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.

Mar Neecha’s Reply to my reflections on Sammuti: 

The idea is, sammuti starts out arbitrary and then we build on that arbitrary until it feels permanent. Where initially we recognize the arbitrary nature of sammuti, after growing used to it, it becomes real and permanent for us. So much so that after we are removed from the situation we persist in seeing things according to that sammuti. Even being told or seeing for ourselves how something has completely changed doesn’t change how we view it in our minds. Because we feed off of that sammuti. It gives us identity.  It gives us worth. Not universal, but subjective. And even in our subjective view of that sammuti, we are inconsistent – bending our own rules to please ourselves.

As long as it is sammuti, as long as it isn’t a universally accepted notion, it cannot be true.

And once you’ve supposed something to be sammuti, what is “wrong” in terms of that sammuti or “right” in terms of that sammuti – if not just another sammuti concept?  Aka meaningless?

If we can see through this sammuti, we will see its flimsy nature, and all the Tuk Tok Pie it causes us. And we will accept that there is nothing pleasing or attractive in this world. Only suffering.

Alana’s Reply –The Initial Question of How Everything Could Be Suffering:

I have given it some thought and I think I understand, all save the last line which I am struggling with a bit. So I am just going to ask — what is the bridge that gets you from the flimsy nature of sammuti and the suffering it causes (which is obvious to me when I think about my own sammuti for mother and partner) to the nothing pleasing in the world, everything suffering

I see this statement a lot actually — ‘everything only suffering’ and I balk at it because it doesn’t exactly feel true; probably because I also see pleasure in the world — it exists, it is what we are born for, it certainly seems real. It is just that it comes along with suffering, no way outta that. I always sorta figured practice was about laying down both.

Little personal example I have long thought of as a parallel to practice.. When I was young, I used to do ecstasy with my friends — it was a blast for a few hours, that was undeniable, but the lows afterwards were horrible, just days of depression. The reason is simple, the very thing that makes the drug fun — it flooding your brain with dopamine and serotonin –means your stores of these essential brain chemicals are  used up and it takes days to replenish them. You are miserable until the replenishment happens.  One morning, after a fun night on drugs, I woke up so deeply depressed, and in that moment I decide “not fucking worth it.” And that was the end of my ecstasy use — it’s not that it was ‘all suffering’ it was just that it was a shit ton of suffering for a few hours of pleasure and the math didn’t make sense to me. Never was I even the slightest bit tempted again.

So maybe that is what it is and ‘everything is suffering’ is just short hand for ‘ no possible way to disaggregate suffering and pleasure so either pick them both or leave them both behind’. That I totally get. Or maybe there is something I am missing? Some self deception so deep it makes what is  unpleasurable a delight?

On another note, Eric got a CT scan yesterday; no sign of cancer, lots of kidney stones. It’s a relief of course, but it is sorta funny — it’s bad news, he likely needs surgery, but it sure seems like great news because it could be so much worse …ah, maybe that is the trick to seeing everything as suffering, when less bad turns into awesome…

OK, I was so going to quit while I was ahead, but one more observation is in order: WHY it is that things in this world won’t just follow my rules/expectation/concepts of what they are; man, I am  like a whiny child that can’t be mollified with a ‘just because’. “But why, but why, but why”… anyway, re-enter the snowflake.

Many years ago, I was at my favorite hot springs resort, on a Wednesday. Out of the blue, the distinct odor of shit came wafting my way, before long a riot of smell and loud sound was seriously cramping my vacation style. Turns out that every Wed. is the day they cleaned out the septic tank of my little paradise. And in just a few moments time, my great escape flipped into a place I was desperate to escape.

At the time, I considered the great lessons of impermanence and suffering that this little event could elucidate. Now though I understand so much more — there is a reason, a cause, a why, that my own prior ignorance of, my own wish it weren’t so, simply can’t trump.  A resort is a place many humans gather, they stay, eat, sleep and therefore shit. Of course the damn place, in the middle of the woods, unconnected to a city sewer has a septic tank. And of course it needs to be cleaned –how long would it be a successful hot spring bath if folks were literally bathing in shit. And, Wed, being the least busy day –furthest from the weekend — was the perfect time to clean the tank. No matter that I was there trying to enjoy the baths.

