Alana's Dharma Blog

I was reading Mae Yo’s autobiography. I got to a section where she talks about a story she had read about a girl, raised in a traditional community in Africa, that was taken by her mother to be circumcised when she hit puberty. Mae Yo considered the suffering, risks, and perils of enforcing this practice and observed that the mothers in that community must view the daughters as belonging to them otherwise they would not bring them in for such a procedure. The men in the community must view the women as their own otherwise they would not require them to receive such a procedure. Without viewing another person as a belonging, making young girls undergo circumcision would not be an accepted custom in this community, or anywhere in the world. Mae Yo saw the harmful consequences that can come from claiming something as ‘mine’.  

After I read this, it made me think about a new definition of ownership — having a right to something. I thought even harder and the idea of ” acting as I see fit”,  “as you see fit” leapt into my head and I started considering it further as a way to define ‘mine’. 

Why would my mom treat me as she does, often scolding and criticizing? She thinks I am hers, she can treat me as she does, and expect my actions to be as she does, because that is what she sees as fit. And myself, why do I expect Eric to treat me well even when I am cold or harsh to him? Why do I think I can take my anger and frustration out on him? Because he is mine and I can treat him as I see fit. And why do people war over territory? It is theirs, they can have it and use it as they see fit. It makes sense someone will fight over land they think belongs to them, in their mind the claim means by right they should be able to use it as they see fit.

But what’s the truth? I don’t act as my mom sees fit, if I did there would be no need for scolding. That I act in accord with my own karma, not her wishes proves I do not belong to her. And when she treats me as she sees fit, scolding and punishing, the fact that my rection can be retaliating, or not talking, or any other response that she doesn’t see as fit, is further proof I can’t belong to her. I don’t act as she sees fit and when she acts as she sees fit it elicits a reaction she doesn’t see as fit.

And if I act as I see fit, being short or cold, with Eric, he gets angry. If he were mine, he would not be angered by my treating him as I desire and see fit. In fact, acting as I see fit, all the time, with regard to Eric, opens up the risk he will leave me. A person that can leave, based on their wishes and desires, without regard to my own, is not mine.

And why am I unhappy with Eric’s actions sometimes, why don’t we always agree? It is because what I see as fit does not drive his beliefs or behaviors. Just like what my mom sees as fit for a daughter doesn’t drive my behavior. My mom holds a view that because she acted in accord with her beliefs on what makes a good mother, I would act in accord with what she thinks is appropriate for a good daughter.  But why believe this? It is not how things work, everyone, and everything, act in accord with their own causes and conditions, not in accord with what we see as fit.

I thought about nature — do leaves just stay with trees even if the trees were to see it as fit? Can planets travel whatever path they want independent of orbits and gravitational pulls? No –these things are bound by circumstance. By rules. What in nature gets to act as it sees fit? Gets to use as it sees fit? Gets to fordge a future, ahead, as it sees fit? Nothing.

I have this house in Montreal — can I use it as I see fit? No, I am on a time limit, bound to follow immigration laws as to how long my visa is good for. Doesn’t the roof of that house  leak? Hasn’t the place gotten moldy, flooded MANY TIMES? This is decisively not how I see it fit for my own house to act. But over and over, ‘my’ shit shows me that it doesn’t behave as I see fit. That is literally not what it is. And yet, I get so excited, happy, on those limited occasions shit feeds my delusions. Seems to confirm that this world will act as I see fit. Sometimes in between floods…

Why did I feel so delighted when my old Greenwich apartment was decorated to my taste? I felt happy because I felt confirmed, like the house, my space, would act as if I see fit. But in the end, the construction project across from that house made me super sick, so much so I had to break my lease early, at a fee, so that I could move out. So did a nice decor really prove my mastery over my space? No amount of decorating was able to overcome the reality of a home that failed to act as I see fit. That couldn’t even perform the primary function of a home – providing safe shelter – on terms that was healthy for my body.

I feel about my clothes the way I do about my decor. That they will make this body look as I see fit. A beautifully adorned body that will represent, affirm, myself. A face that has been made-up with make-up, plumped-up with fillers, further forwarding the image that I see as fit for this body, my body, to have. The problem is the clothes, that get dirty and worn, don’t act as I see fit. The face, that needs make-up to cover brown spots, that had to rely on fillers to begin with, doesn’t look as I see fit. And no matter how dewy my skin, or sharp my outfit, I can leave my house for a night out and catch covid, because this body I decorate, I claim, I try and force into shapes and states that I see fit does not, ultimately give a damn about what I see as fit. Like my husband, the body can get sick, get dead, leave me at any time.

Actually, I used to workout this body continually –yoga, circus training, Zumba, CrossFit, Pilates  — hours a day trying to force the body into states of strength and tone to ‘prove’ I was on top and in control in this world. Right up until long covid laid me low, barely able to get off the couch, at which point I had a body that was the opposite of fit. The opposite of what I saw as fit. A body that I sure wasn’t on top and in control of. Why did I think I could use such a thing to prove I was on top and in control of this world?

I get so hung up on ‘needing this body’ because in my mind it is the ticket to the trip, the life, I want to go on. But the thing is, it’s not a thing that acts as I see fit, so how is it going to create a future that is as I see fit? In truth the body and the future are the same – things shaped by causes and conditions, not bound to my rules, preferences or desires. Nothing needs to act as I see fit.

Its not just me either, this is the way of the world, it has nothing to do with me. The first time I went to the spa, there were a bunch of folks talking loudly, right in front of the large signs that read “SILENCE!”.  The signs said what it ‘should be’, that is what the spa owners saw as fit for their business. But clearly neither owners nor signs dictate patron behavior. And what is more, as I started going to the spa with frequency, I saw that the noise level was conditional, changing by the day, the time of day, the season, the folks there. Sometimes, there really was silence, but the spa owners didn’t force it to be so, it’s just that the conditions were ripe.   

That there is the core problem, there are sometimeses that we all use to feed our delusion. The mom in Mae Yo’s story was in fact able to have her daughter circumcised, the conditions allowed. But before the girl could marry, she ran away, proving she was not bound by her mom’s views of fitness. Proving she was not bound to her mother at all.  What is not bound to us, what doesn’t act as we see fit, what ticks along according to its own karma, that is not ours no matter how incessantly and loudly we shout our claims to a totally disinterested universe.

On the tale of considering the shifting meaning in rupa, I started considering where exactly my sense of identity comes from anyway. In Buddhism the answer is given to us practitioners to back solve for: The 5 clinging aggregates. Below are some of my contemplations on this topic from the time:

Being a cause isn’t proof of self: I have often reflected that I use being as cause of something, whether it is baking a cake, getting ripped, or writing an award-winning essay, as an ego puff, proof of who and what I am. But, by that logic, effects are just the bitches of their cause. Born of, powned, driven and defined by their cause. The problem is: What cause is there that isn’t also an effect?

I tried to give this consideration more structure in my mind by using an example, a tree: A seed causes a tree to become. But then the seed is gone, so what is the cause of a tree to be sustained? Itself. The particular arrangement of rupa that is a tree causes its own sustainment –the roots draw nutrient from the soil, the leaves photosynthesize energy from the sun, the sap moves the nutrients around the tree.

And what is the cause of its cessation? That too is in the tree: The breakdown of the tree state elements, the way 4es shift and destabilize as they interact with themselves and the environment. That is the cause of the tree’s cessation. It’s so clear with the tree, this is all in rupa. So isn’t my body the same? The elements of my parents cause the body. Then the arrangement of the body itself sustains it, and the cessation arises when the elements shift out of a state that maintains a body shape. What is the cause of my ability to utilize the body? The duration and terms of usability? That is my karma. My actions past and present. 

I think of an apartment for further clarity: What is the cause of getting to utilize the apartment? I sign a contract. Of my continued occupancy? I pay the rent. Paying the rent is a now thing, but having the resources to pay the rent, that is longer term. The apartment can burn, and I no longer can use it–it departs me. But I can also be evicted, I depart the apartment.

Even with the body, it seems like it is always the body departing me that ends its use. But isn’t there a vegetative state? The body ticks along –sustained by elements, but I am evicted, my karma is such that I can no longer use it. In reality, I can no longer use the body as I see fit even while I am here and conscious. Can I work out the way I used to with this busted hip? Can I sit in a moldy room given the immune disease I have? Always the body is showing me that I don’t drive. I use, in accord with the body’s terms and conditions. Terms and conditions enforced by rupa, dictated by karma, that are the nature of the object, and the aggregates, themselves.

What is circumstantial, conditional, can’t be self: I was also thinking about how what is circumstantial can’t be self. A while back, I had contemplated on the fact that my view, that a fit body = identity of someone with self-control, was incorrect. For more on that contemplation check out this blog. The first step is to see that a fit body is circumstantial, its conditional. Its fitter at different ages for example –the same activity level at different ages yields different body shapes. That already shows that it can’t prove who I am, it can’t prove my willpower.

