MN: I like this! And yeah, there seems to be an issue with how you define “bad” and “good”. Do you use the same standards to judge others as well? Or is it more about beating up Alana?

AD: I am judgmental as hell on if people are being good/bad (by the ole’ alana standard) although my practice has minimized this greatly (mostly by my finding evidence I am no better than those I judge, I have double standards. This helps my casting the stones outward, but obviously not inward). But there is no one I am less forgiving of than myself. That is why Eric essentially asked if I would be so harsh thinking about my dhamma friends.

When I look at every major meltdown story, this is Alana being good enough (selfless enough, sacrifices enough, equanimities enough, restrained enough) is the hot button. All the way back to homeless alana — do I protect myself or be compassionate enough?

Good is a defining trait for me. It is what I strive for, it is what I think I am deficient in. Even beauty, which is another biggie is tied to goodness — on some crazy level, I think beauty is won by/ physically manifests goodness ( I have no answer to Ivanka Trump).

I deal with this again and again. But these days, I know to look. It used to be this view could lurk in the background wrecking havoc unwatched. But this time it only took me a few days to see it pop up…

MN: “Good” for each person is different. What matters for us is our specific brand of “good”: For Mae Yo it is metta – saving others, sacrificing, being the hero/leader.

For me it is order and sacca – everything in its place and being honest and literal, punishing bad and rewarding good.

For you it seems to be about … compassion and beauty and safety/security?

AD: I would say for me good is compassion, willingness to self-sacrifice for others, doing duty/ fulfilling roles (often to make others pleased: here is where good Buddhist, good daughter, good employee, etc.) and consideration.

I then value certain  traits that I think allows one to ACT good. In other word, do behaviors I think reflect good regardless of ones desires/ thoughts or emotional state. In fact, the more you can ‘slog through good’, the better the action is ( hence my discount of good actions I actually want to do). Extreme will power is an example of these ‘helper’ traits — it helps suppress reluctance to do the  ‘right thing’ when faced with a choice. The homeless alana story, was a failure of will : I should overcome my selfish /desire for safety in order to act compassionate by giving a hug.  Just like I can train and force my body through discipline and hard workouts/diet I should be able to train my heart to Just Do It.

Or equanimity, which I was so self- hating that I lacked in NY, if I had it I could be calm, suck up a situation I hated and not burden Eric.

AD: Beauty in relation to goodness, it is a marker, a sign in people who have it — outer beauty reflects inner goodness. Not solely, beauty has other aspects for me, but there is definitely a cookie for goodness element.

Safety/security/ comfort is my other deep driver. It is what I want, what I seek in this world –for myself and how it ‘should be’ for others. But my quest for it is ‘bad’ it is my dirty little secret that I am so desperate for it. In my crazy-funhouse mind want for safety/security/comfort is the arch nemesis of Goodness. Homeless Alana truly has it all as stories go: I was a failure, not the good me I want to be, because I didn’t have the will power to forgo my impulses to protect myself from disease and compassionately comfort the homeless guy.

I feel guilty regularly that the security/safety/comfort side is usually the winner in my stories. I want to protect myself from my Mom, so I am reserved and limit contact. If I were a good daughter I could make her happy by enduring endless abuse to satisfy her desire for my company.

I hoard money, which is a proxy for safety for me. Why can’t I be a good person and give more of it away to help others. Proof again that I am a bad alana. Obviously, I have spent some time on this topic ;). But if I were to self-diagnose — it is noteworthy that I never deal with view, only action.

I have a split world –compassion/other centric versus safe/comfortable that exists in my mind (probably only on my mind). Is defined by my traits and behaviors of my own choosing. And then I continually test/ challenge my self — try to build an identity–around my ability to force my behavior. People who can sufficiently force get cookies. Others whammies. Alana is crappy at forcing. How could I deserve the ultimate cookie of enlightenment?

Or, another way to look at it is that I think goodness is acting the results. Hence acting compassionately. If I can’t act the results that I assume (all in my mind here) are the results of enlightenment, how can I ever hope to achieve enlightenment? This is all crazy btw. I see it as I write it.

MN: It seems you can’t let yourself win. How exhausting. Why do you think you choose to practice results? Is it easier, or do you think of it as fake it till you make it? Or do you not recognize what the cause is…And if you did recognize it would you do the cause? Or does action mean more to you than view? Or is it that action seems to be more easily perceived by others? And you need others to be supporting actors in your drama? To prove your goodness?

AD: Well, its definitely not ‘fake it till you make it’, that feels like being a fraud and I hate feeling like a fraud. It’s also definitely not easier — harder is what helps prove goodness, and harder is what comfort hates. View means more in my heart, but action, being able to suck it up and overcome, is how I define myself. That set of just do it, suck it up actions, that is what proves I AM GOOD.

MN: It seems like you’re damning yourself if you do, damning yourself if you don’t. If you do what you want, that’s bad because you’re giving into desires. If you don’t do what you want, you think you’re a good person but at a painful cost. But it isn’t about forcing yourself to not do something that makes it good. It is measured by intention, action, and result. Not everything that is difficult or painful is good.

AD: I want so bad to be something that no matter what I do I don’t think I am, or at least I am not enough — good. I guess I have always felt helpless to change the view — the desires — so I have tried to fortify myself with qualities I think will change the behavior. This is actually what drew me to our style of practice – I had never before considered changing my views, but upon reflection, it seems so logical, so doable.

MN:  Behavior changes when you see enough evidence of TTP, or see how ridiculous/impossible/illogical your view is. Forcing behavior can help, but it only helps if it enables you to see the results of a different path you’d normally take – like evidence that you’d normally not get to see if you continue to choose your go-to option. Forcing behavior isn’t sustainable.

