Alana's Dharma Blog

Just a reminder, this entry is the final section in an email I sent to my teacher, Mae Yo, outlining what I see as a road map to practice. If you have not done so already, do go back and read the Last Blog before continuing: _______________________________________________________________________

Part 3: A Few Words on Ideas From the Buddha

At risk of this email turning into a multi-volume desk set, I will try to keep this short. But here we go…before I recently went to Hawaii I had spent some time contemplating and came to the conclusion that the 4 noble truths, plus right view, may be enough to walk the path.

Before I went to Hawaii a friend made some off-hand comment about the 4 noble truths and it got me to really start thinking about them, considering whether I understand them. Once I was in Hawaii I started contemplating hotels.

We have been to Hawaii 3 times and stayed in different hotels each time. This was not driven by external factors alone (or even mostly) like price or availability. It was driven by us wanting certain things out of the experience and striving to get them. I’ll spare writing the full details, but I noticed first we wanted location and quiet, then more luxury and service then more control over diet and anonymity. Each hotel had its benefits but there were also things we perceived as faults, discomforts, so we kept striving for more… I decided to try out considering the subject in terms of the 4 noble truths.

A Short Summary:

The first Noble Truth –Life entails Dukka (unsatisfactoriness, suffering)

From Alana’s Hotel Experience:  I am uncomfortable at home and I want to travel. When I do, each spot I visit is a little off– too loud, too public, too basic, no kitchen, wrong location. I feel dissatisfied in some way. Even the best place, even when I was overall comfortable, there were little things…there was Dukka

The second Noble Truth — Dukka (unsatisfactoriness, suffering) arises based on a cause. The cause is Thanha (craving)

From Alana’s Hotel Experience: My discomfort (Dukka) arises because of things I want (Thanha) — specifically, both physical comforts (luxury, cleanliness, location) as well as identity wants (to be someone who is luxurious, to be someone who takes care about what they eat, to be someone who is off the beaten track) and the desire for control (to be able to cook, to be able to come and go unnoticed).

The third Noble Truth: When the causes of Dukka are eliminated,  Dukka is eliminated.

From Alana’s Hotel Experience:  If I didn’t have a bunch of conditions around travel then I could be ok with a broad range of situations and I wouldn’t suffer. I wouldn’t hotel hop, I may not even go in the first place…If there were no causes the results would cease.

The fourth Noble Truth: The Buddha has taught the path to the cessation of Dukka, i.e. the Eight Fold Path, beginning with correcting wrong views

From Alana’s Hotel Expereince: By extension of #3, if I want the suffering to cease I need to uproot the causes. To do so I need to examine and change the wrong views that give rise to the discomfort.

Wrong View From the 8 Fold path: A few that I found in the Hotel Story:

1)  That I can control–that I can both get the things I want but avoid the ones I want. The evidence however is that there are trade offs with each hotel. The wrong view though causes me to keep looking.

2) That I am a type of person, that types of people always do the same things, that the places I go can reify the person type I see myself to be.

3) That any hotel, anything is perfect. That it can stay perfect, it is repeatable from one visit to another. That it will bring me comfort and happiness. In reality, I know from experience travel is a mixed bag.

4) That I can carve out a time or place in my life that is special, removed from the sufferings of this world. That I can control it by hopping on a plane or having a comfy bed. That the flowers I get at the reception desk will protect me from unhappiness, at least for a little while.  That I can create and hold on to special moments, schedule them and share them with Eric on command. Unraveling this is a whole separate email…

Alana’s later day note: Mae Yo read my roadmap and confirmed it was correct. This particular contemplation is one I have gone back to over and over. It confirms that, in my own heart, in my own words, in my own experiences, I understand the path to enlightenment. From the smoking story, I have a template that I can follow for all my contemplations, for my whole practice. From the hotel story, I have my own evidence that what the Buddha laid out in his very first sermon, the core of the teaching, is accessible to me, is the map he left and which I understand the language and the markings well enough to follow. I still have a long way to go, but I know I can find my way back to the path, even if I get lost.   

 

Dear Reader, this right here is a biggie Buddhist moment –Don’t miss this and the next blog!!!

Around late 2013/ early 2014, I practiced with an acute fear that I would somehow fall off  the dharma path and end-up wandering in the weeds for countless more lifetimes; not exactly a comforting thought for a practitioner whose great aspiration is to reach enlightenment now, as quickly as possible, preferably in this life.

My greatest fear was that I would lose my teacher, Mae Yo, and without her I would be dharma screwed (gone, for a little while anyway, were the days of Screw This Dharma Thing). So I spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand the path as a roadmap, something that I could know myself and follow, even if, one day,  Mae Yo was not there to guide me.

As this is very long, I will divide the email into two blogs. This blog will contain the first two sections: The Path in General Terms and The Path From My Experience Quitting Smoking. The Next blog will take-up the last section: The Path in Slightly More ‘Official’ Buddhist Terms Using My Own Experiences with Hotels in Hawaii

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Part 1: Step by Step in General Terms (If I Had to Write a How-to-Guide):

I guess in a nutshell I see the path this way (I realize it is not exactly linear and that the parts keep intersecting over and over, but for the sake of simple roadmap, I will innumerate:

1) We look around at the world, nature, our lives, lives of others, etc. to gather the evidence we need to begin convincing ourselves that the nature of this world and everything in it is changeable, subject to decay, dependent on basic laws of cause and effect. Once we have begun to internalize this we can →

2) Find places in our life where we are sad, angry, emotionally uncomfortable in some way and begin to analyze why. With enough thought we can see that some idea we hold to be true are actually antithetical number 1 above, everything is impermanent. We want something to be permanent, or we act like it is permanent, or we try to exert control over something to make it more permanent than it is, with the belief we can affect the outcome we want absolutely (this one is a biggy for me). This is what is causing our dis-ease.

