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…

christmas day 2016

Posted on December 25, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #239: Chiang Mai: Seasons greetings blogger friends. No snow here, only the memory of it falling in the silence of mind, like a dream I can’t wake up from pulls me back, over and over. Tree branches without leaves, black figures in a white landscape – image invert.

Words come out in gusts of steamy vapour puffs. Reflected light seen fading to zero white, pixelated edges of peppermint, menthol and bright electric blue-turquoise. Thinking of ice-rinks, chilled nasal passageways, and cranial cavities discovered in the sharp-edged inbreath. The cold is motionless presence. Little hanging earlobes are slowly freezing, teeth are cold, lips are a rubbery fumbling.

Eyes water in the looking-out between scarf and hat, but inwardly removed, seeing instead, the sunshine of some future time where I’m presently situated, at a table on a hotel balcony, remembering the past as we do, brought into present time. Coconut palms shwish-shwoosh in the benign climate of warm winds and the sea.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. [Toni Morrison]

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Photo taken from the hotel balcony in Bali.
Excerpts from backstory included here

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

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.

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Source of the Thai song: https://ilovethaisong.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/homage-to-the-buddha-the-buddhists-song/

today is every day

Posted on October 10, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #225: New Delhi: All these highways, routes, directions connected end-to-end. My itinerary links up in a network that reaches all parts and locations in time and space, everywhere in the world – no end, no beginning. Here-and-now awareness, or wandering in fabricated thought, a game of hide-and-seek where the flip-side of concealment is revelation and returning to the familiarity of present time, it becomes ‘now’ again.

Or I’m thinking about the concept of ‘now’ seated here in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, looking out my window at a landscape of connecting routes flashing by, and engine noise, vibration, bumps and jolts of road surface. Or trying to get emails on my phone but there’s no Internet right now. Try again later… where are we now? Glance at the taxi’s GPS, our point of present location on the map moving in tiny increments across the screen.

Time divided, subdivided and sliced into multi-channel TV programs, compartmentalized, locked down tight – the totality of it impossible to define. The impossibility of finding a way out of constructs framed in words: who, what, where, when, and why. Language gives everything names, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… different ways of describing present time. It’s always today, no matter if I call it yesterday, tomorrow or next week – today is every day. And even if I’m living in a make-believe world where it’s always ‘somewhere else’, all of that is included in present time too, ‘today’ occurring forever and always in rotations of the planet Earth. More than 1000 miles per hour of yesterdays, todays and tomorrows experienced in countless generations of endless time.

The illusion of solidity and grounded-ness created in awareness, the conscious state experienced in a soft body-mind organism that can process data. The feeling of I, me, and my, is the ‘I’ of everything that has ever been. A connectedness with all that is outside and all that is inside. A ‘world’ shared with all living beings as if it were a meal for a great number of guests at a huge table. Talking about all that we all love and all that we hate. All they create, all they destroy and all the words of politicians vanish into thin air, all conflicts are resolved eventually and it’s our mutuality, the fundamental sense of the feel of the air. Just holding in mind the scale of how vast this kind of love might possibly be… is enough to begin to know it.

Looking back again at my screen, still no Internet – a spinning cursor in a frozen background space, the unstated presence, the ‘is-ness’. An easefulness spreading through the face, the scalp, the head, the neck, shoulders and arms. A whole-body experience contained in this small space; metal, plastic, electric-spark-gasoline-fueled internal-combustion engine on rubber wheels, and blur of unseen things in window light passing through the interior of the taxi, small red light showing the fare so far. Time to pause, take a deep breath in, filling the chest cavity from top to bottom, then the long breath out, unfolding like a long ribbon of road in a landscape, reaching out there to a vanishing point on the horizon.

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” [Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie]

Note: excerpts from Eclipse by Pink Floyd

gone, gone, and gone

Posted on September 14, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #222: Bangkok/New Delhi flight: An awareness of things as they are. The main event was the injection in the head and the constant (PHN) headache gone instantly. Wake up next day and it was still gone, gone as I write this, and it remains gone. So reassuring to know the transformation to ordinary things is possible, the car is back from the garage and out on the road again.

The release from head pain is still held back due to the pain of broken rib but so much easier to cope with now the headache has gone. Walking the miles in airports was thought to be a problem though, so Jiab convinced me to request a wheelchair. Wheelchair from check-in to the lounge then wheelchair to the plane, straight in and the first seat in C class section of the plane. Stewardess puts my bag away in overhead luggage space. Wonderful, I’d never been a wheelchair passenger on an aircraft before, my first time. Plenty of space in this expensive seat, a meal with endless courses, and I slept the rest of the way; so comfortable since these recent days of sudden pain, tossing and turning at night and discovering the only way to try to sleep is sitting up on an inclined wall of pillows.

