Thralldom

POSTCARD #39: Chiang Mai: Coming up to Chiang Mai from Hat Yai was done in two stages, with the stopover at Bangkok, as we did going down. It was the same thing, the other way round. Everything already seen, but occuring in reverse order and the hassle and stress we experienced on the way down got cancelled out on the return journey. Like a video on fast-rewind, it stops at the beginning not the end and the memory of ever having gone or been away is erased.

A short trip, six days only. The point of it was to visit Jiab’s youngest brother and his wife and their new-born baby – a truly amazing child with a wonderful smile. It was a bit like the Three Wise Men following the star to the stable where the baby Jesus lay in the manger – not really like that… there was Jiab and her sister, me and M, who is 9 years old and dismayed by lack of internet, sadly playing the same old games on the iPad and not interested in being in a rubber plantation, with its curious waftings of latex smells. I was quite blown away with the experience of being surrounded by rubber trees – I knew that rubber came from trees of course but it was sort of bizzare somehow… trees made of rubber?

Now back here in Chiang Mai and friends have sent pics of the monks blessing everyone for the coming year. These quiet humble events are meaningful in a way I’ve not seen in the Church and all the gusty hymn singing, great heaviness of acoustics and out-of-sync organ suggesting a fearsome power and immensity. What my Sunday School teacher taught me was that “God made the world,” and I wrote that down in my little exercise book but had absolutely no understanding of it; an imponderable, a Zen koan: God made the world…

But who made God? The world and God are two separate things, one of them made the other, therefore seeing this from a place created in the mind for the purpose of looking for God and finding only a complexity of half understood truths. In the end, I stopped worrying about it; there is no God (in that way of thinking) and decades later the whole thing vanished – with it went the concept of ‘self’. Liberated from ‘the thralldom of the senses’. Quite an ordinary epiphany, like one might be sitting in a quiet room with furniture and objects and light coming in through the window then suddenly a letting-go moment takes place and ‘I’ no longer have the burden of ‘my’ thoughts about ‘me’. Released from the subject/object duality. God is not ‘out there’, but ‘in here’. God is subjectivity, conscious awareness.

Conscious awareness is everywhere. In the blogging world, for example,  it’s what we’re talking about or describing all the time, one way or another, in our different locations, circumstances and in our various states of mind and body. Sometimes there’s an instant understanding of what conscious awareness means but it’s beyond words. Sometimes  awareness is there but I think I can’t see it. Thinking I can’t see it, is another mind moment that exists temporarily in awareness. The mind doesn’t create awareness, mind is contained in the awareness. Other times there’s the simple knowing of it and a feeling of quiet purpose in every step, every move.

‘Only by liberating oneself from the thralldom of the senses and the thinking function – both of them servants and not masters – by withdrawing attention from “things seen” to give it to to things “unseen” can this awakening be accomplished.” [E. F. Schumacher, “A Guide For The Perplexed”, p.79]

Source: thralldom – dhammafootsteps

Postcards From the Present Moment

This book is a personal reflection on the Buddha’s teachings directly applied as the human experience. Something we don’t normally bring to mind is the simple fact that we are connected to each other in the subjective sense of being alive, the experience of life itself.
Social networks, blogs, this is what we are writing about every day; how it all seems to be from where ‘we’ are; from ‘here’. Words are all we have, words are used to describe how the outer world enters our inner being by way of sensory mechanisms: by eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue – the five senses – and mind, which is the sixth sense in Buddhist Teaching.
This book is one year of ‘postcards from the present moment’, an ongoing buddhist journal, comprising short entries, max 700 words and each with a picture. Each post takes the form of a postcard we might have received from a friend. An excerpt of human experience at that time. We share this world, we co-experience through sensory awareness – this is from ‘me’ to ‘you’.

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About the author

“I am originally from the UK, born in the Moray Firth in the North of Scotland where it’s cold and windy most of the year – open the door to go out in the morning and the wind is so strong it would blow you back in again. My father’s father came from Orkney, my mother came from Aberdeenshire and I studied in Glasgow. A heritage of Northern skies, a seeker who wandered away in search of the sun.

“Long ago and far away. I started doing publications and artwork for Non Government Organizations (NGOs) in South India. After that I was with an NGO in Thailand and support organizations working on the issue of child labour and children in hazardous situations. Around that time I met the Buddhist monks in Wat Pah Nanchat in Thailand who showed me the Buddhist Path.”

Tiramit now lives in New Delhi with his wife and frequently travels to Thailand to visit family. You can find him at his blog – dhammafootsteps.