Alana's Dharma Blog

As promised at the start of this blog chapter, we will not be closing this part of my story with Alana the Great Understander of Karma. The truth is, the more clearly I understand karma, the more I suspect that a complete understanding of how karma operates is synonymous with enlightenment.

That’s because, my most recent contemplations (March 2023) have helped me realize that not understanding karma is just one more, albeit exceptionally deep, wrong view; it is a failure to see that every effect that arises, arises based on its own unique set of causes –absolutely everything in this world is exactly as it should be. The belief that it should be different, that it could be different, is an incomplete, faulty, understanding of the world and the way cause and effect –karma – actually operates.

And when you really start examining our hope that the world will be as we want, and our fear that it won’t be, it does seem like an incomplete understanding, a wrong view, of what the world actually is (a series of causes and ensuing effects, aka karma) – if fixed – would solve a whole lott’a our ignorance and suffering.

This however is getting very ahead of ourselves in the story line. In this blog, I wanna get just a little ahead of ourselves…

Here I want to share a line conversation I had with Mae Yo, in Jan 2022, about a year after the ‘conclusion’ of my original karma contemplations, because I think it offers a slightly better summary/working understanding of karma. That year really helped my thoughts and understanding on karma ‘gel’, and, I do hate to leave ya’ll Dear Readers hanging too much…so, breaking with my not-so-orderly-ordered-blog, we will skip ahead for a more proper(ish) resolution(ish) on karma:

---

Mae Yo sent over the following handful of videos, please be sure you view them all before you continue reding my reply:

A Bullet that Waited 20 Years #shorts #crazy #storytime

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/znnvC_wDCTQ boy claims he remembers his past life, but wasn’t lying (arias)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EYzYw19mtA

this little boy got in trouble at school because superman

the man who never saw a woman

My Reply to Mae Yo (which did get me a happy sticker in reply 😉):

Every effect in this world has a cause, when the time is ripe, there is no escaping the effect of the cause put in place — just like with the man hit by the bullet in the tree 20 years after it was shot at him.

I have come to understand karma in terms of snowflakes: Every single unique snowflake has a specific set of environmental factors (causes)– humidity, windspeed, temperature, etc. — that are responsible for the unique shape (effect). Given those exact set of causes, no other shape would be possible. Even if all the causes are unknown or unseen it doesn’t mean that the effect is somehow ‘magic’ or coincidence. In fact, with knowledge, training, the right tools, we can get a fairly good sense of a cause by observing an effect –just like a meteorologist might be able to gauge the humidity, windspeed, temperature at which a particular snowflake arose by looking at its unique crystalline structure.

Case and point about there always being reasons, that sometimes we just don’t see: It may seem unbelievable that a man could live till his 80s and never see a woman, but there are reasons. When they are made clear, it not only makes sense that he never saw a woman, it actually would have been strange –given his upbringing and continued life in the monastery– if he HAD seen a woman. The boy with the birthmark on his face is the same, we usually don’t know all the info of a past life, so something congenital we are born with seems to have no reason at all. But with the memory of the past life, the reason was clear. It shows that there is nothing broken in the way cause and effect works in the world, what is limited is our knowledge, our view, our understanding.  This is so clear with the Superman story too…

The teacher didn’t know the boy’s uncle played Superman so she assumed he was being a nuaghty kid and a liar. It was her bias, her belief that her limited set of beliefs/understanding/information was all encompassing, that gave her a blindspot that prevented her from understanding and believing the cause of the kid’s playing dress up. Her own bias –the strength of her view that she had all the info/was correct, knew the nature of kids, etc — made her so blind she ignored the truth when it was literally told to her face by the kid. This is the work of ego, we hold so tightly to our views, to our beliefs of what is true, to the world according to our perspective we ignore the TRUTH that is plain in the world for all to see. The truth of our own fallibility, fragility. The truth that we are not exempt from cause and effect even if we ignore it or don’t fully understand their relationship. The truth of the three common conditions.

I am watching this show about a bunch of colonists lost in space. All trying to make a new life on a new world. One woman on the show is a con artist. Over and over –to herself and to others –she insists she is just like everyone else, trying to make a new life, have a second chance, put her past behind her. But unlike everyone else, she will use any means she can to get ahead: She lies, steals, swindles and even murders. Still in a monolog she explains she is just misunderstood, she says  “I am not the villain of this story, I am the hero”. This is her blindspot.

A blindspot I know I share, not so much in the murderiness, but in the careful curation of a story about myself –that cherry picks the flattering parts and ignores the less ideal. That uses my totally lopsided, half-truth, narrow perspective story as the ‘reason’ to believe I am special, I deserve cookies and not whammies. But the truth is that alana’s reasons are not the real Reasons, my fabrications of how I think things should be is not the Law of Cause and Effect (aka karma).  That woman thinks the world owes her something, that she deserves everyone’s love and adoration and understanding. But in the show, the other colonists are already catching-on, turning against her for her destructive ways. How long till she is cast out? Can she really survive in space alone? There will be consequences –for her, for me– whether or not we think we deserve them’, or they align to our narrative.

With wisdom though, we can be like a meteorologist, and start to piece together the relationship between causes and effect, maybe even learning to avoid the effect we aren’t too fond of in the future by eliminating their cause.

AD: So I just finished reading LP Thoon’s sermon Line of Practice for Developments — in it he talks about how being born in a human body is like building a house. When the time is right, when you have sufficient materials, you will be born/ build a house. If you have lots of assets, it’ll be big and fancy. If you have little, it will be modest. The ‘materials’ are your karma in this analogy huh?

I have been thinking along these lines already: View begets desire, and desire begets action. This is the lefthand of all becoming/creating. Circumstances, or karma is the right. They work together. So, if my desire is to eat cake, my mind goes and finds a way to make it. But it is my training as a baker, my work to have money to buy ingredients, access to a functioning kitchen, they are requisites for that cake to happen.

It’s actually pretty easy to see that this is a chain — one thing builds on another — when I think about getting my first job. The education, the interview skills, etc. were requisites. I got these in school. I got into a good school because I studied hard. I studied hard in part bc of my personality, but also my parents’ values and access to good tutors. I got born into a family who valued education and could afford tutors based on my karma for that family. Actions and behaviors, born of views and desires) intentions, in other lives.

The cycle is endless from the karma — righthand. But by incapacitant desire, via changing our views, the left hand can stop and so can the cycle that requires both hands to continue.

Btw, I know that this response is not about the specific mechanics of how karma works and how particular actions lead to particular results. But I am trying to establish a scaffold — the bones–for how the world works, how births happen and everything else I experience in life happens, and I will flesh out from there. I have understood view as a driver for action for a longtime. But the righthand, understanding why particular circumstances allow cake baking in one case and not in another, I did not grasp. Now, when I think in terms of requisites (karma) for making a cake, or driving a car, or a Porsche, or winning a competition, or being rich or pretty, I can see how it can change:

I see how when I was a kid I passed my driving test on the first go. I was so proud. Many friends had failed. But eventually most did meet the requisites and get a license. Over time folks can lose a license: a friend had a drinking and driving conviction, my grandma lost her eyesight, etc.

There is no reason to take pride or ownership of, or define myself by having, the requisites for a license because requisites can change at any time.

I need to attack Special Alana. The sense I am protected by having certain ‘requisites’ that have played out in the past. I am only now seeing their flux. To understand that it can and will change. I mistake these requisites for control. But I am seeing it is not so: after all, in addition to their changeability, is the fact that requisites are generally built on and up in the past. It’s not even like today’s Alana can muster up all I need for today’s goals from scratch. I rely on older Alanas, blinded  (like today’s) with views that are wrong — dangerous — how do I believe some guaranteed cookie filled future?

MN: Yeah, what we see now is a karmic result from a cause cultivated long ago. Beautiful, healthy, rich, talented, smart – all of these are the result of karma and are subject to change. When we think they are permanent, we act heedlessly.

By the way, your phobias and fears are priceless dhamma material. Many arahant masters had to venture into the forest to practice dhutanga in order to bring out their greatest fears, and here you are in the city, encountering your fears… or in Africa meeting a ferocious rhino.

MN: from Buddho: “While making the consideration of being non-self (anattā), you have to fully understand the condition and nature of self (attā). The aggregate physical form results in there being a corporeal self. The foundation of that aggregate form consists of basic elements. There are four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. You need to understand and realize that all objects consist of the four basic elements which are necessary to sustain life. You decompose all body parts and all objects into pieces in your imagination and contemplate them as they really are. You contemplate them until you know and have a clear view, using your wisdom, that there is neither self nor entity in the four basic elements. Everything is just all about supposed self. You contemplate them to eliminate attachment from your mind. All of the internal and external body parts such as hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendon, bones, endogenous bone membrane, the spleen, the heart, liver, lungs, colon, intestine, fresh food, and digested food should be contemplated as the basic element earth. Even all of your possessions and treasures, you need to contemplate as the basic element earth. All of the above mentioned are just used to sustain your life. Every square inch on Earth is where you can contemplate with wisdom. Everything on Earth you can contemplate in Dhamma and the Truth, applying the contemplative technique (upāya). For instance, if you see aging people, ill patients, or dead bodies, you contemplate them in regard to the law of nature and the Truth, that all senility, ailments, and death apply to all animals. Then you bring them inwards (opanayiko), compare the consistency of their bodies, which are composed of the four basic elements, with your body which is also composed of the same four basic elements. You contemplate their bodies and your body in the same conceptual Dhamma and the Truth. You discern humanity and all animals and how they deteriorate gradually as a result of births, and how they become ill, senile, and eventually dead. Their bodies which are composed of the four basic elements change and decline. The reality is that bodies constantly generate rotten waste, loathsome filthiness, and putrid smell. Eventually bodies become dysfunctional and lie still, and they become putrefied according to the law of nature. After you discern the above reality, you bring them inwards. You consider that your body is the same as others which are composed of the four basic elements. Your body will also become old and deteriorate as others do. You can even observe some changing foliage, for these change from phase to phase gradually. You can see clearly the changing composition of the four basic elements. When you bring that contemplative matter inwards, as the foliage is, so are our bodies.

Vicikicchā is the defilement of skepticism and perplexity in the Lord Buddha, Dhamma, and the Noble Monks (ariyasaṅgha); skeptical doubt of the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna; doubt of hell and heaven; and doubt of the corresponding result of good deed and bad deed. Those who have attained Dhamma enlightenment, becoming Noble Ones, do not have any skepticism, because these are truths according to the Lord Buddha’s statement. The important thing is studying the correct way to practice Dhamma which directs one toward the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna. This defilement causes perplexity and doubt that one has inadequate fulfillment, merit, virtues, and insufficient coherent ability (paññā vāsanā pāramī) to attain the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna in the present life. It is advisable that you eliminate those wrong notions from your mind. You should derive self-comprehension that you have tendencies of perfection (pāramī) to practice to attain the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna in the present life. If you think that your merit and virtue is not ample fulfillment, you need to increase your diligent effort and perseverance in practicing Dhamma. It is like when you know that there is little water in your earthen jar, you should be diligent to fetch buckets of water to fill up the jar. It is the same as deriving perfect fulfillment, keep working constantly on practicing with diligent effort and eventually the fulfillment shall become perfect.”

MN: **the undeserving part sounds familiar, eh?

MN: From Buddho “The important thing to remember is to direct your mind to disavow that the four elements and all possessions are self, and conclude that they do not belong to yourself. They are merely things which sustain lives temporarily and eventually we will part for good. No one could embrace the four elements and possessions, which belong to the world, and take them when departing from the world. Do not attach and pile up possessions into your heart. Do not let your possessions attach to your heart and make you suffer. It does not matter how many possessions you have, make up your mind to admit that all possessions are merely common utensils in families. You constantly edify your mind to disavow that possessions really belong to yourself. Thus the mind shall have no perplexity and doubt as to their true character.”

