Beyond Impermanence

The theme I would like to explore this evening is impermanence and beyond. Actually, in many ways, I want to kind of extend some of what I talked about the other night, when I was talking about refuge. Some aspects of that I want to sort of pull out a little further.

We hear a lot about impermanence in these kind of settings, in the Dharma, in Buddhist teachings. And on one level, of course, the fact of impermanence, the fact that things change -- they're born, they live, they die -- is obvious. It's absolutely obvious, and we could stop anyone on the street and ask them, "Is that the case?" When we talk about insight, though, it's not so much that we practise and then we get the result of seeing that things are impermanent, because we already know things are impermanent. So the insight of impermanence is not a result. It's not a result. It's not something we'll practise really hard, and then suddenly, we'll notice that things are impermanent. Rather, it's an avenue. It's an avenue that we need to practise. We need to orient our seeing a certain way. So we need to practise contemplating impermanence. We need to practise tuning into this fact of change so that other results come about.

And what other results do we want? What do we want it to lead to? What do we want the contemplation of impermanence to lead to? Well, a number of things, and I want to go into them -- several. In the course of the talk, some of what I say might seem to contradict -- what I say later might seem to contradict what I say earlier. Not to dismiss anything of what we're looking for. It's all kind of part of a maṇḍala, so it's more like they're complementary rather than contradictory.

Let's start somewhere quite at an obvious level, at a sort of simple level. We want to tune in, as I said, to this fact of change. That means actually direct the practice in that way. So this morning, Catherine talked about mind states. And it's interesting. Although we know everything's impermanent, how quickly we can forget that -- especially with something like mind states! And we're locked in a difficult one. It feels like we're locked in a difficult one; feels like, even, maybe not consciously, it's going to go on forever. If we track mind states through the day, if one tracks mind states -- you get up in one mood, and the day goes on, and they just change. They just change. It's very hard to sustain any mind state.

So what would it be to go through the day here, or at home, and just be interested in impermanence? The everyday kind, the humdrum, not a big deal, the ordinary kind of impermanence, tracking the mind states, tracking the changes in environment, in temperature, in the way the body feels, going through the day with that orientation. And what we notice -- again, it's what we already know, but we're tuning a perception -- what we notice is that life is like waves. It's waves. So if the mind state is down, well, it'll come up. And if it's up, well, it'll go down.

Years ago, there was this poster. I've forgotten what it was advertising, even, but it was a picture of an Indian swami in tree pose, you know, with one leg like this, on a surfboard, surfing. And the caption said: "You can't stop the waves, but you sure can learn to surf," or something like that. We have to make it happen. I'm not saying anything, again, that you haven't heard before. I'm not saying anything that's not obvious. But we have to turn this into a helpful and powerful tool for freedom, a helpful and powerful insight. It's not going to happen without us tuning it and persistently looking in that direction, seeing it over and over again.

We make, we nourish certain insights, and the results of those insights. So we're in an unpleasant situation in the environment; it will pass. Or a pleasant situation -- fantastic meal in a restaurant, whatever it is -- it will also pass. And so, we can see, when we do that, the more we tune into this, the more there is in our life -- this is what we want, this is a result that we want -- there is a letting go. There is a kind of going with the flow, okay? And we go, and there is a flow in life, and there are waves. And we feel more able, and it's more accessible to us, to go with that flow, okay? Wonderful opportunity there.

Change, impermanence, can often have the sense, to us, of being something difficult, something challenging, some threat in life. But we also see that change has a lot of positivity to it. In many ways, if it wasn't for the fact of things being impermanent, how could this mind and heart grow and open and transform? How could I develop anything here? How could I cultivate what is helpful and beautiful? It's the fact of change and impermanence that allows that. We see in nature, especially around here, you see, there's such an abundance at times. Nature's just overflowing. And in a way, some of that has to die to make space, to make room for the fresh life.

So if we begin to tune our looking -- in a way, that's what insight meditation is: it's tuning the looking, tuning the ways of looking. And we begin to see change everywhere. We begin to see impermanence everywhere we look. We see the seasons, and one season changes into another. And the clouds, the clouds are just changing. The light in the day, arising, changing its colour, its texture, its intensity, and then fading again. The leaves -- again, they're not there in winter, and then they bud, they appear in the spring, and they grow, and in the summer, in the fullness of their life, and then they fade. They change colour, they fade, they wither, they die, they fall off. Petals have an even shorter life cycle in spring -- the beauty just appearing, and then disappearing. Some of this will be welcome to us, of course. And some won't. Some will bring us grief.

