The Experience of Impermanence

By walking down the path of Vipassana meditation, we arrive at experiences that season and mature our personalities. The personal transformation we each undergo becomes the cata-lyst for social change as we influence everything around us. The great Vipassana meditation teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, wrote: “Impermanence (anicca) is, of course, the es-sential fact which must be first experienced and understood by practice.” Anicca is a gateway, an opening.

The complexity and multiplicity of the phenomena of the world can appear like a thicket, but as a person walks the path of Vipassana meditation a clearing emerges. U Ba Khin wrote: “Anicca is the first essential factor … for progress in Vipassana meditation, a student must keep knowing anicca as continuously as possible.”

The Pali word anicca is translated into English as impermanence or change. But anicca is not merely a concept; it is a sign, a marker like the stone cairns a pilgrim encounters on one of those cloud-hugging paths in the Himalayas, signposts to indicate the trail that other true pilgrims have blazed. Anicca is a word indicator that points to a fact of reality: the ceaseless transformation of all material in the universe. Nothing is solid, permanent, immutable. Every “thing” is really an “event.” Even a stone is a form of river, and a mountain is only a slow wave. The Buddha said, sabbe sankhara anicca the entire universe is fluid. For the prac-titioner of Vipassana, anicca is a direct experience of the nature of one’s own mind and body, a plunge into universal reality directly within oneself. “Just a look into oneself,” U Ba Khin wrote, “and there it is anicca.”For a twentieth-century scientist, anicca is an immersion 

into the factual reality of biology, chemistry, and physics the atomic and molecular universe—as if, after years of reading cookbooks, one at last could acknowledge that one is the cookie in question.

The experience of anicca enables the student of science to feel subjectively what was previously analyzed externally and objectively.

Subjective premonitions of time and change are common to all human experience. We sense anicca as we age, and we observe its operations throughout nature.

Polish-born Californian poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a recent Noble Prize winner, returned to rural Lithuania after an absence of fifty-two years, and wrote:

This place and I, though far away, Simultaneously, year after year, were losing leaves. Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1914, Rabindranath Tagore of India analogized the universe to “balaka,” ganderson their restless nonstop migration from Siberia to South India: Beneath the veil of earth, sky, water, I hear the restless beating of wings.Four years after Tagore’s poem was written, Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who was also to become a Nobel Laureate, and who read, admired and helped translate Tagore’s poetry, saw time and ceaseless change reflected to him by the wild swans at Coole:

But now they drift on the steel water, Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?

If anicca is so pervasively intuited and scientifically factual, why do we have to work so hard to know it? Isn’t it obvious, everywhere, to everyone, all day? Our resistance to the experience of anicca is the great sorrow: sabbe saªkh±r± dukkh±—all things are filled with suffering. We maintain direct experience of anicca at arms length, as a scientific concept or a poetic sentiment, because its dynamism melts our sense of security and order, and fills us with a sense of loss and sorrow.

Everyone likes the idea of being purified by a dip in the Ganges, but to anyone standing on its banks as it emerges from the mountains at Rishikesh or Hardwar, icy cold and with a dangerous current, there has to be a moment of hesitation, if not outright retreat, before the actual plunge. And so much more with a river that won’t purify you unless it washes you away. A dip into anicca clarifies reality, but it pulls us away from the comfortable, known shore, and that tearing away is initially frightening and painful. The great sorrow, dukkha, leads to the loss of comforting myth, familiar alli ance, and secure identity all the hooks by which we cling to the idea that we have an eternal, immutable, personal self that will never be washed away from us into the river of life. And so we realize, sabbe dhamm± anatt±—all phenomena are insubstantial. The fantasy of our own greatness, the love we have for ourselves and everything we call ours, is the rock on which all of us build our lives. But every rock is a form of river. Even, or especially, the rock of the self is revealed to be liquid, essenceless, anatt±. How terribly, terribly sad it is to feel our lives slipping down the relentless, cold current of time. Not a scripture in the world is free of this out cry of sorrow and disbelief that the minds and hearts and homes and families we cherish will all be stripped away from us on our passage across this earth.

