Into the Heart of Life (2 page)

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Impermanence

The disciples said, “The leaves in the jungle are infinite, and the leaves you are holding in your hand are so few.”

The Buddha said, “That is analogous to how much I have realized and how much I am telling you. But still, what I am telling you is all that you need to attain your own liberation.”

We should understand that from all the vast expanse of knowledge the Buddha attained when his mind completely opened up in his enlightenment experience, he selected those elements which were the most essential, the most important for us to understand in order to become liberated from this realm of birth and death.

At the beginning of his mission, the Buddha emphasized what are called the three marks or the three signs of existence, three characteristics of everything within our experience which we habitually and persistently deny. The first sign of existence is dissatisfaction. Life as we normally lead it in our confused and very disturbed manner is not satisfactory. It is
dukkha
. Dukkha is the opposite of
sukha
, which means ease, pleasure, everything going nicely. It doesn’t exactly mean happiness; it is more a sense of things going smoothly. And dukkha is the opposite of that. It is dis-ease. It’s when things don’t go the way we want them to go. But of course things unfold as they do whether we like it or not. This underlying dissatisfaction is one of the main qualities of our existence as unenlightened beings.

The second sign of existence is impermanence. The third sign of existence is that nothing in itself has self-existence. In other words, we try to solidify everything. We try to solidify external objects, and we especially try to solidify ourselves. Almost automatically we create a seemingly solid inner core which we call “I” and set everything to revolve around: I think this; I feel this; I am this; this is mine; this is who I am. We usually never ask ourselves, “Who is this
I,
this spider in the center of the web?”

Impermanence. We try to make things stay the way they are; we cling to the idea of permanence. We are normally very resistant to the idea of change, especially the change in what we value. Of course, we like things to change when it’s something we don’t like, but when it’s something we do like, then we hold on.

There are various levels of change, of course. There is gross change—the weather is constantly changing; the seas are changing all the time; the land is changing. Over time, everything is completely transformed. There is the more subtle change in our everyday life, where things are always happening. Relationships, homes, and possessions come and then we lose them. Our bodies change. We start off as tiny, helpless, vulnerable beings and then we grow up. We mature; we age; we die.

And there is the still more subtle momentary change. Nothing actually stays the same for two instants at a time. Life is as a river, always flowing. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, said that no man ever steps into the same river twice. But in fact the same man can never step into the river twice. Everything is changing. On account of that we suffer.

Life is unsatisfactory because it is always changing. It doesn’t have this solid core which we always hope to grasp. We want security, and we believe that our happiness lies in being secure. And so we try to make things permanent. We get houses which seem very permanent and we furnish them. We get ourselves into relationships which we hope will last forever. We have children and hope they may also consolidate this idea of an identity, something which will be constant. We have children, and we love our children, so our children will love us, and this will carry on for a long, long time all through our lives. Our children are our security.

But there is no security in this, because security is very insecure. True security only comes from comfort with insecurity. If we are at ease with the flow of things, if we are at ease with being insecure, then that is the greatest security, because nothing can throw us off balance. As long as we try to solidify, to stop the flow of the water, to dam it up, to keep things just the way they are because it makes us feel safe and protected, we’re in trouble. That attitude goes right against the whole flow of life.

Everything changes, moment to moment to moment. Even in physics we learn that objects, which seem so solid and so stable, are actually in a constant state of motion. Objects are not stable; they don’t remain fixed and unchanging, although our senses give us the distorted impression that they do so.

We look at each other. Today I see you. And tomorrow, you will look the same to me. But you’re not the same. So much has been going on, even on the cellular level, through that time. Cells grow and they die; they are always changing. And we’re always changing, too, in the mind, from moment to moment to moment. Although we try to solidify things and keep them just the way they’ve always been, as that makes us feel very safe, we can’t do it. It’s like those old castles. We build very thick solid walls and think they’re going to last forever, that no onslaught will ever change them. But that’s a delusion. Even if we try to hold on to the river that is our life, it will flow away anyway. We can’t hold on to the river by grasping at it. The way to catch the river is to hold very lightly.

It’s not necessary to suffer. When we suffer, we suffer because our minds are deluded and because we don’t see things as they really are. We have fear, the fear of losing, and we have grief when we lose. But it’s the nature of things to come into being, to last awhile, and then to go.

Our culture finds this question of losing very difficult. It’s very good about getting. Our consumer culture, especially nowadays, is all about getting, getting, getting. We throw away those things which were fashionable yesterday but are no longer fashionable today to get something new. We don’t have that attitude, though, toward our own bodies or the bodies of others. We don’t think that we too need to be recycled from time to time, but we do. It’s ironical that in our society everybody talks very openly about sex, which in other societies is a big taboo. But in our society, the big taboo is death.

