Impermanence as Medicine
When I hear the well-worn sound of that old Buddhist chestnut, “Everything is impermanent,” I always wonder what’s happening in the mind of my fellow amateur philosopher. Is the contemplation of impermanence bending the mind towards a complete relinquishment of grasping at the wily stream of life, or is it trying to encase that crazy, wriggling livingness in some brittle metaphysical amber? It’s hard to know from the outside.
Traditionally, impermanence is presented on several levels, from the cosmic scale of emerging and collapsing world-systems all the way down to the ephemerality of the minutest fragments of present moment experience. This has the benefit that it feels systematic, and allows people to cherry-pick an object of contemplation from the scale that feels most relevant. For some reason, they almost always pick the contemplation, “All political regimes are subject to fall.” But whichever topic you choose, the main question is this: is it helping you to put an end to a habit that creates suffering, or isn’t it? This practice cannot be undertaken under sterile laboratory conditions. It has to come to life in the middle of the messiness you call, “me.” The contemplation of impermanence cannot be separated from the process of getting to know your own mind and its workings.
In early sutras, Mr. Gautama says things like, “You there! Is the body permanent or impermanent?” To which the guy always responds with, “Impermanent!” But when you are practicing on your own, it is better to never have an answer to that question. If you have an answer, you don’t have to look anymore, but the actual medicine is in the looking.
Here are a few ways in which to look.
Let’s Get This Over With
Once, I dreamed I was in a lush temperate forest, surrounded by towering conifer trees. The forest floor was largely clear, save where a few fallen giants had torn holes in the canopy above. I walked past the jutting roots of one such fallen tree, which was now surrounded by a thicket of saplings and woodland underbrush, all ecstatic for the sudden glut of sunlight. It was the one area in the forest in which anything could have possibly been obscured, hidden. If you ever find yourself in such a situation in a dream, I very much recommend that you do not do as I did when I thought to myself, “I certainly hope there isn’t a bear hiding in that thicket.”
It turned out that there was indeed a grizzly bear hiding in the thicket. With a roar, it burst forth at a full sprint, only a few feet away from me. There was no time to react. As it sunk its great teeth into my chest, I thought to myself, “Well, at least this will be over soon.” I awoke with a start, thrilled by my spontaneous diligence in the practice.
When people say that everything is impermanent, they’re making some attempt at what is called the contemplation of gross impermanence, or as Thay calls it, cyclic impermanence. This is basically the extension of death meditation into all of the domains of human experience. Competing here with political regimes for the most popular subjects of meditation are the following: dentist’s appointments, traffic jams, and legal proceedings. The problem is that these are all things that the mind already wants to end. So what is really being practiced here?
When I say to myself, “Maulings are impermanent,” I have to admit that I’m probably not trying to get in deeper contact with the present moment. What I’m actually doing is projecting myself into a future moment in which the mauling is already over. I pass no judgement on this practice, but I can’t help but note that it is suspiciously similar to what the untrained mind is always doing: orienting itself towards some supposed future. But death meditation, you will recall, is effectively a compassion meditation that goes against the mind’s habitual orientation. It is a profound, sustained, open-hearted encounter with a topic that the mind generally expends a great deal of energy avoiding.
For this reason I think it is much more informative to practice the contemplation of impermanence on things you want to stay around forever, a shiny, new minivan for example. At first, there it is before you: beautiful, iridescent maroon finish sparkling in the sun, automatic doors gliding like angels on their runners, cupholders so pristinely clean you could eat out of them. Now is the time to observe your mind. Now is the time to visualize the twelve stages of the decomposition of the corpse of this minivan in the charnel grounds, not as some kind of perverse punishment, but as a way to force a compassionate recognition of what your mind is doing with the pristine minivan, now. Your mind is not neutrally, objectively processing you beloved minivan. Your mind is making a happiness contract, and if you are not present, you will have no knowledge of the terms. You will have to find out the hard way. But if you are very present, you can have complete control over that contract. When you see the first blemishes, the first crumbs, the first tears in the upholstery, there will be nothing to mourn because you will have come to terms with them from the very beginning.
This provides a remedy for something that the mind does, something we might call by the two names nevering and forevering. This is a very curious thing to investigate directly with awareness because it involves a tremendous leap on the part of the mind, out of the immediacy of the moment and into the realm of the timeless, the realm of the sages. Of all of the things that you could project into that realm, why the minivan?
