before the beginning

Posted on August 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 142: Delhi-Bangkok flight: We are reading the newspaper, sharing parts of the Bangkok Post. Jiab also has the Thai newspaper and other pages spread over the seats and folded into the magazine pocket. Comfortable environment; the aircraft furniture, cushions, colourful papers and books. It’s a pleasing, at-home feeling; this is our space – looks like a hotel room, not an aircraft. There’s the hmmmm sound of the engines and shhhhh of the air, not unpleasant. Soft pale daylight coming in through the window, and out there, the blue sky above the clouds stretching on and on, curvature of the planet… it all seems so strangely still.

Stewardesses come with the drinks trolley, five or ten minutes go by and the sky, the horizon of clouds remain the same. It feels like the aircraft is stationary, suspended in space, no landmarks, no indicators of time, no beginning and no end. If I say there is a beginning, I create linear time. Encapsulated inside this aircraft there’s the duration of time – there was a beginning (we got on this plane at Delhi), and there will be an end (we get off the plane at Bangkok). But outside the cabin window there’s only the vast present time – the continuing ‘now’ phenomenon enfolding and unfolding, transforming from the past into future in one continuous surging-through movement that cannot be explained. What a strange mystery it is; future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, ‘now’ falls back into yesterday… something ‘remembered’ because it’s gone now.

Mind creates a structure to explain time, otherwise how could we understand the enigma of how the past has ‘gone’ and the future has not arrived yet? Hovering on the brink of the smallest pause before it gets here; the empty space of not-knowing what it is, and held like this for an instant. We are time itself – how to understand that? It’s as if I were standing at the bow of a small sailing boat floating with the current flow, the sense of moving forwards but no shoreline, nothing to judge which direction the boat is going in, or the distance from (or to) something or anything – nothing to say where we’re going or where we are.

I glance down the aisle at my fellow passengers; Japanese staff based in India, they’ll transit at Bangkok and go on to Tokyo. Wealthy Indian tourists heading for a shopping experience in Bangkok… are they aware we’re presently suspended in timelessness? Probably choosing to not think about it – never arriving, always on the way to get ‘there’ (but where are we going?). Mostly choosing to focus on whatever is happening ‘now’, and creating a story about that. Focus on my presence here in a seat contoured to fit the human body, tight squeeze, enough space for legs and knees with an inch of space from the seat in front – beyond that I can see into the business class section… always the grass is greener. I am one of perhaps 300 passengers receiving services from the staff; a baby bird, beak wide open, help… feed me, please.

Before the beginning there were no beginnings or endings; there was only the eternal Always, which is still there – and always shall be. There was only an awareness of unflawed oneness, and this oneness was so complete, so awe-striking and unlimited in its joyous extension that it would be impossible for anything to be aware of something else that was not Itself.” [Disappearance of the Universe page 122]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: flying time

metaphor becomes reality

Posted on July 29, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 139: New Delhi: Lights change to red just as we’re getting near and traffic comes to a standstill. On the intersecting side, cars start revving their engines as the green light shows over there, and it takes a moment to see the elegant cow standing quietly among the cars, dressed in the body given to it, held in its place by the restrictions of stationary vehicles all around. Exotic and dignified, the animal has a calm and wise bearing; just looking at the world and waiting for the lights along with everyone else.

I’m thinking I should take a photo of it… yeh, good idea, but where’s the camera? Frantic rush to find it, deep in my bag, a pen, papers and things flung out on the seat then leaning out of the car window, take a photo click as surrounding vehicles start to move with the green light. There’s the cow walking at the speed of the others – not holding anyone up, no reason for any driver to be impatient, nobody toots their horn.

Funny how the cow is simply going along there in its own lane, not attempting to overtake, just slowly making its way in the limited space and in the direction of the traffic flow moving towards the next intersection, the next set of lights. It seems to know where it’s going, has probably travelled this route many times. I can see it disappearing in the distance, head held high above the cars, bobbing along with the rhythm of its walk – a being that’s in this world but not of this world.

To me it’s an extraordinary moment. I’m the Western cultural migrant assimilated in the East (resistance is futile). I have userID, password; there’s a sense of connectedness with the East, although still carrying some weight of Western thinking and childhood conditioning from the West. Thus insisting on a preconceived reality by creating supporting statements to prove what I’ve already decided is the correct way of going about things, and convinced about this simply because my continuing engagement with it somehow pushes it over the edge, the tipping point… metaphor becomes reality (although I know there’s really nothing there).