AD: There is no question my fears/phobias are Dhamma gold jackpot. Not just because they give me a ton of fodder for contemplating, though they do. But because the pain of living in constant fear was what motivated me to practice in the first place, and the success I had in taming some of those fears and balancing my view is what gave me the confidence and desire to keep going. The same tools I used to understand that there is no necessary relationship between what I fear and what occurs get recycled over and over for every issue.

Plus, ironically, the same traits that made me a ‘good phobic’ — super sensitive, constantly alert to my environment, a keen eye towards ‘evidence’ that I am in danger/safe and a propensity to plan ahead and problem solve to stay ‘safe’ — turned out to be an A+ set of skills when I put my Dhamma hat on and turn my attention to practice. To being deeply attentive to the world around me and gathering evidence and putting it all together, just to see the truth rather than what I fear.

AD: I appreciate the excerpt from Buddho, it is such a clear explanation of how to see and use 4e/ Rupa to educate myself and disillusion myself with form and belongings and the physical trappings of self. That is definitely the program I am steadfastly on. Using shifting 4es, or impermanence in form, or the idea of items becoming depleted or consumed and turning this inward to me and mine. Or to considering the inevitably of death, aging and illness. To dispelling any illusion of my exemption and to seeing the extreme suffering of those + birth. To talking myself out of belief I control my body/ stuff, to understand that I can’t pick and claim a single, desirable state of Rupa and then ‘disown’ the aging, sagging, sick and smelly states. To convince myself those are not exceptions and that this body for not represent me, how can it when it cycles through states I want to associate myself with and those I do not? And the burdensomeness of using Rupa and the added suffering that I pile onto the normal everyday burdensomeness by claiming and trying to force the things I claim to be exceptional, to follow my rules, to take and remain in 4e arrangements I want. The extreme sorrow and disappointment when I inevitably fail.

And that I’m not special. That these physical things in various shifting forms have no capacity to make me special. It’s snowflakes all around. I alone cause my solution, sell myself a story — plugging in small details of difference to build an identity of special. Reading meaning, based on my own 3s and 4s, into Rupa and then tricking myself with it. Believing it is there. Prancing around — like the emperor that has no clothes — claiming Rupa, with it’s self-injected pretend meanings and further pretending it makes me a ME. Seeing the mechanics and providing to myself that the lies I tell me are lies. That basically is my program right now. Over and over, I actually am pretty damn confident I can crack this.

To be fair, I am generally pretty good at staying on that program, but I do sometimes hit obstacles I need to ramp down. Karma as a topic was such an obstacle. For a few reasons I now see: 1) I kept thinking it was about me, proof of my unworthiness, and it was getting in the way of my staying the course with confidence I could prevail. But I think I delt with this, enough anyway for right now, to forge on. 2) because I felt the tit for tat and some of the details of karma were too unbelievable. It niggled at my ‘faith’ in the path, but with my own story about helping my friend to pay back my debt to you, I realized it wasn’t so crazy after all and 3) to see the right hand. To see how karma creates circumstances in which our view– to desires– to action– play out and the measure to which they succeed or fail. I needed that, to get a more comprehensive picture and to see a place I hide my specialness ( in the way circumstances play) and to understand it’s not special at all — just like a particular arrangement of Rupa, it is an arrangement, circumstances shift, come together and desegregate when the time is ripe. I can’t hide a ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’ in there any better than I can in an apple or an apartment or a body…

Anyway, thank you!! I am forging ahead. Will keep you in the loop of course. Just one foot in front of the other for right now I think. Self and self belonging alla Rupa.

MN: I like this! And yeah, there seems to be an issue with how you define “bad” and “good”. Do you use the same standards to judge others as well? Or is it more about beating up Alana?

AD: I am judgmental as hell on if people are being good/bad (by the ole’ alana standard) although my practice has minimized this greatly (mostly by my finding evidence I am no better than those I judge, I have double standards. This helps my casting the stones outward, but obviously not inward). But there is no one I am less forgiving of than myself. That is why Eric essentially asked if I would be so harsh thinking about my dhamma friends.

When I look at every major meltdown story, this is Alana being good enough (selfless enough, sacrifices enough, equanimities enough, restrained enough) is the hot button. All the way back to homeless alana — do I protect myself or be compassionate enough?

Good is a defining trait for me. It is what I strive for, it is what I think I am deficient in. Even beauty, which is another biggie is tied to goodness — on some crazy level, I think beauty is won by/ physically manifests goodness ( I have no answer to Ivanka Trump).

I deal with this again and again. But these days, I know to look. It used to be this view could lurk in the background wrecking havoc unwatched. But this time it only took me a few days to see it pop up…

MN: “Good” for each person is different. What matters for us is our specific brand of “good”: For Mae Yo it is metta – saving others, sacrificing, being the hero/leader.

For me it is order and sacca – everything in its place and being honest and literal, punishing bad and rewarding good.

For you it seems to be about … compassion and beauty and safety/security?

AD: I would say for me good is compassion, willingness to self-sacrifice for others, doing duty/ fulfilling roles (often to make others pleased: here is where good Buddhist, good daughter, good employee, etc.) and consideration.

I then value certain  traits that I think allows one to ACT good. In other word, do behaviors I think reflect good regardless of ones desires/ thoughts or emotional state. In fact, the more you can ‘slog through good’, the better the action is ( hence my discount of good actions I actually want to do). Extreme will power is an example of these ‘helper’ traits — it helps suppress reluctance to do the  ‘right thing’ when faced with a choice. The homeless alana story, was a failure of will : I should overcome my selfish /desire for safety in order to act compassionate by giving a hug.  Just like I can train and force my body through discipline and hard workouts/diet I should be able to train my heart to Just Do It.

Or equanimity, which I was so self- hating that I lacked in NY, if I had it I could be calm, suck up a situation I hated and not burden Eric.

AD: Beauty in relation to goodness, it is a marker, a sign in people who have it — outer beauty reflects inner goodness. Not solely, beauty has other aspects for me, but there is definitely a cookie for goodness element.

Safety/security/ comfort is my other deep driver. It is what I want, what I seek in this world –for myself and how it ‘should be’ for others. But my quest for it is ‘bad’ it is my dirty little secret that I am so desperate for it. In my crazy-funhouse mind want for safety/security/comfort is the arch nemesis of Goodness. Homeless Alana truly has it all as stories go: I was a failure, not the good me I want to be, because I didn’t have the will power to forgo my impulses to protect myself from disease and compassionately comfort the homeless guy.

I feel guilty regularly that the security/safety/comfort side is usually the winner in my stories. I want to protect myself from my Mom, so I am reserved and limit contact. If I were a good daughter I could make her happy by enduring endless abuse to satisfy her desire for my company.

I hoard money, which is a proxy for safety for me. Why can’t I be a good person and give more of it away to help others. Proof again that I am a bad alana. Obviously, I have spent some time on this topic ;). But if I were to self-diagnose — it is noteworthy that I never deal with view, only action.

I have a split world –compassion/other centric versus safe/comfortable that exists in my mind (probably only on my mind). Is defined by my traits and behaviors of my own choosing. And then I continually test/ challenge my self — try to build an identity–around my ability to force my behavior. People who can sufficiently force get cookies. Others whammies. Alana is crappy at forcing. How could I deserve the ultimate cookie of enlightenment?

Or, another way to look at it is that I think goodness is acting the results. Hence acting compassionately. If I can’t act the results that I assume (all in my mind here) are the results of enlightenment, how can I ever hope to achieve enlightenment? This is all crazy btw. I see it as I write it.

MN: It seems you can’t let yourself win. How exhausting. Why do you think you choose to practice results? Is it easier, or do you think of it as fake it till you make it? Or do you not recognize what the cause is…And if you did recognize it would you do the cause? Or does action mean more to you than view? Or is it that action seems to be more easily perceived by others? And you need others to be supporting actors in your drama? To prove your goodness?

AD: Well, its definitely not ‘fake it till you make it’, that feels like being a fraud and I hate feeling like a fraud. It’s also definitely not easier — harder is what helps prove goodness, and harder is what comfort hates. View means more in my heart, but action, being able to suck it up and overcome, is how I define myself. That set of just do it, suck it up actions, that is what proves I AM GOOD.

MN: It seems like you’re damning yourself if you do, damning yourself if you don’t. If you do what you want, that’s bad because you’re giving into desires. If you don’t do what you want, you think you’re a good person but at a painful cost. But it isn’t about forcing yourself to not do something that makes it good. It is measured by intention, action, and result. Not everything that is difficult or painful is good.

AD: I want so bad to be something that no matter what I do I don’t think I am, or at least I am not enough — good. I guess I have always felt helpless to change the view — the desires — so I have tried to fortify myself with qualities I think will change the behavior. This is actually what drew me to our style of practice – I had never before considered changing my views, but upon reflection, it seems so logical, so doable.

MN:  Behavior changes when you see enough evidence of TTP, or see how ridiculous/impossible/illogical your view is. Forcing behavior can help, but it only helps if it enables you to see the results of a different path you’d normally take – like evidence that you’d normally not get to see if you continue to choose your go-to option. Forcing behavior isn’t sustainable.

AD: Yes I totally hear you on this. My practice ah-ha moments are really so often about seeing how ridiculous my beliefs are. Or how injurious their consequences are.  If I were to self-diagnose again…this is super deep and pervasive tendencies for me. Since starting this practice I see a different path: View first. I have worked on it diligently. But these issues are dragons. I go back and forth on if I should stir them and face them, or if I should let them lie and come back when I am stronger. But this good verse bad, other-centric versus self-centric, is how I define myself and the world.

MN:  I wonder how much proof you have that the rest of the world operates or confirms your views? It seems you’ve tied yourself in knots being so unforgiving toward yourself. Why can’t you forgive yourself? Why such strict/impossible standards? Society and the laws of karma are much more straightforward. When I can’t forgive myself it is because I think I’m likely to repeat the same mistake.

Control freak does not mean good, though. It’s impossible to control everything. Exhausting and not practical, too. Believe me, I’ve tried. I think I prefer the world’s system, with its checks and balances, to my flawed system.

AD: I am quite contrite, especially when something I have done hurts others…it’s not my intention. The act usually stops cold there, so its not about the concern that I will repeat. I think it is about the fact that I believe revenge/ justice/ punishment is necessary. That is why the whammy side of karma scares me so much: Who will dole out harsher punishment than I for myself?

MN: How much punishment is enough?

AD: Spoken like someone with clarity 😉 But seriously — I try to find evidence of the world systems, and a lot of the times I read it through my funhouse mirror mind. This is the trap of my own wrong views — I am continually reading the world through them, so my readings are wrong.

That was the big gift of seeing that working out so much only proves that I think ‘working out =extreme will’, not that it ACTUALLY means working out equals extreme willpower. This was the first time I actually saw saw saw how twisted-up and convincing my own delusions are.

Usually, I have a plan for tackling stuff, I honestly don’t have one for this issue yet. But I do suspect the world is full of evidence it doesn’t operate according to my view.

I also see that since I started practice, I have only dealt the hydra heads of this issue –this notion of goodness/badness and worthiness/unworthiness –I have tamped them down just enough to keep practicing when my sense of unworthiness gets in the way.

First the Ongalimara stories, and the recent take two on the Muggapaka Jataka, are the first times I am starting to see goodness is not the defining feature of practice. It is not the goal. It is not even — in so far as we are talking about Alana’s version of goodness — the effect.

