What is Impermanence Trying to Teach Us?
Everything you rely on will wash away.
This seemingly depressing view has a precious flip side. By the same token, the suffering of the present will also inevitably transform.
Pain teaches the benevolence of impermanence.
Sometimes, in the heart of extreme pain, emotional or physical, this innate knowing is all that is left to us: This too shall pass.
I praise you in hearty gratitude, impermanence.
But.
The ones I love and rely on. That most precious person, dead?
Everything in your life that you look upon now as a reliable foundation will eventually change. The very body dies and decays.
Intense appreciation is the conclusion.
While it is true the impermanence teaches us to appreciate the good and forbear the bad, this very process holds a deeper truth, a more precious lesson if we will listen to it.
The content of experience are are ever changing, and we can become observers of this process. Pain and pleasure associated with this change inspires us to discover this observational standpoint.
Swami Venkatesananda refers to it is equanimity. A state of balanced emotion or pathos.
The pleasure/pain/indifference content of experience can remain while the emotional component is unengaged, or only softly engaged, and then mental clarity can develop.
Mental clarity can then open a vista to consciousness itself.
Why is the world so fraught with uncertainty? Why would it be that a universe would come in to being that offers not a single stable place to ground yourself?
We must abandon the notion of random, purposeless reality.
The truth is: something does remain. However, it is only witnessed once the drama of the world stage, filled with changing characters, plots and events, is seen past. This is only doable with the starting point of disillusion. Only by finally seeing the relentless, repetitive futility of worldly achievement does that something else dawn.
The uncreated or unconditioned remains at all times, unconditioned. The manifest or conditioned however, bears a purposeful history and teleological intent.
By understanding this intent at a more primary level, pre-mind for example, a being becomes more of a cause behind causation’s tale.
Just the same, the unconditioned remains the unconditioned at all times.
So we can see that, far from some damnable flaw in reality, impermanence is there for a reason. It gives us the opportunity to experience this world, but also builds into it the necessary striving beyond.
Eventually, each of us learns from impermanence to not identify with the world of change. Identifying with whatever it may be, jobs, family, money, creativity, anything, it teaches you that you persist beyond this as something more essential, but it brings suffering with it when what you thought was you, a critical support is kicked out from beneath you.
You begin to release, unclench the mind, and let the flow of impermanent things move more easily, without your intervention.
Curiously, the movement of the body, caught up in the flow of impermenence, continues. Creation continues on, though it has been seen through or around, as it were.
Nevertheless, the unconditioned remains the background of impermanence, and we remain seated therein.
See also: The Wisdom of No Escape