Another part of all this is that we don't want to be kind of cold meditation machines, noticing impermanence. We want, somehow, in this, for the heart to be open, to be touched, to be tender in relationship to impermanence, that there's a real humanity here. It's part of our humanity, that the heart can take in this, and feel the sorrow of it, and somehow accommodate that sorrow, accommodate the poignancy, the pathos, the grief of it. That's part of our humanity. [8:13] And I don't think any spiritual path should be trying to kind of, you know, surgically remove that. So all this change, some agreeable, some painful -- can the heart open to it all? Can it kind of embrace it all, and be tender with it all?

There are unique expressions that come into being -- unique human expressions, unique expressions in nature, unique expressions of any moment -- they come into being, they live, and they die. That unique expression is gone. No moment, no thing in nature, no person is ever the same. It's gone. And there's a poignancy in that. There's a pathos in that, the fleeting nature of things. And how much can the heart be tender with that?

There's a poem -- an old Zen monk, beautiful old Zen monk, living many years as a hermit in the mountains and forests, and playing with children, and loving it all, loving all the manifestations, and leaving lots of poems after his death. On his deathbed, and he knew he was going to die, his last poem:

My legacy? The moon on the waters of the lake, the wind in the trees.

So we do want this going with the flow. We do want this heart to be open, to be touched, to be in tune with that poignancy, the beautiful, bittersweet expressions of life. But that can never be the totality of what this path is about, or certainly not its goal. It can never be. That's way too small, in a way. It's not wide or deep enough. And certainly the Buddha never said it. If we keep on with this impermanence, what do we see? We see this endless disappearing of things. Things are endlessly disappearing. Where is yesterday? Even now, on the retreat, where has it gone? Where is three weeks ago? Where is that? Where is fifteen years ago? Where's teatime? Where's the beginning of this talk? Where's the last sentence? T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets:

Where is there an end to it, the soundless wailing,

The silent withering of autumn flowers

Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;

Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,

The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable

Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

And later he goes on:

There is no end, but addition: the trailing

Consequence of further days and hours,

While emotion takes to itself the emotionless

Years of living among the breakage

Of what was believed in as the most reliable --

And therefore the fittest for renunciation.^[1]

If we open our eyes to it, there's this enormity of the unstoppable flood of disappearing. It's just like a waterfall. Everything's heading to this waterfall, this precipice of disappearing -- everything. We can't keep anything as it is. We might try, but we have to look and see this. We actually cannot keep anything -- anything -- as it is. We might try, but we can't. Things, other people, certainly, relationships -- very, very difficult, practically impossible. So things, relationships, people, they come together, and at some point they break apart. In different ways, they fall apart. They can't sustain that togetherness.

So for different reasons in relationships -- and I'm sure, you know, there are people that you've loved dearly in this life, either romantically or as a friend or family or whatever. And then, have you had this experience? I know I have. Very good childhood and teenage friends, and such a bond, and such an intimacy, and some time later, you know, time goes by, you grow apart, or you're separated through living in different places, and you come together again. There isn't that same connection. There isn't that same spark. So there's a pathos there, but something also is right at the edge of being unsatisfactory. Then when we look in the world around us, we see ecosystems -- nowadays, whole ecosystems are threatened. We may not even be able to keep ecosystems as they are, the very life support system of the planet. It's an unstoppable flood.

Some of the change that happens to us and to those dear to us in our life will be brutal. It will be brutal. I recently saw this film -- it's actually from years ago -- Iris. I don't know if anyone's seen it. It's about Iris Murdoch and her sort of descent, really, into Alzheimer's. Very poignant, very beautiful film, beautifully done, beautifully acted. But her husband, you could see, for him, there wasn't really -- I mean, at moments, there was a poignancy there, but mostly, it was just brutal. It was senseless. He couldn't fathom it. I don't think, as important as this is -- I don't want to dismiss that heart opening, the tenderness of the heart, etc., the going with the flow, but I don't think that it's possible for a heart to sustain that tenderness if we only see change in things, which is what we mostly look -- when we see, we see things, and we see them changing. Much as we might talk about it in Dharma talks (opening the heart to change, being with it, going with the flow, letting go, etc.), I think it's actually, when push comes to shove, impossible to sustain that. It's impossible to sustain it.

And there will be, at some point, as they say, as the Desert Fathers said in the Christian mystical tradition, there will be, in the face of constant change, a holy discontent. Something deep in the being, no matter how tender we are, no matter how much we let go, something will be discontent there, a holy discontent.

