Alana's Dharma Blog

The following is an email exchange with Mae Neecha on some of the details of my samutti contemplations. It is very long, so I will be breaking it up into a few entries for ease of reading.

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Seemingly out of nowhere, Eric started peeing blood. Unexplained blood in the urine is cancer till proven otherwise (though in his case also very likely kidney stones given his history of them), we are waiting for all the tests and labs to get performed. Naturally, I am freaking out — Eric has always been so hale and hearty, a foil to my own flower-like fragility — it sounds silly, I know, but it has literally never meaningfully dawned on me that he may well die before me.

Now, as we wait for all the testing to commence, it dawns on me what a house of cards I have built my life on: My sense of self, my daily doings, my imagined future, all founded on something as flimsy and undependable as my body, and Eric’s. It takes so little to break. To change. For things to take a totally new, different, never before expected turn.

But let’s back-up, because the story really doesn’t start here, in this life, with this husband. It starts wayyyyyy before….

Years ago, when I watched a friend who was willing to break-off her happy marriage if her wife didn’t consent to having a second child, I saw the root issue: For my friend, her life was given meaning, purpose, by the role of motherhood. Since her own childhood, her imagination of a perfect, proper, meaningful life was one in which she had two children. It was non-negotiable. She did by the way get her wish, but along with a second child, her wife’s resentment seeped into their relationship. That and a whole lotta extra work were prices paid.

When I look at parallels in my own life, I see how deep the samutti of partner runs for me. Knowing to look for this concept, and I can see the frequency and mechanics by which it plays out in my life: Even as a child, I play-acted the role of wife. Each partner I have looked for has been the same –someone to care for me and support me. I believe such care and support confirms me as special, makes me worthy, that it will keep me safe in this world and that it is inseparable from having a partner. For Alana ‘Partner’ equals a whole ball of wax well above and beyond a monogamous mate.

All activities are sweeter with the presence of a partner, it is like just having Eric around makes the experiences real and meaningful. In his absence, I wait for him. The ideal future is one with Eric —  without him the future fantasy I have dies on the vine. Partner is what gives meaning and purpose to my being, just the way children is what give meaning and purpose to my friend’s.

I was born into this world with a partner shaped hole in my heart. With the idea that a particular form — a Platonic Partner (i.e. sammuti) — would make me fulfilled and a quest to find the person who fit my heart shaped ideal. Enter Eric, the most recent hole plug, who if I squint hard enough, adjust my hole (i.e. expectations) broadly enough, is a ‘perfect fit’.

In the abstract, the failings of this plan are twofold:

1) How do I expect an immaterial hunger, a desire to be/to have meaning, to be fulfilled by some form, even an imagined form? I am the one who carved the shaped hole in my heart: The form I choose is arbitrary, the traits I believe the form can/should posses is equally as arbitrary, there is no meaning in what is arbitrary beyond what I assign.

2) Even more clearly, how do I expect an actual rupa form will embody a set of traits that I have imagined up, and that only exist in my mind? In other words — by what mechanism can a physical object fill an immaterial hole?

In the more mundane, the problem with my plan is simple — my hole plug is flimsy. Just a single virus — imperceptible with the eye — can take him out. A single mutated cell can overwhelm his body and cause it to stop working. A bullet that fits in the palm of my hand can end his life, and all the meaning and imagination I had hung upon it.

A while back, Oat generously translated the forward in her chanting book written by LP Thoon. One part really struck me: LP Thoon talked about how even if we get the most luxurious and delicious food today, we need to seek out food all over again tomorrow. The effort never ends, because the food itself decays, and the hunger it fulfills is fulfilled only temporarily.

I think about Eric and I see I face the same dilemma; not only does his body decay, but the hunger he fulfills in me — my longing for the meaning I have imbued into having a partner — is only temporarily fulfilled. So soon, I will be hungry again, back on the long, painful, prowl to find a new partner plug to fill the partner shaped hole in my heart.

I love Eric, I really do. But if I am being honest, I love my idea of who Eric is (calling out samutti again to make this all very explicit), who he is to me. When he is gone, I will mourn not the loss of Eric, but the loss of what I imagine him to be, and of a fantasy future we shared together in my head alone.

What Eric actually is, is a mystery to me; he is a continual, shifting, array of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and ideas and a form. A form which I clobber onto, which I use to peg (in my mind) his continually shiftingness into something stable, fixed, able to be identified and loved and claimed by me.  And when his flimsy ass form is no more, when a body that is so clearly not him, ceases to be something I can credulously call Eric, my devastation will set in. I will lose that form I convinced myself gave meaning to my life. A meaning I myself arbitrarily created and peddled as valuable. Driven by hunger I will forage again and a new misadventure — marked by striving, disappointment, peril and loss (i.e. internet dating 😉 ) will  ensue.

