a kind of ignoring

Posted on November 19, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #26 Delhi: Putting in eyedrops and I’m not used to it, eyelid reacts just as the drop is coming, blinks before the drop hits the eye, face is wet with eye-drop fluid. Try again… drip. Same thing happens. I’ve just started a two week schedule of eye-drops because of a dryness in the eyes after the recent operation. Hoping it’ll get easier and learning how to not-react, to resist the body’s automatic knee-jerk response to whatever it is that’s coming into the eye. There’s this natural tendency to reject, to refuse, to say ‘no’. The mind has it figured out but the body is still unconvinced.

It’s something like a deliberate not-seeing; the not-wanting-to-have-anything-to-do-with-it thing. Not wishing to engage; a kind of ignoring. It’s denial… “Who me? … in denial? I’m not in denial!” (denial of denial). I’m not going to pay attention to what you’re saying about me ignoring you. Pretending it’s not there and maybe it’ll go away? Ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome [see note1 below] The ‘self’ illusion itself, is a trancelike state. Even though it’s really obvious, people are conditioned to ignore basic truths that conflict with the habitual way of doing things. ‘We don’t look at things, we overlook things’ [Alan Watts].

Ignoring the truth about climate change, seemingly unconcerned about what kind of future we’re passing on to future generations. Ignoring deeply held misgivings about wars created by politicians, weapons of mass ‘distraction’, slipperiness, underhandedness, cunning ploys and guile. Ignoring the 1st Noble Truth of Suffering; tolerating the suffering permits a sort of attachment to it? Or maybe we are genuinely searching for another way to live our lives, but we’re sidetracked by Television, consumer goods, and fall into the world of ‘choices’ and ‘preferences’; burdened with these dependencies. So we might say: NO, this is not it at all… go to the doctor, tell him about it and he says take these pills, something to get us back on track – education cleverly teaches children there’s only one option: consumerism, and to engage with that you need to learn about career, job, debt, house, rent, marriage, car, bills… It’s doesn’t say WHY (ignore that question). Consumerism is what people believe in; consumerism is ‘God’.

Try another eye-drop… head back, look at the ceiling. The eyelid flutters, blinks involuntarily, and an eyelash deflects the intrusive drop, fluid trickles down the cheek like an actual tear drop and falls into the ear. I wipe it away with a tissue – this action triggers a memory of something emotional – why am I crying… trying to do something I can’t, and don’t know why. It’s the squeezing of the bottle between thumb and forefinger, a small intense muscular action, that’s in conflict with the feeling of vulnerability. Reluctantly I see, in close-up, the bubble of the drop emerging from the point of the bottle and glance away from it, anticipating the tiny impact on sensitive eyeball… splish! I have to learn to look elsewhere – a skilful ignoring – and focus on something like the ceiling fan, a light bulb, the flaking piece of plaster in the corner of the cornice.

Mindfulness and being calm. Earlier today, I downloaded 11 hours of Tibetan Healing Bell Chimes and as I’m writing this now I’m already on hour 5. It’s playing quietly in a different window; sweet random sounds, intentional wind chimes; the IS-ness of it. Meditation practice means I can gently ease back from the intensity the mind creates for as long as it takes to see what’s going on; this action feels right – I’m able to emerge from ignorance into the knowing. A wonderful emptiness or the wholeness of it? A great peace in the space of the mind.

‘The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.’ [Alan Watts, ‘The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’ (link to downloadable pdf)]

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Note 1: I discovered that, in fact, the ostrich doesn’t bury its head in the sand when there’s danger, it’s digging a hole and covering the egg with sand and, seen from a distance, it just looks like that’s what it’s doing.

Note 2: ‘If You Are Having Trouble Getting The Drop Into Your Eye: Lay on your back, and place a drop in the inner corner of your eyelid (the side closest to the bridge of your nose). Tilt your head, open your eyes slowly, and the drop should fall right into your eye.’