It took me aback to see that Ongalimara wasn’t a 1-off, accidental, dick. He had the tendency of murder deeply; he just also had a parallel tendency of wisdom. And the idea that self-sacrifice in Muggapaka Jataka had zero to do with being virtuous for it’s own sake, and everything to do with avoiding future suffering, was also mind blowing. It is like I am just now absorbing the fact this practice has the goal of elimination of suffering. Which is, if we judged by my own standards, selfish…

I’m impatient as hell, so I hate to say it, but maybe I just need time. View and understanding are already shifting, just not at the pace I want (which is always finished and done yesterday ;))

Huh… I always thought the wanting-to-be-good-alana ‘side’ drove my desire to practice, but maybe it is the comfort/safety ‘side’ that is the driver. Or probably this world and alana aren’t really fractured warring poles at the end of the day.

MN:  Gotta find more like this, then. They are part of the same view. Maybe you see being good as a kind of security.

AD: For sure. Security of folks loving me and caring for me & security of ‘deserving’ cookies/ good things to happen to me. But also I see goodness as an identity. I was thinking more today, and I wonder if I make it unwinnable on purpose — that way I always have more room to become…I define my success/identity/goodness through action, in part, because there are always more actions. Like when we saw that Lute maker clip — I never thought of being good in that way before, once I saw it my feeling is it was a call out, ‘ alana go be good like that dude’.

MN: Then maybe it is about proving whether goodness necessarily leads to security. Like the lokatissa monk – his one bad act made him go to hell and be reborn as a dog for 500 lifetimes, but immediately thereafter he was human and enlightened. The bad was huge, but he also had good in there that secured him that arahant spot. It is a mix. He was enlightenment and still never had a full meal…security but no security.

Or phra devadatta. He will be reborn as a paccekabuddha immediately after an eternity in the lowest hell. He’s definitely not the poster child for good, yet he’s secured a spot even higher than normal arahants despite all his extremely evil karma. In fact, I’d say evil is a prerequisite for enlightenment more than good. You don’t want to get enlightened when everything is good. Just like you don’t want to leave happiness with Eric.

It’s that you are bad and suffer the consequences and want to get out. And how do you get out? By doing good? Not by doing good or by upholding the precepts first. Wisdom is the prerequisite. You can become enlightened by just realizing the truth of a wrong viewpoint. No goodness required.

AD: Oh, I suspect I have been bad, suffered the consequences many many times already and at that fork in the road, where you decide how to get out, I thought ‘be ‘good’ instead of ‘fix the view’. Now I see I need to fix the view.

So where do I go from here? Or Maybe that isn’t a fair question to ask someone else…

MN: More of what works. If stories like Angulimara help, find more. Or focus on that theme in whatever you are watching/reading.

AD: So I guess my instinct is to look at the evidence of if the world does/doesn’t confirm my rather binary views on good/bad.

MN: Yeah, that’s basically the big idea

AD: Ok I know starting with Rupa works. I know my daily self-assigned exercises to find examples of whatever I am contemplating on in my day works. Which is sorta like having a theme in mind for everything I see/ read/ do. That and just not quitting works quite well for me: both in Dhamma and worldly pursuits.

MN: Rupa is the foundation for understanding how common and not unique we are. If we are all subject to the same worldly laws, then your strict alana laws can’t possibly be the standard.

AD: Yah, I already know I need to hammer this home.

AD: Alright – I decided to change tactics and to see if I could make better headway coming from the karma as cookie direction instead of the karma as whammy direction. I am starting to understand how tit-for-tat would makes sense, how the debt cycle doesn’t need to be paid directly to the one who you incurred the debt with, how debts are settled in kind or degree and how the circumstance of such can arise. I have considered wider world stuff, but also some personal examples.

Here is the clearest personal example in that it shows how I ‘remembered’ a debt owed, I tried to begin paying it with like kind, I paid it forward to someone else (not directly in return), and upon payment I got extra credits (like interest?) and positive reinforcement to continue this kind of cycle.

A few months ago, I had a big dhamma realization — that idea that my putting so much effort into working out so hard didn’t prove that working out = extreme willpower, but rather proves that I BELIEVE working out shows extreme willpower, and I am someone who values that trait. I know it sound kinda obvious now, but I was really stuck. I couldn’t see past my view. Anyway, it was a big help in practice, so I did spend some time considering exactly how I arrived at such a big shift and I recognized that the nudge I needed actually came straight from the story of a dhamma friend that I internalized —  For the purposes here, it came about as a ‘bonus’ in my process of trying to right a debt.

The friend had Lined me out of the blue and asked if I would review her dhamma HW and wanted to exchange some thoughts. It was on rupa and 4 elements, I felt confident that I could share from my own experiences and contemplations, so I helped. I mean I really gave it my focus and attention and time, not just a quickie. Obviously I helped for a lot of reasons, she is a friend, I love the dhamma and want to have it thrive, but most of all, I helped because I feel like I owe you (Mae Neecha) a debt. I am keenly aware, and grateful, that over the years, you have always been my call/line/email a friend lifeline in practice. I also know I can’t pay that back to you directly because of our positions. So, when someone asked for similar help, I was especially eager, and conscious, of a chance to do so as a ‘pay it forward/back’ opportunity.

The cookie I got from you is guidance in practice, what I gave, was in kind. When the opportunity came, I immediately saw it as a way to give in kind. The further cookie I got as a result of my efforts to pay back my karmic debt by helping a dhamma friend, was clarity on a stuck point, a boon in kind. It also makes sense: The context is all practitioners doing practice. That it is continuous and further opportunities for karma to be traded in this sphere also makes sense. This story also shows how karma might be able to play out without being a continual exchange with the same person.

Honestly, I don’t think my block is about understanding how the contours of karma work, it is about thinking it is an indictment of me. I only see one side. Especially when I start from whammy side, I imagine all the whammies I deserve, will be subject to. I think it proves I am a ‘bad’ Alana. A worldly law, that simply describes the nature of cause and effect/ reasons and results, — in my fun-house-mirror-mind — warps into personal indictment.

Then I go extra bat-shit crazy and want to quit practice. Because I don’t ‘deserve’ enlightenment, I am bad. Enlightenment must be a cookie dolled-out according to Alana’s laws and standards of goodness (j/k but also sorta how my mind must work). If I can’t succeed, I might as well quit before I try –better that than failure.

Eric asked me, “Alana, do you think your dear dhamma friends, like Oat and Amy, are failures because they aren’t enlightened?”. I answered, “of course not, no one would call an unripe grape a failure just because it hasn’t ripened yet” That I suppose is my answer to myself here. That and the fact that whether I think I can succeed or not, my feelings aren’t really the arbiter of reality, they don’t dictate what happens — I should have already learned this lesson when I delt so thoroughly with fear/hypochondria.

This pervasive view, that Alana is/can be/should be/ GOOD, it the bigger problem here I suspect. I am working on it, but it is like whack-a-mole. One of these days though….

Anyway, stay tuned . Some other thoughts that overlap karma and self building currently brewing…

Yesterday I started thinking about how I can use a paradigm of ‘meeting the qualifications’ to think about dhamma (in particular self and self-belong). My goal is to reinforce the idea that Alana is not some special snowflake, she is just the same as everyone and everything else in the world — subject to causes and effects, to the rules of the world and to its common characteristics.

I need to prove to myself that all the objects, qualities, experiences or accomplishments that I claim, that I believe belong to and make me a special me, aren’t really proof of my exceptionalism at all.

Let’s take the example of being in a raffle: If I have a raffle ticket, that means I met the qualifications of being in the raffle. I was at the right place, at the right time, to buy the ticket. I had the desire to participate in the raffle based on whatever view I had that made me buy the ticket (for example I was doing it for charity or because I really wanted a particular prize). I had the money to buy the ticket and I was ready to assume the risk/reward of winning or losing.

If I do win the raffle, it is because I met the criteria for winning — a ticket plus karma/circumstance to win. But raffles are a dime a dozen, some you win and some you lose. Wining any one doesn’t make you a winner, it doesn’t confer identity. It just means the circumstances for participation, and then winning, in that particular case, were met.

Take another example — A dance competition like So You Think You Can Dance: To make it to the show you must qualify, based on skill. But you can end up voted off at any time, or you might leave due to injury or personal circumstance. The simple equation that winning proves skill, and skill proves identity, quickly breaks down when I watch seasons where the most skillful dancer has had to forfeit the competition because something, other than their ability, forces them to take leave from the show.

When I win a competition, I use that win to stroke my ego, to build an identity – Alana the Master Debater, Alana the Horseback Champion, Alana the Great Poet. But after binge watching many seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, I see there are winners each season, winning is not so unique. Nor is being a winner/loser a permanent state: Someone who wins once may lose another competition and someone who loses may go on to win later. How can a status (winner) that is not particularly unique, and that changes from one competition to the next confer identity?

Folks who don’t make it into the qualifying round of So You Think You Can Dance one year can then come back, try again, and make it in a subsequent year. There are folks who may still have the requisite skill, but stop being able to qualify for the competition because of the show’s age limit. In other words, someone can have the qualification for something and then lose those qualifications or they may not have qualifications for something but later be able to meet them.

Meeting the qualifications for something (as well as winning/losing), is bound-up with circumstance. It is not absolute. What is circumstantial doesn’t point to the innate exceptionalism of anyone/thing, it is just the result of all the requisite causes coming together temporarily.

It is like getting a drivers license, I had friends who failed the first test. I passed. But after another shot they passed too. In the end we were all qualified to drive, we met the qualifications.  Later some of those friends lost the qualification – one drank and drove, loosing her license, another developed a disability and could physically no longer operate a car.

I had the qualifications for a Porsche. I had the money, I found the car, I had a license, a garage, I lived in an environment suitable to driving a little low sports car. But then the qualifications ended — I moved somewhere snowy, since I was raised in Miami I was incapable of driving in the snow and needed an 4w wheel drive that made it easier to navigate icy roads.  So, I no longer had the skills/knowledge – the requisite qualifications – to drive the Porsche; the circumstances changed.

I loved that Porsche, I believed it was mine. When I drove it down the winding highways, I felt like it proved I was loved by Eric who bought me the car. I felt like its fanciness, the way it hugged curves and performed, proved I was on top of the world. But I went in and out of having the qualifications to have/use it as the circumstances of my life changed. So how could it be mine, how could it be there to represent me and prove something about me? It only proved that for some time, the qualifications were met.

I have started thinking everything in the world is like this, it is circumstantial; the appropriate elements – be they for a raffle, competition, license or item we claim (but really just use) – come together, for a time, and provide the qualifications for a certain status, right, access, ‘ownership’. But then the circumstances change, and just like with the Porsche, you can no longer claim an item, or status, right, ability, access, etc. These things hinge not on ourselves, our exceptionalism, but upon the qualifications being temporarily met.

Lately, I have been contemplating on karma and I feel so stupid, so stuck, the topic feels so impenetrable and impossible that I just want to quit. Frankly, I feel like such a failure of a practitioner, I rather just give up than forge ahead, it truly feels like I will never get ‘there’, never be a person worthy of seeing the truth, worthy to become enlightened. So why work so hard, why bother to try.

But what if the path, and its fruition, is just like getting a license or winning a show, its not about exceptionalism, or being super special –its just that pieces need to come together, the proper circumstances must arise. If that is the case, enlightenment –whether I can achieve it or not – isn’t really about being a bad or good alana, its just about meeting the qualifications. And just because I don’t meet the qualifications for something today, it doesn’t mean I won’t meet them tomorrow; there is no reason to quit, to pre-empt my inevitable failure by throwing up my hands in submission, when instead I can work on building the requisites I need and waiting for the circumstances to shift.

AD: OK, another qq from Eric — are you manifesting the specific punishment? If so how, how do you control someone else to poison you because you previously poisoned someone?

