AD: So I just finished reading LP Thoon’s sermon Line of Practice for Developments — in it he talks about how being born in a human body is like building a house. When the time is right, when you have sufficient materials, you will be born/ build a house. If you have lots of assets, it’ll be big and fancy. If you have little, it will be modest. The ‘materials’ are your karma in this analogy huh?

I have been thinking along these lines already: View begets desire, and desire begets action. This is the lefthand of all becoming/creating. Circumstances, or karma is the right. They work together. So, if my desire is to eat cake, my mind goes and finds a way to make it. But it is my training as a baker, my work to have money to buy ingredients, access to a functioning kitchen, they are requisites for that cake to happen.

It’s actually pretty easy to see that this is a chain — one thing builds on another — when I think about getting my first job. The education, the interview skills, etc. were requisites. I got these in school. I got into a good school because I studied hard. I studied hard in part bc of my personality, but also my parents’ values and access to good tutors. I got born into a family who valued education and could afford tutors based on my karma for that family. Actions and behaviors, born of views and desires) intentions, in other lives.

The cycle is endless from the karma — righthand. But by incapacitant desire, via changing our views, the left hand can stop and so can the cycle that requires both hands to continue.

Btw, I know that this response is not about the specific mechanics of how karma works and how particular actions lead to particular results. But I am trying to establish a scaffold — the bones–for how the world works, how births happen and everything else I experience in life happens, and I will flesh out from there. I have understood view as a driver for action for a longtime. But the righthand, understanding why particular circumstances allow cake baking in one case and not in another, I did not grasp. Now, when I think in terms of requisites (karma) for making a cake, or driving a car, or a Porsche, or winning a competition, or being rich or pretty, I can see how it can change:

I see how when I was a kid I passed my driving test on the first go. I was so proud. Many friends had failed. But eventually most did meet the requisites and get a license. Over time folks can lose a license: a friend had a drinking and driving conviction, my grandma lost her eyesight, etc.

There is no reason to take pride or ownership of, or define myself by having, the requisites for a license because requisites can change at any time.

I need to attack Special Alana. The sense I am protected by having certain ‘requisites’ that have played out in the past. I am only now seeing their flux. To understand that it can and will change. I mistake these requisites for control. But I am seeing it is not so: after all, in addition to their changeability, is the fact that requisites are generally built on and up in the past. It’s not even like today’s Alana can muster up all I need for today’s goals from scratch. I rely on older Alanas, blinded  (like today’s) with views that are wrong — dangerous — how do I believe some guaranteed cookie filled future?

MN: Yeah, what we see now is a karmic result from a cause cultivated long ago. Beautiful, healthy, rich, talented, smart – all of these are the result of karma and are subject to change. When we think they are permanent, we act heedlessly.

By the way, your phobias and fears are priceless dhamma material. Many arahant masters had to venture into the forest to practice dhutanga in order to bring out their greatest fears, and here you are in the city, encountering your fears… or in Africa meeting a ferocious rhino.

MN: from Buddho: “While making the consideration of being non-self (anattā), you have to fully understand the condition and nature of self (attā). The aggregate physical form results in there being a corporeal self. The foundation of that aggregate form consists of basic elements. There are four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. You need to understand and realize that all objects consist of the four basic elements which are necessary to sustain life. You decompose all body parts and all objects into pieces in your imagination and contemplate them as they really are. You contemplate them until you know and have a clear view, using your wisdom, that there is neither self nor entity in the four basic elements. Everything is just all about supposed self. You contemplate them to eliminate attachment from your mind. All of the internal and external body parts such as hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendon, bones, endogenous bone membrane, the spleen, the heart, liver, lungs, colon, intestine, fresh food, and digested food should be contemplated as the basic element earth. Even all of your possessions and treasures, you need to contemplate as the basic element earth. All of the above mentioned are just used to sustain your life. Every square inch on Earth is where you can contemplate with wisdom. Everything on Earth you can contemplate in Dhamma and the Truth, applying the contemplative technique (upāya). For instance, if you see aging people, ill patients, or dead bodies, you contemplate them in regard to the law of nature and the Truth, that all senility, ailments, and death apply to all animals. Then you bring them inwards (opanayiko), compare the consistency of their bodies, which are composed of the four basic elements, with your body which is also composed of the same four basic elements. You contemplate their bodies and your body in the same conceptual Dhamma and the Truth. You discern humanity and all animals and how they deteriorate gradually as a result of births, and how they become ill, senile, and eventually dead. Their bodies which are composed of the four basic elements change and decline. The reality is that bodies constantly generate rotten waste, loathsome filthiness, and putrid smell. Eventually bodies become dysfunctional and lie still, and they become putrefied according to the law of nature. After you discern the above reality, you bring them inwards. You consider that your body is the same as others which are composed of the four basic elements. Your body will also become old and deteriorate as others do. You can even observe some changing foliage, for these change from phase to phase gradually. You can see clearly the changing composition of the four basic elements. When you bring that contemplative matter inwards, as the foliage is, so are our bodies.

