This a continuation of the last blog. If you haven’t read previously then please go back and read ‘Interruption Part 16’.

My Dear Reader, I thank you for bearing with me on this looooonnnggg interruption in our regularly scheduled program (an orderlyish, linearish blog tracing my meandering dhamma path), this will be the last posting in our Post-Retreat Interruption Series. It is simply a brief reflection of what I have come to understand my path to be.

A long time ago, I asked Mae Neecha what it really meant to eliminate sakkāya-diṭṭhi (first fetter – self-view – necessary to be eliminated in order to become a sotapanna). She replied, “I would define sakkyaditthi as the view that you are at the center of the universe and understanding/conquering sakkyaditthi is understanding that you alone are the cause of your suffering and wrong perceptions. Eliminating the sakkyaditthi fetter is seeing that there’s a huge difference between your perception of the truth and the actual truth.”

Now, years later, this answer is starting to make more and more sense to me.

We inhabit a rupa body in a rupa world. In this world, elements are constantly interacting. They are shifting. They are decaying and building new forms. They consume and they become consumed. There are predictable patterns, a balance that exists in a world where things arise from the earth and return to it, a zero-sum equation. There are rules, and to be born into this world is to be subject to these rules. I go through life pretending my objects will obey me, my body will obey me, but there is no amount of effort/ self-deception, that will ultimately make me master of this world( not even my little corner of it). The world simply does not revolve around me.

Even more years ago, Mae Yo taught me about the nama aggregates — especially memory (3) and imagination (4). She checked my homework, she drilled me continually, she made sure I was fluent in how they work. Now, I am starting to understand why.

It is because memory and imagination are integral to the process by which I concoct the delusion that the world revolves around me. With nama’s help, in my head, I reshape the world: I substitute reality with my ‘shoulds’/ notions about how things ‘ought’ to be, and I turn a blind-eye to what the world actually is. Nama is the blinders I put on that help me drown out the ugly bits of this world that lurk just outside my rose-colored glasses. Nama is the elixir I take that gets me believing a lovely single-snapshot-moment can be had and kept and repeated forever.

This path is the process of opening my eyes and seeing the world for what it actually is, not for what I want it to be. I suppose I am also understanding why Mae Neecha told me, “This is why Luang Por told Mae Yo, “ Rupa and Nama, 50/50.” Once we understand the tangible and intangible, we’ll have the whole picture.”