Alana's Dharma Blog

I was watching a bird yesterday struggling to fly in the wind. I realized it puts so much effort into just getting where it wants to go. A place it only stays a little while before needing to struggle to get somewhere new.

To achieve just temporary enjoyment, the bird has to struggle. Which is to say, enjoyment is born of struggling. No struggle no enjoyment. On some level, we all know this: If you want a delicious meal, you need to cook it. Or you need to work hard, to make money, to pay someone else to cook it for you. Enjoyment is the fruit of a poison tree.

One way to look at this of course is to confirm my old beliefs –there is struggle and there is enjoyment. Dukkha and sukkah, they go together. Struggle enough and you get to enjoy plenty.

But here is another way to consider it: My desire for enjoyment, for that tasty meal, is the cause of the suffering and struggle I endure to bring that meal about.  And where did the desire for a tasty meal come from? From the memory of the last delicious meal I had, from my wanting to repeat the experience again. The tasty meal, my desire to repeat it, plants the seed for my struggle, it causes me to struggle, just to enjoy the next tasty meal.

And isn’t the stuff that causes you to suffer –even if it is momentarily delicious – actually suffering in and of itself? If I drink something that tastes awesome, but then a few hours later I am writhing in pain from drinking it, I would say I had been poisoned. The drink is poisonous. And poison is definitely dukkha.

 

A while back, my rheumatologist recommended I go on fasting cycles to help regulate my immune system; every 4 to 6 weeks I have been doing 5 day modified fasts. On the final day of my most recent fast, I started contemplating on my hunger, my joy at getting to eat the next day, and how to consider all of this in terms of the topic that ‘everything is suffering.’

As I fantasized about my break-fast meal, I felt a surge of joy, excitement and anticipation. And that’s when I realized my joy at getting to eat again arises because it will bring me relief of deprivation. This is already evidence that what Mae Neecha said is true – happiness is just less, i.e. a relief from, suffering.

Years ago I had gone to the famous Thomas Keller restaurant, Ad Hoc, in Napa. Above the door read a sign “ For the temporary relief of hunger”. The sign had really struck me. When I consider my joy at breaking fast, I realize it too is just a temporary relief of my deprivation: All I have to do is wait another 4-6 weeks and, with my next fast, the deprivation will return.

But the truth is, if I were to wait even a few hours, hunger would already set-in. It’s just that, when I’m not fasting, I simply go to the fridge and pull out something to eat – the relief comes so quickly that I barely notice either the suffering or the soothing. But fullness is always a temporary state, what exists before –what will exist again just a little bit later – is hunger.

Hunger is the native state, the baseline, that is what I am continually striving, eating, to fix. Striving for food, eating to temporarily relieve hunger, this is how I (and all embodied beings) adapt to this world. Adapting, ‘fixing’ — the fact that I need to do this at all —  proves what is there to start with: A problem, dukkha.

Hunger is just a type of dukkha. Hunger is the baseline state. Therefore dukkha is the baseline state. Fullness is temporary, it is just a temporary relief of hunger.

From the beginning of my practice, the former abbot of Wat San Fran, Phra Nut, has been a true teacher and dear spiritual friend (kalyanamitra) to me. In 2021 he decided to leave his role as abbot at Wat San Fran and return to Thailand. Before he left the US, he took a trip to a sister temple in New York to participate in a Kathina ceremony. I feel deeply fortunate that I had the opportunity to visit with him while he was in New York.  Below are my notes that I recorded just after my time speaking with him:

LP and I had a chance to catch-up today, we both shared where we were with our practices, what we had been contemplating most on recently. LP told a story that had resonated with him and it really resonated with me too. It was about a woman whose baby dies 15 minutes post birth. She wasn’t upset, and the nurses asked how it was she stayed so calm. She explained she wanted to be present for the child she had for the few minutes she had her. Getting upset about the future, imaginary child makes no sense. The future child after all wasn’t hers at all.

LP then talked about how his own practice has been to try and be more mindful. To actually watch his mind. When the imagination starts stirring our suffering, to go ahead and fact check it: Is this thing I imagine actually true? Is it as I imagine? How certain is it really? The gift of this contemplations is in short, a balm to anxiety. But in long, it helps train the mind to watch the mind, to understand the origination of suffering is in the mind alone.

We talked through a simple example on my mind a lot lately — my anger and anxiety at folks who don’t mask, who I believe endanger me and my health. This is a throwback to Hypochondria Alana, an old contemplation of mine that I hadn’t revisited in quite a while. But the punchline is there is no necessary relationship between what I stress about and what actually happens. Sometimes I worry about getting sick and I get sick. Sometimes I worry about getting sick and I don’t get sick. Sometimes, when I’m not even worried about getting sick, I get sick. And of course, sometimes I don’t worry about getting sick and I don’t get sick. All these are always possibilities, even when I stress and worry that for sure those anti-maskers will be my covid downfall. To prove the point: A sneak-peak years into the future when my covid downfall actually did come, it was not due to some anti masker in the store, but my very own beloved, masking, deeply careful husband.

Meanwhile, LP made the poignant point: All my stressing when I walk into a store with anti-masker doesn’t guarantee my sickness, but it sure does guarantee my mental anguish. If something bad happens I will have to deal with it, that is my karma. But if not, then I just worried for free. That too is my karma I guess, a suffering born so obviously from my wrong views.

I shared with LP the very beginnings of my contemplations on Everything is Suffering.  I told him that I was trying to prove this assertion of Mae Neecha and LP Thoon and Phra Ajarn Dang.   I wanted a comprehensive understanding of suffering. In some way I couldn’t yet articulate, I knew in my heart I needed a comprehensive understanding.

