1
Like Nature, the world, I myself, all existence is
subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves
to this inexorable law?
2
If there is any law which governs human existence it
is the law of change. We forget it at our peril. Most ancient societies forgot
it and suffered.
3
For they cannot escape change, nor the sorrow that
change brings, nor the loss of individual existence which it also brings. Such
is the universal law which dominates all things and all creatures. When we try
to press a permanent happiness out of this world of impermanent things, we are
deceiving ourselves.
4
Whether he comes to this truth near the end of a
lifetime after long and varied experience or early in it by intuition, the
effect is salutary, if saddening: perfect and continual happiness would include
perfect and continual functioning of the body, good health, good teeth, good
eyesight, good digestion, and all the rest. How few of the saints and the wise
in history's records had excellent bodily condition to the end? No! - Buddha's
law of decay after growth is still valid.
5
Nothing remains; everything is subject to change.
Whether you rebel against this stark fact or resignedly accept it, it stares you
in the face unaffected by your personal attitude. Call it Buddhistic if you
like, or call it Christian if you prefer, for Jesus said: "This world will pass
away."
6
It is hard to bear the remembrance that whatever
else may happen change is certain, in one way or another, at some time or
another. This is the "eternal flow" of ancient Greek thinkers and Buddhist
sages.
7
Not only is everything subject to change but
everything also exists in relation to something else. Thus change and relativity
dominate the world scene.
8
Even Nature, used to existences extending through
millions of years, is itself subject to this ever-changing process. What chance
then is there for the creations of man? How could they hope to endure? We may
think of the Sphinx and the Pyramid as likely to outlast the hours - but stay!
look at their neighbour, Sahara: today a vast sea of sand, but formerly a vast
sea of water. So we must conclude that all is perishable - yet, to complete the
picture, we must admit also that all is renewable.
9
The one feature of life and the universe which does
not change is change itself! It is an inexorable law, as Buddha himself
persistently reminded his hearers.
10
Wherever we look or search, probe or analyse in
this universe, we find nothing that is permanent. Everything is moving slowly or
swiftly to a change of condition, whether this be growth or deterioration, and
moves in the end to complete disintegration.
11
There is no stability anywhere but only the show
of it. Whether it be a man's fortunes or a mountain's surface, everything is
evanescent. Only the rate of this evanescence differs but the fact of it
does not.(P)
12
Throughout all things in the universe and not only
in the plant and animal kingdoms, Buddha found the presence of what he called
"growth and decay," and later what Shakespeare called "ripe and rot."
13
There are no golden ages, no utopias, no heavens
on earth. This world is a scene of continuous process, or diversification -
which means it is an ever-changing scene. Sometimes it is better, sometimes it
is worse - if looked at from a human standpoint - but none of these two
conditions remains forever fixed. Only romantic dreamers or pious, wishful
thinkers look or wait for one that is. What we may reasonably look for and, if
fortunate, hope to find, is an inner equilibrium within ourselves which will
yield a peace or a presence. Let us not lessen what we are by refusing to accept
the responsibility, by practising self-pity, or by blaming environments. They
have their place and may make their contribution, but in the end it is our own
ignorance of our own possibilities which is the basic cause.
14
Whatever is done to improve human affairs and
arrangements will not last. The time will come when it will need to be improved
again. In just the same way even the planet itself changes its features, turns
tropical zones to temperate ones and great seas to sandy deserts. Only in the
Void is there no activity, no change.
15
If anything is perfect it cannot be improved.
Whoever therefore demands perfection must understand that he is demanding
finality. Could there be such a thing in this ever-changing world?
16
There are no permanent solutions because there are
no permanent problems.
17
Millions of animal and human bodies have entered
the earth's composition through drowning in vast floods or dying in droughts,
famines, and epidemics, through earthquakes and eruptions. It has been an
immense graveyard and crematorium. Yet equally it has brought into living
existence millions of new beings.
18
Men and women terrify themselves with mental
pictures of age, of its diseases and infirmities, its growing cancers and
shrinking arteries. Yet they seldom relate their personal experience to the
wider scheme of things, to the universe as a whole. If they did, they would soon
see that not only are decay and disintegration everywhere in nature, but
brutality and murder are there also on an appalling scale. Millions of animals,
insects, birds, fish, and sometimes humans, attack, deform, mutilate or kill
other creatures.