Every month I go to the local GP in the next little village over, or town, really, to get a prescription that I need. And usually, it's old people there. People are quite old, and you see, and the eyes are open, and people struggling to breathe, labouring. The breath is laboured. The walking is laboured, with Zimmer frames, and you can see it's painful to walk -- or stooped over, cannot really hold the body upright any more. So you know, do we doubt this, the difficulty of it? Do we doubt it? Just go to the local doctor.

And the Buddha, of course, you know, same, centuries ago, of course. He's in dialogue, in this instance, with a young man. He says:

But, my good man, did you not see, among people, a woman or a man, aged eighty, ninety, or a hundred years, frail, bent like a roof gable, crooked, leaning on a stick, shakily going along, ailing, his youth and vigour gone, with broken teeth, with grey and scanty hair, or none, wrinkled, with blotched limbs? My good man, did it never occur to you, who are intelligent and old enough: "I too am subject to old age, and cannot escape it"?^[2]

We've got a friend who works as a therapist, a counsellor for the NHS in hospital, working with cancer patients. And they come to her. They're different ages, but most of them are sort of fifty-plus. And a lot of bitterness, often: people who have put money away, pensions, looked forward to retiring, with plans, with dreams, and those dreams are actually shattered, or really look like they're going to be shattered. And oftentimes there's a bitterness there -- very, very difficult. We make plans, and when we're young, we have a dream of how it's going to be when I'm older, and what I'm going to do, and what I'm going to achieve, maybe. And then things don't always turn out how we want. And then we get to an age where we actually can't change it. You can't change it. You can't go back. You can't really do anything about it. In a real sense, we're trapped by this process. We're trapped in this process of change and ageing. And it's not easy to see that.

The Buddha has this analogy in another dialogue. He was talking to a king, actually. He said, "It's like there's a big mountain that's moving towards you from the east, and a big mountain that's moving towards you from the west, and a big mountain from the north, and a big mountain from the south. What are you going to do about it?"^[3] And there's this sense of, we are actually trapped by this process. There's no -- where's the way out?

Sometimes, I may feel, or you may feel, I'm relatively okay when I look in the mirror, and I've, you know, got a lot less hair than I did twenty years ago, grey, relatively okay with the wrinkles, and the belly, and the sagging this and that. I'm relatively okay with that, but I still somehow feel trapped by its presence around me. This is not easy, not easy. In some relationship or another with someone that I care about, I feel trapped by their ageing. Not easy. I might feel okay about mine, but I look at them -- a parent, a spouse, or whatever -- and maybe I see in them their mental faculties decline a little bit, their sense faculties decline a little bit, their energy levels decline a little bit. And maybe I still feel very energetic, and I want them to feel energetic. Difficult!

Or emotionally, maybe as they grow older, which unfortunately, for a lot of people it's the case, there's a kind of contracting and freezing of the emotionality in one person, not in the other. Or their appearance: again, we might feel okay when we look in the mirror, but we might look at them and feel, "I want someone younger. I want someone who looks different." [laughter] It goes on, and people suffer about it. People suffer with it. And no amount of cosmetic surgery is going to make a difference. And with the mind, no amount of morning crosswords and sudoku is going to bring back the ... It's going to be a problem if I'm attached in a certain way in that relationship. And most relationships do have that component of attachment in them. And maybe they need that component of attachment. You know, most of our relationships with friends, with lovers, etc., with spouses, are not pure mettā relationships. And maybe they shouldn't be, either. That's not the realm of what it is. There's a strand of attachment, and that attachment will cause problems in relation to this, or can cause problems in relation to this. So in a way, we're trapped by all this, with all this, in all this.

And when you read the original Buddha's teachings, it's actually very hard to find him saying, "Just go with the flow. Just open your heart and feel the beauty, the beautiful poignancy of it, and kind of let go, and just roll with it." Very, very rare. I mean, it is there, as a sort of strand. But it's not really the thrust of his teaching around impermanence. So he's not saying that, for the most part. He's saying that in part, but not for the most part.

And with all this, he's pointing to the difficulty. And I know it's difficult. It's difficult to hear, it's difficult to talk about. With all this, he's always saying something really important, which we so often overlook in practice: that this seeing of the difficulty of our situation, this seeing of the inescapability of our situation, is in a context. And this is so important. The Buddha keeps repeating it. It's in a context, it needs a context of cultivating well-being and an inner reservoir of happiness, of peace, of joy, of well-being -- absolutely indispensable. Otherwise, how are we going to have the ability to really look at this stuff in the face, and really remain steady, and really actually even remain joyful through it? Really, really important part of the practice -- and again, if you go back to the original teachings, he's actually emphasizing this cultivating more than anything else in the whole teachings. He's emphasizing that cultivating. Very easy for us to overlook that.