Note 3: ‘slipperiness, underhandedness, cunning ploys and guile’ taken from Ajahn Sucitto’s ‘Parami: Ways To Cross Life’s Floods’

Note 4: Listening to 11 hours of Tibetan Healing Sounds in Zen Flash

Note 5: Reference to: ‘career, job, debt, house, rent, marriage, car, bills, children…’ taken from blogpost: What Do You Want? by Jack Saunsea

Note 6: Upper image taken from the series: “Only In India”

the ‘now’ moment

Posted on November 15, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #25 Delhi: Traffic stops. A great noise of beeping horns and eventually we can see it’s caused by cows crossing the road. Unusual to see cows being herded in the middle of the city – there must be a cowherder at the end of the column driving them, and others to clear the path through the traffic. The cows do seem a little anxious now, hurrying along. Usually they’re relaxed – placid is the word. I see them sometimes, sitting at the side of the road, cars moving around them, or they’re at rest on a traffic roundabout, ruminating, gazing out at the world.

The presence of the bovine mother, with its horns and all its wet-nose, smooth-hide, cowness, creates a kind of out-of-context NOW moment for me, a foreigner in this part of the world – although really, it’s ‘now’ all the time. ‘Now’ is not located anywhere in particular in time or space, it is always ‘now’ – the whole thing is ‘now’. The cow with its long eyelashes and good-looking face, just uncompromisingly ‘there’, is part of the environment and events taking place in the flow of occurrences, always in the present moment. I’m kinda blown-away by the immediate here-and-now reality of traffic flow around a seated cow, like a river moves round the boulders in a stream of tiny moments linked together, a seamless whole; cause becomes effect, what happened before it becomes what happened after that, and out into every available space in the city. It’s everywhere at the same time.

Usually I don’t see it; caught up in the thinking process; watching a movie in my head, driven by the requirements of a constructed ‘me’ and seeing the world in these terms. THINKING ABOUT THINGS so much, I don’t pay attention to the ‘now’ moment, the small period of pause that occurs… that empty space where nothing is happening, just before the next thought arises – a kind of non-event. Focus on it and everything stops shifting around, gradually settles down; time begins to stretch out in a vastness, reaching out over the horizon on all sides. Surrounding traffic is somewhere down below, locked-in, waiting for the cows to pass through.

This lasts as long as it takes for me to forget what I’m doing, attention wanders, and a passing wave of thought spins me off in the thinking process, the automatic default that brings me back to the functioning of the mind-body organism. The “self” getting in the way, feeling it didn’t quite have what it should have had, wanting this, happy with that, glad there are signs of movement at last and the ‘now’ moment is changed to something else. We’re on the road again, the cow obstruction has gone. Revving car engines, horns beep-beep, jostling for space. Car bodies like brightly coloured Lego pieces fit together to create a form, then immediately separate themselves and become a different form; join with other forms and larger constructs fit together with surrounding pieces. Traffic roars, screaming horns, it all begins to spread out, moving as one, then it’s quickly dispersed into separate units, more acceleration, and we’re away like a wave rushing back out to sea. The speed is breathtaking….

‘The human body is not a frozen sculpture fixed in space and time. The human body is a dynamic bundle of energy, information and intelligence that constantly is renewing itself and is in exchange with the larger field of energy, information and intelligence that we call the universe. In fact if we could really see the human body as it is, not through the artifact of sensory experience, you would see it to be much more exciting.’ [Deepak Chopra, ‘The Basics of Quantum Healing’]

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Source for lower image: Martin S. Gotfrit

a terrestrial ocean

Posted on November 12, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #24 Delhi: It’s colder here at this time of year. No fans, no ACs, people have their windows open and you can hear TVs, the clatter of dishes, cooking pots, ding, and bits of other people’s conversations. A child crying, a dog barks, somebody calling a person’s name in a language I can’t understand. It dwindles down as everyone settles in for the night, silent breathing in all the labyrinths of rooms and apartments that surround us here; people asleep on the floor, in beds, in cots, in hammocks. That’s how it was last night, then just after midnight, there was an earthquake.

