patient understanding

Posted on December 29, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #37: Chiang Mai/Hat Yai journey: The Chiang Mai flight to Hat Yai was discontinued just before our departure date, so the journey had to be made in two parts; the first flight to Bangkok the second to Hat Yai – a bit frustrating, yes, but that’s how my Western thinking can be fixated on the way things ‘should’ be, and not how they are. This is Thailand and no upset, just the sense that people were a tiny bit miffed about it. Then we discover the baggage can’t be checked through either, it means we have to collect everything from the luggage belt at Arrivals when we get to Bangkok then to Departures and check in again for the next flight. There were a lot of bags, and we had little M with us who is 9 years old and she’d have to be guided through the crowds safely. I felt I was beginning to lose it at that point but still no reaction from the others, just a kind of ‘no comment’ attitude and the sense of something being ‘held’.

I go along with the way everyone else is doing it; chai yen yen (keep a cool heart) chai ron mai dai (being angry is no good). Patient understanding, putting up with it quietly; othon, in Thai, it’s about accepting things as they are and not fuelling the fires. There’s a cultural tradition of this kind of inhibition of anger in public. It’s a big no-no. Why? Because when people really lose their cool they can go crazy. The word in Thai is baa, a kind of madness; political demonstrations with crowds running into a hail of bullets and not stopping until the cease-fire. So, we don’t want to go there. Thais have acquired the skill of abiding in the suppressed anger state so that the feeling can be allowed to pass and there’s sufficient clarity of mind to see what action can be taken.

We arrive at Bangkok, wait for the luggage at the belt, I get it all on to two trolleys, with little M sitting up on top of the bags and we make our way through the crowds to the elevator. Up to the second floor and enter through security and the baggage X-ray machines to the check-in desk again. There’s not much room and a large congestion of luggage trolleys. Tense pale faces, no anger, only the difficulty that people are having suppressing it. Sweat forming on the forehead, no expression, a tight smile when required, a mutual understanding and a calm appearance. Tread carefully, the fear of becoming angry makes the whole thing kinda fragile.

Recent political demonstrations highlighting the underhanded manipulative strategies that take advantage of this cultural quietness are an example of there being suddenly a legitimate reason for everything to go totally irrational. In this case, organised public protest against a Prime Minister who was put in place by a group of behind-the-scenes bad guys; a situation not unlike the period of George Dubya, the 43rd U.S. president. Both leaders were puppet-like, inarticulate, and the public fell into a kind of embarrassed silence; how can our leader appear to be so hopeless like this? This odd acceptance allowed the controlling group to manipulate events behind the facade. It was tolerated for a while due to the cultural ‘holding’ behaviour, then it exploded. These public protests pull things back into balance because Thais value peace. Anarchy and lawlessness are a scary alternative – almost like insanity. There will be stability, but only for a short time, it seems. Sadly, it’s likely to break out again. An impossible cycle…

We get on the next flight, take-off and up into the clear blue sky again; out there, where there are no problems, the beautiful great curvature of the Earth. One hour and fifteen minutes later we descend into Hat Yai. The outer arrivals section full of Thai muslims in colourful head scarves and matching costumes, children running around. Into the car and out on the great North/South highway that connects Thailand to Malaysia and all the way South to Singapore.

“In essence, the process of division is a way of thinking about things that is convenient and useful mainly in the domain of practical, technical and functional activities (e.g., to divide up an area of land into different fields where various crops are to be grown). However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e. to his self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.” [David Bohm]

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The David Bohm quote above comes from The Ptero Card Post: I Fall to Pieces

– G R A T I T U D E –

Upper photo: Don Muan airport Bangkok

Lower photo: part of the whistle-blowing anti-government demonstration passing through the Siam Paragon shopping area in Bangkok

maya & christmas

Posted on December 24, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #36: Chiang Mai: Going around town in a tuk-tuk, seeing all these new shopping areas getting built and a huge shopping mall opens here soon called MAYA – a Sanskrit word meaning illusion. In Thailand the word maya is applied to the lifestyle of movie stars who have everything money can buy and their lives are thought to be unreal. In an intelligent way, everybody knows what maya is and what ‘reality’ is. But in the shopping mall context maya is presented as an attractive idea; it’s appealing, even though it’s an illusion, we’re partly agreeing with it; complicit in its being there. We might say well, okay it’s an illusion, but what’s wrong with that? Nobody wants to see it as calculated corporate planning to create a market for consumer goods… that would destroy the pretty illusion. Nobody wants to know that the local population, sons and daughters of rural/urban migrants, and naïve hill-tribe folk are likely to be swept away in the wave of purchasing choices. Unseen, built-in strategies contained in an imported Western model that doesn’t suit this culture… and we’re not willing to say there’s anything wrong with it because we’re all in some way compromised.

