Tag Archives: mindfulness

a kind of ignoring

Posted on by

2

PP5POSTCARD #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)]

————————-

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 by

5

D-NDcropPOSTCARD #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]

————————-

Upper image by Manish Jain spiritualartwork.wordpress.com

the attributes of self

Posted on by

2

110520131818POSTCARD #18: Bangkok/Chiang Mai flight: They paint a face on the nose of the aircraft, the ‘cute’ concept – a Thai version of Japanese kawaii かわいい . It looks like a bird because the shape of it is beak-like but it’s recognizably a human face wearing sunglasses. Personifications, masks, fictional characters with human attributes respond in a childlike way to a world full of fear and joy. Goldilocks and the three bears finding the Buddhist Middle Way by trial-and-error: the first try is too hot; the second try, too cold; the third try is just right. Why not? This is a non-serious, one-hour flight; no sooner have we departed than we arrive. Smiling doll-like stewardesses in yellow costumes have just enough time to come up the aisle with a light snack in a paper bag for everyone, back down again to clear everything away and we’re descending into Chiang Mai.

Slightly bumpy, due to weather conditions, the vibration causes the luggage compartments to shake and creak for a moment. Sounds like something nautical; the rattle of rope harness striking the mast of a sailing ship… searching for something it resembles – something to account for this phenomenon of flying above the clouds at an incredible speed. Maybe I’m seeing the journey from Bangkok to Chiang Mai as if we were driving over something solid, bumps caused by an uneven road surface; a highway in the sky, an imagined bridge that spans the distance, 373 miles from there to here – a huge curved span in the sky. Logical mind attempts to create an explanation for it, based on what’s known, a figure of speech, something to help me ease back from contracting around the uneasiness, the unknown… that edgy feeling. Without the metaphor, all I’m aware of is tremendous velocity and a sense of vulnerability. The immediacy of the moment sweeps away all thought-constructs like the ground is gone from beneath my feet. Mindfulness of breathing, deeply in and all the way out…

Further into the descent I become a little deaf, it feels like being underwater, and no amount of swallowing or blowing of air into sinus cavities seems to clear it. Near to landing there’s the sound of the hydraulics, out go the flaps, down go the wheels and the earth rises up to meet us; 300 people contained in a structure the size of a building colliding with the surface of the Earth at 200 mph. A great yawning abyss of existential anxiety; I need something to hold on to – but there isn’t anything that’ll prepare me for such a colossal event; the roller-coaster experience. Aircraft wheels take the weight, first one then the other and the deep lurch, sink-down/bounce-back – for a moment it feels like we’re going to go out of control and disaster… then it’s okay.

There’s something about it being in a public context, we’re all in this together, and the sense of a letting-go of something tightly held: woooooo! The small ‘self’ is seen and relinquished; there’s nobody there… just this unattached feeling that couldn’t happen in any other circumstance. The Buddhist cessation – no words for it, consciousness doesn’t normally reach that far. No person, no identity. Before the Greeks created the Buddha image we know and accept today, there were only symbols, a riderless horse, the empty seat… footprints left behind in the place where he was.

 ‘… that dimension where there is neither earth nor water, nor fire nor wind, nor dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception, nor this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis, nor passing away, nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support [mental object]. This, just this, is the end of stress.’ [Ud 8.1]

————————-

spaciousness of being

Posted on by

2

IMG_0085POSTCARD #17: Nontaburi, Thailand: Here in this large house, surrounded by a garden of tall trees. Monsoon season, heavy rain all day, all night – oceans of frogs all around, hundreds of them, l’amour, croaking throughout the night in rising and falling waves as I sail off into sleep. Still raining next morning, then it stops about 10 o’clock, and the frogs are quiet now – I don’t know where they can be… submerged in mud with a bubble of air to breathe in? Frog heaven. A time for quiet reflection, the actuality of just being here; conscious experience. I’m alone in an empty house, walking around the hallway, bare feet on cool marble tiles; pita, pata, pit, pat, pata, pit, pit… stop and look out the window; everything is totally wet out there.

