Everything Is Impermanent? Compared to What?

Reflections
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My thesis in this brief essay is that there is something tricky about the widely held doctrine of universal impermanence, a problem which, once revealed, requires a profound shift in our understanding of the polarity >permanence/impermanence.<

  1. My argument assumes the claims of Buddhism and theoretical physics that everything in the world and the universe itself is in flux, constantly changing, impermanent. My question is: impermanent compared to what? Obviously, to permanence. All concepts are at least partially understood in terms of their opposite, so this answer looks like simple common sense. Our starting point, then, is the polarity >impermanence/permanence,< which we tend to think is a basic structure of reality.

  2. This looks fine in the abstract, but if we drill down into the real world of experience, we encounter a serious problem: nothing there is permanent. Consider a cherry tree in full bloom. Beautiful today, but the flowers will soon fall and wither. The tree itself will die one day. It’s impermanent. Compared to what? Well, impermanent compared to, say, the Rock of Gibraltar or the Pyramids or the moon. But those are only relatively permanent; they too change over time, only much more slowly than the cherry tree. So they are relatively permanent. Compared to what? Obviously, to relatively impermanent things like cherry trees. Ok, the cherry tree is relatively impermanent. Compared to what? Obviously, to the Rock of Gibraltar…… Oh, dear, we seem to be caught in an endless loop of relative permanence and impermanence which threatens to make the polarity >impermanence/permanence< incoherent. To escape the loop, we need to find a non-relative permanence, but seemingly there is none to be found in all the world. Must we give up on the polarity then? If so, we would have to abandon our original axiom “everything is impermanent,” and there goes a bedrock principle of modern physics and philosophy as well as classical Buddhism.

  3. It should be clear by now that the question ‘impermanent compared to what?’ cannot be properly answered within the world of phenomenal experience. But we are loath to just throw in the towel, to give up the belief that the polarity >impermanence/permanence< is a basic structure of reality. We have an intuition of permanence that won’t retire quietly, but nothing in the phenomenal world supports it. We can’t find anything in our world that is absolutely, not merely relatively, permanent. Therefore, the intuition of permanence, if it is not an illusion, must belong to another order altogether.

  4. I contend that the referent of the intuition of permanence is to be found in the Waking Up experience of the Causal Witness, the Pure Awareness within which all objects arise and disappear but is itself not an object and therefore not subject to change. Because it never enters the stream of time, it transcends the realm of impermanence (samsara) and therefore is the one reality that we can call permanent. The Witness, I suggest, is the Permanence which answers our question, “impermanent compared to what?” Everything in the world is impermanent compared to the Pure Consciousness which sees all impermanent phenomena arise and disappear but which itself has no beginning and no end.

  5. Now, as Wilber would insist, the foregoing is not a given truth or the conclusion of a logical argument. It is an injunction. Although the Witness is ever-present in our experience as the unseen ground of ordinary consciousness, it doesn’t show up in awareness with an id card. As a transcendent intuition, it can only be apprehended by carrying out the injunction, If you wish to find out if the Witness is real, you must perform the experiment by taking up an appropriate meditation practice and then checking the result with the community of the adequate.

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Excellent post Charles, very good points. My current view is that form is impermanent and always changing but That which includes and transcends form is permanent.

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Right on, Namal. The Causal includes and transcends form, and Nondual includes and transcends the Causal.

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The permanent that is assumed by science is matter, elements and laws of physics.
Science assumes - without evidence - that the basic laws of physics are unchanging and that for example the periodic table has always been and always will be.
What would truly be impermanence would be if the next iteration of creation had something besides matter.

But then again, science only assumes that everything in this iteration is matter. To a scientist, if a tree falls and he does not see it and measure it, it never existed. Science denies the existence of all that is not matter - antimatter. The existence of Chi / Ki / Prana / Mana / spirit are all poo-pooed by scientists. They cannot measure it and these concepts threaten their authority so they try to ridicule them. To an open mind the existence of this “force” cannot be dismissed just because we dont have tools to measure it.

We can though measure its effects on reality and how various practices, diet etc affect it. To dismiss this, scientists say “well, erhm its a physical thing we just dont know what yet.” At that point i hear Monty Python yelling in my head" Hes just making it up as he goes along"

Perhaps ironically the only permanence is that which science cannot measure and denies the existence of?

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I will also add that I smile at humankind’s hubris to believe we would be able to understand every facet of existence even if it was laid out before us. Just dipping your toe into the infinity pool is enough to boggle your mind. If time and space are infinite then that means over an uncountable period of time and an immesurable distance of space you have read this exact post an infinite number of times - and slight variations of this post just a little bit more than infinite.

Oh wait i just broke math. You cant have slightly more than infinite lol.
Which brings me to another assumption by scientists, that math is permanent.

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Great point about hubris.

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why don’t you die and find out why you’re arguing about it?

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Hey Charles, this is a wonderful discussion of the permanence/impermanence polarity, which really is such a core polarity. Your paragraphs definitely fit my understanding, and I’m pretty sure this is essentially Ken’s view as well. He’s talked before about the distinction between the “nunc fluens”, the constant flowing of impermanent objects through time, and the “nunc stans”, the permanent and eternal Now. Nothing in the flow of time is permanent, only the singular Now within which time itself is arising.