MN: You don’t. it’s like a job opening. it doesn’t even have to necessarily be that specific person coming back to poison you. If you have a karmic opening for “being poisoned” then whoever can fulfill that job (to fulfill their own karma) can do it. But you know you’ve paid for your karma (poisoning someone else) once you’ve been poisoned, whether you actively realize it or not (because we can’t access the past life info, although it all still exists in our minds).

AD: So it is like dating — the counter party finds you/ you them, you are comparable so you act out the specific karma each of you has together even if it wasn’t created together?

MN: Yeah, sometimes it is about characteristic/symptom matching, sometimes it is person specific (like the Buddha and Yasodhara, or like vowing to exact revenge on YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES). It really is like hiring for a job – sometimes you want a specific person, sometimes it’s whoever best meets those qualifications and is available.

AD: Eric seems to be clearing up on this: He said ” in order for karma to clear the conditions for clearing up need to be met, hence why it isn’t necessarily immediate. So for someone to be in an abusive relationship they have to have an open job post for abuser. It is not that everyone they date will be abusive, but that if an abuser comes along they can date them and then the karma payback can be filled.”

Ok, that is totally fair. I will try to consider ways/times/ evidence that it does work. I also agree that I have a view, particular to the detailed mechanics, that is coloring my perception. Since obviously, I believe in karma. I understand there is cause and effect, I get the broad-brush strokes. My own actions and behaviors — the strictness of my personality, my moral boundaries, and my sense of guilt and deep sensitivity to my own wrongdoings, make my belief in consequence pretty obvious.

MN: Yes! focus on the perspective of the person who commits the crime and remembers the karmic debt – not so much from the “all-knowing punisher” perspective – and it may make more sense.

Think about the job description concept: Whatever meets the requirement; things in this world can be molded and shaped more than we realize. “Magic” is just whatever exists but we just don’t know about. We believe too much in the tangible four elemental world that it is difficult for us to imagine how the intangibles work.

AD: I guess, at the end of the day, I know it sounds childish, my reservation is that I don’t want the world to work this way, it feels vengeful and unforgiving. It scares me that I am subject.

But then I guess this whole practice is about realizing the world doesn’t work the way I want it to, that is not what governs.

AD: Eric wants to ask: what is the relationship between paying off your karma and becoming enlightened? My answer to him btw was no necessary relationship: paying off karma is about circumstances in future rebirth. Becoming enlightened is about changing your views that obstruct you to the truth of this world. In so far as the karmic cycle is the suffering that gets you to put down the world it is related, but simply settling all your karmic debts to zero doesn’t equate to enlightenment. But that’s my guess anyway.

Anyway, Eric’s take is that knowing you need to pay your karmic debts is a good thing. Having the opportunity to do so is as well, otherwise we get crushing guilt aka interest.

Oddly I clearly agree with him in my actions/ behavior, but still don’t like such a dog eat dog world.

In other words, you are right and it is definitely my view blinding me/ creating a mental protest.

MN: There is no way to live in this world without committing karma. Every deed has its consequences. The karma we choose to commit depends on our views. We often choose to repeatedly commit the same karma because our views don’t change. Or we get punished and realize we don’t want to do that karma anymore, so we go and do the opposite instead (which is switching from permanent left to permanent right) – either way, karma doesn’t stop. We pay the debts, but incur more than we can immediately pay for (so it piles up and extends into future rebirths).

Becoming enlightened is about realizing the cause of the karma is within us – greed at the sotapana level, anger and lust at the sakadagami and anagami level, and ignorance at the arahant level. Once you eliminate greed, you will no longer go to hell because a result of the sakyaditthi (understanding self-view…that the world is how it is, not how YOU see it), you will consequently understand the relationship between cause and effect, and that intention is at the heart of karma.

It isn’t that your old karma is paid off, but going forward, you won’t be committing the same kind of heavy karma anymore (at whatever enlightenment level you’re at, anyway). Becoming enlightened is a result of karma. You must have built up the qualifications in order to be able to attain enlightenment. In a sense, you must have paid off relevant karma in order to become enlightened. Like the monk Lokatissa had to have paid off enough of the bad karma (that he committed towards an arahant in a past life) in order to become an arahant himself – although the residue of that bad karma made it so he still never had a full meal, even as an arahant.

Do you have to pay for all karma in order to become an arahant? I think not. judging from Lokatissa, from Upalavana who was an arahant bhikkhuni raped by her cousin, or from someone who attained enlightenment and then was soon killed by an ox, or from Moggallana and this karmic debt from beating his parents to death.

AD: Ok, just to clarify here a bit. We don’t become a sottappana by contemplating greed right? We contemplate on Rupa, it’s nature, and the suffering it causes us in trying to acquire it, and p’wn it, and preserve it and then lose it. Greed goes as a result. Yes? Realizing we cause our suffering with our clinging to these items also feels like a result, at least capital R realizing? Or do I need to contemplate on the bad things I do out of greed and worry about the consequences…That feels so overwhelming and scary.

MN: Yes, you become a sotapana by realizing you are not unique. That you are an arbitrary part of the fabric of the world – not the weaver. Greed goes because the objects that represent greed no longer hold the permanent meaning you once believed them to. It’s both contemplating rupa to see the truth in worldly objects, as well as seeing the TTP (TTP is the way to stop behavior).

AD: Ok, that seems doable. I can see the steps. I have been doing them and I see the results, my own changes in perspective, so I know for sure it works. I just can’t see past the steps and my best guesses of where they lead and why. But that makes sense, you don’t know what somewhere you have never been looks like till you get there.

Mae Neecha sent a few more resources, additional Buddhist stories of past lives, to help educate my karma contemplations further. I am linking the stories she sent here as they are salient to the conversation below, so please check-out the stories before reading on:

https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/the-great-chronicle-of-buddhas/d/doc365081.html

https://www.tipitaka.net/tipitaka/dhp/verseload.php?verse=133

AD: the Kāḷavaḷiya story is simply that the tendency of the wife is bravery (in all this the husband benefits by association, which also makes sense to me). It takes bravery to give up your last bite of food. Bravery to volunteer to go out of the city gates, bravery to face the demon undeterred. Bravery tends to be rewarded and the reward of choice is generally money. Moreover, while bravery can be born of hubris and stupidity, it is clear in her case it comes hand-in-hand with cleverness and wisdom (as seen by her escape of the convict). Again this makes sense in light of the fact that she uses her bravery to the benefit of making merit. So giving food leading to wealth and then to being treasurer (we will assume her husband shares her cleverness as like often hangs with like), a job that takes wisdom, all still makes sense.

Also, it makes sense that someone hungry, since they gave all their food away, goes to the temple to beg, overhears a prophecy by the Buddha and then makes it self fulfilling. The wife knew the prophecy, which may be part of why she was looking for opportunities, like volunteering to go out of the walls, to help make the prophecy come true. In this story, its not like 1 bowl of porridge = 1 bowl of porridge in return.

The Kondadhana story is more troublesome for me. I get that he is clearly someone who likes to stir shit to achieve his ends. First, as a Deva he/she does it to divide the monks for whatever reason. Then as a monk he does it to retaliate for the other monks talking about the woman who follows him. Shit stirring, to someone inclined to stir shit, will be default problem solving mode and it will cost. Clearly, that is the Buddha’s warning about being silent as a broken bell. But why a tit-for-tat, I took the form of a woman to stir shit and now a woman form follows me to make my life difficult? I have no idea. This is one of those ‘a bit too much’ stories for me.

That said, I don’t know if the fact that I can’t always rationalize the exact tit-for-tatness matters right now. I seem to be making ok progress on the general idea of consequence and, more importantly, my practice feels unstuck –I was getting so bound-up in what I didn’t understand, couldn’t rationalize for myself it was shaking my “faith” (used very loosely as a term here), in my own ability to progress. Now though, thigs are starting to unfold again, especially on the topics of hope/fear, my imaginations for the future and the way rupa/self belonging feeds those. I know the past is gone, I know I spend the present worrying about the future and I know the future is uncertain and ephemeral. I think if I can get this to penetrate my heart, to kill the hope, that could be a biggie for me.

MN: If not the tit-for-tat, then what kind of punishment would pay for the debt someone has created in the past? In general, in the world we live in, don’t you pay for a monetary debt with money? if you stole someone’s opportunities, don’t your opportunities get stolen from you? if you took someone’s freedom, isn’t your freedom taken from you? You can see it in how parents punish their children tit for tat is the norm, isn’t it? How else would we learn the consequences of our actions?

AD: It’s the specificity, not the degree or kind, that gives me pause. How would it come to pass that because one chooses to create havoc via the form of an enchanting woman, their ‘curse’ would be an invisible enchanting woman who follows them.

And it’s not always…yes we pay a monetary debt with money, but we can also be ordered to pay money for ‘ pain and suffering’ caused in a law suit. Or we can pay a monetary debt with labor…the ole washing dishes to pay a tab. Or the punishment for speeding is a ticket, a fine, though the infraction wasn’t financial in nature..

MN: Then what else would be a equal punishment? for a monk, a woman is the ultimate symbol of desire and lust – the big rule that once broken, you must disrobe immediately

That money for “pain and suffering” is only paying for the interest. the principal can be paid later in life, or will be paid in hell or in another rebirth. It’s using money as a central currency for value — you sped because you valued time or something that can also be quantified in some sense by money.

AD: Agreed, but it isn’t exact alikes. It is not being hit in the eye for pretending to be blind.

MN: Maybe it isn’t so much, “why does it have to be this way” but more, “why shouldn’t it be this way?” “what should it be if NOT this way?” Do you have an alternate punishment that achieves the goal of paying the debt satisfactorily?

AD: Ok, I hadn’t thought of it in this way. On this one, the likeness in form is really a likeness in severity. This makes sense — if you are the judge of what you deserve, your heart knows it was severe, and this is most severe I get it.

MN: Sometimes the symbol is best served in tit-for-tat form, other times it is best served in equivalent/substitution form; regardless it is our own mind that keeps track. How would it recognize that it has paid a debt if it is too far removed from the actual kamma? for instance, drowning for poking someone’s eyes out. or having stomach cancer for slitting a turtle’s throat

AD: I totally buy the equivalent idea. It is just the stories that make it seem like there is some Fixer-in-the-Sky dolling out the punishment that a person who hits others in the eye will get hit in the eye six days hence.

MN: No, no one has the time to be doling out punishments. Even the guardians of hell don’t want more people to come to hell, when they take the wrong person, they have that person tour hell in order to go back to tell their friends and family NOT to do evil. That there are real consequences.

AD: So what, we punish ourselves for ourselves? To learn our lesson?

MN: We are the ones keeping track of all our karma. Think about the karma we commit by intention, it’s only in our minds, who the hell is gonna want to creep into our minds and do accounting? Think about this – would you want to do it for someone? In the pavillion of 1000 rooms (described in LP Thoon’s Autobiography), the karma that plays on the “monitor” is whatever is in our minds; our side of the story, not the full story, but our take on it. Your role in the drama, regardless of the factors that led to it. your actions – whether incited by others or whether you did it only because you pitied someone, or otherwise – are yours to pay for.

AD: We punish ourselves to balance out books and take debt off them perhaps?

MN: Yeah, think about how we realize what we’ve done and willingly pay for it. if we don’t pay, we feel never-ending guilt. Once a criminal gets caught, it’s kind of a relief, that suffering can end. Like when you lie or steal. If you never pay for it, it lingers in your mind, when you pay for it, it’s finally over.

AD: Oh, I totally believe this. It plays out in the world, it is obvious. It is also logical in that we create circumstances based on our views/ habitual patterns. Circumstances that have 2 sides. In time, being in the circumstances our own minds/views desire will expose us to both sides.