Nobody else here is paying the slightest attention to the cow in the traffic, just waiting for the lights to change. My kind of Western reasoning seems to confirm it has objective reality and that’s tolerated here, along with all the preferences, likes and dislikes that don’t fit. It doesn’t matter because the ‘object’ is not the goal. The answer may be one of many associated answers – maybe all. And related searches are revealed in interaction with the question – more of an exploratory thing, open-ended – the observed world and the observer of it in an all-inclusive oneness….

Smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than a grain of barley, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than a grain of millet, smaller even than the kernel of a grain of millet is the Self. This is the Self-dwelling in my heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than all the worlds. [Chandogya Upanishad 14.3, 8th-10th century BCE]

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multiplicity

Posted on July 23, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 138: London/Delhi flight: Travelling by plane at night is a directionless experience, an invisible route that leads to the destination without any sense of the journey, just the sound of the engines and hiss of the air. I fall deeply asleep and wake up to daylight coming in through the cabin windows. We’re here, missed breakfast, no time for anything, quickly gather up my things, ready to leave the plane. Next thing is I’m in the huge emptiness of Indira Gandhi airport, miles of ochre carpeting, and zooming along moving walkways towards the queue at immigration. Get in line with everyone else, get comfortable with this, it could take some time.

Hello Delhi, nice to be back here, mid-morning in a different time zone, and just the ongoing continuity of it, as if I’d never been away… familiarity of bearded men, turbans, a mysterious woman with exotic nose rings, gold bangles jangle and flick of movement that adjusts folds of sari, consoling tired children with nanny; the whole clan goes everywhere together. In this place I’m glanced at, averted gaze slips away, a foreigner travelling alone, a partially visible stranger from a place of no sunlight, colorless eyes, pale pigmentation, like those creatures who live deep below the surface at the bottom of the sea.

The uncompromisingly here-and-now of it, no disappearing from or disappearing into – a dream and yet not a dream. Letting go of the experience in the North, only the memory of that extraordinary feeling there during the retreat in Scotland. The feeling I’d connected with something specific but now I forget what it was exactly. A scrap of paper in my pocket with somebody’s email on it, remembering… there was the old house, the people who were already there and the sadness when they left before I did. Then the others who came after me – I remember them all – and how they were the ones who said goodbye when it was my turn to leave.

Each one carrying this ghostly sense of familiarity, archetypal resemblance, the uniformity of distinct types. Faces I think I’ve seen before… there was a man who looked so much like Larry King (from Larry King Live), at first I believed it was him. Others reminded me of family members – I recognized Great Aunt B. from East Anglia, passed away long ago… wonderful to ‘see’ her again. And someone exactly like my old Uncle D. Everywhere I looked I saw the elders, all dead and gone now. So good to return to the memory that they were here once like me, I was inclined to think of them as being real. “Who am I? Am I you? Him? He, she, it? We, you, they?” So much of a multiplicity, sometimes it’s just seen… we are all of a oneness.

Thump! Passport stamped, out through the crowds and sudden heat, intense light switched on like a television studio. Shym is waiting with the car, bags in and we’re off into the noise and blare of Delhi traffic, reversed mirror image of the world I just left. Changing the sim card in my phone, changing channels, watching a different movie.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not

[Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief]

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Note: This post was created partly as a result of keying in the term ‘multiplicity of faces’ in Google and finding the pdf in: perceptionweb.com. Check out the exercise of flickering faces in the picture of the girl’s face at the end.
Note2: Many thanks to Mindful Balance for the poem.
Photo: light switches in a corridor at the back of a government building in New Delhi

directionality

Posted on July 20, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 137: The Edinburgh Road: For a moment I’m conscious of the present moment contained inside this moving vehicle following the white line marked in the centre of the tarmac, captivated by the directionality of the journey hurtling through a kind of wormhole in space/time, and plunging towards a vanishing point that never arrives. Pieces of a picture landscape, like a giant jigsaw, fly up and pass through the windscreen of the car, through the transparency of self and a new picture is forming. Left-hand bend approaching, steer around that, attention caught by a constant continuity of looped overhead cables on the right that continually sweep upwards and fall away like waves ebb and flow. Into a right-hand curve… tilt and rising with the camber of the road on the left side then level out and down into the next one. More curves and bends, dizzy and bewildering, winding down these slopes and (ear-popping) altitude drops on the way that leads to the coast.

