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]

————————-

Excerpts from an earlier post: ‘Connectedness’

green-leaf shadows

Posted on July 30, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #217: New Delhi: As if it were a story about a wormhole in time that permits a returning to the past to change the way events took place then and how this has a fundamental effect on present time, I’m able to re-experience an event in the deep past I haven’t visited since the intensity of the headache diminished, and allow that event to change according to present circumstances, wholesome and bright.

These sudden moments of deep reflection not in the centre of thoughts, more at the edge of vision, we can easily fall into and the old story of it unfolds, but seen in less self-adhesive circumstances. Thus the forever ‘stuckness’ that has held one so tightly and for so long is suddenly melted into softness, dispersed in the awakening from the memory of it.

Then before I can seem to retrace the steps that took me there, I find that same deep swoon back to a space in time again, and affirmative extending of the arm to reach the ‘me’ then, caught in another remembered event that’s been a burden for decades, untangling the knots of it from the depths and a raising up into clearer water where it breaks the surface into the wet sunlit present moment. This how it’s been in the varying shades of darker and lighter green-leaf shadows in the rooms of the house, all its windows open to the park, where it’s been raining for so long I can’t remember when it began.

“Give up both righteousness and unrighteousness. Give up both truth and untruth. And then give up that by which you have given up those two.”

————————-

[source of the quote: http://www.yogananda.com.au/upa/Upanishads_by_Shankara02.html#liberation

Note: development of an earlier post titled: changing the past

Dipa Ma

Posted on July 17, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #216: Somehow I’ve been thinking about Dipa Ma lately; the Bengali meditation teacher who had such a large influence on IMS teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and others who believe she was an enlightened being. Just looking at her face on the cover of the book, such a welcoming presence. There are accounts of people who never met Dipa Ma having seen/felt Dipa Ma’s grace, her loving kindness – not in a strange or exceptional way, quite ordinary. Whenever there’s a moment that requires special compassion, the presence of Dipa Ma is there.

That’s how it is for me now; it’s like she’s here by my side. It’s as if she is saying to me that this present moment is absolutely right as it is, no need for anything else. Gone are all stray and wandering thoughts that tend to cling; they just disappear. How can it be possible to have the feeling you are close to someone you’ve never met and all you know is what you’ve read about her? I think it’s because that’s just how she was; always approachable, she welcomed everyone. Dipa Ma was asked once about loving-kindness and mindfulness: ‘From my own experience, there is no difference between mindfulness and loving kindness.’ For her, love and awareness were one…. When you are fully loving, aren’t you also mindful? When you are mindful, is this not also the essence of love?’[Amy Schmidt]

These days I often think about her, whenever I’m in a difficult situation I find Dipa Ma is here too, deep breaths, and everything is ok.

————————-

‘Saintly beings, whether they are the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, Dipa Ma, or one thousand unknown saintly beings living amongst us, share the same fundamental characteristic of selflessness, great compassion, and peace. Each one of us can carry Dipa Ma’s legacy in terms of having that much peace and love. It takes its own time, yet it’s possible for anyone. In the end the point is not to be like Dipa Ma or some other great yogi or saint you might read about. The point is something much more difficult: to be yourself and to discover that all you seek is to be found, here and now, in your own heart.’ [Jack Kornfield]

This post reblogged from 2012

plane hides behind a building

Posted on July 3, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #213: Chiang Mai: Mine is the get-out-of-jail-free card… nothing I’d heard about or read about indicated that an injection in the head, the Right Occipital Nerve (don’t ask me how), would give me this wonderful pain-free life again; the absence of headache 24/7 for the last 10 months, the lack of things to think about or things I think I should be thinking about. I don’t have the burden of it. Weightlessness, a state of suspended disbelief, there are no words, emptiness empties itself, gone, no nothing, inability to articulate, indescribable. I’ve heard from others who’ve had this kind of a sudden easing, an opening, and after the fact they’ve said that it’s this or it’s that, but really there are no words for it. If it could be described, it would be no-self, rather than ‘Self’, it would be non-duality… but that state is indescribable.

Then one day I looked out the window and realized they’d changed the flight path, the planes are now arriving rather than departing. Every 5 minutes one flies over. I’m fascinated by the sudden presence of this low-flying high-speed double-decker tourist bus with wings coming in to land; another planeload of passengers from Southern China. Strange, the engine sound comes after it, demanding attention, and there is the plane, flying silently ahead of the sound wave; seen first in one window then in the other. It enters the space I’m in – appears and disappears as if it were flying through the room.