This is like a gang banger that shoots up people’s houses regularly being the victim of violence himself. No surprise, that’s what you get when you value violence, use it as an end, surrounded yourself by it. I am just saying a gang banger who shot someone could get stabbed. They could go to prison for life. Or they could reform, like ongalimala as a yakka, only to come back again and suffer the consequences of being a cannibal king because they never did break the pattern. This also makes total sense, but then someone who had a guiltier consciousness by their nature might ‘pay’ more steeply than another who committed the same act but just felt less bad about it.

MN: Murder is murder, but the HOW you killed someone makes a difference too. Sometimes a simple shot to the head, sometimes you stab them repeatedly, sometimes you kill with poison, sometimes setting someone up to be killed by planting lies in order for you to steal their possessions – so whatever feeling is experienced is what you’re gonna have to pay for. The shock in being shot,  the pain of being stabbed and not immediately dying but suffering excruciatingly with no hope/help to be found, the specific pain of being poisoned (inability to breathe, exploding, nerve damage, or whatever poison-specific death). I could give you a million examples because karma already makes sense to me, but you need to find your own proof.

Change your view, try looking at it from a different angle – instead of finding reasons why it doesn’t work, look for reasons why it does work. Look for patterns in this world. Don’t let the tit-for-tat be an assumed “wrong,” because it is blocking your view.

Eric and I had recently watched the Wonder Woman movie. I mentioned to him how much I liked the film, how much I got out of it: The idea that getting what we desire has 2 sides. That once we know the truth of the cost of our decisions, we can make better decisions.

In reply, Eric poked fun of me, he asked why it was that a hit-you-over the head morality tale, like Wonder Woman, was something I could both enjoy and also learn from, but when it came to dharma tales, a teaching, sermon, or jataka I so easily get super serious, prickly even, worried I am either being forced or being judged.

I realized, when I watch some Hollywood drama, I don’t think it is about me. But when something seems Buddhisty, because of the identity I have built of wanting to be a good Buddhist, my radar is instantly up — is this a story that judges me? Is this a story that indicts me? Does this story make me feel forced to act or be a certain way?

These Buddhist stories, the ones I see as an implicit yardstick of my worthiness, are stories I am leery of. And of all the Buddhist stories that make me feel most judged, most lacking, the one that has long stood out as the biggest indictment of my dharma deficiencies, is the Mūgapakkha Jātaka (the story is linked here, if you don’t know it, it’s a must read to follow this post).

Of course, over time, I came to understand this same disease/delusion –that a topic/truth of the world is about me/a personal indictment – lay at the core of my deep discomfort addressing the topic of karma, and my continual sense it was a ‘black box’; it was something I was afraid to look too closely at. This insight however came later, first, a message to Mae Neecha with some thoughts on my least favorite Jataka, and what it doesn’t actually mean about me…

______________________________________________________________________________

AD: As a follow-up to some of our recent conversations, I have some thoughts I want to share. It is not about karma though, it is about my persistent belief that I am not good enough/that other people’s greatness is an indictment of my own innate failings. Here are some thoughts about Mūgapakkha Jātaka — long-time winner of my ‘most loathed jataka award’ because I thought it spoke to my inability to be sufficiently-self-sacraficey to become enlightened (naturally the jatakas are about me 😉 ). But, a little background first…

Eric and I rented a place in the country, we figured long term we could use it for weekends/holidays, and for now, while we work from home, we can use it more  frequently because there is a huge, loud, construction project going on across the street from our Greenwich place. It took us months of looking and stress to find, because Connecticut real estate is super hot right now. We had it less than a month –we hadn’t even moved in yet — and the problems started piling-up.

Long and short of it, there were massive repairs to be made and the landlords were essentially slum lords and didn’t want to deal with anything. Plus, the reality of trying to move during a pandemic — when we are being so careful, and other folks’ precautions are basically a crap-shoot, came to dawn on us; how were we going to direct movers over Zoom? Ultimately the landlords decided they wanted “lower maintenance tenets” (i.e folks not familiar with Connecticut tenant rights laws) and we all agreed to nullify the lease. But, before that, there were plenty of contemplations about suffering!

The suffering that arises from my relationship to all rupa when I want it to be one way and it keeps on being another. The suffering that arises when I claim rupa, try to make it mine, try to use it both for my comfort and to reflect my personal style/identity. The suffering that arises because of the difference between what I imagine and reality. How my imagination blinds me, puts blinders on me, so I only see one side…

Anyway, about a week later, I was taking a Zoom Zumba class and the construction across the street was so loud I couldn’t hear the music to follow. I was annoyed and then I realized that in the past, in this same situation, my mind had immediately flown to finding a country rental. This time I thought about the fact that it was easier to just endure it than to go through the rigmarole of trying to find a new place right now.  Literally, right then, with my feet moving to the Latin grooves, I realized I had seriously misunderstood the Mūgapakkha Jātaka: I saw endurance/fortitude isn’t really about having some saintly quality, it is about realizing sucking-it-up in a sucky situation beats the likely stress of the alternative.

After our conversation the other night I started thinking about this more, because, perhaps more than any other story, this jataka has been a symbol of my total inadequacy. I have always felt, deep down, that to be a ‘good’ practitioner (or ‘good daughter’, ‘good person’ and so many other goods) I had to sacrifice. I had to do things that hurt, that I didn’t really want to do. I had to hug homeless people even if I was scared, even if there was a real danger. I had to go on vacation with my mother, even if I could guess it would be totally unpleasant, I had to suck up and deal with her abuse. I had to go to the temple even if it felt too loud and crowded, even if I felt culturally out of place and fake, even if hours of dharma talks about new topics/ techniques left me feeling overwhelmed and unconnected to my practice.

In fact, on some level, I have only valued doing things if I don’t want to do them, if I did them anyway out of a sense of the virtue of self-sacrifice. (Eric has long chided me that I keep trying to find ways to do stuff I don’t enjoy versus assessing, and if appropriate changing, the views that make me not enjoy things.) Being a good daughter to my dad didn’t count because I loved him so much. Being a good sister to my brother used to count, but then (largely based on my suck-it-up efforts) our relationship became close, so it doesn’t count anymore. It’s not just my sibling relationship either, all sorts of stuff that I used to not like to do, that I thought of as ‘do-gooder-saintly-virtuous’, like chanting (which I have started doing a little of each day, for my own reasons), I suddenly start to discount because I start finding them relaxing/ pleasant/informative.

All the things I like to do/do naturally or out of a sense of self preservation don’t count. This is why recording my practice, or practicing continuously to solve life problems, or contemplating just because I like mental stimulation/figuring stuff out and find it relaxing, doesn’t count. This is stuff I do for me, based on my own tendencies/desire/gains.

Ironically of course, by my own definition, I will never ever be good enough; as soon as what I don’t like becomes likable I need to find new virtuous seeming things I don’t like to do. In fact, since by its nature the process of practice fixes wrong views so that I suffer less, it continually diminishes the things I need to self-sacrifice for.  By my paradigm, practice deprives me of ways to prove my goddess, with enlightenment — the cessation of all suffering — being the total nullification of opportunities to be good. When taken to its ultimate conclusion, my paradigm clearly shows itself to be nonsense.  But..that is a contemplation for another time. For now, since we now know this Jtaka is not an indictment of Alana’s inadequacies, I would like to consider what it is actually about:

It is a story of someone that, based on their own experiences, based on reasoning, and thinking ahead just a little bit, sees the likely perils of a situation in front of them (the consequences of executing kingly duties in the Bodhisattva’s case) and — out of self preservation/ the desire to avoid more pain and stress — does what it takes to avoid them.  Even if avoidance involves foregoing some pleasant stuff and enduring some difficult stuff.

Crazy Thought: It almost seems like the Buddha was trying to teach folks, like me, how to avoid our own suffering.

When I get over the idea that this jataka is just an indictment of all the forbearance (khanti) I lack, I can find countless stories of my own when I have forgone stuff I enjoy, and endured stuff I don’t, in order to mitigate future risks. We were flat broke when Eric and I got our first jobs; it involved forgoing lots of enjoyment, but we prioritized maxing out our IRAs. It was a super tough conversation with my parents when I needed to go on birth control, but it was a hell of a lot better than teenage pregnancy. Actually, I am someone that prides themselves on planning ahead, granted it can be too much sometimes, but you can be sure we didn’t have a pandemic toilet paper shortage in my house.

I am not saying I have the forbearance of Temiya, I like treats and avoid fires. I also am not saying this story isn’t too over-the-top-tourmenty-finger-wagging for me.  I also know better than thinking this particular issue is solved, it is so deep for me. But I do see that this is just like me thinking my fit body proves fitness = extreme will power, rather than understanding my (temporarily) fit body only proves my belief that extreme willpower is valuable and that I can prove it with a fit body. My views are so ingrained they blind me, and this particular view about/ self-sacrifice/ goodness/ inadequacy is not just blinding it is shatteringly painful for me, over and over and over again . Anyway, meltdown 2.0 averted. Stay tuned for the sequel. And thank you again!

MN: Sent a sticker and replied: The more we practice, the more we eliminate the “bad” in us and do more “good”… but at the same time, we are eliminating that “good” as well, because good or bad all create consequences and tie us to this world. But the buddha taught us to eliminate evil first, then eliminate good, so you’ll still be a good alana for some time. until you reach ultimate enlightenment.

AD: Maybe so, but my problem is I’m not really a good alana — I’m just trying to be good, by alana’s definition, in order to be a special alana, worthy of cookies and avoiding whammies ;), hoping that sort of thing acts according to my rules versus the world’s.

It’s a work in progress, but I really am starting to see my blind spots more clearly and to be suspect of the alana version of truth and reality check it against the Dhamma version of Truth. The one thing I can confidently say that alana’s wacko paradigm and the actual truth of the world have in common is that I can’t game either. I can’t win. I can’t be satisfied. That is pretty strong motivation to find an exit.

MN: The main thing is the normalization of certain behaviors/ways of thinking/views – this is what we act out day to day without stopping to question ourselves – this is at the foundation of karma/deeds.

Like you mentioned, once you do it once, the second time is easier. Then you keep doing it until it becomes who you are, until you don’t even see that there are other options to choose from.

We aim to satisfy our desires, but don’t want to lose out in any way – we think it is easier to hurt or kill others to get what we want. It’s easy to break the 5 precepts because we don’t understand that nothing is for free and that we have to pay for everything we do. Mainly because the results aren’t always immediately apparent. Once they become apparent, oftentimes it is too late. Each time we learn this lesson, it is stored in our memory (knowing right and wrong comes from experience like this), but because we don’t change the view propelling our reasoning, though we learned our lesson once, we can still make the same mistake over and over. It takes a lot to truly learn and change. That’s why we are reborn so frequently.

Right and wrong is learned from experience. From seeing reactions and results. From how we feel when we think of doing it, when we actually do it, and after it has been done. We innately know how to internalize – so we know that we’ve done good or bad. At the same time, we are profoundly confused about good and bad because our views make us all crooked – we make excuses and deny our wrongs to protect our sense of self… basically we know what should or shouldn’t be done, only we can’t help but act on what we think will feel good for us personally. We value subjectivity over objectivity…even though it hurts us.

Think about smoking – you knew it was bad for you, but you continued to do it for other reasons. How long did it take you to stop? What made you stop?

It isn’t like one warning or one piece of information could overcome the perceived value of smoking… it took time. The concept of karma is the same way. It takes time to accumulate certain views and behaviors, so it isn’t easy to change them.

Karma is like our tendency to act a certain way, to be a certain way. We reap the results of those tendencies, but we often fail to connect the result to the cause. That’s basically what we are trying to do in dhamma practice.