3) With practice we can see that many times the same wrong views keep coming-up in different ways. At this point, for me anyway, it is helpful to think about Sanna and Sanakara (3s and 4s in Alana verbage ;)). Using the aggregates I can see the pattern more clearly of how all those wrong views arise in the first place, and how we can interrupt them. This was also the source of my understanding #4 below.

4) By seeing the patterns of wrong views more clearly and overtime, we can figure out that we are the common denominator–we are the ones who are creating all the noise. It is also therefore us that can create its cessation. I guess this one is pretty critical because, for a while I felt like–what now, what do I do with all this. Sure, I have better seats at the movie now,  know some of the back plot but I still can’t do anything. Then I realized I was writing the script…

5) Seeing that suffering isn’t a “one-off” or a freak exception but rather a consistent pattern lets us start asking “is it worth it?” We can weigh the balance of our pleasure versus suffering, or rather, see the suffering even in our pleasure and begin to overcome our addiction to this world.

Part 2: My Personal Example…I’m Beginning to Think Quitting Life is Like Quitting Smoking...

Birth and Becoming as a Smoker:

Even though, on an abstract level, I knew smoking was bad for me I had reasons for wanting to start. I wanted the social element, I wanted to look cool, I wanted to impress a girl. Just like with other causes in life (like wanting to be better then my brother fueling decades of vegetarianism), over time the original reasons became buried, and I kept smoking out of habit. I became used to the ritual of smoking, the timing, and even though I really didn’t enjoy it that much, the idea of not having a cigarette after a meal, or at the end of a work day was inconceivable. Moreover, I set other particular conditions around smoking and used those to help define my identity as a smoker –I smoked only a particular brand, ‘packed ‘ my cigarettes a certain way, etc.

It was only after my dad died of cancer that I was able to kick the habit. Till then I did know intellectually that smoking was dangerous but I thought :

1) Things won’t change and I won’t die –I am immortal. This was particularly true back when I started smoking at 18 and it was so hard for me to see and identify my own decay.

2) As I got older I thought I’m still young –I can quit later and I’ll be ok.

3) Other folks get sick from smoking, but not everyone does. There is hope that I will be fine because I am somehow special.

4)That it wasn’t going to be this one cigarette that kills me…so I can just go ahead and smoke it.

Seeing the Wrong View:

When my dad died I really saw impermanence.

1)I saw that everyone, even someone that seemed larger than life to me, someone I loved so much , died. If my dad, who was like a hero to me, could die, so could I.

2) My dad was a youngish man when he died, 65. He was so full of life, he traveled and exercised and then bam, out of nowhere a cancer diagnosis. Dead 3 months later. How can I assume I will have more time to quit or change when my dad sure didn’t.

3) This idea that I am somehow special –in better control, really started to erode when my dad died. I loved my dad so much, but I couldn’t make him live through either will or through my own good fortunes.  I saw that even if some folks can have a beloved parent live long into their adulthood, I wasn’t one of them. There was no guarantee I’d be a “lucky smoker” either.

4) So this one is a bit more complicated, I see it though as the issue of when does the pile become a heap. When my dad was dying I often thought about when he actually got sick. He was clearly sick before he was diagnosed, he had been having pain and weight loss for a while, but no one called it cancer. Even before he felt effects, he was technically not called sick at all, but the cancer was probably growing. All of us actually have cancer cells in our bodies, most of us however dispose of them and they never become a critical issue. The wrong view is subtle and I still have some trouble articulating, however I think its about the control we exert and the identity we build through naming, classify and grouping. By isolating a single cigarette I could say this one is not dangerous, its the pile that dangerous–it misses the fact that its a self imposed distinction.

Seeing the Suffering:

Starting to see suffering in general, and around smoking in particular, was much easier after watching my dad die. For one thing, my dad was in so much pain when he was dying–I don’t want to suffer in that way. My brother, stepmom and I went through so much pain as well, not just with his loss, but through the stress of caring for him in his final days –I did not want to cause that kind of suffering to Eric if I can avoid it.

I understand (on some level) that whether I smoke or not, I will die;  it may be from cancer it may be from something else, it may be slow, painful, quick, easy, no way to know. But why stack the cards against myself? Why plant the seeds for suffering and pain if I don’t need to?  Its suffering for free.  So I quit. And I quit for real. I have been out with friends and had a few cigarettes since I quit and I thought, “this is just disgusting.” These days I don’t even have urges anymore, I see other folks smoke and I don’t want to join them, I don’t want to smoke too. I’m just done.

The Sum-up on Why I’m Starting to Suspect Quitting Life is Like Quitting Smoking:

Much of this actually came-to me when I woke from a dream while we were in India, so I don’t have the clearest line of thought as a lead-up. But with some backwards engineering..

I see that my starting to smoke was consistent with my understanding of arising through the 5 aggregates. A bunch of 3s, memories, (that the cool kids smoked, that beautiful women in ads smoked, that smokers all seemed to be collect, that this chick I liked spent a lot of time smoking and only hung out with other smokers) got my creative 4 juices flowing, imagination, (I thought I could be cool, and would be better accepted if I started smoking).

I also see that there are even more basic and older conditions that I set out as true, ruled by older 4s that became 3s sometime in the past. For example I had “learned” if I did things to fit in, I would be accepted. Even further back I must have learned that if I was accepted I would be safe, I would benefit in some way. 