So we see impermanence. We look: this big deal, this problem that's going on right now in my life, and it's so gripping (and this relates to when I was talking about refuge), we need to fix this problem, must -- whatever it is, in a relationship, in a living situation, money, da-da-da-da, whatever it is, I need to fix the problem. Of course. The problem looks like the big deal. Five years, ten years, fifteen years down the line, we've forgotten about that situation. We've forgotten. Who remembers about your exam results or whatever when you were a kid? It's irrelevant now. Or this or that relationship when you were a teenager.

We've forgotten the situation, but something remains. Something does remain, even though the relationship has got lost. It's got sunken. It's got lost in the water. And that thing that remains is the habits we've set up of the ways of relating -- the ways of viewing that I was talking about last time -- because those remain as seeds, and as habits implanted in the mind. If the way of seeing is one of aversion, get rid of, fix, if I'm not giving that a loving, caring attention, that's what takes a seed. Or if I am looking at the relationship, if I am caring: "Okay, this is difficult. Can I meet it with kindness? What does wisdom say about this? Where's the place of equanimity?" All that, those things take root. Those things become seeds. And that's what remains. The situation, we barely even remember. But that we will remember. That we will have as our -- as the Buddha puts it, we are heir to that. We are heir to that.

Usually we pay attention to the problem and not to the relationship. We have an upside down understanding of which is important. So when the Buddha's pointing to all this, and saying, "Look at this difficulty, and these mountains approaching, and they're going to squash you," etc., he's not wanting to depress us. He's not wanting to make us miserable or spoil our fun. He's not, you know, the great big party pooper.

Actually, he is a party pooper. [laughter] Let's be honest. He is a party pooper. But in a way, he's inviting us to a better party. [laughter] You could put it that way. He's also speaking out of compassion. Not to forget that. He's speaking out of compassion, and he's pointing to a possibility that we're not seeing. He's pointing to a possibility, and he's raising it, and raising this hard-to-look-at difficulty out of compassion. So we need to really give this full awareness, and including a contemplation of our death, really full awareness of that.

Nāgārjuna, one of the great Mahāyāna teachers, in his Precious Garland of Advice: "You are living amidst the causes of death, like a lamp, like a candle standing in a breeze. And at death, having to let go of all possessions, powerless, you go elsewhere." We need to reflect on this. Sometimes we're afraid of even the mention of death, or afraid to think about it. If we block it off, when it comes, even more fear -- unbelievable fear at the time of death.

So again, the Buddha is not just trying to make us anxious and afraid and kind of incapable of doing anything at all. That's not the point here. Partly what he wants us to do is to start questioning, to really start questioning. And in the reflection, he says, "The days and nights are relentlessly passing. How well am I spending my time?" And he says, "This should be reflected upon again and again by one who is practising." So these few years given to me -- I have the choice, actually. I can spend them well, or I can spend them badly. And the Buddha asks: how well are you spending your time?

So it's interesting. Here we have a room of, I don't know, sixty or seventy people, whatever it is. How many people in here right now, consciously or unconsciously, among us, assume we'll be alive in ten years' time? Five years? [laughs] Yeah, some hands go up. [laughter] It's great. Yeah. It's there as an assumption. There's not particularly any reason to believe that we will. It's very easy to think, to believe, to feel, to actually feel -- it's not even a thinking process -- to feel that there's lots of time left, there's lots of time remaining. And if that's the case, it's very easy then to go into a little bit or a lot of a relationship with life that can be a little bit wasteful or procrastinating. And even for long-term practitioners, it comes in, and it can influence practice. So it can be quite common. It's almost as if sometimes people -- mostly people who have been practising a long time -- it's almost, sometimes, practising almost as if you have eight thousand years left to practise. It's just, "I can watch this: this old fear around money, or this old fear of this. I've been watching it for about fifteen or twenty years in practice. And I'll just keep watching it. Got plenty of time, plenty of time." [laughter]

Or we go to the opposite extreme: "It has to go!" And the judge comes in. And that's not helpful either, of course. I'm not going to go into that tonight. Can we develop a sense that I could die tonight? I could die tonight. And I have known quite a number of people who got up one morning with no inkling that they were going to die that day, or that evening -- no inkling. Can we develop this as a practice, this sense, when we lie down to sleep: "I could die tonight"? And then: "If so, if I did die tonight, have I been living, am I living so that I could die without any regrets?" It's a difficult question: "Am I living so I could die without any regrets?" And given death, what in my life am I trying to accumulate, and why? It's very easy to see the self, very almost natural to the self, to see it as an accumulator of tangible or intangible things. What am I trying to accumulate, and why? So it's quite easy, unfortunately, for us to mostly dwell kind of on the surface of this mystery -- quite easy. Mostly be concerned -- it's very easy to get swept up in a concern for the surface.

