Tag Archives: mindfulness

the thinking thing

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hNew Delhi: It’s the middle of the night, it’s cold, I’m in bed and covered with a mountain of bedcovers. Can’t sleep, just lying here thinking about things in the darkness. All the stories of my life come and go, click the channel-changer and there’s another one. I remember this, yes… so, he said that… and I said this… and then what happened? Click the channel-changer again and I’m somewhere else. It’s the thinking thing, continually pondering over this and that and when I ask myself how to stop thinking the mind starts to look for a solution, drawing conclusions from known facts ad infinitum and I’m thinking again. It’s my Western cultural inheritance – separate from God, we are created by Him –  studying the ‘object’ and logical, applied, deductive reasoning. Here in the Eastern context it’s more like a gradually accumulating lake of inductive reasoning; the ‘whole’ is a pre-existing pattern composed of its parts. I can ‘feel’ my way into it and see where that takes me.

So I stop thinking. There’s an awareness of the cold air on my face, sensory response vedanā; the mind engaged with the other senses tuned to reception from the outer world like satellite dishes search for a signal. When there’s no thinking, there’s an empty space where the thoughts used to be. I’m aware of the desire to be actively thinking, I see the invitation to be engaged with thinking – same as other forms of ‘wanting’ and mindfulness kicks in. But it occurs to me this is the Buddha’s teaching about the origination of the world: ‘Dependent on the eye & forms there arises eye-consciousness. The meeting of the three is contact….’ (phassa) and I’m back into thinking again.

There’s something obvious about this, the mind is one of the six senses and functions like a receptor in the same way as the others do, except that it also has the purpose of ‘guarding’ the entry point; sense object activates the chain of events and mind has an intuitive, cognitive function; it is capable of discerning the object, like a security system. The exact nature of the cognitive mind holds my attention. I experience the absolutely empty space of no-thinking and either there’s not any sensory input the mind needs to be engaged with, or the apparent emptiness is caused by the mind’s awareness of being aware. There’s more of this empty space. Thoughts come in and go out again and the mind is watching the whole process. Sometimes I’m here as an observer, watching from behind the curtain. Other times the observer disappears, and it seems like only the mind itself is left there. That disappears too and in its place, a sequence of momentary mental events, each one linking with the next as if it were electronic activity. It’s like a small fireworks display, arising and falling away. Some time later sleep comes and the world disappears.

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the end of the line

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IMG_4239 (1)Safdurjung station: Welcoming committee, red carpets and flower petals strewn around the platform, it’s the end of the line; the end of the trip. It’s where the train stops and we get off, but not really the end of the line. The line goes on from here and connects up with other lines in the network and links up with neighbouring countries then ultimately with the network that stretches out over the whole planet. It doesn’t start anywhere and it doesn’t end. There’s an interesting reference to this in the Hermann Hesse novel, ‘Siddhartha’, saying that time doesn’t exist in a flowing river, it’s everywhere at the same time, only the present exists, no past, no future….

There’s something about being on a train that imposes a kind of inevitability of circumstances on everything. There’s no deviation from the direction the train is moving in. The thought sequence, following an ongoing linking, travels along of its own volition, and takes shape as it goes; episodes from an anthology of short stories. It stops sometimes but that’s not the end; the stopping/starting of it is a characteristic of the story’s unfolding.

A particular event occurs somewhere in the process that suggests how the beginning might have taken place. Later this goes into ‘refresh’ and there’s a new possible beginning. Then another one after that and again, then it’s not important anymore. Mind links it all up or associates random parts of it in some barely satisfactory way and this is how the whole thing seems to sustain itself from moment to moment. It’s samsara; driven by some kind of underlying seeking-for-something that can never be found; there’s only the ‘seeking’. A slightly suffocating, enclosed feeling about it all – it can’t be “held” beyond a certain limit, and eventually I wake up. Everything still quite clear in the memory for a while then completely forgotten.