The thing is, once I understand the why, at least in this case, I wouldn’t really even want it another way. OCD Alana definitely doesn’t want to be taking shit baths.

Back during my initial rupa ruminations, we were back and forth on line, and you asked me something: ” Have you considered that this instability that you are adverse to might be part of the overall stability of the larger system?…And the world IS predictable in its way… only we dont understand or see the world’s rules because we are so focused on our own…because we think we are the world.” Yah, what she said ;).

Which maybe all does bring me just a little closer to an answer on why I am so easily deluded by sammuti — because I want to be. Because for all the suffering it causes me, it has a hidden benefit: It is a projection onto reality that lets me believe that reality is predictable and stable and subject to my rules. Now if only it worked…

In his Autobiography  LP Thoon explains, “The term moha, or delusion, is the mind that is deluded by sammuti (supposed form). Avijjā, or ignorance, is ignorance of these sammuti (supposed form).” this one line — and his explanation that sammutti operates hand-in-hand with the 4^th aggregate of immagination —  has really been weighing on me. It makes some sense though; for our imaginations to function, to fabricate imaginary futures, imaginary belongings, and imaginary identity — imaginary stillness in an actually ever-shifting world —  we need form to peg our concepts to. I need an Eric to peg my concept of partner to, and I need a Platonic Partner to peg my abstract ideals and imaginings of what a happy, meaningful, fulfilled life with some partner will be like.

As part of that larger, more systematic, consideration of sammuti, I did go back and plug-in my Ubai of bubbles and it proved to be deeply revealing: What we call a bubble arises when 4es come together in a bubble-y shape. There is a duration, where it maintains that shape that we continue to call it bubble –it has the sammuti of bubble. And then, the elements disaggregate and we can no longer credible call the thing a bubble, quite literally the sammuti bursts. The truth is, even when the bubble has its basic bubble shape, it is continually shifting and changing and sliding over itself. It isn’t really the same object from one instant to the next, it is just close enough –contiguous enough –that our minds can still it, fix it, with the name ‘bubble.’

Of course, bubble is a simple and straight forward thing. Most sammuti –mother, partner — are more complex, heaped with additional meaning and expectation. But mechanistically, they are the same: I want to fix things — make them still — hold them in a state I like, with characteristics that I like, even though they are ever-changing, multi valiant, arising/ceasing based on causes and acting in accord with those causes. Both the physical form of Mom, and Eric change, and their traits/characteristics (manifested through behaviors/actions that are physical), change and move outside my fixed supposition of what they should be.  Both sets of changes –when they get far enough outside of my standards of acceptable — are daggers through my heart. And let me tell you something, a sick, cancer ridden, dying Eric that is waaayyyy outside my standard of acceptable.

Why? Well, obviously, because I love him, because I have pegged the meaning of my life, and the future I imagine, to him as an embodiment of my Platonic Partner ideal. Seriously, I draw a big ole blank when I try and imagine a future without him: Proof that #4 and sammuti are peas in a pod.

What then does it precisely mean that the mind is deluded by sammuti? That ignorance is ignorance of sammuti? Stay tuned, because I am not ready to conclude yet, clearly this is some pretty nuanced shit. But –when I think of the delta between what Eric is, and how I view him, I can’t help but observe that the same exact mechanics are at work with Alana — a continually shifting heap of happenings and a form, that I clobber onto and use to try and fix, to define and hold onto. Ugh shifting sands (nama), set upon more slowly shifting sands (rupa), that I try to thingify… which brings me to the observation that  Atta has gotta be just one more glorified sammuti, and clearly that lil ole’ misconception there is at the heart of my super-delusion.

Anyway, to sorta end (more like till next time) this email where I began, there is suffering. Years ago, I asked Mae Yo the relationship between impermanence and suffering. Her reply, “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.” Back then, the response was totally impenetrable. Frankly, it is still somewhat impenetrable, but one part is so very very clear: Through samutti, I am always trying to stop what keeps moving, and man oh man do I suffer every time that fucking stick fails to stop the river.

And so, my life is literally on a loop of dissatisfaction — I want things to be what they are not — I want to freeze them and hold onto the concepts I have supposed them to be. I either try and force shit to fit my concept (like my mom), or I endlessly chase down objects that, at least momentarily, align with my belief of what they ‘should’ be. And when those objects show themselves to be what they are, not what I want — sometimes through the inescapables of aging, disease and death –I am devastated. No object is what I think it is. No object is what my concept of it is.

