groundedness

Posted on August 7, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #218: New Delhi: Jiab sent me this pic of the cow in Gujarat. There’s always something that ‘clicks’ inside me when I see the cow in the city traffic in India. The aloof separateness of the Gods. Something about the bovine ‘mother’, sacred cow that all Hindus are conscious of.

There’s also a memory of something from my home on the farm in the North of Scotland when I was a kid. I remember long nights and short days, aunties and grannies wearing comfortable wooly cardigans, porridge in a cracked bowl, coal and wood fires, cows in the fields, a black-and-white collie dog – and it’s this that I notice about the rural/urban Indian cities, cows sitting on the pavement, goats nibbling and chickens pecking around, the sound of a cockerel in the distance. It’s the farmyard scene where I was brought up that followed me here!

There’s a familiarity about it, pictures in the gallery of the mind, and yes I’d like to have a home surrounded by arable lands and farmyard animals, but for a very long time now there’s been only a series of temporary homes – all good, I share my life with Jiab and we’ve gotten used to the way things are. Living like a pair of migratory birds. In each place I have my favourite chair, books, and all the things I need. It works okay except sometimes I might spend a long time searching the bookshelves for a book I’m sure is there then realise it’s not in these bookshelves, it’s the other bookshelves, about 2000 miles away. So I have to let that one go, although I can see it there in the mind’s eye.

These days, reading is done mostly on devices and when I get on the plane I have my laptop like other passengers and when I reach ‘home B’ or ‘home C’ I get online automatically with the wifi there and plug my speakers into the socket on the laptop in its position there. And I hardly ever feel dispersed, or stretched, an okay sort of expansive feeling. In this context, it suits me well to follow the Buddha’s Teachings on going-forth, homelessness, non-attachment, no-self.

Whether there is a ‘self’, yes/no, is best not thought about too much because saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it is, in so many words, identifying ‘self’’. Words identify things, language has a default mechanism that allows me to select what ‘I’ want it to be (also what I don’t want it to be) and the resulting attachment to all that I love and hate. I stay with it, see it happening, stay mindful about where the nearest emergency exit is located but very rarely needed – and just open the heart/mind citta to the world as wide as possible.

The presence of the cow wandering through industrialised Indian cities triggers something. The smell of cow dung brings me down to earth, generates a sense of groundedness for the time it’s needed for, then I’m up and away again. It’s also a pretty attractive life; the ability to just wander anywhere in benign foreign lands, live in the fortunate state of being without the tugs and pulls of desire and worldliness.

“Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.” [Swami Vivekananda]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: ‘Connectedness’

green-leaf shadows

Posted on July 30, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

remainderless fading

Posted on July 13, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #215: New Delhi: The mind forgets. All the months of headache gone overnight. These days I wake up in the morning feeling normal again and I have to consciously remember what it was like before this, the billiard ball crashing around inside the skull whenever I moved. I understand how it works of course; an injection of anesthetizing agent into the root of the nerve and there’s no pain. It’s almost like it was never there, but the reprieve is for a limited time only. Two or three months then it’ll not be effective anymore and I have to go for the next injection.

This is the interval, the interim, a breathing space, and a time to reflect on how, for the most part, the body/mind organism has the capacity to heal itself. That built-in elasticity comes as a surprise, a kind of awakening. The true meaning of recovery. The Buddha’s Third Noble Truth (nirodha); the realization we don’t have to remain stuck in this unsatisfactory state. Suffering (dukkha) can be overcome when we let go the craving (tanha) that feeds it.

It is an easing of the suffering of mind caused by holding on to things that seemingly reinforces the belief in a small self inside ‘here’ directed by how the ego interprets sensory data received from the world out ‘there’ through the eye, ear, nose, tastes, feelings: nice or not nice, and how I feel about all of the above. Thus ‘I’ am this, or ‘I’ am that, according to what I like and what I don’t like. Neutrality is an option but it usually swings one way or the other in this state of duality.

