Alana's Dharma Blog

Dear Reader, this blog is a direct continuation of the last two, Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 1 and Part 2: Seriously, this is not one of those to try skipping ahead to get to the punchline. If you haven’t already done so, go back and read the last two blogs prior to reading the continuation here.

Just a a little refresher for those of you who have read the past blogs, below is yet more evidence to support my contemplations on the topic that everything is dukka. The evidence is organized into themes, based around the best examples I found to help prove to myself an assertation I had heard many times from my teachers — that everything is suffering. Moreover, I sought to understand not just the conclusion, but the WHY: Why everything in the world must be suffering, what it is about the nature of the world and everything in it that guarantees that every leaf I turn, every rock I look under, every new corner I turn, I will always find the suffering innate in this world.

• If the things we love are the source of dukka, where can we possibly hope to find sukka? : A few years ago, my friend’s husband gave him an ultimatum: Adopt the kid they had always planned on or divorce so that he could find another partner to raise a kid with. My friend was torn, he really didn’t want a child, but to save the life he had and loved with his husband, he acquiesced. Fast forward a few years and this friend is quite unhappy, the child he adopted has developmental issues, and has been a huge burden, especially during the pandemic. Watching him it is so clear that we invite, and then endure, tremendous suffering for what we love. In fact, nothing else other than what we love could possibly motivate us to endure the kind of suffering we do, if we didn’t love the thing we ‘do it for’ we would say “fuck it” and be done. If I didn’t love Eric I would have said fuck it and left NY. If Eric and I both didn’t love the life we imagine money will buy we would say fuck it and be done with his abusive jobs. It’s not only present suffering either — how many times do folks commit crimes to give their kids a better life, kill to protect themselves, seek revenge to protect a wounded ego — we regularly invite future suffering for the stuff we love.  Just imagining that we have something we love, even for a moment, is the seed for all the suffering we endure in this world as we seek to cling to that thing.  But if the things we love are what brings us dukka, where should we look to find sukka?

• The only thing keeping me here is my bondage — I was watching a play about slavery and in it a slave man decides he is going to runaway. In a scene where he goes to tell his sister about his plans he says, “out there is freedom, the only thing for me here is my bondage, there is nothing else keeping me here.” He invites his sister to join him in the escape, but she refuses, she has two young children –too young to be on the run– and she feels she can’t leave them. Her children are her bondage. In that moment, I got a brief understanding that the things and people we love are our tether to this world; it is because of Eric, my family, friends, enjoyments of various hobbies and places, my comforts and the joys I take in being loved, having the things I believe make me a me, that I can’t just flee to freedom like that sister in the play. The thing is, if all that is here is my bondage isn’t everything dukka? Just because someone with Stockholm syndrome begins to empathize with, love and depend on their captors, it doesn’t mean they aren’t in captivity. Any “sane” person looking at someone with Stolkholms realizes the patient is just deluded, that in fact they are in bondage,  and of course bondage is dukka.

• Waiting to suffer is suffering — My mom was hit by a car and my brother was so angry at the man who hit her. He said it wasn’t fair that man walked away with just a ticket while my mom had to endure so much injury and pain, while the family had to suffer to help her. I told him it was fair, the world is fair, everyone has to suffer injury, death, struggle for their families; the only difference was the timing and the details. We take turns, this was my family’s turn to struggle, another time will be that man’s turn. The more I think about it though, the more I see that waiting for a turn at suffering is suffering in and of itself. Afterall, I started this practice motivated by the deep distress of being a hypochondriac: Even when I wasn’t ill, I was stressed and afraid of my eventual illness, of “my turn”. Though we can sometimes ‘put it out of our heads’, ignore impending suffering, on some level we all know it is coming. The thing we don’t necessarily notice is that it is already here. It is here because if everything were candy canes and rainbows, we wouldn’t need to do so much ignoring and fantasizing and hoping and striving and planning for something better. It is here because the fear and stress of waiting to suffer is just another kind of suffering, a suffering that differs only in degree, not kind.