Over time I lost sight of the original reasons for smoking and habitual patterns took over. It became wrapped-up in my life, in my identity and it became harder to let go of over time. I set so many conditions around pleasure and satisfaction and smoking. What interrupted the smoking cycle was an experience that actually helped me internalize my own impermanence and to consider the real risks and suffering of the actions.  After that I just realized it wasn’t worth it at all. I was done.

Moreover, when I look back at it I realize no one made me start smoking and it was me who was able to quit.

I have also been thinking a little since all this dawned on me about the original conditions that got me to start smoking. Over time they changed — it was no longer cool to smoke, in fact these days its pretty unpopular. I have been wondering a bit about whether I would have been able to quit if the original conditions hadn’t changed…I’m still not sure how to answer this one.

Later Day Note: Mae Yo actually did answer this finally question for me, “Mae Yo says that even if society continued to see smoking as cool, your seeing the truth of it (your dad) effectively made it uncool. So she thinks that yes, you would’ve been able to quit, regardless.”

Tune in next week for  Part Three: The Path in Slightly More ‘Official’ Buddhist Terms Using My Own Experiences with Hotels in Hawaii

Back in Dec. 2013, my teacher, Mae Yo, began a Youtube Q & A series to answer questions that students submit about life, the universe and everything Buddhist (you can check-out her videos here https://www.youtube.com/user/KPYproductions/videos). Since my own knowledge on these topics could use a little work, I compiled a hefty list of questions. Generalized/public versions of these questions and formal answers can be found amongst the videos linked above. However, in this post, I would like to share my original questions and the personalized answers Mae Yo provided becuase I think they highlight the issues I was struggling with in my practice at that time.  Note: My questions are in black and Mae Yo’s responses are in Green.

1) How do I know if my practice goes off the rails? What are the signs to look for? How do I fix it?

You will know, just like you knew that your viewpoints in the past were wrong and caused you suffering, and how you know now that your viewpoints are right and balanced.

2) Who should I go to for help if you are not here?

Yourself! We must always rely on ourselves, and you have relied on yourself to get you to where you are now.  

3) Can you give a roadmap to the practice? A simple and concise explanation of the path according to our method? Alternatively…would you listen to what I think the outline of the path is and help me make course corrections as needed?

There are the 10 fetters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetter_%28Buddhism%29 that are a map that you can refer to. But it’s not like we can look at it and follow it. It’s more like you get there and look back at it for confirmation.

We just practice like we are now, we’ll get there. The important things are the 3 common characteristics, four noble truths, 8 fold path (or really just the first one- sammaditthi, right view), and the five aggregates that we’ve discussed. That’s all you need. But yes, let me know what you think the outline of the path is (The next two posts will contain the outline I sent back to Mae Yo as well as her comments).

4) When I started practicing I had the expectation that practice would make me feel happiness and equanimity. Often though I just feel sad (not dysfunctional depressed, just sad). I look at stuff in my life that used to make me joyful and excited and I see the costs and the suffering. Usually we are taught being sad means something is wrong? Does that apply to practice too?  

Sadness in English doesn’t really describe the feeling so much, right? It’s like a disillusioning awakening… like oh my god how did I not see this for so long? Seeing the other side of what you always thought was just flowers and butterflies.

Sad is like how you felt when thinking about attaining sotapana…what would Eric do without you? That’s sad like worried, your imagination ran wild until you caught it. You don’t even know what will happen, just imagination.

If it’s the right kind of sad, it’s like, “oh good that I see this now, and I’m not sitting on it. I will do better now.” For you, it was like, “oh well if I get to sotapana then I’ll know how to deal with it. we’ll talk about it when i get there.” (the sotapana reference here is from this story: http://alana.kpyusa.org/category/odds-and-ends/)

5)  What do you see as the relationship between suffering and impermanence? Can you give a concrete example from your life/practice?

Suffering comes from something stopping..it’s anything that you need to tolerate. Impermanence is continuous movement, not stopping. Suffering is like you want it to stop but it moves. It’s putting a stick in the water and causing ripples.

5b) I notice control as a recurrent theme in my own practice. It seems to be one of the key elements that links my wrong views of permanence to suffering.  Do you have anything on this particular topic that you think would be helpful for me to hear?

Whenever you see yourself controlling, there is a wrong viewpoint there. Make sure you know what the wrong viewpoint is, and what the right one is. In translating books, we try to control how people view it, how they understand it. But can we?

6) I know we have talked a little about this before, but I will re-ask in case there is additional info …what are the most important things to do to prepare for death. If I am in a situation where I believe I am likely to die what’s the best course of action (I already know it’s wise to make my aspiration, which we have gone through in detail, and contemplate a realization/dharma accomplishment I have had…anything else)?  

Understand that dying isn’t something that is scary, it’s like changing houses. Moving from one house to another. Or changing cars. It’ll be good if you’ve cultivated a lot of good deeds in this lifetime…your next life will be good.

What do you think about death? That it’ll be painful or scary? It’s just like sleeping and dreaming. It’s no different. Take it from someone who has died and come back. We’re only afraid because of how we imagine it to be. No need to imagine it first, we have no way of knowing how it will happen. Let it happen and deal with it then.

7) Any advice on how I should balance the wisdom part of my practice and any ritual/explicitly religious stuff? Any suggestions of other, more traditional resources, like scripture or jataka stories that you think would be helpful to me in addition to my looking at my own experiences and the world around me? Are these things necessary? If so when?

Really, we have all the information we need around us, we don’t necessarily need to read the scriptures or jataka stories, but doing so provides us with confirmation that we’re doing what the Buddha taught.

