In the wake of my cake baking contemplation and seeing the extreme limits on my control/tendency to use rupa arrangements to define who I am, I had gone to get my nails done. About a week later, looking down at them, I caught myself feeling surprised that the polish had started chipping so soon. At lightning speed, I caught myself thinking, “I have been being so careful with them.” Then it hit me– it’s not about me. My actions are a single, small factor, in nail polish staying. It is chipping because that is what happens to polish left alone for a while.

My mind went immediately to Dharma Meltdown 2.0,  when I panicked that I got my light colored  pants dirty, that I could never keep white clean, that it was a sign I was a bad Buddhist. For the first time I clearly saw it — dirt on white is not an indictment of me, it isn’t about me, my ego is lying. White gets dirty, that is a natural, expected state of white cloth over a long enough life cycle. At most, I am a factor in temporarily keeping white clean. I am reading meaning into Rupa that simply isn’t there.  There is no innate meaning that lives inside of 4es that is just waiting to be penetrated by me, Alana the Great Rupa Whisperer.

I started collecting evidence to prove that I am the one who reads meaning into rupa. Because if the meaning of an arrangement doesn’t live in the arrangement itself, can the arrangement create meaning (i.e. identity) in the arranger?

1) The meaning I assign to things keeps changing thanks to new information or new beliefs. So my ex-boyfriend’s emails used to mean I was special, loved, that someone so smart must see that same intelligence in me. Now when he emails I feel little, he is my ex after all. My NY home was supposed to prove I had a nest from which to build my NY fabulousness, but then I decided I didn’t want to be NY anything and that same home became a burden I struggled to sell. My car used to make me feel so on top and clever and then, when I went to sell it, at a huge loss it made me feel foolish and duped (here is the car story).

2) I don’t even consistently apply meaning to like objects. I was thinking about a fancy car I rented for some vacay. I remember someone complemented me on it as we pulled out of the gas station. Out loud, I said “thanks,” but in my head I was thinking I don’t own this car, it is a rental, it’s nothing for me to be proud of…and yet, when someone complemented my Porsche, my heart swelled with pride. But wasn’t the Porsche on loan too? Something I used for a time and then parted ways with. Simply the act of believing something is mine changed my meaning of it. The reality however is the only difference between that rental can and ‘my Porsche’ was the duration of use. That, and my imagination.

3) Even if there is some characteristic ‘proven’ in an arrangement of Rupa I help create, it doesn’t adhere to me, it is literally over once the arrangement ends. That mandolin player played a concert virtousically, he created a sound that the people in the room found beautiful. But then as soon as it was done, it was done. He likely took it home – that ego puff – took it to mean something about him later, but how could some past arrangement say something about present him? It literally exists nowhere but memory, so how could meaning in the rupa carry forward?

4) There are times that ostensible meaning of rupa remains, even when the person it is supposed to point to, to define, is already gone. I had recently gone to a museum that has an extensive collection of Sol LeWit wall paintings and something struck me hard – a number of the paintings were dated after he had died. I wandered around till I found a plaque that explained, LeWit left intricate instructions for his paintings, but by design they were meant to be able to be replicated on walls by other artists on his team. He insisted the date written on paintings was not the day they were created by him, but rather the day they went up on the wall. The result is that  the date of his creation, the object that proves his skill and artistry, was posthumous. It is not like the painting happened and then he died, rather he died and then the painting happened, so how could the painting create an identity in him? The only answer possible is that it can’t, it never does.

When I started thinking about my husband, Eric, I started to see the mechanics inside the clock – the way that my own aggregates clobber onto form, assign it meaning, and then reflect that meaning back onto myself.

I take Eric’s sammuti (supposed form) and give it a meaning: special, discerning, generous, good, handsome, mine and then I use the object and the meaning I create to build and define me. Wife, beloved of someone so great, worthy of treatment so kind. This is the way my mind uses rupa; gives it meaning and then reflects the meaning back to reference me, to build me.

The other night I was watching a show and the Golden Gate Bridge flashed on the screen — immediately I thought “mine” and ‘home” and I wanted to be there. As I reflected on my feeling, I realized this moment sort of summed-up a place I have been stuck: I know a bridge is just rupa, there is nothing in it except for 4es, and yet it seems to say more. It seems to have meaning, where meaning is an abstract ideal like loved, or just, or home and/or to offer  some guaranteed future outcome — like crossing the Golden Gate, in my fancy car, with the top down, holding Eric’s hand, laughing at some joke, as we embark on happily ever after adventure.

Stay tuned…in the next blog we will look at how I started to un-stick this very stuck point.