Flux and Flow

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma8/imperm.html

http://zendirtzendust.com/2010/06/23/a-simple-life-buddhist-basics-impermanence/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-richmond/impermanence-plutonium-an_b_844035.html

http://en.dhammadana.org/dhamma/3_characteristics/anicca.htm

The first of the three characteristics to discuss is invaluable to virtually every other important belief in Buddhism, such as sunyata or the qualification between desire and craving. The trait in question is impermanence, a common translation from anicca, the original Sanskrit. It isn’t just a claim that things tend towards decay, but also that it is something we must realize on a larger scale for progress of our path towards enlightenment.

There are said to be five things we cannot control: old age, disease, death, perishability and transience. Old age is an explicit reminder that time may heal wounds, but it can also degrade humans to little more than shells of themselves in their mid life crisis. And old age in terms of physical degradation is only one side of the proverbial coin. You also retain, precluding dementia, much experience that you can use to aid others. Your eventual weakness can be avoided in part with exercise and diet as well as certain medical assistance in part. If Japan is any indication, many elderly people can be relatively spry with the ingesting of a simple food that many even in the country regard as undesirable, mostly because of its smell. At least one study showed that having natto, the fermented soybean paste, enhanced overall performance and is quite likely a large factor in how Japan has the highest life expectancy, around 82 compared to the U.S. with 78, though a great deal of it may have to do with healthcare differences in each country. I do not completely look forward to getting shorter and losing bone density along with becoming more dependent on others. But at the same time, the inevitability is not something to regard as ultimately bad, but something that has benefits and is also a basic failsafe in nature to prevent overpopulation, since if we lived significantly longer overall, we would have more difficulties. Our mortality is not something we should seek to undermine completely, but accommodate in some sense with improvements in medicine that will make it manageable, but not luxurious.

Disease is not something we cannot ultimately avoid because the nature of sickness has a relation to evolutionary biology as much as our own bodies do in aging. Viruses adapt and become resistant to older medication and new flu shots, of which I got one a few weeks ago, are necessary to combat those unseen enemies. It shouldn’t be seen as a curse upon humanity to still get sick even with developments in immunology and virology happening yearly, if not monthly. “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells reminds us that our resistance and ability to combat the common cold will overcome even extraterrestrials that possess technology destructive enough to bring us to our knees. Within a few months, those seemingly invincible beings succumbed to death because they had no antibodies to fight what can be fatal without proper built up barriers. Humans, as weak as we appear in comparison to the potential beings that may exist halfway across the galaxy, have a resilience that persists even in spite of such immense suffering as in cancer. But anicca in relation to disease, along with all things, claims that it will pass away in time, at least until the next iteration of some threat to our bodies.  

Death is one of the things humans have the most difficulty accepting without attaching extra qualifications to our state after passing away. The positing of a soul and living forever can allow us to feel secure knowing that our loved ones will live on in some immaterial form. As much as many people might feel they cannot live without this belief, many people do, including myself. I have lost family members and experienced a good friend’s loss of her father and saw that people’s mourning is supplanted in virtually all cases by the belief that they are “in a better place”. I can’t say whether I ever thought it was true that there was an afterlife or even whether it would comfort me if it were true. My grandfathers left their legacy in our families, as any patriarch tends to do in our male-centered society where men possess more influence than females in many areas. And I remembered those men who raised my parents as respectable men, who I nonetheless might disagree with, but also could sympathize with, since both of them were raised in a very different time. My paternal grandfather, even though he was exposed quite likely to much racism against African Americans in the deep south where progress was slow. But even relatives who are in my generation used racial slurs occasionally, which he objected to. Each person is different in how they develop their beliefs about race, so that’s how I accepted it, particularly since I probably couldn’t have changed their minds for the most part anyway even had I tried to. The death of anyone especially close to me would indeed cause me to mourn, but not because I think that their physical life was only a welcome mat to wipe your feet off in preparation for your spiritual life. If anyone, be they young or old dies, I weep in one way or another for the loss I feel, especially since I believe we all only get one life. Reincarnation doesn’t imply in any sense that we persist on as souls transmigrating from one body to another, but I’ll get to that as soon as I can.

