Alana's Dharma Blog

This a continuation of the last blog. If you haven’t read previously then please go back and read ‘Part 16’.

My Dear Reader, I thank you for bearing with me on this looooonnnggg recap of my early 2020 “interruption in our regularly scheduled program (an orderlyish, linearish blog tracing my meandering dhamma path)”, this here was the final recap post of that  Post-Retreat Interruption Series. It is simply a brief reflection of what I had come to understand my path to be.

A long time ago, I asked Mae Neecha what it really meant to eliminate sakkāya-diṭṭhi (first fetter – self-view – necessary to be eliminated in order to become a sotapanna). She replied, “I would define sakkyaditthi as the view that you are at the center of the universe and understanding/conquering sakkyaditthi is understanding that you alone are the cause of your suffering and wrong perceptions. Eliminating the sakkyaditthi fetter is seeing that there’s a huge difference between your perception of the truth and the actual truth.”

Now, years later, this answer is starting to make more and more sense to me.

We inhabit a rupa body in a rupa world. In this world, elements are constantly interacting. They are shifting. They are decaying and building new forms. They consume and they become consumed. There are predictable patterns, a balance that exists in a world where things arise from the earth and return to it, a zero-sum equation. There are rules, and to be born into this world is to be subject to these rules. I go through life pretending my objects will obey me, my body will obey me, but there is no amount of effort/ self-deception, that will ultimately make me master of this world( not even my little corner of it). The world simply does not revolve around me.

Even more years ago, Mae Yo taught me about the nama aggregates — especially memory (3) and imagination (4). She checked my homework, she drilled me continually, she made sure I was fluent in how they work. Now, I am starting to understand why.

It is because memory and imagination are integral to the process by which I concoct the delusion that the world revolves around me. With nama’s help, in my head, I reshape the world: I substitute reality with my ‘shoulds’/ notions about how things ‘ought’ to be, and I turn a blind-eye to what the world actually is. Nama is the blinders I put on that help me drown out the ugly bits of this world that lurk just outside my rose-colored glasses. Nama is the elixir I take that gets me believing a lovely single-snapshot-moment can be had and kept and repeated forever.

This path is the process of opening my eyes and seeing the world for what it actually is, not for what I want it to be. I suppose I am also understanding why Mae Neecha told me, “This is why Luang Por told Mae Yo, “ Rupa and Nama, 50/50.” Once we understand the tangible and intangible, we’ll have the whole picture.”

This a continuation of the last blog. If you haven’t read previously then please go back and read  ‘Part 15’.

In this blog, I will begin just after the last blog left off and end with a much more recent contemplation, from 6 months later, when I circled back to the topic of meaning in rupa and found a new depth and clarity.

If you recall, in the last blog I came to realize a big mistake: All this time, I looked at arrangements of 4es and knew they reflected something, so I just assumed that something was meaning. But it’s not meaning at all, it’s just a collection of reasons reflected in results.

But how did I get to such a mistaken view in the first place? It is that I see some of reasons, reflected through rupa, and my nama monsters kick-in. When I see a form that seems familiar, pattern recognition (memory) “informs” me of what is likely to come next. I hit a button; I get an Amazon box. I hit a button; I get an Amazon box. I hit a button; I get an Amazon box. Imagination now has all the ammo it needs to run wild: Rupa of button = guaranteed future box. And since, in general (when I close one eye and selectively ignore evidence to the contrary), the items I buy from Amazon make my life more convenient, I begin to believe Amazon box means convenience.

For some amount of time this ‘pattern recognition” can be close enough to predictive that it not only imparts ‘meaning’ in those buttons and boxes, it feeds my ego too. It reinforces the 3s(memory) and 4s (imagination), makes them believe they are omniscient. I hit the button I get the box. Because I don’t see all the interworking between button and box, suddenly I think I am the cause, or at least a partial cause, or at least that I know what the world will bring – a box.

My mind has become so convinced of my Amazon Narrative that even when I hit the button and don’t get a box, I can convince myself these instances are anomalies. I never stop to gather all those never received boxes up as evidence of my flawed vision of the relationship between button and box or my incomplete understanding of the Amazon supply chain. I have rigorously trained myself to ignore each and every glitch in the matrix.

Now the world is faced with a global pandemic. A shift, a new world order that is, in just a few short weeks, so radically different in so many ways. Suddenly, I find that more and more of those Amazon packages are coming late, or not coming at all. Now, in every part of my life, the patterns I was that I was confident in, have shattered, so much is unrecognizable and unpredictable.

Back at the retreat, Mae Neecha offered a re-framing, of a wrong view —  she called it a case of “incomplete information.” This pandemic has made me see that all my expectations, all the meaning I read into rupa, the outcomes I expect, are based on incomplete information. They are based on the past. The past however is over, the future will always be something different than the past, this is the law of impermanence. The world has not been fooling me. Rupa has not been fooling me. I have been fooling myself.

This a continuation of the last blog. If you haven’t read previously then please go back and read ‘Part 14’.

As a recap: My contemplations had landed me in another ‘stuck spot.’ Namely, I had come to recognize that every arrangement of rupa contains only 4 elements. But, somehow, I still believed that there was a deeper meaning — loved/just/fair/safe/etc. — reflected by rupa. Moreover, it seemed like rupa could portends the future, if only I could ‘interpret’ it correctly…

Of course, logic dictated I must be mistaken. Its not like meaning is a 5^th element after all. But to make my heart see the truth, I had to start dissecting my mistaken beliefs more closely. I had to consider why I was fooling myself and how I was continually ‘finding’ meaning and guarantees in rupa that simply couldn’t exist.

For months, I collected evidence (some of which was shared in the last blog), I kept turning the question over in my head, trying to find an angle of attack. But, in truth, it was slow going.

I was looking at a painting one day and started analyzing the marks. In painting, every time a brush hits a canvas it is called a ‘mark’; it is a term used to describe different lines, patterns, textures, etc. that are made manifest by the artist.

It dawned on me that each mark has its reasons (aka causes) for occurring. There are rupa based reasons –the 4es of the paint, the canvas, the hand of the painter, the training to become an artist. There are reasons in nama: The desire that made the artist want to paint this picture, the things their imagination conjured up to paint. There are reasons behind these reasons, how the artist was born a human, how and why they trained as an artist, their memories and beliefs about art. While there is no possible way for me to see/understand each and every reason that resulted in a mark, those reasons are all there, reflected in each brush stroke as well as the painting as a whole.

My mistake: All this time, I looked at arrangements of 4es and knew they reflected something, so I just assumed that something was meaning. But it’s not meaning at all, it’s just a collection of reasons reflected in results.   

But wait there is more: When I dissect any arrangement of rupa down further, it becomes clear that each reason just backs up into further reasons. Let’s take a very simplified look at the purchase of my favorite green purse as an example: When my favorite green purse wore out, I went on a scavenger hunt in order to replace it. Why? Because I thought it meant that I was special to my husband. Why? Because one time he made a sweet comment about recognizing me from miles away if I was wearing the purse. Why? Because the purse was bright green and easy to see. Why? Because bright green was the color of choice the season I bought it. Why? Ask the fashion industry. Why did I buy a purse that season? I had started going to the gym over lunch and needed a big bag to carry my shoes. Why? I used to go to the gym in the morning before work, but I had started doing yoga in that time slot. Why…

I could go backwards forever and ever and all I would find is an infinite current of reasons. A current is always moving, it is my mind that ‘freeze frames’ a form at a particular moment in time and begins reading the bits of its history that I can see into a meaning and a future. Stay tuned, next time we will peak at the little gears in my brain to see how this all happens.