Summary: I’ve written a lot about impermanence and cause and effect over the last year. I’ve said that there is no escape from these two aspects of the human condition–an idea many of you have resisted (and, I might add, I’m not surprised–resisting these two conditions seems to be what human beings do). Over the New Year’s holiday someone posted the following comment about how he had personally responded to my remarks about this topic. Rather than just post my answer under his post, as I often do, I’ve decided that this is important enough to warrant a separate post. Though this is quite short, I think it will really give you something to think about. THE COMMENT: I think I may have taken some of your advice too closely, or used it in the wrong way. I took what you said about impermanence and said, ‘If I’m happy I can’t enjoy being happy because it’s impermanent and will go away’… which keeps me from being happy when I notice it. It’s quite strange, and like I’m waiting for something to let me go ‘full happy’. Except if I ever noticed that I was on ‘full happy’ I might say, ‘hey stop that’. –James MY ANSWER: You’re experiencing your own resistance to the fact that everything is impermanent–which, unfortunately, is what quite a bit of the human response to life ends up being about. If you go back and read the posts where I talk about impermanence (“News Flash: There’s No Escape”, “Where are You Going–And Why”, “Seeing Things the Way They Really Are, Parts 1-3″–and several others) you’ll notice that I’ve outlined many of the human activities, philosophies, and ideas that are are derived from our attempts to put off, defeat, or deny impermanence (these include magical thinking, including beliefs in some sort of afterlife, attempts to defeat aging by following certain health regimens (wacky or otherwise), trying to accumulate a lot of money, trying to become more powerful, attempts to develop various “powers”, etc). Impermanence freaks people out, and our own impermanence freaks us out even more than the impermanence of the people and things we’re attached to. Particularly up until a certain developmental stage people have a lot of trouble acknowledging their own impermanence (see my series of posts on human developmental levels starting at the beginning of this blog). This is why humans have created so many explanations for what supposedly happens after death–it somehow makes it easier if we pretend that the end of our separate self isn’t really an end. One sign of spiritual maturity is the ability to acknowledge and deal with our own impermanence–plus an acknowledgement of something else humans don’t want to admit: that no one really knows what’s really going on, why we’re here, what it’s all about, how it started, where it’s going, etc. In terms of our own death, we’re talking about the impermanence of the separate self created by our brain/mind–our IDEA of who we are. I’ve extensively written about the fact that the separate self is just an idea, and that there are no separate things or events except in the mind. Separate things and events are merely ideas about reality–handy ideas, to be sure, but still, they are just ideas. There is really just one thing-event (for want of a better word): the entire interconnected going on of it all. The mind chops this one thing-event into many, and then assumes that if many things and many events exist in the mind they must also exist “out there.” This is what some call “mistaking the map for the territory.” When the brain/mind that creates these ideas comes to an end, so do the ideas–including the idea (and consciousness) of “me.[...]
