My Eight Year Old Guru and The Law of Impermanence

The day after returning from a seven-day silent meditation retreat, I was driving my eight-year-old nephew to the movies, both of us excited to see the newly released Chronicles Of Narnia movie.

Discussing the fighting that occurs in the film, my nephew was explaining to me that at this point in time he does not wish to be a soldier but that he might feel differently when he is older because he changes all the time.

Deciding he should explain himself more clearly, he continued by saying “When I was little I really liked tomatoes. Then I really didn’t like tomatoes. Yesterday I ate a little bit of tomato.” 

My nephew was sharing the realization that reality is more fluid than any of our ideas about it.

Impermanence is a fundamental insight in many spiritual practices. Most meditation practices point toward becoming equanimous in the midst of change and wiser in how we respond to what comes and goes.

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, said we can never bathe twice in the same river. A river is a progressive moment, a successive series of different moments, joining together to give the impression of one continuous flow. It has an outward impression that it is one continuous and unified movement, where as in reality it is not. The river today is not the same as the river of yesterday. Life is like a river, changing continuously, becoming something or the other from moment to moment.

Meditative practices help us open to the moment-to-moment arising and passing of every perceivable experience. With deep concentrated mindfulness, we see everything as constantly in flux, even experiences that ordinarily seem persistent.

Sitting in meditation for seven days, I was experiencing acute pain in my knee and hip joints. However when I tried to focus on the pain, I couldn’t pinpoint the exact spot. As soon as I brought my attention to the pain, it flashed out of the existence and reappeared a millimeter to the side. It transformed into a dance of sparking sensations located in no particular place. Pain that seemed solid was actually in constant flux.

Realizing impermanence, we realize that it doesn’t make sense to try holding onto anything, because everything simply flashes in and out of existence. There is nothing real that we can actually cling to. We see that our experiences don’t correspond to our fixed categories, ideas, or images.

It is often our resistance to change that causes most suffering. We view the world in black and white and refuse embrace the shades of grey.

If we defined ourselves as “tomato haters” and discovered a newfound love for tomatoes, do we cease to exist? Our most ingrained attachments are to self, self-image, and self-identity. In the deeper experience of mindfulness, we see that the idea of self is a form of clinging to concepts; nothing in our direct experience can qualify as a self to hold onto.