Video below can be accessed on original site via upper left title-artist below...
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The character Hushpuppy in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild.
When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces. When I look too hard, it goes away. But when all goes quiet ... I see I am a little piece in a big, big universe and that makes things right.
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My father was dying several years ago. He rested much in his bed. He had placed on the wall beside the bed, where he could see, a large picture of when he was a teenager all the way back in the 1940s. He told me once, in his last days, "Son, it goes by fast."
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A Zen Buddhist story tells of a farmer who got so old that he could not work the fields anymore. He would spend the day sitting on the porch. His son, still working on the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there.
“He’s of no use anymore,” the son thought, “he doesn’t do anything!” The son got so frustrated by this that he built a wood coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in.
Without saying anything, the father climbed inside. After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where was a high cliff.
As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it. Still lying peacefully, the father looked up at his son. “I know you're going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?” “What is it?” replied the son. “Throw me over the cliff, if you like,” said the father, “but save this good wood coffin. Your children might need to use it.”
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This story can be read as pointing to the Buddhist teaching impermanence. Some Buddhists use the Tibetan word pratityasamutpada for impermanence.
Pratityasamutpada describes how everything we experience—both material and conscious—arises, plays out, and falls away in reliance upon an infinite web of contingent relationships. In other words, it is because things depend that life moves and we can experience it.
*Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel. The Logic of Faith: A Buddhist Approach to Finding Certainty Beyond Belief and Doubt.
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From one side, to say impermanent is to say nothing about us is lasting, all is fleeting where it is related to the body. The other side is since nothing is permanent about us, we are all connected, for it takes the whole to manifest the parts of that whole. So, seeing nothing permanent, not as to some final time of death of the body, but everything moment to moment, alerts us to being sustained by the totality. In Namgyel's teaching, everything leans. This means nothing is apart, nothing is essentially living in isolation. This leaning together could be called the good news of impermanence, for it means we live in communion and literally the whole is part of us, while we are part of the whole. We are a matrix of whole-parts, part of the Whole.
That death is happening now and will come as a final shedding of body can be good news as to your body and yourself. I mean, that I know I am impermanent can encourage me to cherish this body that is daily dying, that is passing toward a time when it can no longer remain, but must dissolve back into the whole in other forms.
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So, what I ask today is, "What if we could recall every person we relate with is, as though we were actually saying this, 'This one before me is dying'?" How would being aware of this affect the way we treat the person? care for him or her? see her or him? I sense in any moment that we do not respect someone, we are living outside consciousness of his or her and our own impermanence. Remembering our fleetingness could help transform the way we see and relate to living together.
See, the father was right, and wise, reminding his son that the son too is dying and will die. We need to remind ourselves of this, regarding everyone we are close to. "I am dying." "He is dying." "She is dying." We need to do this for the animals in our lives, the trees, ... everything we wish consciously to respect and cherish.
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This, not for to be sad, but to cherish the other, respect the other, and learn to love the other we are in any relationship with. No, this will not make anyone or we ourselves always easy to love necessarily, but it can provide a context for patience, compassion, and understanding. We can learn better how to work through the challenges among ourselves, about forgiving the other, and, as well, forgiving the self too, and loving ourselves more as a person who is slowly moving to a breathless death.
This guides us, likewise, in how we esteem those we judge non-productive in a social sense, such as those disabled and those aged. When we do not rightly esteem them, for they are not the contributors that our society teaches us to be, for they cannot be, we can forget that we too, if we live long enough, will be seen of no use by many. Our body and mind, if we live long enough, will leave us as dependent as when an infant.
The aged father and the younger son share the same ephemerality. We are all visitors here.
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Now, some might say, "But what about the soul?" "What about life after death?" "Well, first, what is the soul? What is this so-called afterlife?" Still, these are important questions, for they are saying, too, "Simply for the body is impermanent, is there nothing about us permanent?"
So, in his The Fragrance of Emptiness: A Commentary on the Heart Sutra, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes, "Seeing the groundlessness of the relative truth is the ultimate truth." We can see the teaching of impermanence itself as impermanent. That is, it is relative truth, and the relative mind can never grasp the absolute truth, we can only point to it.
When a chaplain working with patients nearing death, I would be asked as to the nature of an afterlife. My only honest reply was I was given a certainty that life continues, and I had no doubt about that, but I did not know what the nature of that continuance would be, and I was at peace with not knowing. I never had a patient who did not thankfully receive that response, even those who had religious faith but were questioning what that means after the demise of their body.
So, to say, "I will die," that is relative. Yet, to say, "I will not die" is relative. To intuit a continuance of life that shows us in some sense that what we call life and death are both illusions, temporal and fleeting conceptualizations, groundless in themselves, and that beyond both is the absolute truth, that can be known through wisdom and without our needing to deny the relative of both what we call life and death. What is beyond what we call death, we can form beliefs about, and by their nature the beliefs are temporary and impermanent, dependent on a whole array of other beliefs. Yet, this is good news, for it keeps the unknown unknown, and both life and death can be embraced as part of a single adventure. We can look forward to death, not so much as the process of dying, but to faith in the discovery that continues beyond our pilgrimage here in the body given us for this short time.