AD: Yes I totally hear you on this. My practice ah-ha moments are really so often about seeing how ridiculous my beliefs are. Or how injurious their consequences are.  If I were to self-diagnose again…this is super deep and pervasive tendencies for me. Since starting this practice I see a different path: View first. I have worked on it diligently. But these issues are dragons. I go back and forth on if I should stir them and face them, or if I should let them lie and come back when I am stronger. But this good verse bad, other-centric versus self-centric, is how I define myself and the world.

MN:  I wonder how much proof you have that the rest of the world operates or confirms your views? It seems you’ve tied yourself in knots being so unforgiving toward yourself. Why can’t you forgive yourself? Why such strict/impossible standards? Society and the laws of karma are much more straightforward. When I can’t forgive myself it is because I think I’m likely to repeat the same mistake.

Control freak does not mean good, though. It’s impossible to control everything. Exhausting and not practical, too. Believe me, I’ve tried. I think I prefer the world’s system, with its checks and balances, to my flawed system.

AD: I am quite contrite, especially when something I have done hurts others…it’s not my intention. The act usually stops cold there, so its not about the concern that I will repeat. I think it is about the fact that I believe revenge/ justice/ punishment is necessary. That is why the whammy side of karma scares me so much: Who will dole out harsher punishment than I for myself?

MN: How much punishment is enough?

AD: Spoken like someone with clarity 😉 But seriously — I try to find evidence of the world systems, and a lot of the times I read it through my funhouse mirror mind. This is the trap of my own wrong views — I am continually reading the world through them, so my readings are wrong.

That was the big gift of seeing that working out so much only proves that I think ‘working out =extreme will’, not that it ACTUALLY means working out equals extreme willpower. This was the first time I actually saw saw saw how twisted-up and convincing my own delusions are.

Usually, I have a plan for tackling stuff, I honestly don’t have one for this issue yet. But I do suspect the world is full of evidence it doesn’t operate according to my view.

I also see that since I started practice, I have only dealt the hydra heads of this issue –this notion of goodness/badness and worthiness/unworthiness –I have tamped them down just enough to keep practicing when my sense of unworthiness gets in the way.

First the Ongalimara stories, and the recent take two on the Muggapaka Jataka, are the first times I am starting to see goodness is not the defining feature of practice. It is not the goal. It is not even — in so far as we are talking about Alana’s version of goodness — the effect.

It took me aback to see that Ongalimara wasn’t a 1-off, accidental, dick. He had the tendency of murder deeply; he just also had a parallel tendency of wisdom. And the idea that self-sacrifice in Muggapaka Jataka had zero to do with being virtuous for it’s own sake, and everything to do with avoiding future suffering, was also mind blowing. It is like I am just now absorbing the fact this practice has the goal of elimination of suffering. Which is, if we judged by my own standards, selfish…

I’m impatient as hell, so I hate to say it, but maybe I just need time. View and understanding are already shifting, just not at the pace I want (which is always finished and done yesterday ;))

Huh… I always thought the wanting-to-be-good-alana ‘side’ drove my desire to practice, but maybe it is the comfort/safety ‘side’ that is the driver. Or probably this world and alana aren’t really fractured warring poles at the end of the day.

MN:  Gotta find more like this, then. They are part of the same view. Maybe you see being good as a kind of security.

AD: For sure. Security of folks loving me and caring for me & security of ‘deserving’ cookies/ good things to happen to me. But also I see goodness as an identity. I was thinking more today, and I wonder if I make it unwinnable on purpose — that way I always have more room to become…I define my success/identity/goodness through action, in part, because there are always more actions. Like when we saw that Lute maker clip — I never thought of being good in that way before, once I saw it my feeling is it was a call out, ‘ alana go be good like that dude’.

MN: Then maybe it is about proving whether goodness necessarily leads to security. Like the lokatissa monk – his one bad act made him go to hell and be reborn as a dog for 500 lifetimes, but immediately thereafter he was human and enlightened. The bad was huge, but he also had good in there that secured him that arahant spot. It is a mix. He was enlightenment and still never had a full meal…security but no security.

Or phra devadatta. He will be reborn as a paccekabuddha immediately after an eternity in the lowest hell. He’s definitely not the poster child for good, yet he’s secured a spot even higher than normal arahants despite all his extremely evil karma. In fact, I’d say evil is a prerequisite for enlightenment more than good. You don’t want to get enlightened when everything is good. Just like you don’t want to leave happiness with Eric.

It’s that you are bad and suffer the consequences and want to get out. And how do you get out? By doing good? Not by doing good or by upholding the precepts first. Wisdom is the prerequisite. You can become enlightened by just realizing the truth of a wrong viewpoint. No goodness required.

AD: Oh, I suspect I have been bad, suffered the consequences many many times already and at that fork in the road, where you decide how to get out, I thought ‘be ‘good’ instead of ‘fix the view’. Now I see I need to fix the view.

So where do I go from here? Or Maybe that isn’t a fair question to ask someone else…

MN: More of what works. If stories like Angulimara help, find more. Or focus on that theme in whatever you are watching/reading.

AD: So I guess my instinct is to look at the evidence of if the world does/doesn’t confirm my rather binary views on good/bad.

MN: Yeah, that’s basically the big idea

AD: Ok I know starting with Rupa works. I know my daily self-assigned exercises to find examples of whatever I am contemplating on in my day works. Which is sorta like having a theme in mind for everything I see/ read/ do. That and just not quitting works quite well for me: both in Dhamma and worldly pursuits.

MN: Rupa is the foundation for understanding how common and not unique we are. If we are all subject to the same worldly laws, then your strict alana laws can’t possibly be the standard.

AD: Yah, I already know I need to hammer this home.