8) Is there any other question you would ask if you were me? No

As a kid my greatest Disney World love,  the thing that filled me with anticipation before each visit, was the ride  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I remember climbing down to take my seat on the submarine, watching out the window as we traveled deep under the ocean seeing mermaids, and giant squid, and other sea wonders. As soon as the ride ended all I wanted was to get back in line and do it again.

As I got older, my family stopped taking us to Disney and I didn’t go again till I was about 16 years old. The first thing I did when I got to the park was run for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But even as I stood in line, I saw things I never noticed as a kid. There was no ocean, no submarine, you could see the ride tracks just a few feet under the murky water. The ‘submarine’ was  dank and dirty, the undersea wonders just cheap plastic. As soon as I got off the ride I had an ah-ha moment. I told myself, “Alana, never look back, never look too closely at things you enjoy, when you need to, look away. Do whatever you can to preserve good memories,  keep the happy bits and avoid/ignore the suffering.”

Nearly 2 decades later, I am sitting in the car, reflecting on this memory and realize, I got it all wrong.

1. Looking away from something can’t change what it actually is –I thought, if I avoid revisiting my happy places, I can stay in control, things will be as I imagine and remember. It is the same as my tendency to look away from decay, I ignore what I don’t want to see. But whatever my memories, whatever conditions I set around pleasure and suffering, whatever I I I Me Me Me does, it does not change reality. My perception  does not make a ride something other than that what it is.
2. Nothing I do will ever, ever ever ever ever ever ever, allow me to have only the happy side of something and not the suffering — You see, I loved the ride. I loved the snacks in India when they were still fresh in the wrapper, I loved my Wonder Woman body the night of the Halloween party. Then, when these things changed I tried to avoid the pain of loss, to look away. Clearly though, given that I still remember the great ride disappointment of 2 decades before, my tactic does not work. Ignoring decay does not prevent it. Avoiding the suffering that comes with  loss, as long as I still have things I don’t want to lose, is impossible.
3. Looking away has a cost — it’s not just that my idiotic method (i.e. wrong view) of looking away doesn’t work, it actually works against me. Over and over I think that ride, that snack, that body is worth it. Over and over I will suffer to get those thing and suffer to lose them. But things in this world are only worth it until I start believing they are not any more. And the process of believing, of gathering evidence, starts by looking. (Present day Alana says one of the next blogs takes a concrete example, smoking, to explore the process of moving my mind from worth it to not worth it..stay tuned).  

This next story features our old friends Rupa (form, stuff) and control. It’s not so much that I ever stopped contemplating these topics, in fact I am currently contemplating them with renewed vigor, but they slipped into the background of a number of these stories. So here we have it front and center once again….

I was at the Wat shortly after the India trip and Mae Yo asked a group of us the question, “Why do we have so many jackets?” Since once we start talking wardrobe, I’m in my zone, I left the Wat and kept considering the question carefully. It was clear to me that I have many clothes to exert control: control of my body (to make it look skinnier, prettier, more appropriate for various situations, to keep it warmer or cooler, more comfortable in a variety of circumstances), over how other people perceive me, over the clothes themselves (how often I need to do laundry, how I match things together). But I had already started seeing that suffering is caused in large part by my desire to control, by my failed efforts to create permanence and stability out of a world that, ultimately, lacks those traits.

You can look back at almost every story here in this blog of me trying to control people ( Blake, Sandy, Sue, Candy, Chris), objects (sponges, cups, money, bench),  my own body (disease, weight gain, blood sugar) and situations (flying, sunbathing, dentist visits, becoming enlightened) and note the extraordinary work that went into my efforts and my deep disappointment with their very limited success. I proceeded to ask myself two questions: 1) What is the cost of my control efforts and 2) Is it even possible. I didn’t need to look any further than the objects in my living room for evidence to start answering these questions.

I look around my living room and it is so so clear that everything I bought here was to control something, to solve a problem and each item created new problems.  

My fireplace — I bought to control temperature, to make me warm. But the first one I installed ended-up not being warm enough. Once I had the money for something better, I had to find a new model, new contractors and instal a second one. The second one was warm enough but produced toxic fumes, so it was months before I could use it without the window open. Which btw made it colder in the house.

Chairs — after long debates and late nights internet searching, Eric and I found ‘the perfect chairs’ for the living room. We wanted to be able to sit together, in front of the beloved fireplace, but the chairs we had did not have enough back support to be comfortable. I ended-up sitting on the floor and Eric in the other room. So we bought new chairs, they cost a fortune, covered in beautiful brown leather. We get them in the house and they don’t match anything else in the room. They were comfortable though so after agonizing over what to do, we sell our old stuff on craigslist (pain in the butt) and go through the laborious process of redesigning our living room.

Bookshelves — We couldn’t bear to get rid of any of the books in our extensive library, after all, they were part of who we are, the time we put into our reading and studies, but the boxes and boxes were crowding our closets and creating clutter so we bought a bookshelf. It was an antique piece that took forever to arrive and just as the movers were pulling it from the truck, they dropped it and broke it. We decided they could bring it back to their warehouse for repairs…the company was impossible to get a hold of, couldn’t tell me about the bookshelf, it took hours of emails, calls, and a final angry call to management to get it returned. Finally we got it back. Repaired, but never totally stable. I worry now about when exactly it’s going to break…

Rug — As part of the chair remodel, we decided we needed a rug to ‘tie the room together’. If you have ever been to a rug store…you know suffering! The pressure, the lies, the oh just take it home and try it…the endless stream of carpets testing your patients to tell the difference between each one. Eric and I couldn’t decide, an epic fight broke-out about how much to spend and which one to get. Finally we came to an agreement on a carpet so nice, I’m afraid to eat or drink in the living room, lest it get stained.

