Tag Archives: uncertainty

sky become sea

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OLD NOTEBOOKS [282]: East Anglia, England (originally dated October 8, 2012): 06.00hrs: I’m upstairs in the cottage, sitting at the desk placed in front of the small window looking out at the world. What a strange sight, everything is chocolate brown. The field was ploughed yesterday, I remember now, a man in a red tractor ploughing the earth into neat chocolate furrows, moving by small increments across the field and back, followed by a flock of pale grey seagulls making a tremendous mewing sound. It took him the whole day.

Furrowed chocolate fields forever, like lines drawn in the earth, as you would draw with a pencil on a piece of paper, but on a huge scale; a measurement made across the field. Furrows as neat as a comb passes through hair and it leaves the strands precisely separated from each other. The strange thing is though, it’s done and no evidence of it having taken place remains. Just the mystery of this energy left behind. The field devastated with precise lines marked deep into its surface; an orderly catastrophe.

Events generate their own time, an on-going transformation like clouds in the sky above speeding along in this cold and windy October day; they normally move so slowly you can’t see them moving at all. On a windy day like this they’re tumbling and spinning along, against a layered background of other clouds moving in their own air currents, in their own place in time. A wheeling clockwork of engaging cogs contained in the greater space above me and all around.

It’s as if the sky has become the sea, slow moving but clearly defined ‘waves’ created by a complexity of air currents. The eye/ brain/ visual mechanism, engaged with cloud watching in this way, becomes weary and things come into consciousness in small jerks. The smooth flow of movement is broken up into a speeded up sequence of ‘stills’ that seem to have their own life, unfolding as my consciousness apprehends the ‘knowing’ of it.

I go downstairs, step outside the door to see the sky, and the scale of it blows me away…. It’s immense, over the top of the hill and away in the direction of the coast a few miles away. Then in all directions in a pattern of huge arcs and smaller interlocking wheels of cloud forms reflecting complex wind movements that I can see only part of. There’s a sense of very much more than this and the rest of it is sweeping around, thousands of miles away over the curvature of the earth. Clouds transforming in vast spaces like blossoming flowers speeded up in time-lapse photography.

I go back inside the house and upstairs but the security of this building is not reassuring; I feel like I’m caught in a hurricane, held in freeze-frame motion. When I look out the window again the sky is still up there, doing its thing. The ploughman’s neat lines etched into the earth, row after row stretching as far away as the eye can see. This does not bring stability; there’s a feeling of unease that takes some time to settle. No ‘self’ to make sense of it. A mutuality of awareness in a world that’s not separate from me, but somehow I return to the familiarity of who I am. I have weight… gravity prevents me from flying away.

‘I am what the world is doing here and now. Trying to ground myself in constructed reality is not it. I am not inside my body, looking out at the world outside, so I don’t need to secure myself. Letting go of my self, there is nothing that needs to be made real.’ [David Loy, Linda Goodhew, ‘Consuming Time’]

Reblogged earlier post from 2012

a future un-lived in

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POSTCARD#280: Delhi: Sunday morning, early, everyone deeply asleep. A dog barks, forming a single sound isolated in the quietness like the frog haiku (the old pond, a frog jumps in: plop!). The echo reflected off the walls, window glass, and metal of parked cars, ting! For a moment I feel like I’m not here, invisible. This is how it’ll be after we move away from here and the house is to be demolished as soon as we leave, the house agent says. A new apartment building will take its place. How does this feel? Hovering at the edge of vision, large men with jack-hammers, iron picks and shovels, restless, waiting for us to go.

There are huge profits to be made renting out apartments in this area. Our old house is wasted real estate. For us, the tenants, of course we suffer the loss. The entire space we inhabit right now will disappear completely, only the Frangipani tree remaining; leaves covered in masonry dust until the monsoon winds blow, then the rains come and wash the leaves clean again. I try to picture it; we move out and the same day demolition begins; roof is off before lunchtime, walls come down in the afternoon, trucks drive away with all the rubble and there’s nothing but empty space… birds fly through.

