I was listening to LP Anan teaching and in a class he called out a fellow practitioner who continually has trouble with her mother-in-law. Specifically, she is jealous of the attention and financial support her husband bestows on his mother. LP asked her –if your husband were to leave you, but leave behind millions of dollars, how sad would you really be? She admitted upset, but that the money would certainly temper the emotion. LP called out the issue with the mother-in-law as clearly one of self and self-belonging; the worry that another person would challenge her supremacy, and the material support it provides, in her relationship with her husband.

What is worse, is that this view, it breeds so many negative feelings, negative behaviors and then resulting negative karma. And for what really? We don’t know the future, the mother-in-law could die tomorrow and no longer be a threat, but the negative karma created with her just lives on. Or, they win the lotto and there is more than enough resources to go around, or the practitioner ordains and doesn’t need money anymore, or the world economy collapses and all the money is worth nothing anyway…the point here is, the practitioner, all of us, are so greedy –and stir so much shit resultantly– for a future with an item/person that is totally uncertain.

This got me thinking about Eric and I…

I rely on Eric for his financial support, I encourage him to remain at abusive, but high paying, jobs for “just a little longer”, “for just a little more”, so that we can have the life we dream of. So that I can have the thigs I want and that make me comfortable. So that I can have the money I ridiculously believe will make me safe. But, because I am so picky, the band of conditions I find comfortable, and acceptable, and safe is so narrow. It is so damn expensive. And because he loves me, because he sees it as his job, he keeps working. And I, despite seeing the pain it causes him, end up encouraging him, or at least not discouraging him, because I want the dollars it brings.

I feel guilty about all this, I have the sense that it is wrong, that it is hurtful, worse yet hurtful of someone who does so much for me, who I love so much. Still, I persist because I am greedy. And why am I greedy? Because I don’t understand the true nature of what I am ‘getting/winning’ and I don’t understand the costs. In fact, I pretend there are no costs. This is foolish; I know by now, at least intellectually, that there are costs to everything.

Last night I told Eric to just finish up at his current job and be done. To stop the new job hunt I had been pressuring him to embark on. I told him I didn’t want to keep donkey whipping him anymore, I don’t want the negative repercussions of such behavior and I could learn to live with what we had already.

Eric thanked me, but said that the trick wasn’t in eliminating the desire for money at the earning phase, but at the spending phase; As long as my band for what is acceptable is so narrow, it will be pricey to try and maintain. As long as I view money as a safety net, and I continually feel unsafe, I will need significant financial resources to feel comfortable. My situation moving to NY is the prefect example — what wouldn’t necessarily be a big deals to others, or what would be a strong preference to live elsewhere, became a ‘need’  for me– I was becoming physically ill, depressed, emotionally unstable in NY because I found that arrangement of rupa uncomfortable/unsafe physically and emotionally. A second home, a sudden move to Connecticut, these were ‘solutions’ only available to us because we had the money for them.

This is my need to stockpile, to squirrel and prepare, to be sure I am alright when the time comes  — to be sure I have the resources to effectuate the changes I want, to be safe and comfortable to my standard of both. It is the wrong belief money ‘fixes’ all problems, it doesn’t create them. Money keeps me safe in a world where ‘unsafe’ is a normal part of its nature.

This all got me thinking:

1) Wrong view #1 –I don’t understand the costs: There is a huge cost that I haven’t really considered deeply to having such a narrow band of acceptable, in a world that rarely falls into that band of acceptability. In a world that continually moves and shifts out of states I find acceptable, even if momentarily such states could be found. I think my bad of acceptable keeps me comfortable, keeps me safe, but it is because of these standards that I suffer profoundly — either by not having a set of circumstances that fall into my persnickety bounds of acceptable, or by the sorrow of losing such states when they go, or by the work I do to get to such states, or by the karma I incur trying to force others, like Eric, to help me acquire these states.

I remember the Temiya Jataka, in which the Bodhisatva pretends to be dumb/cripple so as not to have to take on royal duties, and their ensuing consequences. He is tortured to snap him out of it, but he forbears. I always did hate that jataka – in my warped mind, I took it as a personal indictment of my own lack of forbearance. But now I understand: The Bodhisatva, he remembers his past hell births as a result of princely duties in former reincarnations. It was to avoid worse discomfort in the future that he endures some discomfort in the present. This is less saintly perfection and more just good ole’ common sense; it is something even I – a bad and non-forbearing alana – would do if I only had the same level of clarity about where my behaviors have gotten me in the past and where they are likely to get me again in the future. Its not that I am fundamentally and forever lacking in some saintly qualities. Its not that there is no escape from my narrow band of acceptability. Its just that I don’t yet understanding the consequence of my preferences. I prefer them precisely because I don’t see their tradeoffs.

2) Wrong View #2 –I think I am in control: Another wrong view here is that I believe I can effectuate an outcome I want; I have the power, and control, and good karma, and the superhuman will power, to force the world into the states that I want it to be in. At least my little corner of the world. At least for long enough to make all that exertion of effort worth it…

I have recently been rewatching the HBO series Westworld. In it, many of the characters are robots, given a backstory by their creators and programmed to live in loops. Over and over they are killed and then put back into their world where they enact the same basic story with only small variations.  Its sorta a lot of food for Dharma thought.

