Recently, I had an old friend reach-out to me, she emailed –knowing I am a practitioner– looking for ‘Buddhisty advice’ on her troubled marriage. I did my best to help her in accordance with the dharma. And in my explaining it to her, in recounting a number of my own old ah-ha moments, I was able to see a few points so much more clearly. Here I will recount a bit of what I wrote her, and then my re-reflections and deeper understandings of the stories I shared:

In my response to my friend, I also emphasized LP Thoon’s teaching on yielding, and re-told a story Mae Yo had offered me:

“The wife came to the wat distressed about her relationship, she and her husband were always fighting, divorce seemed near. Mae Yo told the woman to go home and, for a week, say absolutely nothing to her husband when he spoke to her except คะ (ká); that’s it, no reply, no fight, no self defense, just a super polite yes. Apparently the marriage was saved.

For the longest time, I didn’t really understand that story, or how just a polite yes to every comment or question could have such an impact; nowadays I am starting to see how much our egos, our need to self defend, our inability to yield, challenges our relationships. Obviously, again, I don’t know the particulars for you guys, but I do know the power of yielding can go a long way in our relationships”

Having retold this story to my friend, I understand it so much more deeply now; it is a permanent view that someone else SHOULD act as I think is best, that the world follows my terms, and it is also a misunderstanding that when it does follow my terms it turns out for the best. This wrong view is why yielding is so hard, and the correction of this view makes it so much more natural a response to conflict or differences of view.

I thought about my relationship with mom, the turning point at that concert where I saw there is no reason to expect mom should follow my terms for appropriate Covid precautions (see this blog). Everyone has their own levels of precautions and comfort, I know that, I grudgingly accept it. But I saw it is because she is mine -my mom– that I think she will/should be abiding by my terms.

I think about a story of a woman at KPY that started pruning trees to her view of perfection with a chain saw. How ultimately, she stopped when she looked up and realized there was no way she could prune the whole forest. That story always touched me. Now I see we all understand the whole world can’t bow to us or operate on our terms. That is why we minefy– we seek out some small corner of the forest and try to control that, we seek out a few belongings, a few loved ones, a few hobbies and roles to identify with/by – just a few trees that can affirm me, can be asked to/coaxed into operating on my terms. We get so myopic, it’s the only way we can delude ourselves as to our own impotence. Why not see the truth: If I have to eke out a few trees, a little plot of forest to call my own, to be my stomping ground for proving myself, I have already lost. The very act of carving out ‘mine’, my little sphere of influence, is a concession to the truth that the world doesn’t follow my bidding or act on my terms.

But, instead of just admitting that truth, that the very act of a carve out was an admission of my failure, I get so sad and angry when the trees over here in my plot act exactly like the rest of the trees in the forest. They also fail to do my bidding or act on my terms. I look to what is mine to affirm me, but what I call mine and what I consider other are all exactly the same. I know other won’t affirm me, so why expect it of “mine” when what I call mine is the same in both form and function as other? Why get so stressed when my face sags, my garden gets overgrown, my body exhibits symptoms that portend disease? It doesn’t bother me when these things are happening to you/yours after all.

I was writing a Dhamma blog about trees. How in one autumn I had been so excited for the leaves to change I had maligned the evergreens and still greens for holding up the show. Then after everything had gone brown I was so happy to still have the evergreens to add color to my landscape. It was so clear from the example these trees don’t follow my terms, they act according to their nature and that nature is not to bring me enjoyment or satisfaction. And yet I constantly look for that in rupa objects when that is not their nature or job to do.

In the original contemplation I had been comparing the stress of decorating of the Redding house ( which ironically I didn’t even keep) — the arranging of rupa to create some little micro environment of comfort when the whole fucking world — the forest outside my patch — was a deeply uncomfortable cesspool of Covid disease and risk. Somehow though I realized I wasn’t really convinced of the parallel — with trees changing color, I really have no hand in their change, but a home, I can arrange and decorate. But I thought on it more, what if I could use some fertilizer, hell a magic wand, to change the rate of trees doing their autumn thing. Even still, in the end the ones with a nature to be green would be green and the ones that go brown would go brown.