Long after this, maybe we forget our old house has been deleted from memory files, and try to remember what it was like being here… unsupported imaginings, totally gone, no evidence here of the building we used to call home – nothing to back it up. Is death like this? This is the end; a future un-lived in, present time has no materiality. I see myself here in an almost invisible house, standing on the second floor with vestiges of walls, floor crumbling away, and I’m just floating up there.

The vanishing of it also somehow associated with darkness, I can’t see anything; for example, entering a darkened room, and have to search for the light switch at the edge of the door by practiced palm and fingertip reaching over the cool wall until it gets to the switch click! In the other rooms it’s more difficult to find the switch and I’m often stuck there groping in the darkness but no light switch to be found. I close my eyes as if that might help, trying again and again. How can this be? Am I comfortable with the thought I don’t know, and knowing I don’t know? Yes, it was there, but it’s not there now.

No resting place, all is movement, a composition of joined-up pieces which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle makes a picture, then broken up into pieces and back in the box, lid closed. Next time it’s opened and put together, a different picture appears and different players. Transition of moving parts everything has changed again. Not ‘here’ for long enough to say much, just passing through. Sorry, can’t stay, got to go now. But wait, not yet… we’re here until the end of September. This short time we’re in right now is only one moment in countless tiny instances, citta moments, and in larger chunks of time, a sequence of images form movement like the ‘stills’ creating continuity in the old 35 mm celluloid film shown in the cinema, the Moving Picture Show.

annicam: all of conditioned existence, without exception, is “transient, evanescent, inconstant”. All temporal things, whether material or mental, are compounded objects in a continuous change of condition, subject to decline and destruction.

 

the bird is the messenger

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POSTCARD#279: Delhi: The bird is the messenger, a leaf in its beak and a note tied around its tiny leg. Brings news, we’re moving from here at the end of September. After that, three months in temporary accommodation, then we’re leaving India for good.

There’s it is again, the tiny bird in the bush outside, and I’m inside the room, trying to get a clear photo of it through the window glass. There are three of them there, the other two out of sight right now. They move so fast, quicker than thinking. It’s the Purple Sunbird, olive green as youngsters; full size less than 4inches in length and these are so small, almost not there at all. I blink my eyes and they disappear… the quickening. See one for an instant then it’s gone – takes my breath away.

Even now, it all seems to be coming an end – a cancellation of everything that remains, no time to settle, before we’re gone. The disappearance of the past, a new direction, and return to Bangkok – return to “Go”… time is just slippin’ away.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that we came to this house, characteristics of the shift from house A to house B. At the edge of my vision, household items look at me as I pass… poised in choreography of dance steps, ready for their next move. The great leap… percussive landing, clatter, scrape, bump and hastily take up their positions in new rooms.

In the morning we wake up in somebody else’s house… a familiarity of objects out of context in these new surroundings. I’m in someone else’s life – stepped out of my own life, into theirs. Same world, just a different angle on how it’s seen, felt and understood– same sensory awareness mechanism creates the kaleidoscope of different coloured lights.

Where am I? Maybe I’ll find myself in the Lost and Found Department. Searching among the ghosts there, for a self that’s missing – but if it can’t be found, any one will do. I can bear with the tendency for “self” to think it’s different from all the other “selves” going around thinking they’re different too.

Who am I? The world is how I/you perceive it, he/she, perceives it. We/you and they see and look into each other’s eyes. A window opens into another realm inhabited by him, her and them. The sense of their presence inter-lacing with the presence of others before them and as yet nothing of our own. Generations and generations of karma in an arrangement of cause and conditions and interconnected lives

I remember coming here with the house agent. Walking up the path, open the door… ghosts of previous tenants rush away to their hiding places in a whisper of movement. For me there’s only the dust of empty houses everywhere in the city – looking for somewhere to sit in a room with no furniture. Leaning thus, in a doorframe, and maybe this will do. Maybe here we can invent a life we’ll be happy with. Awareness takes it all in, puts it away in a new folder. A new reference point: ‘this’ is where the heart is, home is where I hang my hat.