IMG_0170Conscious of cold feet – an unusual feeling in Thailand, it’s usually hot all the time. The skin sense (touch), contact with the world, consciousness of a physical object. Standing on the cool floor – the sensation. And the mind sense (cognition), ‘I like this coolness’, consciousness of a mind object. A pleasant wanting… hovering in a created sense of ‘self’. A whole lifetime taken up with the body/mind’s responses, reactions to the ‘outside’ world. Preoccupied with the doing of it, actively engaged with it; this is happening to ‘me’. Everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think, received through sense organs mostly situated around the face, means the head is thus spinning around constantly to engage with whatever it is; the object of consciousness.

‘A life guided by desire, a life contracted to the mind’s thirst, seldom has the spaciousness of being. That pure awareness which wants nothing, which yearns for nothing, which simply takes on the shape of whatever form comes within its natural spaciousness.’ [Stephen Levine]

There’s consciousness of thought and consciousness of no-thought; consciousness of the cognitive function triggered by a simple curiosity: what is going on here? Unattached consciousness, released from sensory experience – awareness of the awareness, seeing the seeing, knowing the knowing. One way or another, conscious experience is what I’m writing about; an all-inclusive thing. I try to be minimalist, writing as if it were text messaging. No real ‘story’, no sequence of events; it lacks content, barely enough to hold the reader’s attention. It just evolves, becomes something, gets broken down again and rebuilt. Often it feels like once it’s been taken apart, it’s not worthwhile putting it back together; everything in a state of disarray, prepositions and verbs scattered around, ‘a small tribe of semi-colons nibbling at my ankles’, no subject, no object; no actual finished state.

After another couple of days of just ‘me’ and the frogs in the rain, and I realize it must be Sunday because Naa J and Naa M arrive that evening with a take-out dinner. We talk for a while and they spend the night. Early next morning I hear the monks outside. Go to take a look, rain has stopped and it’s dry again, takbat, offering food. Generosity, J and M have this kindness. An hour later I come downstairs, and they’re gone…

‘Awareness could be said to be like water. It takes on the shape of any vessel that contains it. If one mistakes this awareness for its various temporary forms, life becomes a ponderous plodding from one moment of desire, from one object of the mind, to the next. Life becomes filled with urgency and the strategies of fear, instead of lightly experiencing all these forms, recognizing that water is water no matter what its form.’ [Stephen Levine , Ondrea Levine: Who Dies]

IMG_0179————————-

Note: ‘a small tribe of semi-colons nibbling at my ankles’, quote from Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo/ Sharpening The Quill. Thank you! (link in text)
Related post

intuitive design

Posted on by

2

110920131975POSTCARD♯10: Delhi: Going to visit my neighbour who says she can help me with a new sim card for the iPhone5. I got the phone in the UK, and need a Nano SIM for India, the tiny one, rather than the standard size for the Nokia I had before. When I was in London, I had to wait 24 hours for this new NanoSIM(4FF) to be activated – why? I don’t know. Difficult to be without your contacts for that long. But that’s how it is there, no flexibility – in other countries there’s less control. In Bangkok, for example, I needed a Thai NanoSIM for the local network and was thinking it would be the 24 hour waiting thing again but they looked at the screen, clicked a couple of times, went in the back of the shop and came out with the new NanoSIM(4FF). Removed it from the backing card and put it in… working!

Now in Delhi, I need a local SIM and I heard that if you take it to the phone shop and pay Rs.100/- (US$ 1.55) they have a special cutter and it’s done immediately, snip… you’re connected. My neighbour says you can just cut the old SIM with a knife, save the Rs.100/- and it’s better than going downtown in the heat and traffic. I’m hesitating, decide to Google it first. You’re supposed to do a bit of measuring and create a paper template to cut around carefully and then finish off with a piece of sandpaper. Well, my neighbour has a blade, saying, it’s not very sharp but let’s see; I think it’ll do.