The same willpower can after all yield different results. What is more is the idea that a fit body was going to prove this abstract trait –willpower — was an arbitrary selection by me. I could have chosen taking up an instrument, getting a PhD, any number of things that take diligence and effort. I chose fitness because I was already precluded to it. In other words, this choice was conditional too, based on my sanna and sankhara, my predisposition, the resources available to me, etc. Furthermore, even the trait I wanted to prove –willpower– that too is arbitrary. Why choose that to represent ‘myself’? Its conditional, its circumstantial; again 3s and 4s dictated that I chose to identify with that trait. My past experiences with fitness made me think it was utilitous and admirable.

 I tried to back it up further –How is the building of identity itself –not just the particular traits also circumstantial? This was harder –but I realized I need to go the other way: To build the identity I need circumstances that dictate the specifics of what I want to be, the characteristics I want to have –like willpowered. And I also need the circumstances, in rupa, that I think allow me to prove and assume those traits. Afterall, what is an identity without traits? What would I be? And don’t I come into a rupa world specifically because I think the rupa world is necessary to prove and build who I think I am?

Anyway, I already know the answer –what I mistake as identity is just the shifting aggregates. Which by definition shift based on causes and conditions. Which therefore are also conditional. I don’t need to fully understand what the self is to know that is true.

Curation is a silly way to prove self: I also got to thinking about building a wardrobe. How I don’t identify with any one article of clothes, but the wardrobe –that I imagine I curated. When I almost lost that wardrobe in a move, I was crushed, afraid to lose such an integral part of what is mine and makes me who I am. But how could a collection of the same 4es be different that a single 4e dress? Why would one build my identity when the other doesn’t? Isn’t body part versus body the same logic? Isn’t a trait versus many traits the same? One moment, one situation, versus the collections of curated moments and situations I commit to sanna?

Something about collecting, curating — the whole, even though it is a continually shifting whole– is where I imagine myself to lie. Of course, the wardrobe is also circumstantial –what pieces I have access to, my budget, style dictated by body type, age, influences. How can that really reflect who I am? It just at any moment reflects the influences and allowables. If it could have been something else. I it was (sexy librarian, hippy), if it will be again, then how is it who I am?

Getting the future I dream of isn’t self: I thought too about Clementine from Westworld. I, like her, live for the dream of tomorrow. She suffers whoring because she imagines one day a quiet life on her own farm, that she can afford with her whore proceeds. Of course –she lives in Westworld, we already know she will never get that farm. That is not what Westworld allows. I was so stuck on the fact that sure, I can be like Clem and end up never getting what I hope for. But I also have the chance to get what I want. To realize dreams and goals. Afterall, we ca set in place causes and conditions, we can build karma.

 So in my mind, my situation was different. Now though, when I think about the future I live for. The story I am so attached to. The story I imagine I need this body to achieve, even if I do achieve it, am I happy? Am I satisfied? I

 Just look at Eric and I living the travel/retirement ‘dream’ that is so fucking stressful. Do I want the dream for itself? No I want it because I think it will make me satisfied. Sukkha. But is this world any different than Westworld? Is sukkah something to be found here, whether the future looks closer or further away from my dreams? What is stressful, what doesn’t satisfy, it can’t be me or who I am. It can’t prove me or who I am. It just proves the nature of the world –dukkha, meaningless. The whole thing about thinking there is a self, that there is a me and mine, is that  it requires objects, and the world, to behave according to my rules rather than their own. And ais certainly not in accord with my rules and wishes.  

The other morning, I was intimate with Eric. Afterwards, I started thinking the difference between rape and consensual sex. The difference between how it feels to have sex early in a relationship versus late in married life. The act is the same in all cases, so what has changed? It can only be me, the meaning I assign the rupa act of sex.

The thrill was max in a new relationship, when the confirmation felt freshest, novel. Middling when its no longer so fresh, when the sense of confirmation can be taken for granted, or the relationship has grown to confirm me in other ways.  Horrifying in cases of rape, when it feels like an anti-me, that I can just be used, the illusion of autonomy over my body laid bare. There it is, the proof that what I think is sukkah –sensory delight – is just the moments rupa appears to me to be affirming my story of who I am.  

I had been thinking about the SF place I rented when I used to travel NY-SF for work. Now, retrospectively, it seems obviously foolish that I believed an apartment somewhere else could spare me the NY identity. But at the time, I was so convinced that with an apartment, anywhere, SF, CT, and voila, I was no longer a NY. Having a place to sleep that I owned or rented was me, who I am.

I arbitrarily decided SFer came from having a rental to call my own in SF. Or CT was having a rental to call my own in Greenwich. That was the ingredient that made my story to myself credible. And so, once I got the apartments I was happy, I was satisfied. Of course, an apartment is just a place to lay my head when I happened to be in the city. It was silly to believe it was a tool to confer identity. 

The proof of the foolishness was that a change in circumstance –covid – meant that one day I left the SF apartment and I never saw the place again. If it had made me an SFer wouldn’t I have been able to stay? Wouldn’t circumstances of the world have adapted to and confirmed my SFer identity,  so I was allowed to remain, to continue using the place? But reality didn’t oblige, there were lockdowns and dangerous viruses that kept me from the SF apartment, and any identity I believed it may have bestowed upon me. The identity was gone, the apartment no longer usable, but the stress of dealing with the empty rupa apartment that I was responsible for continued: I had to pay for the rent. Finally had to hatch a plan, with the help of a friend, to move out and have my stuff shipped to me in NY.

I remember reading the Assaka Jātaka: In the story there is a king who is addled by grief at the loss of his queen who had died. The Bodhisattva reveled the queen to the king, she had been reborn a worm and had started a new life with a new worm husband. When asked, she said she remembered her time being human, loving the king. But it meant nothing to her now, she had a new story she had built, with a new worm lover.

Now that my story has moved on, now that I identify with new things and new places, it is easy to see what a fool I was to believe an apartment could make me an identity. Now, the story has changed, I claim and cling to new things, I have houses in Miami and Montreal to define me…

I lost so many tears mourning my move from San Francisco. The death of an SF alana and the sad, reluctant, birth of a NY alana I reviled. All that sorrow, stress and attachment, for a story that changes anyway. A story that –by the fact it is changing, based on circumstance, on forces way outside of my control, is actually proving it doesn’t prove me. It just proves the circumstances, the conditions, it is subject to. What is conditional can’t be me. It can’t be about me. It certainly isn’t who I am.

So, if I can see that an apartment doesn’t give me an identity, can I see it about a body as well? Isn't it the same: A 4 e object I claimed so I could try and use it to prove who and what I am. An object I write my story around and that I 'need' for the story to continue. For this story, rather than the object, I cling so tightly. But isn't it like the apartment, when I lose it, a new story will commence with new objects. Just like new homes, and lovers, there are new bodies as well.

For the apartment, its clear that I arbitrarily decided a home will prove my identity. Afterall, I could have just stayed in hotels when I was in the city for work or in Greenwich on weekends. But in my mind, hotels were temporary, they didn’t ‘seal the deal’ of being identified by a place. For that I needed a home. With a body, it’s less clear it’s just what I arbitrarily chose as a marker of identity because bodies are what I have the deepest habit of using  to ‘create’ identity. The supposition, the wrong view, that body I am born with=who I am has been conditioned for so long. It is harder to see this is not me or mine any more than the apartment. But it is equally true.

A lease gives me rights to use an apartment, for a time, when circumstances allow. Birth in a body gives me rights to use the body, for a time, when circumstances allow. While I am able to use these objects to perform physical feats, I am also able to use these objects to feed my imagination and to fuel supposition. I can use them to build any kind of identity the mind can cook-up. But in the end, the shifting nature of the world and objects will mean my physical use for them will end. With that end, the fabrication and supposition will need to adjust and find new objects to meaningify all over again.

Dear Reader – I write and introduction to this blog to warn it’s a mash-up: It is the bones of a contemplation from back in July 2024, rehashed now, in Aug 2026, when I am in the throws of contemplations on the 5 aggregates. This hybrid nature of this blog make it decidedly NOT part of the orderly telling of my practice that I set-out to create with this blog. And yet now, I can’t unsee what recent considerations have prompted. I can’t help but clarify and hone previously muddled half thoughts so that my own process and practice to continue to unfold. So I add new, slightly less muddled half thoughts here, with the frank admittance that this is what it is: A very new take on an old reflection…

I had been thinking more about the moments I am happy. I see so clearly, they are the moments where I interpret rupa as confirming my story – the story of who I am and what my happy future will be like. It is the moments I feel desire, not aversion, for the mental processes rupa sets off in my head (aka nama). The moments where I perceive the rupa aligns closely enough with memory, with the mind objects I have of those rupa objects, that the fabrications of the imagination are pleasurable.

I am happy the moments I think I am safe, that my story is safe, my future is safe, the things I love and claim are safe. Or even better, my future Is heading in a new exciting direction that I want it to head in. Or when it feels like rupa is confirming me. I remember so clearly the moments the porsche made me feel alive, so on top, so loved and beautiful. Right up until I sold it and the dealer pointed out an unknown mechanical problem that dropped its value, and left me feeling super NOT in control and on top; I couldn’t even control my car, getting sick without my even knowing it. Proof that happiness is just delusion about the nature of an object, delusion dashed when the object eventually reveals its nature so forcefully the ignorance addled mind can’t deny it any longer. But, I get ahead of myself here…

For so long, I have been stuck, unable to truly see the dukkha everywhere because there really are moments I enjoy things. The car for example: Hugging the curves of the road, top down, wind in my hair, the imagined stares of the people I passed nodding in agreement that the car proved my status. But now I see the memories that I cling to –the joy– was the moments I thought that car was confirming me. That’s what sticks. In truth, the car was stressful. Stressful to buy when I worried we couldn’t afford it. Stressful to maintain and  hella stressful to part with.

