I’m going to lead into this blog by admitting up front I had actually arrived at a very rudimentary version of its conclusion prior to the contemplations in part 3 taking shape. But it was more of a bop on the head, than a conscious consideration, and articulating it in the rudimentary state doesn’t really work for a blog narrative. So we are, for clarities sake, a little out of order here. It’s not ideal as cause and effect does have its order, and yet I have no other way of making this intelligible (if it even is) so here we go.

I will say the part that precedes part 3 is just at the top, the realization after a conversation between Eric and I. The rest of what took shape was afterwards, I demarcate it in the text.

————————————————————————————————————

Eric and I were talking about the Satipatthana Sutta. He said something that really hit me hard. It was along the lines of, “When you are stressed about the future, when you think you won’t have the future you want, the stress doesn’t arise from the future. It arises based on our own aversion or desire right now.” As he said it, I had the creeping sense of truth lurking just at the edge of my vision.

Later I considered it more: It is the work of the meeting of form and eye/ear/nose/etc. and — even later I realized — an ignorance addled nama. Consciousness (Vijñāna) arises as form and sense organ meet, a mental object (arammana) arises which kickstarts the memory,  feeling, imagination that then run wild.  I think I stress about the future, but in fact I stress about what I imagine right now. There is no future in this equation, there is just now.

I get so wrapped up about having ‘the ticket’ to the future. I think of my identity as my future story. I live for the future. But all my stress, my imagination, the identity I am claiming, it’s not in the future at all. It’s not about the future. It is a reaction to physical forms sensed in this moment. Honestly, this all still feels crazy over my head, I can’t believe it even dawned on me, and yet, undeniably, as soon as Eric spoke, I felt like my sense of ‘my ticket’ had just received a serious and cracking blow.

It wasn’t till a few days later (and after the contemplations in part 3) that I started to understand why: The future I live for is so real in my mind, so meaningful, that I have been unable to loosen the claim on my body because I am attached to the imaginary future life I need it for. But seeing that the trip, the imagined life, isn’t the true future, it is just the work of the aggregates, softens my attachment to it at least a little tiny bit. This clinging to the future, to the self/narrative I identify with so strongly, feels way more surmountable with this context.

A few days earlier I had been considering my apartment that I got in SF when I got my job back at SF Performances and I was commuting between NY and SF.  Now, retrospectively, it seems obviously foolish that I believed an apartment could make me an SFer, that it could confirm an identity as a chill SFer and not a filthy, loud NYer. But at the time, I was so convinced that as soon as I signed the lease, I was an SFer again. Of course, Covid came, I had to abandon travel, abandon the apartment, and therefore abandon the identity. If the apartment had made me an identity, then once I had it, how could the identity so easily change?

Then I considered the Montreal home: In my imagination, with it I could become a Montrealer in the same way I convinced myself an apartment in SF could return me to being an SFer. I laid meaning into the housing to assume the identity of someone from the city. Of course, for both homes circumstances shifted and I could no longer claim the home. It nullified my claim to the home as well as to the identity I tried to build with it. The thing is that in both cases the ‘ticket’ (home) to the trip (future life) was impermeant. Fine, that’s easy, but when I look more at the trip I see a few things:

 The trip, the life in SF or in Montreal was not even what I imagined it would be. I clung to the homes because I wanted the trips they buy, but they were NEVER EVER actually able buy that trip at all. The reason is simple: The imagined trip/future was always just a construction of the aggregates taking place in the now (or the now when the imagination process was happening). When now I imagine a future, it is colored by circumstances now, it can’t even account for circumstances in a future (like covid world shutdowns). In the actual future, there will be new information, new arrangements, new 4es, new everything. This trip I cling to, that I claim, its not the trip I can ever get.

What’s more is over and over the trip, the future imagination, the future mind object, gleefully ignores the dukkha. Ahh the Montreal house. If I had known then what I know now I would not have bought it. It’s not just all the trouble, the floods, and toxic waterproofing projects and being taken advantage of by the seller and realtor and lawyers, the stress of needing to worry when I was away from it. It’s also the failure of the object to be the ticket to the life I imagined it would bring me. In truth, it was never going to bring it to me. The idea the house could buy me an identity that legalities, visa, language, culture and immigration trump was always delusional.

The reality of it, poisoning me in the end — being unlivable — was the reality kick in the ribs that makes it such a good data point for reflection. But even here, this is a dukkha digression, a bit of suffering to keep me motivated to stay on topic, see the deeper machine gears at work…

The key point here is that the ticket and the trip, they work exactly the same way. They are mirrors of each other. A 4e house, a body, is always shifting. It arises when the elements arrange in a certain way, in that form they continue to shift in response circumstances, the environment, etc. And then the 4 e object disaggregates. The whole thing is conditional. anatta all along.

But the trip, the future I imagine, also arises based on a particular arrangement of the aggregates. As I reflected above, there is contact with form, consciousness, the creation of mind object and then the reactions of memory and imagination. This process, it shifts in response to circumstance, exposure. The whole thing is conditional and what is conditional is anatta.

The claim on the ticket and the claim on the trip mirror each other as well. In both cases there is mistaken thingification. I have named and made fixed (in my mind) a physical object (a ticket/ body) and a mental fabrication that becomes a mental object (a trip/future). But they are both momentary arrangements subject to shifting as conditions shift. As new forms and fantasies take shape, I create new claims on the things/ideas that I mistake as the same, or interchangeable.

Ok, admittedly, this is a lot. And I am feeling a little crazy again. But this contemplation has really delt some serious hits to the ticket and trip problem. As I see the nature of both, my attachment to both seems to be loosening.

What has become way more clear is the fuzzy idea of what a claim is: I now understand a claim is just a one way contract with a thingified-non-thing that I think will make and preserve my identity. It can act in any number of ways that may stress me the fuck out, that I may hate, but as long as I imagine its utility in making me me, there in lies the meat of the claim. And as I claim physical objects, I also claim mental objects. As I claim the ticket I claim the trip. As I claim the body I claim the future life.

What is more is ‘the future’ had been such a powerful idea to me. What I live for. What makes everything worthwhile. I actually was getting stuck on what atta actually is. I kept using the framework that it was things that prove me now, AND also my future narrative. Now I see there is no future. Its just now. The identity I imagine now. The way I try and make it permanent by imagining it in the future. There is no deep mystery here. No deep anything. Its just the aggregates doing what aggregates do.  Building self. Claiming the self built. Imagining it is permanent. Reinforcing that delusion. On and on. New tickets, new trips. Always new. Never the same. And yet me clinging to both, when their shifting nature defies claims.

This contemplation has continued to morph and grow. Now, a few weeks after starting to write it, this set of insights have pulled me to start looking more closely at the way the aggregates function. But this is all getting way ahead of my orderly (ish) recounting of my path. So I the next blog will return us back to July 2024.