something lost regained

Posted on November 21, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #171: Zurich airport hotel: Hard to believe that, as I write this, everything in our old house in Delhi is being folded up, layered, packed, sealed into boxes and labeled with a number. When I return, all our possessions will be cubed, diced up, chopped into boxes and stacked on top of each other inside the waiting truck. Larger items will retain some of their shape; a chair will be recognizably ‘chair’, swathed in corrugated cardboard and bubble-wrap. Upside down table will be recognizable by its legs sticking up, wrapped to protect corners but its upside-down-ness, disconcerting… tables shouldn’t be seen like that. A bit strange, but we’ve moved so many times and it’s always like this; as if a surgeon removes a part of the mind/body organism, it’s taken away and never seen again, then strangely a new organ grows in its place, exactly like the old one but different… after that there’s no memory of it happening.

Except, of course, if something is broken or lost during the move and this thing, this object, is mourned and held in the memory for a long time. It must have been something like this that happened to me when we moved from the house in Japan to the new place in Bangkok. I was still working when the movers were boxing up everything and Jiab reminded me that if I wanted to get the bus leaving at 16.40 I could run down the hill and probably get it – if I left right now, She called out as I went that we’d all meet afterwards at the station. So I rushed out the door, ran downstairs and off down the path. Suddenly I remembered something, stopped, turned around and looked up at the house; top floor of a small 2 storey house – I’d stayed there for 3 years, and this would be the last time I’d ever see the house… how could it be so sudden like this? I would never be back here. Tears sprouted from the eyes, what to do? Just look and try to remember it… at the same time, turn my head away, a wrench, something torn – no time, against my will I continue running down the hill, almost as if I’m running away from the house… but focused on getting the 16.40 bus. The last image of the house clear in my mind for a moment then dissolving away and forgotten. Next day I was on the plane to Bangkok and that’s the last time I was ever in Japan.

In Bangkok a few weeks later, I was telling a friend about this, Curtis Cairns – his name was, and sadly I lost track of Curtis in the end… so if you’re reading this Curtis, please get in touch old friend! Anyway I was telling the story about the house to Curtis and he was just listening. When I finished, he nodded and looked at me, felt my loss. Asked me where the house was, and what was the address. It happened he was going to Japan the following week and when he got there, unknown to me, he took a few trains from Tokyo and got on the bus up the hill, walked the last bit and came up to my old house, took a photo of it (before the days of digital images) had the film processed and put the photo of the house in an envelope, stamped it and addressed to me in Thailand. A week later the post came to the house in Bangkok, there’s the slim, letter from Japan, opened it up and pull out the photo of the house, no accompanying note, just the photo. I still have it, pasted in an album – something lost regained.

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth. [Thich Nhat Hanh]

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Photo: The last pic taken of the rooftop in the Delhi house

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 ~

not giving god a name

Posted on October 27, 2015 by tiramit

The Buddha taught us that there is positive thinking and there is negative thinking. The most important thing is to stay above thinking.” [Phra Ajahn Jayasaro]
(Thai text translation)
POSTCARD #160: New Delhi: I feel sad that most children in the West don’t receive the same structured guidance or instruction, as they do in the East, about experiential truths in the lineage of Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad – some of whom are called Gods and some prophets. I remember, years ago, asking an old Anglican priest in East London how to find God and he said: ‘are you going?’ Just left it at that. What he meant was: are you going to church? I wasn’t. When I was a kid we didn’t ‘go’, nobody ever ‘went’… there were weddings, funerals, and ‘God’ was never a topic of discussion. I’d had some spiritual insight in this godless condition and was asking the question because I couldn’t understand what the loud hymn singing and dressed-up-in-smart-clothes thing was about; what lay beyond the ‘thou-shalt-nots’ and instruction on the fundamentals of social behaviour. Later I began to see that what the priest meant was, ‘are you actively doing something about this?’ But where to begin? I felt slightly excluded and defensive; ‘going’, was something known only to those who ‘go’… an enigma I didn’t feel equipped to tackle. It didn’t compel me to go back and follow up the conversation with the old priest, and it’s possible he was waiting for me to come back… I feel quite sad that I never saw him again.