Why did I see, why do I remember, moments of sukkha then? Because the habit of self construction is so strong that it continually directs the mind to curate the memory of experiences to prefer those that confirm ‘me, myself, who I am’ and ignore/filter out the rest.  I see moments the car confirms me, forwards my story as the more real memories, prefer and gravitate towards what brought me sukkah, even if it was totally based on delusion.

That’s all. Its nothing more. These moments of joy are just moments of max delusion. Max belief that I, my story, my mental objects and suppositions are being confirmed. And what was the story at the end of the car? The shattering of that delusion via the revelation the car was secretly sick, defying my identity as on top and in control. And if at the end the car didn’t prove my story in the end –did it prove it in the beginning or the middle? Or had I been wrong all along?

Like one woman who doesn’t know she is 1 of 100 of her partner’s lovers. Feeling so unique and special only to realize all the evidence she took of her specialness is just lies. She is just one in a number. Not confirmed. Happiness is when she believes the self-narrative is confirmed. Sorrow when, scorned, she believes her self-special-narrative is crushed.  Happiness and sorrow are just the products of mental processes, the degree to which rupa and reality don’t strain the credulity of pleasant fabrications.

I think back at the image of myself in my beautiful red wedding dress. How happy and satisfied I felt as I looked in the mirror at the final fitting — Here was a body looking ideal, beautiful to my eyes, reflecting my desirability, my goodness/worthiness to have such a beautiful form, my prowess in powning this body into a perfect shape. Mind you I ignored that it was a compromise shape form the get go: Body builder fit since dancer sleek was contrary to my ectomorph physic. Evidence even in my glory moment –my beauty peak– that I had to adjust my story to reality, to the rupa I am delt, not that rupa that adjusts itself to be a perfect prop in my story.

Still ignoring this, ignoring the suffering to get to such a state, ignoring my stress with every bite of food that such peakness would be lost. I felt joy. I imagined this body telling my story and there was the sukkha. Sukkha is just the moment my lies seem truest. Later, the same dress made a mockery of my 40 something body. Bulging in all the wrong places when I tried it on. Later, that memory of peak body became tinged with sorrow, regret, self-indictment  when it had lost a peak that, by definition of peakness, could never ever have been held onto.  

And yet still, I persist in claiming this body. I take those happy memories– those points that the rupa was close enough to my story to feel affirmed –as evidence I can do it again. All I need to do is change the story slightly, to accommodate the 40 something body… But what’s the truth here, what is actually happening? The truth is that bodies are just shifting 4es, changing states over time. Sometimes the states align with ‘my story’, with the mental objects I cling to, and sometimes they don’t. In order to keep using the shifted (i.e. 45 year old) physical object to fuel the aggregate process, imagination and fabrication must shift too.

Returning to happiness then, it is the rare occasions I can convince myself the object confirms my story. Rare why? Because it actually doesn’t, because the nature of shifting decaying bodies is not to confirm peak and always desirable states. The nature of 4e bodies isn’t actually to confirm anything at all: Meaning, identity, hides no where in the midst of elements.  More often than happiness, I find stress. I stress because the body is continually either shifting into undesirable states, or threatening to do so.  Aging, illness, lurk around every corner. No story, no matter how beautiful and elaborate, no body-mind object, can stand up to actual elemental decay and win.

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.

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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.

This is a follow-on to the last post (#2) with a note from even more recent ‘today’s Alana’. It reflects more contemplations from just a few days ago (July 13, 2026) on this same idea– body as ticket to desired future – that has clearly been a recurrent, and important, theme in my practice over the years.

Since retreat, and at Mae Neecha’s suggestion, I have assigned myself the daily homework of evaluating the claims I make on objects, seeing the way the claim, not just the object, is anicca.

The basic model I had gotten to after a few weeks of contemplation went something like this: A claim is a 1-way contract I make with an object (i.e. the object certainly doesn’t sign my agreement, hence 1 way). I make-up ‘terms’ to the contract, ideas I have about how my object will act. For example, it will allow me unfettered access, it will act as I see fit, it will represent me, it will on a whole follow my rules and meet my expectations, etc. The biggest most important ‘term of the agreement’ that the object makes me or will help me achieve my narrative in the future.

But, of course, the stuff I claim is 4e objects, they change states continually and as states change so too does their ability to be used in various ways. I used to this body for yoga, then the hip got busted and so I had to find other workouts the body was able to do without constant pain.

I came to the conclusion that after I claim an object, I am continually renegotiating the terms of my claim. Accepting limitations and liabilities that arise as the object and circumstances shift. Since I don’t want to just give up the object, ITS MINE, I need to reconcile the contract with reality.

The thing is, I have been trying to nullify my claims to objects by seeing the anicca in my claim. That is the punchline of the homework. The main thing I am gathering evidence to support. But, even as I watch the slipperiness of my mind’s claims, the renegotiating of terms, the ridiculousness of this whole twisted plot, I still cling. Enter the cursed Montreal home as perfect example on this:

I mean really the frequent leak alarms are proof the thing doesn’t do my bidding. The frequent floods and the chemical intrusion from the basement waterproofing project, that had me out for months, mean it is frequently not usable. It causes me dukkha to no end. It should have all offered me overwhelming proof points to its not mine. Still I imagined a life with it, still I imagined the fun and joyous times it would bring once I could just block every possible path of water…

Eventually, it came to light that the waterproofing project had changed the way air moved in the house and the house now was making me sick. With my disease, I can NEVER live there again. I can NEVER build a story on it and a future with it. Only then did I give up the claim on the house.

 I really should have seen long ago that each proof point pointed to the same reality. The house is a 4e object ticking along according to the rules of rupa. And my diseased body, which is also ticking along by the same rupa rules, can’t live in the house without shifting into states unusable by me.

That there are trade-offs, choices to be made, some objects to be sacrificed for others proves that no one object, no one claim, is permanent. That house and body alike act in accord with the rules of rupa, not in accord with how Alana sees fit, should prove that my claim that an object is going to serve the alana identity project and my future is void. That I can only use the house and body some of the time, that the time has and will cease, should support my claim as anicca. And yet, even as I see the house and body are the same, I have relinquished the claim on the house, but the body, the ticket, that I cling to.

For all my evidence gathering and self schooling, I have been stuck on fact that my claims make allowance for the truth that my use of the object is not absolute. I don’t think I will always have it. I allow that it won’t always act as I see fit. This makes my ability to see impermanence of the claim fuzzy. It makes the actual notion of claim, what exactly it is I think the objects contract to do fuzzy as well. Frankly, its all too fuzzy: Even seeing that the claimed object I loved the most, my father, and I have parted ways, that his death clearly nullifies the claim, this is not really shaking my heart free. I am stuck. Or, I was.

A few nights go by and I couldn’t sleep (gotta adjust the progesterone dosage again). As I lay there, I kept looping back to an idea from my daily homework.

I used the body for yoga. The impermeant body changed and I could no longer use it for yoga. I could no longer use it to sustain an identity of Alana as Yogi. So I just swerve a little and come up with a new identity for this body. It’ll be Pilates Alana, yay. By doing this, I may nullify the claim on the yoga body, but the pilaties body just took its place. I am still claiming the same body all along. No wonder I can’t let go of that ticket…

But it dawns on me that something else way more subtle is actually going on here: I am not claiming the same body. The body that could do yoga died. The claim on the yoga body must die with the body. My claim on the new body, that I can use on different terms, is actually a new claim. I construct a new identity (pilaties alana) that takes into account the constraints of the new –now hip busted—body that I have newly claimed.

I had been struggling to understand how the terms of my object-agreements could keep getting violated. An object could continue to refuse to act as I see fit, could change, and yet my mind persisted in the claim, I believed the claim itself persisted despite the changeability of the object because I had already allowed the objects some wiggle room, I already knew the claims weren’t absolute.

Now I see a super deep truth: Nothing persists. The body changes, the claim changes, the claimer changes. This is how all three are actually anicca. But my aggregates work so fast in imagining sameness in an obviously changed body, in claiming that body, that I smooth all the impermanence over.

This actually happens a lot. Because an object changes forms a lot. And so its utility changes a lot.  A circus performer who gets injured and needs a career change actually has a different body after the break. They are forced to abandon an old identity they tried to use the body to build and to find a new one using the new body as a tool.

We don’t see we are doing this though. We see the bubble (this blog here: which now I realize wasn’t entirely correct – there is naming and THEN there is the laying on of sammutti — but it was headed in the right direction) and assume we are laying a new identity on the same body. Because we have named, we ‘solidify’ form. We assume the same claim, the same contract is operating. We assume the same claimer is claiming. None of this is true. We simply see sameness where there is anicca. This is the deep wrong view of permanence pervading our mental process. It is the deep wrong view of permanence that is central to our delusion.