There were actually further examples, but you get the idea. I started reflecting further that with each item in this world, the problem is the suffering is already baked-in, it’s part of what you get. With birth in this body, I get death. With a breakable bookshelf, I get breaking. With a rug filled with patterns I get ones I want and ones I don’t want –its not like I can take-out the patterns I don’t like, thread by thread, and then still have a rug at the end.

Now (today time)  when I look back at this contemplation, I see that my stuff is already evidence of my failure to be a person who is in control — if buying something it is always to solve some problem, and the thing I buy creates more problems;  my failure to have a world exactly as I want it is already assumed in the purchase. The idea that some object is going to help win the war against impermanence and discomfort is ridiculous –how could that be when the objects themselves are impermanent, when they create a fresh set of problems? I mistake my little victories, the small battles, where I bought an object and for a time it made things better, as evidence that with enough objects, with enough effort, I will win the war against impermanence and suffering. But the truth is I will always lose and continuing the fight is starting to feel exhausting.

I am waiting for a table at a cafe and when one opens-up the waiter tells me to have a seat and he will be over to clear the table in a few moments. I sit down and look at the last patron’s trash piled on the table and I feel disgusted. What a mess these folks left behind at my table.

Of course, the waiter comes and cleans everything up, sets my heart at ease, and before I know it I am enjoying my meal. When I am done, I stretch my legs, feel myself full and relaxed, and take-out a book to start reading. Then I stop. I look around at my own trash piled on the table and it hits me…

Someone else’s trash on my table makes me squirm, but my trash is perfectly ok. And other people’s trash on their tables is totally ok, just as long as it’s not on my table. But trash is trash and tables are tables right? There is it again, the culprit of my discomfort, my delusion — me and mine.

 

Aspirations are one of those ‘Big Buddhisty Things’; they cameo in all the liturgy, we are instructed to make them whenever we do something good, they even managed to make it onto the Buddha’s critical stuff shortlist (often poorly translated as ‘right thought’ in the the 8 fold path). So, naturally, I obsessed over my own. I crafted it, word-smithed it, revised it over time. But at around this point in my practice (late 2013) I had come-up with a version that looks a lot like what I still use today.

In plain speak, an aspiration (Buddhist or otherwise) is simply setting a goal. It expresses the intention to move towards that goal, and it calls upon the force of momentum we have already created (for the Buddhist aspiration variety, that is usually in the form of our past good deeds), to help ensure we we get there.

My teacher, Me Yo, emphasized the importance of  crafting a good aspiration, reiterating it, dedicating myself, and my merit, to its accomplishment. Without further ado here is aspiration 1.0 and a few notes of later day changes.

I dedicate all the merit of my current and all my past lives to becoming, at least, a sotapana (first stage of enlightenment) now, as quickly as possible, preferably in this life.  

I ask that if I am born at all, I am born into circumstances of dharma, with true teachers and dharma friends.

I ask for the comforts of this world, health, wealth, beauty and long life (Alana’s present day note: I dropped this part of the aspiration several years ago, figuring it was best to be narrow and focused on leaving this world, comforts and all).

Above all else, I ask for the wisdom to know right view from wrong and the willpower to choose what is right. (Alana’s present day note, again several years ago this line also changed when I realize willpower has nothing to do with anything. Once I see wrong views, the change in action comes with ease, not force. Nowadays I ask for wisdom and any other quality that will help me reach enlightenment quickly).

Let me take back any vows and  remove any obstacles that stand in the way of my  walking the path to complete enlightenment, now, as quickly as possible, preferably in this life.

Since Dharma Practice Day One, Mae Yo has repeated one homework assignment to me over and over — “Alana, look at your stories, go and prove that all your problems really start from your sense of me and mine.” Somehow, I kept ignoring the assignment; just an empty space in my notebook again and again.

Even though I had sort of figured-out that I was the one causing my problems (see the last section, Whoo Wait a Sec its Me…), I figured I could tweak myself, improve myself and then the problems would go away. This idea that the very concept of self and self belongings is a lie (wrong view) and that any self I created, even a new and improved one, was going to keep biting me in the ass, I guess it never really clicked until…

Shortly after I had ‘finished’ the homework about suffering in where my mind visits most often, I happened to go to temple and listen to LP Anan talk about his experiences helping look after a baby some community members were leaving at the temple while they went to school/work.  I must have been primed to really start thinking about the perils of me and mine because the sermon hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt it resonate in my heart and, ultimately it launched my very first effort to answer that age old homework assignment about me and mine.

In this entry, I want to just share a few of LP Anan’s remarks that really got my ball rolling. In the next entry I will share my own contemplations on the topic.

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A couple with a newborn came to the temple in some dire straights — they had no one to help care for their child while they went to school/work and not enough money to pay for daycare. Mae Yo, being Mae Yo, offered to help and soon enough the temple was doubling as day care and the monks doubling as nannies.  LP Anan (one of the monks) was explaining how, at first, he didn’t want to care for the baby. He certainly didn’t want to change a dirty diaper. Its disgusting!

But over time, the baby started to grow on him. The baby would smile, when LP Anan held him. Or cry when he was put down. And LP Anan came to love the baby, to feel needed by him, to feel proud to be such a good caretaker of the baby. The baby became his responsibility. The baby became his.