I was searching for a context for this state of Godlessness for a long time before I discovered Buddhism in Thailand and became immersed in those detailed behavioural teachings. That was more than 20 years ago, so all this is seen in hindsight. What I understood then, was what the old priest was referring to as ‘going’. The focus is on the immediacy of the here-and-now reality – what’s happening? Where’s it at, this mind/body organism, in relation to ‘the present moment’? What are the tendencies, habitualities in thought that cause me to wander off in my own and others’ suffering and unhappiness? What are the practicalities of the sequence? How can I train myself to break the chain of consequences – to not do whatever it is that causes stress or distress?

There isn’t a creator god in Buddhism, it’s an all-inclusive thing – in the same way there isn’t a ‘self’ outside of consciousness. There’s the operating system, Sila (virtue) Samadhi (focus) Panya (wisdom) and some might say this is God – for Buddhists, it’s better not to call it anything. By not giving god a name, I’m not inclined to develop an attachment to an idea of God according to what I’d like it to be. Better to think of it as nothingness – no-thingness, there’s not any ‘thingness’ about it… I’ve read how it’s a wisdom, a gnosis so completely at one with the thing it knows, there’s an absorption into it. No words for it. Maybe that’s what the old priest was thinking…

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you. [Saint Augustine]
Link to: Publications by Ajahn Jayasaro

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

space and far-away things

Posted on September 1, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 148: Delhi: bare feet on marble floor surface, pad-pad-pad, darkness in the front room, no daylight coming in through the glass patio door. What’s the time? Blinding light of my phone left on the desk: 5.15 am. I know my way by feel, through between furniture, mindful not to stub my toe on chair legs, and unwilling to switch on the light that hurts the eyes. Gentle with the mind/body organism waking up after having been parked, horizontalised in sleep mode for 8 hours. I know where the ceiling fan switch is… ting-ting-ting and I can depend on the laptop screen to illuminate the room – switch on the machine and it’s like a car headlight in the room, I need to turn my head away to avoid the glare.

There’s a pair of prescription sunglasses I use for this harsh brightness. Peer at the screen, scroll down through Word Press Reader and discover: Zen Flash: Tibetan Singing Bowl Meditation: Session 2 (27:30), click on the link. Plug in my ear buds and enter a huge, wonderful landscape of sound, space and far-away things – an entire panorama inside my head. But is that some conversation in the background or people chatting outside the house? Here in New Delhi there’s something going on 24/7. Is there a dog barking in the distance or is that on the sound track too? It seems at first that I need to differentiate, the ting-ting-ting sound is not the sound track, it’s the ceiling fan. At first I feel I have to be able to know what’s happening inside and outside of the listening zone, which is which? Then it doesn’t matter, it’s okay, accept it all as a oneness.

Back to the screen, open iPhoto library, and there’s the pic taken at Khan Market, a popular area; bicycle propped up on its stand in an alleyway. Left in the middle of the road, why? The owner must be somewhere nearby. Tibetan Singing Bowl sounds swirl around this bicycle, empty sack tied on the back, with a box on the front. There’s a presence of the owner – choosing to leave the bicycle in plain sight… he must know that everyone knows it’s his. It’s like the whole world is one large room; domestic life without walls, centuries of open-air living. There’s this quality about India – if you’ve ever been here you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not about visiting ancient sites or jaw-dropping experiences that fill you with awe, it can be simply the fragrance of incense, candlewax, ironed cotton clothes; an aura arising from something olfactory, the strange familiarity of cooking smells.

