Impermanence

This is a concept I have never quite grasped. I get the idea on the surface. We die, things decay. We are not permanent. But what is? Love? No, we like to say that in romantic ways, but it isn't true. The truth is, I don't have anything in my experience that is permanent, none of us do. Therefore, I can't understand it really. But I can take clues from my experiences and infer what permanence must be like.

Still, even this inference has always alluded me...the images of perishable and imperishable, of type and archetype, or ideals, of illusions, they all fell flat in some way. But recently, I was rereading something my teacher, Jack, wrote and it fell into place.

Every bit of our existence is composed of atoms, of motion and energy and space. These things do not sit static. They are constantly turning over. We borrow them for a while and then they are released again. This matter is part of the whole of the universe. To bring it to a more human, observable level, my cells are constantly dividing, constantly being replaced. The building blocks for that replacement are received through food, which comes at the expense of some other creature's life. I injest its matter to make more of my own, which is then lost through skin replacement, blood cell recycling, waste, and replenished again through food and sun and complex relations with microscopic organisms and larger organisms. All of what is physically me at this moment will not be me in several years, it will be something else. And what will be me then is something else now. I am not solid. I am a constant flux of matter and energy over the duration of my existence. All things are.

Upon realizing this, it was like Neo seeing the matrix code actively transpiring through the world around him. He had seen through the illusion of it. I am not a constant thing. I have never been and will never be in this life. Nor is anything around me. All things are flux and change, even those that seem permanent, are merely constant reconstructions of the same structure moving through time. As Jack says, I am the curve of a waterfall. It seems solid, shaped, but is actually made up of a constant torrent of water droplets replacing the ones that just passed at such a speed that it seems to hold a shape and a place.

This is impermanence.

To follow the metaphor, something more solid, more permanent, can actually reach into a waterfall and pass through it...this is a new thought...so if Jesus gives us a glimpse into that permanent humanity after His resurrection: He passes through space and time. He appears in a locked room. Therefore His body must be more permanent than space and time. A less permanent object can't pass through a more permanent one. A vapor or thin paper is dispelled by the waterfall, only something more solid can pass through it! Wow!