sunlight on a rooftop

Posted on December 9, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #176: Delhi: Senses interact with the world outside and brain functions create a range of colors inside, as well as sounds, smells, tastes and feelings to fill the dreamscape of the mind – watching a movie in my head about sunlight on a rooftop in an urban area in North India, and this pale tangerine bougainvillea plant so clear and so much in focus it almost hurts. I have to take a photo of it.

The pain in my head that’s part of me now is somehow more at ease in these reflected surroundings, completely warm and comfortable, temperature today max: 26°C and min: 12°C. The rooftop is a place of ordinary things, unexceptional, like the one in the other house, but it’s got a smooth concrete floor, I place my palm on it… warm in the sunshine.

Through sensory awareness it’s possible to know something about how sensations are experienced by everyone, everywhere, how they understand their surroundings. Their responses to the objects of the senses, how they feel about what they look at, what they hear, or smell, taste, touch and mind (emotional) responses.

All of that is the same for me here and now, in the sunlight on a rooftop in India, as it is for everyone else. It’ll be the same for people in the near future, as far as we know, and those who lived in the past. I’m connected with the outer world in consciousness, in the same way all other beings are. As I look at this bougainvillea plant, the conscious experience of what is seen is the same for me as it is for everyone.

Consciousness that’s beyond words, so neutral and at peace that we aren’t aware it’s there. The attention given to any part of it is the karma of that event in time; the observer becomes actively engaged and it becomes a ‘thing’, part of the whole flow of everything passing through that includes the karma of how it came to be there, along with everything else.

All life is a single event: one moment flowing into the next, naturally. Nothing causing everything. Everything causing everything. [Wu Hsin]

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somewhere in a former life

Posted on November 30, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #174: Geneva, Switzerland: People, hovering around the exit door on the 18 tram to Carouge, faces look at me incidentally, I sometimes see one I think I know from times gone by in the metallic click over smooth rail joints, and the gentle jigging motion of the tram as it is now, and so it was then, travelling under an assumed identity, peripatetic teacher of English, here and there on trams every day, passing through security, a practiced conversationalist, and into rooms in banks behind closed and thickly felted huge metal soundproofed doors, gold taps in old bathrooms. Are these the same francophone faces now? Not those emerging from soundproofed rooms and stepping into their black tinted screen limos with drivers holding the door, no, just the ordinary folk you see every day now and then but never talk to, maybe a passing gesture, a nod of recognition?

Now I’m back here nearly two decades later. Do I see those same individuals looking at me with a nod of recognition held in a moment paused, seeing me looking at them in the same kind of way… a hesitation almost: hmm, est-ce que je vous connais monsieur ? (do I know you sir?) Look into these eyes for a penetrating instant with the flickering expectation of acquaintanceship… and in the midst of finding maybe I can’t quite recall what it is exactly, realise with some shock that it’s the awareness of – what is it? The nearness of death? Is this what I see looking back at me? Death, the answer to that question about what didn’t happen here? The past tense disappeared; everything I did in the 8 years I lived here was/is unfinished, and cannot and will not ever continue. It died?

I was in a life here. Now I come back from the dead, the Ghost of Christmas Present, not to ungracefully haunt all these innocent bystanders with more foreign talk and raconteur. Not to upset these slightly-known people with faces turned toward me, stepping onto or getting down from the 18 tram to Carouge two decades ago, and even now turned to glance at me a second time with their elegance of wispy threads of golden hair combed carefully over a bronzed skull with large dark brown skin spots, vapourised and paperised faces, traces of soft skin held nicely like curtain folds at the corners, beneath which these old eyes look out like an unfinished sentence… Je m’excuse mesdames et messieurs, I’m not here to disturb you with things that never took place, but to close those thick soundproofed doors that seem to swing open by themselves somewhere in a former life.

