After the loss of my parents in 2006-2007, my casual interest in Eastern Philosophies, particularly Zen, was transformed from interest to practice. When I considered my state in light of Western Religious traditions, I found them wanting; to me, they were childish and incapable of containing my grief. Their platitudes felt empty and seemed filled with false echoes. But enough of that. My purpose here is not to vilify Western Religions, but to explore my experience of Zen as I have evolved in my practice.
What I’ve found
I’m no one in particular. I’m just a man trying to make sense out of experiences typical of war, famine and natural disaster. To lose a loved-one is natural. To lose so many, so fast, is, well, also natural, we just don’t like it. We don’t like losing them one at a time either. So, we go back to 2006-2007 and think through the experience.
The First Stone
Knowing Impermanence- It is almost intuitive because we experience the world as a changing thing. Seasons come and go, the days cycle changes through our lives every 24 hours. At least, this is how I experience it. Suffice it to say, when I started casually exploring Zen, it seemed almost trivial. But after my father died, I knew impermanence. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise any longer. It was real. Something irrevocable had changed in my immediate life. Nothing was in my power to undo that change.
The Second Stone
Feeling Impermanence- In May of 2007 when my mother died, my world became less certain. I was already, I thought, mentally adapted to impermanence, but when I felt impermanence, it was a crashing wave that seemingly obliterated knowing. The world stays steady when you know things will change. The world begins to shift when you feel the change.
We fast forward four years, and I lost both my nephews. It’s now been three years since Dustin and Daniel died. We struggle on, hopeful it won’t hurt as much tomorrow as today. For me, it comes in waves with no predictability. That encapsulates the loss of certainty emotional impermanence represents. But, three years! So little time to seem a lifetime, so much time to seem so recent. In May, a scant four months, we mark the loss of Daniel. On the surface, this season of life is an unending tide of sorrow and grief. However, in all the chaos of sorrow, I still carried the small stone of knowing impermanence. Though it seemed trivial in light of the powerful emotions surrounding so much loss, it still kept me anchored, it still reminded me of the need to look outside myself for the lessons of change.
The Third Stone
Living Impermanence- There is a point we reach when the slow knowledge creeps to the surface that the way we expect those closest to us to be is not the way they are. We realize that people in our lives on whom we depend change. Then, we realize that we ourselves are not the people we once believed we were. I experience my “I” as the core of my being. It is who I am. But it isn’t permanent. It is illusion. Not only will it cease to be in death, it doesn’t even stay the same in life. Once that is realized, you are living impermanence.
This point where we cease to be objects of experience and become subjects of our own lives requires us to embrace the change that defines us. Every one of my moments is a coming into being and a passing away. The more I fight this, the more I suffer. This is not to say that I am a passive reed in the river. I can choose the direction of the flow through the choices I make in my life. But if I cling to an emotional state, or an idea or a point of view, I cease to be in harmony with the flow of my life and become an object, manipulated by that state, or idea, or point of view. My freedom lies in letting go of desires and not getting distracted by the 10,000 straw dogs the world continually throws at me.
It is not a stone and it is not not a stone
These three aspects of experience are what we carry in every moment that comes to be and passes away. Knowing, Feeling and Living do not occur apart, but converge in the world line of every individual and are present in each experience. Time is not the enemy, it is only the evolving states of being of successive moments. When we live without knowing, live without feeling, live without living, we trap ourselves in our own desires, distracted by the childish demands of the ego and the insistence of a world that demands attention. Then all those successive states of being go awry. And we suffer. In our suffering, we lose compassion. We see only our self-imposed suffering and are oblivious to the suffering of others.
Closure
If we are honest with ourselves, we realize the first sense of impermanence we have is when we realize our parents are not gods. That is tantamount to eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; we pierce the veil and see all the frailties flesh is heir to. Our rebellion against our parents is, on the one hand, a rebellion to define ourselves, and, on the other, a cry out against the impermanence of them. How dare they! How dare they not be immortal and omnipotent. We, the young, we will do better. Only to realize, sometimes too late, that, one day, we will be old, too. And when we are struggling with our own frailties, we find their wisdom has passed, and we must struggle on alone. But if we let them go with love and work to get rid of our dependencies, our obsessions, and the like, we may find the day is less mundane, less redundant. We may find that we are living, feeling and knowing the world in a way we never thought possible. It all starts with a beginner’s mind, as Shunryu Suzuki said. No expectations, no preconceptions. Let things be what they are, including our parents.
Namasté