A kind of tacit approval of consumerist schemes embedded in our lives that has resulted in our losing so much of our inherited cultural traditions. The Christmas festival is layered over with the maya of santaclausisms and the Jesus Teachings are nearly lost in it. It’s as if the essential part of our spiritual Truth got forgotten along the way and consumerism came along in its place. It’s a mystery really, why it should be like this, but for some reason the early Church disapproved of the gnosis (knowledge) part of the teaching. Out went the pragmatic instructions on seeing the constructed nature of appearances and the stepping-through to discover the non-duality between ourselves and God. ‘His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”  <Jesus said,> “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it (113).”’[Nag Hammadi Manuscripts].

After an extended period of study and contemplation, one simply ‘wakes up’ to the Truth of it; the reality that surrounds us all the time; Brahman, the Oneness, the God state that’s here and now. You’ll notice I’m presenting the Jesus teachings as an instance of the Advaita experience, sourced in the Upanishads [I wrote another post about this, link to: Jesus and Advaita Vedanta]. I’m also including the Jesus Teaching in a oneness of spiritual teaching centred in that geographical region where the three Abrahamic religions arose: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the connection with Brahmanic religions and Advaita Vedanta. Others related to this include Buddhism and Jainism. That region, from North India through to Israel and the Mediterranean, a distance of about 3000 miles, say from New York to San Francisco? I see it like a highway of knowledge, wisdom and information. All of it coming and going along the route many centuries before Jesus was born and many centuries after. All the world’s religions arose here.

Somewhere in this context lies the actuality of our Jesus experience; only traces of it remain – enough to know there is this huge feeling of goodwill towards all beings in the world and the universe.

Merry Christmas friends and fellow bloggers ~ Christmas 2013

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Excerpts from: meta-narratives

where there is no christmas

Posted on December 18, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #34: Bangkok: No snow here, of course, winter is just a slight coolness that happens once a year. It lasts about a week. There’s no Christmas either because it’s a Buddhist country. I am the only thing resembling a real christmasee here. Christians in Thailand amount to 0.7% of the population. Yet there are Christmas carols playing in all the malls, and also in the supermarket where I was this morning: ‘… the ho-lee bible says, mary’s boy-child, jee-sus christ, was born on christ-mas daaay…’ twirling around the fruit and vegetables and frozen food section. Gift-giving as purchasing incentive, the season of goodwill has a place here even though the population are 95% Buddhist, 4% Moslem. Thai society is joyful, they like to share everything. They like playfulness – the word in Thai is sanuk (fun), everything has to be sanuk and if it’s not, it’s mai sanuk (seriously boring) and that’s bad style. I was downtown yesterday, saw the yellow duck wearing sunglasses stuck on the red taxi, took the photo. The Thais recognise the 25th December as a happy event but it’s also an ordinary day. People go to work, government offices are open, mail gets delivered, transport systems are normal, it’s all open for business, same as usual.

Heavy rain last night woke me up, and the room is cold this morning. Don’t need any fans, no air conditioning and without the slightly deafening sound of these machines it’s strangely quiet in the house. I’m noticing noises coming from the neighbours; a clatter of sounds enters through the open windows. Screen door opens, and there’s an interval of time to allow someone to enter, then screen door closes again. I get up to see who came in… but there’s nobody there, it’s not this house – it must be the house next door. Somebody else’s cutlery; plates go clink, voices echoing off the tiled floor and cement plaster walls… in which house? A dog barks, a child cries; it feels like everybody out there is in here.

I can feel chilled air in my ears; in the tiny inner surface of the eardrum. There’s a coolness in nasal passageways, emptiness of mouth cavity, tongue stuck in the wetness of the upper palate. The surface of the eye is cold. The body is a sensory organism in the environment of this room; four walls, the ceiling. The smooth wall surfaces holding the enclosed space like a 3 dimensional photographic negative of the room. The shape of motionless space within which things exists. Open the door and the volume of the room escapes. This is how it was when the sound of the rain woke me up this morning in the darkness. I went to sit on the cushion and the whole thing suddenly came crashing into consciousness as if it had been waiting all night for me to wake up.