Thus there’s always something about the question that’s gently pondered, not posed, but poised, considered…it has to be the right question, forever not quite decided upon; what might it be? The moment spent in contemplation of what form this sort of thing could possibly take is enough to begin to know it… or it begins to be known. A kind of indirect position so carefully arranged; or maybe it was like that as it fell into place, who can tell? Induced then deduced. Words don’t hold meaning for very long, the question gets forgotten about in the end (they usually do), or possibly it’s still there in the detached state, just not functioning as a specific inquiry now, more like a wide-openness that’s waiting for an answer in the same way as there are answers, lying in their own wide-openness waiting to be discovered. A kind of non-verbal alertness, a strange familiarity, a passing recognition that seems to go on opening and opening, and opening; déjà vu revisited. It was always here….

But if, transcending petty ego, all the world is known as life – as only living energy – then how can death arise at all? For one who knows the world like this, as only life, there is no death. In truth, there’s only deathlessness. [Upanishads]

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Photo: Watching the sun setting from the room on the 8th floor of the building at Pont-d’Arve, near Carouge

sailing away

Posted on November 19, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #170: Delhi/Zurich flight: Leaving it all behind, a far and distant shore slipping away… there’s a feeling I could be on an old sailing ship, clouds and air currents like the swell of the sea. Jolts of turbulence like the flip of waves at their peak and passengers have to fasten their seat belts and remain seated. These huge engines, velocity 600 mph, bolted onto a lightweight metal cylindrical structure with wings; sailing across the world in a gigantic wind. In my mind, it’s like this; massive areas of stretched canvas sail cloth filling out. The creak of long hemp ropes, old wood decking – a wide open sky….

Sitting here lost in my screen most of the time, I don’t usually consider passenger jets flying above the clouds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Active shipping itineraries reaching out around the globe, and down below, train tracks, highways and rivers of traffic. Arterial routes, ring roads, crossings, lights, junctions, and one particular lorry rumbling along a bumpy Indian road containing all our goods and chattels – rattle, bang, crash, in a cloud of dust; our temporary home. We’ve moved so many times it’s as if it were continuously on wheels.

The present moment is forever in transit, on-going, always underway. It goes by itself, I don’t need to do anything. I try not to dwell on the anticipation of things unforeseen, mind showing a disaster movie of it all crashing through the restraints of planning, and there it goes… it’s all coming to pieces in my head because I’m holding on to it too tightly. Let go, let it go, let it all go, and return to the stillness I feel contained here in the interior of this passenger jet, an enclosed bubble of air flashing through time and space… seeing the curvature of the planet sometimes, so wide and all-encompassing it includes absolutely everything – a breath-taking sense of ease, a very long drawn out out-breath, like the never-ending horizon seen from the aircraft window at dawn, cloud layers upon layers below.

‘Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.’ [John Milton]

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This post inspired, in part, by a dialogue with Michael Mark
~ G r a t i t u d e ~

worlds inside worlds

Posted on November 13, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #168: New Delhi: There’s a little Assamese girl who lives next door, looks Japanese but speaks an Indo-Tibetan language. I can’t communicate with her well so we sit on the floor and I give her a few small objects including a brightly coloured gift bag. She opens the bag and puts the objects in the bag then closes it. A moment later she opens the bag, looks inside and the objects are still there, worlds inside worlds. Closes the bag and they disappear again. She repeats the action again and again, develops it by opening the bag and bringing the objects out one by one and giving them to me.

This curious thing about internalizing objects; the contents of our houses, the contents of our minds, and the news here is we are moving house. The house agent informed us on Diwali day; fortuitous, they’d say here – the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and the symbol of the doorway contained in the number 11. The passageway opening and repeated (11/11) as if there were two doors, the old door, the new door and we’re moving from one into the other. The event, conceptualised as a moving-into action, brings to mind the common idea that all things are ‘in’… the child in the womb of the mother, we are contained beings, somehow.

We want to hide in the prepositional form ‘in’… language gets lost in the mystery, can only describe it in technical terms; capacity, volume. We are in a traffic jam, we’re in a bad mood – in a good mood. Always there’s this feeling we want to go ‘in’, it’s a spatial metaphor, inner/outer. We seek refuge ‘in’ our spiritual world… we are ‘in’ the middle of the Pacific Ocean, even though surrounded by space. Everything is ‘in’… I’m ‘in’ space. Space is everywhere, I’m sunk in it, space is submerged in me… I cannot escape from it. Mind is contained in consciousness. Consciousness is a spatial thing. Contemplating something directional that isn’t spatial; dimensions extending in a non spatial sense… for a moment, it holds my attention.