Thinking further on bubbles and anatta…

I realized that with physical objects, I want to affix things  — make them still — hold them in a state I like, with characteristics that I like. But what is true of simple stuff, houses and cars and even faces, is true of what is more complex too, like mothers. The mechanics are the same. I create a concept — of something narrow and fixed — and I expect the world will oblige my supposition.   Mother is just a form I imbue additional meaning onto, something more loaded than bubble or than car (yes, even that sweet ass Porche). But like a bubble, my mother isn’t fixed, she keeps changing. Both the physical form changes and the traits/characteristics manifested through behaviors/actions that are physical, change and move outside my fixed supposition of what it should be.

The mechanics of both bubble and mother require a physical form. My concepts, my conventions, are pegged onto a physical object. In this case, onto a particular body, my mom’s.

With a body, on some level I know it isn’t me. Or it isn’t my mom. It is just a collection of parts and organs. But I also know that I require a physical form to fix a concept onto. I use a physical body to peg my idea of self onto, to fix the shifting changing aggregates into an identity, I peg them to shifting changing rupa. In both cases I simply gloss the change. I fixate on the sameness to pretend the object, and the concept/meaning I peg to the object, are unchanging. But they continually change. I depend on this body, so I claim it, I try and use the act of claiming to work the magic – transmogify a lump of 4e flesh and bones into some special form — the exceptional form that follows my rules — so I can depend on it.

Only,  nothing I do seems to work. Nothing fixes form, or the concepts I lay on it. What I claim, what corner of the world I try to cut-out, piss around, know and control, resists me. Why?  Because that claim of mineness  is only mine in my head. It is only me overlying a concept, an expectation, a supposition on something that doesn’t really contain that fixed unchanged supposition at all.

Annatta — self — is just a glorified sammutti.  Annatta is just a conventional form being mistaken for something solid, something unchanging, something capital T truth REALZ. Its just a bubble whose temporary spherical form fools us into thingifying it in our minds.

I had read a sermon and it said we are just witnesses of an arbitrary process, a process of aggregates, of cause and effect. But we take witnessing, proximity, and claim it, forge it into an identity.  The process is so clear when I consider my TV habits: As long as I am watching a show, I  become intimate with the characters, I feel invested in their lives. I want the characters I have become attached to, come to identify with, to be  healthy, successful, happy. Even characters with traits I don’t like, consider bad, still I come to identify with them, I become sympathetic to them, just because I am manipulated by the show writers to see the world from their perspective.  When the characters die, or the show ends, I just move on to a new show or character and get wrapped up all over again. Its the same with rebirth: new body, new life and suddenly –because of proximity, because of my tendency to identify with and claim — I get to become attached, invested, ultimately disappointed and faced with loss, anew. From one show to the next –struggle, strive, lose, rinse, repeat. Dukka

Dear Reader: The following post draws upon an old ubai, a bubble (like a kid’s bubble or a soap bubble), which had been a critical tool for my contemplations on physical form, samutti (supposed form or conventional form), and annatta (no self/ or the nature of everything in this world that aggregates to become disaggregated/ or the un-clumping of what seemed, or was temporarily, clumped) for years prior to the present contemplation.

As a reminder, an Ubai is a tool, an example we see out in the world, which we can use to internalize the truths of this world, to see dhamma (which after all, is just the truth of this world) more clearly, to draw parallels with so we can understand how these truths –which apply to our ubai –apply to everything including our so-seemingly-special-selves.  As a further reminder –here is a much earlier contemplation I had on bubbles and annatta. I suggest you go back and read that section of THIS BLOG HERE, before moving onwards.

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All this samutti stuff from LP Thoon’s Autobiography brings me back to old ubai: Bubbles and annatta.

Its clear to me that bubbles are a perfect way to think of the most basic sort of samutti: A bubble is a constantly shifting array of  four elements, but as long as it maintains the bubble form we call it bubble. We superimpose a fixed concept onto an ever shifting 4e object and it adheres there, in our mind, until the bubble pops, at which point it strains credulity to keep calling it a bubble anymore.

From a strictly rupa perspective, we could use this as a simple way to consider ownership. For a constantly shifting set of 4es, which one moment, which state is ours? Clearly, an object needs to be a thing to claim it, enter samutti –the supposed form of the object is what we claim. If we want to say ‘all the states’ of the object are ours, then we need to accept those aggregates before they come together as well as after they disaggregate. We have to accept states of the object when we dislike it, when we are disgusted by it, when it is dirty and decayed, when it doesn’t any longer reflect whom we believe ourselves to be.