Fragments of people’s lives; a hugeness of ordinary things, a sense of loving-kindness and well being in the millions of every-day events taking place inside homes. Inside my home where we’ve lived for nearly five years, the Tibetan Singing Bowl Meditation track has birdsong, a sound like an aircraft passing overhead, voices outside quietly whispering. I look up to find the music has stopped, sounds from the world enter the room, faint daylight coming in through the glass patio doors. What’s the time? 6.00 am.

I am restless. I am athirst for far-away things.
My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.
O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly,
that I am bound in this spot evermore.
[Rabindranath Tagore]

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Special thanks to Zen Flash for the soundtrack mentioned in this post
~ g r a t i t u d e ~

metaphor becomes reality

Posted on July 29, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 139: New Delhi: Lights change to red just as we’re getting near and traffic comes to a standstill. On the intersecting side, cars start revving their engines as the green light shows over there, and it takes a moment to see the elegant cow standing quietly among the cars, dressed in the body given to it, held in its place by the restrictions of stationary vehicles all around. Exotic and dignified, the animal has a calm and wise bearing; just looking at the world and waiting for the lights along with everyone else.

I’m thinking I should take a photo of it… yeh, good idea, but where’s the camera? Frantic rush to find it, deep in my bag, a pen, papers and things flung out on the seat then leaning out of the car window, take a photo click as surrounding vehicles start to move with the green light. There’s the cow walking at the speed of the others – not holding anyone up, no reason for any driver to be impatient, nobody toots their horn.

Funny how the cow is simply going along there in its own lane, not attempting to overtake, just slowly making its way in the limited space and in the direction of the traffic flow moving towards the next intersection, the next set of lights. It seems to know where it’s going, has probably travelled this route many times. I can see it disappearing in the distance, head held high above the cars, bobbing along with the rhythm of its walk – a being that’s in this world but not of this world.

To me it’s an extraordinary moment. I’m the Western cultural migrant assimilated in the East (resistance is futile). I have userID, password; there’s a sense of connectedness with the East, although still carrying some weight of Western thinking and childhood conditioning from the West. Thus insisting on a preconceived reality by creating supporting statements to prove what I’ve already decided is the correct way of going about things, and convinced about this simply because my continuing engagement with it somehow pushes it over the edge, the tipping point… metaphor becomes reality (although I know there’s really nothing there).

Nobody else here is paying the slightest attention to the cow in the traffic, just waiting for the lights to change. My kind of Western reasoning seems to confirm it has objective reality and that’s tolerated here, along with all the preferences, likes and dislikes that don’t fit. It doesn’t matter because the ‘object’ is not the goal. The answer may be one of many associated answers – maybe all. And related searches are revealed in interaction with the question – more of an exploratory thing, open-ended – the observed world and the observer of it in an all-inclusive oneness….

Smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than a grain of barley, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than a grain of millet, smaller even than the kernel of a grain of millet is the Self. This is the Self-dwelling in my heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than all the worlds. [Chandogya Upanishad 14.3, 8th-10th century BCE]

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there and then, here and now

Posted on June 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #134: Elgin, Scotland: It’s a fleeting transitory thing, sometimes so clearly seen – as now on this bus following the coastal route and scribbling down words in my notebook (almost illegible writing due to the motion of the bus). I’m visiting Uncle P who is over 80 and lives in a care-home. The photo above was taken from the bus going through these small villages, and it was shortly after that I got off at Buckie.

Then it all comes back to me, the call of seabirds and smell of the sea. Huddled in my coat in the cold wind looking down at the same street surfaces; pavement cracks I recognize from the last time I was here, years and years ago? What is it? Just a feeling, awareness precedes thought, no words for this kind of thing. Incidental people pass by on the street. I think I know them from long ago, but it’s possible I never spoke to them at all, we were always like this, seeing each other in the town and only that gentle familiarity, glance, eyes meet, strange recognition… do I know you? It’s like I never left this timeless non-objective moment – there and then is here and now.

