no more than this

Posted on May 10, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai/Bangkok flight: Sitting on the plane with M beside me, my Thai niece, and her coloured Tshirt, funny hat; her iPad mini and her 9 year old vision of the world. I’ve been watching her use these kiddy’s applications; cute kittens with large eyes and she shows me how they respond to your voice; all kinds of stuff. We can make fruity ice-cream drinks, waffles and cup cakes with different kinds of toppings and M insists I have an opinion about what kind of toppings to have – lemon or strawberry? It’s important! M asks me in basic English; only the key words: What you like, Toong-Ting? So I choose a lemon topping. When it’s finished we eat the cup cake by tapping a finger on the screen. The name Toong-Ting is part of her former baby language she doesn’t use any more but, somehow, M decided to keep it as my name. She selects things in this unique way because English is a second language. Maybe it’s easier to say Toong-Ting than my actual name, or she likes the idea of being cute (I think it’s this).

And so the time is taken up with M asking me about various things like this. I engage with her on these points and in the intervals, when she’s busy with the iPad, I’m simply aware of our physical presence. There’s really not anything left to think about… mindfulness, waiting for the next question. In the silence there’s a curious emptiness, just a quiet awareness, bhavanga, the space in-between; not reacting to stimuli, there’s nothing happening. Just being here; the knowingness of it. My responsibility is to take care of M; to respond to her small requests in a way that’s in tune with her way of thinking and her use of English. That’s all. We are linked in our present-time mutuality and there’s nothing else coming into consciousness from the outside world unless it’s something very interesting or something we need to be careful about. Right now, here in the aircraft seats, it’s all very bland and neutral. Somehow I seem to have sidestepped my own mental activity; the usual state of affairs of the mind, the way the ‘self’ attempts to perpetuate itself is seen; there’s only this, being here…

Then the cup of coffee is served and M says I should have the powdered creamer in the packet that comes with it: ‘Why you not put that in your coffee, Toong-Ting?’ and she looks at me with these almond shaped eyes and little face… so I put the powdered milk in, even though I normally take black coffee. She watches me open the paper packet and pour it in, her eye level is much nearer to the brim of the cup than from where I’m seeing it. I lean over, we watch this together, powder dissolving in the cup in small clouds and imploding movements. I never really noticed it before… children are here to teach adults (I read in a blog recently?). M tells me to try it and see if it tastes nice. I try it and say yes.

Looking out the window, down on the land below, there’s the surface of the planet; swirling movements of rivers and patterns of vegetation, land shaped by many hundreds of years of the wind and climate, and it looks like the powdered milk dissolving in the coffee. Liquid in a small plastic cup 38,000 feet above what’s seen on the surface of planet below; macro/micro, the oneness, all things have the same characteristics. ‘Look, look at this, Toong-Ting!’ and I have to look again at something else M is doing and make a comment about that. We discuss it for a while, then back to considering the powdered milk in the coffee and I’m feeling this same continuing state that’s empty of thought. I know that M is going to ask another question soon so part of my attention is occupied with being ready for that with a clear mind; metta, loving kindness. I’m a passive passenger transported on an aircraft, aware of the immediate surroundings; a gentle bumping of the plane, the hiss and hum of the engines. Just a sort of space I am occupying right now, no more than this…

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‘Bhavanga literally means “factor of life”; bhavanga is usually translated into English as “life-continuum”. The bhavanga-citta keeps the continuity in a lifespan, so that what we call a “being” goes on to live from moment to moment. That is the function of the bhavanga-citta.’ [Introduction to the Abhidhamma]

Photo Image: Flowers growing in a Thai temple in Buddhist India

metta/loving-kindness

Posted on February 14, 2013 by tiramit

Valentine’s Day 2012: ‘All you need is love, love, love is all you need…’ One very small problem about love is that if you love this person, you can’t love that other person as much. So you have to manage all the likes, dislikes and unlikes; friend and ‘unfriend’ too. The stormy weather of loving one thing completely and other things not at all – but how can we love everything? The practice of mettā holds all beings in loving-kindness; all phenomena, all sentient beings, we contemplate in terms of loving-kindness. Okay but it’s not easy to love everything… yep, some things aren’t very lovable; lovability potential: zero. No matter how much I try, I can’t love that thing; sorry, no, I can’t do it. But what I can do is have mettā for the feeling that I can’t do it; I can have loving-kindness for my resistance to loving the unloved. Being open to all conditioned experience with an attitude of kindness, and accepting things as they are; this is the practice of mettā.

