This blog is, sorta, a follow-up on the last, “It Always Comes Back to Karma”, if you haven’t read that already please go back and do so before you proceed.

That said, the last blog –that was about my struggle with understanding karma, my over confidence in my ability to shape my life, and the hope I have for a sukkah life in a dukkha world – was based off of contemplations from Sept. 2024. This blog is a time warp, bringing us to my contemplations in October 2026, that occurred shortly after writing-up the last blog post and that also covers the topics of karma, my ability to shape my life (only this time in terms of being subject to karma and the aggregates), and the nature of the world as dukka and meaningless.

I know that this is a serious skip ahead, and I have every plan to return to our orderly blog progression next week. But given how much my perspective has changed recently, I felt like I couldn’t conclude the last two blogs without this new perspective, which is really getting much closer to a conclusion –that of anatta – then I have before. And, if its too much, or you get lost, feel free to skip, move on, we will come back to this topic –along with all the contemplations that helped get me there – in due time.

I was driving through the neighborhood at my brothers house and saw a goose, hit by a car,  dead in the road. Its partner was standing next to it clearly distraught, moving from the road when a car approached and then heading right back to stand by the body as soon as the road was clear. I drove by several times over the next few hours, on my way to and from errands. All day the left behind goose lover stood near its partner’s body. Even after the road crew had removed the corpse, the living bird just stood where its partner had been killed, seemingly not knowing where to go.

All day, I cried and cried. I imagined the dead goose was Eric, and the living goose me, standing there beside my swan love, looking at his mangled body and simply not knowing how to move, where to go next.

Crushed though I was, I saw how common this situation is. Standing by the side of a loved one, dead, not knowing what to even do with yourself. I will be like this with Eric. I have been this way countless times before. Alive, watching the person that is my whole world mangled and dead in front of me. That I keep coming back despite this moment, I keep setting myself up for it, is insane.

Still, I kept stumbling on the idea that I am already in this world, part of it. While I am here, what choice do I have but to cling to what I have? The money, body, swan love — I have already put these in my heart, I am attached. But the more I take a longer and wider view of what the world is — a  charnel ground, everything in states of loss and decay — I wonder if I really have no choice. Yes, I am here. Yes I am attached. But is this a given and necessary state? Over and over I have been attached to things before and –one way or another– became unattached. I just keep choosing the hard way. The way that ends in wailing and lamentation losing what I love and then the suffering and string of trying to replace it with something/someone of like kind. A new swan lover to love and lose.

On my last errand of the day, I passed the death scene again, dead body cleaned-up by the complex’s maintenance crew, the living goose finally departed, it was like it didn’t happen at all. I thought about how sanitized this world is: We are always moving the scene of filth, death, decay, out of public view. Keeping this world as carefully manicured and groomed as possible to cover its filth, to help us forget the fate that we, and everything we love, will meet in time.

I thought about the fate of the living goose. What was it off doing now? Probably the same thing it had done before – pecking around for food, swimming the lake, trying to find a place to shelter for the night. That goose is just going about its life, doing mundane and meaningless goose shit, only alone now.

I have often reflected on how Eric – my swan love du jour – gives meaning to my life. When I go on solo trips, I miss having him there, I think about how empty it is without him. The whole trip long, I am doing activities, all while fantasizing about doing it again, returning to such and such a restaurant, some hiking spot, some tourist attraction, only with Eric next time so I can share the experience, enjoy the experience, so that the trip is fun and meaningful.

But aren’t I just like the goose? Isn’t all of this just pecking around doing mundane things I pretend are meaningful while he is there. And then, after he is gone, mourning, wailing, gnashing of teeth, just to go back to doing the exact same things. Pecking around, trying to survive, trying to find bits of comfort and sensual pleasure in a filthy, decaying, dying  world. Same shit, different day — if it is meaningless without him, it is meaningless with him too.

My problem is that I am born over and over with a swan hole in my heart, with the idea of finding a meaningful life just by the act of sharing it with my ‘special someone’ – this is a core part of the samutti of partner for me. This hope, of finding meaning in the world through partnership, is what motivates my becoming. But watching those geese on the side of the road made me see how hollow this is. Believing what is trivial, what mostly amounts to the effortful work of surviving, is somehow special and ‘worth it’ is the path to endless re-becoming in a dukkha world.  