Suddenly changing diapers became an act of love, something LP could do to prove what a good caretaker he was. Diaper time went from being disgusting to being desirable, at least when it was his baby’s diaper time (other baby’s diapers were, of course, still disgusting). And I, heard loud and clear in LP Anan’s story —  the condition of ownership is the ticket — that is what transforms a yuk, a suffering, into something desirable, something that we want to nurture and protect and preserve.

Incidentally several months later, the couple moved away and, of course took their baby with them. And LP Anan, suffered loss, suffered sorrow. Not because a baby had moved away, but because his baby had moved away….

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When I got home from temple I went back through my homework about suffering in where my mind visits most often (see the previous 3 entries) and I noticed a theme (finally!!!!!). My time, my body, my clothes, my self… in each story my suffering has a singular seed — me and mine. And in each story I was able to forgive the pain my time (the careful planning and frequent disappointment), my body (soreness, hunger), my clothes (obligation for continued striving) caused me for one simple reason –they are mine.  Imagine that, Mae Yo was right after all..

 

So, a little reminder, this entry is the third part of my homework assignment to use snippets of my life/experiences (a biopsy) to start evaluating what happiness is and if it’s worth it. Specifically I was told to:

1. Figure out where my mind visits often, my memories/fantasies.
2. See the suffering. How long is the suffering versus happiness?
3. How do I repeat the cycle?

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A Slave to Fashion

You see, I am a Fashionista it’s one of the places my mind visits most often. Even as a kid, I loved to play dress-up. By the time I could drive, my favorite destination was the mall. Even when I was broke in college, I made weekly shopping trips to the goodwill. Little by little, paycheck by paycheck, I came to frequent Marshals, then Bloomys, then Neimans and Barney’s…

I remember my first pair of black boots. I put them on and felt so sexy, so strong, like some bad-ass chick in the movies ready to kick ass. In my wrong view ridden mind, clothes give me a sense of control. With just a little fabric and some bling, I believe I can make people see me the way I want to be seen. I can come-off as sexy and strong (black boots), professional and smart (crisp blazer), wealthy (Goyard bag), buttoned-up (matching belt and shoes), ageless (black dress), stylish… Clothes help make me special and unique, at least till I take them off, or they go out of fashion, or they make the wrong impression…

But my bright and fancy wardrobe has a dark side. It’s not just the monthly credit card bill, or the time I spend shopping and caring for my clothes. Sometimes I open my closet door and I literally feel oppressed. I feel like I have so many items, I have the responsibility to figure out how to wear them all. I need to plan outfits that are original and appropriate, that no one has seen me in before.  I need to shop constantly, to keep up with the stylish image I have created. I bought a great skirt, but now I need to find a shirt and shoes to match. I used to shop at Gap and Banana Republic but once I got a feel for Prada fabric, saw how Gucci fits just right (#3), I set new standards, conditions (#4) for what this fashionista should and shouldn’t go around wearing.  I can’t go back after all, so I get trapped in a cycle of more clothes, more matching, better brands, new outfits. I have to preserve my image. I have to preserve myself.

This is how I get reborn. Just like with clothes, I have an ever changing ‘fact’ sheet (#3 memory) of what is fashionable, desirable, situationally appropriate. Of what is good. I (#4) imagine-up an outfit that fits the bill, I imagine how that outfit helps create an Alana, I imagine the Alana that I will or won’t be. And once I have the perfect outfit, the perfect Alana, I need to figure out how to keep it up, how to one-up it for the next event. Black booted, kick-ass Alana  doesn’t give-up after all, so my only choice is to keep becoming….

 

So, a little reminder, this entry is the second part of my homework assignment to use snippets of my life/experiences (a biopsy) to start evaluating what happiness is and if it’s worth it. Specifically I was told to:

1. Figure out where my mind visits often, my memories/fantasies.
2. See the suffering. How long is the suffering versus happiness?
3. How do I repeat the cycle?

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Wonderfully Beautiful

For Halloween a few years ago, I was intent on going to a party dressed as Wonder Woman. For months, I worked-out even harder than usual (3 times a day instead of just 2), I barely ate, all to fit into the costume and look fabulous (I’m sure you will all recall just how little clothing liberated-feminist-role-model Wonder Woman ran around in) And I did look truly fabulous. For one night, I was a rock star, well, a superhero actually.

But man did it suck. From all the workouts I ached all the time. And boy was I hungry. I had some blood work done around that time and my Dr. asked me about a few red flags in my liver enzymes. Conversation went like this:

Dr: “Alana, you have some weird elevated enzymes on your blood panel, any idea why?”

Alana: “ Can too much exercise and near starvation cause those blood results?”

Dr: “Yes”.

Alana: “No worries then, I’m Wonder Woman, she is invincible”

Even the night of the great party, it wasn’t that great. I looked so awesome as Wonder Women, guys wouldn’t leave me alone to just dance and hang-out with friends, I was getting hit-on left and right. I was uncomfortable being so exposed, not to mention cold! And I was so hungry I could eat an ox. Well, a whole pizza, which I did finally do at 2:00 AM when I couldn’t take it anymore and then paid the price with severe heart burn…

This idea, that I can control my body absolutely, since it’s mine after all, that it will be what I want it to be without downside is a place my mind visits often.  I have a ton of examples of it (some of which you will likely remember from earlier posts in this blog) and, just like in the Wonder Woman story, it doesn’t always go according to my plan and when it does, it sure isn’t forever and it sure isn’t easy. Here are a few more examples I jotted down in my homework (there were actually quite a few more, but you will get the idea):

1. I was going to control my blood sugar with coffee extract and ended up peeing myself
2. I was going to control my teeth by putting crowns on them and I destroyed a tooth and needed a root canal
3. I was going to have that great yoga body but then hurt my back
4. I was going to improve my skin with green tea cream and broke-out terribly

