HOW TO FEEL IMPERMANENT . . . FOREVER

The first thing you're told as you begin lo-jong is to train in the preliminaries. There are four of them. I'll talk about the first two here: this precious human life, and death and impermanence. As we'll see, they're closely related.

But the overall purpose of these four ideas is pretty clear: to help you recreate on a daily basis the kind of feeling you have when you come out of a long illness and regain your health, or when you see a loved one you haven't seen for a long while, or you wake up after a cold winter to that first, warm spring day . . . the four preliminaries are designed to make you aware of how fortunate you are to be precisely where you are now, with all of the resources that lie at your fingertips.  And ultimately, these preliminaries, if you focus on them, will  give you access to the same energy when you are ill, when you are alone and lonely, and when you are staring out the window in the middle of winter, feeling that spring will never come. They are simply that powerful, and they're the fuel that drives the daily practice.

The first preliminary is often written as 'this rare and precious human life of leisure and opportunity,' and the four qualifiers are important. 'Rare' because of all the forms of life that inhabit our world, the human form is a tiny percentage, and you're lucky to have landed here; 'precious' because our human life is the form of life that is most amenable to removing our suffering (dogs don't have our capacity to do it, and in the Tibetan cosmos, the gods don't see the reason for doing it); 'leisure' because having found this teaching, you probably have the time to pursue it, even if you do have to reorder your daily schedule a bit (people living in abject poverty, for example, require even more discipline and will to pursue it); and 'opportunity' because it's pretty clear when you look around you that there are an awful lot of people that don't have the opportunity, or the interest, to receive this instruction. In other words: the fact that you're reading a manual of mind training is very rare.

So you sit down every day, and you find fresh ways to remind yourself of this rare, precious, leisured, and opportunity-filled life that you've stumbled upon, and you take the energy and enthusiasm that rise from this insight directly into your practice. Some days it's easier to do it than others—habit is the culprit because habit keeps you from seeing things freshly—but if you keep at it, the energy matures, and becomes more and more accessible on a daily basis.

The meditation on death and impermanence is, in one sense, obvious enough—you never know when your time is coming; or if you have the opportunity now to practice, who knows about tomorrow; and all the other cliches you've heard.

Somehow these never really did it for me. Or if they did, they only got my attention for an hour or so, and then I'd be back assuming that I had x number of years to live because that was my average on the life insurance actuarial tables. I mean, an asteroid might collide with us tomorrow, but the odds are it won't, so I'm not concerned about it today.

But what did wake me up years ago was this, and I don't remember which teacher I got it from:  our own death is only the grossest, most obvious, and obviously tangible form of impermanence that we know. Don't linger so much on that. Anybody can get worked up about their death, but the commitment from that insight usually doesn't last. Realize instead that the ceaseless change we observe at the atomic level, at the emotional level, even at simplest level of thought, this ceaseless transforming of one thing into another, surrounds us, informs us, and in fact . . . is us! So if we are meant to observe what we might perceive as our physical death, and get some energy from that perception, we ought at least to consider the idea that this so-called death is nothing more than a transformation masked as a final ending because our perceptive apparatus isn't currently sharp enough to see its continuity beyond this life.

As I worked with this idea over the long haul, really looking at how everything is ceaselessly abandoning what it just was as it moves on to a new form that it just as quickly sheds for the newer one it embraces, I began to feel, intuit, dimly perceive—English probably doesn't have the verb—that I too was comfortably a part of this transformational stream and that ending just wasn't a part of it, although continuing in the traditional forms that I carry to school and into the classroom weren't a part of it either.

The result of all this was simply that I felt I had to get busy now because everything I did was causing a ripple in this transformational and changing stream (which gets into the third preliminary, 'actions and their results'), but that the old scythe-bearing grim reaper we know in the West wasn't casting that depressing shadow over my life. A kind of lightness of being ensued . . . an impermanence forever!

Sidney Burris

 

 

Comments

[freelance writing jobs in the philippines]

I'm not sure that I'll manage to do it, but I'll try!

[David]

Hi Sidney, great blog, thank you for your thoughts and ideas. Always lovely to hear how others interpret their life and spiritual journey, and will call back from time to time to read new additions. Keep up the great work, David.