Alana's Dharma Blog

I was online shopping for a new rug (to solve the problem BTW that the old one, did as rupa shit is wont to do, and shifted into a state of shrunkeness when heat from the dryer interacted with its 4e self). I was stressing about how it would look. I realized, much like my face, if the rug is going to be mine, it has to be beautiful. More than the rug, the space has to be beautiful. Why, bc beauty is a characteristic of what belongs to me. It is a fundamental aspect of my imagination of what rupa objects that are ‘mine’ look like. If it is mine it is beautiful– beautiful house, body, clothes.

Note: I don’t yet understand if beauty is a physical manifestation of a more abstract trait (like goodness, or in controlness) , or if it is, in and of itself simply a characteristic of form that belongs to me –like dollars are green. But either way, when something that is supposed to be mine hits a state of ugly there are 2 super suffering outcomes:

1) I feel deep distress at the dissonance that these belongings aren’t acting in accord with my imagination. That they are actually, on some level, proving that any item, even ones I call my own, won’t act according to my rules, but according to the rules of rupa. That the total paradigm I have set-up of being able to PWN the world through Rupa, to manifest my will and myself may in fact be bogus. That physical states are governed by physical processes not by my will or desire or imaginations. Faced with the truth my little mind breaks.

2) I feel deep shame. Why? Because if I believe these physical items are able to express something about me, if they can be used as proxies for my identity, for the traits I imagine I myself, and my ideal world, possess, if they are ugly — a state I literally ‘disown’, disavow, than it must reflect something broken or wrong with me. The world, I, can see my own shortcomings in the ugliness of my belongings. My failures to control, my failures to deserve beauty, my gimpy nature that would accept anything less.

Of course, a wise person might note the obvious — if my imagination conjures up beautiful rupa as a defining quality of what is mine, and the rupa I see in my body and my home is continually shifting states, achieving points of ugliness, then it must, by my own reasoning, mean these things are not mine. They are not me. They do not represent me. Afterall, physical things represent the physical interactions with other physical objects that bring about their changes. Their shifting states. Their aggregation and their disaggregation. That has literally nothing to do with my imagination. It is a totally separate process. If my imagination is the image of who I am in my mind, and no physical object ever can match that image shouldn’t I say no physical thing is going to do the job of representing me or embodying me or manifesting me. The sand literally can’t take and sustain the shape of imaginary Alana. You might as will quit trying GIrrrllll.

But delusional, and bound to continually suffer me (i.e. still me :() instead takes this feedback loop of ugliness in ‘my’ belongings and adjusts my imaginary image. I cry, I hurt, and then I am forced to adapt to the reality of rupa. So I need to say that this 41 year old face, that would have mortified my 20 year old self, is what I have to work with. It is my new ‘base-line’ of beautiful. It is the curve that my mind will always grade myself on thanks to hope and delusion.  And/or, I will try to do better, to be better, to improve, learn modify who I am, because if ugly is an indictment of me, I just need to be better and once again, the things I claim can be beautiful/and or I can claim new things that are beautiful. In other words, if I just fix me, I can fix the things that belong to me by some transitive property.

Again….I am avoiding the far more logical and straight forward message of this whole mess, which is “Alana, this rupa shit is not you, it doesn’t actually belong to you or reflect you. It is just 4es, doing 4e shit. You can’t and won’t ever control it. You can poke at it. You can cause shifts using other physical entities, but there is no way to guarantee you are going to like the shifts that ensue (ahh thank you green tea mask breakout for that helpful life lesson).” But, at the end of the day, the problem is that the only reason I would even bother with all my poking is the delusion that these things are me/mine/prove me in the first place.

1) The starting point, the first problem that I can sense deep in my heart, is that I am hungry. I want to become, I want to feel fulfilled, to feel safe, to have a future, to manifest a vision of myself  and of a world that adheres to my standards. I want to prove me, to validate my sense of self.  Because I so desperately want to be, I have a desire-borne hole in my heart.

2) Crazyass self feels an intangible hole and envisions filling it with a physical shit. How on earth I can ever fill an imaginary hole with rupa should already be a tip-off that this is utterly delusional, but on I press. In this example, let us say I have a house shaped hole (which btw really means I have a body shaped hole, but I am still refining and digging on body, so lets use house as an easier proxy): Because I want safety and a stable future and an expression of this self, I mold my hole — my gaping sense of emptiness and unfulfillment — into the shape of a house. I assign the meaning. House = valuable, safe, a guaranteed future, an identity for me, a canvas upon which I can manifest my vision of me through architecture and design.