‘… have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.’ [Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet #4]

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flying time

Posted on December 14, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #33 Delhi-Bangkok flight: Travelling at hundreds of miles an hour but it feels like the aircraft is standing still. A curious sensation, there’s nothing to indicate we’re moving, only this pleasing hmmmmm of the aircraft, and shhhhhh of cabin air pressure. Daylight enters into the small space of my window seat, a fold-down table, colourful papers, books and everything has the familiarity of being in a small room, brightly illuminated with a warm, happy, sunny light. I’m unaware of travelling across the sky in a passenger jet that observers in a different location might see as a streak of light. In another location they might see the aircraft seemingly suspended. I’ve seen it like this, sometimes, in the car going to the airport; a plane is taking off and if you’re coming towards the ascending aircraft, it looks like the plane is just hanging in the air. It’s this same feeling now, only I’m in it – a strange illusion; the various speeds all around are synchronised and the impression is that everything has stopped. I feel like I should hold my breath…

It’s an illusion… isn’t it? Einstein’s Theory on Special Relativity; everything inside this enclosed capsule is relative to itself. I’m up here, looking out the window and trying to understand this experience… soft, pale white-blue sky above the clouds stretching over the curvature of the Earth. After five or ten minutes, the horizon of clouds is still the same – it feels like we haven’t moved. Suspended in the air and the Earth is spinning on its axis below. The plane is going in an Easterly direction, parallel to the Earth’s rotation, like a boat on a river going in the direction of the current and there’s no sense of movement.

There’s an awareness of space below, an awareness of space all around and the vastness of the situation. Awareness of breathing; the in-breath and the out-breath. The action of releasing the out-breath seems associated with the direction the aircraft is travelling in. It appears to move the entire environment perceptibly forward in a very small way. A sense of something having passed by, I saw it for a moment as it slipped into the past. There’s an awareness that a thought was there and the awareness that it’s gone now, forgotten – no awareness of forgetting, only the awareness of the awareness.

The ‘now’ moment is like the boat on the river going downstream with the current, it’s only when the trees on the riverbank are seen that there’s an idea of relative speeds. I can distinguish things from their time, a local sense, there’s a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, but I can’t separate myself from time. Time is what I am, together with everything in the context of this aircraft. I remember the past but I’m remembering it now – I see into the future but I’m seeing it now. I am what space and time are doing here and now.

I get up and walk along the aisle and notice that walking in the forward direction (the direction we are travelling) is easy, swimming with the current, like walking downhill. Walking back to my seat (opposite to the direction we are travelling) is like swimming against the current; walking uphill. Then sitting in this small window seat, with the familiarity of my breathing, focus and mindfulness as we career headlong through space at 600 mph. The environment of the plane, the presence of noise and proximity of engines… powerful beyond belief.

‘Our awareness is like the air around us: we rarely notice it. It functions in all our waking moments and may even continue in sleep. Usually we are caught up in the content of our awareness, preoccupied with what we think, feel, and experience. Becoming aware of awareness itself is Receptive Awareness, very close to the idea of a witnessing consciousness. Resting in receptive awareness is an antidote to our efforts of building and defending a self: the assumption that there is “someone who is aware” falls away. Self-consciousness falls away; the distinctions between self and other, inside and outside, perceiver and perceived disappear. There is no one who is aware; there is only awareness and experience happening within awareness. We learn to hold our lives, our ideas, and ourselves lightly and rest in a spacious and compassionate sphere of awareness that knows, but is not attached.’ [Insight Meditation Center, Chapter 27: ‘Receptive Awareness’]

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Note: Excerpts from other posts on the experience of flying included here: Suspended Stillness, High Altitude Sunset, Meditating at 600 mph, somewhere over the rainbow

cold denial of winter in the north

Posted on December 5, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #30 Delhi: Gone are the barefoot days of summer, the short-pants and silly Tshirt. It’s cold now. Ah, that warm memory; sunny weather and things that don’t matter. If I’m going around dressed like a clown, how can I take life seriously? It’s okay here except it gets hot like an oven for three months of the year, peak temperatures at 46°C and higher. Now, though, our world is sliding down slowly into the chilled foods section of the supermarket, colder and colder – still warm during the day, but cold at night. Temperature dropping and I’m struggling slightly with this shut-in feeling, like maybe I’m ill or something? There’s got to be some reason for this heaviness, burdened by the weight of clothing.