Jiab wakes up, gives me a shake, ‘earthquake’ she says (Jiab is a linguistic minimalist). It takes me a moment to realize the house is trembling, bed is shaking, floor is like a sheet of tin stretching out from here to everywhere, connected with all other houses in the community… and the uneasy sensation of it undulating slightly; a flexibility, like the surface of the sea – a terrestrial ocean. Voices of neighbours outside, shouts and kerfuffle.

After a moment it settles down and the urgency passes. Trying to be mindful but I feel like I could go back to sleep maybe, just lying there, waiting to see what’ll happen. Then there’s another tremor, and we’re back into the unstable feeling again; louder shouts of voices, and more commotion outside… hmmm, the idea of death just going to arrive one day, anyday, could be a Tuesday, for example, or a Thursday, yes, nice if it were a Thursday.

Falling into a half sleep; there’s that Donovan song ‘Jersey Thursday’… did he mean the pullover or the island? Another tremor rocks the bed slightly and the gentleness of it helps me to drift off a little bit more. The day I die will be an ordinary day, nothing different about it. The moment after I’m gone the next moment will come along; that’ll take place, and there’ll be the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year.

No more holding on to ‘me’, the identity; who’s who or which is ‘what’ and ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘why’… particularly WHY? How to answer that? It’s M’s favourite question, she’s only 9 years old and has this curiosity about everything. Well, it’s just the way it is, you know? It’s all happening for it’s own sake, the inevitability of circumstances – things moving along of their own volition and whether they continue or discontinue doesn’t seem to be a question. (M looks at me: ‘… yes, but WHY?’) It’s like a story that I may think will, one day, come to an end… the final curtain: THE END, but it starts again and the period of ‘ending’ becomes a defining characteristic of it all: it ends sometimes and then it begins again. More like an epic anthology of short stories: ‘as old as we are able to imagine’ and going on forever, the panchatantra, the great cycle of it is always there. All the way out of this tiny space and knowing I’m an integral part of the whole universe.

It’s 4am, can’t sleep, get up and go through to the front room. Start up the laptop and google ‘earthquake’… amazing, the news is there already: ‘Four earthquakes (in Delhi) within a period of 4 hours, measuring 3.1 (12.41am), 3.3 (1.41 am), 2.5 (1.55am) and 2.8 (3.40am) on the Richter scale respectively. No reports of any casualty or destruction of property received so far.’ [reports: NDTV]

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Upper image by Manish Jain spiritualartwork.wordpress.com

the forgotten thing

Posted on November 9, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #23: Delhi: There’s something cozy about having to have the lights on in the daytime; skies are quite dark, a curious colourless light. Feels nice, just pottering around in the house wearing indoor slippers; walking along the corridor to get something in the kitchen, flip flop flip flop flip flip… I arrive there and can’t remember what it was I wanted. Strange, how a thought can simply vanish like that, leaving only the context of it. Walk back down to the living room and as soon as I’m there I remember what it was, ah yes… there’s something about this action that seems to retrieve the memory. Walk back along to the kitchen, and, goodness me, I’ve forgotten again – pause for a moment… there’s no memory of it at all.

A curious reality, the forgotten thing is associated with the idea it’s a lost object and it’ll turn up later, but when it does, how will I recognize it (if I don’t know what it is)? Let it go and the thought has gone, taking with it the thinker of the thought… thoughts without a thinker [Mark Epstein]. Conscious experience is filtered through the conceptualizing process. Without that, there’s no ‘me’; there’s nothing; a state of no ‘thing-ness’. It’s not the object, it’s the space it’s in; this ‘something’ within which things seem to exist, then unexist.

