Life on this planet can be scary, especially if you imagine a future in which terrible things happen. As I’ve mentioned before, imagination is both a curse and a gift, and the same is true of memory: we remember bad things, and imagine them being even worse in the future, yet memory and imagination allow us to plan ahead and avoid at least some our imagined catastrophes.
One of the tools with which evolution has supplied us is the ability to recognize repeating patterns—winter, spring, summer, fall, etc. Patterns allow us to predict the future, and it seems likely that there is a reward system built into the brain for pattern recognition—something like a mini-orgasm—which results in our enjoyment of patterned visual images, (pottery and fabric come to mind,) and sounds (music).
Our ability to plan ahead has never been good enough to avoid all uncertainty, however, and we have come up with an ace-in-the-hole: religion. Over the millennia, our religions have convinced us that no matter how bad things get, everything will work out all right in the end if we perform the appropriate rituals. “The end” has usually been somewhere in heaven or paradise, conveniently beyond our ability to confirm by the usual means, and has to be taken on faith. Nonetheless, this faith has served to quiet our fears somewhat, to reassure us in facing the vast unknown.
Buddhists seem unique in offering freedom from fear in our ordinary lives. Although some segments of Buddhism have hedged their bets with the prospect of nirvana, enlightenment, awakening, etc., in some future life, (sometimes even in another place: the “Pure Land,”) the dominant emphasis has been on freedom from anguish right here, at any moment. The means of achieving this freedom have varied over the centuries, and in elaborating on these means, Buddhists have often created the kinds of absolute truths common to more deist religions. Useful ideas have become dogma. One of the more prominent of these is the idea of impermanence, which I’ve written about before.
To quote myself:
Once I went up to the teacher after a dharma talk on impermanence and noted that for the last few days, every time I looked out there were daffodils growing beside the driveway. “Not the same daffodils,” he snapped, to which I responded, “Maybe, but they haven’t become roses, either.”
Of course, everything is ultimately impermanent—the sun will someday go supernova, and life as we know it on this planet will be over—but… there is some continuity in our everyday lives. We don’t have to re-learn our native language every day, for one thing, so to say, “everything is impermanent, you can’t step in the same river twice, etc.,” is true, but rather useless in understanding the ordinary reality of our situation.
I think it is more helpful to realize the degree to which the various aspects of our lives are impermanent. Some things last longer than others, and the real problems that this variable impermanence creates arise from our wanting things to last beyond their normal span, or in dealing with them as if they were longer-lived than they actually are. It is our disconnection from the reality of things and the resulting reification of our fantasies that bring unhappiness and discontent.
The problem in making use of this everyday idea of impermanence is that it requires paying attention to how long things actually last, and to being alert for the onset of fantasies that diverge from what we can realistically expect. Staying in touch with reality moment-to-moment is much more difficult than simply applying the label “impermanence” to everything, and then pretending that all our problems are thereby solved.
The most recent example I’ve seen of this extreme dogmatization of ideas was in the Spring, 2010, issue of Tricycle magazine. In an article extolling “reason,” the author proclaimed that since “up” on one side of the earth is “down” on the other side, there are no such things as up and down. Pursuing this form of “reasoning,” he continued to state that “coming” is the same as “going”—they are “equality”—as are suffering and happiness, friend and enemy, good and bad, and therefore, “…we stop clinging to opposites as being truly existent.”
Relax, all our problems are non-existent. If only life were so simple.
In real life, you may consider it very important that the person handing you a bowl of hot soup maintains the same relative frame of reference until the bowl is safely in your hands. If they suddenly shifted their reference point to the other side of the planet, you might find yourself experiencing the discomfort of hot soup in your lap, even though comfort and discomfort are “equality.”
The tradition the author subscribes to has set up an imagined absolute truth as the standard for existence: since up and down, here and there, etc., can only be determined by some arbitrary reference point—there is no absolute “up”—they don’t truly exist. The only things that qualify as truly existent are things that exist independently of everything else, and since no thing is independent of everything else, nothing exists!
It is only because we can imagine something that seems better than reality that reality as it is, with its relativity and uncertainty, seems harsh and unpalatable. Imagination has created paradise and heaven—castles in the air—filling us with yearning for the impossible.
I came home from school crying one day because a kid had told me that my mom and dad were Santa Claus. If no one had ever imagined Santa Claus, I wouldn’t have had to mourn his loss. I went through a similar trauma when I found out there was no god.
Like life without Santa Claus, life without absolutes and certainty is not so bad once you get used to it. In fact, it can be more fun because you don’t have to wait until Christmas—or death—for your presents: every moment is a gift.
I’m Absolutely Certain It’s Foggy, I Think