the unbroken whole

Posted on January 8, 2021 by tiramit

POSTCARD#402: Bangkok: I see the world by way of a built-in filter process which selects the sensory data that’s compatible with my operating system. Everything I receive from the ‘outside’ world fits with the default state of mind. The problem is the operating system is set to delete anything that doesn’t agree with the world I have come to know, and I lose things of value every day. There is only this ever-present stream of mental chatter that fills up every empty space and vacant place. Every day I say I need to fix these glitches, in the meantime, make do with things as they are.

How I perceive the world is dependent on causes and conditions arriving here in present time as soon as the inclination, intention or volition arises. I can’t be separate from my kamma, according to preferences and likes/dislikes… it’s part of the software. I think I’m an independent being unaffected by anything or not affecting or influencing anything else. But I can’t be sure. I can’t see that all this is being monitored and directed by the ongoing needs and requirements of an entity; a ‘self’ that has no inherent solidity or existence of its own. I’m dismayed, of course, when it all gets swept away in randomness and returns later, subject to the kamma outcome (vipaka) from some other time.

The outer world just rolls along, as it does, in all its diversity, and wholly neutral. Whether there’s a belief in this or that, makes no difference; it’ll only always, ever be, just how it seems. The devastating emptiness of it all means the population is driven to go out, get and do. Attain and protect and defend – it can be a battlefield. To avoid and deny, to have fear and anxiety and be controlled by authority and feel threatened with the flimsy nature of existence, although the absolute timelessness of the world (anicca), is the beauty of it.

I’m aware the population are not able to see it like that; holding on to beliefs, clutching at straws, and quite unaware that they are maintained in this unknowingness of the world like penned animals are by the farmer, well intentioned though he may be, in order to cultivate a special kind of hunger, clinging and craving (upadana tanha) for consumer goods – the economy depends on this. The greater the craving, the faster the turnover of stock and the Western style of God together with governments and the corporations are simply involved in farming the population.

Workers structure their lives around employment and this fleeting, temporary happiness found in consumerism. They can’t escape from it unless they step out of the earning momentum they’re stuck in, and risk losing everything.

‘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]

Photo: A dramatic explosion is caught on camera outside of the Capitol building amid pro-Trump riots / REUTERS

a hugeness of ordinary things

Posted on July 31, 2020 by tiramit

POSTCARD#379: Bangkok: Breath-taking expanse of forgotten afternoons and time just slipping away. For me the lock-down became television watching all through the day and night – an immense collage of overlapping images, and things of little consequence.

Working from home, or just sitting around, texting food deliveries, we always had enough. Now I see, all of that can be put aside, because “nothing is worth having or being”. Someday I’d like to return to Ajahn Buddhadasa’s words on Emptiness, Suññatā.

It was an opportunity to experience how it must be for those who live in a world of attachment and feel they can’t let go. But not the Thais… they don’t have that kind of problem. It was the Thais, in fact, and their small, slim stature who led to my awakening. One day in a shopping mall, I noticed my expanded waistline in a large mirror showing me and a section of the Thai public. I was a monster by comparison!

So I went on a diet. It is called “The Military Diet” (although it’s got nothing to do with the military as far as I can see), three days low-calorie diet followed by four days of light food, high protein, low fat, low carbs and low calories. Then back to the three days again. I’m now in my seventh week. I’ve lost the kilos I gained in the lock-down, and it continues to go down.

I’ll always be a giant compared to the Thais but I like my new lightness and more gentle impact on our surroundings. I’ve learned so much from this South East Asian Buddhist nation. Living here is like looking through a window on to the ‘old world’. Nearly everything happens in public, practically everything is known, is seen, is understood, and brought to a close in some form, in the eyes of who may be observing.

Fragments of people’s lives; a hugeness of ordinary things, a sense of well-being in the millions of every-day events taking place inside homes. It’s like the whole world is one large room; domestic life without walls, centuries of open-air living. There’s this quality about Asia, particularly India, where we lived for 7 years. It’s not about visiting ancient sites or jaw-dropping experiences that fill you with awe, it can be a single moment felt with the fragrance of something that’s suddenly gone; what was it? Incense, candlewax, ironed cotton clothes and the familiarity of the detergent they use there. I feel immediately at home in this place where multiple generations of other human beings have lived.