That said, I also like to think of how causal “qualities” such as permanence may have some reality within the manifest realm, a little drop of yin in your yang. Perhaps it is how the causal involutionarily enfolds itself into the gross and subtle.

For example, could we say that impermanence is itself a permanent condition of the relative world?

Is the truth of 1+1 = 2 permanent, or the fact that force equals mass times acceleration?

Are the four quadrants a permanent quality of existence, however it arises and whomever it arises for?

And of course we can probably get away with talking about shades of relative permanence, which are simply differing scales of persistence. They say a tattoo is permanent. It’s not, of course, it’ll have faded from existence long before our sun goes supernova. But relative to my existence as a human body, it might as well be!

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I think this topic, the one and many or being and becoming really can’t be answered using rational, sensory experience, You may ask, “well what other means to we have?” I would go back to Parmenides who had a vague definition of being (at least that is what has been handed down to us) whose project was to discover the essence of Being.

Move ahead to Plato. His ontology had God as a triangle maker because in essence that is what he thought was the ultimate “stuff” of air, water, earth and fire was. Sure, a primitive physics but that is not the point. Even though top rated physicists don’t confuse mathematical physics with spirituality, they too are fascinated with the power of math.

Have you ever seen a 1, a perfect circle, a point walking down the street? Where does our sense of perfection that you indicated come from? How can we even conceive of a point which is loosely a geometric element that has no dimensions? How can we conceive of a perfect set of complicated formulae that produces nuclear bombs, computer chips, and the weird science of sub-atomic particles?

Math is in my opinion one area of mental perception that can be compared to the non-sensory world that somehow provides technology that is adapted to the sensory world. I have other examples of human experience but will stop here for what I imagine will be a healthy give and take.

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Whoops Charles, I thought you were negating Pure Awareness in your fourth proposition but you are confirming it. “Everything in the world is impermanent compared to the Pure Consciousness which sees all impermanent phenomena arise and disappear but which itself has no beginning and no end.” Right on, I am with you that different modes of perception garner different results. To paraphrase an old saying, the best things can’t be spoken of, the second best things can only be represented as symbols, and lesser things can be spoken about.

If you wish to find out if the Witness is real, you must perform the experiment by taking up an appropriate meditation practice and then checking the result with the community of the adequate. Well stated.

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Reply to thebeatificvision:

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Hello, Corey. I’m pleased to be connecting with you again.

Yes, the saying “change is the only constant,” attributed to Heraclitus, has the same meaning. But, again, it raises the question, compared to what?

This is interesting. Mathematical truths have a certain kind of permanence insofar as they are necessary truths, unfalsifiable and unchanging within the context of the relevant mathematical discipline. However, unless you are a Platonist, each of those truths only has reality as a thought, and like all thoughts, is but a fleeting awareness in the very impermanent flow of consciousness. In fact, 1+1=2 cannot even be thought as a whole but only as a rapid sequence of thoughts: first ‘1,’ then ‘+’, then ‘1’, then ‘=’, then ‘2.’ The same holds true for Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Oh, boy. I would love to say the 4 quadrant map is a permanent structure of reality, but alas, it too is a thought-construction and is therefore impermanent in the same way as math truths and the laws of physics.

Maybe we need to carefully distinguish between truth and permanence, using polarity thinking. The polarity true/false is logically different from permanent/impermanent. The former occurs within the domain of epistemology, whereas the latter polarity arises in the domain of ontology. In math and science, verification doesn’t involve the question of permanence/impermanence, but that issue does come into view when we ask whether the objects in math and science are real(ontology). The polarities themselves are thought constructions and are therefore impermanent. Which again leads us to…compared to what?

I agree with your last paragraph. Most folks are happy with “shades of relative persistence.” It’s only philosophers who have a high tolerance for headaches who think it a useful employment of time to ponder questions that can’t be answered from a rational perspective (tbv’s point). I like to invoke Nagarjuna in situations like this:

– Everything is impermanent. [We can make a case for that.]
– Not everything is impermanent. [We can make a case for that.]
– There is both permanence and impermanence. [We can make a case for that, too.]
– There is neither permanence nor impermanence. [Damn!]

Thanks for jumping in. This is fun.

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I intuitively feel the eternal now is not separable from the constantly evolving phenomena that arises "within it’ if you pardon the clumsiness of the language as there is neither a within or any true it’s anywhere ever. But the mind has created a sense of permanent objects it calls "it’s ", constructed from values that give certain “longer lasting” aspects of our energetic dynamic experience qualities that appear permanent to that region of the experience. This is created by the phenomena we call memory which is all constantly changing but appears to be reconstructed around a frame work that doesn’t “appear” to change. However the entire universe is constantly collapsing and emerging from that collapse even the aspects of reality that appear to have longevity are as fresh as those that appear new the universe fizzes with a constant fresh aliveness ithere are no things to change just a constant state of change a vibration a wave that the mind collapses into measurable points with qualities it sees having permanence…consciousness is like a surfer that rides the wake of its own death/birth within the eternal unchanging now

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I like the idea that math itself is becoming because it is a flow of thoughts that can’t be seen by mind’s eye as a single formula, for example, in one flash. It still is strange though, that as you said it has a kind of permanence. Math leads to predicative theories and technological objects that are impermeant. I find this very peculiar.

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