In our normal day to day existence there are many things that we hang on to because they give us a sense of permanence.

Our consciousness compels us to be aware of our own mortality. Advances in nutrition and health may have enabled us on average to exceed the biblical “three score years and ten”. Yet, whilst extending our longevity our deaths are still inevitable

In order to assuage our feelings of mortality we identify with longer lasting institutions like our nationality, our religion, our culture and so on. Strangely some of us are even prepared to sacrifice our lives in defending such institutions. It seems as though some are prepared to sacrifice their own limited mortality to ensure these institutions we identify with can be sustained! We seem inclined to project our own existence onto other things that might be more stable and long-lived!

Being faced with our own limited lifespan, many of us take comfort from the relative longevity of the earth. But the earth is forever changing and does have itself a finite lifespan. And whilst to we mere mortals with but a fleeting lifespan it seems steadfast and immutable, it is always changing and slowly moving to its own extinction.

We know, for example the earth’s climate is forever changing. It has experienced periods of global warming am global cooling frequently in the past. (This is of course an “inconvenient truth” for those who want to relate global warming with human activity!)

Even the earth’s surface which seems to us so settled and constant is being gradually changed by tectonic drift.

So in reality, there is little we can attach to that we can rely on, if we are truly objective, to assuage our feelings of impermanence.

In an essay called What Makes You Not a Buddhist Tibetan teacher Dzongsar Khyentse stated that:

If you cannot accept that all compounded or fabricated things are impermanent, if you believe that there is some essential substance or concept that is permanent, then you are not a Buddhist.

Whether you want to be a Buddhist, or not, this is still a good lesson to learn. We neglect this lesson at our own peril.

If I am admired for my physical prowess, I somehow seek to maintain that even in the face of aging when ultimately this is a futile task..

If my reputation is founded on my beauty, (and I can assure you that in my case it is not!) I will try forlornly to hold on to it even as the years strive to take it away.

Perhaps more importantly, if I attach my sense of who I am to this fragile and transient biological host that is my body, then I will always have a fear of death.

On the death of the Buddha, Sakka, the chief of the deities, is said to have uttered the following

Impermanent are all component things,
They arise and cease, that is their nature:
They come into being and pass away,
Release from them is bliss supreme.

The story of the Japanese Buddhist nun, known as Ryonen, is poignant. When young she lived a privileged life being renowned for her beauty and charm. At seventeen she was serving the empress as one of the ladies of the court. However, the empress died suddenly making Ryonen acutely aware of the impermanency of life in this world. As a result she resolved to study Zen. Unfortunately her relatives would have none of this and insisted she get married. Reluctantly she agreed, but only on the condition that after she bore her husband three children, she would be allowed to become a nun. By the age of twenty-five she had fulfilled her undertaking and again ignoring the protests of her family, shaved her head and set off on a pilgrimage to find a suitable master. However, she met with no success. The masters she approached told her they could not accept her because her beauty would prove a distraction. Not to be deterred Ryonen took a hot iron and held it against her face thus scarring her. With her beauty thus compromised, the master Hakuo agreed to take her as a pupil. She was wise enough to have eschewed her beauty, which she knew could only be transient, in favour of her spiritual development.

There is a strong connection between impermanence and what physicists have come to call the arrow of time. The fundamental laws of physics are time symmetric, ie they have no directionality with respect to time. If we had a movie of the earth rotating around the sun and we ran it backwards, we would not be aware of any fundamental laws being violated. If we observe an excited atom decay and emit a photon, that process is no more valid than if we observed a photon being absorbed by an atom and exciting it. Yet our lives are full of irreversible processes. We watch as people age – we never see people resume their youth. Stones are eroded by water in our rivers- they are never built up by the process! Despite the time symmetry of the fundamental laws, decay is all around us. This is captured by the Second Law of Thermodynamics which tells us that the entropy (fundamentally a measure of disorderliness) of the universe must of necessity increase over time.