This must be an old drovers’ road to the markets in the town, it’s foundations laid by the hooves of herds of animals following a path through ancient forests that once were here, and finding a route around swamps and boulders; obstacles long since filled in and cleared away. Now there are just fields of sheep and grass and crops, featureless hillsides – only the road remains, it’s twists and turns carry no meaning. Land owners’ properties claimed on either side have trapped it in its original form, a skeleton from the past, a craggy old branch of a tree, its shape created by historical circumstance.

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, just as we’re coming into Edinburgh. Drop some people here at the train station, then on to drop the rest of us at the airport. Strange to suddenly be in the centre of a town, held by the traffic lights and see people crossing over – reverse culture shock; I’m not used to seeing Europeans, dark-haired, golden, Asian faces with almond shaped eyes fill my world. Memory of a former life, strange familiarity, déjà vu… this pavement, these streetlights, have I been here before? But it’s just somewhere on the way. No, wait… was it here that an event took place, long since forgotten? But no explanation seems to fit – it’s just what’s happening – the world, doing its thing. All that is here is a reflection of me passing through. It appears in present time, and then it’s gone.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” [Heraclitus]

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lowlands

Posted on July 16, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 136, Peebles, Scotland: We don’t usually wake up to the sound of birdsong at dawn, it’s too early – 4.30 am here in the room with curtains closed to keep out light that glimmers all through the night. Summer in the north means it’s nearly always day. Difficult to sleep, getting out of bed is not easy but I have to be up and ready to leave because this is the end of the retreat and the start of the long journey home.

A labyrinth of corridors and narrow staircase that leads down from the upper floors in this old mansion house converted to a Health Center. Nurses chattering together in their white coats come upstairs, pass me on the staircase going down (ghostly image of maids and housekeeping staff from a former life). I go down and down to the small chapel created in the old wine cellar at the lowest point beneath this great house. Find a place and sit in the silence. I feel humble, a Buddhist in a Christian sanctuary, examining the nature of human experience rather than its external creator – ‘a part of’, rather than ‘apart from’. The ‘hallowed’ Presence may have no name… identification creates an object in a world of subjectivity; a world of whispering Hymn books’ paper pages turning in these curious acoustics: ‘forgive us our trespasses and those who trespass against us.’ So many ‘s’ sounds the rhythm of the Prayer goes out of sync for a moment then its momentum builds up and falls into unity again. Trespasses and trespassing; acting out scenarios in the mind – letting-go and forgiveness.

Say goodbye to nurses, therapists, doctors and friends I’ve known for four weeks and will probably never see again – we shared a small lifetime. Goodbye dark stained wood panels, chandeliers suspended in high ceilings; goodbye antique furniture and carpets over oak block herring-bone flooring. Bags in car and down the long drive into the rolling hills. Sun breaks through and the sky is blue as we descend through the landscape. These are the Lowlands.

“The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” [David Hume]

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Note: Dear fellow bloggers, I’ve been on retreat for more than a month, deep in the Scottish lowlands. One of the requirements was to stay away from social media, so I’ve been offline for all that time. Nice to be back, more posts to come…

clan

Posted on June 16, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #135: Glasgow, Scotland: Battles lost and won and always the bagpipes have a part to play. There’s an extraordinary power about the instrument. I hear it as I’m walking down Buchanan Street, drawn towards the sound, and see the huge crowd surrounding the group outside an expensive shopping mall. Street musicians, I don’t know anything about the tartan kilt outfits they wear – the piper seems kinda clean-cut to me, respectable. Maybe he’s also a part-time piper in other bands, or one of the sons of these war-like characters beating out a furious rhythm on the drums. Somebody else going around collecting coins in an open box – there must be more than a hundred pounds in there ($150). I pour the contents of my pocket into the collection.

Jiab was here a long time ago while I was in Japan, she stopped to listen to a street musician playing the pipes and the piper happened to be standing next to an old red phone box with glass panels smashed out (those were the days before cell phones). So Jiab had a think about time zones between here and Japan, gathered all the change she had and called me up. I was in the office in Yokohama and somebody said there was a call for me. Picked up the phone and there was this skirl and blare of the pipes coming from the other side of the world. Then Thai laughter and the sound of coins being shoved into the phone slot – we couldn’t talk or anything, the sound was so loud. So after a while we ended the call. Jiab has a sense of humor.

