one in five hundred

Posted on April 5, 2013 by tiramit

Suvarnabhumi airport: 05.30 hours, enter the check-in hall, and I’m one in a great sea of people, all pushing trolleys with luggage… amazing; takes my breath away. It seems to be divided equally over two check-in areas: H on the left, and J on the right. Quick decision, go right – I’m at the end of the line, I’m the last… I’ll miss the plane! Everybody is stumbling along, dismayed: how could it be like this? The slow-shuffle, steadily moving down a very long, snake-like line, doubling back on itself, for five rows – looks like about 100 persons in each line, 500 people in front? The paranoia of individuals acting-out in wild queue-jumping behaviour arises (protecting my place in the line…) then that ceases. Relax, watch the breath, and observe reactions: a narrative of events in the mind. Seeing it happening as I’m going along; emotions rising and falling like sailing over these large waves on the sea. Stormy thoughts rise up and activate the red light: stop thinking! There’s the experience of intense contraction in the mind and immediately there’s the insight into letting go of it, drop that one now. Back to watching the breath again.

Lose track of time and later I check my watch and realize it has taken about an hour to reach the check-in desk where I have to show my passport and get the space on the plane I paid for. Then it’s done, I’m processed, got boarding pass, making my way through the multitudes, contemplating thoughts on an archetype of Asian migrations and, always, there are 500 people in front. At the toilets 500 people ahead of me, into immigration and the continuing capacity flow of 500 people is passing through. In the larger departure areas there’s an ocean of people as far as the eye can see, and at my gate, again 500. Flight is boarding and the capacity of the plane is around 500. Take off and all 500 of us mind/body units are airborne…

Airline staff serves the meal, feeding the five hundred – sounds biblical. Through the window, sky, clouds, and the surface of the planet. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of life, a microscopic cell. The body is allotted a space in a chair moulded to fit, takes up volume and weight. The body composed of the four elements: earth, water, fire and air, is something like a car battery, positive and negative poles, chemical reactions, and the mind is the energy that comes from that, the nama-rupa compound. Who ‘I’ am is not important, and the idea that it is ‘something’ (it is ‘me’) is a concept, a digital display that comes with the software. The whole thing is more like ‘process’, a connectedness on every level. Origin unknown, just believing in an external creator doesn’t seem to be it – the only reason that comes to mind is my own Christian conditioning as a child. I need to investigate this. The metaphor helps me to transcend my existing situation, figures of speech; other than that it’s all speculative conjecture. How can I see it in any other way? Anything else beyond this present conscious state must be so remote from what I presently know that none of the rules I’m familiar with apply. I’m in awe – I simply don’t know….

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‘… radiant emptiness should not be mistaken for the pure emptiness of Nibbana. The two are as different as night and day. The radiant mind is the original mind of the cycle of constant becoming; but it is not the essence of mind which is fully pure and free from birth and death. Radiance is a very subtle, natural condition whose uniform brightness and clarity make it appear empty. This is your original nature beyond name and form. But it is not yet Nibbana. It is the very substance of mind that has been well-cleansed to the point where a mesmerizing and majestic quality of knowing is its outstanding feature. When the mind finally relinquishes all attachment to forms and concepts, the knowing essence assumes exceedingly refined qualities. It has let go of everything – except itself. It remains permeated by a fundamental delusion about its own true nature. Because of that, the radiant essence has turned into a subtle form of self without you realizing it. You end up believing that the subtle feelings of happiness and the shining radiance are the unconditioned essence of mind. Oblivious to your delusion, you accept this majestic mind as the finished product. You believe it to be Nibbana, the transcendent emptiness of pure mind.’ [Luangta Maha Boowa]

photo image, dreamstime: http://www.dreamstime.com/pier-free-stock-photography-imagefree198297

seemingly continuous

Posted on March 25, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: 05.00 hours. Darkness of early morning. I can hear a motorbike some way off, coming nearer, and voices talking loudly. They’re shouting to be heard over the sound of the engine. The motorbike passes below my balcony on the third floor, sound fills the room, and I realize it’s the driver with a friend on the back having a converstation as they are going along. Curious acoustics here in this narrow street; concrete and glass buildings face each other. The sound of the two voices disappears quickly past my windows and moves on further down the street, contained in the little capsule of their moving world. I hear it again, faintly now, and fading into the distance.