But the local people would be shocked to know I’m alone – Jiab my wife is Thai and we are together in this life, but there are no members of my own family here. Why? well… the aloneness is pleasing if you’re like me, an introspective person, practicing the ways and means of Right View, set in a wasteland of Wrong Views, populated by people with their handheld devices, mesmerized by the colorful window and three dimensional sound jamming in the ears.

Whenever there’s an opportunity, I’m letting it all go, and everything evaporates for a moment. In that instant there’s no thinking. The mind is alerted, an empty space opens up; if you are a contemplative and without wandering thoughts, then at times, there’s just this silence. It’s the space between things, easy to have it simply be here for a while. Silence and emptiness and everything held on ‘pause’. There’s the inclination to be actively thinking, the invitation to be involved with thought is there but it’s the novelty of no-thinking that holds my attention…

“Whatever method of practice you adopt, it should lead to equanimity with regards to the sense – objects which you contact, or to their cessation. Whatever sort of insight meditation you do, if you do it correctly without deceit, it will be in this same one form, that of not letting sense-data be compounded into the feeling of “I” and “mine”. Then it’s not difficult to destroy defilements since, when you practise like this, they are destroyed as a matter of course.” [Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Heartwood from the Bo Tree]

photo: Monsoon in Bangkok

doerless doing part 6b, editor’s notes

Posted on July 24, 2020 by tiramit

POSTCARD#378: Bangkok: This is the last part in the series of posts created from source material in “Heartwood from the Bo Tree” by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. It is a conclusion of sorts, although how this slim volume came to be with me and the events that go with it, is worthy of including.

I found the book again after 20 years of it being lost in a deep cupboard. Such a precious thing to have it leap into my hands again as if by magic. Maybe it got picked up along with the Nokia Phone Manual (that’s how long ago it was!) and got lost in the cupboard for two decades. Finding the book came with all the memories of how things were then, discovering Buddhism for the first time – although there was something déjà vu about it – and how it opened up an understanding in my world that had never happened before.

I arrived in Thailand in 1984 after 2 years in South India. I know I was reading something referenced to the Upanishads at the time and it had a big impact on me… but I can’t remember much more. I do remember ‘What The Buddha Taught’ by Walpole Rahula and it was in reading this that I decided (perhaps wrongly) the turn-around point was at tanha (craving)

All of it was triggered as a result of visits to Wat Pah Nanachat in the north of Thailand and Wat Suan Moke in the South, where I came upon Ajahn Buddhadasa’s book for the first time. Gratitude to the monks I met in these two Wats who helped me understand the subject in more detail.

Today, I have to admit that I can’t seem to bring grasping and clinging to a close at phassa (contact), or vedana (feeling), despite Gratitude and Respect for Ajahn Buddhadasa’s insistence that there is nothing worth having or being in this or any world. Feelings of like or dislike arise and the various kinds of desire that spring from the urges of tanha (craving) are with me until my escape route begins – just before upadana (clinging) sets in.

Another thing I need to say is the constant headache caused by PHN in the Right Occipital Nerve, that’s hindered me these last 5 years. Perception altered due to the struggle with pain and pain meds which always seem to be ‘more than enough’. I become lost in conditions where I’m in the midst of ‘being’; or I stumble and fall over objects that I currently ‘possess’. But I’ve learned how to let go when signs of suffering (dhukka) are arising – last minute relinquishments. The following paragraph illustrating the turn-around point in cognition at tanha (craving), found unpublished in some old notes I’m including here:

“Idleness, sort of a wide-awake sleepwalking around this empty house. Soon, I find myself in the kitchen, pause at the refrigerator, open the door, look inside. Well, let’s see, is there anything in here? Or better to say, is there something in here I can put in my mouth that’ll satisfy the craving? It has to be the right thing, looking for that which is exactly the right one, this craving is for something sweet but there’s nothing here at all that’s sweet, only cheese. So I grab the cheese, cut a large piece off and chew on that, have the flavor of cheese in my mouth for the next half hour. It’s not what I wanted. Now I’m craving for sweet things with the taste of cheese getting in the way.”