“It is not as it were that one, dropping out from this world, is born into another but there is continuity of causes and conditions.” [From Madhyamika, quoted by T. R. V. Murti]

Excerpts from an earlier post: quicker than thinking

astonishment

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pigeons3bPOSTCARD #231: New Delhi: Trumpets blare, the sharp impact of it hits immediately, a cloud of birds fly up in a flutter of uncertainty. Trees splash outwards in branches, twigs, leaves, blossom and seed. Astonishment… how could this have happened? Eyes open wider and wider, like a camera aperture opening so far it exceeds structural integrity, implodes, buildings collapse in controlled demolition made to seem like a natural disaster, the ground beneath us opens up in sinkholes. Words explode into fragments of meaning… thus, the un-expect-ed-ness of this unnerving turn of events.

Curtains open on the First Act. Enter, stage right, the President of the Disunited States, Hollywood version of narcissistic Third World dictator, well-dressed gangster with his carefully balanced coiffure and infrastructure of war, catastrophe, greed, hatred and delusion – a victorious returning to power, with paid-for breathless wave of applause. Financial Advisors grab all the wealth stolen by the Bank (who knows, maybe it’s the same family), memories of Geo Dubbya, the fall of the twin towers, the war in Iraq and weapons of mass distraction. Fear, lies and distrust in Government. How can I find stability in all this, how to let go of this dark uncertainty?

But I understand how everything fits together today up here on the roof terrace with flowering plants in the sunshine, birdsong and a clear blue sky. I can see the compelling, driven-greed in the world. I can see how to be free of it too. People are caught unknowingly in all kinds of habitual, seek/find instant gratification. Everything, everywhere, consumerism, schooling, television, the media encourages this hunger that doesn’t lead to satisfaction but to an even sharper edge to appetite. These are the ways of the enemy.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron” [H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920]

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Photo by Melinda [melindaruck.com]

images of mourning

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POSTCARD #227: New Delhi: Seen from the air, mourners gather and take their positions to form the Thai numeral 9. The formal title of the Thai King, Rama IX. Found on our Thai social network page, dated 19 October.

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Source of the Thai song: https://ilovethaisong.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/homage-to-the-buddha-the-buddhists-song/

 

beyond words

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625921POSTCARD #211: Bangkok: The next day, after arriving here from the airport by way of taxi driven at startling speeds [link to as the crow flies], the recovery from that and… wake up in the morning. Time to go see the neurologist/ neurosurgeon to have the dreaded needle in the head, for the second time (by some means of bone conduction, you can hear the needle point scraping over the surface of the skull: kritch-krrrritchchch). The needle poised at X marks the spot inscribed in biro pen on my scalp (he tells me), the exact position on the occipital nerve (the nerve tree which has been causing the permanent headache since September last year). Now you will feel a little pressure here, doc says quietly, close to my ear, as if it were a secret. Needle goes in, pain-pain-pain, doc voids the syringe, withdraws needle. Thank you very much (I just want to get out of there), go home, sleep, wake up and the headache is gone!

The relief is beyond words

The headache is gone… hard to believe – really. Wow! it worked. How long will it last? (remembering “Awakenings’ by Oliver Sachs, made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams). Well… even if it’s for a short time, I can enjoy life in this headache-free interval; just so good to be able to get around and do things without the billiard ball crashing around inside the skull – only these curious sparkling sharp feelings at the sides of the head. In the centre there’s a kind of blank space where the headache used to be, a soft comfy pillow-like feeling… the first headache-free time for eight months.

So the first thing I discover is there’s all this physical energy… I can go around and do things without the great burden of headache. Rushing around the house in a great burst of enthusiasm, I decide to wash some clothes and like most houses in Asia, the washing machine is outside the house, under an open sheltered area with stretched lines for hanging things out to dry in the fresh air. So I put clothes in the machine, select ‘Quick Wash’ and start the cycle.