Again, the Buddha's not trying to just frighten us, or make us live with angst. Sometimes we hear that in the teachings, as if the angst, the existential angst, is sort of the point of it all. But with all this is confidence, and confidence in the Dharma, and confidence in practice. So that, with the reality of the situation, is a different scenario. It's a different flowering. What it's pointing to, what it's wanting to encourage -- one of the things -- is a sense of urgency, of perspective.

The Buddha, when you look at what he said, he's actually pointing to some possibility beyond our sense of change -- beyond, not just in and with. Sense of urgency, sense of possibility, also that it can feed a sense of love and compassion. This, too, is very important. When we begin to see the commonality of our situation, the commonality of our fate, we can resonate more. There's more sympathy with other beings.

There was this psychologist doing this investigation into a prison in -- I think it was in Texas. And the prisoners on death row were very, very courteous to each other, very kind of kind to each other -- very unusual in a prison environment. And they went in, this team of psychologists. But the prisoners already knew what the answer was. "Well, we know we're going to die," they say. "It's very clear to us. It changes things."

Tsongkhapa, one of the great Tibetan teachers, said, "If you fall off a cliff with someone, are you going to argue on the way down?" [laughter] That's how short our life is. It's only in James Bond movies and Indiana Jones movies where they do that.

The Dalai Lama -- found something from the Dalai Lama the other day. He said:

Sometimes when I am visiting a big city, staying on a high floor in a hotel, I look down at the traffic, hundreds and even thousands of cars going this way and that, and reflect that, although all these beings are impermanent, they are thinking, "I want to be happy," "I must do this job," "I must get this money," "I have to do this." They are mistakenly imagining themselves to be permanent. This thought stimulates my compassion.^[4]

There's an added compassion there, because of the mistaken belief.

So again, going back to what I said right at the beginning: we, everyone knows we're going to die, at some level. Everyone knows things are impermanent. We actually need to make this alive. We need to do something in the way we're seeing this, and orienting to it, and reminding ourselves and contemplating it. We need to kind of bring home the fruits of this practice.

The Buddha's pointing to a possibility, to a possibility for us. Anicca, this word that usually gets translated as 'impermanence,' also means 'uncertainty.' That's another meaning of it. One person was telling me, he has been contemplating death, but still what's difficult is where he's going to die. He doesn't want to die in a hospital with lots of tubes in. The Buddha's pointing -- possible even to be okay with that.

I was teaching somewhere else not too long ago. And a man in his forties asked, spoke, he asked a question. He said his father is getting old and clearly approaching death. And it brought up a lot of sadness and fear for this man, the son. He thought about his father's situation. He could see, well, for the father, there's very little accumulation of good experiences to look forward to. So in that sense, it's just a narrowing timespan of good experiences to look forward to. And this brought up sadness and fear. When he thought about his life, in the sense of good memories, and the fear of losing them, and looking backwards, and they're slipping -- they're slipping away.

So again, with all this, the Buddha isn't -- to repeat, the Buddha is not saying, "Just go with the flow. Just let your heart be touched," beautiful and important as that is. And again, I'm going to repeat what I've already said: if we're relying on experience for our happiness, a real problem there, because it's unavoidable that it won't bring us happiness as we grow older. It's unavoidable, the situation, the reflection that this man had. But if we're relying on cultivating beautiful qualities of the heart and mind, if we're relying on opening the heart in mettā, nourishing compassion, mindfulness, equanimity, all those lists, again, generosity -- those lead to happiness in the long term. And yes, they're impermanent, but they're a lot more reliable. They're a lot more reliable, not relying on good experiences, not relying on an accumulation of good and happy experiences. It's a very mature practitioner who really lives from that understanding. It's quite a rare and mature practitioner that really lives that out in their life as a lived understanding. [36:24]

We don't talk much, in this kind of tradition, about what happens after death, etc. We kind of leave that aside. And that's -- I'm really happy to do that. I was listening a while ago to a Tibetan teacher speak, and they do talk about what happens at death, and the whole process. And I don't know, but they were saying the experience is a veil. A veil of darkness descends on consciousness, and one forgets. Very shortly after dying, one forgets everything in this life -- everything that you've loved, everyone you've known and been close to, everything that had meaning to you -- just forgets. You lose your frame of reference and orientation and memory. There's a veil of darkness, and one starts hallucinating, and there are these winds, and different experiences. And the only thing that remains, when all these memories are dissolving, and just this darkness remains, the only thing that remains, again, is the current of our habits of heart, and our habits of mind. That's the only thing that we take with us, if one believes in future lives.