Strange dream-like event; receiving pieces of an animated conversation moving past me at 30 mph. Then it’s gone from my auditory awareness and (I assume) is being heard by other people further along the street. There’s something here about consciousness creating a sense of continuity; like how you string beads on a necklace and it appears to be one whole piece. A continuous stream of individual events taking place and, in the context of the body, it appears to be one, on-going connected reality – an illusion. When I wake up in the morning, it takes a moment, and everything is a development of the night before.

It must have been the motorbike that woke me up; windows wide open all night in the hot air, with just the mosquito mesh separating me from the world outside. Only 20 miles to go, straight up in the sky, before you reach outer space; no gravity, the universe (where did I read that?). Wow! outer space is so near, half an hour’s drive to get there, if there’s no traffic problem. So, what does that feel like? I suppose it feels pretty… precarious, balanced on the end of a flagpole fixed on top of a monument – the absolute verticality of it… quite scary. The only thing that gives me any sense of stability is the ‘self’ I’m inclined to depend on sometimes? No wonder there’s this tremendous attachment to it; can’t let it go, irretrievably lost in thought; I am contained in this body, stumbling around in this small area I inhabit, on the surface of the planet. I am a bit uncomfortable with the reality of what exists only 20 miles above my head. And go through life assuming that all there ever is, or all there ever can be, is ‘me’; the experience of a created self.

I hear a sound, and think: if that sound is out ‘there’ then I must be hearing it in ‘here’: the subject/object duality: ‘I’ am my body, I am my feelings, I am my consciousness and everything else (that’s not ‘me’) is out ‘there.’ In here, I’m me, I have a personality, it’s myself. And Bert0001 refers to it as: the ‘my’ in ‘myself.’ A distinct feeling of focus that disincludes other evidence – it’s all about me. Fortunately, I can understand and know that the idea of a self just seems to be there, seemingly continuous – a kind of mirage. Delete the ‘my’ from ‘myself’ and I’m free of all the tugs and pulls of likes and dislikes, emotions are not ‘my’ emotions, they’re just emotions; things that happen – liberated from the papañca, proliferating concepts, and concocted thought trying to make something real that’s just not real at all.

I’m glad to be awake early, leaving this place tomorrow and I’ll have to pack bags and get ready. Why can’t I just walk on to the plane not check in any bags at all, only passport, ticket and the contents of my pockets? Why bother with luggage? Ah… if only life were so simple.

Some time after this I hear the Tuk-kae lizard chuckling in a corner somewhere: tuk-kae-tuk-kae tuk-kae. And the Coucal, (whoop-whoop bird) (centropus sinensis) clambering around in the branches; whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop…

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‘Just as a monkey moving through the forest or the woods holds on to a branch, lets it go and holds on to another; in the same way what we call viññāṇa (consciousness) arises as one thing and ceases as another, by day and by night.’ [SN.II.95]

References in this post: Sue Hamilton: ‘Identity and Experience’

Photo: Buddhist shrine in Bhutan, collection Khun Pornchai

applied knowing

Posted on March 21, 2013 by tiramit

‘Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God.’ [Thomas Merton, from: ‘The Intimate Merton’]

Chiang Mai: Standing by the main road facing traffic going into town, looking for the small red bus songthaew /song-tae-oo/. I see one coming in the distance. This time of day there’s always one nearby. It’ll go anywhere you want, the driver will fit you in, depending on the itinerary of the passengers already on board – so the journey may take a different route every time. That’s how it works; 20 baht (US: 69 cents) for a ride to nearly anywhere. There’s no designated route, no schedule, the songthaew just comes along and it’s a bit like jumping into a flowing river, holding on to a lifebelt and somehow it gets you there. I see the indicator light flashing, the songthaew stops, I tell the (lady) driver where I’m going, she says ok. I climb up two steps and get into the vehicle. Low headroom, sit down on the bench, smile at the other passengers, and fall into the mind-state of being taken away.