So flash back a little here:

A few days before all of this, something was niggling me, I had written a blog post and in it I realized I wasn’t quite sure if my claim on an object made it permanent in my mind or if I already believed it was permanent and therefore I claimed it. I remembered I may have covered this topic in a recent conversation with Mae Neecha and I went back to my line chats to review. Sure enough, in black and white I read:

AD: “It is our claiming that leads us to believe something would act in accordance with our will rather than in accordance with its karma. This is the mega permanent view”

Mae Neecha actually corrected me. She said:

MN: It is because we think it is permanent that we claim it in the first place. It is because we perceive that things can be permanent in general”

I realized after that I had struggled with causality on this topic, usually, my understanding of causality is pretty strong. Weakness on this front poins to some pretty deep and clouding delusion on the topic. Now, reading Mae Nee’s response, I saw it must be the case that first is the delusion an object is permanent, or at least long living enough for my purposes. There is the delusion I will be able to control it. The delusion it will build and sustain my identity. And then there is the claim. With reflection, it makes perfect sense: The cause of claiming is delusion. The root delusion is the denial of the 3 worldly conditions (including anicca). It’s so logical its weird I couldn’t get there on my own…

Here now I can understand the mechanics, the WHY, of why delusion of permeance precedes a claim, not just see the logic that it must always be so.  The mechanics:

With a circus performer’s body breaks, it is so fast and impactful it is easier to see but this happens all the time. My own body’s shape is shifting. Shifting according to the elements. Excess food of certain types. Decreased hormones. Decreased exercise. Increased sun. It is not the shape it was before. But I still view it as the same body.

Even as I account for changes to it, I believe it is the same thing physically. I believe it has the same meaning and the same identity. Even as it changes it is monolithic in my mind. Something that is here and then, at some future state that I make so remote in my mind I can’t even deal with it, gone. But the truth is it is shifting all along.

But, I don’t see the shifting as the constant, pervasive, nature of the object. And because I don’t see the 4e process that governs it, I also can’t see that process will always defy my control because it is already controlled by the rules of rupa. And so I also don’t see that my claims on the object are dying with each shift in the form, with each death of a particular arrangement that I identified with or was able to use in the past. I don’t see any identity I imbue an object with, and any identity I believe the object imbues me with, requires control I clearly don’t have. All the identity building, and therefore the claiming, is meaningless drivel.

I am skipping around a bit, for the sake of clarity, but a few days later, I realized that a new definition of impermanence was clearing up my misunderstandings. It was getting the contemplations on claiming to start hitting the heart: Anicca is flux not fixed. It is shifting. The ticket, the body, the claim the claimer, all in flux. And my claim on that ticket starting to see the good kind of fuzzy –the kind where the delusion is weakening…

This is a follow-on to the last post with a note from ‘today’s Alana’. It reflects more recent contemplations on this idea– body as ticket to desired future – that has been a recurrent theme in my practice over the years. While the contemplations in the last  blog helped soften me, it remains hard for me to let go of the ticket because I am still attached to the trip. Because, definitionally, I need an Alana body in order to have the next moment with an Alana body. The other day Eric said something that really hit me, “sure you need an Alana body to continue a story with that Alana body, but so what?” My want for the story doesn’t dictate my getting it. That I can’t continue a life with something once conditions dictate I part ways from it doesn’t change the reality that I will lose it.

We had gone to see Cirque de Sole the other day. And I considered the precarious situation of the performers; they have built a life, a livelihood, an identity by honing their bodies. But all it takes is a fall, a break, an injury and their career is over. The identity of themselves as an elite athlete, honed over years, is over. It’s just further evidence this body can’t really be who we are.

I internalized this and considered my own body more closely. Lately I have needed to go on hormones for perimenopause. Without them I couldn’t sleep and I was anxious and depressed; my entire outlook on life, my way of behaving and being in the world had changed. I like to think these behaviors and outlooks are core parts of ME, who I am, but clearly these traits are super dependent on a little hormone. Now, I am so dependent on the little hormone pill that makes me ‘normal’ again. For the performances and myself, the circumstances of the body dictate how and when we can use it. Our bodies’ are only usable by us, in the ways we want to use them, when circumstances allow.

 I thought on it more and realized that for the performers, what a career ending injury really means is an end to their story. An end to the narrative they tell themselves about what tomorrow will be. My attachment to my body, to this life, is exactly the same. I want this body for a story that happens next: To help me continue to be, to prove who I am. But it is just as subject to breaking as these circus performers’ hanging on bars and balancing on poles. And if it is subject to something so little to destroy my whole dream and sense of self, is it who I am?

It is easy to look at the performers and see the body forces us to alter our narrative of who and what we are in this life. But as I think on it, I see the same thing plays out over multiple lives: I cling to this body because it is essential to my Alana story, I need it for what happens next. With an injury, I adjust, accept limitations, recast the story under the new terms the body allows — I can’t be a yogi, but I can do pilaties. I can’t do pilaties as I have long covid, but at least I’m alive, I can figure a new story. But death is the same, I just accept the limitations, find a new rebirth to recast the story in terms the new life allows. This, zooming-out, to see what is true in one life is true across countless lives. 

A few days later I was again considering the idea of the body as the ticket. In other words, I can say the body is the tool that allows me to write my story. I thought about  slaves –for them, the body is actually their bondage. Because of their blackness, their being owned in a society that allowed ownership of them, their body guaranteed their story, their lives, weren’t theirs to tell, to create. I considered someone with trapped-in syndrome, completely conscious but paralyzed; their body isn’t a tool to the fantasy life they imagine, it is a cage. I considered a friend who recently committed suicide when he got a cancer diagnosis, suddenly his body was forcing a turn in his story he couldn’t abide by and so he killed the body to avoid the new imagined future. To avoid a new identity as sick, out of control of a body he had honed and prized for years (he was the friend who taught me about body building).  

When my house in Montreal flooded, I considered how the house wasn’t a shelter. It can, at times, in certain forms, be used as shelter. But that can change so quickly. It proved shelter is not what a house IS. It’s just what it does some of the time, when the circumstances are right. I can use the house as shelter when it is in a 4e arrangement that protects my 4e body. When it is moldy, in a 4e arrangement that endangers my 4e body I can’t use it at all. It is in fact anti-shelter.

When a 4e body is in an arrangement that doesn’t strain credulity for me to keep using it as a prop, an actor, to tell myself the fantasy story, then I can use it to imagine all sorts of futures. When it has died, de-formed, disaggregated enough that it is no longer a credible prop, a leading actor, for the story I imagine I can no longer use it at all.

When I claim these objects, in truth I am only claiming one state, one side, of them. Once they shift to become traps, poison, I want nothing more than to renounce my claim. My friend committed suicide to renounce his. Because these objects shift through many states, ones that are helpful, ones that are harmful, ones in which we drift out of each other’s stories (karma), the claim is also anicca. The claim is something that I will ultimately renounce when the state of the object is no longer desirable to me. When it strains credulity for my own mind to use it as a prop to further the fantasy that pre-exists the object or my claim on it. Not only are these objects conditional, my claim on them is as well. And what is conditional has to be anatta. Arising based on causes, existing based on causes, ceasing based on causes that prove absolutely nothing about me

I have been thinking more on how to dig up this attachment to rupa. I see my problem: Even if I know what a belonging is, a 4e object, I cling to it because I think I need it for my future fantasy. The parallel is a plane ticket — I know it’s just paper, but I cling to it because I desire the trip. I desire the future I imagine and that ticket is a critical tool to achieve that future, to have fun on that trip.

I have already tried to attack this belief from multiple angles: Just cuz you have a ticket Alana, it doesn’t mean you can go on the trip – look what happed when you had a ticket to go on retreat but got Covid and couldn’t attend.”  Or,  “you can go even without a ticket Alana, the train station is across the street”. Or, “How many time Alana have you gotten a ticket, taken a trip and had it be a total disappointment?” I even tried reasoning that the trip I imagine is just more of the same daily life, after all, what is over there is what is over here; trip after trip I have observed that in Japan, or Italy or Israel, there is need, work, stress, impermanence. Still, none of this self-talk is working, my heart is still attached to the ticket.

I tried another tactic: Sookie(yes, back to True Bloods) clings to Bill. Why? He is the ticket to the future she always wanted — a normal domestic life, a partner. Because she can’t read his thoughts, he is able to fil the hole in her heart, take on the leading lover role in her domestic future fantasy. She already had the fantasy. Then, meeting Bill, she ‘minifies’ him, clings to him, she sticks him in the partner shaped hole in her heart and adjusts the details of her fantasy to be Bill-centric.

So of course, she needs Bill to get that future, she literally designs the future, or at least tweaks all the details of the pre-existing future lover fantasy, around him. Somehow, this softens the body as ticket issue for me a little. I see the dynamics of how a body, a ticket, is not some a priori attachment, instead any particular body/ticket is just the object I plug into the fantasy that preexisted and paint some details around it. As I do, the painting, the detailifying, I claim the body/ticket, become attached, lay meaning and samutti upon the thing. In truth, each ticket, each body, is interchangeable, when this one is used-up, I will keep seeking and claiming a new one so that I can keep taking these ‘fun’ lives/trips.