Go back inside, forget completely they’re there and start cooking a soup with all kinds of vegetables. It’s a bit late in the day when I remember and go out there again, (it’s the rainy season in Thailand) and the rain started to come on, then very quickly it’s a colossal downpour and I have to hang clothes any-which-way in dry corners; on hooks and the back of chairs in places sheltered from this incredible rain like what I suddenly remember as, both bath taps full on.

Back indoors from time to time to stir the soup, plip plop plip like a frog, barefoot on kitchen floor now wet with in-and-out traffic and scraps of vegetable peelings. The great smell of soup starts to come to me as I’m looking for more places to hang wet clothes. Deafening sound of rain on perspex rooftops, and gusts of rainy wind in through the open door nearly blows out the gas flame. But it doesn’t, and everything seems to be just right as-it-is in this wet, green place.
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Photo: Bangkok Post [link] worshippers at the Erawan shrine despite the rain

remembering

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Dazu-Sleeping-BuddhaOLD NOTEBOOKS: In the midst of my contemplation of this Chinese Buddha, along comes an image that becomes a memory; it’s all these objects of reverence and holy things that seem to clutter this central object of focus, the continous chanting by Buddhists from all countries and dressed in different kinds of costumes with bells and accessories, and accouterments… and my own sense of reverence.

When I was a young guy I stayed with an Anglican priest in a Victorian vicarage until I could find my own place. It was my first job, supply teacher in a rough high school in East London, just before Christmas and I hadn’t really thought about it, coming from the far North East, a heritage of strong whisky, fishing boats in the North Sea and gales. Christmas wasn’t meaningful there.

By comparison, everything in London seemed soft and gentle, small wrapped gifts from everyone and I was opening them in my room, when the Church bells suddenly start ringing, it was a collosal din coming from above my room. Did they have bell-pullers? I didn’t see anything to indicate that, and the Father came in dressed in a black cassock, wide-eyed and important and apologised for not telling me about it but it was a cassette tape player and could I come and see – shouting the instructions above the huge noise, and could I please check on these cables reaching up through the ceiling to the huge speakers in the bell tower, carefully placing the cassette player on the small carved clerical table and the wound copper cables stretching dangerously upwards. And I understood I was to watch them for a while to see they didn’t come loose then come downstairs to the service and he’d indicate with a nod when to run up and switch off the cassettte player.

Everyone who came to see the Father just assumed I was a trainee priest and smiling all the time, I felt inspired about being a ‘believer’, but what in? Didn’t seem to matter it was just a sort of space I was occupying at the time; really nice (compared with the storms and savage battle history I’d recently escaped from, best kept quiet about). Aspiring towards the state of being goodhearted, without knowing what exactly I was doing and hadn’t yet discovered what the question was, Looking but not ever finding the opportunity to discuss this kind of thing with the very tall young curate who was always in a hurry; dashing around washing the dishes in this Victorian kitchen with huge taps; abundant generosity with his smiles although kinda narrow in his views.

I happened to show him a leaflet the Hare Krishna guys gave me , dancing in the street with a drum. And the curate said: Oh dear, God on a bad day , and gave it back to me. So I thought about that answer for a long time and it really sounded not bad considering it was not exactly accompanied with any kind of intelligent question. But it did inspire the thought; what might God be like on a good day? So that must have been the question I really wanted to ask this curate, I thought later up in my room, the shape of a large cross that used to hang there where my bed was, and had left the original pattern of the beautiful old Victorian wallpaper in the faded room… it was shortly after that I left for Asia.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle”. [Albert Einstein]

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October 31 and the Aos Sìth

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thai-ghostPOSTCARD #161: New Delhi: Ghosts are pretty convincing in Thai culture – not overly dramatic or garish, very realistic and intense. Thais take care to appease these invisible entities so that they will bless them with good fortune (save them from ill-fortune). Every home or building has a dollhouse-sized shrine on its premises, called a Spirit House. The shrine serves as an altar for gifts to appease guardian spirits of the land. There are offerings of fruit, flowers, bowls of rice, beverages and figurines of people and animals. It’s widely known that accidents or bad luck afflict those who fail to acknowledge the rights of the supernatural beings who rightfully dwell on the grounds.