The outside world rushes by, seen through the open rear door of the vehicle and side windows with no glass; warm air rushes through. The way it unfolds is the way it is and everything is integrated, including my perception of it. The ‘world’ is the metal structure of this small vehicle enclosing the space I’m in; contained in the greater space all around and permeating through. Moving with the traffic next to the canal, water fountains, huge ancient trees and the remains of a 700 year-old wall that encloses the old city in a square. Same ‘now’ as it was then; being in the present moment at that time is as it is now, seven hundred years further on; or just a few seconds later, more-or-less the same. Conscious experience appears like a series of screen shots, holding the movement for a moment and it stays like that, then it changes slightly and becomes something else. Difficult to say how or when it alters but I notice it has changed only afterwards – like, that’s different from what it was a moment ago, isn’t it? It must have happened and I didn’t see it. Present time transforms itself. 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 every time and seeing the situation from the perspective of ‘self.’

It’s not anything, the only reason it’s there is that I linger with the idea of it. I can enter knowingly; I can consciously apply ‘knowing’ to the ‘self’ construct, applied knowing (not the theoretical kind), and the knowingness clears away the habituality. Thoughts that just wander for no reason are brought to an end by knowing that this is what it comes down to. ‘Every time I close the door on Reality, it comes in through the window.’ [Ashleigh Brilliant] 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. There’s identity but it’s nothing other than what it is; the personality flutters like a piece of cloth in the wind; coloured plumage of a bird and a sense of immensity occupies the entire background.

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‘Perception… can easily be seized on as having a self-reality or as one’s self. The average villager likes to say that when we fall asleep, something that he calls the soul departs from the body. The body is, then, like a log of wood, receiving no sensation by way of eye, ear, nose, tongue, or body. As soon as that something has returned to the body, awareness and wakefulness are restored. A great many people have this naive belief that consciousness is the self. But, as the Buddha taught, consciousness is not a self in this sense. Consciousness is simply sensation and memory, that is, knowing, and is bound to be present as long as the body continues to function normally. As soon as the bodily functions become disrupted, the thing we call consciousness changes or ceases to function. For this reason true Buddhists refuse to accept consciousness as a self, even though the average person does accept it as such, clinging to it as “myself.” Close examination along Buddhist lines reveals that quite the opposite is the case. Consciousness is nobody’s self at all. It is simply a result of natural processes and nothing more.’ [Ajahn Buddhadasa, ‘The Things We Cling To’]

Upper photo: Chiang Mai tuktuk, lower photo: Songthaew

memories and the wind

Posted on March 4, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: Gusty warm winds blow through the trees in the park, rustling the leaves and swishing the branches like the sound of waves breaking on the shore. The pigeons are exhilarated by it, flying over at tremendous speeds past me here sitting on the roof terrace, watching them now swoop up above my head – so actively engaged with the mechanism of flight, it’s as if the movements of their wings and the movement of the air are one and the same thing. A wind like this is energy to the birds; it’s a dance. Flight is an expression of the air displacement itself – flying and the wind – ground level is not the reference point; ‘up’ is not necessarily up and neither is down. I see them caught in rapid flight; a stationary moment in the air, suspended in time and space, then an audible flap of wingtip and change in direction.

This wind buffeting me around, hair whiplash on the forehead and the pages of my notebook suddenly leap and turn over on the spiral binding, fluttering through all my various handwritten notes over the last month. In this way, the wind blows through ‘mind’, stirring memories and things from the past, held for years, and released, they come flooding into present time. Each memory stays as long as it takes to examine, and the fullest extent remembered, like meeting an old friend. Time disappears for how long it takes to tell the story and, towards the end of the memory stream, the space behind is seen shining through, the images become transparent and vanish.

The next memory arrives after a moment, I examine that and it disappears like the others. It goes on like this, a collection of things from long ago and far away. Allowing thoughts to go by, unheld, uncaught – the opposite of catching fish; consciously unhooking fish-thoughts caught in the mind at some earlier time; letting them go free and they swim away. Memory stream moves from one moment to the next and I can’t actually see these moments… is this it? Is this the next moment? Is this it, now? Can’t be measured like that; just the circumstance itself; the situations and occurrences follow one another – not a sequence in time, it’s dependent on the nature of the events, there’s a linking that groups them together like coloured beads strung on a necklace.