AD: Ok, I have given this some thought and it does make sense. Views drive behavior and behavior self-perpetuates under the force of habit and unexamined wrong views.

Because we don’t connect cause and effect clearly it is so easy to keep making the same types of mistakes — and receiving the corresponding consequences –because we are easily distracted by minor differences in the details each time, pattern recognition is slllooooowwww and poor. I relate to this.

I also relate to how practice helps either change the core views and/or connect reasons and results to get a sense of consequence. The two together are seeing impermanence and suffering.

When I smoked, I continued, despite ‘knowing’ the risk because:

1) I thought I was young and had time (wrong view of permanence),

2) I thought I was special, that I was going to be the one unscathed by disease ( wrong view my health was permanent, wrong view about the nature of Rupa bodies and my control over it aka permanence)

3) I thought no 1 cigarette would do me in, I got distracted by the single versus the pile versus the heap. I didn’t see consequence because I deliberately ignored the time horizon.

Ultimately though, I just didn’t want to give up the enjoyment, I wasn’t ready.  But when my dad got cancer it showed me I wasn’t special if he, my special person wasn’t. He was young, and without doing so deliberately, I internalized that to mean death didn’t spare folks below a certain age threshold. I also started weighing each cigarette I smoked, I saw drops could build to a flood.

Most of all, I saw my dad’s pain and the pain my family, it wasn’t abstract. It made the suffering real and I didn’t want to go through it or put my family through it if there was some action I could take to mitigate the risk I did.

So I quit. And once I decided to quit it was as good as done. No patch, no pill, no relapse. I was over it.

MN: However, when you quit smoking, it was linked to a specific suffering (TTP) – your dad. If it were someone else, or some other habit/tendency (traveling, cleanliness, food, comforts) you’d still have the tendency to remain addicted.

This is because while the situation made you change, you didn’t address the wrong view at its core. It was more the unbearable suffering that made you adjust your actions.

Like the king who suffered because his beloved consort died – he only let go once he saw her as a bug that was satisfied to be a bug, a bug who didn’t care about the king at all – it was specific to the details. But he could still suffer over other losses whenever the consequences weren’t clear to him.

It is this repetitiveness that we encounter in each rebirth, or even within each lifetime. Because we change ourselves at the result, not the cause.

AD: Ok, so how do we change ourselves at the cause? 3 worldly conditions? Seeing how they apply universally?

MN: Changing view. What wrong understanding, what wrong view made you think that you’d be an exception…to any rule (3 common characteristics) that the world abides by?

When we address view, it is broader and covers more than just smoking. Often, we address thought, not view.

AD: Can you elaborate on this. Not sure what you mean.

MN: Thinking smoking is good, then thinking it is bad. Smoking-specific. But not addressing addiction or heedlessness in general. So you only fix one issue, in that specific instance. Then you turn around and don’t do anything about other addictions. Like dealing with anger toward your mom in one issue, but not understanding your views that lead to anger in general. Not understanding/seeing how your wrong views over rupa/4es led to the anger, not understanding/seeing how nama (#2, 3,4, 5) lead to anger, not understanding/seeing how wrong views over self and self belongings lead to anger, not seeing the consequences of anger, etc.

AD: They easiest one to see/get at is that I believe Rupa that I dub  my own will abide by my rules. That somehow my ‘imaginary line in the sand’ — what is in my territory will obey. That what is mine acts differently. Won’t become cancerous or corroded. Past that, that me, whatever that is, is ‘good’, deserving of cookies by my own standards of goodness ( like those actually rule the world) and not of whammies like cancer.

MN: Yeah, self and self belongings at the root; but who would know to address that without guidance or without the existence Buddhism in the world?

So we are destined to reborn and repeat … rinse and repeat until we manage to change view. That’s why karma is hard to understand – our habits are so engrained in us that we don’t even consider that there are other options, that we don’t have to be like this No, not hard to understand.  But hard to see. The concept of cause and effect is pretty straightforward. Only we don’t see it personally or don’t see it clear enough.

AD: You know, that actually resonates with me. I got so stuck for so long on the idea that a fit body MUST mean extreme will power, since that is what I thought I was using to workout so much. It dawned on me though that all fit body reflects is my BELIEF that fit body equals extreme will and my extreme valuation of that characteristic, enough to act on it so vigorously. The views really are so ingrained as to be blinding.

MN: Yup and a sticker

AD: Ugh, I ping pong between feeling this is doable and that I am totally screwed. Either way, this is unsatisfactory, so I guess practice it is…

An abbreviation: There was a bit more dialogue that for the sake of brevity I will condense here: The main point was Mae Yo sent her encouragement, but also concern about my understanding of karma. I asked if it was necessary to understand karma to become a sotappana, my main goal, and Mae Neecha said that while it wasn’t, “understanding karma provides confidence in the world processes…that this is all proper and how things should be according to cause and effect. That this is all fair and “right.” I resolved to continue my karma contemplations according to the advice of my teachers.  More to come…

AD: I was able to find and read stories of most of the Angulimara births you mentioned, though I couldn’t find the tortoise story anywhere, I have heard it before and I just wanted to share a few thoughts:

— For you Dear Reader, in the story, Angulimara is born a giant tortoise who comes upon a sinking ship filled with 1000 people. He takes mercy on them and saves them from drowning by carrying them all on his back to safety on land. Once they arrive on land, the ship’s passengers decide to kill the tortoise for food. Only one person, a small girl, hesitates. It is said in his final life as Angulimara the 999 people he kills are the passengers from the ship. The girl, is his mother in his final life, whom he does not kill because he is intercepted by the Buddha. Other Augulimara rebirth stories mentioned here (giant Yaka and Cannibal King) are linked in the last blog, if you need a refresher, feel free to head back there to check them out —

AD: You can have multiple tendencies and ‘goodness’ is not the requisite for enlightenment: The takeaway that struck me most was that it is so clear in his final life that he had cultivated the seeds of two strong tendencies — killing and wisdom. I think on some level, before I did the research and consideration, I expected the murderiness to be a ‘fluke’, like at the heart of it, he was really ‘good’ and was just misled by his guru, so of course he ‘deserved’ forgiveness by the Buddha and a chance for Arahantship. But actually, over and over he shows he will kill/eat people and also that he can quickly hear and be persuaded by the truth of this world. He is not one thing — either/or, good/bad.

The storyline makes it very clear that the foundation for enlightenment is not what Alana thinks of as goodness, it is having built the tendencies required to become enlightened: In Angulimara’s case, based on his rebirth stories, I would say the biggest of these tendencies were wisdom, forbearance (as a turtle saving, as a yaka living alone, on his killing quests, when he is assaulted on alms rounds) setting goals and following through (either killing or saving a lot of people even when it is hard, overcoming his addiction to eating people as a yaka and cannibal), and the power of his word (tree nymph and guru and woman in labor).

I suspect that laying the foundations for, and following-through on, becoming enlightened may actually be a related, but separate, issue than the whammy/cookie cycle that comes with rebirth.

Habit/what I am used to as the foundation for desire and behavior:

The stories make it abundantly clear that what we are used to will drive both our desires and our belief in the acceptability, in our own minds, of acting out those desires. As a yaka, he tried to eat the Bodhisattva because he had been eating folks who enter the woods forever. As the cannibal, as soon as he remembers the taste of human he got from his past yaka life, his desire takes the shape of what is familiar to him.

From my own experience I know that what I am used to shapes my desire: When I quit smoking, the worst cravings came after meals because that was the time I consistently smoked. Or, I like a glass of wine in the evening, but when I can’t have it because of work or needing to drive, I feel unsatisfied. My habits affect my desires and give me a sense of satisfaction simply by doing what I am used to/familiar with.

What is more, even in his last life, it seems Angulimara is reluctant to kill, but undertakes doing so in order to please his teacher and gain the merit and power the teacher promises will be gained upon completion of his bloody task. He is willing to kill, though reluctantly, because it is behavior he normalized in the past.

Back to Boardwalk Empire: Early in the series, Nucky is reluctant to kill even as a mob boss; he tries to resolve issues without bloodshed as often as possible. But after his first kill with his own hands, killing becomes easier and easier. It is like once the dam broke, and he is able to reconcile being murdery with his sense of self, he learns to justify the behavior. The first time he kills it is out of revenge on an underling who tries to overthrow him, each time thereafter, killing becomes a duty to protect himself and his family and empire.

My takeaway is that being wary of the habits we build is not so much an issue of ‘goodness’ or morality, it is about the fact that our habits limit our freedom. We put ourselves in cycles that are hard to remove ourselves from because the habitual becomes automatic and then we have to deal with the consequences of those cycles. Afterall, even after monkhood, Angulimara faces violence and hate from villagers who know of his murderous past.

The scary part I think is that I have seen there are habits that work really well, or seem innocuous enough, in some circumstances, but even these end up being a trap, and having negative repercussions in others. Quick example: I am a fastidious cleaner: So often, workmates, housemates, friends who I help clean after a meal, love that tendency. But I have gotten more than one scolding from Eric for ‘cleaning’ up stuff he can’t find. Worse, I feel deep discomfort in environments that aren’t clean, but it’s not always possible or appropriate to clean them — I suffer from my own ‘good’ habit.

I see Myself as #1:

After considering all the Angulimra stories, the single commonality that jumps out at me that motivates (what I would call) both his ‘good’ actions, and his ‘bad’ actions, is the supremacy of ‘I want/I am #1’ in dictating behavior.

In the Yaka life and cannibal life, he eats humans because it is what he wants. He believes that satisfying his hunger is of ultimate importance –that it is a matter of life and death even: He says as much explicitly in the 2 parable retorts he gives to his advisor about the child who starved because he couldn’t eat the apples he liked and the man who starved himself because he couldn’t hav  a goddess wife. He kills 999 people to get the boons and the power he wants.

But he also chooses to not sacrifice the Bodhisattva to the tree nymph because he is a friend, he doesn’t want to kill him (despite a vow to the nymph). He wants to help the shipwreck victims presumably because he feels bad for them; I would venture a guess that the same hubris (I-centrism) that makes him a so-great-shipwreck savior, also makes him heedless enough that he gets eaten afterwards.

When I look at the Nucky (Boardwalk Empire) stories as well, he doesn’t want to kill because he doesn’t want to be a murderer. He does kill because he wants to protect himself and what he built. He gives generously when he is moved, by people whose stories touch a nerve based on his own experiences or beliefs, but he hungers for money to bring him the lifestyle and influence he also desires.

For me too, I wanted to hug a homeless guy because I would want to be hugged. I want to be the kind of person who hugs. But I also want to keep myself safe –enter homeless Alana the O.G. Dhamma meltdown.  All my taking and using and manipulating is obviously to satisfy me/my wants. But as I learned from my compassionate and veggie Alana contemplations, all my faux-compassion has also always been about feeling like I am the good me I want to be, getting others to like and care for me, and deserving the cookies I want.

The Cycle Born from Self Aggrandizement

Me me me, I, I, I. at the meta level, it is hard to ignore that this is what makes us tick. Which also means that the very thing we seek when we come into this world is what keeps us ping-ponging between the cookie/whammy cycle –aka the 8 worldly conditions. As long as we are out for #1, this cycle does not end.

Just a small interjection here: When the pandemic started, you said to me we are living in a nightmare everyday, we just don’t see it. After months of pandemic life, I just notice how much everyone is acting according to the law of #1. People are doing what they need to survive, or acting according to their politics, their peers, their beliefs, their wants. To mask or not, to gather or not, folks act according to their good with far less attention to the utilitarian good than I would have guessed before all this (I spent months in shock actually).