I was brought up in a Spiritualist family. My mother was a Spiritualist, and we held séances at our house every week. In my house, death was an everyday subject; it was a topic which we talked about with a great deal of enthusiasm and interest. It wasn’t morbid. And on those few occasions in my life when I really thought, “Now I’m about to die,” my next reaction has always been, “Let’s see what happens.” I think that is because as a child death was an open subject. I’m deeply grateful for this, because in our society, talk of death generally makes people feel uncomfortable. So many people are afraid of it for themselves and for others. We don’t accept that everything which comes into being lasts awhile and then goes. But that’s the cycle. Everything is impermanent. And it’s our non-acceptance of this which brings us grief. We live in our relationships, torn between our hopes and our fears because we hold on so tightly, so afraid to lose.

Everything is flowing. And this flow isn’t made up only of external things. It includes relationships, too. Some relationships last for a long time, and some don’t—that’s the way of things. Some people stay here for some time; some people leave very quickly. It’s the way of things.

Every year millions and millions of people are born and die. In the West, our lack of acceptance is quite amazing. We deny that anyone we love could ever be lost to us. So often we are unable to say to someone who is dying, “We’re so happy to have had you with us. But now, please have a very happy and safe journey onwards.” It’s this denial which brings us grief.

Impermanence is not just of philosophical interest. It’s very personal. Until we accept and deeply understand in our very being that things change from moment to moment, and never stop even for one instant, only then can we let go. And when we really let go inside, the relief is enormous. Ironically this gives release to a whole new dimension of love. People think that if someone is unattached, they are cold. But this isn’t true. Anyone who has met very great spiritual masters who are really unattached is immediately struck by their warmth to all beings, not just to the ones they happen to like or are related to. Non-attachment releases something very profound inside us, because it releases that level of fear. We all have so much fear: fear of losing, fear of change, an inability to just accept.

So this question of impermanence is not just academic. We really have to learn how to see it in our everyday lives. In the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, of being present in the moment, one of the things which first strikes one is how things are constantly flowing, constantly appearing and disappearing. It’s like a dance. And we have to give each being space to dance their dance. Everything is dancing; even the molecules inside the cells are dancing. But we make our lives so heavy. We have these incredibly heavy burdens we carry with us like rocks in a big rucksack. We think that carrying this big heavy rucksack is our security; we think it grounds us. We don’t realize the freedom, the lightness of just dropping it off, letting it go. That doesn’t mean giving up relationships; it doesn’t mean giving up one’s profession, or one’s family, or one’s home. It has nothing to do with that; it’s not an external change. It’s an internal change. It’s a change from holding on tightly to holding very lightly.

Just recently, I was in Adelaide, Australia, and somebody handed me a cartoon strip which showed how to hold things. The first cartoon was about holding things gently, like a newborn chick; the second cartoon addressed different ways of holding things skillfully, with honor and respect, but not tightly. And then the last cartoon said, “After that, we have to let go. But that’s a whole other thing—we’ll deal with that later!”

Yes, we have to know how to hold things lightly, and with joy. This enables us to be open to the flow of life. When we solidify, we lose so much. Engaged in a relationship with our partner, our children, and with others in this world, we may solidify them by casting them in certain roles. That’s how we see them. And after a while, we no longer experience the real person in the moment. We just see our projection of that person. Even though they are completely unique, and even though they may actually be transforming and changing within, we don’t see that any more, because all we see is our pattern. And then people get bored with each other, or at least they get kind of locked into a relationship which has lost its early vitality. As I said, that’s because we don’t experience the actual moment; we just experience our version of events.

When we look at something, we see it for a moment but then immediately our judgments, our opinions, our comparisons step right in. They become filters between us and the person or object we are looking at, and these filters take us further and further away from what is. We’re left with our own impressions and ideas, but the thing in itself is gone. This is especially true when our subject is other people.

We all know that when people are relating an event, it’s almost as though each person is telling a different story. We’ve all had the experience of listening to someone tell of an event that was shared in common, and thought something like, “It didn’t happen like that!” “They didn’t say that,” or, “It wasn’t like that at all; you completely missed the point!” In other words, everything becomes incredibly subjective. We don’t see the thing in itself; we just see our version. And nowhere is this reflected more clearly than in our resistance to the fact that we are all changing moment to moment. It’s as though the carpet is continually being pulled from under our feet, and we can’t bear that. “That carpet is going to stay just where I want that carpet to stay. That same carpet, under the same feet.” And because that can’t ever happen, because we can never, however much we delude ourselves, have things exactly the same, we have this pain.

It’s so important to understand that our happiness and peace of mind do not come from seeking security in permanence and stability. Our happiness comes rather from finding security in the ever-changing nature of things. If we feel happy and thus able to be buoyant in the current, nothing can ever upset us. But if we build something so rigid that we don’t want it ever to change—a relationship, our job, anything—then when we lose it, we’re completely thrown off balance. Normally, people think that the constant change of things is something frightening. But once we really understand that it’s actually the very nature of things to flow, to change, then we become completely balanced and open and accepting. It’s when we try to dam up the stream that the water becomes very stagnant. We have to let things flow. Then, the water is always fresh and clear.