I watch as she starts to cut the sim; doing it by eye, no measuring, she has to hack at it a bit with the blunt cutter and finishes off with the kitchen scissors – cut off the little corner bit. Yes! Looks like the real thing. So try that… but it doesn’t fit into the slot in the phone! Why? Because she was thinking it was the MicroSIM(3FF) for the iPhone4 – that’s what she has and thought it’s what I had. But the NanoSIM(4FF) for the iPhone5 is smaller than that… oh-no, what to do now? Worry-worry. But no problem just cut off a bit more to get it to fit. It’s like you offer someone a piece of cake and they say, oh that’s a bit too much for me, can you make it a bit smaller please? No science required. I’m amazed that it’s possible to do this. How come I didn’t know about it? There’s a feeling that I’ve been making life unnecessarily difficult when, in fact, things are quite simple.

Walking back to my place, and nobody pays any attention to me, except the gardeners and ordinary folk who stop and look at me as I pass; an anomaly in their world. It’s a direct gaze, gentle, curious: there goes one of these foreigners, look!… children laugh and run away. White adult male, a colourless being, transparent eyes – comes from a different planet. So far away from the actuality of the human experience, dependent on the employment contract that enables all the support mechanisms. Not much of an idea how to do anything except the job and outside of that, wash the car on Sunday, cut the grass, watch TV. I’m dependent on others who have the basic skills I don’t seem to have. Meanwhile, somewhere inside, there’s this feeling that all it needs is the intuitive leap… and I don’t know how it happens or why it’s like that, the solution just comes to me – like seeing the whole picture all of a sudden, and knowing what it is.

‘Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.’ [Robert Graves]

————————-

Photo: the finished home-made NanoSim(4FF)

a kind of analogy

Posted on by

7

IMG_0114POSTCARD♯09: Delhi: The flight from Bangkok arrives at Delhi mid-morning. I’m identified, processed and out in the crowd. Shym is waiting with the car, bags inside and we’re in the huddle of traffic. Not so much give-and-take, more like push-and-shove. They’re opportunists; mindfulness is a necessity. Same old thing. Looking around, what’s different? An unusual brightness, it’s the lens implant, the operation on the left eye in Bangkok. I have to put up with this one-eyed vision only for a little longer. Next week I go back for the second op. All these flights are possible, fortunately, due to some free airmiles we have to use before the end of the year. And coming back to Delhi means I’m noticing the difference in vision here. So nice, much clearer now through the left eye, it looks… clean? What I thought was urban pollution, may have been obscured vision – or what I’m seeing now is an enhancement, a brightened-up version of everything. Close the left eye and look through the right; that’s how Delhi used to be, a dull, indistinct, old, yellowed photograph. Close the right eye and look through the left again and it’s like the Nat Geo channel, as clear as the iPhone5 retina display, 326 pixels per inch; using the techno-device metaphor to describe reality.

The world is a kind of analogy, a figure of speech, the conceptual metaphor. In my case the lens in one eye is plastic, not God-given – the same as having an artifical leg or a dental crown. Nothing special about it except that you walk around with an artificial leg, you chew with a dental crown but I’m seeing the world through this artificial lens. There’s a difference. The world is coming in, ‘seen’ through the plastic. The lens is a functioning part of the cognitive process.

Light passes through the lens, images appear, mind figures it out based on received experience of similar images, and says, there you go, what you see is like this. It resembles something I know, so I accept it, and that’s what it becomes. The metaphor pushes the whole thing over the edge; one thing becomes another. There’s that thing out there and ‘me’ in here, looking at it; so ‘I’ must be on the receiving end, somehow…. the link creates the metaphorical self; conscious experience ‘is’ individual identity: ‘I think, therefore I am.’

The assumption is that everything coming through the senses is real; sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, cognition – and it’s all coming to (((me))). That’s reality, that’s the point of the exercise. I like it, I want it, I want more of it, and so closing the door on other ways of seeing things. Saying this is how it is, means I get all the joy and pain, the good with the bad, love and hate, heaven and hell – thus I have to spend a major part of my life (maybe many lifetimes) trying to control this craving and desire [tanha] that I accidentally created, thinking I was doing the right thing.

“… craving the ensnarer that has flowed along, spread out, and caught hold, with which this world is smothered & enveloped like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond transmigration, beyond the planes of deprivation, woe, & bad destinations.” [Tanha Sutta]

What to do? How to not be a slave to it? Just the intention to be mindful is enough, the tipping point, sufficient to disengage from the automatic reaction. Not caught up in the experience of it, far enough back, one step removed, just knowing it’s there; that’s all. Knowing it takes the place of not knowing it. Step by step, learning how to do it….