Shortly after that, I remember what it is I’m looking for; the eye-drop bottle – I have a schedule of eye-drops to take because of the eye operation. Walk back to the kitchen repeating the words: eye-drop bottle, eye-drop bottle, eye-drop bottle, and there it is sitting on the counter in plain sight – how could an object like that become invisible? Back to the living room where I’m distracted by other events for a while and when I look for the eye-drop bottle later on… can’t find it, oh no (this is giving me a headache). Then it’s there, sitting in the place where it was placed, an existential presence; nature morte avec bouteille d’oeil-baisse, “Still Life With Eye-Drop Bottle”. It holds my attention now – have I taken the eye-drop already, or not yet, and feeling my eyes for moisture, trying to remember…

‘The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.’ [R. D. Laing]

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Upper image: floating small candle boats on the Ganges river, taken from last year’s visit to the Buddhist sites

diwali: an inner light

Posted on November 1, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #21: Delhi: This year’s 5 day Diwali festival begins on Sunday 03 November. Diwali is about celebrating the awareness of the inner light; that which is beyond the physical body and mind – pure, infinite and eternal. The light of higher knowledge that dispels the ignorance masking one’s true nature, not as the body, but as the unchanging, infinite, immanent and transcendent reality. With this awakening comes compassion and the awareness of the oneness of all things. This ‘higher knowledge’ brings bliss, ananda. In the same way we celebrate the birth of a child – the birth of our physical being – Diwali is the celebration of this Inner Light. The story may vary from region to region, but the essence is the same – to rejoice in the Inner Light (Atman) or the underlying Reality of all things (Brahman).

The name Diwali, a contraction of deepavali (row of lamps), involves the lighting of small clay lamps which are placed outside the house and kept lit all through the night. It’s about the triumph of good over evil; there are fireworks to drive away evil spirits going off all through the night – not possible to get much sleep – any lingering old thoughts of attachment are blasted out of their dusty little corners. You can’t really pretend it’s not happening… it’s a social event, parties going on until late at night

For Jains, Diwali marks the attainment of moksha (nirvana) by Mahavira (a reformer of Jainism) in 527 BC. Interesting to note that the Buddha and Mahavira were contemporaries, and there’s an odd similarity between Mahavira and Buddha; google their names and you’ll get all kinds of info. Both were princes and renounced their kingdoms at the age of 30. Mahavira’s father’s name was Siddhartha (Buddha’s name), and both attained enlightenment. They both practiced extreme asceticism, but the Buddha went on from there to develop the Middle Way. Jains believe in a soul, but for Buddhists there is no self, no creator of the Universe, it has no beginning and no end. There are many other similarities and I’ll write a separate post about that one day.

Diwali is also celebrated by the Arya Samajists as the death anniversary of Swami Dayanand Saraswati. They also celebrate this day as Shardiya Nav-Shasyeshti. Diwali begins on the thirteenth lunar day of Krishna paksha (dark fortnight) of the Hindu calendar month Ashwin and ends on Bhaubeej. The Indian business community begins the financial year on the first day of Diwali (Dhanteras). Diwali is an official holiday in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Suriname, Malaysia, Singapore and Fiji. Diwali was given official status by the United States Congress in 2007 by former president George W. Bush. Barack Obama became the first president to personally attend Diwali at the White House in 2009.

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Note: this post was created with excerpts from the wikipedia page. Upper image by Manish Jain spiritualartwork.wordpress.com. Middle image: illustration of Mahvira, a reformer of Jainism. Lower image: Swami Dayanand Saraswati

where I’m calling from

Posted on October 26, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #19: Chiang Mai: M came to visit for the day, my Thai niece aged 9yrs, and her mum brought a bag of pa tong ko (Thai donuts) she got in the Saturday market. And just before we ate them all I remembered to take a photo [click this link for recipe]. But I’m getting ahead of myself, it began quite early this morning. I open my eyes and there’s a sound, a Skype call – where’s the phone? Stumble out of bed, follow the sound… phone has slid down the side cushion on the sofa, singing and buzzing in there; hello? It’s M, hello? Her video appears – hello, hello? I can see the top of her head, she’s watching a YouTube video at the same time as skyping me.