Going back to Thailand tomorrow where it’ll be hotter than a locked laundromat dryer. Ah well, better go pack my bag now and… has the next moment arrived yet? The mental images and fragments have reformed themselves in the endless stream of things? Can we say, possibly, yes, this is, actually the next moment? If so, I must have missed it, everything seems like it’s in the past again…

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[Includes excerpts from: Birds on the Balcony 4]

‘Unhooking fish’ taken from an original idea by TJH

Photo image: dreamstime

how it seems (2)

Posted on March 1, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: Travelling across town, Shym is driving. He drives slowly and carefully, surrounded by vehicles honking their horns, cutting in on the nearside; they don’t like it that he’s driving slowly. But Shym remains calm – much ado about nothing – he’s an older man. Out there, fierce displays of male feathers in a ritual display resemble pure outrage, shouts and gestures through wound-down windows. If looks could kill… eyes sparkling with diamonds of malice, giving him ‘the daggers’…. Shym stays solidly as he is. Ah well, people, you can’t always get what you want. Sometimes you’re just stuck with it, you know? It’s how you respond to that unhappy state of ungratified wanting that determines the future for you; cause/effect – if you react with anger, it’ll lead to more anger. But these drivers seem to have gone way past that stage: up-to-their-eyes in the world of anger. Without their anger there’s no purpose in life. They thrive on the struggle; mythical realms of the Titans, and the Asuras, declaring a state of war that lasts an eternity. All this doesn’t phase Shym, at the correct time he slides the steering wheel slowly through his fingertips, indicators flashing clicka-clicka-clicka, telling the world, I am now turning right, and the car sweeps around like a large boat in a wide arc. The surrounding traffic forced to move out of the way. The response is plosive, to say the least. But, well that’s just how it is.

I’m sitting in the back, looking out through tinted windows, incognito, people can’t see me in here – a car wearing dark glasses. Nobody knows I’m inside, the voyeur, the invisible man, looking out at the world all around. I feel like I’m not here. Everything passing by outside the windows of the car; events come and go, arrive and leave. Things occur in random order and drift away without leaving anything behind, video images recorded on security cameras from various places in the 360 degree coverage, showing the car entering the car park, that I’ll never see. I say something to Shym and I hear my own voice in the acoustics of the car; the sound of it causes me to pause for a moment. Everything stops… it takes an effort to get started again. Before it happens, just this silent space. The body feels light and I’m seeing through it.

We turn into the car park. Parking attendant looks like ex-military, sharp uniform, whistle held in his teeth, a piercing blast, signals for us to go left but Shym indicates right. Outrage, more whistle blasts, and he comes up to the car, peers in through the tinted glass, hand cupping the space around his eyes to shade from the sun, I see a large bristly moustache and yellow teeth, the glass fogs up slightly and there are small bits of spittle from his hot breath and shouted words. But Shym gently points with an inclination of the body and politely insists that he’d prefer to go right, not left. More displays of warlike behaviour but I can see this is an act, it’s only how it seems to be. So we are allowed to go right, there’s no problem.

I’m amazed how this system works. All my assumptions are wrong. Attachment due to causes and conditions, that’s all. It’s like everything is a continuation of how things have been; inherited from some former time, or former life, the outcome of actions still hanging around due to tanha, attachments… velcro fastenings, super glue, magnets, welded bridge structures and all the mind stuff about wanting things to be like this or like that or wanting things to be different from what they are. The created ‘self,’ seeing the world according to likes, dislikes and preferences, obscures cessation; doesn’t see that things stay as they are only for as long as it takes. Then it all dissolves in a myriad of changes, disintegrates, crumbles away. We can’t hold on to anything. It all comes to an end.