Dark grey skies in the morning seen from this old house, through these large single-glazed windows, loose fitting and drafty, high ceilings, marble tiled flooring and small electric heaters on wheels that run across the smooth surface. It’s good enough for rented accommodation, single storied; a large roof window in the middle of it where I set up my drawing board. Nice overhead light but when it’s raining the sound is deafening and in this cold weather it’s as cold inside as it is outside. I wear a scarf indoors, a wooly jumper, and pause to consider the novelty of socks… wiggle the toes.

Jiab is ok about it, she’s from Thailand where it’s blue sky every day and this dullness is quite interesting for her; comes over to me with her sleeve rolled up and holds out her arm for me to look at: ‘see?… it’s that thing again, what you call it?’ I say ‘goose bumps’ (supplier of English vocabulary), look closely and sure enough, the skin is reacting to the cold. Different though from my experience of childhood in 4° below zero in Scotland most of the winter; memories of a snow drift against the side of the outhouse, frozen until the springtime. I am the escapee. It’s so dark there, they use special lighting to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), ‘winter depression’ and set up mirrors to reflect the sun: heliostat skylights. People are skilled in staying cheerful, shut inside small rooms for a third of the year, blazing coal fires in the hearth.

The gloomy ponderings of winter; the closed concept around things, setting boundaries around what is really open space. And it doesn’t have much meaning to the folk who live there if you say that nothing is permanent, all things arise in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions…. ah well, ho hum: one thing leads to another, is that it? Yes, well so what? There comes a time when it’s all been kind of said before and words run out.

I try to be alert, sensitive to what’s happening now… switch off the video in the head; be mindfully aware of the present. I want to deny the presence of winter, stay unattached and free, switch on all the lights in the house. It feels warmer and there’s a 300 watt halogen bulb in the standing lamp I can sit under to read a book and it feels like summertime, still…

‘… something like a level, a dimension, realm or sphere of truth, or a reality, things as they are. `The all-encompassing space’ (Trungpa Rinpoche), the element of space contains everything, contains all existence. This is the wisdom of the dharmadhatu. This word `wisdom’ means, perhaps, `gnosis’; it is knowledge which is nondualistic, knowledge which is completely one with the thing it knows, complete understanding, complete absorption into that knowledge…’ [Francesca Freemantle]

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seeing with alertness

Posted on November 29, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #29 Delhi: Large birds of prey slowly circling above; they make a sound like the mewing of cats. I’m on the roof terrace, watching them. They’ve seen something and I’m curious to see if I’ll witness the dramatic plunge to Earth to catch the prey. Reminds me of a time I was in Pondicherry, South India, walking through a quiet district in the French-speaking Tamil part of town. Not much going on, turn a corner and on the other side of the path there’s this mother hen fussing around agitatedly with her brood of little chicks: chee-eep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep. And the hen is making loud cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck noises, strutting around, strangely fast, unusual body movements; it was like a dance – didn’t look right somehow. The mother hen was dashing about and jumping backwards and forewards and the little chicks were falling over themselves trying to keep up with her. Wow, what is going on here? I stopped to watch.

Then suddenly there was this huge SWOOP down from above. A movement of the air and a large bird of prey with outstretched talons ‘falling’ from sky to earth in a great wide arc; at its widest point, so near to the ground, going at a tremendous speed. I saw it further down the road sailing back upwards in the momentum of its fall, and up in this large curve then winging it’s way back into the higher altitudes. Amazing… an almost silent whoosh of feathers and outstretched talons just in front of me. But it missed the target! It didn’t get what it was after, the mother hen had saved the chicks with her strange dance. And it’s possible that my being there, having just turned around the corner at exactly the right instant, had caused the bird of prey to misjudge the distance to its target; the kamma of the moment – a fortunate turn of events for these cute little chicks. Mother hen and her happy brood went on with their day: cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep… story with happy ending.

It really cheered me up – the feeling that everything is right in the world! It helped me a lot too with a problem I was having with an irate person in the office who’d gotten the idea that I was at fault concerning something I’ll not go into right now. Not easy but it only lasted a short time. She was wrong, and I was completely sure about that but there was no hope of convincing her; so it was just a case of dodging the angry remarks fired at me like heat-seeking missiles. The strange thing about this was, the missiles were not hitting the intended target. It was intense but I was not emotionally harmed. I was able to see what was going on and be one step removed – not unaffected by it of course – but the fierce eyes, the anger, the voice did not cause injury: the missile misses its aim and all that’s felt is the wind of it as it goes by.