Long ago Mae Yo had talked about the imagination process that created refrigeration, the ability to see there is duration of a particular form and there are interventions that can effect duration. Still though, in the end, food we put in the fridge spoils. And shit — from the very beginning, the refrigerator was the solution to a problem, food spoils.

We take so much pride in the in between spaces — the duration a grape goes unspoiled if we fridge it, the time we could fix the broken fridge, the temporary arrangement of a room that suits my tastes — I let these things affirm me, build my sense of ego and accomplishment. But, it’s just like looking only at a single patch of forest — it misses the bigger truth plain to see, the world doesn’t follow my rules it’s not about me. Impermanence reigns supreme and the ego boost I get from intervening in duration, or ‘temporarily solving’ problems that arise from the nature of this world –its dukka and impermanence– is delusional.

From the start the world shows what it is: Why do I feel so happy at a new dress? With the new dress, I imagine I –at least temporarily – solved a problem: The need for clothing to protect a fragile body. The need for something new because what I had before was worn, or my body got fat and it didn’t fit, or style changed I must be a slave to craving what is new and fashionable to maintain my identity as a fashionista. The need to have a body that is beautiful, represents me, takes a shape that is in alignment with how I see myself and want to be seen.

If it is a struggle to maintain the body-look I desire from the start, a struggle to protect myself from the elements, a struggle to preserve the fabric of a beloved skirt, to preserve a body that fits into that dress, to keep up with ever-changing-fashions, then the truth of the world is struggle, not my self-imagined victory at the moment I bring home a new dress home.

If it is like food in the fridge and it goes to decay. Then the world is showing me it’s annica.

Whether or not I have a fridge, or a dress, or a body that fits into a dress/looks a certain way is entirely dependent on conditions: Do I have electricity to run a fridge or is the power out? Did my cat pee on the dress and ruin it? Did famine cause body to go thin or endocrine disruption cause fatness? If something arises based on conditions beyond my control, it endures based on conditions beyond my control and ends when conditions for cessation are met independent of my action/wish/desire then it proves that everything in the world is conditional (put another way, it is subject to karma). What is conditional is not about me, it can’t prove self; the world is showing me anatta.

If every tree, both insider and outside the patch of forest I claimed, acts the same then it proves the world is always acting according to it’s nature, in all places, impervious to my terms and claims.

Just zoom out and it becomes so clear there is nothing here to confirm me. I am settling for identity built in the hot fucking second between solving a problem that arises from the nature of this world and the cessation of the solution, according to the nature of the world, that I ignorantly take such pride in.

There is just arising and ceasing, the only question is duration. If I am locked into finding identity in duration, I am screwed before I start because identity requires staying power and I can only, at best, influence duration. And even then, that influence is predicated on circumstance, conditions, constraints set in place by rupa, by the common conditions, by society, by my karma. Is there really anything for me to claim here? Anything that proves me, my self-determination, my story, when even the imaginary identity I craft is shaped by wiggling within all these constraints?

Now I understand why LP Thoon says we are deceived by duration: Its just a state, like a bubble of anatta, held long enough for us to name and claim. That we can influence it, sometimes and for a short while, are the seeds of hope, of delusion, that this world will obey us. That this world – with just brief moments of sustained states –can identify us. That the state itself is our identity.

If I were being intellectually honest, I should be thanking the gods for all the problems I see in this world, no matter the suffering they cause me, because to feed the delusion of atta I require an ‘enemy’, impermanence, to slay with my great problem solving skills. I need confines to wiggle within and define myself by. Otherwise I would just be, like everything else, subject to the endless flow of cause and effect. I am clearly a dukka junkie…