With mindfulness of papañca (mental proliferation), the process of conceptualising is just a process – no person there doing it. The application of mindfulness, which puts an end to belief in the fictional ‘self’, is also just a process – no person there doing it. It sort of does it itself. As long as there is an intuitive notion of “wholesomeness”, the recognition that what I’m doing is ethically correct sila, then there’s an opportunity to sense if something is right, or it’s the right way to go about it and the process of mindfulness runs by itself. No self, anatta, nobody at home; just an operating system, Windows 8, MacOS Lion, and beyond. A determined and purposeful search to find out exactly where this ‘no self’ exists will yield nothing, of course, because ‘no self’ doesn’t exist. Follow this reasoning to its obvious conclusion and it’s a way of saying nothing exists. So, if there is no ‘self’, who or what ‘sees’ there is no ‘self’ and I asked Ajahn about it: ‘If everything without exception is “not self” including the “I” that’s investigating this – then where does it all lead?’ Without hesitation, Ajahn said “enlightenment” and looked at me with these grey eyes, waiting for the next question ….

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Many thanks to Khun Witit Rachatatanun for the photos in this series of posts

the journey to get there

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Nepal/India border: Trying to find a wet-wipe in my pocket to remove a food stain on my white T-shirt here in the hotel dining room (on the way to Lumbini). If you’re on the road, you have to carry all your possessions in your pockets and it ends up like you’re a walking bathroom cabinet, laden down with personal effects and bits and pieces from the journey. I start to unload things, a toothbrush, a shaver, a wrapper from a holy piece of gold leaf, a ticket stub that allows entry to Bodh Gaya shrine, a pack of tissues, a wad of 10 Rupee notes (US$0.18) for giving away to beggars and all kinds of coins in small denominations; heavy bulging pockets but no wet wipe, so I go to the bathroom to get some water to wash the stain out.

Step inside and the floor is covered in water of dubious origin, splish splash across to the sink. Wash stain off T-shirt and I just know that if I start thinking, I don’t want it to be like this, I’m going to make it worse than it is already: ‘Feelings of pleasure and pain, like and dislike, arise from sense-contact…’ [Ajahn Chah, Timeless Teachings] So I focus, mindfully, on the task right now and, splish, splash, splish out into the sunshine. I suppose it’s just a different way of looking at priorities. There’s a whole lot of things going on here I just don’t know anything about – some of it is difficult to accept, all of it is richly vibrant. Another instance of it was when we entered the hotel dining room, white linen table cloths and silverware, and there was this absolutely deathlike chemical smell. Somebody said afterwards it was the disinfectant that’s used here. It was like something volcanic. The sensory cognition mechanism gets hold of something it hasn’t experienced before and attempts to identify it by retrieving files from the data bank. What gets conjured up is a series of exotic possibilities. After a while, it became less noticeable, then it seemed like it was completely gone – maybe it was still there but we just didn’t notice anymore.

I’m inclined to think visiting the Buddhist historical sites is mostly about the journey to get there; if you’ve done it, you’ll know what I mean. There are extraordinary and wonderful stories about this journey, some can be found in Ajahn Sucitto’s two volumes: ‘Rude Awakenings’ and ‘Great Patient One’. And I’m wondering how things were during the Buddha’s time, less people and pre-industrial, but was this vibrant energy, that’s here now, present then? Could this have been, in some way, the context that played a part in and inspired the effort to find a way out of suffering?

All kinds of stuff going on. Some time later in the day, I passed a cow eating cardboard packaging from a wastepaper bin. It raised it’s head from the bin and there was a long strip of torn cardboard dangling from the mouth, chomp, chomp chomp. Then later I saw another cow tearing off a piece of paper poster stuck on a wall, using it’s long grey tongue with front teeth to trap the small paper scrap quite skillfully. It must be the paper saturated in paste made from some kind of ingredient like flour and the cellulose in cardboard is edible. Just snacking; they  looked like healthy animals. In the time of the Buddha they wouldn’t have been eating cardboard, they’d have been eating other things but allowed to roam around freely, same as they are now. And here I’m looking at things that are not much different. The centuries pass, industrialization arrives, and the cows wander into the 2nd Millenium AD in a rural environmnet that’s pretty much the same as it was in those ancient times.