Maybe it’s just a matter of being situated in that ‘place’ of mindfulness in the here-and-now and that’s enough, observing how there are things that’ll displace, me; powerful emotions, a short flash of like or dislike. These mind states are ‘seen’ same as everything else, momentary, and let-go-of more or less immediately and stability returns.

If not, I lose my ‘place’ for a while and then before I get back on track, there’s that experience of being totally lost for a while. Then I get situated in the here-and-now again, focusing on where I lost the place. Suddenly I re-cognize something and see that I must be functioning in that remembered way, then firmly situated again. Okay, so the mind may fall into a fixation with a passing thought, but at least I know that’s where it’s been.

These days I’m thinking I need to move on from these old reference points in my old comfortable way of understanding the world. That is, if you can see where you are and are aware of suffering caused by tanha (the craving for things you love and hate), then that’s all there is to it. You see it, you know it. Avidya (ignorance) is swept aside, no matter how much these established views may be held or the tenacity of the habit to hold on, because suffering will pass away of its own accord:

“Whatever is subject to origination is also subject to cessation.” “Of things that proceed from a cause – their cause the Tathagata has told. And also their cessation — Thus teaches the Great Ascetic.” [Venerable Assaji answers the question of Śāriputra the Wanderer]

I need to explore Sunyata “Emptiness” which Ajahn Buddhadasa examines in the second section of the book, where we see the truth that emptiness is the remainderless extinction of self. ‘The ‘remainderless extinction of ‘self’ is the non-arising of ‘self’’. In the long term I can see a situation whereby we prevent the arising of ‘self’ completely so that it has no way of arising at any moment in the here and now, nor at any time in the future.

Photo source: Dewdrop

doerless doing

Posted on June 12, 2020 by tiramit

POSTCARD#372: Bangkok: “The doing is done but there is no doer. The principle of doerless doing must be taken up and utilized in our daily lives. Whether we’re eating, sitting, laying down, walking, using, seeking, whatever we’re doing we must have enough truth-discerning awareness to prevent the arising of ‘I’ – the feeling that ‘I’ am the doer. ‘I’ am the eater, the walker, the sitter, the sleeper, or the user. We must make the mind constantly empty of ego, so that emptiness is the natural state and we abide with the awareness that there is nothing worth having or being.” [Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, “Heartwood from the Bo Tree”]

Practical Dependent Origination, emphasis on the word: ‘Practical’… otherwise difficult to understand – the Buddha describes the confusion arising from wrongly perceiving it, as follows: beings have become entangled like a matted ball of thread, become like muñja grass and rushes, unable to pass beyond the woeful states of existence and saṃsāra, the cycle of existence.”

Back Story

I found this slim book the other day, in a cupboard inside a box with manuals for electrical appliances and other stuff 20 years old or more. It must have been put here by accident – the size, maybe it got picked up along with the washing machine manual and got lost here for two decades. It was such a precious thing to have it leap into my hands again with all the memories of how things were then, discovering the study of Buddhism for the first time and how it opened up an understanding in my world that had never happened before.

“Whenever one sees a form, hears a sound, smells an odour or fragrance, touches a tactile object, or has a thought arise in the mind, the feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ arises, and it can be taken to mean Dhukka, suffering, which manifests itself therefore we are caught; the mind disease is fully developed.”

Sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya: Nothing whatsoever should be clung to.

“If anyone realizes this truth that there is not a single thing to be clung to, it means that there is no ‘germ’ to cause the disease of greed, hatred and delusion, or of wrong action of any kind, whether of body, speech, or mind.”

“[Thus] whenever forms, sounds, odours, flavours, tangible objects, and mental phenomena crowd in, the antibody, ‘nothing whatsoever should be clung to’, will strongly resist the disease. The ‘germ’ will not enter or if it is allowed to do so, it will be only in order to be completely destroyed. There will be an absolute and perpetual immunity.”