Where are you now Toong Ting? She calls me Toong Ting, a remnant of her baby-talk days. I tell her I’m in the condo, arrived last night from Bangkok; this is what it looks like, where I’m calling from, then slowly move the camera-phone around so she can see the interior of the room.

What you do there? She speaks English like text messaging – maybe social media is how she learned? I tell her I’m not properly awake yet and that’s why my hair is all mussed up.

What’s mussed-up mean? I tell her that I was sleeping, just woke. But it’s difficult to hear what she’s saying, I need to adjust the volume control. Where’s the clicker? Can’t see well with these glasses, I’ll have to hold the phone so I’m able to see her face on the screen then put it to my ear to hear her voice – she’s laughing because there’s my big ear in close-up, filling her screen. Laughter…

Why you do that Toong Ting? The conversation lasts about a minute. She asks me, Can I come stay with you today, mummy go out, OK? I say yes; see you soon, bye-bye.

Shower, dressed, wash dishes, tidy up and in 1 hour, ping-pong! door opens, M is scooting down the corridor, running around the rooms and jumping on the sofa: yaaaaay! Her mum gives me the pa tong ko and some of M’s items in a bag and other food things, asks if I’m sure it’s okay… yes, of course, and there’s the handing over of responsibility with a few last words of caution to M and bye! Mummy is gone.

We put everything on the breakfast table, and taking the photo of the pa tong ko reminds me about the problem with the phone-camera earlier, with the sound – not finding the volume control and I tell her about this – can she fix it for me? M holds the phone in her small hands then clicks the little button with a tiny pointed finger.

I feel heavy and clumsy by comparison. She tells me I need to change the ringtone… so let’s choose one together, okay? There’s a long list, the names read like a poem; apex, beacon, by the seaside, chimes, crystals, night owl, playtime, presto, radar, radiate, stargaze, summit, twinkle, waves and we go through them all, one after another, like a strange inter-related melody; a breathtaking journey through the diverse world of heavenly and celestial, twinkling ringtones.

Which one you like Toong Ting? I’d like to make a choice but it’s like a kind of hilarious madness to me, they’re all good… M makes her choice and I’m wearing my glasses to see how she’s doing it. It’s this that causes her to quit the ringtone selection as the discussion moves round to my recent eye operation.

What the doctor do? M comes close to my face and looks at my left eye, carefully, then looks at my right eye. She’s a bit scared of the thought of it, yet kinda fascinated when I tell her about making a hole in the eye and sucking out the lens shloooorp! then putting in the new lens folded over to get it into the hole and it’s made of plastic, so it opens out flap when it’s inside and lies down flat.

I see her small face and almond-shaped eyes absorbing the story into consciousness. It’s a mirror I can see myself in. The ‘I am’ feeling – the sense of ‘I-Amness’. All the way through one’s life, the constant. It’s the same today as it was when I was 9 years old. Absolute subjectivity.

‘Consciousness veils itself from itself by pretending to limit itself to a separate entity and then forgets that it is pretending.’ [‘The Transparency of Things’, Rupert Spira]

We take other photos of the rest of the food things brought by M’s mum and here they are:

1. (below) Kao nyaow: glutinous rice cooked in banana leaves

2. (below) Ground nuts, the original version of the salted peanuts we buy in a can. They’re actually a purplish-green colour.

3. (below) Thai kanom: a glutinous rice paste flavoured with panyan

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References to Absolute Subjectivity taken from a Ken Wilbur video: Subject becomes object.

The title of this post: ‘where I’m calling from’ is taken from a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver

constructed reality

Posted on August 31, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD♯06: Bangkok: Standing outside the house in the shade of a large tree, waiting for the taxi to the airport. The brightness of the sun is tremendous, colours are vivid, the world is a high resolution Photoshop enhancement. After the eye surgery I feel like a nocturnal creature, squinting in the daylight, a quiet presence behind sunglasses. I have an attachment to darkness, I’d like it to be dark, dull and rainy today but instead it feels like I’m in a television studio. The light penetrates everything. There are no real seasons in Thailand, no markers in the calendar to say where we are in the annual cycle. The weather is the same every day. Night comes at 6pm, instant darkness, then at 6am, instant daylight and each day is pretty much like the one before. The days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. The whole thing is just one very long, continuous day, and night is the blink of an eye.