Upper photo: view from the bus to Nepal, Lower photo: from the Witit Rachatatanun Collection

expecting the unexpected

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IMG_3972Gorakhpur station: 21.00 hours, just got off the bus and we’re waiting for everyone to assemble and walk together to the train. There are security guards here with short lathi sticks as if expecting a small riot. Darkness, shadowy figures flitting around and trying to see what’s going on, I’m confused by something that seems to be heaped on the road beside some parked cars. It’s a shapeless mass I cannot identify; looks like a pile of brownish-grey sacks filled with something – no, wait, it’s alive. I saw it move! What is it? And for a moment there’s uncertainty… something I cannot recognize, no matter how hard the brain fathoms it. Eventually I see it’s a cow sleeping on the road. I forgot, of course, that they have to lie down and sleep at night. I’ve seen plenty cows standing about, but somehow I assumed they’d be rounded up at night and put in cow sheds. Of course not; they just sleep on the streets; as if the whole environment were fields and meadows. Surprising really, a cow sleeping in a car park is the last thing I’d have expected, but you can expect events and occurrences to be unexpected here. It’s that thing again, difficult to understand, a consciousness of a sense object that’s unknown and the subsequent search for something that’s not in the data bank inevitably causes the mind to invent an explanation that will fill the empty space.

Tour guide blows his whistle, raises his little flag. We have to follow him. So we set off walking through the station in a long line, headed for the train. It attracts attention; we are the Buddhist pilgrims, dressed in white and black costumes and flanked by uniformed guards who raise their sticks and shout at the local people to get out of the way. Seems to me people here are used to the idea of privilege, hierarchy and the sons and daughters of the Buddhist feudal lords in some distant country are passing through, so get out of the way. It’s not a good feeling but that’s how it is here. On to the train and into our little carriage – just Jiab and me in this cosy place, quite nice. Preparing now for an overnight journey to Gonda then Sravasti.

IMG_3901After some time the train sets off, speed increases and the track is rough and bumpy, we have to get used to being thrown around. Along to the little bathroom to brush my teeth and holding on to every handhold available along the corridor; mindfulness of rock-and-roll. Inside, there’s a tiny sink in the corner with a shelf above it and I have to bend down, lower the head under the shelf and brush my teeth quite close to the sink. The movement of brushing teeth: updownup downupdown updownup is in sync with the rhythm of the train for a while then there’s a sudden lurch of the carriage, down and up. I hit my head upwards on the underside of the shelf and whack my elbow sideways on the wall, simultaneously.

Getting shoved around and bullied by the train causes irritation to flare up, it shouldn’t be like this, then it falls away – easier to see that letting-go thing when you’re in an unstable situation like this on a moving train and all the rough and tumble. There’s an underlying awareness that I’m rattling along at about 70 mph, everything is moving past me, sorry can’t stay, got to go, bye!… and I’m in a long tube, penetrating stable realty. Back along the corridor jiggidy-jig jiggidy-jig, nursing slightly painful elbow and into the carriage. Jiab is in the top bunk, and I’m down below. It’s all very different from normal environmental conditions, where there’s stability and a tendency to sink deeper and deeper in the slow mud of thinking-about-things.

I’m asleep straight away then four hours later something wakes me; back in the world of bump, rattle, bang – rattle, bang, bump. How to get back to sleep? I try watching the inbreath, the outbreath, lying flat on my back and the extremely bumpy track becomes the object of attention. It helps to see the bumps on the line not as bumps but as downward movements; small steps going steadily downwards, some steps are lower than others and it’s all going down bit by bit; sometimes there’s a little upwards return but mostly it’s small incremental steps getting lower and lower. Then it seems to land on a much lower step and down into a place where consciousness seems to remain steady, smooth and restful. It stays like that. A space stretches out from here that seems to encompass all the small steps that have occurred so far and all the steps yet to come. It’s in this space I’m able to settle. Sleep returns and the train goes on through the night in a straight line across the moonlit landscape, jiggidy-jig jiggidy-jig jiggidy-jig….