————————–

‘… look upon the events occurring in your mind-and-body with the very same impartiality that you would look upon clouds floating through the sky, water rushing in a stream, rain cascading on a roof, or any other objects in your field of awareness.’ [Ken Wilbur, No Boundaries’]

Gratitude to Roger at One Garden for The Ken Wilbur quote above

lonesome highway

Posted on by

4

IMG_0063POSTCARD♯07: Bangkok: Travelling along the highway to the airport in a taxi that has past its best – seen better days. It’s veering off to the left, trembles for a moment then corrects itself. There’s another problem, the driver has it revved-up because the engine stalls when we slow down, so the sound is a bit alarming. We stop at the tollway to pay the fee, engine stalls, driver gets out to push. Fortunately there’s a little slope at the tollbooth and the car moves forward easily. Driver jumps in, ignition on, and the engine comes to life. Big sigh of relief, driver apologizes to me: koh tod khrap, polite. A nice guy, just trying to earn a living with a rented vehicle that’s barely roadworthy. The Thai compassion for this kind of predicament means it’s tolerated more than it would be in other Asian countries.

In a moment we’re accelerating down the road again with this huge noise and there’s still about 20 km to go. I’m thinking that if the engine fails, we’ll have to stop at the edge of this long and lonesome elevated highway with nothing around except sky up above… this really is the middle of nowhere. I drop into a state of alertness; being mindful is exhilarating, the inclination to be awake, watchful. All senses switched on, an awareness that sees also, at the edge of this, some anxiety – the Buddhist term: samvega/pasada describes it – a sense of urgency. There’s clarity too, even though things are not looking good at all.

It’s like a death, just stopping at some place on the road, anywhere’ll do and that’s it, engine conks out. Nothing extraordinary about death; we die and come to life again from one moment to the next. Physical death comes along and instead of coming to life in another moment, we find ourselves in another lifetime. This is how it is, according to what I’ve read, and it could be time’s up for our taxi, it’ll die anytime now. Worst case scenario is waiting in the heat of the tarmac with no air-con running because there’s no engine and hoping another taxi will come along – unlikely… empty taxis don’t normally go out to the airport. What to do? Ah well, miss the flight, I suppose, go tomorrow – yes, but I’m getting ahead of myself here, it hasn’t happened yet.

In the end, the taxi holds on to life and we arrive at the airport okay. Get the bags out of the car with engine still racing and the last I see is the driver heading off in the direction of Arrivals; hoping he’ll pick up another passenger and make it back to the city again. I wheel my luggage into the cool airport and go look for the check-in row. Doorstep to the world. Goodbye Thailand, next stop Delhi…

BKKairport‘The universe I’s (using the word ‘I’ as a verb) in the same way that a tree ‘apples’ or a star shines, and the center of the ‘appling’ is the tree and the center of the shining is the star, and so the basic center of self of the I’ing is the eternal universe or eternal thing that has existed for ten thousand million years and will probably go on for at least that much more.’ [The Essence of Alan Watts, Vol. 4: “Death”]

————————-

Upper photo: approaching BKK tollway. Lower photo: BKK airport departure gate area

context & content

Posted on by

3

AsokBTSBangkok: Near Asoke, downtown, on my way to the eye hospital for an appointment at 3.20pm. I have a lens implant in the left eye and the surgeon is going to take out the stitch that’s been in the eye for 2 weeks. Today’s the day… dum-dee-dum, sing a song and forget about that (resistance to the thought of needles and eyes). A space in the mind opens up for a moment, and I take refuge in there, calm abiding; if a feeling is not present, I am not aware of it. Thoughts return, the fragility of things; eyeballs and eardrums, taste buds and nerve endings, vulnerability, perishability, finely tuned, limited lifespan. Get involved with my surroundings; crowds of browsers in the Asoke shopping area, a wealth of attractive objects. There was something I was supposed to get but I’ve forgotten what it was; new input replaces existing memory. How much time before the eye appointment? The memory comes back again… somewhere else, the needle-and-eye situation is happening to some other person, not me. Abide in the space of no-thought, remembering about the thing I’m looking for that I’d forgotten (I’ll remember what it was later), and just contemplating the empty space where it used to be.

