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Meditation
Finding Freedom in the Freshness of Every Moment
Personal Perspective: Reflecting on the ever-changing nature of experience.
Posted August 25, 2023 Reviewed by Davia Sills
A widely accepted view is that stability essentially defines our lives. Like right now, conventionally speaking, one would say that I'm sitting in my living room, a place I've sat countless times before. But the experiential truth is that I’ve never been in this particular version of the room before, as my perceptions of it are in constant flux. While we imagine things endure from moment to moment, they actually don’t.
The world of experience and circumstance does often appear to be knowable and recognizable. Some mental-emotional state arises, and we recognize a pattern. It feels familiar to us. “Oh, yeah, I know what that is. It's fear, or joy, or sorrow, or ecstasy.”
Similarly, we see some familiar person, place, or thing. “That's my car, or my house, or my friend, or the neighborhood I live in,” and imagine that what we’re beholding is more or less the same unchanging phenomenon that we’ve experienced before. But the notion that what I’m seeing is essentially the same thing I’ve seen before is just that, a notion. Even if I might think that I’m sitting in the same room that I’ve sat in a thousand times before, the reality is that I’ve never actually sat in this room before.
While we believe that experiences and objects have a kind of persistence or continuity to them, i.e., that they are essentially what they were when we last encountered them, the fact is that they are not. At least not exactly. And this is a remarkable, really life-transforming thing to discover. Yes, my living room appears to be the same place I was sitting in last week, the day before, or a second ago. But it only seems to be the same room because I’m essentially overlooking all the ways in which what I’m perceiving and calling my living room is not actually the same from moment to moment, at least not experientially.
Your friend or that difficult emotion you're being visited by may look, feel, or behave in such a way that makes it seem recognizable and describable. But the fact is, wherever you think you are right now, whatever you believe you’ve experienced before, has never actually looked or felt or been perceived exactly the way in which it’s being perceived now.
To be sure, experiences appear and can seem to be more or less the same as what they were before (and hence recognizable). True as that sense of familiarity may be, the fact is that we've never actually felt reality in the way it’s being felt right now. No experience, no moment, no person, place, or thing is ever quite the same, owing to its radically dynamic, non-static, alive nature.
That’s the impermanence, the slipping away. And because of this radical instability, there really is no reference point to know what anything is, at least not definitively. We can say and, from one perspective, experience the world as repeating patterns (i.e., forms that are knowable). It certainly seems that way. But really, there are no fixed, solid, enduring forms.
For example, look at a cloud. We could say that it’s an identifiable form. But the shape of this thing we’re calling “a cloud” is, in fact, a shape that is shifting and doing so every instant. The cloud isn’t actually a fixed, knowable, identifiable form. And so it is with every other perceived phenomenon, including us. Like the clouds, we have no fixed form either. Whatever we think of as our “selves” is, in the very next instant, becoming something else.
While we seem able to identify the myriad forms that life can take, if we look carefully, it becomes clear that we can’t actually determine what any of the forms are because whatever we’ve just identified has now become something else! And yet, this same identity-less, unknowable reality shows up as all the seemingly recognizable and identifiable forms that constitute what we call our life.
That's the startling paradox. We seem to know what things are on the one hand, and yet if we actually look, what’s revealed is the ultimate impossibility of knowing or defining phenomena owing to their ever-morphing nature. This is no mere philosophy but our actual experience, as concrete as anything could possibly be. In fact, it’s what we’re feeling and experiencing in every moment. Something appears and there's this sense that what’s appearing has some degree of persistence to it. And yet, what's here is so obviously slipping away, vanishing, faster than it appears.
As abstract as all of this may sound, the discovery of the ever-dissolving nature of reality is of utmost pragmatic utility. How so? Well, not infrequently, we humans experience this sense of being caught up, stuck in, or troubled by various things. And yet, for something to exist as a “thing” we could literally be trapped in, there would have to be persistence both of that thing and the presumed person encountering it, something that direct investigation reveals is not actually the case.
Whether it’s a particular situation or circumstance, a thought stream, or an emotional state, it doesn't take 30 years of sitting on a meditation cushion to discover that the phenomena we think of and experience as problematic have zero endurance. Just look for one instant and see that the instant is no longer here. That's about how long it takes to discover impermanence. The dynamism of life is showing itself constantly. What we call the moment appears, and then, in a flash, boom, it’s gone. Just like that.
And so, while there is no denying that we can, and often do, experience certain moments of life as difficult or overwhelming or stressful, by exploring the way in which experiences and circumstances are not merely the fixed, seemingly enduring things we imagine them to be but this ever-changing, ever-morphing, fluid dynamism, a very different way of experiencing life is revealed.
It can certainly feel like certain moments have a kind of persistence to them that we can find difficult to manage. There is no denying the reality of this perspective and how it can feel. But at the same time, there is another way to encounter reality, and that is to see that all phenomena, including those we find ourselves struggling with, have no actual fixed form owing to their ever-changing nature.
This discovery frees us up to encounter both ourselves as the perceiver and whatever it is that’s being perceived more open-endedly, more flexibly, and less rigidly. The feeling of being a person who is somehow stuck, trapped, or imprisoned by difficult circumstances or experiences starts to loosen up as we discover the ways in which the challenging states conventionally thought of as “things” that we can actually be stuck in or victimized by are not actually “things” at all owing to their ever-changing, dynamic, ultimately indefinable nature.
By exploring the ever-changing nature of experience, we discover a profound freedom, a freedom that is revealed as the ever-present freshness that is every moment.