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Photos from the Witit Rachatatanun Collection

Buddhist tourists

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Angulimala stupa, Śrāvastī: The Buddha is gone from here, it’s like languages that become extinct; if the language is not used, refreshed and evolving continuously, it disappears in history. And there are no signs of Buddhism beyond the gates of these historical places, no characteristics of mindfulness, compassion, there’s not even an understanding of it. It can so easily fragment and we can’t hold on to these historical times, annica, impermanence; what’s left are the teachings and sati sampajañña (mindfulness and clear comprehension); a deep and thorough understanding of impermanence. This teaching helps me to understand impermanence in a way that suggests some other kind of temporality. It’s enough to know such a thing is possible and this helps me accept the fact that things are so completely changed now, in the places where the Buddha used to be.

Begging children gather outside the gates and as we are leaving, the tour guide gives us packets of sweets to give to them – intended as a gesture we can make, reflecting on the generosity of Anathapindika (“feeder of the orphans or helpless”), all those centuries ago. But when we start to distribute these small packets, there’s such a fierce clawing and snatching that most of us have to drop the gifts and make a dash for the bus, chased by beggars. Last thing I see is a scuffle amongst them fighting for the ’gifts’. It was a feeling so completely different from the generosity of the historical figure who covered Jeta’s grove with gold coins in order to buy it from Prince Jeta. The Prince was so impressed with the generosity of Anathapindika, he gave the rest of it to him for free and joined with Anathapindika in offering the whole grove as a gift to the Buddha.

Is it possible that the presence of Buddhist tourists has created a generation of beggars at the gates? Anyway, this kind of thing seems to be unavoidable in India; there are beggars in other tourist places also. But the giving of money and gifts is a bit of a shambles and it would be better for everybody if this could be properly organized. What I did see that seemed more positive was a couple of people giving money to the beggars with an honest generosity, joyfully sharing; they were very good at doing it. I learned from this, it seemed to me to have a quality of dignity and mindful generosity and I tried to do it that way afterwards.

So, I wasn’t expecting the presence of beggars to have such an impact during this visit to the Buddhist holy places. Maybe it seems so dominant because what else is there here to see? Only ancient mounds and reconstructed low walls that show the location. I doubt if the bricks are original. There are very old Bodhi trees decorated with prayer flags but not of an age that could be anywhere near to the Buddha’s time. Otherwise there’s the earth and the sky; the air, nothing more than that. What is present is a special kind of sensitivity; visitors are all Buddhists or persons that way inclined, respectful and sincere and what we’re all considering is something that is unseen. If you can focus on being in these places where the Buddha used to be, and allow space for mindful contemplation, just being here becomes part of conscious experience; there’s a reality of that ancient time that comes through, such a fragile thing, barely noticed. It triggers something about these events that happened here all these centuries ago – just knowing it’s possible is enough.

The light and warmth; coolness in shadows in the afternoon, sense impressions, the laughter of a child in the trees and I’m thinking, yes, there would have been this also. I can allow it to be present for a moment and I’m in the 5th Century BC. It’s a simple feeling of just being here. I know how it must be for all other beings to experience this feeling; just like this. Subjectivity; we’re linked like this. The feeling stays for as long as I’m aware of it then it falls away.

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Photos – Upper: Bodhi tree with prayer flags.  Middle: Beggars at the gate [Witit Rachatatanun Collection]

now as it was then

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Bodh Gaya: 04.00 hours, this is where the enlightenment took place. I’m in a hotel not far from where it happened, early morning and the window is open, sitting on a cushion with mindfulness, watching the breath. There’s a sense of, it’s just over there, out the window and over to the right a bit; yes, it was there that the event took place. I’m near to the epicenter, ground zero. From here, it spread outwards to the people close by and dispersed among everyone who had a mind to listen. Then, in the course of time, reaching out to all parts of the world, so that visitors from Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, South East Asia and other places eventually came here to see for themselves. Ordinary lay people came, conversions from Hindu castes, bearded sannyasis with matted hair and white marks smeared across the forehead, and monastics came from all over Asia, robes in shades of ochre, maroon and grey; chanting … namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa … various intonations and melodic rhythms altogether in a pleasant discord.

