Alana's Dharma Blog

Ever since I caught covid, my long-time health problems have gotten worse. After exams, and extensive appointments with specialists, I was finally diagnosed with an immune disorder –Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. It is an illness mediated by allergic pathways in the body; in short, my body overreacts to low levels of toxins in my environment. Even short exposures to everyday substances like mold, smoke, cleaning products and fragrance can trigger my immune system to ‘protect me’  with the release of chemicals that cause symptoms from eye issues to breathing problems, chest pain to vertigo.

I was talking to Mae Neecha about my illness and she said that we are all just heir to our karma. She talked about her own health, mentioning that she has hives a lot. She knows she is the kind of person who secretly curses others, with a common curse wishing for others discomfort, or having their skin crawl. To her it is no surprise that now her own skin crawls. She talked about Mae Yo too; she is the kind of person who doesn’t silently curse, she is more direct ‘bonk on the head’, she has the kind of personality –and the ensuing behaviors – that explain the terrible car accident she suffered.

I thought more about my own disease. My body ‘thinks’ it is protecting me against bad stuff in the environment, but it’s made me too sensitive, it has made me sick. I realize that, in this one lifetime I can think of example I have done this same thing to others…

I once adopted a stray cat that came to my door regularly looking for food I took her in, I brought her to the veterinarian, and I learned she was diabetic. Needing shots, special food, I forced this outdoor cat to be an indoor cat, for her protection of course. That cat would cry at the door to get out, but I self-righteously kept her safely locked away, ignoring her unhappiness as I stoked my ego with stories of compassionate-alana-the-cat-rescuer.  

Not long after the cat died, never having the pleasure to go outside again. Now of course, I regret my behavior. I see the wrong view, the self-identity I was so determined to bolster that I did not care that the cost was another being’s suffering. But, this is so my personality…

This tendency of mine appears in the story that launched my practice: Homeless Alana. I was so fixated on being compassionate that I didn’t ever stop to consider that the homeless man I regularly hugged and gave food to may not want my hugs, may have not wanted my attentions at all. I assumed because I would want to be treated a certain way if I were homeless, I should treat him the same way.  In my mind, my behaviors protected him, not just with physical food, but protected his dignity; but again, for my own ego and self-aggrandizement, I gave someone what I thought they needed/wanted without ever actually considering them.

In fact this is a deep and troubling pattern has created ongoing stress in my marriage.  Over and over, I try to be a good wife to Eric by acting in ways I think protect him, that I think benefit him, despite Eric telling me this is not what he wants, despite the fact that I hurt him with these behaviors. The examples are too many to innumerate here, but one biggie comes to mind…

Back when we moved to NY I was so depressed, angry, miserable and melt-downy, I thought Eric would be better off without me. I didn’t want him to have to sacrifice his career by leaving NY with me, but I also didn’t want him to continue to be exposed to toxic NY Alana. To protect him from both fates, I offered to leave him. To go back to San Fran alone. In my mind, I did this out of love. In reality, Eric felt abandoned and devastated. Though our relationship has ‘moved past’ this point, I know it still haunts both us, and him. It is one of the moments I most deeply regret in my life.

Snowflakes have long been a powerful ubai in my practice. When I consider this illness, I see that, sickness is universal, a necessary result of any birth. It is just like the fact that rain that hits 32 degrees will turn to snow, it is the result of the nature of water and the freezing temperature. But, like a particularly shaped snowflake, the specific shapes of each person’s disease is unique. I am clearly suffering a disease of my karma.

I heard a really interesting news piece on NPR. It was about how plants have agency; they use information from their environment, mixed with past experiences, to shape their behavior for the future. They seem to have an active stake in the outcome of their life and they have the tendency to, and the means for, shaping that future. They are able to change how their bodies look, they can change conditions that they create for their offspring, change the direction they grow or the way they allocate nutrients.

As I listened to the article, it dawned on me that I have held a mistaken view: I have been mistaking agency for control. Afterall, even if you buy that plants have agency, no one would believe a plant, tethered to the ground on which it grows, fully dependent on the elements for its ultimate survival, is in charge of its fate, no matter how invested in it the plant may be. And I have a strong level of suspicion that self, without self-determination, is utterly meaningless. I mean really –arising, existing, continually changing, dying, buffeted by circumstances outside of my control, if that is reality, then what do I think ‘I’ am?