I consider how Eric is my Bill. The type of relationship we have – so close, partners in everything, constant companions that face the world together -- is already my fantasy, it pre-exists Eric, I was just looking for a leading lover to fill the role. Then, I met Eric. He and I naturally fell into lockstep with one another, and so I placed him in the hole in my heart. He was acceptable, so I claimed him to forward my future fantasies. In so doing, the fantasy  took on an Eric shape, an Eric hue.  

The issue is twofold: The first is that Eric, who I think is so special, who I cling to so tightly, actually is not. He is in fact one in a string of folks –in this life and in past ones – that I have claimed, and lost, as I try to use them to fulfill my dreams.

The second is I really am setting myself up for sorrow by naming, claiming, clinging to this ingredient, this particular prop that I attach to in service of my fantasy. By saying to myself, “that person/thing there is my ticket” I have now invested in, become hooked by, a changeable object that I don’t control and will definitely lose. Who creates my sorrow other than me? And why? For some arbitrary fantasy of my own making. For the contours, the props, the leading players, the interchangeable bodies and lovers and tickets that I convince myself I ‘need’ mostly based on the fact they were there and I believed I could claim them, use them, in the first place.

The truth is, if the fantasy calls for a partner, shouldn’t any partner do? If the trip calls for a car shouldn’t any car do? If I need a body, shouldn’t anybody do? And if I saw this really, that none of these are special or unique, would I claim them as mine, as who I am?

But I don’t see that, instead I look at every detail about how the snowflakes I love, I call my own, are incredibly special, rather than see that they all share the fundamental nature of snow.  The reason why is that I can’t really build a fantasy that way.  I need to personalize, to make it unique.  Not all dresses will work, I like the one with the frills that reflect who I think I am. Not every body will work, or is ideal, I need the one with details I think reflect me. That I think will advantage me. And if I can’t have that body, if karma prevents it, then I at least need to pay attention to the details of the body I have, zoom in on features I think are different –like a snowflake’s crystalline structure. There is no identity in sameness. I need details, differences, that uphold that I’m unique. That seem specific to the Alana I curate. 

What is more is that I can’t abide by a fantasy in which I don’t control the object. In which I have no say in its preservation. Its direction. In which I can’t depend on it. I know this, so I claim object in the hope my claim means they will act as I see fit. Or maybe I claim and as a result assume the object will act as I see fit. Or more likely there is a cycle, a pre-existing delusion the object will act as I see fit and a claim that reinforces this view. Regardless of the order one key  truth is the same — each object is like every other one. Interchangeable. It hurts to admit it, puts a chink in my story, introduces a whole lot of ‘risk’ I am not comfortable with. But, regardless of my claim, my body and some other body are exactly the same 4e object. My claim exists only in my head. The nature of the object exists in the object. 

When reading Mae Neecha’s autobiography, I had been deeply struck by her description of a life as a swan in which she saw her swan lover die before her. I started crying when I read that short paragraph and I knew it had struck a chord.

Eric is my beloved swan mate. I love him so, I am so attached. I am a person who wants a swan mate, someone with whom I share every moment, side-by-side, always together. That love ideal is not the same for everyone. But it is overwhelmingly meaningful for me, and has been since I was a kid, that I reason it must be based on my past experiences, based on what has arbitrarily happened to me before, based on what I am used to. I came into this life with a swan shaped hole in my heart and my entire existence has largely centered upon filling it. Life without a swan love is a life that is empty and meaningless for me.

I chose Eric as my swan love. And when I did, I started grasping at him, clinging to him. I placed him in my story and started writing my story around him. Now I am stuck, attached, with all the dukkha that ensues. But when I consider the mechanics here, I realize it is pretty dumb to get so attached to Eric that I cry over random swan deaths, because I  can’t imagine a future without him, when it was me that made him some critical ingredient to my future in the first place.

It’s like painting a picture with a bowl of fruit in the center. Then stressing that the bowl of fruit may be cut out somehow. Worrying the picture will then be incomplete. But I am the painter, I put the fruit bowl in the picture to begin with. The object itself has no meaning, no significance. I just place it there, claim it as mine, and as a result I became attached. Then I suffer the idea that it could disappear. That the story, the image, will be incomplete. This is my situation: I wanted a swan partner, someone who I believed would care for me, keep me safe, affirm me. Eric fit the bill so I claimed him, I created a story –a future fantasy of our life together — and because of the story, not because of Eric, I am attached.

For the story I stress, I work, and most of all, I worry if the ingredients I believe I need for the future story are in jeopardy. I need this body, I need Eric, I need money. But the only reason I ‘need’ these things, is for the story I myself made-up. The story, that is self. ME. MY NARRATIVE. This is atta – I , others, belonging are something meaningful because they mean something in my narrative. I am the story I tell myself.

The thing is, that story is totally conditional. I ended-up with Eric because my ex had decided to go to Oxford and leave the country. Otherwise, I might well have married him. Eric’s ex had dumped him just before we started dating, if not, Eric would not have been available just as my prior swan flew the coop. Its circumstantial that Eric and I ended up together and what is circumstance can’t prove ME, it just proves the circumstances in which something arose.

I was watching a workout video, the instructor shouted encouragingly, “control your body, control your movements.” Even as my body was doing the moves, my brain started to consider my bias to pay attention to, draw evidence from, the moments I think I am in control. Right now, as I haul this heavy weight, feeling tough, on top –controlling my body, controlling my movements – I am considering how many times my workouts have led me to injury. Usually though, I edit those moments, where I am not controlling my body, not controlling my movements, out of my memory, like those moments don’t even count.

Back when I was yoga-alana (before the yoga-induced hip tear that ended my yoga career), I took so much pride in controlling my body, my movements. It was like every pretzel shape my body could make affirmed me, my practice. Like each asana, if perfectly performed, could showcase my extreme willpower.

But now, as a considerably less strong, less toned, less flexible alana hauls todays’ weights around, I think about the truth: A body can be trained. A muscle strengthened. Practice can hone skill to make certain shapes. That’s not control. That’s just terms of a 4e body. It is  just effects that the set of causes and conditions of my practice manifested. Its normal.

If I controlled, I would not have had to quit that yoga practice due to injury. I would not still hurt today. I would not have had to change my story, limited the kinds of activities that present Alana can do to try and re-claim that feeling of control. I would not be stuck doing this boring workout, struggling under weights that used to feel light, as I try and regain a body, a feeling I once had before.

How is it that I fool myself so thoroughly? I puff up my ego, feel so affirmed as I do the exercise in front of me, believing I am controlling my body and movements exactly as the instructor says. When the very fact that I am hauling these baby weights, doing this less strenuous non-yoga workout is already perfect proof that I wasn’t in control in the first place. This is a compromise workout, for a compromised body, that is showing me with each labored, pained movement that I am not in control at all.

I have been thinking about it: I am sick a lot. I have been sick a lot since I was a kid. I had bad stomach issues growing up, later the back issues, the allergies, asthma, mast cell disease. One way or another, I have almost always, in this life, been sick.

In addition to my actual sickness, how many times have I worried about being sick? All the cancers, the autoimmunity, the covid, bird flu. How is it that I can’t accept that that this body DOES get sick and die. That is its nature. Obviously, all my fear and hypochondria suggests I know it CAN get sick and die.  Logic tells me that eventually it WILL get sick and die. But I obviously think I have some measure of control, like the duration or the terms of sickness can be determined, at least influenced, by me.  

I can actually see my own thinking, the points I need to disprove:

• Sure, I’m sick, but not fatally so.
• I am not so sick I can’t accept it, at least I can continue to live-out my beloved story.
• I can prolong the duration of my health, or at least maintain todays’ or better level of health, till I die. 

But is this all even true? And to the extent that it is, does it even matter?

Sick, ok, but not fatally so…this time. Each time it seemed fatal in the past was clearly a false alarm. It was sick, but not terminally. But that’s normal. In a life,  everyone who survives long enough is sick many times; continually shifting aggregates, growing dis-eased until there is one final death is the nature of a 4e body. Eventually there will be a fatal illness. A fatal arrangement of the elements. How can I possibly take there not being one yet as any kind of confirmation about me? That I am special, that I am in control? It is crazy to think I am exempt from the fatal part when my elements show so clearly they are subject to the normal, like everything else, sick part.

Not so sick I can’t accept it, that I can’t continue to live out my story…I mean, what choice does anyone have but to accept their illness? People accept their handicaps, their pain, their cancer, their chronic diseases. Everyone accepts this stuff because there is no choice. The illness isn’t on our terms. We accommodate it. How can I take this universal fact, that we all bear the fruit of our karma, the limitations of a 4e body,  and interpret it to believe that enduring is equivalent to dictating?

I pretend that I can still live my story despite my illness. But its not true: I am not living ‘my story’, I am not executing on some great vison I had in the past for my present and future. No, I adapt, wiggle, adjust the story to fit the body, to accommodate my illnesses.  The proof of this is insanely obvious: My mast cell disease limits where I can go, what hotels I can stay at, the air quality my body can bear. I claim my story is me, it is alana, it is who I am, but the story is just my shifting narrative that recasts my hopes and dreams and sense of self in light of the actual facts this ailing, eventually dying body dictate.