The moving-into is a transformational event, a rebirth. Everything is deconstructed, taken apart, the pieces are wrapped in paper, packed in boxes, placed in the removals van, taken out at the new house, removed from the box, unwrapped from the paper and things are reconstructed in their new setting. Something is forgotten, something new is acquired. The completeness of it evolves over time and becomes the new context within which we engage and interact, like actors on a stage. The story will come to an end some day and we will have to pack and move on again. I can see it coming but that seems like a long way off right now.

“The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and interdependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other, and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, Reality is Silent.” [Nisargadatta Maharaj]

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Photo: The monk practices mindfulness by meditating in a dangerous situation seated on the peak of a rock, knowing that if his concentration moves from the present time in this precarious position he may fall.
Thanks to Garrett S for his inspiring post: The Philosophy of Metaphors as a Means to Define Spatial Consciousness. Also thanks to Lou at Zen Flash for the Nisargadatta quote here.
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

the way things are

Posted on November 10, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #166: New Delhi: In the office they’re saying, he’s been here all morning but he’s gone now – you just missed him, as if that helps, and there’s this gesture that seems to indicate the empty space where he was; the empty room, desk, chair. I’m held by that space, I want him to be here, but he’s not. Somebody is making a call in the background but can’t get through right now so he must be at that somewhere-else place but he’s on a motorbike so maybe he’s on his way back here. Nothing extraordinary, it’s just that this motorbike guy is the one who signs the rental documents and we can’t go any further until he comes.

There’s the Indian head movement; an affirmative shake of the head that indicates a yes-I’m-sure, but deep inside that affirmation there’s a no-I’m-not-sure. I’m captivated by the swaying head gesture and want him to do it again. So I repeat the question that requires his answer and there it is; a headshake that is a vertical nod and a horizontal shake from side to side. It seems it could go either way… Yes, so have a seat, relax, see how things go.

I can’t sit down, too many possibilities, step outside and stand in the doorway. Look out across the busy road and up and down the street, all these faces turn around, eyes looking directly at me. It’s a kind of flicker of awareness all along my field of vision. More faces turning towards me like windows opening. People, mostly men, standing in doorways like me, maybe also waiting for the outcome of a possible event, and not doing anything right now, leaning on walls, interested in the white guy just entered their surroundings…

For a while I get the look, investigated, then the faces begin to turn away and we all fall into this state of just being where we are. Heads all swivel around at the same time if there’s a loud noise… something that gets our attention for a moment. The ‘self’ always receiving data, taking in, responding, rejecting, avoiding things unpleasant. Looking for something pleasing, heads swivel back to where we were before, front facing, the default position; has anything changed since the last time I was here? Nope it’s pretty much the same as it was.

Watching the inbreath, the outbreath, there’s an alertness about the sensory function, the simple curiosity about sounds and things happening – an awake receptivity that stretches to include the next moment: the response to that seems to arrive before it happens and there’s a glimpse of the construct. Attention blows like the wind this way, and that way, filled with the activity of being.

I hear a text message on a phone somewhere near and somebody comes along to say he’s coming back from that somewhere-else place. But I’m concerned because sometimes the somewhere-else place slips away and becomes the ‘here’, the point of origin we come back to and go away from and the going-away becomes the coming-back and he has gone becomes he has been. But not wanting to get into that, things are stretched enough as they are; he’ll be here soon, In the meantime, staying with the way things are.

‘No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.’ [Thomas Merton]

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somewhere to be

Posted on November 7, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #165: New Delhi: I’d like it to be a windswept hut made of bamboo on a beach on an island, but we’re looking for a place to rent in South Delhi – a small house or a duplex. Right now I’m being driven around at high speed by the agent looking at houses, buildings, one after another which all seem to be part of the same interconnected vast network of habitations; neighbours pass through your room on the way to somewhere else. Arrive at another street, get out of the car, go inside, there’s a staircase, corridors and empty rooms, nothing here. Stare at the wall… a painted flat surface. Can I see us here? Not impossible, what are the criteria? Searching for the ‘right’ place – try to estimate ceiling heights… windows, doors, floors. Birdsong from a nearby tree enters the empty house in an irregular chord of strangely related notes… walk over to the window. Look at what’s out there; the agent talking about this and that, and all I can think of is what Hipmonkey said: there is no ‘out-there’ out there that’s separate from what’s in ‘here’.