Sound of the pipes fading into the background as I walk now through these streets back to my hotel… extraordinary that I have no home in Glasgow. I’m a tourist, even though I lived here for 5 years, and all that’s left is a strange familiarity – recognizing the streets, the buildings. Feels like I’m a member of a clan, vanquished, as if in a battle that took place in the time I was away – the Celtic sense of calamity. And today, after more than thirty years living in other people’s countries I discover I’m homeless. It feels like I don’t exist. I’m nobody, in a place where I used to be ‘somebody’. Mutuality in the illusion; clan, this is all we seem to have in the lifetime we share. In truth, it all merges into one; cycles of darkness and light, and seasons, a spinning planet around the sun, cycles of organic forms that reproduce, die and other’s take their place, continuously.

“… the moon, reflected in the water, shines brightly and within the spotless water seems to be, but the water-moon is empty, substanceless; there is no thing to grasp… ‘tis thus that all things are.” [Samadhiraja-sutra 2nd century CE]

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Note: Dear friends tomorrow I’m going offline for a couple of weeks in order to enter a retreat and receive advice on my health situation. I’ll be back again in July and catch up with your posts and comments then. Thanks for reading….

there and then, here and now

Posted on June 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #134: Elgin, Scotland: It’s a fleeting transitory thing, sometimes so clearly seen – as now on this bus following the coastal route and scribbling down words in my notebook (almost illegible writing due to the motion of the bus). I’m visiting Uncle P who is over 80 and lives in a care-home. The photo above was taken from the bus going through these small villages, and it was shortly after that I got off at Buckie.

Then it all comes back to me, the call of seabirds and smell of the sea. Huddled in my coat in the cold wind looking down at the same street surfaces; pavement cracks I recognize from the last time I was here, years and years ago? What is it? Just a feeling, awareness precedes thought, no words for this kind of thing. Incidental people pass by on the street. I think I know them from long ago, but it’s possible I never spoke to them at all, we were always like this, seeing each other in the town and only that gentle familiarity, glance, eyes meet, strange recognition… do I know you? It’s like I never left this timeless non-objective moment – there and then is here and now.

And they would say it makes no difference if I’ve been away in foreign lands, North India and Thailand, Chiang Mai, Bangkok and living my butterfly life. Coming back here is like stepping into the same instant of existence. It’s like it was yesterday, except people are older, aging, settling into a comfortable gravity. And a feeling of how everyone is near the end – I don’t know the young folks, of course. People I used to be friends with are inexplicably gone. It’s like the estuary leads out to the sea – water from the mountains flowing through so many different circumstances, on the way to joining the oceans of the world.

I get to see Uncle P and he looks well but almost all that he says is subtly incorrect, wrong dates, gives people all the wrong names and I agree with everything he says. When it’s time to go, he takes me to the exit, but we get lost, pause at the dining room and he’s puzzled why everything has been tidied away – I ask a staff lady in the kitchen who assures me that Uncle P had his lunch already. He forgets things; she tells me out of earshot – shows me the exit. Last I see of him, he’s going back down the corridor with the kitchen lady and telling her he’s looking for his wife. But she passed away a year ago.

On the bus to Elgin I have a little weep about Uncle P, and when the bus gets there, find an Internet café to write this.

‘Wandering through realms of consciousness like a refugee, thought looks for a home. Thought thinks that perhaps by clinging to this or to that, it can find a home. In this way, thought forms attachments with names and forms, with concepts such as “is” and “is not,” “self” and “other,” “me” and “mine,” and with emotions like envy, pride, and desire. It is the mission of thought to form these attachments in hopes of finding a home. Thought wants to own its own home.’ [Thought Is Homeless/The Endless Further/ 2012 July 16]

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awareness of awareness

Posted on June 1, 2015 by tiramit

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

POSTCARD #132: Delhi: Today, June 1st, 2015 is Visakha Puja – a special day in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Singapore. This day commemorates the birth, enlightenment (nirvāna), and death (Parinirvāna) of Buddha in the Theravada tradition. So you get all three on the same day. The events that take place on this day go all the way back to the time of the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago, monks chanting verses, there is a talk by a senior monk, listeners seated on the floor, and it fills me with awe to consider that it’s the same now as it was all those years ago; this moment here and now is actually that moment there and then. Everything about who I am, the clothes I wear, my appearance, identity, gender; all of that disappears for an instant in the huge span of time that appears to lie in between. There’s only awareness, I experience it physically, somewhere in the centre of the chest, spreading out to the shoulders. In Pali it’s called the citta, the heart.

