Alana's Dharma Blog

The other morning, I was intimate with Eric. Afterwards, I started thinking the difference between rape and consensual sex. The difference between how it feels to have sex early in a relationship versus late in married life. The act is the same in all cases, so what has changed? It can only be me, the meaning I assign the rupa act of sex.

The thrill was max in a new relationship, when the confirmation felt freshest, novel. Middling when its no longer so fresh, when the sense of confirmation can be taken for granted, or the relationship has grown to confirm me in other ways.  Horrifying in cases of rape, when it feels like an anti-me, that I can just be used, the illusion of autonomy over my body laid bare. There it is, the proof that what I think is sukkah –sensory delight – is just the moments rupa appears to me to be affirming my story of who I am.  

I had been thinking about the SF place I rented when I used to travel NY-SF for work. Now, retrospectively, it seems obviously foolish that I believed an apartment somewhere else could spare me the NY identity. But at the time, I was so convinced that with an apartment, anywhere, SF, CT, and voila, I was no longer a NY. Having a place to sleep that I owned or rented was me, who I am.

I arbitrarily decided SFer came from having a rental to call my own in SF. Or CT was having a rental to call my own in Greenwich. That was the ingredient that made my story to myself credible. And so, once I got the apartments I was happy, I was satisfied. Of course, an apartment is just a place to lay my head when I happened to be in the city. It was silly to believe it was a tool to confer identity. 

The proof of the foolishness was that a change in circumstance –covid – meant that one day I left the SF apartment and I never saw the place again. If it had made me an SFer wouldn’t I have been able to stay? Wouldn’t circumstances of the world have adapted to and confirmed my SFer identity,  so I was allowed to remain, to continue using the place? But reality didn’t oblige, there were lockdowns and dangerous viruses that kept me from the SF apartment, and any identity I believed it may have bestowed upon me. The identity was gone, the apartment no longer usable, but the stress of dealing with the empty rupa apartment that I was responsible for continued: I had to pay for the rent. Finally had to hatch a plan, with the help of a friend, to move out and have my stuff shipped to me in NY.

I remember reading the Assaka Jātaka: In the story there is a king who is addled by grief at the loss of his queen who had died. The Bodhisattva reveled the queen to the king, she had been reborn a worm and had started a new life with a new worm husband. When asked, she said she remembered her time being human, loving the king. But it meant nothing to her now, she had a new story she had built, with a new worm lover.

Now that my story has moved on, now that I identify with new things and new places, it is easy to see what a fool I was to believe an apartment could make me an identity. Now, the story has changed, I claim and cling to new things, I have houses in Miami and Montreal to define me…

I lost so many tears mourning my move from San Francisco. The death of an SF alana and the sad, reluctant, birth of a NY alana I reviled. All that sorrow, stress and attachment, for a story that changes anyway. A story that –by the fact it is changing, based on circumstance, on forces way outside of my control, is actually proving it doesn’t prove me. It just proves the circumstances, the conditions, it is subject to. What is conditional can’t be me. It can’t be about me. It certainly isn’t who I am.

So, if I can see that an apartment doesn’t give me an identity, can I see it about a body as well? Isn't it the same: A 4 e object I claimed so I could try and use it to prove who and what I am. An object I write my story around and that I 'need' for the story to continue. For this story, rather than the object, I cling so tightly. But isn't it like the apartment, when I lose it, a new story will commence with new objects. Just like new homes, and lovers, there are new bodies as well.

For the apartment, its clear that I arbitrarily decided a home will prove my identity. Afterall, I could have just stayed in hotels when I was in the city for work or in Greenwich on weekends. But in my mind, hotels were temporary, they didn’t ‘seal the deal’ of being identified by a place. For that I needed a home. With a body, it’s less clear it’s just what I arbitrarily chose as a marker of identity because bodies are what I have the deepest habit of using  to ‘create’ identity. The supposition, the wrong view, that body I am born with=who I am has been conditioned for so long. It is harder to see this is not me or mine any more than the apartment. But it is equally true.