Wanting things to be different, other than what they are, is the cause of endless dissatisfaction and profiteers’ goods and services have created an opening; phones, tablets and adult toys that hold the mind in this unhappy state. After the newness wears off there’s the seeking for this or that, not included in the current model. Clever advertising creates the perception of ‘me’ in a world of other beings preoccupied with devices that can render the ‘self’ as an actor ‘I’ choose to project to others; mind reflects upon itself in its own sense of being, is aware of its perception of itself as subject in its own blissful states. Other times seeking an escape from that world when things that were blissful turn bad with the same intensity, and the truth arises that all this is not real. How to get out?

It’s here that people wake up to the recognition it’s a dependency, but there is a way out of the sickness, no matter how much the marketeers pull us towards it. There is the natural elasticity in the knowledge it doesn’t have to be like this, true happiness and contentment are possible. Let go of that craving for more, allow for the far reaching concept of renunciation, relinquishment and release, the remainderless fading & cessation of suffering. Let it go and it all comes to an end, the way out of suffering and the Noble Eightfold Path.

“The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.” [Thich Nhat Hanh]

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Header image: the library of Ajahn Vajiro
source of the quote above: Lou @ Zen Flash, “We don’t know how to suffer”
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

plane hides behind a building

Posted on July 3, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

as the crow flies

Posted on June 15, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

passing through 2

Posted on May 31, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #209: Delhi, North India: There are times when the whole thing just gets stuck in the traffic jam of Mind – objects in movement screech to a halt, metallic creaks stretch out the momentum, jerk back and come to a standstill. Eyes blink in the silence and falling specks of dust, the world is seen as if it were a screenshot of the present moment. I focus on the long deep in-breath, the forever long out-breath… it is as it is in this instant, a fusion of everything seen, heard, touched, the taste, the smell, and all this held in thought, in words unspoken.

I’m falling into this familiarity again, having been far away from here, the first time in four years. Returning now and I’ve forgotten how to write, how to shape it so it fits, how to allow it to take form of its own accord. Surprised to discover that when I engage with it, that action seems to trigger remembering, opening up a gallery of recollections unfolding and integrated pieces of imagery like massive Lego constructs of long-term memory files (patisandha, if we can call it rebirth), fit together as in a 3D jigsaw, and the whole thing gathers speed like a long straight highway cuts through the landscape, large chunks of it seen rising up and falling away on either side, then the engine noise, a rolling and a tumbling along.

Many thanks for the Voice from blogging friends that reminds me of the connection that’s out there. I’ve got more of an understanding of Indie Publishing now than I had a few months ago, the first section of the book is completed as preliminary draft and the wind in its hair. I know at some point it’ll shout out that it’s complete. Nothing else to say at this time, everything that relates to this swept away in the doppler effect, sounds flatten off and it’s gone….

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Photo: autorickshaws in Mumbai

ever-present

Posted on May 3, 2016 by tiramit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: excerpts from an earlier post titled: ‘constructed reality’. Upper image: scene from the taxi window. Lower image: Chinese car number plate in Chiang mai

knowing knows knowing

Posted on April 25, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #204: DELHI: … like suddenly waking from a dream, an unfinished story and something just happened – so fast that everything is out of sync, skips a beat. It’s because I’ve been unknowingly holding this pain in my head that’s now breaking through and the holding is not as important as the getting away from it… this is not happening to me! With that recognition, suddenly there’s no ‘me’ to whom this pain is happening just the velocity of it, like a wind storm and I’m lying flat in the grass as it passes over.

Some time after that, having taken my meds and the pain is now walled off in a corner of the head, I’m sitting in a straight-backed chair, just to see how that feels. Breath enters the body like a wind gusting in, withdraws, comes back, blows through everything then it’s not there again. Focus shifts to a great emptiness opening up – opening and opening… I might easily believe this will never end, but moving along with it to see what the next thing is. The purpose of my life is the on-going experiential response to the impact of sensory contact – what else could it be about? Skin, muscle, flesh, and these mysterious organs held by ligaments bonded into a skeletal structure. It’s as if there’s an electrical charge in there, sparks flying out. I am the context for the outer content. The whole investigation is one that is open to following where the knowing of it leads, see where it’s going, how it reacts. Conscious awareness of how the mind is able to concentrate and to what extent – passageways of insight open in an instant and a great flood of things to think about pours in.