I often think that the worst part of a terminal illness, what scares me the most, is I won’t get to continue to live, to create my story, it’ll just be over. Eric and I are always trying to imagine our future. We feel so restless when that totally fictious future seems uncertain. It seems so terrible to me to imagine something other than the future that my present-self desires. Afterall, the past is gone. The present is fleeting. I live for the future.

But is the end of my body the end of the story? Rebirth is driven by desire, by my craving to keep the fantasy, the story-of-self going. If the desire hasn’t died, the new birth is coming. It is just a different a body, a different name. A different fantasy that adapts to the limitations I face in the same exact way that right-now-Alana-story adapts to the limitations of body that I face.  

That I can prolong the duration of health, the duration till death. Duration is a bitch. The heart of my hope, what makes it so hard to smother my delusions. But, why should I believe I can prolong duration? Why do I feel like every time I haven’t died yet is on ALANA, as opposed to the causes and conditions of death not having yet been met?

If I really could control duration, wouldn’t I have been able to infinitely avoid covid? Sure I was able to lock myself away for 18 months. But does that prove I controlled duration? It was the fact that I had the karma –the resources, the will, the circumstances – that facilitated such a long period of isolation. And when it was exhausted, when I simply couldn’t endure isolation any longer, I promptly got sick.

I selectively remember the times, the places I believed I had some influence and I interpreted that to mean the power lies with me to delay illness and death. So while there is a duration of health, a duration of illness, a duration before death, this is not proof the power over that duration lies with me. Even if it did, is duration really satisfactory? No amount of healthy time, no amount of life while I am still so invested in the story of the future is going to be enough.

I lay hope for duration, for a duration that is satisfactory, for a story long enough to make alana true, on a shifting, dying 4e body I do not control. A body that has been sick, many times before.

I had sent a message to Mae Neecha about a contemplation I had on regret. Here I want to share the original email, and her reply, as it prompted renewed considerations of rupa, sickness and atta which I will delve into in subsequent blogs.

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Original Email to Mae Neecha:

I wanted to do a quick write-up of a different regret contemplation I had begun considering on retreat. I have fleshed-it out a bit more, and thought I would share, since, why not 😉. But more because it brings me squarely to a topic I’m not sure I have closely considered enough, the dukkha specific to self-belonging. Or maybe just self belonging in general – with feeling this time.

The background: Back when I had covid, I took Paxlovid. I cleared the infection quickly and, per CDC guidelines at the time,  I exited quarantine/masking after I tested negative on day 5, took a second test 48 hrs later that was also negative. A few days later, I started having a sore throat and mucus again. I wrote it off as allergies. That night, I went to a concert, unmasked. The next day, still having symptoms, I decided to covid test again before some friends came over. I was positive. I had rebounded.

It has been weighing so heavily on my heart that I went out, unmasked, and exposed all those folks in the concert hall.  I blame myself for writing off those early symptoms as allergies.  Especially because Eric had a Paxlovid rebound as well and that is when he got me sick. It wasn’t just some abstract possible statistic risk out there, it happened to me. Ironically, part of my reasoning when I started getting symptoms again was, “2 super ‘rare’ Paxlovid rebounds in one house, what are the chances?”…

Of course, in my heart, I know that if I knew I was sick, I would not have gone to that concert and exposed others. But still, I was blaming myself for not having a high enough level of suspicion of symptoms. I blamed myself for not knowing. And I felt especially sheepish because all pandemic long I had been throwing shade, wondering why the hell it was so difficult for folks to just stay home and keep others safe. And here I was doing exactly the thing I despised.

As I was turning this all over in my mind, an old, different story I had already contemplated on popped into my mind. It was when I sold the Porche. The short version of it was I was super upset when I went to sell the thing and it was worth way less then I had expected. Turns out, there had been engine trouble brewing. Sure, I had felt a little bit of kickback when I drove, but I thought nothing of it, it was so subtle. But the dealership mechanic said it was a symptom of a very sick engine.  I was so hung up, I felt like this car, I thought was valuable, proved my value, had deceived me. I felt foolish. One of the things I felt especially foolish about was that I felt like I SHOULD HAVE known it was sick. Here I was using this car to help prove my self image of a buttoned-up, on top, in control Alana and I didn’t even know there was engine trouble. I felt so irresponsible. The opposite of in control. Of course, the punchline there was that the car never did prove anything about how in control and buttoned up I am (and lots  of other stuff, that’s actually a pretty elaborate contemplation for another share).

But when I considered this SHOULD HAVE KNOWN issues in the context of the covid story, I realize I have a pattern (there is other evidence I won’t bore you with) – I consider knowledge of something as a marker of mineness. It’s a trait I have (arbitrarily) chosen to prove to myself that something belongs to me.  Because I consider this body (and the car) mine, I should have known it was sick. And I am so addicted to the idea that this body is mine, I rather take on heavy guilt for not knowing it was sick, rather than just admit the more obvious truth: The fact that I have no idea what is brewing in this body — that it is happening without my knowledge, better yet my direction/control – is pretty strong evidence that it isn’t mine at all.

The funny thing is, this same wrong view of ownership cuts another way – I suspect it played a part in my slowness to suspect that I had rebounded despite symptoms. Again, another contemplation from a while back helps elucidate:

I had gotten strep years ago. I had a sore throat, but I felt like I was just run down. Like I had talked a lot the night before…it took 2 days before it even dawned on me to test for strep. Sure enough, positive. I considered at the time why I was so reluctant to admit, to myself, I was sick. I realized that I was slow to admit illness at the time, because I considered myself healthy, that was the self-vision I had. On some level, back then, I thought I was exempt from illness, it couldn’t be happening to me. Just like rebound couldn’t be happening to me. Because I view this body as mine, who I am, I struggle to accept it is the same as every other person, every other 4e, subject to shifting states, to imbalance, to decay. Surprised when it happens against my will, not on my schedule. That and, of course, the knowledge trap –if it were really sick, wouldn’t I know? Afterall, its mine.

The irony of course hasn’t escaped me that I try and use this body to prove what a kind, compassionate Alana I am, and here it is exposing others to illness. Because I claim the body, treat it as a tool for self-actualization, I bear the burden of guilt for it. I bear shame and embarrassment, when I smell, when I sag, when I wrinkle.  When this body doesn’t match my self-image.  I bear physical pain trying to push it to do my will, to fit into the slinky gala dress or to stay in places in which I am struggling to breathe. I live with constant fear and stress trying to protect it, because in my mind I need it to keep being me, to keep becoming, to have the future that exists in my mind. Afterall, self is meaningless without an imagined future.

With the Eric story, self belonging played a star role as well. I think it is ok to whip Eric, I expect a certain set of actions and availability to me, precisely because he is mine…

I guess this is a round about way of saying, I really had to go a ways before I could come back to this idea of mineness and really see the burden of it. To really see just how it sneakily flies under the radar. Such a huge wrong view that has been hiding in plain sight.

Anyway, I am back to self and self belonging. I am also going to dig into this idea of comfort. There is some real magical thinking required to believe that standards that lie with me –my rupa, my nama – are going to be pandered to by the world. Just a wild guess…its also going to require a delusion of self and self belonging.

Thanks again and I’ll keep you posted.

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Mae Neecha wrote me back the following: 

“It is so interesting because you get sick very often, like all kinds of sick, for someone who works so hard to be healthy and thinks “It couldn’t be happening to me”… at this point, shouldn’t you be convinced it IS happening to you AGAIN? The body is doing what it always does, what it is supposed to do…age and die.”

I had started watching the HBO vampire show True Blood again. The main character, Sookie, falls hard for the very first vampire she meets, Bill. Why? Because she is a telepath, she can read other humans’ thoughts, but not vampires’. When she meets human guys, she can hear their disrespectful thoughts, their carnal desires. Her telepathy confirms that all of these men’s interest in her is just about fulfilling their desires; their desire isn’t really about her, she is an object, debased, not special.

But with Bill, there is silence, and in that silence, her imagination can work to create a fantasy not immediately dashed by the evidence provided to her by her telepathy.  Just for the chance at romance, at a future she imagines, she leaps at him.

But, in fact, he tells her as clearly as the men, whose thoughts she can read, who he really is, what a future with him will be like: In just the first few episodes we see Bill needlessly humiliate a police officer right in front of her. His hooligan friends terrorize Sookie’s boss and place of work. Bill even goes off and kills her ancient, crippled, uncle who had imagined abusing Sookie as a child (he didn’t even do it, she just read his thoughts), even though the old man was clearly no danger in the present.

It really strikes me that this is the power of imagination: We can convince ourselves that we don’t really know who Bill is, what the world is, what the future holds. Even though, we really do know. It’s just with imagination we can selectively block-out the evidence, it fuels our hope.  