Very important in this dialogue with this man to remember, where am I investing in happiness? Is it in the experiences, in the accumulation of experiences? Or is it in the cultivation of this reservoir of beautiful qualities? It's a real reorientation. But secondly, and perhaps even more profoundly, we tend to see life as experience. What else would I see life as? That's what I have as a human being. I have experience. I have this experience and that experience, and the whole texture and flow of experience. And we tend to see life as experience and experiences. What else? Couldn't be anything else, for most of us. And then we look for happiness in that view of life as experience.

But if we're doing that, looking at life that way, as what it appears to be -- experience and the flow of experience -- it cannot bring more happiness as we get older, that view. Talking about views again, that view, which is totally a given, it's -- we're almost born with that view. We are born with that view. We see life as appearances. We see life as experiences. That view cannot bring more happiness as we get older. It can't. It can't work out that way. And actually, having that view, it will be very difficult to avoid the kind of feelings that this man was having. Life is slipping through the fingers, slipping through the fingers. You can't hold on to it. Experience, life, slipping through the fingers, only going one way. So we have this world of appearances that we live in, and the deep Dharma teachings are saying, is that really the reality of the world? Is that the objective reality of the world, this world of appearances? And if we believe it is, which, as I said, we take it for granted, we're setting ourselves up for a problem. It is inescapable.

So how am I, if -- this is part of what the Buddha is pointing at -- how am I, how are you, if I want to, how am I going to go beyond this world of appearances? How am I going to understand something here? Well, one way is to actually go deeper into impermanence, deeper into impermanence, and begin refining our contemplation of impermanence even more finely and sharply. So really look at moment-to-moment impermanence. Please remember, all this is pointing in the direction of possibility, not despair, okay? That's why I said the Buddha's pointing to possibility, okay? The heavy talk is to get this sense of urgency. It's pointing to a possibility. So please remember that. [40:51]

We practise, again, a way of looking. So Catherine was talking about in the talk the other night, you look at it like this, you look at it like that. One way of looking at experience, one way of looking at life, is tuning into the moment by moment impermanence. And we sharpen our attention to see this flickering nature of reality. And the more we do it, the more it becomes evident to us. All experiences, all experiences arising, passing, arising, passing, so it's just flickering like -- well, like those old TV sets. Now you've got 24-hour TV. But before you had that, you know, just flickered there -- flickering, appearing, disappearing. So we practise a mode of seeing, a way of seeing where all I'm interested in is seeing this impermanence. I'm not interested in drawing close to the texture. I'm not interested in meeting the experience as it is, etc. All I'm interested in is impermanence, impermanence, impermanence. I put some glasses on, and I just want them to see impermanence, as finely and as fully as I can. If I do that, then the more that I do that, it should bring a letting go with it. One sees that there's nothing -- everything's changing so quickly, the heart lets go. It should -- actually, ideally, it should let go. It should let go.

One teacher from another tradition, modern teacher from another tradition -- similar tradition, though: "Beneath the turmoil of thought, emotion, and personal will, there is a flow. You may have felt it -- the natural movement of life, the truth that beckons below the surface of things. What would happen if you were to stop avoiding, and completely embrace this universal energy?" So it's there for us. Some different perception is there for us, which even in the course of the retreat so far, or other retreats, you may have glimpsed: the story's not so compelling for a while. You manage to get underneath it, and focus in a different way. There's a whole other stream going on.

Really important, but -- I don't know what he would have gone on to say, but sometimes people would equate that with a kind of ultimate, final truth of things. That's the truth: this moment-to-moment flow, this river of life. Again, if you know the beautiful story of Herman Hesse and Siddhartha, when he sort of sits by the river and watches the river, the flow of life. But the Buddha never pointed to that flow, that river, as the final goal -- never. And again, if there's any sense of flow, even underneath the story, underneath the will, underneath all that, any sense of flow -- again, from the depths of the heart, for someone who really cares about this, the holy discontent, the holy discontent. I can't settle in a full peace when there's a sense of flow. [43:51]

A person might begin to wonder: is it possible to go beyond impermanence? Is it possible to go beyond all this seeming change? And then you hear, the Buddha talks about the Unfabricated, the Unborn, the Unconditioned -- different words given to it. In deep practice, for some people, and I'm not -- please don't grasp at the description of an experience here. I'm just, again, pointing at a possibility that's there for us as practitioners. But it can seem, when things get quite quiet for us in practice, it can seem as if all experience (sounds, and body sensations, and thoughts, and emotions, and everything) is kind of appearing, and lasting briefly, and then disappearing out of a vastness, out of a vastness of space, almost like the sky of beingness, or the ground of being -- people give it different names -- out of the sense of silence itself, just appearing and disappearing. And what becomes more prominent to consciousness is actually that sense of space, of silence, of nothingness. Some people call it emptiness. Everything's just like shooting stars in the sky, just appearing and disappearing out of this vast, still, eternal-seeming spaciousness, nothingness.