But it strains credulity to say our body is ours when it is a sperm and egg, or rotting in the ground. It feels off to claim the cancer cells are us, even though they are so obviously a part of our body. We don’t claim our poop, even though it is in us and comes from us. We don’t identify with disease states,  in fact, we feel assaulted by these states, they need to be fought off and ‘corrected’. This strain of credulity, the ‘extreme’ edges at which our claims clearly make no sense, is a way even simple physical objects can be used to make the truth known to us –the world doesn’t abide by our concepts of it, by the suppositions we superimpose.

Like a bubble, northing in this world can stay still. Nothing is fixed like the stagnant ideas of  things that we conjure up, and that we superimpose onto the world around us. No — objects change, they aren’t what we suppose — what we think they should be.

I claim items because I think my claiming them, “owning them”, can flip a magic switch and fix an item, freeze it from it’s continual shifting. I think my claim has the power to make my objects abide by my expectations of it, my supposition of what such-and-such a form will be and behave as. I think my claim means I can use this object to represent me, to prove myself, my self conceived identity, my control, my autonomy. With this claim I hope to upend the actual rules that govern the object –rules of rupa, of cause and effect, and substitute in my own expectations. But this doesn’t work, it can’t work. How do I know? Because every vial of botox and filler I inject into my face is a response to a body that keeps going ‘renegade’; it keeps sagging and wrinkling against my wishes, against my expectations of what an ALANA looks like, of who she is. This face is totally oblivious to, indifferent to, my claims of it.

The truth is: I am not attached to the object, I am attached to what I imagine it to be, to my fixed concept of it. That is why it is so painful when a face I claim sags and ages. This is why I can so easily move on to a new wardrobe when I feel like the style of the old clothes don’t reflect me anymore.  When I mourn a loss, it is the loss of the supposed form the object represented, not the object itself. Eric is not attached to me, he is attached to what he believes me to be. My mom is not attached to me, she is attached to the supposed form of me. Even I am attached to who I think I am –the supposed form of Alana.

Of course, I suffer! Of course my life is a series of disappointments and  dissatisfaction — I want shit to be what its not. I am attached to an idea of things, an idea that exists nowhere other than in my own mind.  And I scurry through this world trying to force items to align with my  ideas instead of accepting them for what they are. And when everything, eventually, shows itself to be what it is –at the latest when it goes all annatta and pops like a bubble — et voila, I have Dukkha.

In October 2021, Mae Neecha sent me a draft of LP Thoon’s Autobiography, that she had been working on, for my help with some editing. My reading of the Autobiography ultimatly spured me to do a deep dive exploration of Dukkha. But before that, it stirred-up, and casued me to revisit, a number of old contemplations, particularly on the topic of samutti – supposed form.

Below are some of my initial thoughts on sumutti, which I shared with Mae Neecha. More in depth contaplations will follow in subsequent blogs:

One thing that sorta hit me from the get-go of reading through LP Thoon’s Autobiography was the concept of samutti. Before the autobiography itself, in the translators notes, Mae Neecha chose the example of ‘mother’ to demonstrate the concept and – perhaps cause I have mama issues – it hit me hard; I started thinking about all the ways the word (concept) mother is loaded to me and all the suffering it has caused, also how the word daughter is loaded in my mom’s mind and the suffering it has clearly caused her — how our differences in definitions and expectations give rise to the conflict and disappointment in our relationship. I have been plugging in other words and examples because this little exercise actually shows a big  part of the mechanics on how suffering arises vis-a-vie how our memory’s and imagination’s twists and contorting of rupa.  One example that is particularly clear is the word home: I applied it to lots of my past homes, but it was pretty shocking when I considered my little CT apartment.

We have lived in this CT place for years now, we got rid of the SF place during the pandemic, so it is our only ‘home’ — ‘the place we reside’. What is more is since the pandemic, we spend a ton of time here, more than in most other places we have called home in the past. The thing is, I don’t really think of this place as home…

Don’t get me wrong, I like the apartment, it is a fine place to live, I have no hates or complaints about it like I did the NY place, which was definitely ‘not home’. I simply think of this place as TEMPORARY, a solution to my need for a safe and convenient place to lay my head. It works, for right now, but I don’t imagine a future here. It isn’t some cornerstone of my retirement fantasy life the way some unbought property in Carmel was, or a ‘safe nest’ to launch my adventures the way I imagined the NY loft (before I hated it).

I don’t really imagine it reflects me either. It certainly doesn’t reflect my wealth or my status, it is a modest little 2 bedroom walk-up. I decorated it, but it doesn’t capture my aesthetic –my sense of myself as someone who values beauty and taste — the way my dream home does. It’s not just the home that doesn’t capture ‘me’, neither does the town it is situated in. Greenwich isn’t ‘who I am’ the way SF was, I don’t share its values and it doesn’t reflect those values back on me. I feel no sense of being ‘confirmed’ here in Greenwich, or of belonging, again it is just a perfectly fine place to reside temporarily. I have no deep attachments here, when it makes sense to leave, I will do so with little suffering — not the agonizing departures of SF and the Texas houses before.