The final two inevitabilities are linked in that things passing away materially and existence as a whole being transient are similar in admitting a thing many Christians, for example, would admit in part. The notion that things are unsatisfactory (a mark of existence I’ll talk about last) is explained by Christians to be the result of a sinful world corrupted and warped, which explains things like our getting sick, our growing old and dying and the passing away of things in this world. Instead, the permanent things are of God and remain so in heaven and hell. Buddhists instead note that it is not intrinsically evil (“sinful”) that things pass away, by a simple principle that things have value because they are impermanent. Not only do we inevitably replace things, but we can appreciate things for their contribution to us as they did exist before breaking down. That people die, objects fall apart and the state of the world is always flowing forward are not signs of evil, but are just the way things are. We should strive in some way to alleviate the pain, but if we try to avoid accepting that these are fundamentally out of our control and cannot be made to persist, then we live in a fantasy world, a delusion. Things exist in a web of interrelation, another concept commonly referred to as dependent origination, which is a way to consider that things may pass away, but they also bring forth other things in their passing. A tree burning down provides a form of fertilizer for future trees to grow, humans dying provides food to worms, which improves soil quality, and the examples can continue ad infinitum. Even our personality and psychology change over time. We cannot say we are exactly the same person we were as a child when we are an adult, no more than we can say anything maintains its identity fully in any sense as time passes. Even a mountain eventually wears down, and anything else we can think of, material or immaterial, changes or deteriorates by disuse or its interrelation with other concepts subject to change as well. The belief in a soul, for instance, has changed dramatically, or for a more pertinent example, the belief in divinity. The core message we get from anicca is that things can be appreciated but should not be seen as remaining the same in any way. This is not to claim hard relativism is true, but only that we should not see tradition as the determinant factor for truth or reality, but inquiry and investigation of the world as a series of moments and instances instead of a whole without parts.

Life is impermanent, but this does not suggest things do not exist objectively, but only exist in a continuous state of change and progression. In that sense, the recognition of time is especially important to understanding anicca in Buddhism. And just because things are temporary does not mean we cannot enjoy them as they are. Things will change regardless of if we want them to or not, so accepting the futility of trying to eliminate change and decay is a way to liberate yourself further from those chains. The true value of things is that they don’t last forever, not that they might last forever in some universe with a soul or afterlife. Beliefs also change, even supposedly orthodox ones. Christianity split off and has had schisms even today (Episcopal church for example). Nothing truly stands still or remains forever, to quote Heraclitus in part, and one’s attachment only binds one to this destructive mindset of clinging. Everything I’ve spoken on before in the last three weeks and anything I could speak about afterwards has a relevance to this quality of existence and I think that makes my next topic after the other two characteristics of life pretty obvious. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Resurrection in Modern Times

http://www.newsweek.com/id/235418?GT1=43002

With Easter coming up, the issue of the resurrection of one Jesus Christ is at the forefront of discussion in churches across the world no doubt. While the article’s author suggests that 80% of people believe in heaven, a particular flavor of the afterlife where people are rewarded for eternity in return for their faith and works associated thereof, there is a large array of positions on what the nature of heaven is. The absurdity of this debate becomes clear if you consider this; since heaven is taken on faith, no clear and coherent definition and explanation of heaven should be attempted or said to exist. Theologians would be the ones at fault, though it’s more likely in human nature to inquire and investigate everything, even if we also believe we’re taking such things as real by virtue of faith. Even such things as God’s existence, Jesus’ resurrection or the afterlife are not so mysterious to believers that they can’t push past the veil and question about what each entails; which leads to the myriad forms of heaven and the resurrection that are believed in by the countless sects within Christianity.