It is possible to examine discrete parts of the universe and see a decrease in entropy. In fact if you take any living organism, this is the case. Each of us by the mechanism of our DNA forges our own particular order from the universe. But what is true for a part is never true for the whole. The breakdown of the food I ingest and the emanation of the heat energy from my body all contribute to the increase in entropy overall. In this way, entropy is a result of the interdependence of the various components of the universe.

The physicist Victor Mansfield has argued that the conditions of the universe that lead to ever increasing entropy were set up very soon after the “Big Bang”.

He goes on to say:

If I could deeply appreciate that any irreversible process, whether the rotting of carrots or my body, is due to the earliest and largest scale structure of the cosmos, then how much easier it would be to appreciate that my neighbour’s loss or gain is not separate from mine. Then the suffering in one cell of the body of humanity is truly the suffering of all. Perhaps, we could even realize that compassion is actually in our own enlightened self-interest and that the survival of our very planet requires a profound understanding of our co-dependence.

The Buddhist philosophers, far from decrying impermanence, make the case that we benefit from it. Without impermanence there would be no change. Permanence can also only prevail when such things are inherently unchanging and independent of all else. Even though impermanence leads to aging and decay, it also leads to growth, diversity and life.

As usual Buddhism points out the inevitability of the polar opposites. If there was no decay there would also be no growth. If there was no death there would also be no life.

Again, as we have seen before, our problem arises when we become attached to something inherently impermanent.

The quantum physicist, David Bohm, argued that one of the problems of modern society arose from imbuing the false notion of independent existence.

It is proposed that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and “broken up” into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent.

But we know this is not possible. The interdependence between all the elements of the universe is such that they can never be “self-existent”. Psychologically, denial of this fact is the phenomenon that leads to ego and separation and a host of other problems.

Perhaps we should consider the words of Thich Nhat Hahn the Vietnamese Buddhist and peace activist:

Nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments. Heraclitus said we can never bathe twice in the same river. Confucius, while looking at a stream, said, “It is always flowing, day and night.” The Buddha implored us not just to talk about impermanence, but to use it as an instrument to help us penetrate deeply into reality and obtain liberating insight. We may be tempted to say that because things are impermanent, there is suffering. But the Buddha encouraged us to look again. Without impermanence, life is not possible. How can we transform our suffering if things are not impermanent? How can our daughter grow up into a beautiful young lady? How can the situation in the world improve? We need impermanence for social justice and for hope.

If you suffer, it is not because things are impermanent. It is because you believe things are permanent. When a flower dies, you don’t suffer much, because you understand that flowers are impermanent. But you cannot accept the impermanence of your beloved one, and you suffer deeply when she passes away.

If you look deeply into impermanence, you will do your best to make her (or him)happy right now. Aware of impermanence, you become positive, loving and wise. Impermanence is good news. Without impermanence, nothing would be possible. With impermanence, every door is open for change. Impermanence is an instrument for our liberation.

When we begin to understand the importance of impermanence we will surely understand why the sages implored us to live in the “eternal now”.

In human consciousness there is no “past”, only a construction of a mental picture somewhat informed by our history. But these artifices that we call memories are only experienced now.

Similarly any concept we have of the future is nothing more than a construct informed by our anticipation of things to come. Even more so than our past, our future is entirely imagined, but it too is experienced in the present.

I have often wondered about the famous biblical quote from The Sermon on the Mount which is usually rendered as:

Consider the lilies of the field for they neither toil nor spin….

Common interpretation of this famous aphorism is that God will provide for his subjects if they have faith in him.and thus we should not concern ourselves with day to day tribulations.

But maybe the “lilies of the field” is an analogy for those who are unaware and thus unconcerned about the past and thefutre. They are truly living in the “now” and have found the serenity that such a state allows.

Whilst writing this I was reminded of Robert Sapolsky’s famous book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,

Sapolsky’s argument is that whilst zebras on the Serengeti Plain are subject to predation by lions and they are hard-wired to quickly move into “flight” mode when a lion attack seems imminent. But once the threat is removed, having no concept of the future, they don’t have an ongoing concern for attacks by lions.

Human beings on the other hand, overwhelmed by concerns about the future continue to worry about many things, most of which will never happen.

If we live in the “now” our worries are reduced and our concerns of impermanence are absolved.