The problem is, sometimes I win, get what I want, appear to be in control. For one night, I looked amazing as Wonder Woman. I save that image in my head (#3 Memory) and hope is born.  Hope that I can stay wonderfully beautiful forever (#4 Imagination), that I can keep working out till exhaustion and limit food to starvation and my body, my beauty, will endure.This is how I repeat the cycle, keep trying to stay pretty, stay young, stay healthy, control my body.  But I don’t have an invincible liver or the super heroic willpower to not eat forever. So I suffer. Forget the suffering of getting to Super Woman levels of fitness, losing it was so so so much more painful. Even today, I look in the mirror and see the flab and sag that wasn’t there that night and I mourn for the loss of Wonderfully Beautiful Alana. I wonder and hope if maybe for just one night, I can get there again….

 

I had only a brief moment of feeling triumphant —  having conquered Mae Yo’s seemingly impossible homework assignment about how the aggregates work — when I realized, I now had an even bigger question…Why? I mean seriously, why do I create  a sense of self and then bolster it using some crazy ass mental acrobatics ( i.e. aggregates of memory (3) and imagination (4))? Why bother with this self-stuff? Why bother getting born?

Try as I might I was stumped so I did go to Mae Yo and Neecha, “Whyyyyyyyy-ey-ey-ey!”

This next entry is the guidance they provided me and the few that follow are my early contemplations on why and how I create this self. This is a very ongoing contemplation so it is not quite as ‘buttoned-up’ as some of my other stories, but it lays an important groundwork for future contemplations so I will do my best to get it out here and make it clear(ish).

 

Mae Yo’s Suggestions/More Homework

So spoiler alert, Neecha basically told me the answer to my question up-front. It went something like, “We create a self to maximize pleasure/happiness and avoid pain” I remember answering, “seriously, that’s it?”

Mae Yo then went one step further than answering the why by giving me contemplations on how to stop, essentially, to evaluate the cost. Here is what I wrote down:

Things arise and cease too fast for us to understand. So we need to take a biopsy, look at a single section and take a closer look. See where is comes from and what the problem really is.

We try to avoid suffering/ impermanence. But clearly we can’t. What we can do is use suffering as a tool to leave this cycle (rebirth). Like using snake poison as an antidote, we can use suffering to teach ourselves the undesirable aspects of being born.

We get born for such a short period of happiness, is it worth it. Mae Yo then walked through a personal example using my life:

I am the oldest of 2 children, I loved my parents, wanted their attention. I was born and enjoyed that undivided attention for 4 years before my little brother was born. Then, for the next 30+ years, I was no longer the center of my parent’s universe. I lost what I had, what I loved, what I sent myself up to be born into…

All you need to do is pay attention to what happiness really is, its duration and if it’s worth it.  With that I was given the following homework:

1. Figure out where my mind visits often, my memories/fantasies. The places my mind visits most often are my biggest addictions. Identify them and find the suffering in them.
2. How long is the suffering versus happiness. Just like in the story with my brother and I, it is important to see that I got 4 years I wanted and then another 34 that were less than my ideal of being the center of my parent’s attention.
3. How do we repeat the cycle? Neecha gave an example, someone allergic to nuts, they love the taste but when they eat them they itch and their face swells and they have pain. Still though, some people can’t stop eating them. In general, what we have done is what we keep doing, we never think through the cost.  They want the flavor and ignore the suffering. It is how we all perpetuate our pain. Use snapshots from my real life to see the suffering and try and be done with it.

Next week we will see how I fared with this assignment…

Alana’s Later Addition Note: So, I just want to connect a few dots here and make explicit the connections between the aggregates, the illusion of self (wrong view) and suffering. Through these were not terribly clear at the time of this contemplation, I think my adding a little more filler info will serve you Dear Reader, so let’s recap.

In Buddhism, the self is considered an illusion (remember the exercise of trying to find baby and prom night and day dad died Alana? ). The reality is we are just a continual flow of arising and ceasing. This belief in self is a deep wrong view. As we know, wrong views cause suffering (there is a whole blog about this ;)) and since the goal of this Buddhism thing is to escape suffering we had best correct our view of the self. That’s the overview.

The aggregates are the process by which we hide our/the world’s true nature (continually changing) from ourselves. These aggregates, especially our memory and our imagination, sell the lie that we have a self. Mae Yo asked me to go and investigate them so I could understand the mechanics of my self delusion in order to be better equipped to fight it (it’s like knowing the tools my enemy uses so I can better strategize how to win a war). Once I saw the how,the next question was why.

The answer to why was given to me — I create and sustain myself because I think it will make me happy. Really, it’s the same reason any of us do anything. Mae Yo then gave me contemplations to help me stop creating the self — look at the suffering that comes with the happiness and the motivation for continued thrill seeking becomes lesser and lesser. Bringing us to the homework in the next section…

 

So, I am going to warn in advance that this is sure to be a mighty technical entry. This is about to get REALZ so, if you are having trouble, assume you’re in good company (even with this blogger) and do your best to follow along. Also note,  the stuff in this post is not a starting place for practice, this is not meant to fuel anyone else’s contemplations, though none of this is a great secret (there are no secrets thanks to Wikipedia), it can be a bit confusing. This was however information and a Homework assignment (in the next blog) that Mae Yo gave me to act as a scaffolding for my contemplations. With this blog, I am trying to tell a linear(ish) story of how my practice progressed and if I don’t explain this we will have a big gaping hole in the plot line. This blog then starts a period of more technical analysis of myself and myself belongings (from around Sept. 2013). So without further ado..