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.

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.

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.

It is now early 2024 and Eric and I have spent the last few months doing some extensive traveling.  As I write these blog on my old snowflake ubai, I can’t help but see new evidence of the sameness of snow all around me. Here, I want to again break with the orderly chronology of the blog and share a few of my current thoughts on that old ubai — there is no such thing as a special snowflake, snow is just snow…

Eric and I are finally living ‘the dream’: After years of hard work, saving and planning, we have embarked on our grand tour of the world. We are wandering, unfettered, across counties and continents, currently in our 3rd week in Japan having arrived after 3 months in Europe. This is the fruit of our effort, this is just the kind of life we imagined; we are always so eager to explore what is new, to experience what is different.

The problem is, the more we travel, the more different places I go, the more I am struck by how life everywhere is basically the same. Life is the same and it is un-fucking-believably hard…

When I am at home, a lot of the mundane details of my life, of what life actually is, are easily ignored. With a fridge filled with my favorite foods, its easy to ignore that I a a slave to eating, that nourishing this body is a chore. With a comfy bed, and a safe place to sleep, it is easy to take for granted that having shelter is a  privilege, not a given. With all my belongings stored away in a closet, I forget that to enjoy the comforts, utility and safety these belongings bring, I am forced to bear their burdens as well.

Now though, on the road, I see just how much of my life revolves around meeting my most basic needs. I get up and I begin my day by planning how/where I will go for food. What can I find to eat that is healthy, that agrees with me, that isn’t just junk restaurant fare. Here in Japan, the sugary diet is hard on my blood sugar, it takes time, and lots of google translate, to find ingredients that suit my health.

Once I have food solved, I need to ensure I will have shelter; in Japan, mold is a problem at many hotels and I am severely allergic to mold. After the first few times I woke-up in the night unable to breath from mold, I realized I could no longer just book hotels ahead of time. Instead, I have been researching online to find possible places to stay and then showing up and asking to see a room before I book. Sometimes it takes half my day just visiting hotels and checking them out; my standards for shelter have gone from seeking comfort to being willing to settle for safety rather quickly.

When I began my travels, I had a big bag and a little bag, filled with all that I thought I would need to ensure my safety and comfort. Quickly I came to see that dragging a big bag onto trains, and subways, through streets to different hotels, its a burden. I winnowed myself down to one tiny carry-on –filled with medicine and 2 changes of clothes, cursing the fact that my health and warmth prevented me from getting rid of anything more.

I  always loved to travel because I crave what is new. In my heart of hearts I believe that lurking, just around the corner, just at the next street, just at the place I haven’t gone before, is something exotic and exciting, something that will bring me joy and satisfy me. But what is over there is just the same as what is over here, and if what was over here were so satisfying, why would I be so eager to go explore elsewhere?

Now that I am traveling so extensively, I see that outside the frame of the Instagram shots, past those few moments taking in the sites, day-to-day life is the chore of survival. It may be croissants in Paris, or rice in Japan, but everyone, everywhere, is slave to food. Simply put, snow is snow everywhere. And me, everywhere I go, its guaranteed to be more snow.

Lately, I have been super stressed about going to get a Covid booster shot; I don’t technically fall under the immune compromised category of folks currently eligible, but in light of the autoimmune blood markers I have, I worry I am at increased risk of bad Covid outcomes. When I spoke to my doctor, he agreed, and thought a booster was a good idea. Still, I feel bad going to take one, like I shouldn’t do it because not everyone is eligible, and technically, under the strictest definition of immune compromised, neither am I. I was thinking a bit about why I feel so guilty/stressed about getting a shot and it reminded me of another time I felt similarly…

At the last Katina I was at, there was bad air quality in SF due to fire. I made it to the event, but I felt like, because of my asthma, I couldn’t go early to help set up as it left me exposed to the smokey air too long. I felt bad though, like I should be helping out more, after all, other people were. I realize that when I look at both situations, I am benchmarking myself against an imagined standard of ‘normal’, what ‘those other people’ do, and assuming what applies to that imagined ‘normal’ group must also apply to me. I don’t see how we aren’t the same –how those snowflakes are shaped differently than me — how there are different causes and conditions that gave each of us our unique crystalline structure, our characteristics, our physical abilities and diseases.  I don’t see that really no one is the same, that there is no actual ‘normal’ group, that both the benchmarking and the standard to which I benchmark myself are both entirely in my head.