• There are no happy endings in this world, only stories that haven’t finished yet: I was rewatching Westworld and I came to an episode where some of the characters –bandits — have successfully stolen a safe and are trying to get it open. Here is the thing, in this show, the characters are reborn countless times, each life is just a variation on their last, small differences, but for these bandits the story line, the thing that drives them, is always the same, get and open the safe. This life, they are finally able to open the safe, inside it is empty. The scene hit me really hard, and I realized it is a powerful ubai for life: So often we struggle, labor, fight for what we want and we fail to get it, it is instant tragedy, spending lifetimes trying to crack a safe only to have it be empty. Of course, there are times the safe is full –we strive and struggle and are ‘rewarded’ with just what we want, it’s a happy ending with boku bucks. The problem though is that the story isn’t over; with a bunch of money, a host of new problems arise. For bandits, there is the consequences born of stealing money. Even if it was well gotten, with money (with anything) comes the fear of loosing it, the need to protect and preserve it. Ultimately it will be used up, and then there is the need to find at least as much as you had before to keep up the lifestyle that you had become comfortable with. When you play it forward –past the fake happy ending — it seems like whether the safe is empty or full, it is functionally the same;  neither temporarily getting ,nor not getting, quenches my thirst or stops the efforting. There is no happy ending, there is a pause –at best — and then more struggle. Stories without happy endings are called tragedies (no matter how many comic relief moments they have), and this world is an endless story without a happy ending, it is a tragedy, it is dukka.

• If getting what I want really made me happy, why the hell am I so damn stressed and sad: Back in early April, when it was time to head home from a fairly pleasant winter in Miami, all I wanted was to stay and enjoy more time here. As we were driving home, my mom got into an accident and I turned right back around and have been in Miami to help care for her since. I got my wish, more time in Miami with family, but this has been one of the saddest, scariest and most stressful periods in my life. It got me thinking that I frequently get exactly what I want, and yet, rather than being satisfied, I am stressed. Foundational to birth and becoming, to every action, is want, followed by belief that fulfilling said want will lead to sukka. But over and over I get what I want, and I suffer just the same. In fact, in many cases I suffer because of getting what I want…

• A world where every activity is a risk is a world of dukka — I was getting ready to go meet my brother and some family friends for dinner the other night. It was a gathering I was really looking forward to, a way to destress a little from a very intense week dealing with mom stuff. In the shower, I did the quick ‘new normal’ risk calculation: These friends had recently recovered from Covid, so the chance they were carriers was low, my brother and his wife tested that AM. It was safeish; I could enjoy. Then I thought more about it and realized that everything I do, all the activities I enjoy, the stuff that brings me comfort and delight, it comes with risk. Covid makes this so clear, but its always been this way, it is a product of having a fragile body, clinging to breakable things, of everything we do having 2 sides, coming with unforeseen consequences. I read about a study that shows that the human brain actually tries to shield us from the reality of our deaths, categorizing information about death as something that happens to others, but doesn’t relate to us. The researchers hypothesis that humans need to be desensitized to our own mortality to function in life. Folks are hardwired to to ignore risk and to believe it doesn’t apply to them. If we were truly cognizant of the risks of an activity, it wouldn’t be fun anymore; enjoyment requires ignoring, closing our eyes to ever present risk, or assuming a situation –a life –that is safe and comfortable now will continue to be so as long as we are in it. But just because we ignore stuff it doesn’t make it untrue, just because we believe we are exempt from mortality, risk, it doesn’t mean we are. We live in a world of omnipresent risk, and omnipresent risk is just another way to define dukka.

• Easier doesn’t mean easy, it proves degrees of hard: I was reading the news and there was an article about a study that concluded that having more money makes people happier in their day to day life. There is no threshold either, more money = more day-to-day happiness. The reason being that money tends to solve problems, it makes life easier. The story hit me because I so obviously agree, money makes life easier in many ways. Which got me thinking… Since my mom’s accident, having money has certainly made stuff easier; I have a flexible salaried job (and savings), I don’t have to worry about lost wages taking care of her. I have used money to free up time on day-to-day stuff, a meal service so I don’t need to worry about cooking, a laundry service so I don’t need to worry about cleaning. Mom has a concierge doctor, so she got immediate referrals for a pulmonologist when lung issues arose last week and the doc was super fast communicating prescription and med history to the hospital and rehab facilities. Money has definitely made some stuff in this situation easier, but  things are still exceptionally hard. Now, finally I understand your answer so many months ago, ” hot and cold are on opposite ends of the same temperature scale. Or how 0 and 100 are on opposite ends of a number scale”. If you need to demarcate stuff on a scale of how hard they are — if sometimes it is relatively harder/easier — it doesn’t mean stuff is easy, it actually proves that degrees of hard/difficulty are what define living in this world. It can be more hard, it can be less hard. But the scale is the scale of struggle, degrees of dukka is what the world slides along.