Outside invades inside, I’m back in the agent’s car and we’re off to the next place, slooshing and splooshing through the crowded streets at breakneck speed, talking as we’re going (she does this driving thing for a living), her livelihood is set in this river of noisy, crazy traffic that’s consistently doing unexpected things. The urgency of it all going past too fast… I can’t look, it’s too much, avert my gaze to the side window instead, and see out there, the reflection of myself in the glass shop windows flashing by opposite, focus on the shadowy face looking back at me from one window to the next, somehow staying in the same position – it’s the world that’s rushing by, not me.

Trying (but failing) to understand the Buddhist term: sati-sampajañña, clear comprehension (the absolute clarity of understanding), whilst stumbling over all the indistinct, half-seen, misunderstood truths, and eventually I realize it means the clear comprehension of everything, including the confusion; the mistake, the mix-up, the puzzleheadedness. The fact that I don’t understand this is what’s causing this problem. Don’t ‘do’ anything with it… I see it now. An epiphany, revelation, insight; the experience of total confusion – random things just seem to fit, the recognition that all related parts and everything come together, anyway, according to their circumstances; parallels link parts of the story together with a kind of inevitability.

It’s an all-inclusive world, the ‘self’ comes with the software. I’m playing a role integrated with one whole consciousness – dimensions within dimensions – acting the part; being this person living in these rooms, being that person in those rooms, finding my way through this curious illusion, looking for words to describe that it’s a construct through and through. No way out, I know because I stopped looking for the way out a long time ago. In the 30 years of learning how to get along here in Asian society, I think I’ve let go of that remembered fiction about where I come from – migrants from Europe have experienced this in North America since the 17th Century. Long ago I learned, involuntarily at first, to be at home with other people’s preferences and relinquish my own choices, in time forgetting how I figured out how to be comfortable with it. So when there’s an opportunity to have a place of my own, I return to the old default, surprised to see it’s still there, and how shall I do this? Let’s see, the bed goes here, the table there, and my chair…

‘We are members of a vast cosmic orchestra in which each living instrument is essential to the complementary and harmonious playing of the whole.’ [J. Allen Boone]

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Note: ‘there is no out-there out there…’ sourced in the Hipmonkey site (What the bleep do we know – 3rd video down)
Photo: fishermen’s shelter, Krabi, Thailand (from M’s collection)

familiarity of places I’ve been

Posted on November 5, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #164: New Delhi: The rental agent calls to say she’ll pick me up at 11am to look at a few houses. I’m glad to be going out because packing for the move is difficult; the attachment to possessions is so strong it’s like they’re being pulled from my grasp by the sheer force of having to move from here – I hold on tight, fingertips clutching the surfaces but it’s slipping away… no choice. It’s a last minute thing, there’s a moment of familiarity, remembering this in other places I’ve been, doorbell rings, put much-loved object into the box marked ‘Give Away’ and get up from the cluttered room. That’s the letting-go, the final goodbye… walking away, the rental agent is here, get keys, step outside, close door behind me. Into the car, chatting with the agent, and we’re off.

I visit a house in a popular area… crowded. Walk up the path, open the door, go in and there’s a feeling of the previous tenant everywhere. In my state of recent relinquishment it’s like this is still their surroundings and it’s me that’s the potential new owner of their life … walk into the living room – the ‘living’ room? Suddenly I’m in someone else’s life – feel like I stepped out of my own life and into someone else’s by mistake – who am I? The world is how I/you perceive it, he/she, perceives it. We/you/they look into each other’s lives. A window opens into another realm inhabited by someone else in the network of interconnected lives. It’s just a slightly different angle on a world that’s seen, felt and understood, but through the same sensory awareness mechanism we all have.. a kaleidoscope of different coloured lights. The only difference is the ME that feels it, thinks it’s different from all the other ‘MEs’ walking around thinking they’re different too

Now there’s this feeling I’m looking for a place to ‘be’, the sense of a presence interlacing with the transparency of the presence of others. Observing the motion of the body in a sort of surprised way seeing that it can do it by itself. Gently stumbling around these empty rooms – looking for a place to sit down but can’t find anywhere because there’s no furniture. Well, isn’t this nice, says the agent, and I’m thinking, I’m tired, maybe this’ll do, maybe here I can invent another life I’ll be happy with.