The repetition of it, one plane after another. Seen in slow motion, in time-lapse it appears as if the plane is rushing through between the buildings in a great catastrophe of joy. Out there and in here, things merge together so much it’s difficult to distinguish, no need. Even having to click the Pause button on the Netflix movie I’m watching, until the plane sound flies through the room (because I can’t hear the soundtrack), even that isn’t an inconvenience, the ease is such, these things don’t matter.

Suchness, thusness, Thatāgata. The answer to a question I haven’t even thought of yet. And I wake up from it for a moment. These easy days of lounging around on the sofa, watching the planes go by, are coming to an end. Wasting away the last afternoon instead of getting ready to go… okay, time I wasn’t here. Drag myself into the upright position and go pack my bag, the flight to Bangkok leaves at 14.30. A few hours in transit, then another flight into the darkness and early rains of North India. Placed on the ground, monsoon, pleasantly cool, a man without a headache. Put on the clothes of who I am there, become the person who lives in that location. Pick up the thread, the sequence of time unfolds by itself, events occur in the forward momentum I create by facing the direction I’m in. The identity I have is where I hang my hat…

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

this post is composed as a result of a correspondence with ESW, gratitude

the sky is falling

Posted on June 24, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #212: Chiang Mai: The sound of the alarm tone is in the dream I’m having… which came first, the event or my comprehension of it? Time-sequence resolves itself when I reach around to switch it off and life as it’s lived in ‘me’ returns to a familiarity I recognize as reasonably normal.

Five thirty in the morning, another Chiang Mai day in the rainy season, caution, check, the headache is still gone… yep it’s still gone. The only disabling thing now is the result of the body’s reaction to the headache – backache in the wake of hurricane-headache. I can lie here for a moment and get ready for the pain as I haul myself into the upright position… not too bad; the osteopath said it would get better. Okay hobble off to the shower looking for handholds on the way.

Remembering now how the osteopath looked at me standing there, and after a moment said it’s the body’s response to the last 10 months of 24/7 headache. Mind has pulled the body into a walking crouch – a kind of protective posture; shrinking into itself, slightly bended knees, bent-over back, and head sticking out like a turtle looking at the sky… the sky is falling, oh no the sky is falling, and that’s what Henny Penny said. (US: Chicken Little)

I couldn’t feel the pain of it then because of the super-pain meds I was taking. Now I don’t need the meds, the pain in the body is felt. It’ll take time for the vertebrae to ease back into where they are supposed to be. Square pegs do not fit in round holes, exactly, and I’m truly amazed by the elasticity of everything.

So much has happened in the last few days all that can be accurately said is that nothing is fixed, permanent, unchanging. This knowledge I simply stumbled upon, how the body reacts, responds, and the mind or is it circumstances (?) reveal there’s a deeper awareness in here, dormant until something like the correct password is entered then it’s activated.

Now there’s the sense of just waiting to see, no urgency, no problem about how long it takes. Something I can return to time after time and it’s not hard to understand that this embodied identity I call ‘me’ is just not important at all.

There are no words to say properly what it is. Language is inadequate. My 12 year-old Thai niece, M, has temporarily lost the ability to speak, transfixed as she is in the digital screen. I leaned over and asked what she was doing and she just sent the picture of the sky above (the header image) to my email… ting!

“Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.” [C.G. Jung]

Header image: M’s pic of the evening sun seen from the apartment window yesterday

beyond words

Posted on June 19, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #211: Bangkok: The next day, after arriving here from the airport by way of taxi driven at startling speeds [link to as the crow flies], the recovery from that and… wake up in the morning. Time to go see the neurologist/ neurosurgeon to have the dreaded needle in the head, for the second time (by some means of bone conduction, you can hear the needle point scraping over the surface of the skull: kritch-krrrritchchch). The needle poised at X marks the spot inscribed in biro pen on my scalp (he tells me), the exact position on the occipital nerve (the nerve tree which has been causing the permanent headache since September last year). Now you will feel a little pressure here, doc says quietly, close to my ear, as if it were a secret. Needle goes in, pain-pain-pain, doc voids the syringe, withdraws needle. Thank you very much (I just want to get out of there), go home, sleep, wake up and the headache is gone!

