With that tooth pain gone, I got to thinking more clearly, and I couldn’t help think more about what it was that tooth could teach me. Specifically my mind turned toward the relationship between form and imagination. You see, in the weeks prior to the tooth extraction I had begun to consider the question of where my stress in life comes from –what exactly is the cause of my dukka? With the extraction, it was so clear that the cause of my pain was the tooth, but the cause of my stress, that was all imagination.

Rupa is an essential ingredient to my stress of course, it is what I fixate on, what I obsessive over. It is the skin spots that prompt my concern over skin cancer, the lump that I stress might be breast cancer, or the leg cramps that turns my mind towards thrombosis: I have this body and I don’t want to loose it. But clearly the body,  with all its spots and lumps and cramps,  isn’t the cause of my stress –imagination is the real culprit.  Imagination must be  the cause of my  non physical dukkha because without imagination dreading the worst –assigning meaning and portending the future — all the lumps and bumps in the world couldn’t cause stress.

Imagination is sorta a double whammy though: It doesn’t just imagine the worst while I wait for biopsy results to come in. Imagination has the naughty tendency to imagine only the best, ignoring the worst, right up until I read the rupa ‘signs’ of illness and danger. That all-sunshine-and-rainbow side of imagination, the side that ignores a sky that also has storms, is what gets me into trouble in the first place. Ex 1: The country home Eric and I tried to rent (Blog About it Here), when we signed the lease it was the joys of the quiet and the fresh country air, only after I had moved in to find rodent droppings near the laundry, did I begin to imagine –to stress– about how to deal with a mouse infestation during a pandemic. Ex 2: Eric and I moved to NY imagining the exciting, eventful, cool, artsy life we would have there. Only after we moved did I see my imagination had left our the filth, the noise, the bustle that came hand-in-hand with such an artsy, event filled city.

I have this body, because  I craved the experiences I imagined I  would have with it. Imagination is why, after being born into this body, a shifting arrangement of four elements, I claimed it, said it was me/mine. Imagination of what will come next, of further living, and becoming, and enjoying, make me cling all the more tightly.  But right up till I experience it, my imagination glosses the tooth pain, the stress of worrying about more pain, worrying about loss of a part of this body –and eventually the whole thing. This imagination that I live for, that gives me identity, that gives me hope actually stresses me the fuck out. Why should I live for something, be born for something, that brings me so much suffering?

A long time ago, Mae Yo asked me, “What does rupa do to people?” Now I see, rupa is the clay nama uses to construct its fantasy world. It is the props in the imagination’s story line. It is the match that sets my heart ablaze. But fire can’t start without fuel. You could throw matches at an empty firepit, devoid of kindling, all day long and never get a spark. Rupa is just 4 elements, an empty firepit. It is my imagination that allows for my heart to be set ablaze with stress, and the hope that gives rise to it. And hope, fantasy, all my imagined delights, are come at the heavy, hidden, cost of STRESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!