[Link to: how it seems (1)]

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‘…when attention is drawn to the presence of the Knower, to that which knows and experiences, whatever that is, it immediately becomes obvious that there is something present that is conscious of the body, the mind and the world. As we do this, whatever it is that knows seems suddenly to become more present. It shines. In fact it is simply discovered to have been always present, but apparently eclipsed by our exclusive focus on the known.’ [Rupert Spira, ‘The Transparency of Things’]

space and thoughts

Posted on February 26, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: It’s that Sunday morning feeling again; so silent, the neighbour’s dog feels uneasy about barking too loudly – maybe there’s nothing to bark at. Sadly, it walks to its place on the balcony and looks out… nope, still nothing happening out there. No intruders on the property, no people anywhere to be seen. The world is asleep… the zzz, zzz ZZZZZs, slow breathing of sleep; the no-work-today comfort zone. No need to get up until early afternoon. Sleeping off the excesses of the night before; dinner started at 10pm and the party went on until sometime after two o’clock in the morning.

I didn’t get to sleep until late but it wasn’t because of partying, it was the neighbour (not the ‘dog’ neighbour, the other one). These people decided to have a medium/large social event last night – verging on the mildly-obstreperous. The noise and kerfuffle became kinda abstract to me, drifting in a coma of half-sleep, sounding not like people having a party, more like a party among the animals at the zoo; two or three hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) trying to get comfortable in a room too small for them – getting up and sitting down again and disturbing each other in the process, smashing small breakable things, reversing into corners and making squelchy sounds along the side of the wall with their great weight squidging around awkwardly. Slightly frenzied but not ‘losing it.’ A bit farmyardish too, with yelps and howls, crowing chickens and meowing cats and geese and ducks; somebody with hiccups. On the other side, the dog barking on the balcony – dogs of the mind bark – and the whole thing reached a kind of pandemonium of people talking over each other in a flowing jibberish of words, scraps of music mindlessly playing in two different places, punctuated with the odd crash, squeak and shout. Other percussive noises, the smell of beer floating out into the air and a cloud of cigarette smoke from men standing outside the house, speaking on the phone, lengthy shouted monologues in a language I don’t understand.

It’s really noticeable that the mind grabs at something immediately; velcro fastening, unpleasant rip as it comes apart, so you leave it attached: Yep, I could get really angry about this… There is nothing pleasant about this feeling at all, no reason for it to be there other than simply the desire it has to adhere-to, and ‘be’ something. It’s ‘birth’ in the Buddhist sense. No matter how mindful I am, there’s that driven brooding thing, the scenarios of outrage. I concentrate on letting the mind untangle itself from the problem; just letting it get on with it; it goes away for a while. Then it comes back again and eventually I move through to the front room, wrap myself in a blanket, sit on the cushion, and get ready to remain there until it’s over – watch the breath…

See where the mind leads, where it goes how it reacts to ‘me’ trying to hold it, how it is able to concentrate and how it does that. A bit like getting to know it as if it were a stranger, rather than thinking it’s ‘me’ and I can control it. It really is undeniably noisy next door, it needs attention and I give it what it needs and what’s left over gets focussed on the struggle to be in a state of peace – not a placid thing, mostly it’s like swimming in dangerous waters, but knowing that as long as mindfulness is maintained, there’s no threat at all from the carnivorous species of the deep. Just letting them be there. Anger/distress is a passing mental state, same as everything else, nothing special.

There is the body, the heat, the cold, the hard, the soft, and the thinking mind starts to drift. Let it go where it wants; a sense of travelling behind it, follow it, be curious about where it goes. Disengage from the attachment, just enough to feel safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, flying around dangerously and ricocheting off the walls and ceiling.

There is Rupert Spira’s example [Link below] about a room filled with people. ‘I’ am the space in the room, the people are my thoughts and images, bodily sensations and world perceptions. All kinds of people in the room, large, small, kind, unkind, intelligent, unintelligent, loud, quiet, friendly, unfriendly, etc…, each doing their own thing. But what they do or say has no effect on ‘I’, the space of the room. The space is there now and it will be there when the people go home. The space, is/was there before the building was constructed and will be present after it is demolished, it’s always present.