What is more, is that I am choosy with the way I interpret details. I look at ‘others’ and I see ‘healthy’ as normative. Of course when I see this it is me looking with half closed eyes, certain people, at certain times, not knowing their full pictures or histories. Still — healthy is what I choose as the ‘should state”. I should be that, others are. I should act that. I should live my life as though it were true, ignoring the actual differences — the diseases — at play.

The irony of course is that I am focusing on what I ‘imagine’ is similar, instead of seeing what really is the same.  What is the same is that we are all subject to disease, to illness and breaking. These circumstances — air quality to my asthma, Covid to my potential immune system issues, are just the details of ways I am subject to the common experience of breaking. Death and disease, that is snow, the specific illness, that’s just a particular snowflake’s structure.

Years ago, I complained to Mae Neecha  about hating a world that felt unstable and unpredictable. She asked me if I ever considered that the instability I hate might be part of a larger system of stability, in a world that was predictable in its way. She suggested I just didn’t see it that way because I am so focused on my rules I miss the world’s rule. As I consider snowflakes again, I am coming to understand just how right she is: There is an order to this world, there are rules that govern snow and reason’s for each individual snowflakes unique structure. I just don’t always see them, I don’t always like them and in the delta between my expectations/desires/shoulds and reality lies all my fears, anxieties and suffering.

But wait….there is more…

How I use details like those little horse blinders — zooming me in, myopic in sight, fixated on moving forward in the world.

Lately I have been considering another problem of my details-fixated view: It keeps me myopic, zoomed-in, constantly engaged with/dazzled by what is right in front of me.

Last week — as Eric and I were talking about if we have enough money for him to retire soon (again) — I was considering a tendency I have to over-value being prepared, of ignoring both the costs and risks of preparation because I idolize it as always good and right in all circumstances. In my mind, if I am prepared, I am in control, and if I am in control shit is bound to turn out better than if I am not. Preparation, control, are proxies of safety for me. My recent blog post goes into some of the details of considering the wrong views that underlie my beliefs about preparedness ( this blog here), but  as I was thinking about it, I realized the reason I get my panties in a knot in the first place is my myopic, little zoomed-in view.

When I fixate, narrowly looking at each instance/occasion with blinders on, I believe I can see all the ingredients that get a particular outcome on a case by case basis. When I get outcomes I want, I take away the lesson that I prepared correctly — amassed the right mix of knowledge, skill, relationship, money, influence and try to do it all again next time. When I get unwanted outcomes, I try and learn/amass/prepare for next time. Case by case this long, arduous methodology sorta works because results arise based on reasons, and we can absolutely be part of the mix of reasons that give rise to certain results. And, while no two sets of circumstances/events are exactly the same, the world has a way of churning out circumstances that are similar enough, some of the time, to allow preparation based on past learnings to apply to new circumstances. So I spend lifetimes trying to get the circumstances just right for the crystal configuration I want –dazzled by each special snowflake.

Zoom out though and I get a picture of endless snow. Like a video game : you can prepare — amass life, power, energy and weapons to beat the big baddie you are stuck on. Only winning just means you need to face the next bigger baddie. This is a video game that there is absolutely no way to win. With details I distract myself, convince myself that this game is fun and different each time, worth playing instead of seeing the truth: Endlessness of the same-ole-same-ole bs.

But wait, there is EVEN more…

I use a curated selection of details to affirm my own warped, personally preferable view of the world is the correct one; I use the details I like to strengthen my wrong views.

Here in CT we have a mask mandate in effect, this morning I was silently fuming at the asshole that couldn’t follow the rules and keep his damn mask on at Whole Foods. I get so angry, I think to myself, “how hard is it to wear a mask, look at all these other people wearing one.”  I am focusing on some people, some details, some snowflakes wearing masks and trying to use them to derive a rule for all people; it is the sometimes, plus my own beliefs/biases/desires (i.e. the meaning I imagine into the rupa of masks), that get me to the ole’ royal SHOULD.