But me, I assume my ability to make educated plans for the future, and then act on those, is part of who I am. I build pride, ego, based on the degree to which I am successful in achieving the outcomes I plan for and desire. Here’s the thing though, even plants can do this, so how special is it? Is this really the grounds upon which to build an identity. This is who I am, and the animals, and the plants, and the viruses…

A few weeks later I was talking to another practitioner about a problem she was having. The details aren’t critical; the main point of the problem is that over and over again she felt hurt when her kid did something she didn’t like and proud when he did something she liked. She was stuck in a loop of identifying herself with, building her identity off of, her child.

 As I thought about it, I saw that this is really the plant problem. Just because she is invested in the kid’s future, she can, and has, acted in ways that have impacted his future, it doesn’t mean she controls her son. Even more subtly though, it doesn’t mean her son reflects who she is as a mother, or as a cause: It just means that like so much else in this world, she can want an outcome and in so far as situations allow ( i.e. sometimes) be a factor, or even a cause, of temporarily achieving that outcome. Her and me and the viruses and the trees…This is what is natural. Or, in terms that resonate with me even more, this is what is conditional. How do I know?

An effect can die and/or change independently of the cause and a cause independently of an effect. This is pretty obvious: My friend’s kid could die and she live on. Or going the other way: A tree can thrive after its seed is gone. Even if a tree, or a child, is dependent on a cause for arising, after inception, it continues rolling along based on its own causes and conditions. Its own karma.

This is proof an effect doesn’t belong to the cause. Can not define the cause. Proves nothing at all other than that at one point, the causes (and conditions) for achieving that effect were met. A tree proves there was once a seed. A child proves there was once a mother. The shape these things twist and grow into, or if they grow at all, is due to countless new arisings of circumstance –causes and conditions—some of which may, or may not be, due to the continued influences of what birthed it.

Being a cause is normal, everything in this world is both a cause and an effect. It’s not special at all. I love to ignore all the shit I cause that I don’t like – my own shit is in fact a literal example: I don’t look in the toilet after every bowel movement taking pride it that poop. I don’t believe it defines who I am. Why not? I’m the cause. If I want to claim the fit body I think I caused by the workouts, the A+ I caused by my studying, don’t I need to claim everything I cause as who I am?  

I claim what I am proud of, use it to boost atta, just by being a cause to effects I adore. But it’s arbitrary. Back when I lived in San Fran, I took so much pride in knowing the city like the back of my hand. I was an SFer, how did I know? I could point to every secret staircase, each hidden gem restaurant, all the public bathrooms, and feel pride, proof of ownership. But isn’t that all just an effect of walking the city, of time spent there, of priding myself in getting to know the city because I am already inclined to identify with places? This is not identity, this is just my tendency to build atta, on the causes and effect I am already drawn to claiming.

Conditionality shows why being a cause doesn’t equate to ownership.  Why It can’t prove self. Because everything that is conditional arises based on conditions, and as those shift, so too does the effect. When those dictate the effect ends, it ends. Even I  cause something, that cause itself, and the effect, are continually subject to conditions. Conditions always shifting, not under my control.

When I lived in SF, I had agency in relation to the city: I was able to work towards a future living there, to work towards knowing it, to adjust myself to the environment, to plan and react and try to shape my fate vis-a-vie this place. The only difference between me and the plant, however, is that I  was foolish enough to begin to take prided in that agency. To begin to believe that happens naturally, based on causes and conditions, could somehow be WHO I AM. With agency I stoke atta and yet the nature of agency, and its limitations, are the proof that it can’t be who I am

I was again doing a 5 day fast. Already on day 4 and, as you can probably guess, super-duper hungry.  I walked by a burger joint and the smell wafting from the shop was soooooofrigginnndelicious. Desire, hunger, snapped-up in me in an instant.

Committed to the fast, I kept walking, thinking to myself how desire doesn’t really NEED to be addressed or satisfied, I could just let it pass. And as I let it pass, I started considering what this desire really is: My physical form, a nose, meets with a physical phenomenon, the burger and I smell. Then my consciousness sorta registers it as food. Then my memory recalls my love of burgers, my imagination comes up with some fantasy of what it will taste like/ be like to eat it and voila, I have desire. Desire made even sharper by the physical state of a body unfed for 4 days. Burger craving, just the output of the process of the aggregates. There is nothing special or meaningful about it at all. 

I thought back to my last fast, to countless fasts before, the moment I break fast with that first bite of food…I have reflected before that actually, that break fast moment isn’t really the moment of delight. The delight comes as I near break fast, the anticipation. The fantasy about what I will eat, how it will taste and feel. Each time I actually eat though, I fill-up fast. It’s over before it starts, never quite as tasty as my fantasy. Only to be hungry again a few hours later. I have reflected before that fullness is fleeting, hunger, that is the basic state. In such a world satisfaction can’t be found.