Now it’s later, the morning after. Am I the only one awake? So quiet, the electric hiss of the computer seems loud. It may have been on a morning like this, in those historical times, that Siddhartha Gotama, the prince who became the Buddha, woke up in the rooms in the palace, where the endless parties had taken place, surveyed the devastation of spilt drinks and furniture tumbled over, and seen the true reality of the event… he just knew, this is not where it’s at. Left the palace, gave away everything he possessed and set off across the landscape…

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‘Our objective experience consists of thoughts and images, which we call the mind; sensations, which we call the body; and sense perceptions, which we call the world. In fact we do not experience a mind, a body or a world as such. We experience thinking, sensing and perceiving. In fact all that we perceive are our perceptions. We have no evidence that a world exists outside our perception of it. We do not perceive a world ‘out there.’ We perceive our perception of the world and all perception takes places in Consciousness.’ [‘The Transparency of Things’, Rupert Spira]

being here

Posted on February 11, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: This is the 100th post! I feel like I should celebrate, I’m a blogger centenarian! But still a youngster, I think. Many bloggers are much older than me. So, what’s going on here? This blog is about the Buddha’s teachings, Advaita Vedanta, non-duality. I went public on July 6th, 2012 and I’ve been putting up new posts every three days, mostly, since that time. Now it’s ‘The One Hundredth’, and I was going to use that title for this post but it’s been used already – the 100th in the TV series: ‘Friends.’ The dhammafootsteps blog is, of course, about reaching out to friends, but the discussion is about just being ‘here.’ We’re all here in our various states of being, in different parts of the world; in different time zones and we’re all individually contemplating our own experience of being ‘here.’ Blogging is a good medium for this kind of thing because, just being ‘here’ is what everybody is talking about or describing, one way or another – isn’t it?

Here’s something from: Beyond The Dream: ‘…the awareness that looked out of our eyes as a five year old is the awareness that’s looking out of our eyes now.’ When I read that sentence it had a curious effect; there was an instant understanding of what being ‘here’ means. Then the next thought was, what is ‘the awareness’? And it’s a good question, that one, you can just go on asking it…. It’s like trying to understand sati-sampajañña, clear comprehension; what does that mean? And maybe I’m off somewhere searching for the meaning of clear comprehension, overlooking the fact that all the confusion is still there in my head. So, I’ll never find clear comprehension that way, because every time I think I’ve found it, the confusion just jumps up in its place. Eventually I realize clear comprehension means understanding the confusion. It has to be that way; clear comprehension of the confusion, and not some kind of desired state of clarity that doesn’t exist. The confusion is, I can’t see reality because I’m too engaged with the idea of it.

In the West we suffer from the creator-god condition; God made the world so the world and God are two separate things. I see the world from some impossible place outside of it; I’m on shaky ground here, in control mode, there’s the paranoia of thinking I can’t let it go and the fear of having to hold on indefinitely. All the clutter and stuff and mental goings-on and stumbling over all the indistinct, half-seen, misunderstood truths – believing that this is what life is about. Not able to see that it just doesn’t matter what kind of story is showing on the screen, it’s all fiction, created by the mind, arising and ceasing, dependent on causes and conditions and the karmic outcome of past events.

The mind doesn’t create awareness, mind is contained in the awareness. It’s something like, awareness is there, I just think I can’t see it. Thinking I can’t see it, is another mind moment that exists temporarily in the awareness. Being here is about getting to know everything there is to know about what that means….

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somewhere over the rainbow

Posted on February 5, 2013 by tiramit

Bangkok-Delhi flight: Something happens to interrupt the dream… it wakes me up and I remember I’m on the plane. It’s a window seat, clouds outside and a huge horizon – the curvature of the earth. Here in the confines of economy class, the large man next to me wears a short-sleeved shirt and has hairy arms, the passenger in front has extended his seat all the way back, and it’s like his head is in my lap. I feel I’m part of the South Asian population already. Stewardess announcement: ‘raydee and gentermens…’ Thai, mispronunciation of the L and R consonant and a plurality problem, ‘.. ensure window shades are up, armrest is down, fold away table up, and chair forward… If I think too much about it, I get lost with the instructions. ‘And this concludes our fright service…’ Reminds me of a flight to Jakarta once; and the last part of the stewardess announcement: ‘… and the penalty for dlug tlafficking is death, thank you.’