Should is a dangerous beast, it becomes the implicit correct, the way the world –if only it was just cleared of its ugly adulterations –is meant to be.  Alana of course sees the correct and proper should-world-order and takes it upon herself to try and enforce, at least in whatever small corner of the world I claim as my own. What can’t actually be enforced can at least be hoped for, worked towards, expected, because in my own weird circular logic, could proves should (some folks wear masks so everyone could, which means they should) and should by definition proves could, since only a crazy person (hint hint Alana) would say everyone has to follow a rule that can’t be followed.

The problem of course is that this is total nonsense. I took some details — some people masking, and with a flick of my imaginary wand, turned that into “proof” that all people could mask, they should mask, we are just one asshole away from being my perfect paradise of masking!!!!  But the fact that some snowflakes have rounded points doesn’t =  all snowflakes must have rounded points. I curate the details I like into ‘proof’ because I don’t understand that sometimes never magically transforms into always. Especially not simply because I want it to.

The real truth is there are reasons some people wear masks, just like there are reasons some people don’t wear masks; people act in accordance with the causes and conditions that shape their actions. The expectation that all people are going to mask the same way ignores the differences in causes and conditions that impact each behavior, in each moment, by each continually changing aggregate process (i.e person). People will act in accord with their causes and conditions independent of my preferences or beliefs about what is ‘true’ and ‘right’ and ‘should’. Just focusing on the details I like/want, and ignoring the others, doesn’t change this one bit. All it does is reinforce my wrong view that Alana rules are universal ones. That and it makes me an angry, bitter, judgmental bitch.

Final Thoughts for Now

I know there is still more to glean from these snowflakes, and I am thinking that for next steps I will turn my attention back to self and self belonging (particularly body and rupa)– with this new context in mind — and see what new I can shake loose on that front.

There is still work to do, more persuasion needed, but I am starting to be way more suspicious that my mind is constantly doing a snow job on me. It tricks me (I trick me) to build an identity, a specialness and safety with details, to be distracted by them and to interpret them wildly in support of a fantasy-funhouse-mirror version of the world. But, if I take-off the crazy glasses and put on clear ones, I can use details to demonstrate that not only does this world not act in accord with my preferences/rules, but it never can/will. What needs to adjust isn’t this world, it can’t, it is already governed by a perfectly functional, logical, necessary set of rules. What needs to be adjusted is my expectations/view.

In fall 2021, I had been digging deeper on an old Ubai: The special snowflake. Below is a synopsis of my thoughts on this topic that I shared with Mae Neecha. As it is a fairly long synopsis, I will divide this into several entries.

Before now, I saw clearly that when I consider the fact that each snowflake is special and unique in small ways, I miss the greater commonality — that all flakes arise when water reaches a certain temperature and melt when it heats over 32 degrees. In the most fundamental way, independent of their slight crystalline differences, snowflakes are the same. Bound to arise and cease according to the rupa rules that govern snow. Just as this body of mine, despite the detailed differences I tend to dwell on, is the same as all bodies around me. Arising and ceasing when the physical conditions for arising and ceasing are met.

What I didn’t quite see before however is the fact that each snowflake having its own unique crystal form isn’t some wacky coincidence, best off ignored to fully understand the nature of the world, it is, in and of itself, an affirmation of the nature of this world and the rules that govern it.

The crystalline form a water droplet takes at the moment it becomes a snowflake — based on all the unique causes and conditions of that moment — is precisely why each snowflake has a specific, and unique shape. In other words, the difference in fine details between every snowflake affirms the full truth of cause and effect giving rise to the nuanced differences of this world. Different causes, different circumstance = different effects, and as the stream of time moves, there will never be the exact same set of circumstances/ causes, so there can never be the same effect.  Hence, there will never be the exact same snowflake crystal structure twice.

Differences in bodies, differences in nations, differences in personalities, all these arise simply because of differences in karma (cause and effect). This is just normal, the way the world operates, there is nothing special about the process and, surely noting special about the products of the process. Just because a snowflake is unique, arising from its own unique set of causes, it doesn’t mean it is special. It’s just one more snowflake churned out by the process by which all snowflakes arise.