Time disappears, people are startled to discover they have aged… wake up one day to discover they’re old – life has gone. Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and woke up with a very long beard. The story is based on an Orkney folktale about an inebriated fiddler, late one night on his way home, hears some wonderful music and discovers a group of magical beings dancing in a circle. He plays his fiddle with them for a while and continues on his way home. When he arrives he discovers fifty years have passed; people have died, his daughter is middle-aged, her children are grown up. We don’t see the true nature of the world. Reality is thought to be what is out ‘there’, perceptions based on received sensory data input: what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell – and what we ‘think’ it is. What we recognize as a particular colour, is seen by an insect as ultra-violet, by a snake as infra-red. Who are we to say our view of the world is exactly what it is? The ground appears to be solid, terra firma even though the planet is spinning around, hurtling through outer space at thousands of miles an hour. Things are not what they seem to be.

A bright pink and white taxi approaches the house, enters the driveway and fills my vision. Bags inside, door slam, reverse out and we’re gone.

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‘… there are no colors in the real world… there are no textures in the real world. There are no fragrances in the real world. There is no beauty; there is no ugliness… Out there is a chaos of energy soup and energy fields. Literally. We take that and somewhere inside ourselves we create a world. Somewhere inside ourselves it all happens.’ [Sir John Eckles, Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine 1963]

a small island

Posted on July 31, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #03: London: Writing this on the new iPhone I bought in Apple Store, Covent Garden. Takes some getting used to. The keyboard is tiny; index finger placed on the letter key blocks out the whole letter – fingers too thick. The letters ‘O’ and ‘P’ are difficult, and when I type ‘M’, I hit the backspace instead. Jiab can do it okay, she has fingers as thin as flower stalks. Maybe I’ll give it to her…? A friend fixed me up with a blue-tooth keyboard and small projector (Optima). I’m using the image on the wall like a screen. Uploading the post to WordPress is possible with wordpress mobile but only with a good Wi-Fi connection. Interesting to work in miniature like this – there’s something about the smallness of it that suits things here in UK.

We’re in a tiny hotel room, just enough space for everything. The streets outside accommodate pedestrians on the pavement, and a narrow road allows the big black taxicabs to rush by. Could be a claustrophobic feeling if you think about it too much, compressed, economy of space provision. Don’t think about it. Japan is the same, squeezed into a little country. It is a small island, travel across from East to West and you come to the sea again – I am marooned. Geographical aloneness. The world is out ‘there’. I remember the separateness; the belief in a ‘self’ but seeing only the lack of it, and nearly a lifetime is taken up with looking for the answer to this conundrum – seeking. Now coming back from Thailand where I’m living in somebody else’s country, an outsider, and finding that it’s been so long since I was in the UK, where I was born, I’ve become an outsider here too. Can’t relate to this culture; holding on to a UK identity and there’s really not anything to support it, just my attachment. Most people I knew then are gone, I’m a homeless person, staying in hotels, staying with people I met in Buddhist groups, friends, and at Buddhist monasteries on the way.

Pretty nearly everyone here is an outsider, a visitor. So many different languages: Italian, Japanese, French, South American and others – where are the English people? It’s the holiday season, maybe they’re in someone else’s country too, being outsiders there? All the staff in hotels, restaurants and shops are East Europeans. Visitors come here and what they see is a system run by other visitors to England. A picture of England; a picture of reality – when was it not like this? Buildings and statues of eminent Victorians, a solitary man standing alone, high up there on a plinth, pigeons sit on his head. Splendid isolation, tourists take pictures of each other standing next to the man’s name carved in the stone of the base of the statue’s plinth and up above he’s there, looking out at other statues. I feel I should know who he is, I’m British, I should know… but you’d have to have studied history to know that. I can’t remember, it couldn’t have been important to me. All I see here is a monument to ‘self’, the grandeur of it escapes me. But it was important to the people of that time; statues, ornate buildings, the opulence and wealth of the Empire recorded in history. Such a great achievement, such a small country. This was. Can’t help reflecting on the fact that it’s all a fiction created by the storytellers of the day about a reality somewhere else, far away – samsara, stories from a small island.