The final part of the Woody Allen movie I was watching before I went to sleep is still showing on the screens. I don’t have the sound plugged in, just looking at the actors fumbling around like serious, grown-up children. The ‘I’ metaphor is an image projected on a screen; reassuring in the midst of our existential anxiety. Consciousness plays the game of hide-and-seek, concealment and obscuring – if consciousness is revealing itself, it means it’s also obscuring itself and things appear to be what they are not. Woody Allen has a cartoon face, he was born with it, that was/is his destiny. I plug-in the sound to see what it’s about – the idleness of it is immense, samsara, conversations of no consequence unravel here during the time it takes from departure point A, to arrival point B at the speed of 600 miles per hour.

Watching other people looking around, heads spinning left and right, down, up, coordinating body movements; going along the aisles and coming back to their seat, holding on to chair backs as they go, simply occupied with the physicality of being in the limited interior of this aircraft, mesmerized by the phenomenon of individuality. There’s not anything beyond the mind’s perception of itself as the leading actor in this movie; the assumption is that, one way or another, everything coming through the sense gates and into the mind is about ‘me.’

‘Infinite being playing the game of limited being. The limited being is a construct we’ve taken on; it’s like this because the infinite being that we are isn’t bothered by limitations and permits everything with infinite love…’ [David Bingham, Conscious TV]

Plane tilts over and makes a left-hand turn. Sunlight comes in through the cabin windows on the right side and sweeps around the interior as the plane changes direction, circles around and goes into descent. It’s as if it were a flying house, spinning around on its axis (We’re not in Kansas anymore, says Dorothy to Toto. We must be somewhere over the rainbow.’) Audio switched on; music for arriving. Slow calm triumphant music has a kind of congratulatory sound; the final approach; our journey’s end. And the digital map of the world shown on the monitor has the illuminated flight path BKK/DEL as a diagonal line about 30 degrees North East with the small icon of the plane now circling over New Delhi – population 16 million, including rural/urban seasonal migrants. A few moments later: BUMP BUMP wheels touch down on runway. Population increased by one planeload.

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‘I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens’ [Woody Allen]

castles made of sand

Posted on January 22, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Traffic congestion at the intersection and everything comes to a standstill. The tuktuk driver makes some remark, I ask him what he’s saying and out comes a whole string of words I think I can’t understand. Then I start to recognise a few familiar vocabulary items and can reply with the same kind of observation. He laughs and says this thing I’ve never heard before: jai yen-yen (heart stay cool) jai ron mai dai (heart hot – not okay). So what now? He looks around to see if we can do a U-turn; not possible, we have to wait and see, and he switches off the engine. Sit back, relax, silence, it’s strange to be suddenly quiet after the large sound of the 2-stroke engine stops with the flick of a switch. Seems like another world; sitting on a sofa in someone’s living room, decorative chromium bars – an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor on wheels? The driver has photos of his family stuck above the windscreen, and decorative flower garlands swaying in this slight wind. No walls, a canvas roof and the outside world enters my space, like it’s always been here; the inside merged with the outside. Birds could fly through… it’s odd, just metallic creaks and the sound of other engines turning over. The smell of fuel, tarmac; this is somewhere in some part of town. Ah well, I’m glad it’s not too hot, we might be here for a while.

I could send someone a text message …reach for my phone – then resist the urge. Okay, so, what’s the plan? All things are now directed here: the Plan; an habitual thing from long ago, frequent updates, always in line with current changes. It’s a comfortable space I create in the mind and that’s okay but sometimes I feel compelled to have a plan about the Plan. Then a plan about the plan about the Plan. The Plan is an end in itself, detached from its location in some future time, it’s now placed in present time – more like a plan for the present moment. We’re always only part the way through anything, anywhere, anyway and never at the end – we just don’t know what happens after that. Nobody ever came back from What Happens After That to say what it was like… we just don’t know.