Thought and mental activity are all located in the brain area; flashing like electricity voltage sparks, but awareness is in the centre of my being. Experientially I’m conscious that awareness is prior to thought and mental activity, awareness comes before everything. It’s there all the time, even when I’m asleep. I may assume that awareness is ‘me’, ‘self’. This ‘self’ says it’s ‘my’ awareness, ‘I’ am aware. But when this ‘self’ that I believe to be me starts to look for the ‘me’ that possesses awareness, it finds that it’s the other way round: awareness has to first start looking for the ‘me’ (and the ‘me’ can’t be found).

The question then arises, ‘who am I?’ I might say, well, I have an identity given to me by my parents, and a birth certificate, driving license, passport, ID card, and all this documentation is saying this is ‘me’. I have a personality; I’m like this, I’m like that. But it’s awareness that sees all this, the feelings, emotions, moods and I find the question: ‘who am I?’ is itself focusing attention, opening the mind, thoughts flicker and disappear, sparks fly, awareness sees all this. The identity, the personality is witnessed by awareness. Awareness was there before it all; before feelings, moods – emotions are objects of perception that awareness perceives. Awareness is what I am, it’s what all sentient beings are, it’s not personal, it’s everything. No beginning, no end, awareness has always been there. Awareness is spirit. Spirit is awareness

Most of the time I live with my small self, worn like a costume in a fancy-dress party, and function with other small selves doing the same thing. Same with everybody here today, at Vesakh time seated in meditation and focused on the Buddha’s teaching. But the Buddha wouldn’t have wanted us to say anything like, “I am a ‘Buddhist’”… beliefs appear in awareness, awareness is there before beliefs, before thought, before all that. There’s an awareness of a constructed ‘self’ – necessary for getting around. There’s this awareness and an awareness of the awareness itself.

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Photo source: http://asiaplacestosee.com/wesak-day-celebration/

Note: some parts of this post inspired by an Adyashanti talk in a post on the website: To Know Beauty/ Meditative Self Inquiry

beyond belief

Posted on May 29, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #131: Delhi: I received this photo of a plane journey on my phone from M, my 11-year-old Thai niece. She was on a night flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. All our devices are connected so I get her photos, downloaded images, screenshots, kiddie’s apps and have to subscribe to an increased GB storage plan due to these thousands of ‘cute’ digital items, increasing daily. I read in Google somewhere that the number of mobile phones exceeds the population of the world, due to users that own multiple devices. Let’s say there are trillions of images all around the planet… whatever, there’s just this sense of vastness. Like the stars seen through M’s downloaded pic of the plane window. More than that; a quick look at Google tells me there are 200 billion galaxies out there, a Universe filled with a septillion: 10²⁴ planets –on ‘the short scale’ (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) and 10⁴² on ‘the long scale’.

Changing from the Macro to the Micro, each star that can be seen from the plane window out there looks like a micro particle – wiki tells me that ‘point-particles’ are zero-dimensional. So it doesn’t take long to start thinking about transparency, lightness, non-being:

You are boundless space.
You are nothing that you appear to be.
You are the fathomless ocean, forever flowing.
The waves do not affect you.
Nothing affects you, for there’s no you.
[Robert Adams]

(reblogged from: Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean

It’s just that everything I’ve been taught as a child is the received perception that’s passed down through generations of those with the same mind/body organism as I have. Most of us hold on to creationist belief systems, “God” – the ‘Big Bang’. But what caused the big bang? What came before that? A lot of people I know spend most of their time in contemplation, one way or another – meditation or focused thought, and seeking a way of living that allows for this because it’s possibly the most important thing you can do with your life.

Advaita Vedanta talks about Brahman being the cause, and the world is the effect. Without the cause, the effect is no longer there. What that means is the ‘World” is real when seen with Brahman but it’s false when seen without Brahman. So basically Brahman is the original cause and those of us who see without Brahman are seeing the World as an illusion. Sounds like the sky is blue, the grass is green because the human sensory system creates it like that, and there’s no way to prove this is ‘real.’ That’s how it seems to be, in a manner of speaking – the sense there’s something missing… Brahman/Pure Consciousness/Reality? Not seeking, just considering the question. I like what cabrogal says: ‘Pure consciousness has no object’ – this has become like a kind of koan for me.