Very tempting, and actually very common for people to say, "That's the Unfabricated." There's such a sense of beauty in it, such a sense of something in the heart being touched at a very deep level. "This is the Unfabricated. I've found it. I've found the Unconditioned. I've found the Absolute." Well, a question: how do you know that that goes beyond death? There's a birth and a death of things within that space, but when I die, how do I know it's still there? It's very skilful, though, as a way of practising, as a practice. In fact, tomorrow morning I'm going to suggest it as one way of opening up the practice. Very, very skilful. But again, this sense of something lasting in a still, unperturbed way forever, eternally -- beautiful, touches the heart, opens the heart, gives a tremendous amount of peace and freedom -- still not the final goal; still something inside should, I hope, have a little bit of holy discontent there.

So where would this possibly go for someone who wants to find out? Contemplating impermanence in this subtle way, contemplating in this way -- this sky, this spaciousness or silence which receives and gives birth to everything -- should bring a letting go. And the more we let go, actually, the more we have a sense of this nothingness, of this space, etc. And as we do that, the more we let go, the more a sense of freedom deepens in the being at that time, with the letting go. It's very clear: the letting go brings a sense of freedom. There's a sense of freedom deepening in the being. But that's not the only thing that happens at a very deep level in practice. It's not the only thing. Something else begins to happen. And it's that the sense of things themselves, and time itself, begins to unbind, kind of fall apart.

So we're interested in finding ways -- and those are just two: contemplating impermanence subtly, and letting things be in this big sky -- we're interested in ways of letting go, letting go of all things. But again, repeat for I don't know how many times, we let go of unskilful things first, and we hang on to skilful things. We get attached to mindfulness, to equanimity, to insight, to peace. We need them, because they're our platform from which to let go. And in time, we can let go of that too. [48:19]

We let go of things, and things begin -- the mind, the heart begins to be (the Buddha's word) unbound. The very sense of the consciousness itself begins to be unbound. And in the unbinding of the heart, there is correspondingly, then, a non-binding, a letting go of binding the appearance of objects to consciousness. I know this may sound very abstract, but what I want to do is point to a possibility, because otherwise, it's possible that our sense of possibility is quite limited. And that would be a shame. And there's an unbinding of appearances of objects to a perceiving consciousness. That whole subject/object duality is actually unbound, disbands -- these are the Buddha's words. One translation of nirvāṇa is 'unbinding,' nir-vāṇa, 'unbinding.' The Buddha points to this. What's then left when everything is unbound? When everything unbinds, objects, time, consciousness, the heart -- all unbound.

In the other talk I gave some synonyms that the Buddha actually gave -- thirty-seven synonyms for nibbāna. There are others: the unageing, the stable, the undisintegrating, the unailing. That's one way of going about things. There's another way. Let's see how we do for time here, but there's another way. In some suttas that you come across, in some discourses, you hear things like this: "Things, all things, do not arise. They do not abide. They do not cease." Or another text: "Whatever is dependently arising" -- which means everything -- "Everything is unceasing, unborn, unannihilated, not permanent, not coming, not going, without difference or sameness, and free from conceptual construction." These are designed to challenge our sense of reality.

What's more important than an experience is understanding an insight, a very deep insight. That understanding is much more important. Usually, our relationship with experience is pushing away what we don't like, and pulling towards us what we do like, at all kinds of levels -- either strongly or minutely. Got a pain in the back, got this, got that -- aversion. And what I like, I try and hang on to it. This is going on every moment of consciousness. There's a push, pull, push, pull, tug of war.

As practice deepens, we actually begin to let go of that at more and more subtle levels. And a person can notice, begin to get the sense of time falling apart at a very deep level. You can actually see something of the same insight at a much grosser level, even now in the retreat like this. You're sitting, and you're sitting, and "When is the bell going to ring? When is the bell going to ring?" And in the notion of time, and the resistance or aversion or impatience or leaning forward, the sense of time gets more and more kind of solidified. It gets more and more prominent. So time is really taking on a big -- it's very loud in consciousness. As you let go of that -- someone can ring the bell, and then suddenly, it's all gone. That's a more gross manifestation of the same insight. Time, the sense of time, is built. We think it has an independent existence. It's actually built by our pushing and pulling and tugging with experience.

