding with the inner walls of the skull. Always like this, in every new circumstance, reassembling the parts of who I am, and nothing seems to fit; searching for a ‘self’ to be satisﬁed with – or dissatisfied with, or upset, or angry, confused, depressed, gloomy or sad.

I’m drawn back across the years to how it must have been at birth. Sudden embodiment in a separate physicality, immense sound, trauma of coldness that has no name, the shock of air entering unopened lungs. All the early events from there on that are internalized; unexpected fear, huge sensations – everything happening without language to give it form so it cannot be understood. All the hurt and pain deeply embedded in who I am today.

My life is conditioned by these energy imprints, which are as present now as they were “then” – the past doesn’t exist, ‘clock time’ doesn’t cover it. There is only the karma of circumstances contained in present moment awareness.

I’m so glad to know this, if I didn’t have the PHN headache condition, I wouldn’t feel as motivated to look everywhere for a cure, and thus begin to uncover the mystery. A handful of meds swallowed with a swig of bottled water and in a short while, the headache is gone, everything begins to fall into an easing… long sigh of outbreath. I cannot find language that fits the moment.

The melancholia of winter. It takes a while to notice the sun shining through the kitchen extractor fan. Around this time, the shadow cast by the next-door building moves away. I can go up now to the roof terrace and sit in the sunshine… footsteps on concrete steps, flip-flop, flip-flop, flip… disappear up the staircase

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

[Rumi]

Special thanks to Miriam Louisa Simons who introduced me to “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown. Study notes from this form the main part of the post.

there and back again

Posted on January 4, 2017 by tiramit

POSTCARD #241: Chiang Mai: Went down to Bangkok with Jiab and our niece M, aged 12, for the New Year get-together with family, which was happening in the house where we used to live. Strange familiarity of furniture and objects seeming to jump out and call to me… M’s old toys abandoned here and there – a childhood almost gone. The next day, she went back to Chiang Mai with her mum, Jiab set off for Wat Poo Jom Gom, a remote Buddhist monastery near the border with Laos, and the others who were there all left for their homes in the South.

I stayed on in the Bangkok house for another day, a quiet time reflecting on how it used to be, living there, but mostly revisiting the things we talked about the night before – as we do, thinking about what was said, received, held, seen, nurtured… and noticing then, how the memory is displaced by the next moment of remembering – a kind of a death – and all of it, soon enough, fading away into forgetfulness.

Too much to be retained in conscious thought, and a gentle amnesia takes the place of that which groups all conversations in the mind so they form into one. A fleetingness takes away a thought, complete in itself, a picture seen in an instant just as it’s passing away. I seem to understand what was said better than I did when saying it at the time, busy as we are, putting the thought-forms into words… with a return at the end of each response and remark for the others to link with the place where I’d entered the dialogue.

Without trying to make it into anything, just playing my part in the discussion, waiting to see how it was going and where, while all sorts of things came tumbling out in unrehearsed, articulated speech… slotting into the right places. And something is said which fits in place of the piece that’s missing but we only see how it belongs there, after it’s placed. And the whole thing works so well after that, there’s no memory of it ever having been other than what it was/is, perfectly balanced.

Jiab returned from the Wat and the next day we went to the airport together. She was going South and me, back up North. Her flight to Hat Yai was leaving just before mine to Chiang Mai. Bye-bye at the turning of the ways in the long corridor at Don Mueang Departures. Waiting for boarding, she sent me a text saying to look out the window because her aircraft at gate 46 was opposite mine at 55. Her plane took off and mine must have followed on the single runway. Up and away… taking our separate directions above the clouds. How strange and funny to be up ‘there’ together in the air, she in her plane and me in mine, as if we’d been in two ships sailing in an ocean that reaches all other oceans and seas everywhere in the world.

“Because the mind has no beginning or end, you can’t use the mind to put an end to the mind. Because there’s no inside, outside, or in between, if you look for the mind, there’s no place to find it. If there’s no place to find it, then you can’t find it. Therefore, you should realize there is no mind at all. And because there is no mind at all, demon realms can’t affect you. And because you can’t be affected, you subdue all demons.”
Hui-chung (578-650)

Lower photo: Curious rock formations at Poo Jom Gong, the sea that went away…

sentience

Posted on December 17, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #237: Bangkok: Awake at 3.30am, Jiab had to get the early morning flight to Delhi. Coffee, bagels, and conversation. Cases loaded in the taxi… bye-bye. Lights diminish in the perspective of where the straight road leads. How strangely the moonlight illuminates the garden. I go back into the house, put away her warm coffee cup, her plate with bagel crumbs, and wash them in the kitchen sink, clink-clink. I don’t feel like going back to sleep, wide-awake because there’s no headache. I had the injection yesterday, and all that remains is the pain where the needle went in.

I’m now looking at a no headache period of a month, at least, and when the headache-free time is used up I’ll go back to see the friendly needle man in the neurology department again. In the meantime I feel like running up and down the staircase and doing crazy things. When I sit, sometimes I find I’m searching for a pain in the head that isn’t there. I’m so seldom in this ‘ordinary’ space where the headache is usually situated, I don’t know what it feels like – only the memory of how it was last time I was here. There are no words for this. What is it, sentience?