Usually, the ego is thinking ‘I am me,’ and ‘this is mine.’ It’s divisive and selfish. So Ajahn asks that whenever possible, we mindfully drop all claims to our Self. “If we are empty of egoism, there is no consciousness of ‘I’ and ‘mine’. We have the truth-discerning awareness that can extinguish Dukkha and is the cure for the spiritual disease.”

The Diagram

The cycle begins with Ignorance and ends with Aging & Death. It might seem curious that Birth is only one stage before Aging & Death, but Birth is to be understood as a momentary ‘birth’ and death is the end of the cycle. It is possible to go around the cycle in an instant.

We have to try to stop the cycle at Phassa (sense-contact) and not allow the cycle of dependent arising to take place; by sheer force of mind, cutting it off right at the moment of sense-contact. As soon as there is contact with a sense-object there is Phassa, and the subsequent development of Vedana, Tanha and so on, it happens immediately – right around the cycle. If, at the moment of sense-contact, when there is only Phassa, the cycle can be stopped, there is no arising of ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘mine’.

If it is too difficult to stop the cycle at Phassa, we can focus on the next stage, Vedana and stop it there. By not allowing the development of Vedana, not allowing feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction to arise, there is no development of the next stage, Tanha (craving) and Upadana (clinging). So the cycle completes in an instant and there is no arising of the ‘I’ ‘me’ and ‘mine’.

Link to Heartwood from the Bo Tree

causally connected momentary dhammas

Posted on June 5, 2020 by tiramit

POSTCARD#371: Bangkok: A couple of weeks ago I wrote a very long post about the dentist. This post will be as short as possible. It’s like this, I went back for the follow-up appointment and started to think about aspects of No Self and the Paticca-samuppada Dependent Origination. That’ll come after this.

So anyway I went back to see the lady dentist on Tuesday 26 May and after five minutes of inserting needles to numb the nerves, a lower jaw extraction happened; so easy! Then prolonged drilling in the bone of my jaw to situate an anchor for a dental implant (in the x-ray it looked like a rawlplug in a masonry wall).

It was painless, amazing – yes my head was jerked around a bit, and there was the dentist adjusting her tools to get a hold of the tooth, to get maximum clench, grasp, grip so that it wouldn’t slip, then steady pulling to extract the tooth, with dental assistant behind me, arms around my head and holding, while pressing down hard on the lower jaw. Then one, two, three: ‘pop’ and it was out.

The painless aspect of it was breathtaking, especially as the lady dentist quietly told me what was going to happen next; drilling a hole in the jaw bone for the implant. It took about 30 minutes to get it finished – all without any person to feel the pain. An example of the Buddhist selflessness (anatta). There was no Self to whom this was happening – I could hear all the sounds of drilling inside my head… and there was nobody there to hold out against the sustained pain, It wasn’t happening to me. I felt like laughing out loud.

A note about the flow of changes to do with normal cognition: All dhammas (“phenomena”) arise in dependence upon other dhammas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”. As a dhamma vanishes, it gives rise to a new dhamma which appears immediately afterwards. In this way, there is an uninterrupted flow of causally connected momentary dhammas. In this flowing continuum, there is no enduring Self since everything Is dependently originated.

Changes take place in the context of this momentary arising and falling away of dhammas. In the first list below, we see transitional stages that lead to Suffering. In the second list we can see how the problem can be solved; the step by step cessation of the preceding stage leads to the end of suffering

The Standard Description Of Dependent Origination

By Ajahn Bramavamso (click on this link for the whole essay)

From delusion as condition, volitional formations [come to be]; from volitional formations as condition, consciousness; from consciousness as condition, name-and-form; from name-and-form as condition, the six sense bases; from the six sense bases as condition, contact; from contact as condition, feeling; from feeling as condition craving; from craving as condition, clinging; from clinging as condition, existence; from existence as condition, birth; from birth as condition, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair come to be. Such is the origin of this whole mass of suffering.