And they would say it makes no difference if I’ve been away in foreign lands, North India and Thailand, Chiang Mai, Bangkok and living my butterfly life. Coming back here is like stepping into the same instant of existence. It’s like it was yesterday, except people are older, aging, settling into a comfortable gravity. And a feeling of how everyone is near the end – I don’t know the young folks, of course. People I used to be friends with are inexplicably gone. It’s like the estuary leads out to the sea – water from the mountains flowing through so many different circumstances, on the way to joining the oceans of the world.

I get to see Uncle P and he looks well but almost all that he says is subtly incorrect, wrong dates, gives people all the wrong names and I agree with everything he says. When it’s time to go, he takes me to the exit, but we get lost, pause at the dining room and he’s puzzled why everything has been tidied away – I ask a staff lady in the kitchen who assures me that Uncle P had his lunch already. He forgets things; she tells me out of earshot – shows me the exit. Last I see of him, he’s going back down the corridor with the kitchen lady and telling her he’s looking for his wife. But she passed away a year ago.

On the bus to Elgin I have a little weep about Uncle P, and when the bus gets there, find an Internet café to write this.

‘Wandering through realms of consciousness like a refugee, thought looks for a home. Thought thinks that perhaps by clinging to this or to that, it can find a home. In this way, thought forms attachments with names and forms, with concepts such as “is” and “is not,” “self” and “other,” “me” and “mine,” and with emotions like envy, pride, and desire. It is the mission of thought to form these attachments in hopes of finding a home. Thought wants to own its own home.’ [Thought Is Homeless/The Endless Further/ 2012 July 16]

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thinking about it

Posted on May 15, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #128: Delhi: After I finished writing this post I went back through the draft and changed it so much I forgot how it originally started and how it ended. Decided then the best thing to do is accept that this is not the beginning of the story; this is an entry point in a story that goes on and on and obviously it starts with Jiab’s photos of the visit to the coast at Chennai (Madras) South India, and the perfect silhouette of flying seabird upper right.

I came to Madras more than 30 years ago, and now remembering how things were then. I must have been convinced it was of real value at that time but the fact that it was all forgotten about later says that this was mind-created… things appear then disappear. So now I’m returning to the place I set off from but not the beginning – too remote and lost in time. Returning to this as a starting place riding the waves, flip from one journey to the next; it’s all connected. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey to get there – the Path is the goal.

And sometimes in the process of creativity you have to destroy all kinds of things you really like. Deconstruct everything to the point where you still kind of half-remember how to put it together again but usually it ends up as something very different from what you intended and surprisingly, somehow better! Sometimes, though, it can’t be reassembled in any satisfactory form at all, remains as fragments of rememberings and has to be let go of completely.

Mostly it’s thinking about it, thoughts, a function of the mind that synchronizes with the sensory data received and the world and objects appear the way they do. Fortunate or unfortunate, we may find ourselves with the karma/vipaka of received knowledge misinterpreted – maybe adrift on a boat without a sail, depending solely on the happenstance of things. There’s sadness about remembering how things could have been and having to accept they’re gone.

At first I thought how beautiful these little fish are … then I realized they had all been alive just a few hours before this photo was taken. Now they are dead. It’s like this in all fish markets everywhere I’ve been in Asia. People look at, feel, examine the animal they intend to consume, negotiate a fair price and it becomes the evening meal.

I remember my niece M when she was very small, crouching down close to a plastic bucket of water containing a beautiful yellow fish that mommy had bought at the market and she was watching it die as the man whacked it on the head a few times with the wooden handle of something designed for the job. Beautiful fish wrapped it up in plastic and then in a bag, sold! This was part of her education.

It’s difficult for me because I was brought up with fish and meat already chopped up and prepared for display in the supermarket. This is how it is, in the West we choose not to think about that, meanwhile the majority of the world sees the truth; the whole animal, head, tail; fully aware of what they’re doing. Yes in the West we decide not to think about that – even though thinking about all kinds of other really weird stuff from time to time – so we can decide not to think, we can stop thinking when we need to.