A lease gives me rights to use an apartment, for a time, when circumstances allow. Birth in a body gives me rights to use the body, for a time, when circumstances allow. While I am able to use these objects to perform physical feats, I am also able to use these objects to feed my imagination and to fuel supposition. I can use them to build any kind of identity the mind can cook-up. But in the end, the shifting nature of the world and objects will mean my physical use for them will end. With that end, the fabrication and supposition will need to adjust and find new objects to meaningify all over again.

Dear Reader – I write and introduction to this blog to warn it’s a mash-up: It is the bones of a contemplation from back in July 2024, rehashed now, in Aug 2026, when I am in the throws of contemplations on the 5 aggregates. This hybrid nature of this blog make it decidedly NOT part of the orderly telling of my practice that I set-out to create with this blog. And yet now, I can’t unsee what recent considerations have prompted. I can’t help but clarify and hone previously muddled half thoughts so that my own process and practice to continue to unfold. So I add new, slightly less muddled half thoughts here, with the frank admittance that this is what it is: A very new take on an old reflection…

I had been thinking more about the moments I am happy. I see so clearly, they are the moments where I interpret rupa as confirming my story – the story of who I am and what my happy future will be like. It is the moments I feel desire, not aversion, for the mental processes rupa sets off in my head (aka nama). The moments where I perceive the rupa aligns closely enough with memory, with the mind objects I have of those rupa objects, that the fabrications of the imagination are pleasurable.

I am happy the moments I think I am safe, that my story is safe, my future is safe, the things I love and claim are safe. Or even better, my future Is heading in a new exciting direction that I want it to head in. Or when it feels like rupa is confirming me. I remember so clearly the moments the porsche made me feel alive, so on top, so loved and beautiful. Right up until I sold it and the dealer pointed out an unknown mechanical problem that dropped its value, and left me feeling super NOT in control and on top; I couldn’t even control my car, getting sick without my even knowing it. Proof that happiness is just delusion about the nature of an object, delusion dashed when the object eventually reveals its nature so forcefully the ignorance addled mind can’t deny it any longer. But, I get ahead of myself here…

For so long, I have been stuck, unable to truly see the dukkha everywhere because there really are moments I enjoy things. The car for example: Hugging the curves of the road, top down, wind in my hair, the imagined stares of the people I passed nodding in agreement that the car proved my status. But now I see the memories that I cling to –the joy– was the moments I thought that car was confirming me. That’s what sticks. In truth, the car was stressful. Stressful to buy when I worried we couldn’t afford it. Stressful to maintain and  hella stressful to part with.

Why did I see, why do I remember, moments of sukkha then? Because the habit of self construction is so strong that it continually directs the mind to curate the memory of experiences to prefer those that confirm ‘me, myself, who I am’ and ignore/filter out the rest.  I see moments the car confirms me, forwards my story as the more real memories, prefer and gravitate towards what brought me sukkah, even if it was totally based on delusion.

That’s all. Its nothing more. These moments of joy are just moments of max delusion. Max belief that I, my story, my mental objects and suppositions are being confirmed. And what was the story at the end of the car? The shattering of that delusion via the revelation the car was secretly sick, defying my identity as on top and in control. And if at the end the car didn’t prove my story in the end –did it prove it in the beginning or the middle? Or had I been wrong all along?

Like one woman who doesn’t know she is 1 of 100 of her partner’s lovers. Feeling so unique and special only to realize all the evidence she took of her specialness is just lies. She is just one in a number. Not confirmed. Happiness is when she believes the self-narrative is confirmed. Sorrow when, scorned, she believes her self-special-narrative is crushed.  Happiness and sorrow are just the products of mental processes, the degree to which rupa and reality don’t strain the credulity of pleasant fabrications.

I think back at the image of myself in my beautiful red wedding dress. How happy and satisfied I felt as I looked in the mirror at the final fitting — Here was a body looking ideal, beautiful to my eyes, reflecting my desirability, my goodness/worthiness to have such a beautiful form, my prowess in powning this body into a perfect shape. Mind you I ignored that it was a compromise shape form the get go: Body builder fit since dancer sleek was contrary to my ectomorph physic. Evidence even in my glory moment –my beauty peak– that I had to adjust my story to reality, to the rupa I am delt, not that rupa that adjusts itself to be a perfect prop in my story.