The aversion I experience is not so much about the unloved thing itself, it’s about ‘me’ struggling to accept the reality of it being there. Mettā is about non-aversion, if I have aversion for the unloved, it just exacerbates the situation. Allow it in to conscious awareness, the unlovedness, let it be there and just know this feeling as it is now. Okay, so I leap into a state of aversion as soon as I open up to it like that. But I have mettā for that state too. I can come back later, try again; I can be patient with this condition as it is right now in this present moment. Having mettā means allowing it to be. I’m not interacting with it, I’m just willing to be with it. It’s the same as everything else, its nature is impermanent, it changes, breaks down, crumbles into pieces and it’s gone. I’m not looking for the natural cessation of it, though, that’s not the goal. I’m just allowing it to be as it is, accepting that and, bit by bit, there’s a release of the tension caused by ‘me’ resisting the presence of the unloved. That’s the point of the exercise.

The effort to get away from the reality of the unloved, restimulates the discomfort and negative emotion starts building up again. Even so, there’ll be times when it’s possible to just receive the experience without resisting it. I see then, this is the way to go; loving the unloved. Over time, things begin to change, there’s a willingness to let everything be as it is, pleasant feelings and unpleasant feelings. I can have mettā for all the negativity locked away inside, opening the door, letting it all go; freedom! The heart isn’t heavy with dislike, blame and resentment. A sense of lightness and well-being.

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‘By reminding ourselves to have metta for the feelings we experience – not thinking about them or analysing them but going to the place in the body itself, to the mental quality, really embracing that – really being willing to feel those particular emotions, they become bearable. By changing our attitude to one of acceptance rather than of rejection, to interest, rather than just wanting to get rid of them, we find that they are things we can tolerate. Then they cease on their own, for all conditions are impermanent.’ [‘Universal Loving Kindness‘ by Ajahn Sumedho, Forest Sangha Newsletter, October 1997, Number 42]

– g r a t i t u d e –

backstory

Posted on January 27, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Skype call from P in the North of Scotland, walking through a shopping mall interior, holding up his phone camera in front of him and I’m able to enter into a view of the world at this moment, about 5500 miles away. It feels like I’m really there; a chromium steel, tiled and glass environment with Starbucks and everything is recognizably ‘the mall’. People wearing scarves and hats, thick clothing – it’s below freezing outside that building. Light from the mall windows fading out to zero white, pixelated edges of electric blue and turquoise suggests air so cold it’s like an ice-cream headache, chilled nasal passageways and cranial cavities. I’m thinking of ice-rinks, peppermint and menthol. Words come out with vigour in great gusts of steamy vapour.

I lived there in a former life – long ago and far away. The sharp clear air, constant wind, and winter daylight lasts only a few hours; it was a world without colour. Cold, wet, windy and the mind is saying: ‘No, I don’t like this. I want sunshine, I want warmth,’ the samsara of wanting it to be different from how it is. And eyes looking through the gap between hat and scarf, out into the world but inwardly removed and seeing the sunshine in some fictional landscape created in the mind. I didn’t know anything about the Buddhist perspective on Suffering, dukkha nirodho ariya sacca, at that time, just ‘driven’ by a sadly dysfunctional family and nameless hunger that arises from the feeling that there has to be something better than this.

So, one thing led to another, and it’s a long story, but eventually I discovered it’s not ‘me’, it’s just the way it is. I can have loving-kindness, mettā, for the created ‘me’ and lighten up about that. I don’t get seriously into it any more, now there’s that distance from my constructed identity. It’s been with me all those years, wow, like something historical: ‘This is the house that Jack built.’ And now I’m here in South East Asia; not too hot at this time of year, warm like a Mediterranean summer; rubber slippers, shorts and a T-shirt. The quality of light is amazing, colours of things are outstanding, as if lit from within – a Disney cartoon – papaya fruit is an amazing fluorescent, magic-marker orange; green trees against blue skies and the whole thing feels like it’s been photo-shopped. The air is warm like a soft quilt cover wrapped around the shoulders, with no weight, so you feel this lightness – ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘ by Milan Kundera, worth reading if only for the title.

But all this coming to an end very soon, less than a week to go before the time comes to go back to Delhi and the colder climatic conditions of the North. Not able to flop around in thin cotton clothing any longer… nope. This time next week I’ll be socked and shoed and trousered, and scarved and coated, hair-combed, passported and ticketed and transported to the North of India in a passenger jet, but that’s not happened yet so there’s time to reflect on that difference and get ready for the adjustment.