So I was feeling a bit like the little chicks who escaped the sharp talons of the Great Bird of Prey. My mind was transparent, a large empty space; nothing there – no target. Just this freshness, clear comprehension, and seeing with alertness, yet detached from it, knowing it’s Mind that’s the real threat. It’s understood in a moment and after that the system does it by itself; it’s not a ‘mine field’, it’s a mind field. When I think of it now and see these birds of prey suspended in the air, they’re harmless. When I’m not thinking about the threat, it’s not there. The birds hold my attention, their patient observing …

‘Mindfulness is what keeps the perspective of appropriate attention in mind. Modern psychological research has shown that attention comes in discrete moments. You can be attentive to something for only a very short period of time and then you have to remind yourself, moment after moment, to return to it if you want to keep on being attentive. In other words, continuous attention—the type that can observe things over time—has to be stitched together from short intervals. This is what mindfulness is for. It keeps the object of your attention and the purpose of your attention in mind.’ [Thanissaro Bhikkhu, ‘Mindfulness Defined‘]

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Note: The above was developed from an earlier post: Skilful Avoidance

‘self’ is a sensory experience

Posted on November 26, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #28 Delhi: Thinking about things in the darkness. Stories come and go, pondering over this and that, and the awareness of being caught up in the thinking thing gets included in the meanderings – searching for a way out. If I start thinking about how to stop thinking, the mind gets busy looking for a solution; finding something and comparing it with other reasons why I can’t stop thinking. Thinking has its own momentum, takes time to slow down; that’s the nature of the vehicle I’m driving. Letting it all fizzle out until it can go no further and everything evaporates for a moment.

In that instant there’s no thinking and the mind is alerted… an empty space opens up; a great mirror showing Mind looking at itself – the awareness of being aware. Silence and emptiness, held on ‘pause’. There’s the desire to be actively thinking, and I see the invitation to be involved with thought but pay no heed, it’s just part of what the software does.

The breath coming from the nostrils, so faint and light it stirs only the tiniest thing; a single strand of hair. No other sensory input the mind needs to be engaged with; no sense object activates the chain of events and all that remains is the mind’s cognitive function. There’s a curiosity about this: The ‘self’ is a sensory experience; the experiencer is an experience – there is only experienc-ing. What is it? Consciousness is the sensory organ of the the universe. By seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, the universe experiences itself. [See below: Note 2.]

A wave of thoughts comes rushing in, stays for a moment and goes out again, as if in another reality. I see it as an observer watching from some hidden place. Then the observer disappears and only the awareness itself is left there. Another wave of thoughts comes rushing in, forms appear and disappear and in their place, a sequence of obscured mental events, each one linking with the next; small bursts of electronic energy explode then it’s quiet, and again more explosions, like a fireworks display, arising and falling away. Fainter and fainter. Some time later sleep comes and the whole world disappears…

“… stopping the mind, stopping the flow of thoughts that are proliferating, stopping the flow of moods that get drawn into either attraction or aversion. We return to a clear center, to awareness.” [Ajahn Passano, on Becoming And Stopping.]

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Upper image replaced from the post: uncertainty

Note 1. This post is developed from an earlier post (click here: the thinking thing)

Note 2. ‘The self is a sensory experience’ arose from a dialogue with Truthless Truth last year

– G R A T I T U D E –

filled with emptiness

Posted on November 22, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #27 Delhi: It’s like this sometimes… nothingness, the state of there being not anything to attach to at all – like when you switch off the TV suddenly and there’s this absolute silence. Reality comes crashing in, everything is filled with emptiness, boundaries and walls collapse and, for a moment, it all falls into a state of awe…

Scenes from the past flicker across the mind for a few moments then pass and, one by one, are replaced with empty space – the kamma of emptiness inherited from earlier times, maybe – it’s not the kind of thing you’d notice. I should make a note about it in my diary. A regeneration of empty spaces from the past invading other places where events are situated. The kamma of emptiness may return again in a future time and out of nowhere, all of a sudden, there’ll come this feeling of nothingness again and I’ll say to myself, how about this déjà vu familiarity? Where did this nothingness, out-of-nowhere feeling just arrive from?