Difference/details isn’t an exception, it isn’t an abrogation of the dhamma, it is actually manifest proof of it. I am a fool for trying to use difference to find evidence of exception, or exceptionalism, in myself or anything else, when the true lesson of the snowflake is that everything is the same — subject to the governing rules of this world, aka karma and the 3 common conditions, WITHOUT EXCEPTION. There are no special snowflakes, just flakes that have unique shapes based on the conditions that gave rise to them.

The snowflake tells the whole truth of this world –not just the truth of rupa that I originally saw, but the truth of karma as well. {{{And — modern day Alana (Feb. 2024) really wants to add that, most critically, snowflakes, in their total lack of specialness, tell the truth of anatta as well, but more on this later.}}}

Why is this anything other than an overly academic observation of snowflakes? Because Alana has a disease of delusion by details.  Rather than taking details, and nuanced differences that exist in this world, are evidence that the laws of karma are working A-OK all the time, exception free, I twist and warp those differences and details to be ‘evidence’ that supports my wrong view of how the world is. Or rather, how the world, according to Alana, should be: How I can force it to be (or at least my little corner of it) if I can just control and whip up the precise set of circumstances I need to manifest the effects I like.

{{{And again, modern day Alana wants to interject to point out how this belief that I am special, different, helps feed an even deeper delusion, that I am atta, I have an abiding self. Atta requires differentiation. If everything, everyone, is the same, with what will I build an identity? What will justify my belief in, my hope for, a world that will act in accord with my rules and standards rather than its own? Afterall, to get different effects, for different rules to be in effect, there would need to be something different about the cause, there would need to be something different –special — about me… }}}

All the while, as I am dazzled by each little snowflakes’ grooves and ridges, picking out the ones that ‘prove’ my version of reality, I am missing the nature of both the snowflakes and the snow. The nature of arising in a particular form, and then ceasing, in accord with causes and conditions.

Ugh….I so should have known before that the whole part of the Ubai that felt a little shady/sketchy to me — the fact that snowflakes are the same and different — was manifest evidence of the blind spots of my view.   But, at least it isn’t too late, so here are just a few more detailed examples of the lessons I can learn from the uniqueness –the detail — part of snowflakes. Seriously, I will say ahead of time this won’t possibly be everything I have or can learn, but it’s a start:

How I find false specialness and safety in details when really they are showing me that we are all subject to our karma, I can’t possibly be ‘safe’ from the effect of causes I put into place:

I hide special in the details, this is an old ‘ahha’ that I have shared before. I hear a story on NPR of a rape victim and immediately perk my ears to find the reasons why she is not like me — how the circumstances are different, the country, the age, the use of drugs, whatever the dumb ass shit she did to put herself in the situation to get raped –that obviously I would never do (even though I promise I  have done plenty of dumb ass shit that could have gotten me raped before) — any/every detail I can cling to to justify why she is not me. And more importantly, why I am not her.  Here is the big punchline: She is actually not ‘me’ (she is her own unique –always shifting –snowflake), but that doesn’t mean anything about me (different circumstances give rise to a different –always shifting — shaped snowflake), especially not that I am safe (all snow melts).  Let’s drill down a little further to look at why my crazy ass mental gymnastics to prove my specialness and safety with details are bald-faced wrong views. Let’s start with the easier of the two and work our way to more complicated:

1) All Snow Melts: This is the easier truth to see — already at the heart of my original snowflake contemplations — but obviously still not 100% clear to me (or I would be a Sotapana), so let’s re-look:

This morning I was chanting, and after reading the parts of the body bit, I thought to myself how damn unreliable bodies are. My mind strongly flashed to a memory I had of the first person I met with MS. I was in my 20s, she in her 30s, and we were volunteering at the same organization. She was wheelchair bound. So many years ago now, and I so clearly remember thinking how happy I was not to be her. Fast forward to present day; I got a blood test result recently that indicates I may be developing/am at risk of an autoimmune disease. Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Connective Tissue Disease — no doctor can tell me what, or when or even if. As I was considering the unreliableness of bodies, this woman and her autoimmune disease, me and my blood tests, I thought about one of those stories where the Buddha basically tells a woman in mourning that “everything that is subject to break will break.” It made me pause, because in truth, I don’t really care which disease I get, how I break — I just don’t want to break.