This morning I was meditating, trying to watch mind objects as they arise. I saw an image of some friends, a couple, one of whom has a rare and degenerative disease slowly killing him.  The dying partner is trying every treatment he can, even trying to raise money to fund research on new treatments for his disease. The healthy partner is helplessly standing by watching his swan’s decay. I thought, “how do they live with this everyday?” But this is the work of the aggregates. We receive new –horrible info– we are shocked and devastated by a diagnosis. New information, new suppositions and the imagined future of death and disease. And then, once that new sanna has been digested, new sankara has been created, we accept, we normalize. This diagnosis is just a new constraint that our imaginations wiggle around. 

I have thought in terms of wiggling around constraints before. This is what life in a rupa world is like. This is what life in a world run by karma is like. We are delt constraints – that arise from the nature of rupa, that arise from karma –and then we have degrees of freedom in which we can wiggle around them. We can try and fabricate, devise some sankara ‘solution’, but the fundamental problem remains: We keep becoming in a world defined by its constraints, by causes and effects that arise independent of our desires, by death and decay and dukkha native to the world.

Take a step back and it is clear that all I do is cling and try to solve for keeping the items I cling to as long as possible. Taking joy and finding blind and foolish hope in the micro moments I am able to do so. In the meaning I have assigned to meaningless objects and experiences. How do I stop clinging to what I think I already have? How do I let go of things I am so convinced I want and need in the future? I say it here, even if I can’t really feel it yet: See the future with those items, no matter what it is, ends like those geese on the side of the road. Lamentation. Meaninglessness.

Which brings me back to that couple friend: Not only do we wiggle in our actions, the aggregates –this conditioned process — is also constantly wiggling around new ‘data points’. This is the process by which I fool myself, normalize dukkha and aging, sickness, death. Accept the tidy clean-up of corpses and the hiding away of mourning and –understand that, abstractly it applies to me – but then ‘moving on, new fabrications, new future fantasies, despite these most obvious, most important constraints. I go back to focusing on the shape of a snowflakes instead of the fact they are all  dead and melted in a flash.

And now on to the samutti of self. Not just body. But identity. Samutti of being an I. It has to be the same as my samutti of partner, of swan lover. Once I have this sense of I, once I have an existence/becoming that fills the pre-existing hole in my heart, I am just running around, doing survival things, and pretending it is suddenly meaningful. Doing trivial things and pretending it confirms me.

Just look at alana-the-great-yogi: For years I contorted a 4e body into different shapes and pretended it gave some meaning to my life. Pretended it proved something about the person I am. Took something effortful and convinced myself it was fun, something worth dedicating myself to, something I could claim to be. That was going just great till all that yoga busted my hip past the point of further yoga-ing. Yogi-alana is long dead, the hip still hurts.  

Or I take a job –the thing that society has established because people need money for requisites to survive –and feel purposeful and affirmed doing it?  Hunting and pecking turned into an accomplishment and an identity. Every prize for an essay written well, every social interaction I think I excelled at, every relationship I have that I think affirms that others love me (rather than love their ideas about themselves vis-a-vie their ideas about me) and I pretend this is somehow aggrandizing? I take mundane things that happen in this world and because of my own delusion believe they enable me to self-define and self-create. Even though, nothing is being created, nothing is enduring, nothing is self anythinging; it is just imagination (sankara) about various events and moments being used in order to further build sanna of self.  

Everyday I am at my brother’s house, I sit out by the lake in the yard and watch pairs of birds swim around. Hop on and off shore. Eat. Have babies, sleep, die. This is a swan existence. Ignorance has conditioned me into thinking that worldly moments and things are so meaningful, but step back and look at these birds and I can see what it really is.

I started out early in this blog asking how to un-cling from the money, and Eric, and this body. From my beloved samutti of self, my enchantment with simply existing, of the hope for getting another moment in this world to add to my existence/identity bucket. The answer is to see that each moment is the same as the last. The same as all of them. Meaningless. I can collect them all, individual moments eternally, and never be fulfilled. Why? Because no moment is any more meaningful than the last.

Early in my considerations of annata, I was moved by a definition LP Thoon gave in a sermon, “ There is nothing that belongs to us, they are all meaningless things. Now, how are they meaningless?” I think I am starting to see an answer: It is meaningless because all there is is just hunting, pecking, pretending and loss.