The relief is beyond words

The headache is gone… hard to believe – really. Wow! it worked. How long will it last? (remembering “Awakenings’ by Oliver Sachs, made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams). Well… even if it’s for a short time, I can enjoy life in this headache-free interval; just so good to be able to get around and do things without the billiard ball crashing around inside the skull – only these curious sparkling sharp feelings at the sides of the head. In the centre there’s a kind of blank space where the headache used to be, a soft comfy pillow-like feeling… the first headache-free time for eight months.

So the first thing I discover is there’s all this physical energy… I can go around and do things without the great burden of headache. Rushing around the house in a great burst of enthusiasm, I decide to wash some clothes and like most houses in Asia, the washing machine is outside the house, under an open sheltered area with stretched lines for hanging things out to dry in the fresh air. So I put clothes in the machine, select ‘Quick Wash’ and start the cycle.

Go back inside, forget completely they’re there and start cooking a soup with all kinds of vegetables. It’s a bit late in the day when I remember and go out there again, (it’s the rainy season in Thailand) and the rain started to come on, then very quickly it’s a colossal downpour and I have to hang clothes any-which-way in dry corners; on hooks and the back of chairs in places sheltered from this incredible rain like what I suddenly remember as, both bath taps full on.

Back indoors from time to time to stir the soup, plip plop plip like a frog, barefoot on kitchen floor now wet with in-and-out traffic and scraps of vegetable peelings. The great smell of soup starts to come to me as I’m looking for more places to hang wet clothes. Deafening sound of rain on perspex rooftops, and gusts of rainy wind in through the open door nearly blows out the gas flame. But it doesn’t, and everything seems to be just right as-it-is in this wet, green place.
————————-

Photo: Bangkok Post [link] worshippers at the Erawan shrine despite the rain

as the crow flies

Posted on June 15, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #210: Delhi/Bangkok flight: I arrived at the place and couldn’t remember how exactly I came to be there except for the journey returning to me in flashes; scanned by X-ray machines, identified, processed, held in aircraft cabin pressure for 4 hours… then look out the window and see small green rice fields with water everywhere; 1800 miles southeast on the Asia map as the crow flies.

Placed on the ground and I have to get my things quickly, put together the parts of who I think I am in this new context of a day I missed the beginning of, and things out there are just happening anyway. Extraordinary, even so – catching up on the rebound, the momentum of the journey, the sense of something recharged, action endowed with purpose because I’ve arrived in what remains of a day that belongs to other people, those who have been here since early morning… Sorry I’m late, dropped out of the sky unnoticed – the Fall of Icarus in a painting by Pieter Bruegel.

Look at the camera please, click, passport page, thump, you have entered the Kingdom… exotic creatures made of gold. The world seen in flashes from an airport taxi in the fast lane, everything designed to get us there with the urgency of speed. It feels like the whole outside is entering the inside in large jigsaw pieces of landscape partly remembered, connected familiarity, but no time to think where, when, or who with. Glimpses of other people’s traffic congestion at the paytolls, shadowy drivers and their tinted glass and steel glint, chromium shine of new cars in pastel shades sliding slowly along in the golden light of their early-evening lives.

In here everything is locked down tight, attention captivated by the directionality of the journey I see through the front windscreen how we’re hurtling into a wormhole in space/time, plunging towards a vanishing point that never arrives. The outer world becomes neutral, non-intrusive random thought mechanisms that function at the edge of a dream pull me into the gentle whirr and flicker of thinking-about-things, and it seems like what’s happening here just could not be any more ordinary.

I find relief in that… can unwind in the Thai sense of normality, thammada, ธรรมดา, mind still buzzing as it is with the energy, the immediacy of the experience. Just fall into focus on the neutrality of no-thinking, looking for the space that’s between things. Deep in-breath and extended outbreath; the long and forever road extending deep into the horizon with great dome of sky above. Everything looks like a picture of what it is, a composition, a story told by a storyteller long since disappeared and I can’t remember how I came to be here, only parts of the journey now coming back to me in flashes, shining in my darkness at the edge of sleep in a different time zone.