This is why I try to give that great turmoil of thoughts a rest for a while… the whole thing. Stop thinking. The state of no thought, no language, no images, a great emptiness for a while; but eventually another thought comes along. I examine that for as long as it takes and let that one go too, then return to the state of no thought. Vipassana meditation, yoniso manasikara: proper, wise, or appropriate attention; skillful, wise, or critical reflection. Purposeful, systematic and methodical thought (please take a look at this link).

But then of course we all continue to eat fish. In UK it’s deep fried in batter with chips (French Fries), pretty basic but tasty. It comes in all forms. I remember walking through a fish market in Yokohama with a friend named Curtis Cairns and Curtis stopped me to look at a whole fish on display, pinkish grey in color, “I think that’s a Grouper’ he said, but I’d need to have them cut off the head, tail and part of the skin, take a slice of it and place it in a polystyrene tray held with Clingfilm with a barcode label and then I could recognize it.”

“… thinking I am this and you are that is what separates you or I from everything and we become something. In that something the ego is and as it is everything isn’t. That dream of thought the ego “knows” is the making of a reality that isn’t but thinks it is. So my ability to walk with one and see the other is what allows me the ability to see love in everything. The love I see is the love or “God” I have. The thought I think is the making of a reflection that wants and lives in need. The thought is an expectation of something to come. That something though isn’t real and what is real is left behind as the thought chases something it needs” [tommyg1231’s Blog “Tell Me Why?”]

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Just a note about Curtis Cairns. Hey Curtis I lost you! It’s been years. If you happen to read this, please be in touch…

always here, always now

Posted on May 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #127: Delhi: Jiab sent a photo from Madurai in South India, people go to work, life goes on. Meanwhile I’m hanging out my laundry on the roof terrace here in Delhi in an immense dryness of heat, knowing I’ll have to take them in an about one hour because if not they will become crisps, weather conditions being as they are and also the leaves of the bouganvillia plants and palms all around are soaking up the moisture in the air. I water the plants too of course but every day they’re dry in the morning. Somehow, everything survives.

It’s an ordinary day. And I was starting to write about that… then there was the small earthquake in Delhi, buildings shook for a few moments, nothing compared with the 2nd quake 7.4 Richter scale in Nepal. In fact I was there in Kathmandhu in the earthquake in the early 90s The thing I rememember about it was I was in a hotel on the 4th floor and suddenly the sky was full of birds, pigeons dashing around, hovering in the air… then the building started to move. The birds felt it first.

This is when blogging becomes a kind of mind-bogglingness. The aloneness of the solitary blogger in some time-zone in the world – an aloneness, maybe that’s what motivates this reaching out. ‘The internet is an extended sense organ’, bloggers in the world scattered around the planet, but really all contained in conscious awareness – we couldn’t be connected in any other way! I can’t see you, or hear you. I can’t touch you and will never ‘meet’ you in the normal sense of the word, I just know you’re there, or here inside me, or where we all are… curious how it’s the awareness of the connection that activates it.

‘There’s no other time than now, so how could we be elsewhere? We’ve always been “here and now” ―there’s nowhere else! Whether we think we are living in the past or in the future, we’ve always been squarely in the present moment. When we “stroll down memory lane” or “boldly go where no one has gone before”, we’re still exactly wherever we are, in the same time and place. Our memories of the past and plans for the future are nothing but present mental fabrications. Wherever we are, that is “here”. Wherever we were before, that was “here” then. Wherever we go later, that will also be “here” then. We can never return to yesterday, nor can we advance to tomorrow. Yesterday was now, only then. Tomorrow will be now, only then. It’s always now.There are no geographical or temporal alternatives. It’s HOW we live “here and now” that matters: avoiding harm, doing good, purifying the mind.’ [Nying Je Ling – Jonang Buddhism]

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