3) But the imaginary house shaped hole is fixed. It doesn’t even take into account the changing samutti that is ‘house’. The hole’s only shape is fixed-up house, not roof-leaking or crumbling house. Of course I am going to be unfulfilled with these objects! In addition to trying to fulfill intangible desires with tangables. I will only be satisfied with one state of the tangible, not the continually shifting state that occurs with all rupa. I will spend my life, my energy, trying to achieve a thing of that perfect, shiny and new shape and then I will fight like hell to preserve that shape. I will be constantly burdened by the need to exert effort, effort that often fails, to achieve that particular shape, to damage control or reset expectations when it loses that shape. I will be devastated when that shape passes beyond the threshold I maintain as ‘house’ in my heart.  This is clearly a major problem of relying on changeable things to fulfill desires that change at totally different rates, and based on totally different causes than 4eobjects. I foolishly believe these forms, that don’t regard me, are mindless of my holes, that I have to adjust to and can only sometimes temporarily ‘force’ to adjust to me (on rupa’s terms no less) are mine. Not so swift Alana…

4) What is more, is this house form really is just an ever shifting arrangement of rupa. It is like shifting sand, always moving. It is the stuff of all objects. I am trying to fill a hole in my heart, in a shape I have cut out all by myself, with sand. But I ignore that it is just elements. I ignore because to really believe that objects that are nothing more then 4es are going to manifest me, be the medium through which I satisfy my formless desires, it strains credulity. So I squint HARD at the world, trying to focus on difference, details, flourishes of shape — a bay window, a vaulted ceiling, a one of a kind carpet — instead of the uniformity that is their basic nature. Afterall, how could I ever get to becoming my special self with same same sand? I self dazzle and delude with my agenda to sell myself this lie.

I am the one who assigns the value to these objects, treasures them in the degree to which they satisfy the imaginary form that my nama has carved-out a shape of in my heart. In the real world, they have only utility that is defined by their shifting form in the shifting circumstances in which they are usable.

When I left my first house in Houston, I cried and cried. I thought I would never own a house again, I thought that I was leaving an object that proved I had ‘made it’, been successful, adulted, achieved, where would I be without this instrument of my future? This manifester of me? This object that was so obviously mine. But, if it were really mine, how come it so easily moved along to a new owner, still standing there, doing fine completely divorced from me? And more importantly, if that house proved me, portended my future, how come I am still here now cruising along without it?  I have simple moved on to new objects to fill my heart holes, house shaped and otherwise.

The other day (before the above contemplation), as I was primping in front of the mirror, trying for the umpteenth time to consider the burden I assume for a body just because I think it represents me. I was getting nowhere. Suddenly, I shifted my take just a bit — I was doing the primping because beauty is who/what I am. That was the ticket! I was able to  begin to consider whether or not this body and I are actually ‘intertwined’. Now, of course I see the chain of craziness, I imagine a me, assign it abstract characteristics, assign those characteristics a corresponding  physical characteristic (enter Alana and her shit are definitionally beautiful), take possession of an object that comes close enough to my imaginary form (for 1 hot sec anyway), and then spend the majority of my time miserable when that object doesn’t conform to my imagination of what that object is /should do because, duh –why the hell should it? I mean, sure I can use a physical object to poke at, and cause a shift in, another physical object. But to pretend that being able to cause (sometimes) perceivable change means those objects obey me or prove my mastery is insane. The sands are always shifting, in response to all manner of ‘pokes’ from 4es (including this body) in their environment. On occasion their shifts correspond to what I desire. But to assume that that means they conform to my desire…lets just say even a broken clock is right twice a day ;).

OK, so a little background first…over the years of my practice I had repetitively returned to one of those crazy pervasive wrong views that I just couldn’t shake: A fit body = extreme willpower.

Of course, I knew it was a wrong view, that it was permanent; I had done countless exercises gathering evidence of all the times a fit body doesn’t equal extreme willpower (how easy was it to be fit without trying in my teens, how much more did I will it and work for it only to be less fitter in my 40s; many slaves working in fields had fit bodies, did their fitness really reflect extreme willpower or just being forced to do what it took to survive; what about folks who get all sorts of skinny when they have cancer, its not willpower over their diet that got them there; etc.). Still though, on some level it seemed ‘obvious’ to me that when I was at my fittest, from strict diet and 4 hours a day of exercise, my crazy ripped body was a physical reflection of the willpower it took, to do the shit it took, to achieve that state. Like boiling water reflects a temperature over 212 degrees, my fittest self reflected my extreme willpower. No matter how much evidence my brain gathered to the contrary, my little heart just couldn’t believe it, the ‘truth’ ripped body=extreme willpower was so damn ‘obvious’ to me.