Still ignoring this, ignoring the suffering to get to such a state, ignoring my stress with every bite of food that such peakness would be lost. I felt joy. I imagined this body telling my story and there was the sukkha. Sukkha is just the moment my lies seem truest. Later, the same dress made a mockery of my 40 something body. Bulging in all the wrong places when I tried it on. Later, that memory of peak body became tinged with sorrow, regret, self-indictment  when it had lost a peak that, by definition of peakness, could never ever have been held onto.  

And yet still, I persist in claiming this body. I take those happy memories– those points that the rupa was close enough to my story to feel affirmed –as evidence I can do it again. All I need to do is change the story slightly, to accommodate the 40 something body… But what’s the truth here, what is actually happening? The truth is that bodies are just shifting 4es, changing states over time. Sometimes the states align with ‘my story’, with the mental objects I cling to, and sometimes they don’t. In order to keep using the shifted (i.e. 45 year old) physical object to fuel the aggregate process, imagination and fabrication must shift too.

Returning to happiness then, it is the rare occasions I can convince myself the object confirms my story. Rare why? Because it actually doesn’t, because the nature of shifting decaying bodies is not to confirm peak and always desirable states. The nature of 4e bodies isn’t actually to confirm anything at all: Meaning, identity, hides no where in the midst of elements.  More often than happiness, I find stress. I stress because the body is continually either shifting into undesirable states, or threatening to do so.  Aging, illness, lurk around every corner. No story, no matter how beautiful and elaborate, no body-mind object, can stand up to actual elemental decay and win.

I’m going to lead into this blog by admitting up front I had actually arrived at a very rudimentary version of its conclusion prior to the contemplations in part 3 taking shape. But it was more of a bop on the head, than a conscious consideration, and articulating it in the rudimentary state doesn’t really work for a blog narrative. So we are, for clarities sake, a little out of order here. It’s not ideal as cause and effect does have its order, and yet I have no other way of making this intelligible (if it even is) so here we go.

I will say the part that precedes part 3 is just at the top, the realization after a conversation between Eric and I. The rest of what took shape was afterwards, I demarcate it in the text.

————————————————————————————————————

Eric and I were talking about the Satipatthana Sutta. He said something that really hit me hard. It was along the lines of, “When you are stressed about the future, when you think you won’t have the future you want, the stress doesn’t arise from the future. It arises based on our own aversion or desire right now.” As he said it, I had the creeping sense of truth lurking just at the edge of my vision.

Later I considered it more: It is the work of the meeting of form and eye/ear/nose/etc. and — even later I realized — an ignorance addled nama. Consciousness (Vijñāna) arises as form and sense organ meet, a mental object (arammana) arises which kickstarts the memory,  feeling, imagination that then run wild.  I think I stress about the future, but in fact I stress about what I imagine right now. There is no future in this equation, there is just now.

I get so wrapped up about having ‘the ticket’ to the future. I think of my identity as my future story. I live for the future. But all my stress, my imagination, the identity I am claiming, it’s not in the future at all. It’s not about the future. It is a reaction to physical forms sensed in this moment. Honestly, this all still feels crazy over my head, I can’t believe it even dawned on me, and yet, undeniably, as soon as Eric spoke, I felt like my sense of ‘my ticket’ had just received a serious and cracking blow.

It wasn’t till a few days later (and after the contemplations in part 3) that I started to understand why: The future I live for is so real in my mind, so meaningful, that I have been unable to loosen the claim on my body because I am attached to the imaginary future life I need it for. But seeing that the trip, the imagined life, isn’t the true future, it is just the work of the aggregates, softens my attachment to it at least a little tiny bit. This clinging to the future, to the self/narrative I identify with so strongly, feels way more surmountable with this context.

A few days earlier I had been considering my apartment that I got in SF when I got my job back at SF Performances and I was commuting between NY and SF.  Now, retrospectively, it seems obviously foolish that I believed an apartment could make me an SFer, that it could confirm an identity as a chill SFer and not a filthy, loud NYer. But at the time, I was so convinced that as soon as I signed the lease, I was an SFer again. Of course, Covid came, I had to abandon travel, abandon the apartment, and therefore abandon the identity. If the apartment had made me an identity, then once I had it, how could the identity so easily change?