Thought sequences and memories become apparent when they reach the point of “being”… before that they’re in the uncreated state – arbitrary, disassociated. Things don’t exist at all, until I observe them. There’s the Observer Effect in quantum physics, the experiment showing that when one is observing the movement of electrons it changes their behavior. In Buddhist thought, the ‘observer’ is not the ‘self’ but the self-construct arising from responses to sensory input via the Five Khandas. Received data is formed according to the mechanisms of the human sensory process – including cognition, which is a sense like all the others, and the great dome of sky above. Mindfulness is a returning to that place where I see how things change through my engagement with them…

‘All we know of a thought is the experience of thinking, all we know of a sensation is the experience of sensing, all we know of a sight is the experiencing of seeing, all we know of a sound is the experience of hearing…. And all that is known of thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling is the knowing of them. And what is it that knows this knowing? Only something that itself has the capacity to know could know anything. So it is knowing that knows knowing.’ [Rupert Spira]

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Note: excerpts from an earlier post titled: ‘it’. Photo: Buddha rupa on the my working desk and the view of the garden

darkness and light

Posted on April 22, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #203: DELHI: I’m sitting on the meditation cushion in the darkness of a very long power cut. What else is there to do? The back-up system keeps one fan working at slow speed creaking around, then it goes out too and we fall into a quietness of no fans at all, no air con. Look out the window and no street lights either. It’s fortunate there’s still some cool air here, upstairs in the bedroom as I get settled down on top of a short pillar of cushions that sink into the soft bed and the top is just the right position for me and my folded legs. So, here we are, just the two of us, corpus et mente. The agility of Mind senses body mass, tubed liquid of intestinal gurgling, body heat and wind of breath gusting around. Mind sweeps around the limbs up to the head in a high acrobatic somersault then down to the lowest point as if called to do so, and loosens leg muscles consciously. Ease and empty space creep in; the facility of it pervades everything, enters, becomes, or seems to be already here… it was always here.

It’s as if I’m part the way through something not experienced yet. Access at some middle point with nothing to indicate what has gone before, nor what it is now, only the empty space of what it could be… but not going there; held somehow in the neutrality of the pause before anything or everything arrives. There is only this surging through, it seems, an on-going movement, then a flicker of physical sensation somewhere sends Mind off to that location to be there with that small consciousness. Then another sensation and Mind seems to be able to travel around and through the cavern of body, front to back, no barriers, rushing through the invisibility of body structure, into the elbows, up to the base of the skull, everywhere.

Attention is drawn to a zizzle-zizzle sound and I’m fully aware of what it is; the ever-present, insistent mosquito, whizzing past my ear, then back again: zizzle-zizzle. I can picture it in its slight weight, tiny wings-blur of movement hovering for one brief second near to the ear… in proportion, a canyon swirl leading deep inside the brain with hot cloud of air all around that mossies like; that inner ear smell, blood capillaries and aspects of the vast organism it feeds on, the great mountain that is the human head. I twitch in response and it changes course: zeeet. It returns again and I do the head twitch, then it stops zzt… we know it has chosen an unseen piece of skin to land upon, unfelt, and getting the needle-sharp proboscis ready, positions it at the chosen point of entry: Em… now you may feel a very small prick here… please don’t move, it won’t hurt at all…. Mosquito arches her small abdomen (yes only females do this); the treasured insertion tool pierces the skin and plunges down deeper and deeper searching for a blood vessel further into the redness…

I try generosity; okay, go ahead! Giving it away free like this, letting go of the intensity, but it’s not working. Fall sideways off the cushion, defeated by a mosquito. All the other cushions that were underneath me spring up immediately and I’m flat on the bed surrounded by cushions; vigorous face and body slapping, fingers ruffle through hair on head for a moment then it seems it’s gone away.