My mind does mental gymnastics to prove who I am not, what I am not (as well as what I am, but that is for a different day) –not the raped woman, not the MS woman — and it is correct, I am neither of these women.  Then, my mind stops, not taking the thought to completion. Because the complete thought is that it doesn’t matter one bit to me how I break, not really, what I am desperate for is to not break at all, or at least not for a very long time, or to be as unbroken as possible. But that I am unbreakable, or bound to be lesser broken, or longer unbroken, is not what the details and differences between these women and I “prove” at all. No amount of detail disguises the similarity; snow is snow, breakable things break, all people (including alanas) are subject to cessation (i.e. impermanence) and suffering along the way. And as we shall get to below, we are all heir to our karma.

Mechanistically, what is happening here is my imagination is seizing on some bit of rupa –details — that I use to ‘prove’ or mark the differences between these women and I, so I can imagine-up a different story for myself. A different identity. All so I can feel safe, sleep at night, convince myself to keep going. But imagination is, by definition, not reality. Which is to say, all the meaning I imagine into details really doesn’t protect me from squat. No imagining a long healthy life will keep me from getting an autoimmune disease. No imagining I am ‘better than’ a rape victim will keep me from being raped. All that imagining meaning (where meaning is based on memory/ pattern recognition) into the differences and details does is make me feel better for one hot second. Feel better till new details arise, that I imagine new meanings for, and I ping pong between being comforted and feeling terror (two sides of this capability of imagination) based on the rupa details I see, and the stories I use them to curate. All independent of well, you know, actual reality.

So, if the details don’t prove I am safe, exempt from misfortune, what exactly do they prove? Karma of course!

2) Snowflakes are unique cus karma is for real:

So the super subtle truth, alla unique snowflakes, is in fact that in any/every detail I am not those other women and they are not ‘me’. We can never be, have been, nor ever in the future will be the same; Each rape, each disease, each woman called a ‘me’ or ‘she’, arise based on totally different sets of circumstances, brought about by a different sets of reasons (i.e. effects caused by past and current behaviors and views).  Just like each snowflake has slightly different crystalline structures that arise based on the exact circumstances of their freezing.

So, back to chanting here: This morning I was reading that bit, “I am owner to my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my action and live dependent on my actions”. Now, normally, that part makes me a little squirmy, you know, I got karma issues. But this morning, my little inside voice said, “well duh, who else would be heir to my action, who else’s actions would I be born of?” That would be like a snowflake taking on a shape completely independent of the circumstances that mold it into its precise crystalline structure, it would be impossible.

Now, none of this is to say  Alana hasn’t been, or can’t be, or won’t be raped or diseased, quite the opposite actually; after all in a rupa world, where we all share the same basic elemental forms, disaggregation of those forms (i.e disease) and forced taking of those forms (i.e. rape) are extraordinarily common/normal/necessary events. And in a world each of us enter in the first place striving and feeling entitled to/ be/become/ fulfill our desire, depriving or using others to benefit ourselves is an extraordinarily common behavior, with common results. And, skipping ahead to a topic we will address in the next section — this continual process of cause and effect, arising and ceasing, births is basically endless (save for enlightenment) — across near infinite time, of course I’ll face many permutations of rape and illness, each one a bit different, but common in their total suckiness.

A few weeks ago,  Eric considered quitting his abusive job. I encouraged him to, said we would figure it out. But he wants this to be his last job pre-retirement and thinks we don’t have enough savings to retire now without compromising our lifestyle. He candidly told me that in the past ( like when we moved to NY) , me compromising on where we live hasn’t worked well. I don’t exactly suffer silently and he doesn’t want to be miserable because I am. It really hit my heart, even if I could promise “I have changed, this time will be different, I have corrected some views (which is a matter of debate for another time)”, he wouldn’t believe me, he said as much.

There is no way to avoid the consequences of my past behavior; I now see there are inescapable results of being picky, difficult, hard to satisfy. It’s not about good Alana/Bad Alana, it’s just about the way crystals form. My persnicketiness and low forbearance threshold isn’t a ‘victimless’ personality trait. It hurts me and the folks who love me and try and care for me. In the short term, I have to deal with a strained husband, a strained relationship, and feeling trapped in CT; In the longer term, there is no denying the guilt in my heart that needs repayment. The thing is, it is so clear how long and self perpetuating this trait and its consequences are, I can see that from my lifetime trying desperately to satisfy my difficult, needy relatives. This is all to say, the causes I seeded yield the effects I reap; even if today’s Alana ‘disowns’ the past behaviors, even if I change, consequences follow me.

