As this plane tips its right wing towards the Irish Sea, the sun, which at this early hour sits deep in the south west, pours its heavy orange gold into the cabin. Rick is working on yet another terrible script; folks around us are snoozing, chatting, vacantly looking at the shopping brochure of the airline. Planes more than airports have become the locus of transience, with their often frequentation developing into a kind of peculiar constancy. Some of us write well in planes – what else is there to do, but to cruise along to wherever your mindstream takes you as you are trapped in utter passivity from a to b.
We are on our usual two hour flight to Bavaria with its obligatory turbulences, clouds over the Atlantic, and mainland illumination spreading over the continent like some kind of glowing disease. The only thing that glows up here right now is the horizon and it isn’t electric and loud, as the never ending string of civilized streetlamps, but warmth in golden lavender, soft and majestic.
In the book that lies next to me on the seat between Rick’s window and my isle seat, Thubten Chondron attempts to explain what Buddhists think of the query into the beginnings of mind. Science, she admits, attempts to unravel how our physical universe unfolded, but since mind is not physical, one may ask how it began? She writes: “Our afflictions, which include ignorance, also arise from causes: the previous moments of afflictions. Their continuity goes back infinitely. If there were a first moment of affliction, then we would be able to point to what caused it. If we were initially pure and later became ignorant, where did ignorance come from? It’s impossible for pure beings who perceive reality to later become ignorant. If someone becomes ignorant, he or she wasn’t completely pure before.” (Taming the Mind, p.7)
Is it useless to inquire into the beginnings of time and mind? And are they different to begin with or is the latter as intertwined with the former as it is with matter? “The Buddha”, writes this wise woman, “was extremely practical, stressing that we deal with the present situation and try to remedy it. Getting lost in useless speculation prevents us from focusing on the present and improving it.” (ibid.) Fair enough – the only tangible experience we have of time is the present and any meditation on what happened “before” and possibly “first of all” may well be futile, particularly when we admit just how much the present moment needs remedying. So in day-to-day practice it may well be best to avoid “useless speculation” and fix ourselves in the here and now. But I do find her exclusive, swiping dismissal of such fundamental questions as “what was at the beginning” or “how did the mindstream begin” a bit overzealous. Yes, it is hard to argue that anything besides focusing on the immediate present will lead to an alleviation of problems as they are. But contemplating the notion of the temporal character of time itself, no matter how potentially negligible the investigation may be in the eyes of Thubten Chondron's Buddha, could surely shed some light on our experience of time as we go and hence influence how we deal with the life-span that we are given whilst on this planet.
We are on our usual two hour flight to Bavaria with its obligatory turbulences, clouds over the Atlantic, and mainland illumination spreading over the continent like some kind of glowing disease. The only thing that glows up here right now is the horizon and it isn’t electric and loud, as the never ending string of civilized streetlamps, but warmth in golden lavender, soft and majestic.
In the book that lies next to me on the seat between Rick’s window and my isle seat, Thubten Chondron attempts to explain what Buddhists think of the query into the beginnings of mind. Science, she admits, attempts to unravel how our physical universe unfolded, but since mind is not physical, one may ask how it began? She writes: “Our afflictions, which include ignorance, also arise from causes: the previous moments of afflictions. Their continuity goes back infinitely. If there were a first moment of affliction, then we would be able to point to what caused it. If we were initially pure and later became ignorant, where did ignorance come from? It’s impossible for pure beings who perceive reality to later become ignorant. If someone becomes ignorant, he or she wasn’t completely pure before.” (Taming the Mind, p.7)
Is it useless to inquire into the beginnings of time and mind? And are they different to begin with or is the latter as intertwined with the former as it is with matter? “The Buddha”, writes this wise woman, “was extremely practical, stressing that we deal with the present situation and try to remedy it. Getting lost in useless speculation prevents us from focusing on the present and improving it.” (ibid.) Fair enough – the only tangible experience we have of time is the present and any meditation on what happened “before” and possibly “first of all” may well be futile, particularly when we admit just how much the present moment needs remedying. So in day-to-day practice it may well be best to avoid “useless speculation” and fix ourselves in the here and now. But I do find her exclusive, swiping dismissal of such fundamental questions as “what was at the beginning” or “how did the mindstream begin” a bit overzealous. Yes, it is hard to argue that anything besides focusing on the immediate present will lead to an alleviation of problems as they are. But contemplating the notion of the temporal character of time itself, no matter how potentially negligible the investigation may be in the eyes of Thubten Chondron's Buddha, could surely shed some light on our experience of time as we go and hence influence how we deal with the life-span that we are given whilst on this planet.
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