How much of this is the same now as it was then, 2,600 years ago? The sensation of the breath is the same. The air gently touching the inner surfaces of nasal passages and throat and the consciousness that arises with that feeling. Through my own humanness and in a subjective sense, I can recognize the humanness of the bodhisattva. As well as the same blue sky, brown earth; green foliage, and even though the outer objects I can see may not be the same, changed over the centuries, the process of seeing is the same. The consciousness that recognizes this is the same for me as it was/is for everyone, and the ‘me’ and ‘mine’ I experience is not in any way different from anyone else’s ‘me’ and ‘mine’ who lived at that time, or now, or will live any time in the future.

You could say it’s just a sense of history that’s present whenever you enter a historical site, or a building or museum. It’s possible to know how the people, who lived then, felt and understood the world; the things they looked at and what they heard, smelt, tasted, touched and their mind responses; all of that is the same for me now, here in this place where the bodhisattva walked 2,600 years ago. I’m connected with the outer world by consciousness, in the same way the people at that time were; the conscious experience of what is seen is the same for me as it was for the bodhisattva – simply that function. And the environment I’m in, the outer world, may be different from how it was at that time, but the body/mind organism that receives the experience is universal. All beings are caught in this conscious experience. There’s no need to add anything else. The sense of ‘now’ that’s the same today as it was then could be the sounds I hear, the feeling of sunlight and the gentle wind blowing in my face; an awareness of the ever-present sensory data telling me outer and inner are the same and I’m an inseparable part of it all.

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Where there is the mind, where there are mental phenomena, mind-consciousness, things to be cognized by mind-consciousness, there a being exists or the description of a being. Where there is no mind, no mental phenomena, no mind-consciousness, there a being does not exist nor any description of a being. [SN 1.65]

Photo: prayer flags, Sravasti

Buddhists and Christians

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Chiang Mai: A very nice short flight here from Bangkok yesterday, 1 hour 10 minutes. They serve a small meal; it was like going upstairs to have lunch in the clouds, then it’s time to come down again. During the flight I was able to have a discussion with somebody I met there about Christianity and Buddhism – is there ‘something’ there (God) or is there not anything? And ‘not anything’ implies something that cannot be verbalised.

It is a bit like tight-rope walking for me as a Western Buddhist and now 30 years in Asia but still subject to the conditioning of the Church and childhood memories of it in the West. With my Christian companion here, there is agreement on many things. The main thing we agree about is that human beings may experience a certain kind of realization that there is no ‘self’, no identity, nothing there; nothing in the mind/body organism, it’s a construct. There’s a feeling of ‘lack’, and the shock that comes with this discovery causes dismay, distress, etc. Christians say the realization of emptiness is the absence of God, and this knowledge facilitates the entry of God, the creator of everything. This is what fills the emptiness; a significant turning point for all Christians.

Buddhists encounter this feeling of ‘lack’ in the same way but will not ‘fill’ it with anything, rather, they contemplate the emptiness of it in depth; examine the associated emotional reactions with mindfulness and come to see that, this is how it is. Śūnyatā, the emptiness, the lack of ‘self’ is everywhere and in all things. The understanding that everything is without ‘self’ helps Buddhists to contemplate the constructed nature of the mind. It’s possible to see the whole picture; how everything works and where we go from here. It’s an open-ended, investigative approach that may lead to an understanding of the non-duality of the observed world and the observer of it, together as a oneness. What the Christians call God must be inside this, because it is all-inclusive. There cannot be anything outside of it.

Christians will depend on the attachment to a belief in God for guidance and that’s how they see the world; they might say that ‘emptiness’ for the Buddhist is the Buddhist sense of God? And Buddhists could consider it this way, but the Buddha didn’t see any point in going further with that because the important thing is to make sure you are seeing reality correctly; anything else is getting caught in wishful thinking. Necessary because working only with belief and faith and no pragmatic teachings means there are all kinds of things that can go wrong with it. Christians are focused on the experiential aspect; Buddhists say conceptualizing a God leads to attachment, tanha; the desire for, and attachment to, ideas and ideals, views, opinions, theories, conceptions and beliefs. [Dhamma-taṇhā, Walpole Rahula].