“You are not in the universe, you are the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.” [Eckhart Tolle]

Photo: Departures walkway at Delhi. New… pls chk out the latest art page post

parts of a whole

Posted on May 11, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #208: CHIANG MAI: Sorry we’re closed for renovations, editorial work and improvements; facilitated and inspired by friends I’ve met here in the blogosphere. I wanted to take things a step further, turn the energy of the posts into a completeness; thinking of a book. I’m trying to see how all the posts could simply become that. I’m happy to go on writing and engaging in dialogue with friends in the comments box, but I’m wondering where does it go from here; just more posts, adding to an ever increasing number of posts, and no objective other than taking things to pieces to see how they fit together as parts of a whole.

WordPress admin page tells me there are 368 posts 815 followers and 4,878 comments. Unbelievable, it just goes on and on, and I’m so grateful to all the friends out there in the blogging world who are reading this, and those who have contributed in the comments box. I’ve been posting since December 2011 and twice a week from then until now, May 2016 – with only one other break when I got ill. A turning point if ever there was one; next thing was the PHN condition; learning to live with a headache that doesn’t go away… but enough said about that.

So having decided to stop blogging for a while, the first thing I notice is it’s hard to do that… hard to stop blogging. I haven’t properly figured it out yet, but I can see there’s an attachment to it, the blogger is driven, every few days, to get that post out. Same as how the potter flings a lump of slithery clay on to the wheel and holds it spinning there with hands and fingers moulding, shaping, forming it into a beautiful hollow object with mouth so open it feels like the whole outside is inside. Like the sculptor hacks and cuts and chips at the block of stone to release the form that got trapped inside there.

That’s the creative itch identified, and I will be adding more posts to the art page, otherwise not blogging for a while and I’m hoping this means I can turn my whole attention to the pain in my head. Why’d I want to do that? Just to be with it, understand it, see why it’s there – why there is a pain in my life, not as a question… more like a statement of fact and it becomes an object of contemplation. Is there a no-self space beyond the pain? (as Karin has said?) Some people would pray and ask a higher power to help them remove the pain or at least help them to see it differently and to guide them. Do I do that? Do Buddhists pray? Or is it all about just noticing sense perceptions with compassion and detachment?

I’m hoping to make some progress into this and find the energy to work on the book project motivated by the transformation, piece by piece, of the whole blog/book project – working title: ‘Postcards From the Present Moment’. Various people have suggested I should do this, I’m grateful to Ellen of stockdalewolfe.com and Karin at karinfinger.com, this is not an ending, I’ll be back with updates from time to time. As we get near to completion, there’ll be pre-publication news and a new beginning…

————————-

UPPER AND LOWER PHOTOS: CABLES & SINGAGE, CHIANG MAI

the desire to believe in

Posted on May 6, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #207: CHIANG MAI: Before my Thai niece M runs out the door to spend the day with her friends, she comes over to where I’m sitting and says: Toong Ting? I am going now. Bye bye! And she’s gone. I sit there for a while being Toong Ting, her pet name for me, part of her baby talk that remains because it’s thought to be cute when applied in a grandfatherly way. I feel like I don’t deserve it… the Judeo-Christian sense of guilt that doesn’t fit in this Buddhist country (I need to remind myself always). M is courteous and respectful as she’s been taught, a learned thing which reinforces the natural world-view children have. But I wonder if I’m worthy of it – am I simply taking advantage of people’s natural desire to believe in, to trust?

More than thirty years of living with other people’s preferences, adopting them as my own… how it is for the migrant in his/her host country. North Americans must have a deep familiarity with this. There’s a slight doubt that enters sometimes, it’s as if everything that’s done or said is a form of compliance, has the quality of procurement – how can I be as committed to being here as everyone else is when I know I could get on a plane any time and disappear? Moving from one ‘safe house’ to the next, the leave-taking between is sudden and children may forget me completely, or think about it for a lifetime and never understand why I went away. It’s something unknown, unthought in the Thai world. They’re so kind here. I feel I don’t deserve it.

The silence of the room comes as a surprise, birdsong in the trees opposite the window, and I wake up from this prolonged moment in search of the memory of who I am. The same as it always is; I’ve arrived here by the same route I’m accustomed to when reviewing the image of who I want to be and who I think I am. It happens in a tiny fraction of a second, so fast it feels like the process of trying to figure it out is in slow motion.

