I was online shopping for a new rug (to solve the problem BTW that the old one, did as rupa shit is wont to do, and shifted into a state of shrunkeness when heat from the dryer interacted with its 4e self). I was stressing about how it would look. I realized, much like my face, if the rug is going to be mine, it has to be beautiful. More than the rug, the space has to be beautiful. Why, bc beauty is a characteristic of what belongs to me. It is a fundamental aspect of my imagination of what rupa objects that are ‘mine’ look like. If it is mine it is beautiful– beautiful house, body, clothes.

Note: I don’t yet understand if beauty is a physical manifestation of a more abstract trait (like goodness, or in controlness) , or if it is, in and of itself simply a characteristic of form that belongs to me –like dollars are green. But either way, when something that is supposed to be mine hits a state of ugly there are 2 super suffering outcomes:

1) I feel deep distress at the dissonance that these belongings aren’t acting in accord with my imagination. That they are actually, on some level, proving that any item, even ones I call my own, won’t act according to my rules, but according to the rules of rupa. That the total paradigm I have set-up of being able to PWN the world through Rupa, to manifest my will and myself may in fact be bogus. That physical states are governed by physical processes not by my will or desire or imaginations. Faced with the truth my little mind breaks.

2) I feel deep shame. Why? Because if I believe these physical items are able to express something about me, if they can be used as proxies for my identity, for the traits I imagine I myself, and my ideal world, possess, if they are ugly — a state I literally ‘disown’, disavow, than it must reflect something broken or wrong with me. The world, I, can see my own shortcomings in the ugliness of my belongings. My failures to control, my failures to deserve beauty, my gimpy nature that would accept anything less.

Of course, a wise person might note the obvious — if my imagination conjures up beautiful rupa as a defining quality of what is mine, and the rupa I see in my body and my home is continually shifting states, achieving points of ugliness, then it must, by my own reasoning, mean these things are not mine. They are not me. They do not represent me. Afterall, physical things represent the physical interactions with other physical objects that bring about their changes. Their shifting states. Their aggregation and their disaggregation. That has literally nothing to do with my imagination. It is a totally separate process. If my imagination is the image of who I am in my mind, and no physical object ever can match that image shouldn’t I say no physical thing is going to do the job of representing me or embodying me or manifesting me. The sand literally can’t take and sustain the shape of imaginary Alana. You might as will quit trying GIrrrllll.

But delusional, and bound to continually suffer me (i.e. still me :() instead takes this feedback loop of ugliness in ‘my’ belongings and adjusts my imaginary image. I cry, I hurt, and then I am forced to adapt to the reality of rupa. So I need to say that this 41 year old face, that would have mortified my 20 year old self, is what I have to work with. It is my new ‘base-line’ of beautiful. It is the curve that my mind will always grade myself on thanks to hope and delusion.  And/or, I will try to do better, to be better, to improve, learn modify who I am, because if ugly is an indictment of me, I just need to be better and once again, the things I claim can be beautiful/and or I can claim new things that are beautiful. In other words, if I just fix me, I can fix the things that belong to me by some transitive property.

Again….I am avoiding the far more logical and straight forward message of this whole mess, which is “Alana, this rupa shit is not you, it doesn’t actually belong to you or reflect you. It is just 4es, doing 4e shit. You can’t and won’t ever control it. You can poke at it. You can cause shifts using other physical entities, but there is no way to guarantee you are going to like the shifts that ensue (ahh thank you green tea mask breakout for that helpful life lesson).” But, at the end of the day, the problem is that the only reason I would even bother with all my poking is the delusion that these things are me/mine/prove me in the first place.