There’s no Halloween in Thailand maybe because the seasonal change is not so clearly defined, no harvest coming to an end in October/November. But spirits are everywhere, in the same way, the ancient Aos Sí (usually spelled Sìth), in Celtic countries would appear, and offerings of food and drink were left outside for them. The souls of the dead were also thought to revisit their old homes at this time, seeking hospitality. Feasts were had, at which the souls of dead kin were beckoned to attend and a place set at the table for them. These Aos Sí, were the supernatural race who were said to live underground, across the western sea, or in an invisible world that coexists with the world of humans. They would be able to cross the boundary between this world and the Otherworld during the Gaelic festival of Samhain celebrated from sunset on 31st October to sunset on 1st November, marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the “darker half” of the year – halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

Samhain was observed in Ireland, Scotland the Isle of Man and in other Celtic lands; the Brythonic Calan Gaeaf (in Wales), Kalan Gwav (in Cornwall), and Kalan Goañv (in Brittany, North of France). There is evidence of Samhain since ancient times; the Mound of the Hostages, a Neolithic passage tomb at the Hill of Tara, is aligned with the Samhain sunrise. It is mentioned in some of the earliest Irish literature and many important events in Irish mythology happen or begin on Samhain.

October 31st was the time when cattle were brought back down from the summer pastures and when livestock were slaughtered for the winter. There were rituals involving special bonfires, deemed to have protective and cleansing powers. It was believed that the Aos Sí needed to be propitiated at Samhain, to ensure that the people and their livestock survived the winter. Performers were part of the festival, and people going door-to-door in costumed disguise, reciting verses in exchange for food. Divination rituals and games were also a big part of the festival and often involved nuts and apples.

IMG_2379Halloween suits the East very well where animist beliefs and superstitions are a part of everyday life for Thais. My Thai niece M (aged 11 years) sent me pics of her halloween party, there’s one where she’s staring at the camera with an intensity that’s a bit scary and hair all spiked out. Also this pic of a halloween pumpkin lamp carved out of a pineapple, something I’d never seen before.

You hide me in your cloak of Nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of Being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles [Rumi]

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Upper photo source

transparency

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POSTCARD#101: Bangkok Suwannabhume Airport: Looking out from the interior of this coffee shop into another interior; the glittering glass-paneled B concourse, and through that glass window to what’s out there; blue sky, a concrete horizon and planes taking off. I am contained in a transparent interior, inside a larger interior, contained in a reality construct, the steel and glass of this moment. It’s the same place I was in last time, and the time before that (the ‘Mango Tree’ coffee shop, near gates B1-B6, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods). We started coming here a year ago and Jiab comes when she’s travelling on her own… sends me phone-pics of fruity drinks and ice creams she consumes after the photo is taken. This is my departure lounge; the Delhi flight leaves from this coffee shop, rather than gate C5, which is simply the entrance to the plane. A kind of applied personification in an airport vastness, anonymity and incidental eye contact with a few individuals. I see their birth, their death, their merging in a sea of people all on the way to/from somewhere else… going or coming. We’re all just passing through.

Long columns of us waiting to be X-rayed, instructed and directed by officials guiding us into and out of security portals like water passes through rocks and stones in a continuous flowing stream. No resistance to it… the coldness of regulations; a physical sensation in a body that’s somehow become transparent. I notice how the energy feels rather than how I can ‘be’ negatively energized by it. Everything is so much not what we think it is, there can’t be any assumptions; just letting it take place and being okay about it is enough. Disengage from thinking it should be something other than what it is, and everything that’s currently bothering me about that disappears for a moment – long enough to be able to see it’s possible to let go of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts completely… the peace that’s in that.