LP stopped me and issues a warning: That folks like he, and I, we tend to be such elaborate and comprehensive thinkers. But folks have become enlightened on so much less. He suggested I drill down and ask myself if this is truly what I need? If so, why. I talked more, strung together the bits and pieces of observations I had so far. My evidence for suffering and how this helped establish the whys of suffering. LP just pressed me further with a simple question, “so what?”.

I couldn’t really answer at the time, but as I got into the car and drove home I considered the point blank “so what?” more closely. LP Nut’s teachings always struck me with their simplicity, with the utility of asking simple questions to really watch our minds, trace our beliefs, get at our core tendencies and views. I got to thinking about one of LP’s first teaching I had heard, a technique he called  ‘Killing the Hope.’

At one of my first retreats, LP had emphasized the need to kill the hope that we are special, that we are different, that the world will obey our rules. A group of students had gone for a hike and we took a break during which LP taught. Those days were my hypochondriac days and LP called me out on whatever impending disease I was fretting about in that moment. He went around a circle of 20ish students and asked each of them if they had been ill? Had they lost people to illness? Did they have illnesses from which they hadn’t recovered? One person had had cancer, diabetes, many had lost family to disease, or struggled to care for the diseased. In the end, he asked me why I was so worried about illness? Just look at the evidence around me, everyone suffered illness, if I could simply kill the hope I would be exempt from it I wouldn’t need to worry about it so much any more. I would begin to understand the nature of my body, that like every body, was subject to disease and to breakage.   If I could kill the hope that I was so special, that my health could be eternally preserved –or at least preserved on my terms, on my schedule and agenda — I could pull off major blinders that blocked a clear understanding of the world. A world that doesn’t bow to my body, or my imaginations of what a future with that body ‘needs to’ looks like.

Hope, this is what we are born for. Killing the hope, that is the way to exit, release, cessation of rebirth.

That’s when it struck me and the direction of my suffering contemplations took real shape: I realized that my project, the path forward for me had to be not just ‘proving’ that everything was suffering, but understanding the WHY. WHY is it that everything is suffering? With the causes in play, could I realistically expect a result other than suffering?

Afterall, I have contemplated on suffering before. I know damn well its part of this world. But by calling it a part of this world, in my mind, I leave a part that is sukkha. I have a part that I can chase, that I will keep trying to squeeze and hold and maximize. Spending each life cultivating knowledge, qualities, skill, karma that I need to chase the last little bit of sunlight on a darkening porch. No, to truly convince myself that EVERYTHING IS DUKKHA I seriously had to see WHY. I needed to prove to myself that this world doesn’t allow things to be any other way.  That is the path to killing the hope for a world that is anything other than Dukkha.

Mae Neecha’s reply to my question how everything could be suffering:

Yes, it’s the feeling of relief (that you’d call happiness) over Eric’s kidney stones that embodies the concept of everything is suffering.

Happiness is relief from suffering, or just less suffering. They are on different sides of the same scale… the scale of suffering. Just like how 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.

It is like how sometimes people enjoy doing yoga, traveling the globe, talking to friends, or cooking dinner. The physical act itself is suffering, because you are exerting energy and working. Physical and mental exertion is suffering. Just because we tell ourself that it is fun and doesn’t feel like suffering doesn’t mean that it really isn’t suffering.

Alana’s reply with further thoughts on how everything could be suffering and the starting point for my Everything is Suffering contemplations;

Alright — I need to think on this more, but it does make sense, especially the part of suffering being a continuum we are always on, a scale we move up and down, but never get off of.  I think, on some level, I have always thought of suffering like landmines — if I can just tread carefully, chart the right course, it can be more or less avoided. But this I am starting to see isn’t right at all. Suffering is just the land itself. It has peaks and valleys for sure, but as long as you have two feet on land you have two feet firmly planted on the suffering scale.

We are up in VT for a few days checking out the leaves. We are staying in an air bnb and it is dirtier than I want. When Eric and I dirtied it even more, just by living in it, last night I started thinking…People are dirty, they do dirty things, they act in ways that dirty the environment around them. Here I am wanting to travel, but needing to stay in places where people are, places that naturally go through cycles of dirty and clean. I spend so much time stressing about cleanliness, trying to make my environment clean. Ridiculously believing that if  an environment looks clean, then it is clean, and if it is clean then it is safe (compounded wrong view obviously).  I have these rigid standards of cleanliness that are totally out of whack with reality. I have an expectation the world will bow to my standards, at least the air bnbs I ‘own’, that I use my money and effort to arrange, that I need to be in. But there are perfectly good reasons that my standard of cleanliness simply is not possible all of the time. It is my standard, not some rule. The more I considered this impossibility, and the suffering and discomfort I feel when I am places not perfectly clean, the more my heart eased up a bit.

I got to thinking suffering is like cleanliness. It too exists on a scale; like dirt, it is innate in this world, that is the part I never deeply considered before. I put myself in this world filled with dirt (suffering), I want to go places where there will naturally be dirt there (again suffering), I want to enjoy activities that create dirt (suffering). The idea that I can avoid suffering –keep from sliding up and down the scale that I literally live on–is as crazy as the idea that I can avoid dirt by never sliding off of a state of cleanliness. Now I am starting to see it — I don’t understand what this world actually is.  The belief that it is possible to make the world bow to my standards and expectations clearly underscores this deep misunderstanding.

Anyway, like I said…still thinking. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.