But from the remainderless fading away and cessation of delusion comes cessation of volitional formations; from the cessation of volitional formations, cessation of consciousness; from the cessation of consciousness, cessation of name-and-form; from the cessation of name-and form, cessation of the six sense bases; from the cessation of the six sense bases, cessation of contact; from cessation of contact, cessation of feeling; from the cessation of feeling, cessation of craving; from the cessation of craving, cessation of clinging; from the cessation of clinging, cessation of existence; from the cessation of existence, cessation of birth; from the cessation birth, aging-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering.

(SN 12, 1)

(dhamma = an aspect of the mind that captures the quality of an object, and that has the ability to colour the mind)

house on a hill

Posted on January 14, 2015 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Chiang Mai: I used to have a house on a hill in England, so far away from here – it’s just a memory now. I had it for 36 years and it was sold just a few days ago… feels like a part of me has become extinct. Another part of me says, what’s gone is gone, let it go because I never really lived there. I’d stay there for a while, go away to Asia for a year, then come back; very long grass in the garden and generations of spiders.

Curiouser and curiouser it was part of a larger building owned by my Great Aunt Liz, a spinster, a recluse and she could read fortune-telling cards. Aunt Liz gave me the house by Deed of Gift in 1978, then became a bit distant and elderly and quite stubborn about allowing me to help.

I’d send Aunt Liz postcards from the places I’d been and bring back gifts but she became more and more remote. Our communication dwindled and in the end she hardly spoke to me. When I knocked on her door, she would open it on the chain, smile and say: ah, so you’re back. You’re looking well… then close the door. I’d hear the lock go: click, and I was left outside.

This is how it was, a kind of companionship, no more than that. She was probably disappointed that I wasn’t going to just come and settle down in that place and be what she’d imagined I’d be. But what could I do? Her decision to create a situation for me to have a ‘home’ next door to her was just so kind. There I was in the centre of rural life and the simple rumbling-along of things, but… never for very long, always moving on to somewhere else.

She died in 1989… I was in Japan and it was impossible to return. I negotiated with a relative who inherited Aunt Liz’s part of the house and to cut a long story short, eventually I owned the whole building. Contractors were hired to renovate the place, but it was two or three years before I managed to get back. The house on the hill had long since become a dream… years and years spent thinking and planning how I could go live there in the end, and just get old sitting by the fireside. These last few days I have revisited that same place in the midst of these rememberings, knowing that sometime soon I have to disengage from it – it’s not my house anymore it’s somebody else’s. People I don’t know walk around in these rooms where I used to be, sit by the fireside stare into the flames.

How long do memories remain? One time I was sitting there burning some old floorboards removed during the renovation of Aunt Liz’s bedroom. The wood was dry and old and good for kindling. They were also painted along the ends – she had a carpet in the middle and painted floor boards all round the edge. It all came back to me when I found it… stuck in the paint on a piece of the floorboard, a human hair – a single strand of hair, quite long. It got stuck there as she was applying the paint. I kept it for a while; would hold it between thumb and forefinger for a moment and pull the tension of it gently… still attached to the painted wood. Then one day I placed the wood piece in the flames and watched it burn away.

Everything is always in the process of ceasing to be, turning into ash. There’s a reluctance to leave, drawn towards the extinguished fire; something peaceful about the absence of everything…

As fire, through loss of fuel grows still [extinguished] in its own source, so thought by loss of activeness grows still in its own source… For by tranquility of thought one destroys good & evil karma. With tranquil soul, stayed on the Soul, one enjoys unending ease. [Maitri Upanishad 6.34]

————————-

story within a story

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tiramit

POSTCARD #15: Rutnin Eye Hospital, Bangkok: I’m back in the outpatients for a routine eye examination after surgery – the peppermint green and menthol coloured room, etched glass and white ceiling. Receptionist gives me a number, 109, and I look around for a seat. It’s crowded in here today… are all these people in front of me? It’ll be a long wait. What to do to pass the time when I can’t read? I need glasses to read and have to wait 3 weeks for a new lens prescription; the eye has to settle after they take out the stitch – okay, let’s not talk about needles and eyes… the eye of the needle? Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God… they don’t make it easy. For ‘rich’ substitute ‘greedy’ lobha and it makes sense.