Now I see humans are just like the animal planet shows — tigers eat gazelles, freaked out gazelles stampede each other, killing the small and leaving behind the weak. Of course, there are also stories of the dolphins that save people, the wolves that nurse adopted pups. Both tendencies. But at day’s end,  4Es are finite, when there is shortage, when there is need, even when there is just desire for more, animals and humans alike do what they need to do to get.

Anyway, while I can’t say I now fully understand the mechanics of the tit-for-tat cookie/whammy cycle, I can say I understand where the root cause lies (me, me, me, I, I,I) and the way in which our views will drive us over and over into circumstances where there are both benefit from the fruits of our views and suffering from them: Just like Nucky’s view on money brings him both friends and enemies, esteem and notoriety.

Being Fed-Up

Which brings me to my final thought: If the cycle is endless ping-pong, maybe the escape hatch has nothing to do with goodness and everything to do with being fed-up.  It is pretty clear that Anglimara was ready to be done with his killing quest, it is why he was rushing to find his final victim. When he meets the Buddha, the exchange — the thing that the Buddha offers him – is about stopping. This is not really a story of being reformed or being repentant it is a story about being fed-up enough to stop.

Across the stories, there are the big whammy sufferings – being eaten as a turtle or being assaulted on alms rounds – that sound a lot like a finger -wagging and “you get what you deserve.” But there is so much more subtle suffering that laces all the stories —  living all alone as a Yakka when it is clear at the end he enjoys the company of the villagers. Being exiled from community and family as a cannibal and ultimately being utterly alone when he eats his only companion, the cook. Being sent from his family in his final life due to bad omens and his own troublesome nightmares and rejection after he ordains. But, of course, it makes total and complete sense, its not hard to imagine a murdery-cannibals not having lots of folks who wanna hang-out with them.

In some ways, these pains and slights touch me most because they look less like extreme punishment and more like the ‘trade-offs’ we all make — that we have come to normalize and accept — as the cost for the lives and wants we peruse.

Which brings me back to being fed-up, maybe the trick is to not normalize and accept trade-offs, whether those are loneliness, or extreme anxiety, or needing to leave homes and established lives every few years for jobs, or just the trade-offs of birth bodies, aging, sickness and death.

OK, that is what I have on the Angulimara stories and karma right now. I am not quite sure where I will go from here, but I felt like it was critical for me to address karma, at least enough that I had a sense of the contours. Plus a sense that it was discernible through wisdom and increased understanding, by myself, when the time is ripe. For a while, it has just been taunting me from the corner of my mind, something I felt like I had to ‘take on faith’, which just doesn’t sit well with me. I sorta figure that if I go back to my self and self belonging contemplations with rigor, this will all come together a bit more organically for me.

Again, I really do appreciate your guidance on all this stuff. I try not to bother you and Mae Yo too much, but this was really stuck and needed some expert prodding.

If I may, I would like to ask you two one more question –it might be an answer I put on ice and contemplate on later, or use as a sanity check when my own contemplations get there in the future, but since I have the chance, I will ask now: Why do we know, in our hearts, what is naughty and what isn’t? Why is it that us humans, even animals (in dogs you can see in their face), have a sense of shame/guilt built-in? Is it because in our landscape of me-me-me-I-I-I we know what we would want to be on the receiving end of and what we wish to avoid?  Or is it just pattern recognition — after a while you notice your murdery behavior makes you unpopular — and wanting better outcomes for ourselves?

MN: Not magic, just the result of karma. Maybe think small scale first, then expand the same concept to bigger scale. Isidasi, Khujjutara, all the others in the Jatakas – their actions led to karma.

Try looking at the result of karma in terms of the five precepts. That might be a good start. What happens (short term) to people who lie? Steal? Kill? Commit adultery? Spend their days intoxicated?

What happens (long term in this lifetime) people who lie? Steal? Kill? Commit adultery? Spend their days intoxicated? Commit adultery?

Spend their days intoxicated?

What happens (long term, in next rebirths) people who lie? Steal? Kill? Commit adultery? Spend their days intoxicated? Commit adultery?

Spend their days intoxicated?

AD: Lets just start with 1, adultery, since that is the topic in the Isidasi story:

In general, people who commit adultery tend to get caught at some point, we will call this short term and long term in this life. Their own spouse, if they have one, is upset and they can leave them, divorce them, take the kids and otherwise ruin their domestic life. The spouse of the adulterer’s lover, if they have one and find out, can try and exact vengeance by violence or other acts to try and ruin the adulterer’s reputation and life.

More ongoing/patterns/trends that can persist across lives — all behavior arises from view. Again, in general, it seems like the view of an adulterer is that achieving their own satisfaction takes precedence over the feelings of others. In 2 of the human lives from the Isidasi story, this is super clear, he toys with women to fuel his pleasure independent of how his serial use’em and lose’em behavior will impact those women, and then in a future life forces out wife number 1 for her own advancement without regard to how that is going to impact wife 1.

This will naturally leave a wake of pretty hurt and angry people in an adulterer’s path until something — either a serious enough bitch slap; or a come-to-Jesus that touches their heart; or being cheated on themselves; or a deliberate process of self exploration, internalization and view changing (aka practice) ends their view and by extension their behavior.

This all makes total sense to me. It even makes sense to me that while, in general, these are the consequences of adultery, they don’t always shake-out in the short or long or mid term. We can return to this later, but I did ask the Buddha (via Access to Insight https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.136.nymo.html)  for some clarification on karma and was really touched by the Maha Kammavibhanga Sutta. I see it is a matrix, and I see it is exactly like sand –so many variables that in any given instance it is impossible to predict what will occur for sure.

Totally A-OK so far.

Here is where I start getting frustrated — in the Isidasi story, it is obvious in her last life she is on the flip side, having her own home broken-up when she was a home wrecker before.  But, by all accounts, at least in her last life, Isidasi was the picture perfect wife. Nothing in her behaviors, at that time, should evoke retribution from her husbands. So what is the mechanism by which they ‘knew’ they should reject her? Even if you say, on some level, in her heart she felt like she deserved punishment, how did she know these marriages were the ones she should put herself in to be punished?

I guess put another way, karma gets talked about as very tit for tat. In a single life, I hit you so you hit me back makes sense. Even across multiple lives, I am a hitter so eventually I’ll get hit back makes sense. What doesn’t compute for me is I used to be a hitter, I would never hit now, but out of the blue, countless lifetime later, I get hit. The ‘why’ of karma doesn’t really make sense without understanding the ‘how’. What is the mechanism by which this gets carried forward?

Of course, I have some guesses, based mostly on what I have heard and a little on my own understanding. My biggest one, is that the aggregates, namely 3 (memory) and 4 (imagination), somehow  carry the ‘account book’ forward??? Memory of what we had/didn’t have and imagination of what that will be like are clearly responsible for becomings, so the fact that they pack a little retributive baggage along for the ride, is a reasonable guess to me. But, serious black box here.

Which does bring me back to the Isidasi story. Even if I buy that immediately after his player death he did not pass go, and went straight to hell, because he felt so bad about his actions (which then why would you do it again if you were so contrite as to send yourself to hell?)  It is not like some angry god pressed the down arrow. What’s with all the castration lives?

I suppose karma as a topic is extra, extra, frustrating because these whammies (like castration), that can come along and whack you at any time, are so worrisome, but I feel like I am stuck and it seems almost impossible to live in this world without doing whammy worthy stuff sometimes.

Seriously if you have any thoughts on the black box of karma, those would be great. Or maybe I just need a little more patients… Its not exactly my top virtue though…

MN: As for reaping karmic consequences, there are two things: Becoming the victim of a similar offense, or acting out that same offense again. This is mainly because our views do not change. If you committed suicide before, it was because your views led you to conclude that death ends things, or that death is the only answer. Though you may be stuck for eternity at the bridge or skyscraper where you jumped to your death, you only know that it sucked and you suffered – you can’t trace the result back to the cause, which is your wrong view. So come next life, you still haven’t changed your view on death, you encounter a similar situation, you act similarly….rinse and repeat until you’ve had enough. That’s what’s behind the whole 500 lifetimes we see in the discourse. It is like A LOT, or A LOT A LOT, too many

Angulimara is a good example. He had a lifetime as a large tortoise, as a human eating yakkha, as a king turned cannibal, and as murderer turned arahant. If you see all the lifetimes together, you’ll see why people repeat offenses, and why they end up becoming victim of offenses they once committed

This is an Angulimara past life (From MN) https://youtu.be/whNT4oxFPZ4

AD Present day addition: Here are a few other Angulimara stories I ended up finding on my own to get a better picture:

https://thejatakatales.com/maha-sutasoma-jataka-537/

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/hecker/wheel312.html

MN: As for who is keeping track of karma? Sañña, memory, has everything covered. If you recall, in Treasure Trove, Luang Por Thoon talks about the thousand room pavilion where recent arrivals watch a movie of their past deeds…and then if it the scales tip toward good, you reap karmic consequences in heaven realms first. If they tilt toward evil, you reap karmic consequences in hell or animal realms first. If it isn’t too bad or they sorta balance out, you could be headed to a human rebirth instead. The info is all contained in our memory. We know very well what we did, whether we want to admit it or not. Sometimes we mistakenly accept fault for something we didn’t do, or sometimes we refuse to admit fault for something we did do. But, like in a court of law, the proof exists. Once put on the stand, the truth slips out, somehow, someway.We can lie to others, but we cannot lie to ourselves.

AD: Generally, I am really good about staying super focused on a topic, and synthesizing when I am ready. I have been on self and rupa and belonging for many moons already, bringing everything back to touch on it. Just something about our conversation, plus my general frustration state (caused in part by my rupa contemplations), seems to have caused the karma black box — that I keep putting aside for another day –to creep out of its corner and start me feeling itchy from ignorance.

Anyway, I may ultimately need to time-out the karma box back into the corner for a while. But, since its already out, and I have already started poking…Give me a little while to do some Angulimara binge watching, we’ll see if my ‘Buddhist patron saint’s’ story can jar something for me.

I will say this much now, I suspect I am on the right track:

I am watching a show, “Boardwalk Empire”: The main character, Nucky, has a rather pronounced relationship with money. Clearly he values it, sees it as part of what makes him him, what he can use to shape the world to his liking, he uses tremendous force of character to acquire and preserve it. He is super generous and charitable, giving very freely to folks in need and friends and family, community — money is a way he can help solve problems and injustices people face. At the same time, he runs a bootleging empire, to build his wealth he regularly engages in violence and even murder, it is just part of the business.

Of course, for his generosity, he makes many friends, it allows him to advance his family life, public persona, to have folks who feel indebted to him. For his violence and murderiness, plus just his being in a position that competes against equally ‘hungry and forceful’ souls for business and territory, he makes enemies, who are by their nature as mob bosses are pretty ruthless. It is very very clear in the show how he sets the seeds both for good stuff and whammies, neither coming for him would surprise the viewer.

It is the same view about money, about its role in shaping identity and his future, that underlies both sets of actions –giving away and ruthlessly acquiring.   Until his view is changed there is nothing that would stop his relationship to money, his efforts to acquire it and the consequences it brings. If the view is unresolved in one life it will simply pop up in the next.

Still super confused on the mechanics in the Isidasi story because in that last life, she didn’t seem to have a choice in husbands, she seemed to act the picture of perfect wife, I am not sure how her rejections were ‘arranged’. Also not clear on the casterations.But anyway, to be continued…

Thank you again, I really do appreciate your help!

MN: Isidasi is a good one to keep on the back burner. It seems so weird how she could appear beautiful but be rejected. Are those men specifically acting out Isidasi-specific karma, or are they just realizing their own karma while she realizing her own. Is karma like a ray donovan fixer, bring two debts together to be cleared at once?

AD: You don’t have to tell me twice to back burner that particular take 😉.