The psalmist wrote:

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood….  

                         —The Bible, Psalm 90 

In the great epiphany of the Bhagavad Gita, chapter XI, we read of “all powerful Time which destroys all things,” which is portrayed as a world consuming conflagration, a fiery finale to all hopes and dreams.

The Koran, sura LVI, reminds us of a time “When the Terror descends … when the earth shall be rocked and the mountains crumbled and become a dust scattered ….” It is up to us to understand that that day is every day.

                                               II

With his characteristic straight forwardness, courage, and clarity, Freud dared to shock his readers with his views on organized religion.He wrote that every member of humankind felt small and helpless against the forces of nature, preeminently death. The thought of death wounded the individual’s sense of narcissism. Freud felt that every individual was to a greater or lesser extent like Narcissus, the Greek mythic figure who fell in love with his own reflection. To heal the wounds inflicted by awareness of time and death upon each of our own narcissistic feelings, Freud said, humans bond together in collective narcissistic excitement. Thus we see collectives like nation-states or organized religions join in self-proclaimed self-importance. This herd drama helps the individual to feel that even though his own beautiful self may fade and die, at least he is part of something endur-ing, important, and powerful. We need only remember when Freud was writing to realize how tragically keen his insight was. Soon all of Europe was to explode into hordes of self-aggrandizing murderers who justified their actions on transcendental grounds: I am part of the fatherland, I am forging human history. Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of the S.S., the special forces whose job was to kill innocent noncombatant Jews, told his men that he knew they sometimes suffered confusion and guilt over what they were doing, but they should not be deterred, for they were serving their Leader and Fatherland in “an unwritten and never-to-be-forgotten glory.”

Freud’s psychoanalytical psychology clarifies the link that joins falling in love with an image of one’s own ideal-ized, beautiful self—narcissism—with the narcissistic injury that no person can avoid when even a glimmer of death crosses his mind; and both to the final link in this small chain: the psychological defense against death provided by group narcissistic inflation. Grandiosity—overweening self-importance—whether individualistic or collective, is one way that small people can experience themselves as safe and powerful. Grandiosity is a common security operation in a world of insecurity. As Freud so poignantly foresaw, the greater the insecurity of the times, the greater the likelihood that people will huddle into defensive, self-protective, self-trumpeting clusters. The power of these human whirlwinds is as great as the terror that underlies them. They are inac-cessible to reason because they spring not from ideation or dogmas (which are secondarily used to justify and rationalize them), but from deeper psychological strata: the egoistic desire to transform the world into a stage for one’s own, indelible self. From a desire for permanence to narcissism to grandiosity to social aggression: mob membership is a common reaction against the great sorrow that is immanent in human life. Intelligence and culture are no palliative: the greatest Western philosopher since Plato,Martin Heidegger, publicly espoused Nazism.Similarly, exhortation to abstract values like compassion and service can be used to fuel the fire of self-importance. When Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, he justified his behavior as an act of selfless courage in the service of his motherland. But his own words in his defense revealed his fear of being weak, “emasculated” and vulnerable.

Henry David Thoreau was probably the first American to have contact with, and attempt to practice, India’s ancient pathways to wisdom. He wrote, “Most of what my neighbors consider to be good, I consider in my heart to be evil; and if I repent of anything at all, it is of my good behavior.” It is in the name of the gods, and the groups, that most murders are done in the service of the chimera of greatness. From the crusades to the ongoing religions and ideological war-fare on our planet today, we can see activation of the link between the human ability to imagine personal death, and the reactive, outraged denial of such frailty, with the result of power-seeking and violence. Rather than correcting this disease of the psyche, organized religions often provide a channel, similar to politics, through which the howl of incredulous despair can strike out.