• Where there is desire/craving there is stress and there is ALWAYS desire: I had read the news about Omicron and I was stressed (another word for suffering), specifically I was stressed because I so desperately desired to go on a planned trip to see my family, but I also desperately desire to stay healthy and avoid Covid. So I stressed to come-up with a plan where maybe I could do both, private flight, driving to Miami, better masks, etc. All this stressing going on in my mind on my drive to Pilates class, where I paused my family/omicron stress, to stress about hitting each red light and getting stuck behind a slow driver because I was also stressed about making it to class on time. Stressed about what the teacher would think of me if I was late, etc.

I realized I live in a state of constant stress and the reason is my constant desire.  Afterall, if I didn’t give a damn about seeing family, or protecting this body, or what folks think of me, I wouldn’t care about canceled trips or Covid or being late to class. The continually shifting sand of this world (impermanence again) wouldn’t bother me at all.  But because I do want to acquire what I desire, protect what I desire, and avoid what I feel threatens those things I desire, I live under constant stress. Everything in this world is bound-up with desire, it is literally the cause of my entering this world and remaining in it. Therefore everything in this world is also bound-up with dukka –so long as my heart desires, there is absolutely no freedom from stress.

Still though, as I looked out at the ocean again this morning it got me thinking: Not having something is suffering, otherwise we wouldn’t chase, we wouldn’t work so hard to aquire. Desire is deep and the urge to fulfill it is primal. Hunger, as we have already established is dukka. But having this ocean view is suffering too. Just as enjoyment dawned, so too did the impulse to keep and preserve what I already have. The fear of loss, the effort and drama to make it mine, just so I can buy the option of an (imaginary) future with this ocean view.  But what I leave out of that future vision is the truth that even when I have something I need to work to preserve it (dukka), and I will fear losing it (dukka), and I will ultimately actually lose it (more dukka)  — a deed won’t change that anymore than a 3 month rental agreement.  Which brings me to the point that if having something is suffering, and not having something is suffering, isn’t everything Dukka?

The problem is we hunt for sukka in the identity we build with relationships, jobs, stuff, but when we lose these things –or they behave in ways we view as an affront to the identities we cherish — we suffer a massive gut punch. As soon as we fall in love with something (the instant desire turns to clinging), that thing sinks little claws under our skin, claws that go in smooth, almost unnoticed like a toggle bolt into drywall. But when that thing is yanked out, its hooks catch, pulling against the grain and it is sheer suffering to have them removed. Suffering that we welcomed with open arms by letting those claws sink in in the first place.

There is an old song about a woman who sees a sick snake on the side of the road and decides to nurture it back to health. She feeds it, warms it, loves it and then is shocked when, fully recovered, the snake bites her. The song ends with the snake saying, “you knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in”. These things we seek sukka in, props for our identity and imagination, aren’t actually sukka, they are toggles waiting to be ripped out, snakes waiting to bite…a coiled cobra waiting to strike looks a lot like dukka to me.

• Everything nama touches turns to dukka: Eric and I were driving down to Key West and it was a beautiful day — the perfect mix of humidity, wind, warmth from the sun — as I soaked it in, I realized there really is comfort in this world, i.e. there are physical circumstances a 4e being, with a particular 4e arrangement, finds comfortable. Just so, there is beauty, deliciousness, etc. The problems however arise as soon as Nama enters the scene: The moment Nama senses something, it goes into overdrive, if it likes it it clings and begins to scheme ways to maximize, to prolong, it plots to recreate and obtain more, it stresses over loss, it is saddened by loss and the future imagined without what we claimed/cling to. If nama dislikes it rejects, schemes ways to avoid, to disclaim and disassociate with what it doesn’t like and stresses to be near that thing, enduring suffering until it can disassociate. Nama is basically a dukka factory, it consumes everything around it and regurgitates dukka. Nothing is left unconsumed and unturned. So no matter what is actually in the world, as soon as our nama touches it, it turns to suffering. And there is nothing we experience untouched by nama, so functionally (at least till we stop craving and clinging) everything must be dukka.