I’ve been living in other people’s countries for more than 30 years; met Jiab on the way. She still identifies with her Thai cultural context. I’ve nearly forgotten mine. I used to go back to the family home up there at the top of the world and most people couldn’t remember me; all the elders’ hair going grey, and greyer then white, Now I go there for funerals and people just don’t know me at all. I’m a foreigner there and a foreigner everywhere else. I’m more into the Thai world than any other culture – they see me as a kind of cultural hybrid.

There’s a shrine in Jiab’s family home; a structure of tiny ornate tables placed one on top of each other, in a hierarchy of size. The larger ones are at the bottom and smaller ones placed on top and even smaller ones placed on top of them. It’s built up to about five levels. An ascending, perspective effect as things recede above eye level with candles and an image of the Buddha on the topmost table. It’s the one where he’s protected by the hooded snake god Naga, extending Cobra neck hood and curved over the head of the Buddha forming a kind of umbrella (there was a rainstorm at the time of approaching enlightenment). Above that, framed on the wall, there’s a row of these faded old sepia photos of Jiab’s ancestors. There they all are, looking down at me. I feel their gaze because I’m not just a cultural hybrid in their eyes, I’m from a different planet too. I sometimes feel they need to look at me more carefully than they look at other visitors to the shrine. So I just let them do that, it’s a kindly gaze, without the burden of thought, comfortably dwelling in a state of wakefulness, and understanding things in their actuality.

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Photo (upper) Iceland wave, Peter H. Photo (lower) Chinese temple BangPah-in, Elaine H

how it is

Posted on January 14, 2013 by tiramit

‘All conditioned Dharmas are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows. Like dew drops, a lightning flash. Contemplate them thus.’

Chiang Mai: It’s late morning, getting near to noon and I have to go out and get something from 7-Eleven. Down in the elevator and it’s not far, along to the end of the lane, tall buildings on either side and the brightness of the daylight is astonishing as I step out of the shadow into the open space of the main road. Intensity of colour, noise, people and everything is undeniably what it is, no room for considering what it might be or might have been, a tendency we have – those of us originating in the indistinct climates of the northern hemisphere, colourless eyes and no pigmentation of the skin – to ponder like this over hypothetical situations, papañca, that proliferate without end.

This is the tropical, the equatorial, and all in uncompromisingly vivid maximum pixel, vibrant colour. This is how it is; clearly defined, good looking people with black hair and golden skin. And all with a will to go out there and get it done. We’re all in this together, including the pale foreigners, who live here with us for part of the year. This is the public domain, the shared environment, we are a large population accommodated in small houses and rooms and we like it like that. No allowances for personal space – what is ‘personal’ space? It’s structured to allow for large numbers of human beings who may carry with them their ‘personal’ space and other needs and requirements, their babies their infrastructural support systems, schools, hopitals, shopping malls, cars, motorbikes and everything as it is here and now, inherited from generations before us to whom we are grateful and pray for earnestly.

I’m having some resistance to the immediacy of it, I don’t want it to be like this; too bright, too public; I feel like an owl in the daylight, a nocturnal shadow, like I shouldn’t be here, cloaked in the darkness of my quiet space, buddhist vampires wither away. Same old story, just see this aversion without being overly attached to the thing. Have metta for the state of mind. There’s the getting into it; there’s the attachment, the ‘hook’ to get caught… or is it a ‘perch’ to rest on for a moment and look at the view… waves of samsara all around; I’m wanting ‘it’ to be ‘this’ and believing this is really how it is – the experience of being able to change the image in the mind’s eye, to make it be how I want it to be – a skill I learned as part of childhood conditioning. I can see the folly of it, the baseless fabric of this vision… all which it inherit, shall dissolve…’ it leads nowhere, exists for it’s own sake, momentarily and comes to nothing in the brightness. The sun shines through all parts of it; they become shadows, vapours and disappear.

It’s that ‘letting-go’ thing again. Why does it have to be like this? You could say there’s a kind of glue spread over objects and attention gets stuck on that. Seeing it like this means, of course, I recognise the possibility that there’s also a solvent that renders the glue unstickable, it doesn’t adhere and, there’s no need to remind myself to ‘let go’ because everything has been let go of already? There isn’t anything anyway that has the power to cause one to attach. It’s the mind that’s doing it. Stop creating it and there’s nothing there! I get what I need from 7-Eleven and back upstairs to the apartment, where it’s cool and quiet and shady.

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‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors,  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and  Are melted into air, into thin air:  And like the baseless fabric of this vision,  The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff  As dreams are made on; and our little life  Is rounded with a sleep.’ [The Tempest Act 4, Prospero, scene 1, 148–158]