Alana's Dharma Blog

Several times, over the last few weeks, friends of my mom’s would come to visit her and upon meeting me they would pull down their masks and then ask me to pull down mine, demanding to let them see my face. This is in the ICU, hospitals, nursing care facilities –high risk places for myself, for my mom, for countless other folks around.

To be honest, it made me angry at first, violated, that someone would ask me to incur such risk/put so many at risk just so they could have the satisfaction of seeing my face. But it just happened so many times, I got to thinking a bit more about the dynamics.

It dawned on me these were my mom’s friends — they wanted to connect, to know me and be known by me. Seeing the face was a proxy for intimacy, for exposing self/identity. For identity, we incur risk.

I’m as vain as they come, and yet in this context, the absurdity of using flesh and bone as a proxy for self was so clear: These people don’t need to see my face, its not me, its not who I am.

How is it that if this basic fact is so clear in the hospital context, it isn’t clear all the time? Why do I persist with the botox and fillers, stress over each wrinkle, pluck every gray hair. Why don’t I always see the truth that the face, the body, is no proxy for who I am.

Even in the right view, this face is not who I am, there is a wrong view underlying it. That I can claim identity as I see fit: I will adjust my sense of self to circumstance. When there is too great a risk, I’ll happily say this face isn’t me. But when I see old friends, show up to an event — when some part of me either wants/ or feels compelled — to be judged by the degree of my success in maintaining my figure and my face, then I can’t see the truth. In those moments I claim this face as mine, as a representative of who I am.

I am continually trying to read the world, to adjust to it. It is like each moment I head to my closet, survey my clothes, try to pick out what rupa thing I can put on to be who I want to be, to prove that identity to others. In most cases, the first thing I grab to ‘put-on’ is this face, this body. In the hospital I was so quick to say this is not me. Why? Because saying it, needing to unmask it to assert myself, was a danger. This is not the clear view of rupa is not self. This is the doubly deluded view I can build a self, use rupa to do it, and that both rupa and self will adapt to my desires, priorities and needs.

At the core of Buddha’s teachings are the 3 common characteristics: Dukkha, impermanence (anicca)  and no self (anatta). These, as their name implies, are the fabric of this world, the fundamental truths to which everyone and everything is subject. All of our ignorance, and the resulting dukkha we experience, arises because we don’t understand the 3 common characteristics, we don’t see how we are subject to them.

I catch myself all the time, imagining there is some workaround, some way to — if not entirely avoid these three marks of existence — bend them to my will, experience them on my terms, at least eke out a little management of duration. This my friends is the OG poison, the heart of my delusions, the basis of misunderstanding. This is the most fundamental wrong view that the entire path of practice is meant to help us uproot.

For me anyway, anatta is the most subtle of these 3 characteristics. The hardest for me to get my head around. Mae Yo talks about it in terms of un-clumping. In one of my favorite sermon clips, LP Thoon says, “Annata as nothing belongs to us. Everything is meaningless.” Over time, I have started to understand anatta in terms of conditionality — what is conditional arises based on conditions, exists and shifts dependent on conditions and then ceases when the conditions for cessation have been met. But I am getting ahead of myself here…

I  started my practice becoming intimate with impermanence, and finally achieved some clarity around dukkha, it certainly seemed time to begin pressing harder on anatta. So in this next chapter, I will share my budding explorations of anatta. Of course, what is new, is just an extension of what is old – so here we go, once again, back to self and self belonging.