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Impermanence - VIP Audio

Hello, this is AJ. Welcome to our lesson this month. Let’s get started. The topic this month is ‘Impermanence’, impermanence. So ‘permanence’ is the state of being permanent. What does that mean? So permanent means not changing, right? It means something is the same and it stays the same and it will never change. So ‘impermanence’ is the opposite. The ‘im’ makes it negative, so it’s not permanent is really what this word means.

It’s the idea that nothing stays the same. Nothing is always the same year after year, month after month, etc., that, in fact, it’s the opposite. That everything is always changing. Nothing at all in the Universe is permanent. This is a common Buddhist theme, I guess you could say. But not just Buddhist, it’s just a common theme in a lot of things.

We can look at this idea in the natural world, certainly. That nothing is permanent; all things are changing. I mean if you look at astronomy, for example, you can see that the Universe is constantly changing and evolving and some things happen very slowly for us, for humans, over thousands of years or millions of years and, yet, even stars like our sun will eventually explode or die. That they’re born and then they die. So even stars are born and die. Galaxies are born and then die eventually. It takes millions and millions or billions and billions, as Carl Sagan would say, of years for this to happen.

Even things which seem very permanent to us from our timeframe as humans are, in fact, impermanent. Not permanent. They are changing. We can especially see this when we look at things in a more human timeframe. We see this is especially true in our society, in our culture and, in fact, the process of impermanence, the process of changing, is actually getting faster and faster and faster because of technology.

Technology is changing faster and faster and faster, which is causing changes in our societies, our cultures, our economics, all these things faster and faster and faster and faster.

We can see this in relationships, that all of our personal relationships are constantly changing. Even when they seem on the surface like they’re not, they in fact are. That means whether it’s a marriage or a friendship or the relationship between parents and kids, all of these things are impermanent. There’s nothing permanent about them and then, if we want to get really deep and serious about it, we can see that this is true, of course, of our lives. That all of us will die. None of us are immortal. ‘Immortal’ means living forever.

So we’re not immortal, at least not physically. We won’t get into the spiritual stuff right now, but the physical reality is that we’re all going to die. We’re constantly changing during our life and all of our lives will end. That’s part of this idea as well of impermanence is that everything ends. Nothing lasts forever.

This is a fundamental law of the Universe. Scientists will talk about this and confirm it and I think most religions at some level talk about this. Now, they may have some idea of a paradise or a heaven or a nirvana or something that is behind our physical world that is indeed permanent, the Tao or Buddha nature, God or whatever, but that’s not what we’re talking about in this video. I think that most religions, however, recognize that at least in the here and now in our physical world that things are not permanent, things are always changing.

So it’s a philosophical idea, it’s a scientific idea and it’s a practical idea and it’s really a fundamental principle or law of the Universe. You can rely on nothing, is the maybe scary way to say it. You can rely on nothing to stay the same, nothing at all. Not yourself, not your body, not your mind, not your emotions, not your friend, not your parents or your family, not your job, not the economy, not politics, nothing at all. It’s all changing.

Ten years from now it’s all going to be different. Twenty years from now it will be even more different. You can’t rely on any of it to stay the same and this is a source of tremendous, tremendous stress for many of us and a source of a lot of fear and a lot of resistance for many of us because instinctively we want things to be permanent and stay the same because it feels safer. When things are predictable they feel less dangerous and indeed they are less dangerous.

If you know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow then you can prepare for it and it’s not scary. You know that nothing bad is going to happen or even if you do know something bad is going to happen at least if it’s very predictable, if you know exactly what’s going to happen you can plan for it and be ready for it. So that’s why we love this idea of permanence and we kind of crave it. That’s why we tend to crave safety and predictability and we try to create that in our life.

That’s not a horrible thing. That’s not a bad thing it’s necessary. We need a certain amount of security in our life. We need a certain amount of predictability. If things are just totally chaotic and changing too rapidly and you have no idea what the hell is happening and what’s going to happen then yes, indeed, you can maybe go insane because it’s too much. You can’t handle that and you know the extreme amount of that would be you actually just die. Your body can’t handle that either.

However, on the other side of the coin, the flipside of the coin as we say, which is a little idiom as well, we also have to realize that, in fact, things are changing and they’re changing more and more rapidly and that if we resist too much, if we crave safety too much and security too much, which many of us do, then, in fact, that can be very harmful because we actually will not learn how to handle this. We have to learn how to handle impermanence. This is a super important life skill. Maybe the most important general life skill, handling impermanence, handling change in all aspects of our life, physical change, emotional change, mental change, changes in our families, changes in our relationships, changes in the economy, etc., etc.

So the first step of this then is that we have to accept it. I mean that’s the basic thing. A lot of people don’t accept this idea. They really resist this idea of impermanence and when things do change they try to hold on to the past and pretend like things are not different. You can see this in relationships a lot. I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Maybe I’ll just talk about someone I dated in the past before I was married.

