Eric and I decided to do a spa day at a fancy hotel in Miami. As we entered through the spa doors it felt like we were transported to a Spanish palace garden– a candle-lit courtyard dotted with lush trees, surrounding a fountain. A deep wave of relaxation washed over me, I hadn’t even had a spa treatment yet and I was already feeling as pampered as royalty. And then, suddenly I “sobered-up” and realized we were still indoors. My mind recoiled a bit, everything about the scene was so familiar –reminiscent of the perfect Spanish garden — even though I knew we never walked out of the building, I had mentally processed the place as being outdoors. I had processed it as a place of luxury and comfort and royal pampering, like the countless historic castles I had visited in Spain. My eyes saw familiar trappings– rupa — and my memory and imagination (nama) filled-in “realities” that weren’t actually real. I had literally caught my mind in the act of manufacturing meaning in my surroundings, and then getting me to swallow my made-up fantasy, even with abundant evidence (like never leaving the building) that proved those fantasies as false.
All this got me to think about some of the other places I manufacture meaning in rupa: I convince myself cleanliness =safety even though plenty of dangerous things can happen in a clean place. I convince myself that being fed hot food means someone loves me, even though every restaurant is in the business of serving up food not love. And then of course is the issue of this body — a shifting aggregation of elements that somehow I have pegged as “me” and “mine” despite all evidence to the contrary.
For months now I have tried to ‘sober-up’ my mind , to understand this body isn’t mine. That it is a 4e object that belongs to this world. That it is not special, that it can’t prove I am special. That I don’t control it, that I can’t rely on it, that ultimately it will go its way and I will go mine. Still, despite all this evidence, I cling to this body and I can’t even figure out exactly why I do. It is a body that causes pain, that embarrasses me, that I worry about and stress over constantly, still I can’t divorce skin suit from the identity of Alana. Now, though, upon seeing the way my mind manufactures meaning in/from objects I am starting to understand why I can’t just ‘let go’ of the body– this body is part of the Alana construct. I need the body for the meaning I overlay onto it. No body, no Alana.
For so long I have thought about rupa and I have thought about nama, but separately. Now I see that that it is nama and rupa together that create atta, they create my sense of an Alana self. More specifically, nama, overlays the Alana identity onto this body. So of course I want it to be pretty, healthy, alive — the body it is bound to the construct of who and what I think I am. Because I love “Alana” I cling to this skin suit.
Once I assume a body is Alana, or at least the scaffolding that holds an Alana together, I have to start assuming that body is somehow special. My mind uses mental gymnastics that I have seen play out again and again (See Past Blog on
The Relationship Between Desire, Clinging, Mine and Self for a more in-depth dive of the mechanics) whereby I claim this as mine, or in this case sorta ‘me’, and with that label I ‘read’ in a meaning of special so that I can conveniently ignore the evidence that this body, like every other body, will decay and decline and is liable to disappear at any moment. Afterall, no one wants an object –better yet one they build an identity off of –that can just up and leave them at any moment.
All this special-bull-shit-delusion is to make this entire endeavor of being and birthing and becoming seem like it has a point, like it isn’t just futile. But no matter what my mind reads into the body, into the world, the efforts to become really are futile because the reality I am choosing to ignore is the reality of annicca (impermanence) . This body is subject to impermanence, to dissolution and decay — it is in fact the ticking timebomb that insures that my carefully curated Alana construct will one of these days implode. Rupa+Nama may= Atta, but the truth of this world is anatta. The truth in an indoor room, an uncertain future, no matter what meaning my mind manufactures, no matter what illusions my imagination cooks up. I just need to keep pushing my mind to sober-up.
