IMPERMANENCE AND THE CYCLES OF LIFE

 

However, as long as you are in the physical dimension and linked to

the collective human psyche, physical pain — although rare — is still

possible. This is not to be confused with suffering, with mental-

emotional pain. All suffering is ego-created and is due to resistance.

Also, as long as you are in this dimension, you are still subject to its

cyclical nature and to the law of impermanence of all things, but you

no longer perceive this as “bad” — it just is.

Through allowing the “isness” of all things, a deeper dimension

underneath the play of opposites reveals itself to you as an abiding

presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good

and bad. This is the joy of Being, the peace of God.

On the level of form, there is birth and death, creation and

destruction, growth and dissolution, of seemingly separate forms. This

is reflected everywhere: in the life cycle of a star or a planet, a

physical body, a tree, a flower; in the rise and fall of nations, political

systems, civilizations; and in the inevitable cycles of gain and loss in

the life of an individual.

There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and

cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let

them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for

transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it

means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer.

It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle bad, except

in the mind’s judgment. Growth is usually considered positive, but

nothing can grow forever. If growth, of whatever kind, were to go on

and on, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive.

Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist

without the other.

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You

must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss

or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very

success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be

failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every

failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody

“fails” sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually

comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.

You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms

and circumstances, but you won’t be identified with them. You do not

need them to give you a sense of self. They are not your life — only

your life situation.

Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a

peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be

periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also

be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you

are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything. A cycle can last for

anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large cycles and

small cycles within these large ones. Many illnesses are created

through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for

regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your

sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as

achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified

with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the

low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the

organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an

illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary

regeneration can take place.

The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked with the

impermanence of all things and situations. The Buddha made this a

central part of his teaching. All conditions are highly unstable and in

constant flux, or, as he put it, impermanence is a characteristic of

every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It

will change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you. Impermanence is also

central to Jesus’s teaching: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on

earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and

steal. . . .”

As long as a condition is judged as “good” by your mind, whether it be

a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical

body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you

happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part

of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension

where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may

undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday

or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same

condition that made you happy then makes you unhappy. The

prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow.

The happy wedding and honeymoon become the unhappy divorce or

the unhappy coexistence. Or a condition disappears, so its absence

makes you unhappy. When a condition or situation that the mind has

attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind

cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist

the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.

We sometimes hear of people who have lost all their money or whose

reputations have been ruined committing suicide. Those are the

extreme cases. Others, whenever a major loss of one kind or another

occurs, just become deeply unhappy or make themselves ill. They

cannot distinguish between their life and their life situation. I recently

read about a famous actress who died in her eighties. As her beauty

started to fade and became ravaged by old age, she grew desperately

unhappy and became a recluse. She, too, had identified with a

condition: her external appearance. First, the condition gave her a

happy sense of self, then an unhappy one. If she had been able to

connect with the formless and timeless life within, she could have

watched and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of

serenity and peace. Moreover, her external form would have become

increasingly transparent to the light shining through from her ageless

true nature, so her beauty would not really have faded but simply

become transformed into spiritual beauty. However, nobody told her

that this is possible. The most essential kind of knowledge is not yet

widely accessible.

The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha — a Pali word

meaning “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is inseparable from its

opposite. This means that your happiness and unhappiness are in fact

one. Only the illusion of time separates them.

This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of

things, so that you don’t pursue an illusion for the rest of your life. Nor

is it saying that you should no longer appreciate pleasant or beautiful

things or conditions. But to seek something through them that they

cannot give — an identity, a sense of permanency and fulfillment — is

a recipe for frustration and suffering. The whole advertising industry

a nd consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened

and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more

you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you. Nothing

out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but

you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize

that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will

also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but

they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused

and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of

the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of

God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work

hard for or struggle to attain.

Many people never realize that there can be no “salvation” in anything

they do, possess, or attain. Those who do realize it often become

world-weary and depressed: If nothing can give you true fulfillment,

what is there left to strive for, what is the point in anything? The Old

Testament prophet must have arrived at such a realization when he

wrote: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and

behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” When you reach this

point, you are one step away from despair — and one step away from

enlightenment.

A Buddhist monk once told me: “All I have learned in the twenty years

that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises

passes away. This I know.” What he meant, of course, was this: I

have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow

the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of

all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and

lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in

a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when

your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your

life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or

conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come

to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to

enjoy and appreciate them — while they last. All those things, of

course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with

dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with

ease.

The happiness that is derived from some secondary source is never

very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the joy of Being, the vibrant

peace that you find within as you enter the state of nonresistance.

Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you

from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and

crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of

peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.