                                              III

Sabbe sankhara anicca (all things are impermanent). The individualistic drive to transform the world in accordance with egoistic desires underlies social rage. Vipassana counters that drive at its root. So far I have been discussing the experience of anicca; now I want to stress the experience of anicca. One insight Freud shared with the Buddha is that by directly confronting the source of our suffering, we can be freed. To be human is to suffer; to be fully human is to suf-fer consciously. Vipassana meditation enables the ordinary individual to see what is hidden, to confront the elusive, to envision the unimaginable. Change is invisible; reality is elusive; the evaporation of ourselves is unimaginable to most of us most of the time. Yet through a gradual, guided, time-tested process, we may grow in our human capacities. Vipassana provides a developmental ladder by which we can continue to climb upwards, just as we did as toddlers when we learned to walk, or as we did as schoolchildren when we learned to read and write. What is terrifying and impossible when viewed as a whole becomes challenging and possible when viewed step by step.

The rung of the developmental ladder where we now stand is the experience of what might be called anicca inspite of ourselves. Because there is a great resistance in our hearts to anicca, because of the great sorrow involved in the loss of our image of ourselves with which we have narcissistically fallen in love, and which we want to preserve and defend by the exercise of willful power because we each seek security and satisfaction in life through an aggrandized, projected sense of the idealized self as we imagine it to be forever, the experience of anicca comes with pain.

Is there a Vipassana student who never got up at the end of a determined sitting without at least two small channels of the river of life flowing down his or her face?

Anicca is what we run from; anicca is what we fear; anicca is what we join forces against and attempt to smash. Anicca is the destruction of our personal power, the loss of our world as we know it. Anicca is what drives the world mad. But the experience of anicca, a precious and fortunate opportunity into which one develops slowly it is said, over lifetimes the actual direct experience, as opposed to our images, bugaboos, and sideways glances the experience of anicca is a simple, clear, fact, like the wind. 

It is a release, like a dip in a healing, cool, fresh river. Now I am washed away in the river; after so much fussing, I am torn away and alone in the current. But I can swim, or rather, float. The self I held, I left with my towel on the shore, but I’m still alive; I haven’t drowned or died. Pieces of what I imagined I had to grip to me come floating along beside me. The current of the world is unraveling in faces and forms. Without my will the universe unrolls, and fills my arms with muscles, my heart with human concerns. The scintillating milky way of my back is a winking and shim-mering constellation; my body itself is a river, a continent of rivers, a flickering, vibrating, shoreless ocean of currents and channels, unfathomable, beginningless, endless. The living ride on life like foam on the crest of a surge in the cosmic ocean.

The experience of anicca leaves one floating on the exfoliating, impersonal truth, the ocean of life. The flood of life need not drown us; it can instead buoy us up if we learn how to swim. The experience of anicca is the place to plunge in and be turned into a fish, a wave, a fleck of foam on the surging expanse of life itself.

The three Nobel Prize winning poets whom I quoted in the beginning of this essay all deepened in their ability to absorb the painful truth. Czeslaw Milosz, who felt himself “losing leaves,” found intact an old meadow of his child-hood and, “Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.”

Aging, sick, near death, Tagore felt his body floating down an ink-black stream,

…as shadow, as particles, my body Fused with endless night. I came to rest.

Yeats wanted his last words to champion detachment, and gave this directive:

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid… No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut:

“Cast a cold eye On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!”

The experience of anicca is not the endpoint of the path of Vipassana. It is not nibb±na, the transcending of the transitory world of mind-and-matter. It is not the final goal of enlightenment. But it is itself a critical step on the path toward that goal, and liberating in important ways. The path of Vipassana, as taught by the Buddha, leads away from craving and aversion that derive from a rigid self-concept, away from negativities of greed, hate, and delusion that derive from defense of the false, ephemeral self. The path opens into the virtues and qualities produced by experienced insight. The realization of anicca is a deep insight into our-selves and the world around us. It exposes the absurdity of clinging to a passing life in a passing world. It relaxes the clenched, false hopes of narcissism, and enables the flow of spontaneous identification with all other transient lives. From the experiential realization that all things are anicca, that I am anicca, comes the deepest empathy possible: a feeling of kinship with all beings who suffer alike from the pain aroused by the illusion of separate self; a feeling of fellowship with all beings who yearn for liberation from the agony of separation, dissolution, death.