To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-William Blake
There is continuity among King Ozymandias and the poet Shelley and us. Shelley read the inscription and resonated with the king's despair, bringing hope to us, the community of mortals. Similarly, Chopin's music resonates in our hearts, Cézanne's paintings reflect in our eyes, Rūmi's verses serenade our souls. These are just extraordinary examples of our immortality. Closer to home, you may carry the smile of your mother, or the melancholia of your grandfather.
All the particulars of precious, ordinary living creatures, famous or not, human or not, are still here, only transmuted into other forms. In this context of nature, death is only part of the larger cycle of birth and renewal. The seeds of today sprout, grow, blossom-and fall back, to be repeated in tomorrow's seeds. The cycles of endless renewal, however, are not beyond death-they embrace death as part of a larger plan or purpose. This is also true within our bodies. Our cells undergo aging and death, but not because they have been forced into extinction by some grim reaper. Rather, the atoms that constitute our being are billions of years old and have a comparable number of years of more life. When they are gradually broken down into smaller particles, these atoms do not die; instead, they get transformed into another configuration. From death comes life, and only from the death comes life.
No creature, writes Ananda Coomaraswamy in The New Indian Antiquary, can attain a higher grade of nature without itself ceasing to exist. Indeed, she says, "The physical body of the hero may be actually slain, dismembered, and scattered over the land or sea." He will return to nature to nurture new sprouts that partake of the cycles of endless renewal without knowing that would be his fate, something as natural as a seed or plant coming out of the ground. The seed has no idea of being some particular plant, but it has its own form and is in perfect harmony with the ground, with its surroundings. As it grows, it expressed its nature.
Our presence is impermanent and has been compared to drawings made on the surface of water with one's finger. Similarly, everything in the world and beyond is made up of infinitesimally tiny changes. This transitoriness is expressed colorfully by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, as father and son discuss the meaning of life:
A rainbow is formed by the play of a shaft of sunlight falling on a
cloud of raindrops. It appears, but it's intangible. As soon as one
of the factors contributing to it is missing, the phenomenon disappears.
So the "rainbow" has no inherent nature of its own, and you can't speak
of the dissolution or annihilation of something that didn't exist in the first place.
That "something" only owed its illusory appearance to a transitory coming
together of elements which aren't intrinsically existing entities themselves, either....
Therefore all phenomena are the results of a combination of transitory factors.
A similar insight is expressed in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:
A wave in the sea, seen in one way, seems to have a distinct identity,
an end and a beginning. Seen in another way, the wave itself
doesn't really exist but is just the behavior of water,...something
made temporarily possible by wind and water, and is dependent
on a set of constantly changing circumstances...and every wave
is related to every other wave. Nothing has any inherent existence
of its own.
T. Byram Karasu, M.D. is author of The Art of Serenity