‘Pretending you’re not “it” is exactly the same as “it”‘ [Alan Watts]

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post inspired in part as a result of a dialogue with Sonnische
~ G R A T I T U D E ~

transfiguration

Posted on November 2, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #162: New Delhi: November in North India is the best time. The heat has gone and our orange tree is heavy with fruit. When the first basketful is picked we have to keep it with loving kindness for a few days in a place that’s separate from the tree. This is to allow the tree to forget about its lost fruit. Our curious seasonal change is like a brief springtime that occurs as we’re heading towards winter. It’s suddenly pleasantly warm like an early English summer, plants flower, and the bougainvillea on the roof terrace (Jiab calls them ‘bookend-villas’) transforming with more and more new blossoms.

I go up to the roof terrace and the yoghurt bowl is sitting on the table in the shade because the kitchen is too cold for it now – yoghurt is made without any artificial warmth, just room temperature itself. The milk is boiled, allowed to cool to about 45°C (113°F). The bacterial culture is added, and the warm temperature has to be maintained for 4 to 7 hours. I sit at the table next to the small bowl, feeling I ought to be quiet as this liquid is changing its form, bacteria active, fermentation. It needs some respect and privacy… I shall not look at it. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not, because after November it’s too cold for yoghurt – except that a Japanese friend said she’d managed to make it by placing the bowl on the Wi-Fi router (horizontal type), covered with a plastic box all night, and ready in the morning. Interesting idea, yoghurt made with Internet signal.

As it happens, seasonal change for us coincides with a change in accommodation. We’re moving to a different part of Delhi. It happens once every three or four years, living in rented houses for intervals of time, watching the paint slowly peeling off in the heat and letting it all be as it is. No agitation about anything that needs fixing because, just at the edge of vision, household items are ready for the next move, poised… the choreography of the dance step/transfiguration, the great leap, percussive scatter of objects landing. Wake up in somebody else’s house with all your own things looking out of context… everything that’s old has been forgotten in the confrontation with the new, that’s not yet been gotten used to. Perception takes it all in, files it away in a new folder, a new reference point: ‘this’ is what we shall call reality for now… before that happens there’s the transition, looking for things:
‘Where’s the coffee filter cone?’
‘In the box.’
‘Which box?’
‘The one in the room.’
‘Which room?’
(no answer)
sound of footsteps walking off in search of it…

The separate self is not an entity; it is an activity: the activity of thinking and feeling that our essential nature of pure Awareness shares the limits and the destiny of the body and mind. [Rupert Spira]

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Thanks to Non-Duality America for the Rupert Spira quote

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

not giving god a name

Posted on October 27, 2015 by tiramit

The Buddha taught us that there is positive thinking and there is negative thinking. The most important thing is to stay above thinking.” [Phra Ajahn Jayasaro]
(Thai text translation)
POSTCARD #160: New Delhi: I feel sad that most children in the West don’t receive the same structured guidance or instruction, as they do in the East, about experiential truths in the lineage of Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad – some of whom are called Gods and some prophets. I remember, years ago, asking an old Anglican priest in East London how to find God and he said: ‘are you going?’ Just left it at that. What he meant was: are you going to church? I wasn’t. When I was a kid we didn’t ‘go’, nobody ever ‘went’… there were weddings, funerals, and ‘God’ was never a topic of discussion. I’d had some spiritual insight in this godless condition and was asking the question because I couldn’t understand what the loud hymn singing and dressed-up-in-smart-clothes thing was about; what lay beyond the ‘thou-shalt-nots’ and instruction on the fundamentals of social behaviour. Later I began to see that what the priest meant was, ‘are you actively doing something about this?’ But where to begin? I felt slightly excluded and defensive; ‘going’, was something known only to those who ‘go’… an enigma I didn’t feel equipped to tackle. It didn’t compel me to go back and follow up the conversation with the old priest, and it’s possible he was waiting for me to come back… I feel quite sad that I never saw him again.

