At the core of Buddha’s teachings are the 3 common characteristics: Dukkha, impermanence (anicca)  and no self (anatta). These, as their name implies, are the fabric of this world, the fundamental truths to which everyone and everything is subject. All of our ignorance, and the resulting dukkha we experience, arises because we don’t understand the 3 common characteristics, we don’t see how we are subject to them.

I catch myself all the time, imagining there is some workaround, some way to — if not entirely avoid these three marks of existence — bend them to my will, experience them on my terms, at least eke out a little management of duration. This my friends is the OG poison, the heart of my delusions, the basis of misunderstanding. This is the most fundamental wrong view that the entire path of practice is meant to help us uproot.

For me anyway, anatta is the most subtle of these 3 characteristics. The hardest for me to get my head around. Mae Yo talks about it in terms of un-clumping. In one of my favorite sermon clips, LP Thoon says, “Annata as nothing belongs to us. Everything is meaningless.” Over time, I have started to understand anatta in terms of conditionality — what is conditional arises based on conditions, exists and shifts dependent on conditions and then ceases when the conditions for cessation have been met. But I am getting ahead of myself here…

I  started my practice becoming intimate with impermanence, and finally achieved some clarity around dukkha, it certainly seemed time to begin pressing harder on anatta. So in this next chapter, I will share my budding explorations of anatta. Of course, what is new, is just an extension of what is old – so here we go, once again, back to self and self belonging.