Some Initial Thoughts: Everything is Annatta
In a video on Anatta, Mae Yo talked about a mango seed, how while it is still a seed it is not yet anatta, but when it is planted and becomes a tree then it is anatta. I was able to follow her description, but something about it troubled me…
The starting point of my practice had been impermanence – anicca – the first of the 3 common characteristics. With just a little consideration, it quickly became clear that everything was anicca, nothing was ever fixed or permanent.
The second common characteristic, dukkha, took a whole lot more contemplating. I had been so convinced that there was dukkha in the world, of course, but also sukkah. It wasn’t until my dukkha deep-dive (see the last chapter of this blog, ‘Everything is Dukkha’) that I was able to understand that everything is dukkha. Just more or less dukkha. The problem was that my mind created a blind spot, refused to see dukkha, even mistaking it at times for sukkah. But my wrong view, my misunderstanding, didn’t change the truth –everything is always dukkha.
Now, as I turn my attention to the last of the common characteristics, anatta, my impulse is that it must be the same as anicca and dukkha: Everything is always anatta. My task then is testing this theory, gathering evidence to prove (or disprove it). How can I start understanding this most tricky, slippery, subtle worldly condition? That was the task I decided to work on.
I though more about Mae Yo’s mango seed: How can I prove that even when it is in the seed state, the seed already has the nature of anatta? How do I understand anatta in terms of seeds, or any other rupa object?
I considered a past contemplation: Bubbles and anatta. I find the bubble to be the perfect physical illustration of anatta in rupa terms: The nature to pop is the nature of the bubble, it was always anatta. While it exists, it isn’t even one thing, it isn’t a solid ‘mountain’, it is a constantly shifting-changing-slipping-sliding over itself form, it’s never a fixed thingified thing. But we zoom in on the part that stays fixed, the vague dominess, a shape that allows us to assign it a fixed identity, to name it, to give it sammutti, a supposedly fixed form we call a bubble. The truth is, the bubble is always shifting as it marches along toward manifesting its nature of ultimate cessation, but the continuity of 1 aspect of its form is enough for us to call it bubble.
In fact, its actually somewhat arbitrary — bubble has many aspects after all — but we choose the outside shape, the thing that in rupa persists over time, to define and name that thing. Just as I use my body, the shape that persists over time, to define and name an Alana identity.
I watched Mae Yo’s video on Anatta again, this time with Eric: Eric said that what he understood was that things do clump into form, but there is nothing intrinsic, no identity in that form. It’s just a phase through which something passes.
His take really resonated with me. I can call something a chair, a house, an Alana. But those things have no inherent meaning or value, they are just temporary states through which the 4 elements (and in the case of an alana, the 5 aggregates) pass through before disintegration. A state is not an identity, it can’t be, it arises and ceases subject to causes and conditions. Where would a fixed identity lie in all that flux? How can I assign identity to something conditional? If its conditional it proves only the conditions that led to arising –conditions that shift, change, disappear — it can’t prove a master, a controller, a thing that exists beyond the process of causes and effects, arising and ceasing. When I really think about it, identity is kind of a stretch in the absence of both permanence and autonomy.
The problem is that I imagine there is identity in a state. Just the way I imagine there is sukkah in less dukkha. My imagination obscures the truth and the more permanent a state appears –the more solid, the longer it stands, the more easily I can imagine its fixedness — the more easily I can super impose identity. No self admits there are states, temporary clumps; the mango seed has a seed state, the bubble has a spherical state, in this lifetime my body facilitates and alana state. There is just no identity. No atta.