Generosity is the antidote for the ‘holding-on’ disease; fixating on a thing we think we need to make us happy. Apply the sense of generosity to the problem of being a compulsive reader and I should be able to let go of this reading habit – see what it’s like to do that. For backup I have the basic Kindle 6” with the font set nearly to maximum; digital words, the physical substance of the book is absent – switch it off and there’s nothing there. I like the emptiness of it, yet a whole library could be on this small device that fits in my pocket. Yes but I forgot to bring it with me today… terrific, so I have to learn how to sit in this waiting area doing nothing for maybe a couple of hours.

Language creates fiction – a story carried over from a former life, kamma, an extension of another story written long ago, once upon a time…. a story within a story, in which one of the characters in the narrative will pause and say, ‘this reminds me of a story…’ and goes on to relate a story inside the current story that the reader gets so immersed in the starting point is forgotten and it becomes just part of the whole; a vast structure of inter-related, nested stories enclosed by the original, frame story. Lost in the samsara of forgetfulness, caused by the holding-on disease, greed, tanhã (craving) passed on from former lives; seeking gratification in whatever sense object presents itself and wherever it finds rebirth.

‘… if I were born again as a fruit fly I would think that being a fruit fly was the normal ordinary course of events, and naturally I would think that I was a highly cultured being, because probably they have all sorts of symphonies and music, and artistic performances in the way light is reflected on their wings in different ways, the way they dance in the air, and they say, “Oh, look at her, she has real style, look how the sunlight comes off her wings.” They in their world think they are as important and civilized as we do in our world.’ [The Essence of Alan Watts, Vol. 4: “Death”]

————————-

the holding-on habit

Posted on May 21, 2013 by tiramit

A village near Hat Yai: Sitting in the house with M, it’s been raining and the farmyard is a plethora of muddy things. M is inclined to stay indoors and that’s how it is today, a day of uncertainty, the catastrophe of failed projects, unfinished paper structures, and fooling around with the camera phone. M is tired with the stories in her 9 year-old world. Some excitement and interest when: clacka-clacka, the sound of the cow with the bamboo bell around its neck, energetically chomping the grass that grows around the house – all this thick lush grass in the wetness. The other cows, four altogether, have been brought home because it’s the end of the day and soon they’ll be herded into the cowshed and closed in for the night. I ask M if she’d like to go out? We can get the big umbrella and go look at the cows? But this is not a good question to ask right now.

Complex emotions, M is suffering a disappointment. We took her to the bookshop in town. There was a book about science with a ‘SUPER SCIENCE KIT’ in a large box that went with it. The thing is, it was really too advanced for M but she became convinced she had to have it. So we got it, came back to the house and I started to look at the instructions. Opening the box and assembling the pieces of the kit, test tubes and small pieces of plastic equipment – all that goes okay, but following the instructions to carry out the experiments, has no meaning for her. She simply doesn’t know where to begin and I can’t explain because of our limited communication. She tries to enter a created story with a ‘pretend’ thing but science doesn’t work like that. Somebody thoughtfully removes the difficult SUPER SCIENCE KIT and all that can be done now is damage repair. M is quiet. I ask her if there’s anything I can do, and she says, ‘… no, is OK, Toong-Ting.’ (Toong-Ting is M’s pet name for me.) I suggest we read a book or play with the iPad… then I remember there’s no Internet and some of her apps don’t work. That’s part of the problem. ‘No, Toong-Ting, is OK,’ she says.

So I sit with her, everything is dull and meaningless – I can feel it too. M makes small, whimpering sounds like her digital kittens on the iPad. She’s holding my arm, cuddled up in a small ball next to me, eyes closed and face hidden away, struggling with the uncertainty of her world. Thai children are taught othon [khanti] patient endurance – or it could be an inherited character trait. I don’t have any children of my own, so no experience; having M in my world is an opportunity for me to learn. What I notice is, there are no tears or tantrums that I’d expect (from Western children). Here, it’s more like a locked-in holding. I’m available, ready to support, but I can’t do much to divert her attention. It’s the holding-on habit and what this is about is just allowing for these moments of not knowing that we’ve all got to get through, somehow, and the uncomfortable feelings that go with it. Just letting them go…

