If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in
the future. Well, I suppose that makes me a bloody time traveller. But, in all seriousness,
I think before we can finish this quote, we need some understanding about transience.
Sometimes referred to as impermanence or change, this idea of transience is one of
the most fundamental questions in philosophy, and has been tackled in the East and West alike.
One of the first philosophers to write about transience in the West
was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was active around 500BC and is notable for having
the word ‘clit’ in his name, which is hilarious. Heraclitus was said to have created only one work
in his lifetime, so our knowledge about him mostly comes from what others have written about him,
including Diogenes and Plato. Though Heraclitus provides a rich account of the nature of the
world, his most famous idea (both then and now) is that of universal flux, or transience.
For Heraclitus, the most fundamental characteristic of the universe is change,
which is the idea behind his famous quote: ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice.’
The river might have the same appearance from the outside, and travel the same path across the land,
but the river itself is always changing. The river might flow from the same source in the mountains,
but the particles that make up the water are constantly shifting in their position. And so
the river will always be different from the one you stepped in before. For Heraclitus, the world
was a stage for opposing forces which battled in a mutual rivalry. The fundamental stuff that made up
the universe was not some material substance like matter, but rather it was characterized by change.
At the bottom of everything were not things, but processes. The river is not an object but the flow
of water; a tree is not a thing but the totality of all the life forces inside it. All of nature is
defined by process, and activity and change. This metaphor of the river,
although Heraclitus meant it literally, can be applied to the rest of our lives as well.
We like to think that the world is immutable and fixed, but this could not be more incorrect.
If we introspect into our minds, what we find is not a concrete self, but rather a stream of
thoughts and ideas and sensations. If you hold your mind’s hand as you allow it to wander,
it is amazing how many times it can leap from one thought to another
from one moment to the next. There seems to be no fixed state in which the mind can rest.
Likewise for the body. It appears as though the body is a stable entity with a concrete reality,
but in fact, the atoms that constitute you are in a constant state of flux, and are shifting their
states and positions almost constantly. Every 7 to 10 years, the body will replace most of its cells
with new ones, so there really is not much basis on which you can call your body the same one that
it was 7 or 10 years ago. Stranger still, on the atomic level, there really is not much difference
between your atoms and the atoms that make up the rest of the world. You are continuous with nature,
and are just as changeable as Heraclitus’s river! The same goes for the people around us. We like to
think that our loved ones will stay and be around forever, but unfortunately, that is not the case.
People come into and out of the world all the time, and at some point, we will all have to
bid farewell to some of our friends and family, as they disappear from this life into whatever comes
next. Humans are no more permanent than a sunrise in the morning, or lightning in a thunderstorm,
and that can really hurt sometimes. If loss is like a choir, then our feeling of loss
is like a cathedral, where the sound echoes and reverberates off the walls until it builds into
something almost unbearable. How difficult it is to live in a universe with the knowledge
that all the things we have learned and all the ones we love will, at some time, be taken away.
Even as we move away from the Earth, transience affects the rest of the universe too.
We used to think the stars were immutable and unchanging, and that all of them were fixed to
a massive celestial sphere in the heavens. Can we really blame our ancestors for thinking that?
Within a span of a human lifetime, the stars do indeed appear to be fixed in their positions,
however the more we learned about them and their motions, we found that this was not true. Each of
them is travelling on their own orbit through the Milky Way at incredible speeds, but their
extreme distance makes their movements almost impossible to detect. If the stars could see,
they would have been around to witness our entire history unfold,
and witness the birth and death of every human that ever was. Even in that unimaginable stretch
of time between the first Homo sapiens and now, their positions will have shifted only a little.
However, even the stars will die at some predestined time in the future,
in a massive cosmic explosion that can outshine entire galaxies. Such a supernova can last days,
months, or even years, but even these are referred to as transient astronomical events. When compared
to the timeline of the universe, these supernovas are barely even worth mentioning. It can serve to
remind us that nothing in the universe lasts forever. The universe itself, of course,
will also die at some time in the future when it succumbs to heat death, or whichever theory about
the ultimate fate of the universe is correct. From the small and insignificant scale of human lives,
to the grander structures and even the universe itself, will at some time come to an end.
The totality of existence can be defined in terms of transience and loss. And despite
however much we want to avoid the tragedies of existence, nothing can be done to prevent it.
This idea of transience and universal flux was something well known in the East,
especially to the Buddha, where transience is one of the three marks of sentient existence, along
with suffering and non-self. Ignorance about these three characteristics in the course of our lives
and interactions with the environment will lead to us thinking that we actually exist as individual
beings, when in reality that is not the case. This appropriation will then lead to the formation of
attachments, where we desire to obtain certain things and to be rid of certain others.
This cycle then repeats, and strengthens our initial ignorance about the true nature of
sentient existence, and the three characteristics which comprise it.
It’s a never ending cycle that compounds our suffering until it becomes unbearable.
However, there is a way one can escape from the cycle. Buddha says that the key to this escape is
to realize the truth about sentient existence, that it’s characterized first and foremost by
transience, suffering, and non-self. Now, this realization is not an easy task, and all the
appropriation in our lives thus far has formed habits that are deeply entrenched in the mind.
So the Buddha teaches that we must rethink the way we live, and train ourselves to replace these
habits with different ones that help us see nature as it really exists. For example, meditation can
be helpful to arrive at a greater understanding of our minds and psychological states,
and help us come to realize the transience of being. Fundamentally, there is no such thing
as the self that underpins our experiences, and an acceptance of that will allow us to free ourselves
from the attachments we have made. Once this is achieved, there will be no such thing as desire
or aversion that can distract us into falling back into our bad habits. We must follow the
middle path, and seek to achieve enlightenment. So whatever it is that’s getting you down.
If there’s something you can do about it, then there’s no need to worry.
If there’s nothing you can do about it, then there’s no need to worry either.
The knowledge that nothing lasts forever can hurt, and life likes to remind us of that
sometimes. Actually, it likes to remind us of that a lot of the time. But it can
also bring a great sense of comfort to know that whatever it is that’s afflicting you,
that too will not last forever. The quicker we come to realize this,
the quicker we can release ourselves from the iron collars that keep us tied to the ground,
and we can become free. To finish the quote from Lao Tzu at the beginning of the video:
‘If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.’
Thank you very much for watching, peace and love, and I will see you in the next video.