Now though, as I consider the role of the aggregates in the arising of my hunger, my desire, to begin with, something else is abundantly clear: : That burger is not ever going to be capable of satisfying me because a burger just feeds me, it doesn’t extinguish the process by which desire pops-up in the first place. Hence why am I always hungry again a few hours later. Hence why, even as I eat the physical food, my aggregates continue to wander and weave stories of side dishes, and other burgers, and other restaurants, and future fasts and break fasts, a 1000 twisting and turning tails before I have finished chewing the first bite.

Obviously, to stop this process, it is easier said than done. But I suppose the first step is to see the dukkha of hunger. And then to kill the hope that the object of my hunger, my desire is going to satisfy me. And as I see the mechanics of hunger arising, I am also just a little starting to seeing the hopelessness of trying to quenching it with chasing, consuming, claiming, holding.

With no direct flights from Tokyo to Miami, Eric and I decided to fly through San Francisco, taking a few days to see folks, on our way home. I made an appointment for us to stop by the temple and visit with Mae Yo and Mae Neecha.

During our conversation, something Mae Neecha shared about karma really hit me. At the time, I wasn’t fully able to fully digest it, but retrospectively her example had a deep impact on my contemplations about karma and anatta over the years since. As the example was so clarifying, I do want to go ahead and share it here –through it wasn’t my own contemplation – so that this context has been established as I continue to share my own ongoing practice and contemplations.

Mae Neecha explained how at the end of Game of Thrones, one of the characters, Theon, went out to face the Dark King (villain), sacrificing himself to protect his adopted brother Bran, and buy the family more time to survive and fight back. Mae Neecha said that she got a little teary eyed from the scene and reflected that this idea, of self-sacrifice, always gets her. She felt it was brave, but also a little unfair that Theon had to be the one to die so others could live.

But then, she through more about the whole story. Theon had for much of the series been a real dick. For a while, there he had turned against the family that raised him, trying to overthrow them. From this perspective, it made sense to her that now Theon needed to be the one to sacrifice, to protect that family, it was a balancing of his previous role and actions. This was karma. When she saw it was about karma, it didn’t seem so unfair anymore. Nor did it seem so extraordinary. This was, after all, the natural order of things; cause and effect playing itself out. Then Mae Neecha said something that really blew my mind, what is karma is by definition anatta…

Later that night I got back to my hotel and considered it a little more: I had been using Mae Neecha’s technique of trying to strip situations down to their elemental basis, to see themes that I felt were unjust/unfair/troublesome – like my neighbor the obstacle – as consistent with how things play-out in nature. The power of this was already clear to me, it lessens my own ego, forces me to see that a situation that is just about nature playing itself out can’t actually be about me.  

But with her story about Theon, Mae Neecha named ‘karma.’ As I thought about it more, it dawned on me – what happens in nature, the way elements behave, this is karma in its most observable form. This is absolutely everything acting according to its causes and conditions, and that is the definition of karma. Karma, nature, these are two ways to look at the same exact thing. And now, I am hearing –just starting to see the glimmer of –how these must also be not self. Karma, nature, anatta, different faces of the same dice.

Fast forward a bit, over the next few weeks I started considering another way to frame this same idea. Over and over my practice had kept coming back to (and, spoiler alert, will for years continue to get back to) the idea that what is conditional is not self. Afterall, where is a self in something that arises bases on conditions, subsists based on conditions, ends based on conditions; conditions that are not owned or controlled or tied to any one thing, conditions for conditions that are conditional in and of themselves. And Isn’t what is ‘natural’, the flow of nature, just the arising of circumstances based on conditions, cessation based on conditions?

A tree that blossoms and grows because the conditions –water, sun, soil are there –which dies in drought, or when overshadowed by another bigger tree, or uprooted from soil? A riverbank shaped by the flow of water, which changes and fills back up with soil again when the water dries-out? An island born from volcanic magma, only to be swallowed by rising oceans? What is in nature, this is not special, it is not self, there is nothing self-determined or unconditional about it. To say everything is natural, is to say that everything is subject to karma, it is to say it is conditional. So many ways to say –to see – this final, most elusive of the 3 common conditions: Everything is anatta. And, suddenly I had so many more places to look for the evidence to really prove this to myself.