Hanging around spiritual types, you hear a lot about impermanence. I confess, I never got why anyone finds impermanence to be such an earth-shattering revelation.
Is being traumatized by impermanence a guy thing? I mean, in a lot of Buddhist traditions, the threat of impermanence is deployed like the spiritual equivalent of “Wait til your father gets home!” The majority of teachers have been male. Just a thought.
Bug life
I was standing in line at a local organic grocery store. Apropos of nothing, the woman behind me proclaimed: “I feel sorry for bugs. Their lives are so short!”
This was Berkeley, California. Eighty-seven percent of the people are thinking stuff like this instead of looking in their rear view mirrors and using their turn signals.
“I hate to break it to you,” I answered helpfully, “but humans don’t live much longer than bugs.”
Slug fest
Acknowledging one’s own inevitable death does put things in perspective. We should all do this frequently.
One of the standard answers to the question “Why do spiritual practice?” is “You could die at any moment.” Putting off sadhana today might mean putting it off for a long time.
If you are reborn as a banana slug, you might have a hard time remembering your mantra. And you certainly won’t be waving around any incense or ringing bells.
But acknowledging and getting comfortable with ephemerality has much farther-reaching effects.
Blobs of resistance
Most of us cling to fixed concepts about ourselves, others, and the world. We pretend that we have more control over the outcomes of our actions than we actually enjoy. We suffer mightily when things don’t go according to our plans, or we are not “rewarded” for our efforts. In the process, our lives become repetitive and stale.
Manifest life is continual change by design, but we resist life at every turn. Most of us are basically Blobs of Resistance.
But we’re all gamers (even if we don’t know it yet)
We are generally trying to force ourselves, other people, and circumstances to conform to our limited concepts and expectations. A more successful strategy is to learn to skillfully adapt.
Treat life as a game app. As in a game, you never know what’s coming next. Whether your options are vast or extremely limited, there’s always a more skillful way to navigate.
You can use your skill to listen, feel, and improvise as life continually moves and moves you. This orientation takes impermanence as a given and ground. And it’s way more fun.
Destruction is beautiful
One of the most stunning things about my spiritual tradition, Trika Shaivism, is that it already knows itself to be provisional.
A practitioner will eventually shed even the concepts and practices that make up the tradition. We need them now to support us in gaining direct knowledge of how things are, but they eventually fall away as we become more awake and immersed in spontaneous, natural, and all pervasive living presence.
The Vijñana Bhairava Tantra teaches that spiritual concepts are meant for the advancement of the unenlightened. Most of us are not enlightened, so we need all of the spiritual scaffolding. But at some point, all of that naturally falls away.
Swami Lakshmanjoo, a 20th century siddha and teacher of Trika Shaivism, put it this way in his commentary on the Vijñana Bhairava Tantra:
You have to take a medicine which is not sweet. It is bitter. It is not tasty. You do not like to taste it. Then what does your mother do? She puts something sweet in your mouth first, and says, ‘Take it now’. 1
The “bitter medicine” is that we really must lose all of our cherished concepts about ourselves and the world, including those about our spiritual traditions. The “sweets” are all of the necessary supports that we use along the way to help us to do that.
For a long time, lifetimes perhaps, we are extremely motivated by our complicated spiritual ideas and practices. Their energy is brilliant and enlivening. We are deeply in love with our traditions. But in the end, even these must go.
Have you ever heard of such a thing? A spiritual tradition that teaches its own provisionality? I find this unspeakably beautiful.
Impermanence is Awesome
Rather than rejecting or feeling sad about impermanence, Trika Shaivism gives us the means to make the return home to impermanence as a creative production of the eternal.
Lord Shiva is often referred to as the Artist or the Magician whose Shakti, creative power, gives rise to the infinite, magical displays of ephemeral life in a vast theater of self-expression.
When we recognize the real nature of manifest life, we can be totally at home, compassionate, tender, and wise in the theater of impermanence. We can relate more playfully to impermanence and enjoy impermanence without being conditioned by it.
If we feel like doing ritual, we can do that. But now our activities are performed solely as expressions of the pure, unimpeded devotion of alive awakeness to itself.
We already love impermanence
(As long as it doesn’t mess with our plans, our self-image, or our loved ones.)
We love watching leaves die and fall off the trees.
We love watching waves arise and then crash ashore.
We love disaster movies. The more apocalyptic, the better.
We gawk at road accidents.
We walk in cemeteries.
We love seeing our kids transform into adults. Well, mostly.
Notice yourself enjoying impermanence, and see if you can enjoy it more.
Find the poignancy and beauty in absence and loss.
Find the astonishment and sense of openness when plans go awry.
Find the opportunity for discovering wisdom in illness and grief.
Touch the profound relaxation and sweetness that arises when you stop trying to control everything, when you drop the monumentally doomed effort to manufacture a contained sense of self.
Play your brief part with adaptability and heart. Then see what happens next.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
Lakshmanjoo, Swami. Vijnana Bhairava Tantra: The Practice of Centring Awareness. Trans. Bäumer, Bettina. Varanasi: Indica, 2002: 12-13.