A little Buddhism 101: 5 Aggregates and the Buddhist Concept of Self:

So, spoiler alert — Buddhism believes there is no self. This is probably one of the single most important tidbits of the Buddha’s teachings; our concept of self is an illusion, our biggest, dirtiest, most troublesome wrong view!  Now that we got that out there, let’s back-up a bit and try to understand what all this actually means, what exactly is ’no self’ or Anatta . I really Like Phra Anan’s explanation of this so, I’m going to borrow it here…

If I asked you to go find for me baby Alana could you do it? The answer of course, is no. If I asked you to go find middle school alana or prom night alana or day dad died alana could you find those alanas either? Though each of those alanas really did exist at one point, now they are gone. Things, their form, are constantly changing. This is the principle of No Self in Buddhism — there is no enduring, inherent, unchanging thingness, no self in anything…there is just a continual flow of arising and ceasing. This is actually happening in every instant, but we have developed tools in our minds to ignore it.  If we look over a long period it gets easier to detect that our little snapshots of moments aren’t enduring at all. In other words, baby alana and middle school alana and today alana aren’t really the same alana at all. Alana has no permanent enduring self.  

So now the million dollar question — if we are just a continual sequence of arising and ceasing (little momentary self particles for simplicity), how did we come to the delusion that we are actually some kind of solid, enduring, permanent self? What are the tools we use to ignore reality?

Enter the 5 aggregates, which are essentially the mechanism that creates and sustains the illusion of self. I like to think of them like a watch — we call the watch a watch, a single solid thing. But in reality, if you open the back you can see it’s a bunch of gears, ‘aggregate’ parts, each performing their functions, contributing to the whole, making it seem like the watch is some constant singular entity even though its parts are always moving and changing. So here we are going to have the briefest review of what those parts are, with a special focus on the two Mae Yo explained are super key to my practice… #3 and #4 (memory and imagination).

The Aggregates: I will use the Pali once for the sake of precision and after that English for the sake of practicality…

1. Rupa/Form — This is just the physical, tangible, forms in the world. We talked about it a bit in the blog Stop Being Such a Mooch. For ‘self’ this is our body and our sense organs like eyes and ears, etc.
2. Vedanā/Feeling — this is just our response to something as yah yuk or neutral. In general we like yahs, but it is actually the next 2 aggregates that really control what we view as a yah/yuk/neutral and what scheme we are going to employ to get more yahs and less yuks.
3. Saññā/ Memory — I like to think of this as a memory bank. It is a place we we have stored memories of past experiences, things we have learned, been taught and which we remember.It’s the fuel we use for #4 to start moving.
4. Saṅkhāra/Imagination — I like to think of this as my own personal storyteller. This is the  ‘gear’ that takes what we sense, and whatever memories that it triggers and starts imagining. Imagining how you can use this object, avoid this pain, it fantasizes about the future, it innovates, it retaliates, it selects, it interprets, frankly it causes a commotion
5. Viññāṇa/ Consciousness — This sort of goes on in the background and is not something I have contemplated.  The  best explanation I have heard for this .. if you had a room full of corpses and cranked-up the party tunes, they wouldn’t hear a thing. Even though they have ears, they don’t seem to have the ear consciousness to register sound. This is the job of Viññāṇa.

Why are Memory and Imagination so critical to consider? Its because they sell the lie. Memory selectively stores moments from the past, pictures of infant alana, details of prom night alana or dad’s death alana.  Imagination colors in the lines, tells stories that take these separate moments, which are merely connected, and makes them seem solid, like an identity. Though our ignorance has been in charge of the storage and imagination up till now, with some wisdom, we can take back control of the story telling and begin to write new memories to the bank –ones that are in alignment with the truths of this world, namely impermanence, our propensity to suffer and no self.  This part gets a little ahead of the game though. With way less info than I have given ya’ll…my homework assignment from Mae Yo was — Go and figure out how Memory and Imagination work. What is their process?

You can see how I fared in the next blog….

I began this blog with the idea of Buddhism, of Bhuddistiness — what I said from the get-go remains entirely true: This blog, all my contemplations, my path, is firmly rooted in the path the Buddha himself laid-out, beginning with correcting our wrong views, to guide us to freedom from suffering. Simple as it sounds, this is the heart of my dharma practice — seeing the reality that everything is impermanent, subject to change, to cease, to die and that woven into the fabric of my life is suffering, discontent, peril  and consequence, brought about by a failure to align my view of the world with its true nature.  

Nonetheless, at around this time (late 2013) my contemplations began to incorporate some additional Buddhist concepts (like the aggregates, karma, the worldly conditions, self and self belonging). These evolved naturally, some arose as topics from my own contemplations, others were given to me as homework by my teachers. All the topics and their contemplation had a purpose —  they act as a scaffolding to grow my contemplations, concepts to help me structure my thinking more clearly.

So, in the eyes of some folks, the next period of practice will start looking a little more “Buddhist-y”.  At least it will introduce some fun new Pali/Sanskrit vocab, and if that’s not the sign of deep religious understanding, I don’t know what is ;). I ask that you guys, my readers, try not to get too distracted/overwhelmed, after all the heart of the practice remains as simple as it was in all the earlier stories. Just take what you can and leave the rest for someone else.
For my part, I will do my very best to keep it simple and to add explanations (to the best of my understanding) of those Bhuddist-y topics that come-up.  My goal is not to be all fancy or make things difficult, my goal is to show the direction my practice took/is taking. To do that fairly, I need to include some of these topics…so hold on, buckle-up and prepare for a Buddhisty ride..