Here is the issue with details then: My mind is a slippery beast, I use partial truth — that all snowflakes really are unique, to obfuscate the whole of the truth — that other people deal with the consequences of their actions, and I will deal with the consequences of mine.  I can imagine all the ways I am not that, I am this, I don’t deserve that, I deserve this, but in reality there is  no ‘safety’ in being ‘not them’, it doesn’t free me from my own burdens born of greed, or from ignorantly being born to live in a world of impermanence and suffering.

And there is no special, no identity in not being them/being who I imagine/having the future I imagine, because we are all just subjects, utterly unexceptional, always moving/shifting/changing based on the causes, cogs to the fundamental laws that govern all of us just the same. The details are just momentary shapes, resulting from the forces that moulded them before, already changed/changing to some new shape.

Recently I thought back to my days as a Candy Crush addict. For over a year, I played in much of my free time. I wasn’t just good, I was great. I grew-up playing puzzle games as a kid and with Candy Crush, I felt like a natural. Of course, lots of bucks that I could spend on extra lives, 99 cents at a time, helped as well. In time, I reached level 900+ and then, suddenly, I grew bored.

When I hit such a high level, it became obvious that my success or failure we predetermined by the starting board the computer delt me. If the board was favorable, I could play it out and had a chance to win. But many of the boards I was delt were impossible from the get go, no amount of skill was going to allow me to win. Early levels were easy, lots of moves/few pieces, and so when I won, I took it as an affirmation of me –my smarts, my abilities. But statistically, as more pieces entered the game, it was less and less likely I would be delt a hand that was even winnable. One day, seeing how the odds were stacked against me,  I felt like the game didn’t affirm me anymore: I quit cold, feeling slightly cheated by an endeavor I had spent so much time and money on.

In fact, I felt manipulated, because if the computer’s deal was manipulating my success at the end, it was doing it at the beginning as well. Every step of the way in fact I saw I was being ‘tricked’ — I given easy wins, like hits of a drug, at the start to boost my ego, to make me feel the thrill of success. Over time, I was given the chance to build skill, so I could peg my sense of self, my awesomeness to my abilities to win. Now it wasn’t just luck, it was the work and ability I had –that were me/mine. Only when it became clear the computer was sometimes letting me win, and sometimes handing me failing boards from the start was I able to uncouple my sense of self from the game. Only then did I begin to think –hey, this isn’t about me, its about the hand. And, naturally, what isn’t about me, what isn’t proving I’m a winner any more isn’t fun at all.

I realized in many ways, candy crush is a lot like karma: I build my sense of identity from my successes and failures, but the board was set up by past actions and beliefs, by past alanas that I don’t even really consider alana anymore. Still, I take the wins as affirmations of WHO I AM, and I ignore the loses, pretending that if I just build more skills, the game of life is beatable, never considering the world is rigged against my most basic goal — becoming, controlling, avoiding loss and impermanence and suffering –from the start.

Moreover, I feel cheated, tricked by the Candy Crush makers, who ‘lured’ me in with all the early ego stroking. But isn’t it really me who tricked myself? Me who said there is some value to being a ‘winner’ at this game. Me who let myself feel special that I was able to win? Me who built an identity off of a skill, when a skill is just the sum of the experiences, the practice, the values, the opportunities, that shape it? Me who is so easily dupped because I want to be? Because I want to believe there is something that makes me special and good, even if it is just a stupid game

Me who uses the same methods to fool myself all the time –gathering the easy wins, giving them meaning, and then using them as ‘evidence’ of my awesomeness, while ignoring all the data points to the contrary. Pretending winning a few rounds can make me a ‘winner’ when there is no possible way to win every round.

And so, as quickly as I became enamored with Candy Crush, I became disillusioned.  A small joy in my life lost. Me wondering at how foolish I had been to allow all those new and exciting candy shapes and colors to amuse me for so long.