19
Civilizations do not progress; they grow, but they
crumble by their own weight, or, rather, overweight.
20
If anything ever impressed me with the truth of
civilization's transformatory nature it was my reading of the Frenchman Volney's
book The Ruins of Empires, together with my visit to the remains of two
cities. One, Anuradhapura in Ceylon, sixteen miles long and sixteen miles wide
stretching in the sunshine with thousands of golden and silver pillars, was
eaten up by jungle growth or dissolved into dust! The other, Angkor in Cambodia,
displayed huge temples rising out of the thick clogging undergrowth and broken,
weather-beaten statues of the Buddhas tangled with, or root-bound in, gnarled
wrinkled trees.
21
Despite the ever-confronting evidence that change
is ceaseless throughout the universe and through all human experience, we
persistently get the feeling of solidity in the universe and permanency in
experience. Is this only an illusion and the world merely a phantasm? The answer
is that there IS something unending behind both.
22
There is no stability anywhere in the universe,
given enough time, and there is none in human life. Yet the craving for it
exists. There is a metaphysical meaning behind this phenomenon. It exists
because THAT which is behind the craving person is the only stable thing
there is, or rather no-thing, because IT has no shape, no colour, is soundless
and invisible and beyond the grasp of ordinary thoughts. It is this hidden
contact, or connection, which keeps man seeking for what he never finds, hoping
for what he never attains, refusing to accept the message of ceaseless change
which Nature and Life continue to utter in his ears, and opposing the
adjustments that experience and events demand periodically from him.
23
There is no permanency anywhere except in
ourselves. And even there it is so deep down, and so hard to find, that most
people accept the mistaken idea that their ego's ever-changing existence is the
only real existence.
24
The earlier non-existence of the cosmos is only
physically and not metaphysically true. Even when its form was not developed,
its essence was and shall ever be. Whether as hidden seed or grown plant, the
appearance and dissolution of the cosmos is a movement without beginning and
without end. Science establishes that the cosmos is in perpetual movement.
Philosophy establishes what is the primal substance which is moving. Although
the cosmos is a manifestation of World-Mind, it is not and never could be
anything more than a fragmentary and phenomenal one. The World-Mind's own
character as undifferentiated undergoes no essential change and no genuine
limitation through such a manifestation as thoughts.
25
This is a universe of unceasing change, both
within its atoms and within itself - hence of unceasing movement in the same two
categories. It is an active universe. Yet at the heart of each atom there
is quiescence, that mysterious stillness of the unseen Power which must be, and
is, the Power of God.
26
The new physics finds creation to be a continuous
process, which has never had a dated beginning in the past. Its atoms and
universes appear and disappear. What does this indicate? That the unspaced
untimed No-Thing out of which all this comes is itself the Reality, and the
Universe a showing-forth.
27
In The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, I wrote
that the one certain thing about the universe is change. This is because from
the moment that Spirit began to go out into seeming time, place, form,
relativity, and individual souls, it left behind the infinite stillness of
Absolute Being, the motionless Void. The appearances taken could only be
fleeting and changing and could only keep this same characteristic until they
returned to the still Source. This restlessness was the inevitable consequence
of consciousness' becoming immersed in the unconscious, of Reality's becoming
the victim of illusion, of the Perfect's becoming shrunk into the imperfection.
It can not be content to remain with such limitations. So desire for change
begins but is never satisfied, is ever active but is ever changing its
objects to new ones.
28
"Each [thing] is proceeding back to its origin,"
said Lao Tzu. This is why change is incessant in the universe, why only the
Origin is without it, and why Lao Tzu further explained that "to understand the
Changeless is to be enlightened."
29
Lao Tzu wrote: "I come back to the Beginning! I
beat down to the very origin of things. It is astonishingly new. Yet it is also
the End of all. It is both return and going-out. All begins in death."
30
There is a central calm behind the universe's
agitation.
31
The fluidity of human life, ever moving onward and
onward and carrying us all with it, is a hint that it is not the ever-real.
32
Energy radiates, whether in the form of continuous
waves or disconnected particles - "moment to moment" Buddha called it. It is
this cosmic radiation which becomes "matter."(P)