It feels miraculous, even though science would have it that the nerves are numbed in that area and no longer send erroneous pain signals to the brain. See how a technical explanation can occupy the place where the experience should be – such a lot could be said about this kind of thing. We’re so much in fear of the natural world, we’ve allowed Science to make our lives dull.

Four hours later I get a Skype call from Jiab in the Delhi house. I’m holding my phone screen like a mirror looking at Jiab sitting in the room I was in two weeks ago. What time is it there? 1½ hours earlier… trying to understand these back-to-the-future time zones again and again. The world is seen but the one who sees it, curiously absent, lost in thought somewhere in past or future time. The value of simple things… taken for granted.

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers [Basho]
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Excerpts from an earlier post: Ordinary Miracles, and with thanks to Sue Vincent & her post: Butterflies in the Rain. Gratitude also to sandrasightseer for the Basho quote. The photo of the moon is from our Thai social network

falling out of the sky

Posted on December 6, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #235: Bali, Indonesia: Twenty past midnight in Delhi, colorless and cold. Headache-bewilderment due to heavy meds; postponed boarding, delay before the story begins, before the catapulted leap up into the night, and a single star seen through my cabin window twinkling above the clouds of pollution. Four hours later down again to Bangkok where it’s six in the morning, stumbling in through security portals and out again then we’re up once more, into the clear blue sky where it’s still the same day. Wonderful to see, slept deeply through the five hour flight and woke only as we were falling out of the sky, down through the rain clouds into Bali.

I hadn’t realized how close we are here to the Land of Oz, where things are so far down-under, most of the rest of the world is up-over when you get down to that latitude. I’ve been to Oz many times (estranged father lived there) and right now I can recognize what this inverted view feels like in Bali. Anyway, I’m here for a short visit, Jiab has an international meeting and I have no part to play except to be he who is introduced in the breakfast room as, this is my husband, handshakes all round. Yes, quite nice really because I get to have a holiday while they’re all working… hooray! Scooting down the long corridors of the hotel and escape for the day.

I thought I’d be able to spend time on the beach, but it’s been raining all morning. So I get to explore craft shops for woodcarvings instead. Beautiful works of art, but then there’s the challenge of Indonesian currency; take a number with a great many zeros and divide it by 13 to get US dollars. I was doing it in my head at first until I suspected I’d given the waiter a $10 tip… generosity, ah well, he was a nice guy after all, but seeing the need to be a bit more accurate, therefore the necessity of using the calculator app, I realized I’d given the waiter $1 after all. Say no more.

More rain in the afternoon so I get to go around seeing the world through the windows of a taxi. Stopping at old temples, the puddles and mud of innumerable visitors splish-splashing like ducks, quack-quacking in the warm rain. Then suddenly, a huge noise of shouting up ahead, what’s going on? It’s a group of Chinese tourists trying to get everyone into their photo in an overly loud spectacle of disregard for their surroundings – so different from the quiet Bali people and the rest of us visiting here. I search for compassion for these survivors of a failed Communist regime. They really don’t know how to be polite… never had to learn.

Into the car again and off we go on the winding road, tarmac like a carpet on the narrow route North through Ubud town. We stop at a coffee place where they sell Luwak coffee produced by way of Asian Palm Civet cats (paradoxus hermaphroditus) who eat the coffee cherries and these pass through the animals’ digestive tract then the beans are collected and processed to make coffee. The woman sales staff calls it poop coffee, lips forming to make a delicate high-pitched plosive sound. We see the civets in their large cages just hanging out, gazing at all the visitors as if we were the ones in cages. The coffee, popular among tourists like me, costs RP 240,000 (US$ 18.00) for 100 grams – over-the-top expensive. I had a cup; it tasted like good coffee to me.

Easy going smile-a-lot local people living inside a hologram where visitors from everywhere in the world appear sometimes, pay money for goods and services, then leave. A woman gently chases a mother hen and her cheep-cheep chicks tootling around in the front of the guest house; soft handclap and gentle shooshhh sound, takes her broom and sweeps the smooth stone floor after they’re gone. And I’m in the car watching the breathless ease of her movements with the recognition of small things. All that’s required is to be fair and polite in actions, gentle and quiet in speech.

“The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.” [Swami Vivekananda]
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night and day

Posted on November 21, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

AN 8.6 Lokavipatti Sutta: The Failings of the World

Thanks to Jill Shepherd for the Sutta reference

astonishment

Posted on November 11, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Melinda [melindaruck.com]

artifact

Posted on November 4, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

light in the darkness

Posted on October 28, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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silence

Posted on October 23, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

images of mourning

Posted on October 20, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #227: New Delhi: Seen from the air, mourners gather and take their positions to form the Thai numeral 9. The formal title of the Thai King, Rama IX. Found on our Thai social network page, dated 19 October.