It’s not just forgotten, it’s not there at all; replaced with a kind of consciousness I can’t identify, an awareness of the seeking? Seeking leads to the sense that something is missing, the suffering caused by wandering in a created world of being lost. The mind that seeks is restless, searching for things endlessly but never finds what it’s looking for. Always, always reaching out for something beyond the here-and-now: the sense there’s got to be something that’s better than this. There’s a place somewhere else where I’ll find the thing I’m looking for… but how will I recognize it if I don’t know what it is… ho hum, depending on the belief there’ll just be some kind of extraordinary familiarity and recognition? Somebody wise said: ‘What we are looking for is that which is looking…’ The mind that sees this relentless searching sees that other mind that seeks this; two minds. What am I seeing? Mindfulness and the curious situation of just seeing the seeking – and there’s no object. Seeking non-objects means seeking the seeking itself; seeing ‘the seeing’, the situation before the question arose, the motionless space in which everything exists; context and content.

Walking through the doors of the eye hospital as if in a dream, wait in the waiting area for my number to be called, then into a cubicle. Lie down on the bed, stare at the ceiling and the nurse bathes the eye with antiseptic eye-drops every 5 mins for 30 mins, then into the surgeon’s room. Lean back and more eye drops, anesthetic this time. I sit facing the opthamologist, a lady, place your chin here, she says and there’s a kind of binocular device for seeing into my eyes in an adjustable stainless steel structure with chin-rest and my head is held in the steel frame. I tell her I’m nervous, Painless, she says, it’s painless… and smiles at me reassuringly. I hear a sound like plucking violin strings, pizzicato, in the upper registers, ‘ting, ting’. Am I really hearing this small musical sound? I catch a glimpse of the surgeon’s tiny cutting tool as it releases the cords of the held stitch. She says it’s over… can’t believe it.

Sometime later that day, I remember what it was I’d forgotten in the Asoke shopping area*. I’ll have to leave that until I come back for the next operation on September 20th.

‘… eternity is realized at the cessation of striving for any event, looking for nothing’ – not looking for anything? …. Not looking for anything reduces the constant searching for it, so you can discover it was there all the time…’ [David Loy]

————————-

*I wanted to buy a jar of Chyawanprash at the Indian market near Asoke
This post contains references to the Betty Edwards text: ‘The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain‘ and the text ‘The Path of No-path: Śaṅkara and Dogen on the Paradox of Practice’ by David Loy.

plasticity

Posted on by

4

190320131769Chiang Mai: Holding the inverted eye-dropper bottle close to the eye, head back and squeeze a drop… it goes in, blink, and overflows, trickles out of the corner of the eye down the cheek like a tear drop and falls into the ear. I wipe it away with a tissue – the action triggers a memory, something emotional. I have new vision now, eye surgery for cataracts. The left eye is done, the right eye will be operated on next month. I’m seeing everything with such clarity; hard to believe the natural process of seeing that I’ve taken for granted all these years now involves a plastic lens. I see the world refracted through a man-made device and it doesn’t make any difference – well it does make a difference, of course, it’s very much better. My glasses don’t do anything any more; in the good eye the lens distorts vision, in the bad eye it enhances some things but it’s dull, blurred and yellowish in colour. I’ve had an overhaul – like taking the car to the garage to have new parts fitted. Or it’s how the system gets updated, the latest version is now installed. I feel renewed.

There’s this plasticity about the human body (and mind) that allows all kinds of changes to take place. I’m a Buddhist and I’m inspired by the thought that things can adapt, evolve, move on. It feels like there’s no such thing as getting stuck with anything or any state of mind, because we can learn to ‘unstick’ from it. In the same way, we can study a new subject; we put our minds to it, get interested in it and learn how it works. If I’m stuck with something, I’m attached to that thing in a strange kind of way; a locked-in response to adversity – more of a driven, unaware action than something done knowingly, mindfully. It’s a deluded attachment to habituality and I’m inspired by the very real possibility of working towards being free of this; acting always in awareness, seeing clearly.