So time has no independent existence, separate from the mind. That's one of the ways, one of the things that the Buddha's pointing to. We also see, things also don't really exist independently of the mind. It's the mind that makes things. The mind makes things. We say, or it is said in the texts, it's the mind that imputes objects. It makes objects with its perceptual and conceptual process. So one yogi gave me an image one time. It's a lovely image. What happens when you throw a chair in a fire? At what point does someone coming along say, "That's a chair" or "That's not a chair" as it's losing its form? Is there a point that everyone would agree on? It's something that the perceptual process does to decide, "This is this thing or not this thing." Or another one: a tree fallen over in a forest, and rotting. At what point is it not a tree any more? The mind is deciding the point at which things are things. It seems, to our senses, that things cease. It seems that they stop, that they disintegrate. But actually we can't find the moment that they cease. We can't find that moment that they cease.

There's a classical analysis. I'm just going to say it quickly. There's a classical analysis. The moment that they cease, that must have a beginning of that moment, and a middle of that moment, and an end of that moment. And when the moment is at the beginning, it's not in the middle. And then, when it's in the middle, it's not at the beginning or at the end. It's always in -- you know, the time goes through there -- in which case it's actually three moments, because when you're at the beginning, it's not the time of the middle. When you're at the middle, it's not the time at the beginning. So it's actually three moments. Is there a moment that's actually one moment? So it's really many moments, not one moment. To have many moments, I'd have to have many one moments, right? That's what many is. It's a collection of ones. But to be one moment, it would have to not be divisible into a beginning and middle and an end, because otherwise it would be many moments again. So I can't find one moment, because if I can't divide it, it means it doesn't have a beginning and an end and a middle -- in which case, how would I line that moment up with other moments to make a succession of moments? Something very weird is going on here. Something very, very weird is going on here.

We can hear something like that, and we say, "Well, pfft, okay. Kind of, that was smart, but you know, whatever." [laughter] I didn't make it up, by the way. It's a classic reasoning from the Mahāyāna tradition. We are addicted to accepting appearances. We're addicted to accepting appearances. And our senses tell us that things arise, and they last, and they die. We're addicted to that. We believe that. And it seems so vivid. We believe it because it seems so vivid. And we're suspicious of teachings about emptiness. We're suspicious of that kind of reasoning, that classical reasoning which I ran through. We're not suspicious of appearances. And the Buddha says, "On its head. That's the wrong way round." Be suspicious of the appearance of things. Be suspicious of what comes to us through the senses, and not so suspicious of this way of reasoning and way of looking that actually seems to really question that.

Another synonym for nibbāna, for nirvāṇa, is the truth. When we don't build up experience and things and a subject and an object, the Buddha calls that, in one of the thirty-seven synonyms, the truth.

So as we said at the beginning, all this, when we contemplate impermanence, all this is actually available to us. All this is there for us. And this is what the Buddha is pointing to -- the totality of all that: different levels, things that seem to kind of contradict or stand by each other. All of that's available to us as human beings. It's up to us to decide how much of that we want, how much it's okay for us to live with this seeming world of appearances, and death, and the kind of trappedness of that, and ageing, impermanence.

And then finally, just, it's even more beautiful. It's not that then we're locked into, trapped in the view of impermanence and change. And yet we're also not trapped into a view of emptiness. So the deeper freedom actually is to be able to pick up and put down different views -- as and when they're helpful for the heart, and for freedom, and for compassion, and for peace. So tonight, I think probably everyone knows, but tonight is New Year's Eve. Did everyone know that? Tonight is New Year's Eve. And obviously, that's, you know, an extreme convention. I mean, in other religions and traditions, it's not New Year's Eve tonight. It's New Year's Eve tonight. If it's helpful for the heart, and often it is, to reflect in certain ways, to aspire in certain ways, to remember in certain ways. Something's happening to the heart. When that's helpful, we pick that up. So the question is: what's helpful, not to be stuck in time, and the things of time, and not to be stuck in emptiness? In that is a wider freedom.

And just to say, to point at some possibilities. Some might seem a little abstract. And what happens when we hear something that, you know, sometimes it's easier to hear about some of this stuff when you're not on retreat. Sometimes people hear it, and they love it. And people have different reactions. But just to notice the reaction. I'm really wanting to point to a possibility and say, if we want it, this is there for us. As much or as little as we want, it's there for us. It's a possibility.