In the beginning the relationship was one way, a certain way. I thought about her a certain way and she thought about me a certain way. We were certain kinds of people, but then over time that changed, right? Maybe she changed and what she wanted was different or her life was different or her beliefs changed. Lots of different things can change and then the same happens to me. So you can find after a few years whoa, it’s not the same at all. It’s totally different. Even just the passing of time you become more comfortable with each other. You know each other more. That means the good stuff and it also means maybe the stuff that’s more annoying.

All of this can change and so it can come to a point where whoa, this relationship is totally different now and sometimes it’s totally different in a great way and then sometimes it’s totally different in a not so great way. Whatever the case, sometimes we tend to want to hold on to the past. It’s not the same as the past. We’re looking to the past and we have that nostalgia for the past, that feeling that the past was better and we’re trying to hold on to the past and we’re resisting what’s happening now.

We’re resisting the change and this can create huge problems because in a relationship, for example, if you keep trying to see that person as they were in the past they are going to be very upset with you. They’re not going to like it. It’s going to create a lot of problems in your relationship. I can give you a clearer example of this in my own life with my parents, with my mom who is an absolutely wonderful person.

For many years, and still even now sometimes, she still treats me like a kid. I’m in my 40s and, yet, she still will sometimes try to see me as I was when I was a kid because that was a very comfortable time in her life and she’s used to this role of being a mom.

Most kids have this experience with their parents, that their parents never quite treat them totally like adults.

Well, that’s one example and it can create some problems. With my own mom it’s a very small thing. It’s not too strong or extreme. Sometimes I get a bit annoyed. You know like ah, but it’s nothing big. I still have a great relationship with her, but I have seen other relationships of parents with their children where it’s very extreme, where it’s very strong and it creates huge problems between them, so much, in fact, that the kids don’t want to be around their parents very much. So the parents by holding on to the past and not being able to change actually can push their children away and we can all do this in different ways.

So resistance is the first thing you have to get rid of. You have to accept what’s happening now. You have to accept that it’s going to be different in the future. You have to get comfortable with this idea that everything changes. No matter how good it is now it’s going to change in the future. Maybe it will get better, maybe it will get worse, and maybe a mix, but you can’t hold on. Remember we talked about letting go in a past lesson several months ago? Well, it’s that same idea.

So accept it. Accept this idea of impermanence. This is so important in all aspects of life. When you accept it you can relax a bit and then the next step is to cultivate flexibility. Cultivate flexibility. This is perhaps the number one achievement formula if I had to pick any. What’s the number one secret to achieving massive success in anything? Well, flexibility probably would be it because flexibility means adaptability. It means the ability to change with ease, to comfortably, quickly change when necessary, to adapt to situations as they change.

It’s a hard thing. It’s something you have to cultivate, something you have to develop, because most of us, again, we like security, we like patterns and so we can get stuck doing things the same way. Sometimes the hardest part about achieving something is just changing our old patterns, our old bad habits, so cultivating flexibility, purposely doing different things just because they’re different. You don’t have to do this all the time, but sometimes it’s good just to do something different just because, just to develop the ability to be flexible.

So, for example, you drive to work the same exact way every day, go a different way. If you always use a car maybe try taking the bus if that’s available. That’s a small, small example, but it does cultivate flexibility. You could do this physically, for example. Maybe if you always take hot showers maybe you could take a hot shower and then gradually turn it colder and colder and colder and then build your body’s ability to handle both hot and cold. Build your body’s ability to adapt to change. So when it gets cold you feel more comfortable and when it gets hot you feel more comfortable.

That’s another tiny example. Not such a deep meaningfully example, but it’s an example of developing flexibility. It’s more important to develop flexibility in your career, in your job, for example, in business, super important. So just because your job has always been one way don’t think it’s always going to be the same in the future. It won’t be, that I can guarantee, so you have to develop that.

Now, you can sit back and wait for things to change and be surprised or you can be proactive. You can go and change things yourself first in a way that you want them to change and that’s the better way to handle it. So build flexibility within your job, within your career, within your business. Actually push yourself to do things in a different way.

Even if things are going very well right now, keep pushing yourself to try something in a different way that might not feel comfortable just to keep developing and developing the mental ability to be flexible, so, so, so important. Rigidity equals death.

All right, we’ll talk more about the practical uses of this in the commentary. Right now I just want you to really think about this idea of impermanence; change is what it really means too. Impermanence, nothing lasts. Everything will end. How will you handle it when things change? How will you handle it when all of these situations in different parts of your life change? How can you handle those things more flexibly, more gracefully and more easily?

All right, so we’ll talk more about that in the commentary. See you then, bye-bye.