The general description in popular culture of heaven embodies our desire for incarnation; that is, a concrete and tangible existence. We can feel, see, hear, taste, smell and overall enjoy the things we did when we were physical vehicles of our souls. Such things as driving your favorite car, eating your favorite ice cream, or speaking with relatives long past; or the more heinous idea of 72 virgins in heaven for martyrs in a particular flavor of Islam. In all these cases, we want physical bodies, albeit the usual idea communicated is that of a perfect physical body. It will never age, it will never suffer illness and theoretically you’d be nigh indestructible. Not to mention other things that would come about with such an idyllic existence. You’d never run out of gas in your Corvette, you’d never run out of ice cream or get fat from said dairy product, and you’d never get bored of talking to grandpa about his war stories. All of this is very well and good, and I could point out the hollow nature of this fantasy, but for the moment, I’ll focus on the discrepancies within the faith itself on this stereotype about heaven.
One issue that has existed since the dawn of said thesis of bodily resurrection is the funerary process of cremation. The problem lies with destroying and otherwise ruining the consistency of what is supposed to be a creation of God, a vessel for your soul and a template for your perfect spiritually resurrected body. If you’re just ashes scattered to the winds or the seas then one asks how you can have a resurrected body. The obvious theological answer, which is just as easily believed as ignored, is that God, being all powerful, could reconstitute you from even a mere atom of your physical body. Or in such a case as your body is vaporized in a nuclear blast or such things, then the problem would be solved in a similar fashion: God can do things humans cannot imagine, so remaking a human body from scratch should be like putting together a child’s puzzle.

Another problem is the complexity of institutions like marriage. The most readily available example is the challenge of the Sadducees to Jesus of the problem of a Jewish marriage practice. If a married man dies and has no heirs, then his brother is obligated to marry his brother’s wife and produce an heir. But the issue that comes up in such a situation is this: if all the brothers don’t succeed and are all married to the woman and subsequently die, then if they are all resurrected, who is married to the woman? All of them, none of them, the original husband? Jesus’ answer is something to the effect that marriage will not be relevant in heaven, so the question is moot.

There is a secondary but equally compelling argument about resurrection concerning the immortality of the soul itself. This one originates in Plato, it seems, and suggests that the body is left behind and the soul communes with God in heaven in some mystical way for all eternity. An objection to this idea lies with how a mere spiritual existence can enjoy such things as driving a car or eating ice cream. But I would imagine a theologian could reply that with the soul encompassing our mental states and memories, it could be easy to make a lifelike simulation of events like enjoying a ride in a sports car or tasting rocky road for the first time.

But either way, there are further problems that can conflict the notion of bodily resurrection in Christian thought. There is the avoidance of the credibility of an actual resurrection of the body by some thinkers today in suggesting that the term resurrection is a metaphor for some change in the worldview or perspective of the believer. I would imagine this is appealing to the majority of people because of the simplicity. One can believe in the resurrection of Jesus, but not have to confront such problems as what a resurrection would mean for you if you happened to be cremated or wrecked beyond imagination in a horrible accident. But people would object to this because Jesus coming back from the dead in the spiritual/physical body that could both be touched and pass through walls is intrinsic to Christian belief. The consensus among believers is that if the resurrection could be proved false, Christian faith would fall apart. Though somehow I doubt this would happen (even though I’m not a Christian myself), the centrality of this belief in a bodily resurrection is undeniable in any investigation into Christian theology. There is a minority position that suggests that when we first die our soul merely “sleeps”, found in Seventh Day Adventist thought, but there is a parallel still with the bodies resurrected, or more precisely resuscitated it seems, and the real difference being that there’s no bodily parallel of hell. Instead, the unrighteous are burned to nothingness and cease to exist.

The problems of bodily resurrection would also persist in considering the flip side of the afterlife. Without a physical body, one cannot imagine the damned suffering in agony and anguish with hot coals being shoved in places you don’t want them, being poked by pitchforks or suffocating in brimstone. But I’ve noticed a general leaning today of believers towards the idea that hell is merely separation from God’s presence and is not necessarily to be viewed as literal physical suffering or torture, but instead the absence of what they believe to be the source of all purpose and happiness. In short, it is a similar idea to the “soul only” idea of heaven where one’s spiritual essence communes with God instead of the body. And I suppose a case could be argued that psychological and emotional suffering are more in line with what the Bible explains about hell and being unsaved, so the objections fall on the same ears that believe in the righteous counterpart to the “lake of fire” (literally speaking, in the opposite case)

In conclusion, however you stand on the issue of the afterlife, resurrection, reincarnation or annihilation, it’s important to understand how diverse the issue can be even within the resurrection crowd. Don’t even get me started on the mistaken association of the term reincarnation with Buddhism (rebirth is more preferable). So, until next time, Namaste and Aloha.