• Enjoyment is just turning a blind eye to suffering:  I was thinking about my love of travel and realized that one of the things I love the most about it is that I see vacation as a time when I can put aside my daily worries and burdens a bit. I can relax, enjoy, de-stress. The thing is, just because I put aside my to-do list for a bit, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there; in fact, it seems to grow with every email that piles up while my ‘out of office’ is on. With vacation there is food indulgence which I tell myself to  ‘worry about later’,  all while engaging in the very eating, and weight gain, that causes me shame and stress and that will require vigor and effort and sacrifice to ‘repent from’ when I get home.  Since the tasks required to tend to a breakable, decaying, body are endless and routine, there always seems to be a mammogram, or broken crown, or some other painful, anxiety producing procedure/ appointment on the calendar for just after I get home. All through the trip I try to put it out of mind, tell myself to worry later, though the worrisome stuff lies in wait for me upon my return. When I look at my vacation habits, I see that enjoyment requires, in fact may fundamentally be, the act of closing my eyes tight and pretending –pretending what is effortful is fun, pretending the world will go as I want it to, pretending that struggle/burden/difficulty isn’t always lurking. Enjoyment is just times suffering doesn’t intrude on my imagination. Which must mean that suffering is the ever-present reality of the world — it never disappears — my imagination just lulls me into a fantasy world, and I shut my eyes,pretend, at least until that ever-present dukka intrudes forcefully enough for me to notice.

Once again, I am going to cut this off at a somewhat arbitrary point. There are just so many examples/themes and thoughts it feels like cutting it up into more ‘bite sized chunks’ is the best approach for this blog. So stay tuned till next time …

The truth is hunger, craving, these are uncomfortable states –dukkah in and of themselves. If they weren’t we wouldn’t always be running around, exerting so much energy trying to ‘solve’ them. Relief of hunger, and the ensuing sensation of relief — which we register as happiness —  is just the temporary dampening of our hunger (after all, I get hungry again soon after I eat. Thanks impermanence.) Dukka is the foundational state. All we need to do is wait for any comforts, any sense of fullness, to pass and we return to the base state of dukka.

• We are never actually satisfied/there is no satisfaction to be had in this world: When I sent a short Line to Mae Neecha a ways back, with a bit about my progress on this everything is suffering topic, part of her reply made me start thinking of a different angle. She said, “if while you feel happy, it could still be better somehow (if only _were here, if only there was_instead) that already indicates it is suffering not happiness.” This got me to begin considering a different definition for dukka — ‘dissatisfaction/not satisfactory’; no matter how much I am enjoying something, in the back of my mind I am always thinking of the thing that could make it better, or the way to repeat it, or how to enjoy it for longer. Implicit in that thinking is a basic truth — the thing I am enjoying is not satisfactory. If it really were satisfactory, I wouldn’t be trying to change it. If it really were satisfactory, I wouldn’t need to find a way to prolong or repeat it. I would simply be satisfied with what it was. But every single vacation I have ever been on, no matter how magical, left me wanting more vacation time. Never have I finished a trip and said, that is it –I never need to travel again. That was perfect, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I always want more/different. We are born into this world desiring satisfaction. We are born to satisfy desire. But this is impossible because impermanence dictates any delight we get is fleeting. So yes, we can enjoy a trip, we can momentarily fulfill our desire to travel or see a beautiful place, but there is no endurance in that delight. Instead, like the hit of a drug, the tiniest bit of enjoyment leaves us craving for more –worse, it feeds the hope that we can have more/better — and I am already calculating and planning and efforting my next trip. Why? ‘Cause everything in this world is unsatisfactory i.e. dukka.

• If you have to pick your poison then you get poison either way. I was dragging myself out of bed for an early workout. I didn’t feel like working out, I don’t really enjoy the process, but I do it to try and stay healthy. I hedge, trying to endure what I see as the smaller suffering of working out now to stave off the bigger suffering –heart disease — that can come later from a sedentary life.  Or, another example: I was sitting at a restaurant the other night, a toddler next to me screaming. I considered my options, moving to a table closer to road noise or staying with the screaming child. I moved, trading off what I considered the greater discomfort for the lesser discomfort.