But on a more meta level, I think what has frustrated me so much for so long about karma is that, coming from a judeo christian background, it just seemed tinged with old testament angry God retributive justice. But I really see now, after even just a little investigation, that it’s not that at all. It is that views drive everything we do, and what we do has consequences. And we keep doing that same stuff over again so long as we have the same view. Look at that, not magic after all.

Without context though, the Jataka and other such stories, sound like morality tales. Like a child being pat on the head and told to believe what I am told to believe and do what I am told to do because ‘its for my own good’. Which, may be true, but if it were my personality to take stuff on faith Is probably still be practicing Judism…

MN: Jatakas aren’t telling us to be good, they’re showing us consequences that we are too short sighted to see on our own. We aren’t told to believe, but to figure out if it makes sense to us, and if it makes sense on a small scale to adapt that to the world on a large sclae

AD:  Yes, that seems pretty reasonable when you say it like that ☺️.

One of my most pervasive wrong views, that I see come up again and again in my practice, is on good alana/ bad alana — aka what alana believes is good versus what alana believes is bad is the universal rule of morality, something fixed that exists inside fixed individuals. Homeless alana, compassionate alana, bad Buddhist alana, bad daughter alana, it’s all the same story. I think even beauty, in my twisted mind, is one of the physical manifestations of goodness. Which is to say, my wrong views color everything, even the way I see practice and Dhamma. So it’s not exactly super shocker that that is the lens through which I read the Jatakas or try and frame karma. I understand it isn’t right, it’s just so hard to catch the more subtle ways it pops up, it is so deeply ingrained into how I view the world. Believe me I am working on it…

Dear Readers, as I explained in the intro to this blog ‘chapter’, near the end of 2020, the topic of karma came crashing into my contemplations, and I decided that rather than my usual M.O. — box it up and bury it for later — I would finally take the topic of karma on head-on. Once again, Mae Neecha was a massive help to me: She was a guide, a teacher, a sounding-board, a conversation partner, and a  ‘fact checker’ all rolled into one, amazing, Kalyanamitra . Because it pretty much captures my contemplations ‘real time’, I will once again (much as I did with my aha moments on rupa following the 2019 retreat) break our conversation into ‘bite-sized bits’ and share our Line Chat, over the course of a few blog entries, more or less intact as a transcript, with a few alterations for clarity.  So hold on, the train is about to embark on the karma line (…ugh, I know, I just couldn’t resist the pun though)…

---

So, as a little refresher here, I had been addressing the topic of beauty, but couldn’t quite get the clarity I wanted on what particular causes might result in being a super model beauty versus a hunchback ugly. I chalked it up to my “karma black box/total blind spot.” And asked Mae Neecha for hints…and so the journey began:
MN: Hints? Try looking at karma in terms of short term (doing something in this lifetime and seeing the results in this lifetime) vs long term (doing something in another lifetime and seeing the results in this lifetime or a future lifetime). Mae Yo always recommends whenever you want to know something that cannot be easily known, to draw a parallel to something that we can know in this world. The general rules governing the entire world, which means the 3 Realms, are the same

AD: I don’t know, this is so hard for me…when I think about beauty, one thing that stands out is effort. Compared to many of my friends from school, I have stayed fitter and more beautiful because I put a lot of time and effort into it. I also have financial resources I can direct towards my beauty tools, efforts and helpers — part of the reason for my success then is intention and energy.

When I look at friends even more able to retain beauty, they are 2 trainers who put even more effort in than me. Fitness and beautiful movement are their livelihoods. But I guess I just feel like to be born beautiful you need to be ‘good’ or ‘blessed’ somehow.

Much like being born rich, I look at my dad and Eric both, who grew up pretty poor and got rich. Both of them share a willingness to effort. And a willingness to problem-solve and quickly course correct to meet their goals.

Or maybe, because I am an effort-full person it is biasing my reading of the causes of these successes.

MN: Maybe this will help. Karma is both results of karma/past life actions we can’t see (I don’t know why I was born with X and not with Y), and actions we can see (I have A because I did B in present life). For instance, maybe you don’t know why you were born poor, but you can know why you lost money in this lifetime – because you gambled it all away or you joined a business venture that didn’t accurately predict market conditions.

But the concept is basically the same. So, if we can see how present actions lead to present results works in relation to this beauty topic in the present life, we can extrapolate past life to present results as well.

AD: Ok, I had a super fit body in my 30s because I worked out 3 hours a day. Now I have a medium fit body cause I at least work out 5 days a week.

I have retained more beauty relative to my age than many folks because I have taken care of my skin, been careful about sunscreen? I think for Eric and money, he has just been able to work so hard and adjust so much and learn what people want from him, what they will pay for and deliver.

I am still seeing the side of having consequence informed by the effort born of wanting. Fixating on that thing I want in order to get it.

Or the other side, getting what I don’t want as a consequence of some behavior: I used to smoke and I am getting those lip lines, a consequence of the reckless behavior of smoking. But also, I can’t sperate this observation from understanding that, to some degree, it is just the nature of Rupa to age and change, for lines on the skin to appear.

OK, lets try again: Eric and I lost a bunch of money on the house we bought in NY. We rushed into it. Made a rash decision based on what we imagined it would be like. We didn’t weigh and measure and info gather.

QQ: What does losing money on a business venture that doesn’t accidently predict market conditions say about karma? In my mind, this is the sand problem. The fact that you really can’t ever know what will happen in tomorrow’s market. Then again, a friend of mine tried to start a business and failed. I love him, but the whole thing felt like he just believed he knew best and others would follow him. He didn’t really evaluate the way the business he went into worked. The kind of expertise folks looked for in order to buy his products. There was hubris.

Ok, when I think about it, my dad made his money because people liked working with him. He had good relationships to his bosses. His employees liked working for him. He was someone who took time to mentor and he was well known to give a chance to women and minorities at a time that was not so common. As a result he had a number of people very loyal to him. They helped him succeed, get promoted and make money.

Likewise, when I wanted my own old job back, even with a weird schedule and semi remote thing, I got it because I always worked hard, I was dependable and I took pride in the organization and my own contributions to it. I also have a very good relationship with my boss, I went out of my way to adapt to her and get on her good side and position myself as valuable.

Still not sure about beauty.
Still, I see there are obviously causes. Things folks do that get them success or sets up failure. But this feels unsatisfactory.

MN: It follows the same pattern

AD: OK, I have recruited Eric into this effort. Here is our collective take:

Eric got rich because he believes the reward of money is worth his effort and boy oh boy does he effort. In addition, he has learned and adapted on the way in order to up the chances of his success. He was just saying back at Google he hated managers that yelled at him. He has learned not to tell at his subordinates. Those better relationships help him succeed.

Eric said he watched a masterclass by a fashion designer and something he said really resonated: He said the reason many folks aren’t successful at being fashionable is they think they can only be 10 percent more fashionable, and they don’t think the effort is worth the small percentage success. They give up. But if it is like that, slowly 10 percent at a time you build, you grow. Money, or fashion or beauty.

A few extra minutes on makeup. Learning new face massage techniques. Working out and going for botox. You think it is worth it. So you do, you build on success. You watch what others do and adapt. There is intention, effort adaptiveness and resourcefulness all based on the desire/ sense of worthitness of the reward of the pursuit.

As Eric said, he may have started in this life with more raw material than most — smart, persistent, perceptive. But each of these are traits, plus more, have increased and with it so has his success.

So is this it, the process of becoming a desirable trait? Clearly it is necessary, but not sufficient, what about penalties? Where is the smack down for naughtiness that are all over the precautionary jatikas that try to tell you not to be a dick, or cheat, or be murdery?

How does this tie to the rather quaint notion that folks who keep precepts will be beautiful?

Eric and I looked at the 10 paramitas together. He thinks that they are the checklist to any gain you want to make. Half of them hunker down and persist. A few planting seeds of kindness and endearment so others help. A couple don’t be a dick ones to avoid the vengeful pit falls or running afoul of law pitfalls. I think he is right. Which would mean the traits that get you worldly cookies are also the traits that get you Dhamma cookies. Hum…

Ok, I am still stuck on the retribution side. I was watching the Isidasi Theri story online, I am trying to follow the how’s and why’s of her punishment rebirths and I just can’t get there. I see in 1 life she/ he is a player and then goes to hell. Then has a bunch of castration rebirths. Then, not learning her lesson not to be a home wrecker, tries to overthrow a first wife to become favorite and finally gets born beautiful and proper but rejected by all husband’s. At least on the home wrecker side ( not clear on the hell’s or castration) she is getting exactly what she gave. I just don’t understand why? What is the mechanism here? This feels so much less clear cut then I workout therefore get ripped…

Anyway, on a different aspects of all this, it seems that success, ‘good karma’s is all delivered through the medium of Rupa — wealth, beauty, health. Looking back on my chain of crazy, it does relate. If I am hungry and decide somehow Rupa will satiate me that is the cause of all my effortfulness to build the Rupa stash of things I believe are worth it, will satiate me. If Eric works and builds 10 percent at a time for money, me for beauty, across many lives with persistence, and we achieve it, we only do so because of the tenacity of the wrong view we held in the first place that these things will satisfy us. I’m going on a limb here, it is late, but does that mean even what I would call the results of good karma is born of wrong views?

Ok, also on things about karma that make no sense to me. Khujjuttarā is said to get her wisdom from a life she offers bracelets to a pacceka Buddha to help him while he struggles to handle a hot bowl. How is this the cause of sharp wisdom?

I suppose if karma is like a video game, I get the basics, you start from nothing, build skills and tools. Play levels again and again till you improve enough to beat them. Dying when you lose focus. Not progressing when you don’t have forbearance.

But I don’t get the whammies that send you back to the start just for hitting them. I don’t get the warps. Or the special power ups that seem to just fall from the sky. It frustrates me because I feel like I don’t really understand how this all works and I hate being left with the ‘Oh, it’s just magic feeling’ when I know darn well magic is just science I don’t understand yet…

Karma is the law of the universe – it is cause and effect – and as such, it is basically the foundation of Buddhism and all the Buddha’s teachings. You would think any ‘good Buddhist’ would have a good grasp of karma, or at least try to consider it, and mind it on occasion…

So, I will begin this blog chapter with an honest confession… until rather recently, I just ignored karma. Yup, alana-the-striving-to-be-good-Buddhist, came-up against questions of karma and balked; I considered it a black box, a topic so impenetrable, that every time my practice pushed-up against it, I froze, and put the topic aside for another day.

In truth, what I came to realize was that karma wasn’t necessarily an impenetrable topic for me, so much as it was a scary one. Karma to me was about punishment, it was an indictment of me, of my worthiness as a person and a practitioner; when I bumped up against the topic of karma, some part of me worried that if I looked too closely, what I might find would steer me off the course of practice for good. Afterall, why practice when that practice is definitely doomed to fail? So, to ‘defend’ myself, my practice, I choose to just ignore karma altogether.

My strategy worked great, until the end of 2020 when a conversation with Mae Neecha about beauty took a turn toward karma, and for once I felt both frustrated and brave enough, that instead of balking at that karma black box, I decided to try and pry it open a bit and have a look. This next chapter will cover my karma contemplations, mostly by recounting an ongoing line chat with Mae Neecha in which she helps guide me on my karmic-ventures.

I will give you a spoiler alert here: At the end of this chapter, you will not find  Alana the great understander of karma ( I have come to see that is synonymous with enlightenment). You won’t even find an Alana with a super clear working knowledge of karma (that came later too). But, you will meet an alana who was finally ‘brave’ enough to start trying to unpacking that karmic black box, and who, in the process, discovered karma isn’t a personal punishment, a personal indictment, a personal anything at all…

Imagine that, the law of the universe just isn’t all about me…