If I say the word ‘God’ to myself, something comes into my mind, the word ‘God’ has an immediate emotive effect. Certain assumptions arise and the mind is already closed around it; it’s a ‘special’ thing. When Christians talk about God, what they’re referring to (I think) is the God they are creating in their own minds – their loving devotion to a personal god: a deity who can be related to as a person, but God is beyond everything that is conceived or thought about. There is no adequate analogy, words cannot describe it. It cannot even be imagined because it is beyond space and time. Buddhists stay separate from the God concept because to become involved with it means making assumptions about a kind of consciousness that is totally different from ordinary mind states. This is not to say there is no God, for me, at this time, it is impossible to express in words what God could be.

Then there’s a stewardess announcement, the plane is starting its descent, please put your fold-away table up, arm rest down, and chair forward. I get lost in the directions for a moment; a small clutter of prepositions, then were on firm ground again.

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‘Both Jesus and the Buddha were pointing to something that could not be found in the context of ordinary ‘mind’, the Buddha’s goal was to strive to realise the unconditioned, the unoriginated, the deathless, that which is free from mortality. So did the Buddha find God? Was it this that he called Nibbana? God is not Nibanna, because when we speak about ‘God’ we start getting ideas in our head about what God is and that is very far from the unborn, the unconditioned, the uncreated, the unoriginated, the deathless. All these words tell you nothing. What comes into your mind? Nothing. Anything you might say or try to put into words to describe God is an image in the mind. There are no words for it.’ [Ajahn Jagaro]

‘God is God only in relation to man. God appears in the material world like the reflection of the moon in a pool of water, as part of the illusion that is the context of man searching for God with his mind. What man sees becomes “God” (gender neutral; “He” only for explanatory purposes). He is Omniscient, Omnipresent, Creator of the world. He is both immanent and transcedent, full of love and justice. He may be even regarded to have a personality. He is the subject of worship.’ [Wikipedia Brahman page]

Image: Peter Henderson

30 minutes

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Bangkok, Suvarnabhumi: Awake very early and in the car before daylight, through the empty streets and strange yellow sodium street lights on the elevated tollway over the rooftops of the town and out to the airport to meet the Air France flight, ETA: 06.15 hrs. As it turned out, the flight was delayed by one hour, so there was time to sit in the seats at the tour group end of Arrivals, near Gate 10 and open the laptop to write this.

Gate 10 is where the tour groups gather, bleary-eyed and sleepless, having just got off the plane from some distant part of the world. The people around me are speaking Russian and I see from the Arrivals board it must be the flight from Novobirisk (Wikipedia says it’s a large industrial city in Asian Russia). They assemble at Gate 10 and have their names ticked off a list by the Thai representatives of the tour. There’s 30 minutes allowed to have a cup of coffee; children run around, go to the toilets and everyone is ready to get on the coach. When they’re all accounted for, the tour leader gathers them together and they all leave. The mass exodus of the group is dynamic, all following the leader in front who’s holding a coloured flag high in the air so they can see it. Off they go, through the wide passageways and shuffling along with their luggage and running children and moving as one great lake of beings in the direction of the coaches somewhere in another part of the airport. In a short time all the seats at Gate 10 are suddenly empty. Bye-bye the group from Novobirisk.

But before that happens, the Russian tourists spend the time intensely absorbing everything around them; talking with the tour guides and taking pictures of everything; roof structure, walls, illuminated adverts, airport signage, and each other posing in front of vases of purple orchids, dressed up in their best summer frocks and smiling for the camera. It’s as if they’d stepped out of the 1950s, remote from anything I know of and yet there’s a familiarity; it’s possible they could be people I knew in my childhood in the North of Scotland. There are so many photos being taken, it’s like a small press event; digital camera lights flashing like strobe lights in a disco. I’m dazzled by it, blinded for a moment and have to look at the floor to allow normal vision to recover. Look up again and they’re leaving, the whole place captured in pixels and taken away back to Novobirsk, at the end of the holiday, where all the views of it are reassembled to form one composite image of the waiting area at Gate 10. ‘… and here is Aleksandra and Nikolai at Bangkok airport don’t zay looks zo bright and lively?’