Then I considered the Montreal home: In my imagination, with it I could become a Montrealer in the same way I convinced myself an apartment in SF could return me to being an SFer. I laid meaning into the housing to assume the identity of someone from the city. Of course, for both homes circumstances shifted and I could no longer claim the home. It nullified my claim to the home as well as to the identity I tried to build with it. The thing is that in both cases the ‘ticket’ (home) to the trip (future life) was impermeant. Fine, that’s easy, but when I look more at the trip I see a few things:

 The trip, the life in SF or in Montreal was not even what I imagined it would be. I clung to the homes because I wanted the trips they buy, but they were NEVER EVER actually able buy that trip at all. The reason is simple: The imagined trip/future was always just a construction of the aggregates taking place in the now (or the now when the imagination process was happening). When now I imagine a future, it is colored by circumstances now, it can’t even account for circumstances in a future (like covid world shutdowns). In the actual future, there will be new information, new arrangements, new 4es, new everything. This trip I cling to, that I claim, its not the trip I can ever get.

What’s more is over and over the trip, the future imagination, the future mind object, gleefully ignores the dukkha. Ahh the Montreal house. If I had known then what I know now I would not have bought it. It’s not just all the trouble, the floods, and toxic waterproofing projects and being taken advantage of by the seller and realtor and lawyers, the stress of needing to worry when I was away from it. It’s also the failure of the object to be the ticket to the life I imagined it would bring me. In truth, it was never going to bring it to me. The idea the house could buy me an identity that legalities, visa, language, culture and immigration trump was always delusional.

The reality of it, poisoning me in the end — being unlivable — was the reality kick in the ribs that makes it such a good data point for reflection. But even here, this is a dukkha digression, a bit of suffering to keep me motivated to stay on topic, see the deeper machine gears at work…

The key point here is that the ticket and the trip, they work exactly the same way. They are mirrors of each other. A 4e house, a body, is always shifting. It arises when the elements arrange in a certain way, in that form they continue to shift in response circumstances, the environment, etc. And then the 4 e object disaggregates. The whole thing is conditional. anatta all along.

But the trip, the future I imagine, also arises based on a particular arrangement of the aggregates. As I reflected above, there is contact with form, consciousness, the creation of mind object and then the reactions of memory and imagination. This process, it shifts in response to circumstance, exposure. The whole thing is conditional and what is conditional is anatta.

The claim on the ticket and the claim on the trip mirror each other as well. In both cases there is mistaken thingification. I have named and made fixed (in my mind) a physical object (a ticket/ body) and a mental fabrication that becomes a mental object (a trip/future). But they are both momentary arrangements subject to shifting as conditions shift. As new forms and fantasies take shape, I create new claims on the things/ideas that I mistake as the same, or interchangeable.

Ok, admittedly, this is a lot. And I am feeling a little crazy again. But this contemplation has really delt some serious hits to the ticket and trip problem. As I see the nature of both, my attachment to both seems to be loosening.

What has become way more clear is the fuzzy idea of what a claim is: I now understand a claim is just a one way contract with a thingified-non-thing that I think will make and preserve my identity. It can act in any number of ways that may stress me the fuck out, that I may hate, but as long as I imagine its utility in making me me, there in lies the meat of the claim. And as I claim physical objects, I also claim mental objects. As I claim the ticket I claim the trip. As I claim the body I claim the future life.

What is more is ‘the future’ had been such a powerful idea to me. What I live for. What makes everything worthwhile. I actually was getting stuck on what atta actually is. I kept using the framework that it was things that prove me now, AND also my future narrative. Now I see there is no future. Its just now. The identity I imagine now. The way I try and make it permanent by imagining it in the future. There is no deep mystery here. No deep anything. Its just the aggregates doing what aggregates do.  Building self. Claiming the self built. Imagining it is permanent. Reinforcing that delusion. On and on. New tickets, new trips. Always new. Never the same. And yet me clinging to both, when their shifting nature defies claims.

This contemplation has continued to morph and grow. Now, a few weeks after starting to write it, this set of insights have pulled me to start looking more closely at the way the aggregates function. But this is all getting way ahead of my orderly (ish) recounting of my path. So I the next blog will return us back to July 2024.