The thing is, this is all correct, this is what a home and a town is — temporary places we reside. But what is so marvelous is that of all my homes past, and imagined future places, the more-or-less correct view one here in CT is the one that feels most strange/ most ‘off’ to me. And here we have a big and important clue that I need to look inward for the mechanisms by which my (deluded) views of reality arise and the way those views are implicated in my suffering.

Which helps bring me to a sorta backdoor way into an interesting observation: My mind (memory and imagination in particular) is in a constant process of overlaying my beliefs/concepts onto rupa objects. As I have noted before, it gives them meaning that does not exist within the objects themselves. But this process slips below consciousness, I forget these sammuti are my own creation and I start to expect objects in the world will actually adhere to my concepts of them. I use my mind to try and fix ever shifting, multi-valiant, changeable, shit in the world into a stagnant/ one-sided/ limited view mould my mind has made for them. And then, when the objects (and people and situations) fail to fit my fixed concept of them (which they ALWAYS will since NOTHING is fixed) I suffer. Over and over. I am the architect of my own suffering, and summutti is my scaffolding.

Anyway, more to consider on this topic, but this book has really made me think it is time to dig back up another old ubai — bubbles and sumutti — and have a closer look…

Recently, I had been having a Line conversation with a Dharma Friend. She asked for some practice advice and I kept emphasizing to her how critical it is to identify our wrong views. This is, after all the heart of practice, but it is also something I see my friend struggle to do time and again. I get the struggle, frankly, its easy to get caught up just analyzing a story or a situation, while missing the wrong view.  I decided to follow my own advice and to test myself. Could I go back to an old story of my own and identify the wrong  view.. This is the story that came to mind:

Years ago, I was getting ready to leave KPY and Mae Yo was standing nearby. She came over to my dustyass car and began to dust it off. She wouldn’t let me go till she had finished. I felt sheepish standing there with my teacher cleaning my car for me. As I drove down the mountain it became clear to me why she did it — the glare was strong and if there had been dust it would have been hard to see. It would have been dangerous.

It would be easy to say I was being lazy. Laziness is dangerous. Don’t be lazy, case closed . But that misses the nuances and it misses an opportunity to really see how my mind/heart ticks.

The truth is, I am not lazy — I regularly work hard at shit: My practice, Thai, fitness, beauty, health. I work hard on things that I view as important. I saw the dirt on my own car, I didn’t clean it because I didn’t view it as important, I thought it was trivial. Even seeing my teacher do it, I still thought she was doing something trivial, a kindness, I didn’t understand the importance (that there is proof of how damn deep the wrong view runs).

To be explicit here: The wrong view is that what is important in the world is what I judge as important. What is outside of my beliefs, values or concerns is trivial. There is an implicit permanence that my limited view/understanding/beliefs and preferences are universal, that there is a law to the universe, and it is the law of Alana.

So lets challenge that view: Am I the arbiter of all things important? Do only the actions/rupa I assign meaning to have value? Do only the actions/rupa I assign meaning to have consequence? At the bottom of my action is a deeply skewed vision of the world: I believe the world revolves around me. That what I think is important IS important, to the exclusion of everything else. That if I can’t envision or imagine a particular effect then I am immune from it, like a get out of jail free card for not knowing the law. But is that the way the law works –exempt in ignorance?

From here it is easy to consider the Ttuktokpie starting with the very real situational example of getting in an accident. But it also is easy to consider all the places my core belief that I am the arbiter of importance in this world screw me in my daily life (hint hint the belief my priorities are more important that other peoples’ is the basis for every fight/disagreement and every self entitled, judgmental and cunty behavior and the antecedent consequences). And the super scary perils, like hell births, that come from views like this. Seeing the specific behaviors of course give me the opportunity to change them.

Ultimately though, when I talk about changing a behavior, my real goal is minimizing the stresses of living in this world. It is important, but no matter how good I get at living in this world, I am still in this world. Ideally, practice leads you out of this world. That there is why it is so critical for me to understand, deeper and deeper, my views. To evaluate them and truth test them . Those views are the reason I get born. The views are the reason I act. They are the reason I reap consequences and the reason I suffer with the experience consequences I don’t like.

This is a very very very long way to stress this most critical of point: everything boils down to view. It is why it is the first of the 8 fold path, everything else follows. Id one can fix their views the rest will follow naturally without effort. It is a prime cause.