The seating area is empty for a while, strangely quiet, light slowly coming up and then it’s completely daylight, people again start to assemble in the seating area. It’s another group from Beijing, same thing as last time but the conversations I hear this time are in Chinese.

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‘… it seemed to him that these people were his brothers. Their vanities, appetites and absurd traits had lost their absurdity for him. These traits had become comprehensible, lovable; he even experienced them as worthy of respect. The blind love of a mother for her child, the ignorant pride of a father over his son, the raw hunger of vain young women for jewellry and the admiring looks of men – all these impulses, all these childish qualities, all these simple and foolish but incredibly powerful, incredibly vivid, forcefully dominant impulses and cravings were no longer childishness for Siddhartha. He saw that people live for them, achieve an endless amount for them, travel, wage war, suffer and persevere unendingly for them. And he could love them for that. He saw life, that which is living, the indestructible essence, Brahman, in all of their passions in each of their deeds.’ [Herman Hesse, ‘Siddhartha’ p128]

Photo Image: Peter Henderson

the doorway

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London-Bangkok flight: What a strange way to spend the afternoon… brilliant clear light enters the window as if we were in a room high up in an apartment building. Purple carpet with yellow stars, walls are grey, the fittings are of brushed steel, but I’m somewhere in the air, and thousands of miles away from where I was 8 hours ago. The little old house in East Anglia is empty now, I packed up and left it behind.

Last thing was to bless the room; a blessing and a ‘thank you’ for providing shelter, and doing this also helps me to be alert, mindful and ready for the next thing. Hands held in anjali, and walking through all the rooms in that small dwelling saying in my mind: ‘May all beings live in safety, be happy, be healthy, live with ease. May all persons who come here after me find the same feeling of security and stability I found in this place.’ Then step outside, close the door, double lock it and into the taxi. It helps give a sense of closure, or something, at the end of an event. I recommend it. Recently I came across something very similar about blessings that I liked [Link]

After that, walking through the airport halls and passageways and all these people just moving along with their bags; as you pass them there’s a hint of something familiar – it’s that transitory ‘thing’. Airports and stations are an extraordinary example of it, in fact it’s always there – there at the corner of one’s vision. We’re all having the same kind of experience; we’re all going ‘away’; we’re all in transit; this is the time after we left and before we arrive. This is aniccan the ‘in-between’; the moment of transforming.

Change is there all the time – might seem like a contradiction. There’s a Nagarjuna quote: ‘All things are impermanent, which means there is neither permanence nor impermanence…’  could be a koan; the constant sweeping along of aniccan and waves of change. But immediately it says to me, first I need to lighten up and there’s always something new, gently nudging at the elbow and that’s what makes it possible to ease away from attachment.

If I’m free from ‘holding’, I can easily pass through the layers and corridors of the travel experience, part of the great river of human beings, all of us on the way to ‘somewhere’, surrounded by advertising images of well-off, good-looking people smiling all the time; Julia Roberts doing a Gucci advert? Celebrities I know but can’t remember their names, just posing as ‘themselves’ wearing a watch the cost of a small car. I look closely, trying to remember who it is, and fall into the dream.

They look secure, confident, happy and everything is going allright for them. They don’t seem to suffer from that great chasm of nothingness situated in the centre of everything; the ‘me’ I live with. What is it they have that I don’t? If I could have whatever it is they have, I could be happy, like them…? I’m drawn towards ‘the purchase’ by scenarios and strategies created by commercial psychologist witchdoctors who can manipulate my conscious experience.

Mindfulness means I stay free of the hunger and the urge. Here on this plane I can see  a small piece of  sky out there. It’s sufficient to remind me that if I get pulled into consumerist samsara too much, there’s a doorway in the mind which leads to freedom from suffering… the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving. Just knowing this is enough.