The truth is, no situation is perfect, there are always these compromises, trade-offs. The reason is that there is always dukkah, just in different shapes (toddler versus road) and in different degrees (workout versus heart attack). I like to think to myself, “yes, life entails suffering, but I got this, I can try and control my life, my fate,  by picking the suffering I prefer, that I think I can live with.” Of course, there is no guarantee I can get my wish –that workouts will stave off heart disease. There is no guarantee that even if I do get the ‘lesser evil’ it really IS the lesser evil — traffic noise may annoy me less than a toddler, but road smog can irritate my asthma. The only real guarantee is that when you have to pick your poison you get poison –dukka — either way, so of course everything must be dukka.  In fact, even the act of picking my poison –the effort, the sense of uncertainty — is in and of itself dukka. So I guess I get a dukka shot with a dukka chaser.

• If a little less sucky feels like sukka, I must be livin’ in a dukka world. Just as I started my dukka contemplations, Eric began pissing blood. Blood in urine is presumed cancer till proven otherwise, so I was deeply afraid (dukka). A CT scan showed kidney stones and the doctor recommended surgery to remove them, but no sign of cancer. Suddenly I was overwhelmingly relieved –my mind registered this less bad news as sukka even though, lets face it, needing surgery is certainly not good news. Happiness in this case was just less suffering, less of a bad outcome than I had feared.

The problem with this situation is that in order to really feel happy, we are required to know sad; any sukka I experience is really relative to the dukka I suffered before/after it.  The pandemic isolation is another perfect example: For almost a year, Eric and I remained quite locked down. We avoided any indoor activities, even having groceries delivered. I was so lonely during that time, I longed for a return to ‘normality’, to the simplest things I had known and done before. After I got vaccinated, my first trip to Whole Foods felt like ecstasy, but I needed the extreme loss and isolation of my long lockdown to have the extreme joy of that first trip to the store.

We have already established that the world is unsatisfactory, continually stressful, that dukka is in fact the pre-existing/foundational state. Which means that it can’t be  that ‘suffering is just less happiness’ –life doesn’t bear this out: I would never say my dad’s death, or my move to NY, or my fear of Eric having cancer is ‘less happiness’. So it must be that happiness is just less suffering. Everything is just more or less dukka.

• Comparison is the thief of joy (i.e even a little less sukka feels like dukka, which means I live in a super sucky world) . Throughout most of my life, a trip to Whole Foods was just a chore, but after my looooonnnnggg lockdown, my first Whole Foods adventure was a slice of heaven.  With each subsequent shopping trip, as I returned to more and more pre-pandemic activities, my delight waned, until a few weeks later when the grocery store became just another chore again. The reason for this loss of enjoyment in the same exact activity is that enjoyment is not in the activity, an object, another person or a situation. Enjoyment exists in my heart. And my heart is always changing, judging what meets the threshold of enjoyment using past experiences and my own fantasies as a benchmark. So Whole Foods may have been pinnacle joy at one point, but  once I had started doing more and more public stuff again, including museums and outdoor concerts –which I like way more than the store– Whole Foods felt lackluster and boring.

• Entropy is the law of the cosmos and entropy makes life HARD: I was reading an article that was explaining the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. To illustrate the concept in simple terms there were 2 little pictures embedded in the text: The first was a wall of bricks and then an arrow, labeled “time”, that pointed to a disorganized pile of bricks. In a closed system, what is organized and orderly becomes less organized and orderly over time. In the second picture there was a jumbled pile of disorganized bricks and an arrow, labeled “work”, that pointed to a constructed wall of bricks. In an open system, things can move from disordered to more ordered, but only with the introduction of energy, work.

 A few days later I was shaping my eyebrows, frustrated at how quickly they grow, at the time, and painful plucks, and effort it takes to keep them in a particular shape and I realized entropy rules my life, rules this world, and it makes everything so damn hard. Left alone, buildings will crumble, eyebrows will grow bushy, rooms become dirty, bodies and objects will decay. Orderly arrangements of 4es will naturally shift, eventually disaggregating altogether. To build an orderly state, to maintain that state — even just temporarily — in the face of entropy (aka anatta) requires work, it requires effort. This effortfulness, this continual need to exert energy to obtain and maintain, this is the cause of dukka and it is literally a consequence of the law of the universe. Simply trying to live in this world, at the most basic level trying to provide requisites to a body, to acquire things and maintain them, requires herculean, regular, daily effort, not to mention overwhelming, omni-present risk (thanks Covid for making this one so obvious). For all that effort, all we buy is a little time because ultimately the law of impermanence reigns supreme. What is hard is dukka and life in this world is hard, therefore life is dukka.

This is already a lot to read and consider so more examples to come next week…to be continued…