‘There is a path to walk on, walking is being done but there is no traveller. There are deeds but there is no doer. There is no self. The thought of a self is an error and all existences are as empty as whirling water bubbles, as hollow as the plantain tree. There’s a blowing of the air but no wind that does the blowing. There is no self, there is no transmigration of a self; there are deeds and the continued effect of deeds…’ [Ramesh S. Balsekar, ‘Advaita, the Buddha and the Unbroken Whole’]

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Optoma projector on gorilla tripod keyboard and iPhone

before the story begins

Posted on April 30, 2013 by tiramit

Delhi/Bangkok flight: People don’t normally go to Thailand for their holiday in the middle of the hot season – highs of 40°C – mad dogs and Englishmen… No passengers, plane is nearly empty, fortunate for me with this back pain I’ve had for more than a week now. I set off on this journey knowing that really the last thing I’d want to be doing is getting into the overcrowded economy class section with no room to move. But the good kamma of plenty room today, I can position myself in the chair so there’s no discomfort and able to quietly contemplate the clouds in the sky. Everything seems so still, not really comprehending the phenomenon of travelling at 500 mph – 1 mile in seven seconds? I count to seven: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 and one mile further on. Hmmm, it feels like everything is stable and down-to-earth; stewardess smiles sweetly: something to drink sir?… I feel I’m a bunch of time-stretched-out spaghetti strings, going most of the way back to the point of departure.

Consciously watch the breathing and the mind settles. Soon there’s the quiet space of no thinking. Watch the breath for a while but then, after a moment, something triggers thought again. A story starts up and I remember Lisa’s post, Doing Nothing Out of Anger: ‘…we have to get the story of it going in our head’. Without the story, it doesn’t happen. Usually you fall into it and it’s more to do with convincing yourself it’s like this, rather than it actually really being ‘this’. But there’s the small space just before it locks in and I can see that this is the last opportunity to consciously let go of the story-building, and be aware of the unchecked habituality that’s there for no good reason.

I read something about this in Rory’s blog/Tao Te Ching 12: The Inner World: ‘It’s been estimated that we think around 60,000 thoughts each day… probably over 90% of them are simply recycled from yesterday and the day before…’ Thoughts about absolutely everything – most of the world is inside your head. No wonder the space of no-thought is such a novelty to discover, no stories unfolding. Training the mind to consciously monitor the randomness, yoniso manasikara, contemplate the act of thinking with focus and concentration.

Mind settles again in the space of no thought, no end, no beginning, everything is always in present time, no past, no future… then, in the mind’s eye, I’m with my mother in the Care Home, holding her hand and she stops breathing, I see the moment she dies and it’s like her last teaching to me: this is how you die son, just watch me… and I see her move from the present into the past – forever.

A long time spent coming to terms with the fact that all of that is now irretrievably in the past; there are memories but if I don’t start the thinking process, there’s nothing there. Sometimes finding myself cast away on a small island of thought with stories like this, then the peace returns, sound of the aircraft. No thought, not trying to find it, not engaging with the story of it. We’re all just seeing ‘the seeing of it’. There’s something about the human reaction to the world, sensory organs mostly positioned around the face, so the head moves in response to functions of eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin and mind – the mind and stories, the ubiquity of the story.

The story is everywhere and it’s necessary to see the input clearly and the habituality. As far as possible let there be no reason for Mind to step in and take control, create the story of ‘me’; someone at the receiving end and the whole subject/object duality starts up. Without that there’s just the sensory receptors and our shared world. There isn’t anything else to be done; only to ‘see’ the reality – seeing the seeing; awareness of the awareness; knowing the knowing. ‘I’ am not creating it. Awareness has somehow sidestepped that. Seeing the events without the story.