I think about this a lot, cases where it is clear I/character would have done something different if only we had known… There is the main character on Pose, she gets AIDS after one time having unsafe sex. She just wanted to feel loved and accepted, this guy did that, so she forewent a condom. Clearly not worth it. Had she known she wouldn’t have; but the risk was there clearly, especially at that moment, in that community, at that time. Still she imagined something otherwise, lulled by the fulfillment of her desire she ignored what she knew.

I think of my enjoyment of drinking; if I knew for sure it would cause health issues, mental clarity issues, I wouldn’t do it. It’s the chance, the possibility, even in the face of risk that it turns out ok that makes it something I do. I felt the same when I used to smoke. When I used to use people sexually to boost my ego, for my sense of fun, and pretend it wouldn’t cause them (and ultimately me) suffering. I do these things because of my desire, and the imagined hope I will somehow escape the most dreadful of consequences. If I KNEW knew…  

Or, another biggie for me: Duration. I marvel at why vampires would fall in love with humans, who age and die in a blink of a vampire life, when over and over they are kicked in the teeth loosing their beloved. One human, the next, the next, the next, 300 vampire years, dozens of human lovers loved and lost. How does the suffering not add-up to enough already? It feels stupid to me, to accept the sorrow of loss for so little duration.

At this moment in True Bloods, Sookie heard the news Bill may have died in a house fire. Of course, I know, having seen the show before, he did not. Still, I put myself in her shoes and I think, for just a few episodes, the pain of losing a new love, not worth it. But what about 8 seasons, a human lifetime, at least a few decades? Sure Bill is a constant danger. Sure, they are on again, off again, in a continual emotional roller coaster. Sure she watches him die in the end. Still, I foolishly think, maybe worth it? Its a long time…

Maybe Eric and I will have a full life together, maybe for all the ups and downs, worth it?

In her autobiography, Mae Neecha’s recalls her past lives, one short description hits me so hard. She was a swan and had the ‘gut punch’ of seeing her swan mate die. I read that short line and I felt that gut punch myself, I started crying. Eric, my sweet swan mate. Everywhere, always, together. Till were not, till I watch him die, or I die leaving him. But that’s the point of the recall –it’s a flash relationship amongst so many many rebirths. A vampire with their endless human loves. Is it worth it? I know how this ends, I see the evidence all around me – loss, death. Still, I imagine something different, enough time to make it worth it, I find hope in not KNOWING knowing, even though, don’t I?

I found a lump in my breast. I kept palpating it, poking it, trying to remember if it had been there before. I couldn’t recall, I couldn’t be sure, so I made an appointment with the doctor to get it checked. Now it’s just a few days waiting to get in and see the her. And as I wait, I consider: On one hand, I am stressed. Of course, my precious body is in peril, my most beloved of possessions that I use to make me ME.

On the other hand, when I zoom out, past my own myopic fear, I can’t help but think about how common this is: At least 5 or 6 friends, my age or younger, have found lumps. One is being treated for breast cancer now. So many women go through this –Find a lump, stress. Get the painful workup, stress. When my friends have gone through this, I lend a tender ear, say comforting things, hope for the best of course. But when it’s them, honestly, it’s not all that important to me. When it’s them, I don’t stress. Now that it is me, my turn, it’s stress city.

But I need a turn to die. It’ll be something someday. This body is designed to fall into disease, that is the nature of rupa. It is so so normal, and yet when I fear it is my turn I get so stressed-out just because I have invested in this body, because I mistakenly believe the stories I use it to tell are real and meaningful. The body offers the medium, the substrate, that can turn a sequence of events, of causes and effects, into what I perceive as a cogent, continuous, purposeful narrative. In truth, it is trivial, meaningless, a miniscule blip in the infinite, timeless, sea of arisings and ceasings, the sea of countless women and countless cancers and countless deaths.

I get caught up in this idea that I ‘need’ this body for the future, even through whatever is needed for the future is, by definition, gonna be present. I am simply mistaking my preferred, imagined future, for THE FUTURE. My future story is just that, a story, a fabrication, some shit I am continually making-up. A story about a house is nonsense before the house is built and after it has collapsed. The Alana story is nonesense without the body prop and it ends when the body ends; there is no alana future at that point, no matter what fantasies, what ‘needs’ I have made-up.

Moreover, if I want to concoct a story dependent on a prop, I really do need a controllable prop to lay that story on. This body, as is evidenced by the lump in my chest, is not a controllable prop. This is not a controllable story.

Even if we aren’t talking about the life and death shit,—in the mundane day-to-day –- does it feel at all like I am controlling either body or narrative? For 18 months, I isolated this body to protect it from Covid; I forfeited my desires, my fantasies, I delayed travel and adventure, all the ‘fun stuff’ I like to think makes life worth living.

And when I got long covid, was I dictating the terms of use then? For most of my adult life I identified with fitness, activity, strength; with long covid I couldn’t get off the couch, better yet BE A FIT ALANA.

I like to think I have this body as an instrument of my will, some prop to do what I want, to manifest my story, my sense of who I am. But it dictates the terms. To preserve it, I need to work, adjust, and even then it is continually breaking or threatening its imminent demise. It is continually showing me that the stories of the future I like to tell are ungrounded nonsense that will be chewed-up and spit out by the actual FUTURE.

Mae Neccha she sees her own personal tendencies –and their perils – clearly. It is what is helping her end her rebirth cycles. So what about me, do I know myself? What are my tendencies that keep propelling me forward?

I am driven by the quest for comfort. Security. It’s so deep that I fell in love with Eric when he said he would take care of me. Over and over, this desire for safety is intertwined with the people, characteristics, and objects I choose to identify with. I am someone always trying to be popular, I think it will get me cared for. I want to be good to ‘prove’ I am worthy of safety. I want to be beautiful, rich, because those are characteristics I believe will give me options, escape routes ,when danger comes knocking.

I had read a true story about a girl who went hiking on White Mountain. A snowstorm came, she struggled to find shelter. She kept pushing on, despite punishing conditions, only to freeze to death just a few feet from the door to a lodge where she would have been safe. I imagine myself as that girl – in every life almost to safety – but of course I die, I lose. Still, I think this time will be different, something I do, someone I meet, some object or characteristic –wealth, popularity, beauty, goodness – is going to get me through that lodge door.

Ever since covid, I have constantly looked over my shoulder, twitching at every sneeze I hear, running from every cough. I suffer fear, anxiety, hypochondria. Why? Because I keep looking for safety in the wrong places. If this pandemic proves nothing else, it proves that this world, that human bodies, are not safe places.  Still, in just one life – with every one of my longevity regimens, fitness fads, obsessive health and safety precautions I struggle for the safety that has so clearly eluded me: Long covid, joint issues, my immune disorder, I am no stranger to the disease I define as danger.

Any why am I so desperate for this body – why is it that my obsession with its safety colors so much of my personality, my deepest desires, drives and behaviors? It is because without this body, my story ends. The alana story ends. And it is this, this story, that I most want to protect. It is after all, MINE, it is who I think I am.

But just like Yennifer’s story, mine will change. Look at how many alana’s I have been in one life, the story has changed endlessly before. This body, that I view as a tool for my preservation, has changed endlessly too. Puberty. Long covid. Aging. This is not a body for preservation – it is a fragile thing that will ensure that the Alana story ends in death.

I have come to an unsafe place to look for safety. I am born into a body that will surely die. I have come to an uncomfortable place looking for comfort. I am born into a body that continually suffers pain. I have taken it upon myself to try and hoard, to get, keep, preserve. But I am born into a world where resources are scarce and get spent.  My belief, my hope, for safety and comfort are exactly what keeps me returning. Ironically, this quest, is exactly what guarantees more rebirths into an unsafe and uncomfortable body and world.

In the context of so many lives, none is all that meaningful. And yet I cling…

I have been reading Mae Neecha’s autobiography and her recollections of her own past lives really struck me. From them she is able to reflect on her tendencies and views that keep her coming back, for example returning to the world to ‘fix’ others she judges. She sees the perils of these habits of view so clearly: She talks about a friend staying with a loser husband because she thinks she owes him; even in one life it is clear how her friend’s belief causes her to return to that husband  again and again, despite the suffering he causes her. This is what we are all doing over countless lives – returning again and again, despite the suffering it causes us. Rebirth really is the ultimate peril.

I can’t recall my own past lives, but I decided to start thinking just about the many Alanas of my current life: Hippy Alana, Beloved by my Father Alana, Miss High School Goody Popular Alana, Yoga Alana, Hipster Body Building Alana, there was Prove my Worth With Many Lovers Alana, and then Prove my Virtue as Good and Dutiful Wife Alana…In one lifetime I have changed so much, assumed a sequence of identities that are not just changing, but are sometime diametrically opposed to other, older, versions of myself.

 And as I further consider all these Alanas, it is pretty clear their identities don’t lie ‘out there’ anywhere. They are in my head. They are my stories, my fantasies, my curations. I start with views about what I value, what it would be ‘good’, useful, desirable to be, or not be. Then I am the choosy narrator, curating particular ‘proof points’, memories, actions, belongings and relationships to help me assume and prove these many alanas.

All the while, I am not even honest with myself about what or who I am: I assign so much value to the image of someone on top and in control of my life, I can’t even control my body aging, I can’t even control my behaviors, growing agitated with my mother, or angry in NY, even while trying to claim myself a virtuous daughter, an equanimous, unflappable Buddhist.

