Around June 2021, Mae Neecha, on the tale of our karma conversations, had reached out again to share a few videos for contemplation. In the next 2 blogs I want to share a few highlights – though, in the interest of brevity, not the complete record – of that conversation, particularly in light of Mae Neecha’s insights about the delusions of specialness and differences that give rise to rebirth.

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AD: I just started watching Loki, one of the Marvel spinoff shows about Loki. In the Avengers movies he is a comical villain, planning to try and take over the world to rule it. In the show, he is time warped into an alternative universe — a time universe — that guards multiple timelines. Loki is being interrogated and he is so self-important, claiming his awesome godlike power and intention to take over earth. The interrogator, who has seen multiple timelines and realities play out over and over, sort of smiles and nods at him like he is a cute child.

Finally, Loki escapes and finds a file room where the infinity stone he seeks is, only he finds tons of them in a desk drawer. A clerk remarks that lots of his office mates use these infinity stones as paper weights. In the movies these are all powerful objects that launch epic wars. In this context though, they are just baubles. It is then Loki understands his story trying to takeover earth is up. He sees it is small and sort of silly in the broader context. After all, just a change of circumstances and stuff that is so powerful is petty. All his schemes are just the schemes of so many men over so many times, in different worlds and different timelines, that eventually fizzle. Stories saved to files in record rooms.

It has really been striking me lately how zooming out can really take the shine of special out of self and situations. My “epic” mistake is thinking things and people that are normal are extraordinary (because they are associated with me or my beliefs). In believing that decay and change, sickness and death is something broken that if I try hard enough I can “fix”, rather than seeing my story and everyone else’s tends to play out in more or less the same way. There is nothing “broken” for me to be fixing.

MN: Ooh I really like this. The nothingness of a spec like me feeling is so necessary in dhamma practice. It’s almost comical how often we have to tell ourselves this. And how often we try to deny it or fight it.

AD: Yah, I am starting to sense my own smallness. I am honestly just hitting self and self belongings, especially rupa, super hard but it has a way of giving perspective. After all, the #1 job my imagination ascribes to this body is to somehow make me a special me, it is ( in my funhouse mirror mind) some supposed manifester of the traits I value and want to associate with. That plus the tool that I depend on to stay alive so I can weave my fairytale future story.

But in reality it is just a body, a 4e thing. No matter what meaning and story I ascribe to it, it doesn’t really change the facts of what it is. I suppose that is where the perspective is coming from.

Yesterday I went for my annual mammogram and breast ultrasound. As there is social distancing in effect, they had me wait in a room that had all the scans of my boobs up. It just looked like black and white waves. I couldn’t say which pic was which part of which boob. I honestly wouldn’t know they were my boobs if there wasn’t a name on the chart.

It made me see that these physical parts that I have tied so much of my identity, my womanhood, my sensuality to, are just layers of fat and tissue and water. If you pasted up the pics of all the women in the office, it would look more or less the same.

MN: Gotta watch this channel https://youtube.com/c/InstituteofHumanAnatomy. The doctor is so excited talking about body parts from people who donated their bodies to science. It is like those boob pictures. Just 4e, but we say my boob, my leg, my Achilles tendon. He sees them as components. But when we are still alive and well, they aren’t components – but our pride and identity.

AD: Yes, obviously there is a conventional need to identify. But I see that the problem is when #4 (imagination) starts to believe the convenient convention is actual reality. We claim, then we cling because #4 becomes invested.

After clinging comes suffering bc clinging doesn’t change the reality that if I call something mine, or I call it Bob, it will shift and decay like all 4es.

It is a long and detailed contemplation, but the punchline I got to yesterday was that it is my imagination being invested in some particular future/outcome (i.e. hope) that creates all my burdens. The burden to acquire and preserve shit towards the goal of achievement of the outcome. The sorrow and stress when I lose the thing necessary for that outcome.

If I just put down preference for outcome a vs outcome b, I don’t have to suffer anymore.

I create my suffering. And really what for? Even when I have achieved a goal outcome in real life have I really felt satisfied? Mostly I have almost immediately fixated on preserving, or grown board and wants more or different. Or, like after my mammogram yesterday, I breath a sigh of relief that I can live another day to keep building my fairytale future. In other words, I don’t get much for the cost. Definitely nothing enduring.

Rupa that I claim is just the future-fairytale props I use to convince myself the fairytale is on track and will come true. Be it a body, a cute outfit or an IRA, these things, in so far as I let them keep feeding fantasy mongering #4 are toxic

MN: Preference is the glue that makes us come back to be reborn. Not understanding that no matter what choice you make, you will always meet the same result – suffering

AD: Oh, clearly.  Without a fairytale, some attachment to a particular outcome, what would be the fuel to become at all? If a or b or c or d is all fine by me. If it is just the product of all the causes that brought it into being, not meaningful to me, there is no inertia nor burden.

MN: We really believe in “different”…that we are different, that each outcome is different… and so it is worth it to keep coming back to experience different things.  We fail to see that, no matter what name we give it, it is always the same thing on the menu.

AD: Ughh I intellectually understand that. But I know in my heart I don’t believe it. I’m not bored enough, or unenammored enough yet. But…I am working on it. I feel disillusionment creeping in.  I have been having a series of ‘almost’ health issues. A cervical cyst the doc thought could be cancer, a mole that was inflamed but benign, blood markers for an autoimmune disease but no symptoms (yet anyway). One after another it is starting to erode my hope to somehow march through this world unscathed. Like this particular body can be different from every other object that gets sick and breaks.

MN: That’s why it is so beneficial to see our own past lives. To see how often we have failed attempting the very same thing. Trying to preserve this body, trying to preserve our status, trying to preserve our belongings – and failing miserably every time. Well we do not have the Buddha to point out our past lives to us, we can look into the past of this life and draw the same conclusion. Because we are basically running the same storyline everyday, every week, every month, every year.