Nothing is permanent, anicca, but the intervals between change may be immense; it doesn’t change for a very, very long time – then it does. I have a vision of it coming to an end one day… there goes the world, collapsing like a dead star, all matter reduced to an atom… all gone in a flash. Or maybe it’ll be slower; bits start to fall off and you hardly notice. And there’ll come a time when the System and all who sail in her will begin to fall in on itself like great empires do that have spanned the centuries; in the end, become too unreal and like castles made of sand and all things subject to collapse, tumble to the sea – nothing is permanently permanent – eventually. But it depends how you choose to see it, of course. In a different kind of temporality, it would just arise again and pick up where it left off; a continuous unfolding transformation and that’s how it is, even as we speak.

Something happening up front, cars beginning to move, the driver switches on the engine and it starts up immediately, a few turns of the throttle and we’re suddenly not there anymore, away in an exhilaration of speed and noise….

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‘For many lives I have wandered, looking for, but not finding the house-builder who caused my suffering. But now you are seen and you shall build no more. Your rafters are dislodged and the ridge-pole is broken. All craving is ended; my heart is as one with the unmade’ [Dhammapada v.153-154]

the ‘I’ metaphor

Posted on January 19, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Contemplating birdsong here in this place, next to a wooded area and a very large tree in the early morning and there’s a male Koel bird on a branch somewhere repeating its call: ko-el, ko-el, ko-el! a two-syllable utterance, at measured intervals, getting louder and louder each time, reaching its peak and the bird stops for a breath. It starts again from low volume working up to high volume, The sound, ko-el echoes around in the spaces between the hard branches and trunks, the layers of foliage and around in the air into my space here in the room: ko-el, ko-el. The end of the sound –el collides with the beginning of the next sound in the sequence: ko- and for a moment it becomes more like: el-ko-el-ko-el-ko, smoothly presented in a unity the bird knows so well and I’m just discovering it.

The preception of the sound shifts back to ko-el, ko-el, contained in this space. And in the space contained in all the other rooms in this building, the corridors and passageways, as I go down to street level; the elevator and front lobby. The ko-el sound can be heard everywhere in the building. I know, of course, it just seems like the ko-el sound is contained in the building, it’s an illusion. In fact the ko-el sound and the whole building are contained in space; space holds all, there are no boundaries, no beginning, no end. The ko-el sound can be heard all along the street too.

Back upstairs again and I am in this space, the space is in me. I can say ‘I’ am here, meaning the fictional ‘self’arising from the five khandhas, the mechanisms that filter conscious experience received through the senses. And the ko-el sound reaching my ear convinces me that if there is sound, there must be somebody in here hearing it – and that’s ‘me.’ The belief in self is backed up by sensory data input through ear, eye, nose, mouth, feeling sensations and mind. I can hold on tight to this belief that I am ‘me’ but there’s really nobody there. I can let go of it. It’s a metaphor; it’s saying conscious experience ‘is’ individual identity – a figure of speech, a kind of analogy. Not real. The emphasis on it being the same as the object of comparison pushes the whole thing over the edge and it ‘becomes’ the object. In fact the conceptual metaphor is a tricky business….

My Western conditioning still struggles with the anatta teaching, and the misleading statement: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ [René Descartes] isn’t helpful. It’s like the opposite of what Buddhists know to be true. If Descartes had been a Buddhist, he might have said: ‘I think, therefore I am a thought construct’ …but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? What I think I am is not what I am. Thoughts think themselves, dependent on conditions arising from other conditions which are dependent on other conditions; peeling back the layers of onion, like this, to discover there’s nothing in the center; just empty space (again). It’s the ‘I’ metaphor; a structure created by words to explain a concept. In the mind’s eye we can leave the body behind, soar up into the sky and leap up into the heavens. It’s a figure of speech. The self is not contained in me, ‘I’ am contained in ‘self’ – the universe – everything, no subject/no object.

The ko-el sound shifts to some other location and it must be because the bird has flown to a different tree, further away. Later in the day I hear it again, coming from some distant place and after a while I don’t hear it anymore….

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‘…the anatta teaching is not a doctrine of no-self, but a not-self strategy for shedding suffering by letting go of its cause, leading to the highest, undying happiness. At that point, questions of self, no-self, and not-self fall aside. Once there’s the experience of such total freedom, where would there be any concern about what’s experiencing it, or whether or not it’s a self?’ [“No-self or Not-self?”, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 8 March 2011]