‘Within that cycle [the wheel of birth and death (samsara)], there is one doorway through which we can step out, namely, between feeling[Vedana] and craving[Upadana]. All the other steps of dependent arising are automatic causes and effects. Unless we learn to live with unpleasant and pleasant feelings without wanting to get rid of the one or keeping and renewing the other, we don’t have access to that doorway.’ [Aaya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies, Transcendental Dependent Arising p55]

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London: I’m in a narrow rush-hour train, standing in an integrated mass of human bodies all supporting each other. I’ve got something to hold on to above my head which is fortunate because the train is shaking about on uneven tracks, noisy and exhilarating. This really is the whole experience of train travel…. Then it settles down to a smoother pace and I’m focused on the closeness with other people; fragrance of wet raincoats and a forest of arms reaching up to hold on to roof bars, blocking the view. Somewhere nearby, a voice suddenly shouts out: ‘I’M ON THE TRAIN’ – a man speaking on his phone…

‘I think, therefore I am’ [cogito ergo sum] The Buddha noted the inherent problems in this kind of thinking: “I am the thinker’ lies at the root of all the categories and labels of conceptual proliferation, the type of thinking that can turn and attack the person employing it… “Do I exist?” – It depends on what you mean by “exist.” “Do I have a self?” – It depends on what you mean by “self.” Thinking driven by definitions like these often falls prey to the hidden motives or agendas behind the definitions, which means that it’s unreliable.’[Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

The man on the phone continues with his loud conversation, surrounded by people with grim faces who don’t speak. He disregards us completely, asserting himself in this space that everybody is squeezed together in, caught in the dis-ease of ‘deadly tedium’. We are struggling over this intrusion of the man and his phone but holding our composure with patient endurance. Folded newspaper in front of the face to avoid eye contact, we are managing to ignore each other completely. Turn the page of the newspaper, fold it back skillfully without untoward touching and have a casual glance all around, as I’m doing it, just in case there’s anything that needs to be noticed, looked at or ‘seen’. No, everything is as it should be; newspaper held like demure fan that masks the face, and doing the crossword: 7 across: Four letters, ‘It may follow something  _ _ S_. Meanwhile the man talking on his phone is saying the line is breaking up because we are going through a tunnel.

I am committed to a world of consumption of goods and services. I want to have more of what I like and less of what I don’t like. I’m not interested in things that are neutral, they are meaningless (it’s a pity really, because the neutrality of feeling is the Way To Go). I am therefore in a chronic state of dissatisfaction because I never get what I really want. Okay, but as long as we’re mindful, it can be manageable? Well, it’s allright for some, you might say, for those of us who have recently returned from somewhere colourful and bright, light and cheerful, sun shines all the time; smiling Thai faces and their polite behaviour. But isn’t it just that they have a more cheerful kind of dukkha over there?

There’s a passenger announcement: ‘…delays at Croydon and Blackfriars due to congestion’. Then entering Liverpool Street: ‘… this train will not stop at Liverpool Street because of “flooding” at the Eastbound station (flooding?) and will continue on to Aldgate where passengers can take the train back and enter from the Westbound station which is unaffected and we apologize for any inconvenience.’ I have to ask other passengers what the announcement was about and surprised to discover everyone is friendly; the shared burden of these times of hardship and emergency – something conditioned by World War II?

I get there finally, near the end of a long list of Anglo-Saxon place names, and walking along with the South coast tourists in the pleasant harbour area of a town near the sea at Eastbourne. I’m looking for the office of an agent I have to visit and the phone in my pocket is ringing, who can this be… Hello? Jiab, she’s in Peru; hard to believe. She wants to know, can I get some of these wipes that are good for doing polished wood, and get a few packs, please? I have to take them with me when I come to Thailand. I hold up the phone high in the air so she can hear the Eastbourne seagulls all the way over there in Peru; a great swirl and echo of Northern seabirds singing in the wind, like cats mewing in the air.

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 ‘It’s because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is 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, and bad destination.’ [DN 15 PTS: D ii 55 Maha-nidana Sutta: The Great Causes Discourse]