Vicikicchā is the defilement of skepticism and perplexity in the Lord Buddha, Dhamma, and the Noble Monks (ariyasaṅgha); skeptical doubt of the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna; doubt of hell and heaven; and doubt of the corresponding result of good deed and bad deed. Those who have attained Dhamma enlightenment, becoming Noble Ones, do not have any skepticism, because these are truths according to the Lord Buddha’s statement. The important thing is studying the correct way to practice Dhamma which directs one toward the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna. This defilement causes perplexity and doubt that one has inadequate fulfillment, merit, virtues, and insufficient coherent ability (paññā vāsanā pāramī) to attain the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna in the present life. It is advisable that you eliminate those wrong notions from your mind. You should derive self-comprehension that you have tendencies of perfection (pāramī) to practice to attain the Path, Fruition, and Nibbāna in the present life. If you think that your merit and virtue is not ample fulfillment, you need to increase your diligent effort and perseverance in practicing Dhamma. It is like when you know that there is little water in your earthen jar, you should be diligent to fetch buckets of water to fill up the jar. It is the same as deriving perfect fulfillment, keep working constantly on practicing with diligent effort and eventually the fulfillment shall become perfect.”

MN: **the undeserving part sounds familiar, eh?

MN: From Buddho “The important thing to remember is to direct your mind to disavow that the four elements and all possessions are self, and conclude that they do not belong to yourself. They are merely things which sustain lives temporarily and eventually we will part for good. No one could embrace the four elements and possessions, which belong to the world, and take them when departing from the world. Do not attach and pile up possessions into your heart. Do not let your possessions attach to your heart and make you suffer. It does not matter how many possessions you have, make up your mind to admit that all possessions are merely common utensils in families. You constantly edify your mind to disavow that possessions really belong to yourself. Thus the mind shall have no perplexity and doubt as to their true character.”

AD: There is no question my fears/phobias are Dhamma gold jackpot. Not just because they give me a ton of fodder for contemplating, though they do. But because the pain of living in constant fear was what motivated me to practice in the first place, and the success I had in taming some of those fears and balancing my view is what gave me the confidence and desire to keep going. The same tools I used to understand that there is no necessary relationship between what I fear and what occurs get recycled over and over for every issue.

Plus, ironically, the same traits that made me a ‘good phobic’ — super sensitive, constantly alert to my environment, a keen eye towards ‘evidence’ that I am in danger/safe and a propensity to plan ahead and problem solve to stay ‘safe’ — turned out to be an A+ set of skills when I put my Dhamma hat on and turn my attention to practice. To being deeply attentive to the world around me and gathering evidence and putting it all together, just to see the truth rather than what I fear.

AD: I appreciate the excerpt from Buddho, it is such a clear explanation of how to see and use 4e/ Rupa to educate myself and disillusion myself with form and belongings and the physical trappings of self. That is definitely the program I am steadfastly on. Using shifting 4es, or impermanence in form, or the idea of items becoming depleted or consumed and turning this inward to me and mine. Or to considering the inevitably of death, aging and illness. To dispelling any illusion of my exemption and to seeing the extreme suffering of those + birth. To talking myself out of belief I control my body/ stuff, to understand that I can’t pick and claim a single, desirable state of Rupa and then ‘disown’ the aging, sagging, sick and smelly states. To convince myself those are not exceptions and that this body for not represent me, how can it when it cycles through states I want to associate myself with and those I do not? And the burdensomeness of using Rupa and the added suffering that I pile onto the normal everyday burdensomeness by claiming and trying to force the things I claim to be exceptional, to follow my rules, to take and remain in 4e arrangements I want. The extreme sorrow and disappointment when I inevitably fail.

And that I’m not special. That these physical things in various shifting forms have no capacity to make me special. It’s snowflakes all around. I alone cause my solution, sell myself a story — plugging in small details of difference to build an identity of special. Reading meaning, based on my own 3s and 4s, into Rupa and then tricking myself with it. Believing it is there. Prancing around — like the emperor that has no clothes — claiming Rupa, with it’s self-injected pretend meanings and further pretending it makes me a ME. Seeing the mechanics and providing to myself that the lies I tell me are lies. That basically is my program right now. Over and over, I actually am pretty damn confident I can crack this.

To be fair, I am generally pretty good at staying on that program, but I do sometimes hit obstacles I need to ramp down. Karma as a topic was such an obstacle. For a few reasons I now see: 1) I kept thinking it was about me, proof of my unworthiness, and it was getting in the way of my staying the course with confidence I could prevail. But I think I delt with this, enough anyway for right now, to forge on. 2) because I felt the tit for tat and some of the details of karma were too unbelievable. It niggled at my ‘faith’ in the path, but with my own story about helping my friend to pay back my debt to you, I realized it wasn’t so crazy after all and 3) to see the right hand. To see how karma creates circumstances in which our view– to desires– to action– play out and the measure to which they succeed or fail. I needed that, to get a more comprehensive picture and to see a place I hide my specialness ( in the way circumstances play) and to understand it’s not special at all — just like a particular arrangement of Rupa, it is an arrangement, circumstances shift, come together and desegregate when the time is ripe. I can’t hide a ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’ in there any better than I can in an apple or an apartment or a body…

Anyway, thank you!! I am forging ahead. Will keep you in the loop of course. Just one foot in front of the other for right now I think. Self and self belonging alla Rupa.