The odd thing about being in a wheelchair is you approach silently, moving along very smooth floor surface feeling the vibration of small jolts of joints between tiles below, crowds part immediately. If anybody is still standing in the way friends will pull him away or the wheelchair guy says excuse me please? and they move straightaway. A few sideways glances and I resist the temptation to say Hi, how’re you doing? And sometimes feel I should try to look really sick, to provide a reason for being like this, problem is having a broken rib is not a noticable thing. But I keep looking ahead exercising the right to be in a wheelchair and humbled by the generosity of everyone giving way. Astonished by the experience of sitting on wheels in a public place, the great perspective of long airport walkways ahead and seeing the surroundings move towards and go through me. Also the thing about travelling long distances while seeing the world from a lower eye level – a familiarity, déjà vu, the memory of being a child again.

The wheelchair experience means an understanding of what helplessness is, understanding vulnerability, aging… it’s all coming unglued, bits dropping off, but the revelation comes along too there’s no point in feeling bad about yourself because you are simply incapable and that’s all there is to it. At the same time, being (temporarily) disabled gives some insight into the existential plight; the realization that most of us are held prisoner in a trance-like state, incultured into the ‘self’ fiction through the mirror of society’s fear of the unknown, living with a sense of purposelessness and not able to see it.

Not able to cope with pain, tragedy, loss; unable to see the awareness that accompanies our ordinary joys and sorrows – there’s more than one kind of awareness, this provides some relief from pain, ease and understanding; I can step back from the trauma and see it as coming from somewhere else. I can be engaged in clinging and at the same time be in a position to see that this is what’s happening. Letting go, it’s not ‘mine’ anymore.

Then we’re in New Delhi, into the Indian wheelchair and out onto the miles of ochre coloured carpet. At the end of a long time of sitting, I’m looking up at the immigration official; passport thump and wheeled in, permitted to enter the country.

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” [Rainer Maria Rilke]
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Photo: Jiab’s collection from Ladakh

groundedness

Posted on August 7, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #218: New Delhi: Jiab sent me this pic of the cow in Gujarat. There’s always something that ‘clicks’ inside me when I see the cow in the city traffic in India. The aloof separateness of the Gods. Something about the bovine ‘mother’, sacred cow that all Hindus are conscious of.

There’s also a memory of something from my home on the farm in the North of Scotland when I was a kid. I remember long nights and short days, aunties and grannies wearing comfortable wooly cardigans, porridge in a cracked bowl, coal and wood fires, cows in the fields, a black-and-white collie dog – and it’s this that I notice about the rural/urban Indian cities, cows sitting on the pavement, goats nibbling and chickens pecking around, the sound of a cockerel in the distance. It’s the farmyard scene where I was brought up that followed me here!

There’s a familiarity about it, pictures in the gallery of the mind, and yes I’d like to have a home surrounded by arable lands and farmyard animals, but for a very long time now there’s been only a series of temporary homes – all good, I share my life with Jiab and we’ve gotten used to the way things are. Living like a pair of migratory birds. In each place I have my favourite chair, books, and all the things I need. It works okay except sometimes I might spend a long time searching the bookshelves for a book I’m sure is there then realise it’s not in these bookshelves, it’s the other bookshelves, about 2000 miles away. So I have to let that one go, although I can see it there in the mind’s eye.

These days, reading is done mostly on devices and when I get on the plane I have my laptop like other passengers and when I reach ‘home B’ or ‘home C’ I get online automatically with the wifi there and plug my speakers into the socket on the laptop in its position there. And I hardly ever feel dispersed, or stretched, an okay sort of expansive feeling. In this context, it suits me well to follow the Buddha’s Teachings on going-forth, homelessness, non-attachment, no-self.

Whether there is a ‘self’, yes/no, is best not thought about too much because saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it is, in so many words, identifying ‘self’’. Words identify things, language has a default mechanism that allows me to select what ‘I’ want it to be (also what I don’t want it to be) and the resulting attachment to all that I love and hate. I stay with it, see it happening, stay mindful about where the nearest emergency exit is located but very rarely needed – and just open the heart/mind citta to the world as wide as possible.

The presence of the cow wandering through industrialised Indian cities triggers something. The smell of cow dung brings me down to earth, generates a sense of groundedness for the time it’s needed for, then I’m up and away again. It’s also a pretty attractive life; the ability to just wander anywhere in benign foreign lands, live in the fortunate state of being without the tugs and pulls of desire and worldliness.

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

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