I had only a brief moment of feeling triumphant —  having conquered Mae Yo’s seemingly impossible homework assignment about how the aggregates work — when I realized, I now had an even bigger question…Why? I mean seriously, why do I create  a sense of self and then bolster it using some crazy ass mental acrobatics ( i.e. aggregates of memory (3) and imagination (4))? Why bother with this self-stuff? Why bother getting born?

Try as I might I was stumped so I did go to Mae Yo and Neecha, “Whyyyyyyyy-ey-ey-ey!”

This next entry is the guidance they provided me and the few that follow are my early contemplations on why and how I create this self. This is a very ongoing contemplation so it is not quite as ‘buttoned-up’ as some of my other stories, but it lays an important groundwork for future contemplations so I will do my best to get it out here and make it clear(ish).

 

Mae Yo’s Suggestions/More Homework

So spoiler alert, Neecha basically told me the answer to my question up-front. It went something like, “We create a self to maximize pleasure/happiness and avoid pain” I remember answering, “seriously, that’s it?”

Mae Yo then went one step further than answering the why by giving me contemplations on how to stop, essentially, to evaluate the cost. Here is what I wrote down:

Things arise and cease too fast for us to understand. So we need to take a biopsy, look at a single section and take a closer look. See where is comes from and what the problem really is.

We try to avoid suffering/ impermanence. But clearly we can’t. What we can do is use suffering as a tool to leave this cycle (rebirth). Like using snake poison as an antidote, we can use suffering to teach ourselves the undesirable aspects of being born.

We get born for such a short period of happiness, is it worth it. Mae Yo then walked through a personal example using my life:

I am the oldest of 2 children, I loved my parents, wanted their attention. I was born and enjoyed that undivided attention for 4 years before my little brother was born. Then, for the next 30+ years, I was no longer the center of my parent’s universe. I lost what I had, what I loved, what I sent myself up to be born into…

All you need to do is pay attention to what happiness really is, its duration and if it’s worth it.  With that I was given the following homework:

1. Figure out where my mind visits often, my memories/fantasies. The places my mind visits most often are my biggest addictions. Identify them and find the suffering in them.
2. How long is the suffering versus happiness. Just like in the story with my brother and I, it is important to see that I got 4 years I wanted and then another 34 that were less than my ideal of being the center of my parent’s attention.
3. How do we repeat the cycle? Neecha gave an example, someone allergic to nuts, they love the taste but when they eat them they itch and their face swells and they have pain. Still though, some people can’t stop eating them. In general, what we have done is what we keep doing, we never think through the cost.  They want the flavor and ignore the suffering. It is how we all perpetuate our pain. Use snapshots from my real life to see the suffering and try and be done with it.

Next week we will see how I fared with this assignment…

Alana’s Later Addition Note: So, I just want to connect a few dots here and make explicit the connections between the aggregates, the illusion of self (wrong view) and suffering. Through these were not terribly clear at the time of this contemplation, I think my adding a little more filler info will serve you Dear Reader, so let’s recap.

In Buddhism, the self is considered an illusion (remember the exercise of trying to find baby and prom night and day dad died Alana? ). The reality is we are just a continual flow of arising and ceasing. This belief in self is a deep wrong view. As we know, wrong views cause suffering (there is a whole blog about this ;)) and since the goal of this Buddhism thing is to escape suffering we had best correct our view of the self. That’s the overview.

The aggregates are the process by which we hide our/the world’s true nature (continually changing) from ourselves. These aggregates, especially our memory and our imagination, sell the lie that we have a self. Mae Yo asked me to go and investigate them so I could understand the mechanics of my self delusion in order to be better equipped to fight it (it’s like knowing the tools my enemy uses so I can better strategize how to win a war). Once I saw the how,the next question was why.

The answer to why was given to me — I create and sustain myself because I think it will make me happy. Really, it’s the same reason any of us do anything. Mae Yo then gave me contemplations to help me stop creating the self — look at the suffering that comes with the happiness and the motivation for continued thrill seeking becomes lesser and lesser. Bringing us to the homework in the next section…