And when that comes around I may have forgotten about this moment where I am now – but if I remember, I’ll see it from that new location and say aha! this is the result of that empty space then; I made a note about it in my diary, let’s see…. And finding the handwriting on the page, I’ll remember the circumstances at the time, knowing that was the cause of my present recognition of it in this place where I am currently seeing the world. It somehow seems easier seen in the past, in hindsight, after the event – all that, and everything has passed, has been experienced, and there’s a sadness about it now; gone forever. I can split into two and look back on the event, reflect on that from where I am now, divided between here and there. I can look into the future and predict events that may occur and what that’ll be like… See it all as something happening ‘out there’ at different points in linear time. But wherever I’ve been in my mind, the return to ‘now’ takes place; the reel winds me in, there’s always the coming back to the point of reference, the present moment. It’s always now.

Maybe sometime next month I’ll be somewhere else, and next year in some other place – eventually it’ll be in a future time, distant but not too far away, and I’ll be lying in a bed with clean white sheets, hospital equipment and the people I see will all have names I seem to remember when they were children. It won’t matter, nothing will matter because I’ll be travelling through memory, revisiting times gone by: how did that come about? When did that happen… how long ago was it? Who was there and why am I remembering this now? And the answer will be that it had it’s origin at this specific point in time because I can see it writ; faded handwriting on the page in the diary, and I’ll reflect on the quality of that moment, this moment here now. Gratitude.

‘It is not that enlightenment will occur “when the time comes,” for “there is no time right now that is not a time that has come.”’ [The Path of No Path, David Loy]

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a kind of ignoring

Posted on November 19, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #26 Delhi: Putting in eyedrops and I’m not used to it, eyelid reacts just as the drop is coming, blinks before the drop hits the eye, face is wet with eye-drop fluid. Try again… drip. Same thing happens. I’ve just started a two week schedule of eye-drops because of a dryness in the eyes after the recent operation. Hoping it’ll get easier and learning how to not-react, to resist the body’s automatic knee-jerk response to whatever it is that’s coming into the eye. There’s this natural tendency to reject, to refuse, to say ‘no’. The mind has it figured out but the body is still unconvinced.

It’s something like a deliberate not-seeing; the not-wanting-to-have-anything-to-do-with-it thing. Not wishing to engage; a kind of ignoring. It’s denial… “Who me? … in denial? I’m not in denial!” (denial of denial). I’m not going to pay attention to what you’re saying about me ignoring you. Pretending it’s not there and maybe it’ll go away? Ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome [see note1 below] The ‘self’ illusion itself, is a trancelike state. Even though it’s really obvious, people are conditioned to ignore basic truths that conflict with the habitual way of doing things. ‘We don’t look at things, we overlook things’ [Alan Watts].

Ignoring the truth about climate change, seemingly unconcerned about what kind of future we’re passing on to future generations. Ignoring deeply held misgivings about wars created by politicians, weapons of mass ‘distraction’, slipperiness, underhandedness, cunning ploys and guile. Ignoring the 1st Noble Truth of Suffering; tolerating the suffering permits a sort of attachment to it? Or maybe we are genuinely searching for another way to live our lives, but we’re sidetracked by Television, consumer goods, and fall into the world of ‘choices’ and ‘preferences’; burdened with these dependencies. So we might say: NO, this is not it at all… go to the doctor, tell him about it and he says take these pills, something to get us back on track – education cleverly teaches children there’s only one option: consumerism, and to engage with that you need to learn about career, job, debt, house, rent, marriage, car, bills… It’s doesn’t say WHY (ignore that question). Consumerism is what people believe in; consumerism is ‘God’.

Try another eye-drop… head back, look at the ceiling. The eyelid flutters, blinks involuntarily, and an eyelash deflects the intrusive drop, fluid trickles down the cheek like an actual tear drop and falls into the ear. I wipe it away with a tissue – this action triggers a memory of something emotional – why am I crying… trying to do something I can’t, and don’t know why. It’s the squeezing of the bottle between thumb and forefinger, a small intense muscular action, that’s in conflict with the feeling of vulnerability. Reluctantly I see, in close-up, the bubble of the drop emerging from the point of the bottle and glance away from it, anticipating the tiny impact on sensitive eyeball… splish! I have to learn to look elsewhere – a skilful ignoring – and focus on something like the ceiling fan, a light bulb, the flaking piece of plaster in the corner of the cornice.