Eyes closed and there’s that wonderful light coming in at the edge of vision that I haven’t seen for a long time – a kind of unreal ‘heavenly’ warm creamy white moonlight light. Open my eyes again… where’s it coming from… any light on in here? Nope total black out conditions. Close my eyes again and lying flat, waiting… in a moment it returns. Not seen, indirect, it illuminates the space as if it were just about to appear. So it’s okay to be here lying on the bed, coping better in this position with the mossies circulating around breath exhale, and the mystery of the light that has returned, light in the darkness – darkness and light.

‘What’s happening now is the position that I’ve always wanted to be in, I was just trying to get here.’ [Prince, 2014]

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photo above: wave on the beach at Hua Hin collecting shells with M

the two-hundredth

Posted on April 3, 2016 by tiramit

POSTCARD #199: CHIANG MAI, THAILAND: the two hundredth postcard leaves this keyboard with a question I’m hoping will find an answer. There’s more of a familiarity with the characteristics of my perpetual headache, but the months slip by and I’m postponing the plan I had to come to terms with the dependency on the medicine I need to numb the pain. Future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, and everything I was doing a moment ago has disappeared into the past again – the enhancement created by the meds masks many things. No sooner has it been seen than it’s gone. On the rebound, senses are alert, listening, feeling, searching… how can this be? But I’m caught in the conundrum of not being able to see it’s the searching for the way out that maintains the state of being lost.

After the illness came to stay (September 2015), it took a while to focus on the functioning of Mind as I’d previously known it; as the cognitive sense, the sixth sense that knows the other five senses and knows itself as the ‘self’ until attachment to that self aspect is seen through. Everything from there onwards is understood in a different way. There’s the seeing of events without the story and it all can be deconstructed carefully – indeed nowadays, there’s a fascination with this investigation, somehow believing that by taking things to pieces I’ll be able to see where the problem of dependency lies. But the investigation goes deeper and deeper, Mind changes its focus, and I discover I’m not able to find what it was I was looking for because I’ve simply forgotten the train of thought that brought me here. An uncomfortable place of attachment to something but no idea what it is. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to try to return to how things were before I started this, even if I could remember how it all fits together, which I can’t. Besides, things being as they are, putting it back together is impossible because everything has changed.

The confusion of mind like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing that can only be put together in chunks and not ever completed, means there’s always this dissatisfaction and returning to it again and again; this coming-back to look for the beginning of it… then, as if to remind me, and before I am properly aware of it, the parts come together as a felt pain. A thought now appears in a small window and the recognition of it as pain unfolds with ‘me’ suddenly playing the role of the person to whom this is happening – this is a story about ‘me’ and I’ve learned to take the dosage as soon as possible, and I leave the story and the window closes.

In the vast ease that follows I recognize an important piece of the puzzle; selected attention affects perception. What I think is the solution has been displaced by my attachment to searching for it. So, it just looks like it’s complete because time has moved on in the duration of thought arising, and everything now has the quality of being seen in hindsight.

In the peace and quiet ease of those moments when there is no driving urge to take the meds to correct this perceived pain, it’s possible to see that my attention to it is both the problem and the solution; trying to get what I want or to get rid of what I don’t want, but unknowingly caught in attachment to it. The desired state I’m seeking already belongs to ‘me’. Everything I have, everything I want, all of this is ‘mine.’ Even the pain, that which I consider to be the thing I hate the most, is also ‘mine’. What to do? How to learn the skill of detachment in these circumstances?

How wide are the horizons of the spinning earth! The moonlight leads the tides and the sun’s light will not be confined within the net of heaven. But in the end all things return to the One. The deaf and the dumb, the crippled and deformed are all restored to One’s perfection. [Hsu Yun]