Impermanence - Letters from Readers

 A reader wrote to me not long ago about impermanence, and its relationship to our physical, materialst bodies and even our world paradigms.    She writes:

"Why does nothing last?  Why does it seem that everything - everything - changes?  My mom's death made me realize that nothing lasts, and no matter how much we love it, it won't stay."

I agree with parts of her statement, while at the same time disagreeing with all of it.   I'll explain. 

It is true that in this materialist/physicalist paradigm in which we currently reside that nothing seems to endure perpetually.    Relationships come and go, jobs come and go, lives come and go.    It all appears - at least on the outside - to be interchangeable and non-unique.   It can, for all intents and purposes, appear that one thing/concept/relationship/individual is fungible with another - and the emergence of concepts/people and their subsequent disappearance from our lives rolls like the ebb and flow of the tides. 

I disagree, though, with the premise that everything changes.   I believe it is our observation of the externalities of the materialist paradigm that change. Consider this for a moment:  at any given point in time, you observe only a fraction of your own physical body.      You cannot ever see the actual back of your head, for example. You may look at the reflection of it in a mirror, but this is a secondhand reprsentation of the actual back of your head.  The same is true for your back and buttocks.  You also cannot see your own face (save perhaps for a small portion of your nose and/or cheekbones when you peer downward).   So most of the time, you are not experiencing the existence of your own physical body at all - you are instead digesting and processing information about it from the observance of it by others.  Consider how this same concept might apply to other concepts like relationships, paradigms, lives. 

You never doubt that you have a face, do you?  Of course you don't.   You know you have a face because of the experince others have of your face.   The same goes for your back, and the back of your head.     So you cannot experience the changing of these over time - to you they are constant, and so you internalize this as permanence.  However, if you approach your 3rd grade music teacher, I bet he will tell you that you've definitely changed!  But you won't notice that you've changed, except for maybe your bones are stiffer since 3rd grade.     Does this mean that you've stayed the same? No. It means that your own perception of your own body has not changed.  This is common, of course. 

But if you take this to the next logical step, then the change could be said to be observed, rather than experienced.  And this, then, could be applied to the entire paradigm of our physical world - we observe its changes; we feel the grief of a loved one's departure from our physicalist paradigm, we ache with longing when a relationship comes to an end, and much, much more.  But the reality is that these experiences are based on observations; some with our tactile senses such as touch, taste, and vision, and others with the deep, cavernous places of our human hearts, where voids are left behind when those we love are seemingly gone.   But all of these observations feed our paradigm, and it leads us to the belief that since these things appear to be going away (meaning, they are no longer experienced by us at this point in time) then they must be impermanent. 

To us, everything appears to end when it reaches the limits of our observations.   

This notion of impermanence, however, is based upon current worldview, which involves entropy and destructibility.   Entropy, for those who may not know, is essentially the inherent element in everything physical that leads to its ultimate demise.   If we understand the world as only an observable experience, then entropy applies. 

But we cannot prove that the observable universe is all there is.  We cannot prove that only what we observe - feel, sense, touch, see, etc. - is all that exists.   We have developed very tightly held paradigms and beliefs that we are certain are supported by scientific proof that this is true.  But it is not certain at all.   And now, more than ever, we are at the beginning of understanding the true nature of what lies beyond the observable universe, though we are reluctant to admit that something unobservable could even exists at all.    

This is all well and good, of course, but it offers little comfort to know any of this when we feel the very real sense of loss when a love one passes on.  To my reader who wrote this, and to those of you who may be grieving now, I can only offer this: 

We cannot yet understand the infinite.   We cannot yet observe it.  But it is there - waiting for us to emerge from our stubborn devotion to physicalist doctrines.  And when at least we do, the questions that have plagued us for so long - the ones that ask "where did they go?" and "do they still see me?" will be answered with much greater certainty than they are now.   

In a finite world, we cannot bear the burden of infinity. But in the Infinite, we will no longer be bound by old, ill-fitting paradigms.   Your grief is not misplaced; and it is not forgotten.   

Remember those you hold dear.   They exists in the timeline of your memory - and you can observe them any time you like.