A few bits from some sermons from LP Thoon have really struct me lately. The first was in a sermon on how to get to heaven. He basically said you could do good deeds and not get to heaven. Why? Attachment. You cling to things from this life and then you end up reborn with them. If you want to go to heaven, the way to do it is to relinquish attachment.

In a second sermon on the 3 common characteristics, he explained Annata as, “Nothing belongs to us. Everything is meaningless.” Then he asks how is it meaningless? Leaving the question open for the listener to answer for themselves.

I started thinking along these lines: How nothing belongs to me, how to stop clinging, how to understand the idea that everything is meaningless. The next few blogs will cover some of these contemplations.

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I was thinking about the new house I recently purchased in Miami. I realized that it is only convention that makes it mine. By law, I hold a deed, I have a right to use it. But despite the law, it can be taken from me at any time. In this world, it is normal for there to be floods, fires, thieves, civil unrest, imminent domain confiscations, etc. These things don’t give a damn about my deed. The law can’t make the home truly mine if it can be taken away at any time.

What is more is that by law, I also have rights to an Airbnb I rent for a week, or my old Greenwich rental apartment — there is some legally binding contract letting me stay for a time. So why do I imagine so strongly that the home is more ‘mine’ than the rentals? These are all just places I can lay my head while circumstances allow. Places the norms, laws and conventions of our society govern the use of, to the extent they are able.

In my imagination, the home becomes something I will use on my terms, whereas the rentals I must use on someone else’s. But is the house really usable ‘on my terms’? Do my terms dictate if and when I can use the house? In the case I am forced out by a flood –is that really my terms? What about needing to leave because of bankruptcy or rezoning? Shit, this has already happened to me once before: Construction and asthma forced me out of an apartment I had rights to, a contract I had dutifully upheld with monthly rent payments. Why do I imagine the house to be different?

Even while I am able to use the house, can I use it entirely on my terms? Aren’t there already limitations, by city ordinance, by neighbors, by the physical realities of the construction, by my budget, that all govern its use? In the end, the house is something I use temporarily, no more mine than other places I use temporarily. A deed — a legal document, only confers any meaning in conventional, societal terms.

Yesterday, Justice Clarence Thonmas started talking about appealing abortion rights. For decades, women in America have had the right to an abortion –to dictate how we use our body vis-a-vie pregnancy. Now, in one court ruling, decide by 9 total strangers, my body rights, the body rights of all American women,
can be limited.

The rallying call of the pro-abortion movement has long been, “my body, my right”. But when I really consider it, I see a thinly veiled truth behind these words: These aren’t really my rights. If they were my rights, they couldn’t be denied by a law, or by society. They would be a matter of fact, not circumstance and convention. And if I don’t actually have rights to this body, if it is controlled –ALL THE FUCKING TIME –by the state, by social norms, by viruses, by aging cells, by the constant, exhausting, need for food and sleep and shelter, is it mine?

In a context where I don’t control the use of something, when I am bound to interact with it on someone/thing else’s terms, where I have no actual rights to it, when even my ‘reasonable expectations’ for use can be dashed by a construction project, a court ruling, a medical diagnosis –anything, anywhere outside of my control – I’m not so sure I should be calling that mine. Mine is conventional, like a deed. Truth is that convention is ultimately meaningless, a hurricane doesn’t give a damn whether both myself and the state call the house mine.