Mindfulness and being calm. Earlier today, I downloaded 11 hours of Tibetan Healing Bell Chimes and as I’m writing this now I’m already on hour 5. It’s playing quietly in a different window; sweet random sounds, intentional wind chimes; the IS-ness of it. Meditation practice means I can gently ease back from the intensity the mind creates for as long as it takes to see what’s going on; this action feels right – I’m able to emerge from ignorance into the knowing. A wonderful emptiness or the wholeness of it? A great peace in the space of the mind.

‘The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’ (link to downloadable pdf)]

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Note 1: I discovered that, in fact, the ostrich doesn’t bury its head in the sand when there’s danger, it’s digging a hole and covering the egg with sand and, seen from a distance, it just looks like that’s what it’s doing.

Note 2: ‘If You Are Having Trouble Getting The Drop Into Your Eye: Lay on your back, and place a drop in the inner corner of your eyelid (the side closest to the bridge of your nose). Tilt your head, open your eyes slowly, and the drop should fall right into your eye.’

Note 3: ‘slipperiness, underhandedness, cunning ploys and guile’ taken from Ajahn Sucitto’s ‘Parami: Ways To Cross Life’s Floods’

Note 4: Listening to 11 hours of Tibetan Healing Sounds in Zen Flash

Note 5: Reference to: ‘career, job, debt, house, rent, marriage, car, bills, children…’ taken from blogpost: What Do You Want? by Jack Saunsea

Note 6: Upper image taken from the series: “Only In India”

a terrestrial ocean

Posted on November 12, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #24 Delhi: It’s colder here at this time of year. No fans, no ACs, people have their windows open and you can hear TVs, the clatter of dishes, cooking pots, ding, and bits of other people’s conversations. A child crying, a dog barks, somebody calling a person’s name in a language I can’t understand. It dwindles down as everyone settles in for the night, silent breathing in all the labyrinths of rooms and apartments that surround us here; people asleep on the floor, in beds, in cots, in hammocks. That’s how it was last night, then just after midnight, there was an earthquake.

Jiab wakes up, gives me a shake, ‘earthquake’ she says (Jiab is a linguistic minimalist). It takes me a moment to realize the house is trembling, bed is shaking, floor is like a sheet of tin stretching out from here to everywhere, connected with all other houses in the community… and the uneasy sensation of it undulating slightly; a flexibility, like the surface of the sea – a terrestrial ocean. Voices of neighbours outside, shouts and kerfuffle.

After a moment it settles down and the urgency passes. Trying to be mindful but I feel like I could go back to sleep maybe, just lying there, waiting to see what’ll happen. Then there’s another tremor, and we’re back into the unstable feeling again; louder shouts of voices, and more commotion outside… hmmm, the idea of death just going to arrive one day, anyday, could be a Tuesday, for example, or a Thursday, yes, nice if it were a Thursday.

Falling into a half sleep; there’s that Donovan song ‘Jersey Thursday’… did he mean the pullover or the island? Another tremor rocks the bed slightly and the gentleness of it helps me to drift off a little bit more. The day I die will be an ordinary day, nothing different about it. The moment after I’m gone the next moment will come along; that’ll take place, and there’ll be the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year.

No more holding on to ‘me’, the identity; who’s who or which is ‘what’ and ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘why’… particularly WHY? How to answer that? It’s M’s favourite question, she’s only 9 years old and has this curiosity about everything. Well, it’s just the way it is, you know? It’s all happening for it’s own sake, the inevitability of circumstances – things moving along of their own volition and whether they continue or discontinue doesn’t seem to be a question. (M looks at me: ‘… yes, but WHY?’) It’s like a story that I may think will, one day, come to an end… the final curtain: THE END, but it starts again and the period of ‘ending’ becomes a defining characteristic of it all: it ends sometimes and then it begins again. More like an epic anthology of short stories: ‘as old as we are able to imagine’ and going on forever, the panchatantra, the great cycle of it is always there. All the way out of this tiny space and knowing I’m an integral part of the whole universe.

It’s 4am, can’t sleep, get up and go through to the front room. Start up the laptop and google ‘earthquake’… amazing, the news is there already: ‘Four earthquakes (in Delhi) within a period of 4 hours, measuring 3.1 (12.41am), 3.3 (1.41 am), 2.5 (1.55am) and 2.8 (3.40am) on the Richter scale respectively. No reports of any casualty or destruction of property received so far.’ [reports: NDTV]

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