On a journey like this, you somehow think that, at the destination, that’ll be the end – no more stories. But you arrive and there’s just another set of stories going on and we’re always only part the way through whatever story it is – same as what’s going on with everyone, everywhere else in the world, all at the same time.

Landing at Bangkok, yawn and swivel the lower jaw to release trapped air in the cranial passages; ears go ‘pop’ and a whole new 3D sound enters…. didn’t realize how cotton-wooly it was before. Ah well, so which gate are we coming in at? There’s a long walk to the domestic terminal and the next flight to Ch’mai…

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inevitability of circumstances

Posted on April 17, 2013 by tiramit

A LONG TIME AGO I had the idea to write a book. It was 1983, I’d just started travelling around Asia and all this colourful, exotic stuff around me, I’d never seen before. So I started making notes. That was okay but I got stuck with it; no story-line, no plot and, for a while, I thought the story could be a kind of unfolding of events as they went along… but this was too wide, I needed to narrow things down a bit. Too complex, it’d give me a headache. I kept on making notes, anyway, believing that a story would reveal itself in the course of time, but it never did and I never figured it out. Years went by and I just carried on with more and more notes. Now I’ve got five A4-sized ring folders of typed notes I managed to print out from an old hard drive just before it finally crashed about 10 years ago, and I’m scanning these back into text files bit by bit. Also there are all these little old notebooks full of scribbles I have difficulty deciphering today – it’s like they were written by somebody else. I’m telling you this because this is how the blog came into being. The posts are developed from these old notes; you could say, altogether, this is the book I never wrote.

The difference is there’s a distance now that wasn’t there then. There’s no obvious author, thoughts without a thinker, it’s very much more indirect than it was. There are these faded old notes written by the younger me, on yellowing paper, etched into the surface with a dried-out ball-point pen and I don’t remember half of it. Now they seem to be a bit reckless, stepping into that magical world of heightened feelings that generates a kind of gripping intensity: the experience itself… what’s this? what’s that? Things had to be written down quickly before they’d disappear and I’d not be able to remember, suddenly – wow! gone, they’d vanish and all I’d have were the fragments of their being there.

Of course, it was stress all the way; trying to hold on when holding-on wasn’t needed. The urgency of it going past too fast, whole scenarios flashing by like buildings seen through the windows of a moving vehicle and you see this shadowy reflection of yourself in glazed shop windows, looking out from a taxi or bus or car and always in the same position: the point of reference… Then I started to slow down, one thought-moment, then another thought-moment – we can’t have two thoughts at the same time – thinking is the linking thing. And eventually I arrived at an understanding that this is what the process is; a mindful effort to experience consciousness of the real live situation as it’s going along. Haphazard things that before just seemed to fit in as happy coincidences, came to be more like a recognition that all things are related anyway; similarities that link parts of the story together in a kind of inevitability of circumstances.

So there’s now this quiet familiarity, and it’s more relaxed. Being free of the great rush that lasted all these years, I reckon I’ve arrived… yes, that’s it, the purpose in life has been achieved. I can see, though, there’s also something here that tells me it could be that I’m just experiencing normality. Isn’t this just ordinary reality? Isn’t this, in fact, the place where ‘normal’ people abide all their days, and what’s been happening is I’ve been practising brinkmanship, acting slightly mad all these years and have only returned to ordinariness? Ah well, whatever… I’m pleased because how could you not be? How much better and more mindful it is now compared to how it was then. And, okay, the transformation from that to this maybe makes it seem like something more than it is. Well, ho hum, it could be that the release from that samsara is all that can be achieved in one lifetime and just being happy with small miracles is all there is – nothing else needs to be done. So I go on here in this quiet place with the pleasantness of simple things and every day seems quite wonderful.

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