I’m affected by the mood, it’s really tense, but can sit quietly without making a ‘thing’ out of it. The self is a sensory experience. The experiencer is itself an experience. Consciousness is the sensory organ of the void. There can be nothing separate from this, except the ability to think about things. The question, then, is: what is thought? And thinking about thought, itself, leads only to the empty space where the question used to be…

Some time after that somebody finds a small bottle of food colouring in the kitchen and I show M what happens when you put a tiny drop of it into a test tube of clear water. The violet colour is like a tendril of descending smoke curling around the inside of the test tube and her whole attention is focused on this extraordinary event; the world is opening up again… wow! how to develop this? The uncertainty of the moment has vanished and suddenly everything seems full of wonderful choices….

————————-

‘What effort should I make? Should I do something about this situation or simply watch my mind?’ Such moments of not-knowing are precious. Uncertainty does not have to be seen as failing. In fact we might lose something important if we are in a hurry to push past it. The actuality is I don’t know what to do and there is not necessarily any fault in that. If, however, I’m completely caught in the momentum of wanting to escape suffering, I may miss the truth of the situation, as it is, and learn from it. With the confidence that comes from our commitment to precepts we can afford to trust in being patient and aware of ‘not-knowing’, and the uncomfortable feelings that come with it. Feel the force of the momentum of wanting to get away from it, to ‘solve it’; stubbornly refuse to be drawn along. We can experiment with waiting until the feeling of being driven subsides and quietly listen to what intuition suggests we could do.’ [Ajahn Munindo, Dhammapada v. 276]

[Note: There are references here to, ‘the experiencer is itself an experience’, taken from an Internet source I can no longer find. If anyone knows the origin of it, please let me know, thank you!]

Upper Photo: My pic of M taking a photo of me. Lower photo: The cows coming home

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…

————————-

‘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]

how it seems (1)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by tiramit

I SEE THE WORLD through a built-in selection process that reflects and supports the default state of mind; it’s like fish cannot see the water they swim in; so obvious, yet… but I can get it to fit, more or less, according to my likes and dislikes and fall deeper into the dream. I make it into something good or bad or whatever and the fact that I can’t see it – well, it just does that. I call it reality. How I perceive the world is dependent on causes and conditions that were here before I was born; you could say it comes with the software. I think I’m an independent being not affected by anything or not affecting or influencing anything else. I can’t see this is a work of fiction and it’s all being monitored by the ongoing needs and requirements of an entity I created; a ‘self’ that has no real substance. I’m dismayed, of course, by how it all gets swept away in randomness; subject to the kamma, unknowingly created at some earlier time.

‘… It’s because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond the cycle of the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destinations.’ [Tanha Sutta: Craving” (AN 4.199)]

The outer world just rolls along, as it does, in all its diversity, and totally neutral. Whether there’s belief it’s this or that, makes no difference; it’s just how it seems. The devastating emptiness of it all means the population is driven to get and do and attain and protect and defend. It’s a battlefield. To avoid and deny, to have fear and anxiety and be controlled by authority and feel threatened with the flimsy nature of existence, although the absolute fragility anicca, is the beauty of it. But the population can’t see it like that. They are clutching at straws but don’t see it like that; don’t see they are maintained in an unknowingness of the world like penned animals are by the farmer, well intentioned though he may be, in order to cultivate a special kind of hunger, upadana tanha (clinging and craving) – and the economy depends on this. The greater the craving, the faster the turnover of stock and the Western style of God together with governments and the corporations are simply involved in farming the population.

I can understand why the Buddha was thinking the Dhamma was too subtle and there was no point in teaching it because no one would understand. I can see how, in those historical times of feudal hierarchy, it would have seemed impossible to create social change…. and is it any different now? It seems just as impossible for people to understand today. I wonder if I really fully understand it myself. I’m no different from other people, this is our shared suffering. But the Buddha changed his mind about it being too subtle. He said there is a way out and we can find it in the framework of the Four Noble Truths. The teaching has survived 2600 years. Understanding replaces misunderstanding; ignorance is pushed out. There’s a simple curiosity and this quiet state of at-ease knowingness….