Notice that this practice does not work with things that you are averse to, just in the same way that death meditation would not be affective for someone who is genuinely suicidal. If you contemplate the complete decay and disappearance of a traffic jam, there may be no conditions for the arising of compassionate awareness, no conditions for transformation. In this case, I recommend permanence contemplation. Generate the conviction that the traffic jam will never end, and you will be forced to generate a love that is big enough to embrace an eternal traffic jam. When you stop struggling one way or another, you will be able to see the naked activity of your mind, and you will not need to blindly follow it.
Did You See That?
The second kind of impermanence contemplation is traditionally called subtle impermanence or impermanence in every instant according to Thay. Please forgive me for the divergence here, but I will call it momentary impermanence.
Let’s start with the traffic jam. While it is happening, it is still a traffic jam, but it is different in each moment. If you really squint here, you can start to see the practical application. You will need a certain degree of concentration. Let’s say you’re relatively present with your mind, thanks in part to the leisure time that the stop-and-go traffic has endued you with. Now, which traffic jam exactly are you railing against? You will undoubtedly try to answer this question with some enduring traffic jam that comprises all of the individual moments, but can you actually find such a traffic jam in the here and now? If not, your struggle with the situation will simply fail to reconstitute itself. This is the exact application of breath meditation to everyday phenomena.
The minivan is a trickier case, because it is not changing in any obvious way. Without bringing in anything metaphysical like vibrating atoms, do we have any reason to believe that the minivan is the same from moment to moment? To answer this question, we will have to look at it, to feel it, to listen to it. Again, some concentration may be required. We will be forced into contact with the fragmentary stream of sensory impressions that we draw upon to constitute our idea of the van. However self-evident this leap from raw impressions to the inference of an enduring, external object may be, we have to admit that it is a leap. And then we are forced to admit that the concept of the external object itself must also be internal, since it is accessible to awareness. Then, upon inspecting it, we find that the mental faculty is a fragmentary stream just as the bodily senses are! Here we’re at risk of some seriously pointless navel-gazing unless we are grounded by the one relevant concern: what exactly in all this is the pristine thing I’m so enamored with? Your conviction about your minivan, your emotional attachment, may not immediately vanish, but you will have a chance to see them for what they are. When your van gets keyed in the Safeway parking lot, you’ll know if your contemplation was successful.
But what, oh what, could the contemplation of momentary impermanence possibly do for the unavoidable agony that must surely be experienced when being torn to pieces by a grizzly bear? The answer is that this contemplation, when carried to its ultimate conclusion, prevents mauling, or anything else for that matter, from being taken personally. This may sound like a small consolation, but horror is entirely personal. This insight constitutes complete liberation from horror. This is not achieved by practicing bear-mauling visualization meditation. You can just contemplate the breathing.
What is it like to be concentrated on the breath? We become “aware of the stream of sensations,” and we say that we see the momentary impermanence of the breath. There is no single entity called “breath” that can be grasped upon. The mind lets go. We experience ease. We celebrate. We go home. But momentary impermanence in breath meditation does not just apply to the breath. It applies to the meditator. The meditator is just as discontinuous in each moment as the stream of sensations of breath.
In fact, we cannot even talk about a stream of sensations in meditation without positing this illusory, enduring meditator outside of that stream and observing it. For “continuous observation” to happen, a self has to be positioned at that imaginary observation post. This is a fabrication that is totally unnecessary for the healthy functioning of a human adult, just as the breath does not need an identity breathe. The habit of maintaining this fabrication can be completely exhausted, which eventually leads to the collapse of personal suffering, something we could call a kind of limited, although very transformative, enlightenment.
To begin to investigate this, you can start with the discontinuity of the sensations of breathing. You know already that the sensations are not quite the same in each moment. You also already know that they are somewhat similar. They have a sense of being somewhat related. The question is, do the sensations that are happening now have any inherent reference to the sensations that have come before, or that will come next? Or is that sense of continuity, of the sensations being stitched together into a greater breath that extends into the past and future, something that the mind is adding? Can you be aware of that process? This is a good first step.
Medicine for the Healthy
If you are about to be mauled by a bear, the most helpful thing may be to imagine how nice it will be when it’s all over. You may be short of time to really deeply transform your mind through the contemplation of impermanence. In the words of master Guishan, “When you are dying of thirst, it’s too late to dig a well.” Otherwise, when you have time, you may like to undertake some of the practices above, but only when you are feeling solid. It may sound absurd to prescribe medications exclusively for the healthy, that’s what a lot of Buddhist meditation is. If your mind is a burdened or agitated, these practices may actually make things worse. So take time, stop, rest, practice compassion, and when you are ready you can return to these exercises and spend some time getting to know this little corner of your mind, because there’s a lot happening there.