Objects scattered on the desk in the position they were in, unmoved, a pen, papers – a cup with a curious handle that appears to stick out further and wider than it should, waiting for my fingers to come and hold it… I’d be that person I think I am if I were to I reach for the cup. Alice in Wonderland, Drink Me says the label on the bottle… but I don’t and it doesn’t happen. Everything on the desk and the sofa and the floor remains as a quiet presence of M, these are her unclaimed, unidentified objects that come alive when she’s here. Maybe it’s easier for me than for the native inhabitant to choose to stay with the emptiness and silence of inanimate things, the motionless space where everything is situated, aware of context and content, and seeing that which normally passes unseen.

It’s a perception, and only seems real by comparison with other things that are thought to be not real… falling into the delusion it’s not delusion, or knowing it’s reality – we do it knowingly, we go with the illusion. For a moment it’s seen and this is how we escape from it. Sometimes it’s a familiarity displaced and we’re tricked into staying there believing it’s really real but we’ve only convinced ourselves that it is, and it can take years, a lifetime. A pattern found in the itinerary of former lives, all these journeys connected end-to-end, divided and subdivided into periods of looking out the twin windows of the upper front face of the skull as if it were a moving vehicle, and looking out and thinking: ‘are we there yet?’ Then back to the conundrum of being busy with thought, and never arriving.

Later in the day a message on my phone goes ding! A picture of somebody’s lunch. It’s from M they’re all in a restaurant I’ve been in before and I can imagine how that is right now…

————————-

Photo: a carefully created pavement repair in Chiang Mai.

ever-present

Posted on May 3, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #206: CHIANG MAI: Sitting in a taxi stuck at the red light in Nimmanhaemin, Chiang Mai town. The nearness to Southern China is obvious these days with the occasional Chinese number plate seen in Thai traffic and streets full of Chinese tourists, women in curious long white costumes and wide brimmed hats in the tremendous luminosity of sunshine. The border is do-able now the roads have improved; road 3Asia (R3A), part of the GMS North-South Economic Corridor. The total distance is 350 miles from Chiang Rai across the Mekong River into Laos, then on to the border town of Boten, and China’s Yunnan Region at Mohan.

I’d prefer it to be darknight, but instead it’s brightday, step outside and it feels like I’m in a television studio. Inside the car, cold air blasting through our enclosed metal bubble; this could be an ice-cream headache… then I remember this one is the one that’s always with me, ‘my’ headache is part of my life; ‘my’ arm, ‘my’ leg. Part of everything and right now, undeniably out there too, exposed in high resolution Photoshop enhancement. Light penetrates everything; the orange color of papaya fruit blinds me, street vendors’ cut pineapple painfully vivid. I feel I’m really a nocturnal owl-like creature, squinting in the daylight through slit eyes; a quiet presence behind sunglasses vibhava tanha, (buddhist term for the desire to not exist)… I am not here.

I’ve been away for only 2 weeks and now I’m back, all recollection of where I went and what I did when I was away are suddenly gone. There’s this feeling it never happened, I’ve been here all the time, only imagined I went. Somebody asks: where did you go? I went to Delhi, North India 2,300 miles away. Sixty-eight hours driving time on NH 28 through Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and India to Delhi… but I went by plane of course, so fast, and it’s as if I went there in my mind, gone from here for only a moment. A pause in mid sentence in the timeless ever-present…

My niece M, aged 12, is taller since I saw her 2 weeks ago; taller, longer and elongating as we speak, like a plant in the darkness searching for the light, sprawled on the back seat in an adolescent bundle of legs and arms, wearing a diver’s watch, colorful T-shirt; long black hair curtains a small oriental face, sometimes seen, when adjusting the thread of earphones cable, then disappears again. Sorry, she’s unavailable at the moment, plugged into the tablet device and YouTube videos while checking for messages at the same time on her phone device. Questions addressed to her remain unanswered.

It’s all one extended ever-present time, no seasons, nothing to say where we are in the year. Summer every day. Night comes at 6pm, instant darkness, then at 6am, instant daylight and each day is like the one before, and it all runs together, days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. The whole thing is just one very long, continuous day.

Time disappears, I’m startled to discover I’m now an old person – lifetime is running out. Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and woke up with a very long beard. He discovers fifty years have passed since he fell asleep; people have died, his daughter is middle-aged, her children are grown up. There’s an awakening to this reality, unasked-for, it just falls into place…