I was searching for a context for this state of Godlessness for a long time before I discovered Buddhism in Thailand and became immersed in those detailed behavioural teachings. That was more than 20 years ago, so all this is seen in hindsight. What I understood then, was what the old priest was referring to as ‘going’. The focus is on the immediacy of the here-and-now reality – what’s happening? Where’s it at, this mind/body organism, in relation to ‘the present moment’? What are the tendencies, habitualities in thought that cause me to wander off in my own and others’ suffering and unhappiness? What are the practicalities of the sequence? How can I train myself to break the chain of consequences – to not do whatever it is that causes stress or distress?

There isn’t a creator god in Buddhism, it’s an all-inclusive thing – in the same way there isn’t a ‘self’ outside of consciousness. There’s the operating system, Sila (virtue) Samadhi (focus) Panya (wisdom) and some might say this is God – for Buddhists, it’s better not to call it anything. By not giving god a name, I’m not inclined to develop an attachment to an idea of God according to what I’d like it to be. Better to think of it as nothingness – no-thingness, there’s not any ‘thingness’ about it… I’ve read how it’s a wisdom, a gnosis so completely at one with the thing it knows, there’s an absorption into it. No words for it. Maybe that’s what the old priest was thinking…

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you. [Saint Augustine]
Link to: Publications by Ajahn Jayasaro

the way it unfolds

Posted on October 21, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #158: Chiang Mai: The tuk-tuk driver outside the Shangri-La Hotel charges me too much – he thinks I’m tourist staying at the hotel but I’m not, I’m visiting the tailor in the lobby. So I agree to the tuk-tuk price, not overly concerned, and he starts up the 2-stroke engine; key-turn ignition, a few revs of the throttle and I climb in. He edges out into the road, and in a flash of passing vehicles makes a fortuitous U-turn in fast-moving traffic so suddenly it takes a moment to see we’re facing the opposite direction, speeding away in a swirl of noise, vibration and acceleration. The outside world invades my space, rushes through a hot wind, no walls, no windows, no glass, except the driver’s windscreen up front and for a moment I’m drawn to that. But the accelerating jolts as he overtakes vehicles in front throws me back into a kind of La-Z-Boy sprawl across the double seat where it’s more comfortable, holding on to my possessions in case they get blown away in the gusts of air. And, at least, this way I can see out, under the overhanging flaps of the stretched canvas roof, blowing in the wind.

Everywhere you go in central Chiang Mai the old canal is on your right side. It forms a square, and to go from south to north the one-way traffic has to go round three sides of the square. Water fountains, huge ancient trees and the remains of a 700 year-old wall that encloses the old city inside the square. It all looks the same, all these journeys connected end-to-end, thinking of it as a repeat pattern, the total itinerary, past lives spent here and there, divided and subdivided into periods and instants of looking out at the world flying by thinking: ‘where are we now?’ But not recognising anything and in the blink of an eye back to being busy with thinking. Everything fits together, including my perception of it – the way it unfolds is the way it is.

The tuk-tuk stops at the traffic light and driver switches off the engine to save gas. All of a sudden it’s quiet; the tick-tick and creak of hot metal, smell of tarmac. Here I am in this laid-back position as if lounging in a fifteenth century market stall waiting for customers. Bamboo poles and the roof is thatch, enclosing the space I’m in; contained in the greater space all around. People walking by the wall, fifteenth century bricks sagging and curved like a slow moving wave that’s formed with the gradual sinking of foundations.

Same ‘now’ as it was then; seven hundred years in the past, it wasn’t any different for the people who lived then, returning, as I do, to this same reference point; ‘me’ the human being, eyes looking out ‘there’ at the world. All that remains is the emptiness of the moment; the sound of the engine, the vibration and the pressure of the bench I’m sitting on. There’s skin, hair; there are arms, legs, a head and eyes, ears, nose and tongue. I am a sensory-receptive organism. Just the warm air in my face and things rushing by.

‘… impossible to be aware of an experiencer because it is always the experience itself that momentarily occupies that space.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’]

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