These identities, they are forged by forces of habit, what I value based largely on what I am used to, what has proven useful in the past, what I have been exposed to. It’s really just arbitrary values I have picked up over the course of lives, norms dictated by the norms of the circumstances of my births. And for these identities, that are nothing but passing moments,  meaninglessly  dictated – by what I am exposed to, what I choose from habit – I work, I suffer, I mourn the loss of. Oh the hours of struggle to get the body shapes I needed for each identity, the time squandered on collecting and caring for objects, outfits, relationships that proved the particular me de jour.

There is a scene in the show The Witcher that hit me so powerfully when I saw it that it has stayed with me for years:  A girl, Yeniffer, is abused by her father, forced to live in a pig pen, and yet, when a stranger comes to take her away Yennifer is despondent.  As the viewer, we already know this stranger is actually someone who ultimately helps Yennifer find a better life.  I have often considered why it is that Yennifer is so reluctant to leave when she has such a shit life.

It’s a shit life, literally, filled with pig shit, but its ‘HERS’ what she is accustomed to. In the end, no one wants to lose what they have, no matter how meager it is. Human tendency is to cling even when letting go may offer us something better. I rather keep trying to be some rotating version of an alana than lose my sense of self, even through those identities, those births keep me mired in a shitty, painful, world.

Ever since I caught covid, my long-time health problems have gotten worse. After exams, and extensive appointments with specialists, I was finally diagnosed with an immune disorder –Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. It is an illness mediated by allergic pathways in the body; in short, my body overreacts to low levels of toxins in my environment. Even short exposures to everyday substances like mold, smoke, cleaning products and fragrance can trigger my immune system to ‘protect me’  with the release of chemicals that cause symptoms from eye issues to breathing problems, chest pain to vertigo.

I was talking to Mae Neecha about my illness and she said that we are all just heir to our karma. She talked about her own health, mentioning that she has hives a lot. She knows she is the kind of person who secretly curses others, with a common curse wishing for others discomfort, or having their skin crawl. To her it is no surprise that now her own skin crawls. She talked about Mae Yo too; she is the kind of person who doesn’t silently curse, she is more direct ‘bonk on the head’, she has the kind of personality –and the ensuing behaviors – that explain the terrible car accident she suffered.

I thought more about my own disease. My body ‘thinks’ it is protecting me against bad stuff in the environment, but it’s made me too sensitive, it has made me sick. I realize that, in this one lifetime I can think of example I have done this same thing to others…

I once adopted a stray cat that came to my door regularly looking for food I took her in, I brought her to the veterinarian, and I learned she was diabetic. Needing shots, special food, I forced this outdoor cat to be an indoor cat, for her protection of course. That cat would cry at the door to get out, but I self-righteously kept her safely locked away, ignoring her unhappiness as I stoked my ego with stories of compassionate-alana-the-cat-rescuer.  

Not long after the cat died, never having the pleasure to go outside again. Now of course, I regret my behavior. I see the wrong view, the self-identity I was so determined to bolster that I did not care that the cost was another being’s suffering. But, this is so my personality…

This tendency of mine appears in the story that launched my practice: Homeless Alana. I was so fixated on being compassionate that I didn’t ever stop to consider that the homeless man I regularly hugged and gave food to may not want my hugs, may have not wanted my attentions at all. I assumed because I would want to be treated a certain way if I were homeless, I should treat him the same way.  In my mind, my behaviors protected him, not just with physical food, but protected his dignity; but again, for my own ego and self-aggrandizement, I gave someone what I thought they needed/wanted without ever actually considering them.

In fact this is a deep and troubling pattern has created ongoing stress in my marriage.  Over and over, I try to be a good wife to Eric by acting in ways I think protect him, that I think benefit him, despite Eric telling me this is not what he wants, despite the fact that I hurt him with these behaviors. The examples are too many to innumerate here, but one biggie comes to mind…

Back when we moved to NY I was so depressed, angry, miserable and melt-downy, I thought Eric would be better off without me. I didn’t want him to have to sacrifice his career by leaving NY with me, but I also didn’t want him to continue to be exposed to toxic NY Alana. To protect him from both fates, I offered to leave him. To go back to San Fran alone. In my mind, I did this out of love. In reality, Eric felt abandoned and devastated. Though our relationship has ‘moved past’ this point, I know it still haunts both us, and him. It is one of the moments I most deeply regret in my life.

Snowflakes have long been a powerful ubai in my practice. When I consider this illness, I see that, sickness is universal, a necessary result of any birth. It is just like the fact that rain that hits 32 degrees will turn to snow, it is the result of the nature of water and the freezing temperature. But, like a particularly shaped snowflake, the specific shapes of each person’s disease is unique. I am clearly suffering a disease of my karma.

I heard a really interesting news piece on NPR. It was about how plants have agency; they use information from their environment, mixed with past experiences, to shape their behavior for the future. They seem to have an active stake in the outcome of their life and they have the tendency to, and the means for, shaping that future. They are able to change how their bodies look, they can change conditions that they create for their offspring, change the direction they grow or the way they allocate nutrients.

As I listened to the article, it dawned on me that I have held a mistaken view: I have been mistaking agency for control. Afterall, even if you buy that plants have agency, no one would believe a plant, tethered to the ground on which it grows, fully dependent on the elements for its ultimate survival, is in charge of its fate, no matter how invested in it the plant may be. And I have a strong level of suspicion that self, without self-determination, is utterly meaningless. I mean really –arising, existing, continually changing, dying, buffeted by circumstances outside of my control, if that is reality, then what do I think ‘I’ am?

But me, I assume my ability to make educated plans for the future, and then act on those, is part of who I am. I build pride, ego, based on the degree to which I am successful in achieving the outcomes I plan for and desire. Here’s the thing though, even plants can do this, so how special is it? Is this really the grounds upon which to build an identity. This is who I am, and the animals, and the plants, and the viruses…

A few weeks later I was talking to another practitioner about a problem she was having. The details aren’t critical; the main point of the problem is that over and over again she felt hurt when her kid did something she didn’t like and proud when he did something she liked. She was stuck in a loop of identifying herself with, building her identity off of, her child.

 As I thought about it, I saw that this is really the plant problem. Just because she is invested in the kid’s future, she can, and has, acted in ways that have impacted his future, it doesn’t mean she controls her son. Even more subtly though, it doesn’t mean her son reflects who she is as a mother, or as a cause: It just means that like so much else in this world, she can want an outcome and in so far as situations allow ( i.e. sometimes) be a factor, or even a cause, of temporarily achieving that outcome. Her and me and the viruses and the trees…This is what is natural. Or, in terms that resonate with me even more, this is what is conditional. How do I know?

An effect can die and/or change independently of the cause and a cause independently of an effect. This is pretty obvious: My friend’s kid could die and she live on. Or going the other way: A tree can thrive after its seed is gone. Even if a tree, or a child, is dependent on a cause for arising, after inception, it continues rolling along based on its own causes and conditions. Its own karma.

This is proof an effect doesn’t belong to the cause. Can not define the cause. Proves nothing at all other than that at one point, the causes (and conditions) for achieving that effect were met. A tree proves there was once a seed. A child proves there was once a mother. The shape these things twist and grow into, or if they grow at all, is due to countless new arisings of circumstance –causes and conditions—some of which may, or may not be, due to the continued influences of what birthed it.

Being a cause is normal, everything in this world is both a cause and an effect. It’s not special at all. I love to ignore all the shit I cause that I don’t like – my own shit is in fact a literal example: I don’t look in the toilet after every bowel movement taking pride it that poop. I don’t believe it defines who I am. Why not? I’m the cause. If I want to claim the fit body I think I caused by the workouts, the A+ I caused by my studying, don’t I need to claim everything I cause as who I am?  

I claim what I am proud of, use it to boost atta, just by being a cause to effects I adore. But it’s arbitrary. Back when I lived in San Fran, I took so much pride in knowing the city like the back of my hand. I was an SFer, how did I know? I could point to every secret staircase, each hidden gem restaurant, all the public bathrooms, and feel pride, proof of ownership. But isn’t that all just an effect of walking the city, of time spent there, of priding myself in getting to know the city because I am already inclined to identify with places? This is not identity, this is just my tendency to build atta, on the causes and effect I am already drawn to claiming.

Conditionality shows why being a cause doesn’t equate to ownership.  Why It can’t prove self. Because everything that is conditional arises based on conditions, and as those shift, so too does the effect. When those dictate the effect ends, it ends. Even I  cause something, that cause itself, and the effect, are continually subject to conditions. Conditions always shifting, not under my control.

When I lived in SF, I had agency in relation to the city: I was able to work towards a future living there, to work towards knowing it, to adjust myself to the environment, to plan and react and try to shape my fate vis-a-vie this place. The only difference between me and the plant, however, is that I  was foolish enough to begin to take prided in that agency. To begin to believe that happens naturally, based on causes and conditions, could somehow be WHO I AM. With agency I stoke atta and yet the nature of agency, and its limitations, are the proof that it can’t be who I am