Metaphors like ‘clouded vision’ describe tanha, habitual craving for something thought to be deservedly earned because of the endured hardship seemingly required to get there, unaware that one gets lost in the getting-there and there’s no end to it. Because I don’t normally understand things as they truly are, usually it’s how they’re seen habitually, I choose to see everything according to what’s already known; apperception, understanding newly observed data in terms of past experience. Before I get stuck in the delusion that it’s unavoidably like this, an opportunity arises to escape the cycle at Step 7 vedana in the paticcasamuppada (Cycle of Dependent Origination). Interrupt the causality sequence, go to the door leading to the emergency exit, aware that in the Buddhist sense of ‘no-self’, the habituality of mind’s perception of itself as the central actor in its own world, personality-view (sakkaya-ditthi), is the root of the problem. Step out of the cycle and I’m free…

Then later that night, walking to 7-eleven to get a few grocery items and I leave my glasses at home because they don’t help – I’ve worn glasses for most of my adult life and this is the first time I’m going out without them and at night time too. It’s been raining, there’s the glare of car headlights, and street lights reflected in large puddles. Only a short walk and arriving there, I notice some of the tiles on the floor of the lobby forecourt at the supermarket are shiny, glossy, and these must be new ones, replacements for the ones that were damaged? Why am I seeing this? I cover the good eye and look at the tiles with the old eye, no it can’t be seen, but I can see them with the good eye. It’s a repair I’d not have noticed before. People must think I’m acting strangely, better move along. So many discoveries about the world, and I’m stumbling around like this, seeing everything for the first time…

800px-ChiangMaiNightMarket————————-

‘Instead of starting with a perception or a conception of anything, the Buddha established a way based on awareness, or awakened attention. This is an immanent act in the present. It is sati-sampajañña, an intuitive awareness that allows the consciousness to be with the present moment. With this attention, you begin to explore personality-view (sakkaya-ditthi) in terms of the perceptions you attach to as yourself.’ [Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem of Personality]

Upper photo: Interior of Chiang Mai songteaw (public transport vehicle). Lower photo: Night Market, Chiang Mai

 

layers

Posted on by

2

IMG_0041Bangkok: Falling out of the sky, jet-lagged and inert. A 12-hour flight from London; they gave me an upgrade to business class, nice. More space, better everything and a larger seat. Able to stretch out in the prone position, yes but also a huge selection of videos so I watched movies for 12 hours and no sleep. Now in a state of hypnosis here at the house, lying on the sofa in another time zone. Early morning in Bangkok and I’m watching the FOX channel. There’s only one English language channel on TV in this place so it simplifies things: NCIS, Bones, The Bridge and others. The stories merge into one all-inclusive narrative, a complex and improbable plot. Good-looking actors in expensive cosmetics play characters that migrate from other crime series into this one, the central story, all roads lead to one end, catching the bad guy, variations on a crime scene theme. The pace of it is intense, camera shots hold for about 3 seconds then change. Background audio has a percussive, mechanical sound then it’ll switch to something calm; a picture of domestic reality, beautiful interior, elegant lighting, lovely fabrics – I wish I had a room like that. Slow piano notes played meaningfully, like steps taken through the memory of something that happened once. I’m lulled into acceptance; the way it unfolds is the way it is. I become the story.

I could switch off the TV but there’s a reluctance; a pleasing attachment, something that appears more difficult to let go of than it is. Resisting the emptiness, the deep knowing there’s nothing there that triggers the reaction to fill the empty space with a self-construct, or an image, a movie celebrity, a child’s doll, the sphinx, the totem pole, dependency on a perceived creator. I mute the sound, allow the engagement with it, following the story as it transforms, watching the present moment until it changes – how did that happen? I didn’t notice it take place, only after it occurred. There’s the sense of something applied. Consciousness seems like an unconnected series of screenshots, a random sequence of events; things without substance appear and fade away. Rest in this fictional state… it’s just the way things are. Mindfulness is at the base of it all, in every way. Sleep shuts off the system; down through the layers, comfort, familiar surroundings. Crash out on the sofa in flickering TV light…

————————-

‘Like fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world.’ [David Loy, The World is Made of Stories]