Surveillance cameras protrude into the space I’m in and suck out all data, send it to a room containing video screens, dark and gloomy, where security people with bulged-out eyes scan the images of the crowd, zoom-in, zoom-out. I feel I’m being looked at, studied… I’ve just been jostled slightly, pockets rifled. I can’t see them but I know they’re there. This whole thing is a performance, there’s a sudden urge to do a song-and-dance act. Maybe it’s a more serious drama production; Japanese Kuroko stagehands, dressed in black, appear on stage with the actors and rearrange the scene as the play is going on. They’re there for everyone to see but become invisible. The mystery of how we can be unaware of things in plain sight – mesmerized by politicians, illusionists’ sleight-of-hand; everybody acting out the story of their lives without questioning it, improvised dialogue according to the karma of causes and conditions.

Coming near to the end… the last camera, passport stamp, thump! And I’m suddenly through the barrier, blinded by the lights of the glitzy duty-free, gold Rolexes, impossible jewelry and stumbling towards my place in the coffee shop. Waiting for the flight to be called, the great leap up into the sky. A heightened feeling, a quickening, I know all this is happening – mindful alertness, awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware…

“The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn’t have without them.” [Suzanne Segal, Collision with the Infinite] 

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‘… awareness creates an awareness, aware that it is aware’ – reference: Is Awareness Aware Of Itself?

 

enigma of hiccups

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POSTCARD#98: Bangkok/Chiang Mai flight: M has the hiccups but can’t remember the English word for it and asks me: How you say sa-oog in English Toong-Ting? Thai onomatopoeia describes it well – and just as she’s asking the question, by way of example, the involuntary existential hiccup arrives. She recovers from the small jolt and looks at me with a kind of inner alertness. I tell her it’s a hiccup and she laughs – it’s the name of a character in a cartoon movie [How To Train Your Dragon 2]. I show her how to hold her breath for as long as she can, take a quick in-breath, and then keep on doing that. But no worries, we’ll be landing soon and that’ll divert her attention. The descent is quite bumpy… turbulent hiccups in the outer world. Luggage compartments overhead rattle and creak in the vibration. For a moment there’s an awareness of tremendous velocity, vulnerability, and the mind conjures up some kind of explanation for it. I feel like we’re on a road in the air, bumps caused by an imagined uneven road surface; a highway in the sky… a bridge that spans the distance from Bangkok to Chiang Mai – descending from the heavens now on this huge curved span all the way down to the surface of the planet.

There’s the sound of hydraulics, down go the wheels and the earth rises up to meet us. We are 300 people contained in a structure the size of a building, careering along at 200 mph in a collision course with the Earth. The deep uncertainty of our situation fills my awareness for a moment, then there’s the soft bump and we’re down. Wheels take the weight, first one side then the other, the deep lurch, sink-down/bounce-back as it settles and the engines roar like the dragon in M’s cartoon movie. The end of quite a long journey; Chiang Mai/Hat Yai, via Bangkok and home again for M. It’s just another arrival for me, there’ll be a departure again on 30 October; I’m traveling most of the time. Thirty years on the road, the default link with my own culture is not as important as it was. Thailand is my country of choice now and for the rest of my life. I can be M’s teacher of English until I’m old and grey – one of a minority of West/East migrants assimilating with the host country. The story of how the US came to be… identity is a created thing

Out of the plane and along the corridor, M walking along beside me with her little bag; the totality of her being, head to toe, is inside my field of vision… so small. She seems to be all-right with everything and all the events so far; hiccups are gone and chatting about all kinds of stuff I can’t quite hear. I have to guess what she’s saying and comment with appropriate responses like: really? oh yes, hmmm… and that’s working okay until there’s something that sounds like a question: Toong-Ting, when you were in your mummy’s tummy, before you were borned, you didn’t breathe, right? and I say, Right! confirming this truth. She’s still thinking about holding her breath to stop hiccups. After that there’s a fairly complex observation on the enigma of hiccups and life in general. Sounds interesting but I can’t quite understand it because I missed the first part. We walk on through the long corridors in the arrivals and out to the taxis: really? oh yes, hmmm…

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‘As all waves are in the ocean, so are all things physical and mental in awareness. Hence awareness itself is all-important, not the content.’ [Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That (261)]