The Buddha didn’t agree with the external, eternal creationist idea:

“As far as the suns and moons extend their courses and the regions of the sky shine in splendor, there is a thousandfold world system. In each single one of these there are a thousand suns, moons, Meru Mountains, four times a thousand continents and oceans, a thousand heavens of all stages of the realm of sense pleasure, a thousand Brahma worlds. As far as a thousandfold world system reaches in other words, [the universe], the Great God is the highest being. But even the Great God is subject to coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.” (Anguttara-Nikaya X 29)

It’s like saying these are all concepts and true reality is not a concept – words cannot reach that far. I received another picture from M, her painting of a beehive, done after she got off the flight and back in school again. It’s a natural hive in the forest. When Jiab asked what the bee outside the hive was doing there, she gave it some thought and said it was counting the stars – a created answer, sort of an on-the-spur-of-the-moment thing…

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Note: I Googled the title of this post after I’d set up the thing for publication and discovered in Amazon it’s the title of a book: ‘Beyond Belief’ by Elaine Pagels about the “secret” Gospel of Thomas. The idea that the Jesus Teachings were changed by Churchianity. Jesus was saying he was the son of God but we are all the sons and daughters of God, no difference. We can all be enlightened. I was wondering if anybody had read this book and should I order it from Amazon?

endeavour

Posted on May 24, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #129: Delhi: I’ve had this photo in my files for a long time. All kinds of stuff come to mind, studying it, but if you look closely, there’s an orderlieness about it. These people are not fighting with each other to get on the roof of the train. This is Dhaka, Bangladesh, the massive exit from the city for Eid celebrations (end of fasting during the month of Ramadan). At the lower left you can see a hand extended to help someone climb on a window ledge. Others on the lower right are calmly waiting to see what’s going to happen because it looks like they can’t all get on this train. Maybe they’re waiting for the next one to arrive. Another thing that’s obvious for those on the roof is the fearlessness, the strength, the belief in each other, a kinship; the closeness of the group that you find everywhere in Asia, also I’ve noticed it in Thailand. These folk are from the ‘old world’. In the ‘new world’ (the West) the closeness is not so obvious. Could be we have been more war-like, the hunter-gatherers in ancient times, but within each clan there would still have been this unity, this bonding in the face of adversity. I feel it’s possible to recognize something of this affinity with each other.

I’m thinking of what it must be like to be one of these individuals with a place on the roof of the train, doing this trip annually; quite used to the sheer vastness of it all. Perhaps taking some comfort from the fact that there could be hundreds of human beings there at that very moment – also aware that the totality of this annual migration in Bangladesh is in the millions, certainly. Holding on to each other up there on the roof on the rough and bumpy ride. A journey maybe a day and part of a night, for some of them, and jumping off the train in groups, then probably another long journey to get home.

It reminds me of another event long ago, South India maybe 30 years ago. I was stuck in this provincial Bus Stand (bus terminal) because of a mix-up in routing on the way from Pondicherry to Bangalore. So just sitting on the pavement like all the rest do and waiting for my bus to turn up. Terrific noise and people everywhere, food vendors, everything. Other buses careering past and clouds of dust, black exhaust fumes and dangerous speeds – overloaded with people on the roof so much, the vehicle was leaning precariously to one side. It was quite a thing to see.

Then I noticed this boy running to catch his bus, 12 or 13yrs maybe, he looked at me, maybe the first foreigner he’d ever seen. There I was just sitting with everybody else. He hesitated then carried on running with a quick look back at me. Then running flat out to get his bus, speeding away very quickly. There was a moment when it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, then a hand reached out from somebody on the bus and he got pulled near enough to grab the ladder at the back that leads up to the roof. A wild leap and with both feet safely on the bottom rung, and held by others’ arms so both hands were tightly holding on, his head swiveled back, black eyes staring at me. The bus racing further and further away. I held the gaze like that, thinking there’s no way I’d have the strength and endeavor to do that. It seemed like this, held by watching his golden face turned towards me until the bus went out of sight.

“Right now you are Consciousness, appearing as a character in your play. Maybe you think you need confirmation. Forget it. Relax. You already are That.” [Nathan Gill]

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Photo Source: Chez Chiara