In the book The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche (a great read) the concept of impermanence, of how everything lacks permanence and our obsession in believing that what we see and who we are, is somehow permanent, carried forwarded as an entity throughout life is false.
Given that the past is past and the future is unknown we are left with the present. The present, under these circumstances is a moment in time devoid of the past and the present, it is the now.
In our lives we conflate ourselves into believing we can effect our lives and are continually planning for the future, as if the future were a forgone conclusion, just join up the dots and we are there.
Part of our anguish in life comes from the discovery that no matter how hard we try, the end result is often not what we wished for. In fact if we could relinquish the idea that we have control over the things which will happen in the future, we should then not be surprised when the future turns out differently. The idea that our actions guarantee the outcome is, for all of us, clearly not true and we can recall many hopes and desires built on the false premise that if I do this then that follows.
If we introduce the concept of "impermanence" as the crucial element in what controls, or in this case doesn't allow control of events, we have to accept the fact that we are wrong to base our lives on the assumption that our lives are a conveyor belt of our input to guaranteed rewards. The disillusionment when the outcome is less, or totally different to what we had planned leads to a life of disenchantment and often great unhappiness. We may bolster our feelings with banter but deep down the failure hurts.
In some ways our lives could be described as a succession of hurts, some inconsequential but some the scars are deep and we never get over them. Imagine if instead of listing these failures we accepted that success or failure are out of our control and that forces, other than those we control, are responsible.
If we could imagine ourselves as inconsequential to the flow of events around us but very much involved in our personal analysis of our own real existence, the existence we display moment on moment, understanding that each moment is impermanent, it dies as it is born, that the sense of self we create is a delusion and that our final death will be nothing more than another moment in time.
One can obviously see the advantage in reassessing our blind surety in the future, being able to deal with failure in a different way.
For most of us hooked on the material possessions accumulated over the years this must all seem a bit far fetched, a bit too intellectual. Yet when we come close to dying and we are scared witless, having to contemplate letting go of all the things and people we value. Having to contemplate a nothingness, no future which, when we were fit and healthy had made us feel who we "thought" we were.
Perhaps a second look at how we value life and seek security could ease us through this inevitable ending of our journey ?
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