One particular set of characters and their storylines had really struck me: There is a band of thieves who over and over play out the theft of a safe, living for the promise of the money inside and the imaginary future it will buy them. At one point, they finally get it open only to find there is nothing at all inside the safe. The scene hit me really hard because it is such a powerful ubai for life:

Maybe, with the force of my will, with my good karma, I am able to get my own life’s safes open. How often is it empty inside? Eric had a colleague years ago who worked so hard to become an executive and finally earned enough money to fulfill her dream – an early retirement at a cottage in Carmel with her beloved husband. The husband who died 6 months after the retirement, crushing the dream that had just opened for her. Her story haunts me to the core, for fear something similar could happen to me.

Or maybe there is money in the safe. Something to use for a little while. Yes, you get the money, but you get the problems that come with it. The jealousy, the getting used to a new standard that you need to upkeep, the fear of loss, the dependence. Like with living in SF; I got an amazing city I loved for 10 years, but then it set my standards to a place where New York disappointed me. Angered me. Where I missed my old life and now I keep searching and working to get back what I lost.

In fact, San Francisco makes it so clear that even if I could have stayed, I could have kept my circumstances the same, the city itself is changing. It has become uglier, less safe, less fun, it has slipped outside my standards of acceptable. Because of impermanence, even if the safe is full, the money you get, the stuff it buys, those change and slip away too.

Plus, once those robbers get the money to buy up the things they dream of, won’t they just dream up new things to want?  Eric and I have made so much money in this life, we have been getting richer and richer for years. But for every dollar we make, we have time to use it, or save it, before we start imagining new wants and new needs and where we will get new money to pay for those in the future.

Is any of this really control? Is this a world that I can force? That I can bring all my resources and will to bear on and make even a meaningful dent on? It’s more like hitting waves washing up on the beach with a stick and pretending I am meaningfully changing the shape of the ocean.

3) Wrong View #3 – I don’t actually understand what money is: I believe money is a tool for comfort, safety and satisfaction, despite so much evidence to the contrary; I completely ignore all the ways/times that money is a tool for my discomfort, danger and dissatisfaction. We moved to NY, we did it for money, but instead of bringing me satisfaction, that move brought me stress and depression. And while I credit money with helping solve the problem –a second home in CT – that view sorta ignores the glaring truth that the rat race for $$$ was what got me into trouble in the first place.

This pattern plays out over and over — I lust after rupa arrangements, and the money to buy them, but it is precisely rupa’s sucky nature I am trying to fix with money in the first place. Always trying to solve a problem, that should tell me what the world I lust to buy really is (obvi a problem).

And when money does buy a shortly satisfying arrangement or circumstance, I just need to go back to the robbers and the safe to know that, along with an assortment of pretty things, the money in the safe also buys strife and worry and standards that just make things harder going forward. Empty or full, ultimately the safe is the same – stress, not satisfaction is what will be found there.

Furthermore, having money now doesn’t mean I will have it later. It doesn’t mean that if I do have it, I am safe. Illness and death strike rich and poor alike. I hear Eric — I may face a problem later, that if I just had more money, more stuff, more people, more skill, more whatever I could overcome. But I will definitely face a situation that, no matter what I have, it is not enough to overcome the obstacle before me. The reason for this is simple –stuff is finite, money is finite, karma and still and relationships are finite. Dukkha however is endless.

In this way, it’s a lot like a video game: If one baddie doesn’t get you, the next one will. Only unlike a video game, it goes on forever…this is what I cause Eric suffering for? This is what I am greedy for? Still, I am always building, squirrelling more, clearly convinced on some level that if I can just have enough, whatever next time brins, I can game the system and win. Or maybe I just willing to try and extend my game as long as possible, no matter the cost, somehow convincing myself a little longer is all I want when in reality no about of win, of play time, of being on top, of being in a life we love, is ever enough.

In many ways, this life – my very blessed alanahood, is to date, as close as one can get to being able to game the system: I have been well cared for, mostly comfortable, mostly healthy and safe. But is it satisfactory? I live in fear all the time that I will loose what I have. I squirrel and skimp and ask Eric to work so I can stockpile – this peak life is a life of fear, work, greed and task-mastering. And what do I really hope for the future? What are the great aspirations I think I can realistically hope for with this peak life? A house or two. A few years with Eric to travel, after covid, before the next global or personal catastrophe? A ripe old age for both of us, which is max only another 50ish years.

My problem is, I am always zoomed in. I worry about having enough resources to take on one problem at a time; enough money to weather a pandemic, enough nutrition and medical care and strength of body to weather an illness. I worry about each moments’ arrangement being comfortable and satisfactory. Such myopia breeds greed, because greed is born from not really understanding the thing we are greedy for, from not understanding the costs of clinging to that thing.

Zoom out and it is clear I can’t have enough forever. Resources diminish, situations change and what works one time fails the next. Ultimately this body craps out and there goes everything I built in this life.  Zoom out and it is clear if I get past one obstruction, I will just meet the next. Zoom out and I can see birth, age, sickness and death are the mile markers of this life, even a peak life, with suffering all on the road.