Thinking further on bubbles and anatta…

I realized that with physical objects, I want to affix things  — make them still — hold them in a state I like, with characteristics that I like. But what is true of simple stuff, houses and cars and even faces, is true of what is more complex too, like mothers. The mechanics are the same. I create a concept — of something narrow and fixed — and I expect the world will oblige my supposition.   Mother is just a form I imbue additional meaning onto, something more loaded than bubble or than car (yes, even that sweet ass Porche). But like a bubble, my mother isn’t fixed, she keeps changing. Both the physical form changes and the traits/characteristics manifested through behaviors/actions that are physical, change and move outside my fixed supposition of what it should be.

The mechanics of both bubble and mother require a physical form. My concepts, my conventions, are pegged onto a physical object. In this case, onto a particular body, my mom’s.

With a body, on some level I know it isn’t me. Or it isn’t my mom. It is just a collection of parts and organs. But I also know that I require a physical form to fix a concept onto. I use a physical body to peg my idea of self onto, to fix the shifting changing aggregates into an identity, I peg them to shifting changing rupa. In both cases I simply gloss the change. I fixate on the sameness to pretend the object, and the concept/meaning I peg to the object, are unchanging. But they continually change. I depend on this body, so I claim it, I try and use the act of claiming to work the magic – transmogify a lump of 4e flesh and bones into some special form — the exceptional form that follows my rules — so I can depend on it.

Only,  nothing I do seems to work. Nothing fixes form, or the concepts I lay on it. What I claim, what corner of the world I try to cut-out, piss around, know and control, resists me. Why?  Because that claim of mineness  is only mine in my head. It is only me overlying a concept, an expectation, a supposition on something that doesn’t really contain that fixed unchanged supposition at all.

Annatta — self — is just a glorified sammutti.  Annatta is just a conventional form being mistaken for something solid, something unchanging, something capital T truth REALZ. Its just a bubble whose temporary spherical form fools us into thingifying it in our minds.

I had read a sermon and it said we are just witnesses of an arbitrary process, a process of aggregates, of cause and effect. But we take witnessing, proximity, and claim it, forge it into an identity.  The process is so clear when I consider my TV habits: As long as I am watching a show, I  become intimate with the characters, I feel invested in their lives. I want the characters I have become attached to, come to identify with, to be  healthy, successful, happy. Even characters with traits I don’t like, consider bad, still I come to identify with them, I become sympathetic to them, just because I am manipulated by the show writers to see the world from their perspective.  When the characters die, or the show ends, I just move on to a new show or character and get wrapped up all over again. Its the same with rebirth: new body, new life and suddenly –because of proximity, because of my tendency to identify with and claim — I get to become attached, invested, ultimately disappointed and faced with loss, anew. From one show to the next –struggle, strive, lose, rinse, repeat. Dukka