Impermanence

Market Emotions (and The Pitt) meet Atrocity Exhibitions and Buddhist Foulness Meditation

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“This too shall pass,” is annoying. The Taoist Farmer who meets each change of life with “maybe!” The great Sufi Mystic who tells the king that “this too shall pass” is the cure for both mania and depression. The foundational Buddhist sensate experience of Impermanence. The Stoics. The education of Arjuna by Krishna.

Jesus on the Mount: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34)

All these wise folk tell us that nothing lasts. On big market days, this can be challenging. In crashes past my emotional reactivity has been pretty high.

But over the last week, I’ve had far more chill than I expected. Beyond chill, I’ve felt grateful, compassionate, and full of, dare I say it, Love. Don’t get me wrong, I got shellacked like everyone else. But honestly? So it goes.

This feels like a superpower, a very recent one.

I give credit to a half decade of really focussing on impermanence and change in my daily practice. But mostly, to horrific pictures of decaying bodies.

Seasonality and the “Ango”

In Soto Zen, an “Ango” is (as I understand it), is a season of practice. Traditionally, each seasonal Ango (a word which means “Peaceful Dwelling”) has a flavor. While I’m primarily a solo practitioner both by choice and constraint (nerve damage), I find myself falling into my own “Angos”, each with its own challenges and gifts.

Summer/Fall: Ease & Joy

For maybe 8 months a year, by default, I meditate facing out an open, screenless (if the bugs cooperate) window. A “normal” sit might start at 5:30PM, as the sun paints the trees orange before fading to gray.

Typically my modality (the ‘what am i doing on the cushion’) here is “shikantaza” which is a fun Japanese word that means “just sitting.” A typical sit: a few minutes of “woodshed clearing” (settling in), a quick note of some thought too insistent to dismiss, then the thinking-me recedes, perceiving-me takes center stage, as I semi-consciously note each sound, image, sensation or mental formation. Sometimes, feeling me recedes until there is only all, and words stop being useful. A poetic description might be floating on an ocean, occasionally washed over with love, or gratitude, or compassion, or electric connectedness. Or maybe not.

And then an hour has gone, but as I’m privileged/unemployed, in summer/fall “ango” the sit is augmented by an hour or three outside in the woods (sometimes hiking, often sitting).

This season of practice sometimes feels like cheating. New England in bloom explodes with life and love and beauty. I’ve walked the same trails since the 1970s. Some walks, I can remember a tree from 50 years ago. Each shift in the ecosystem feels like aging — slow, inexorable, constant movement. There’s nothing fixed about a tree, or a bear, or a stream. The lessons of practice yell loudly.

Winter/Spring: Right Concentration

Eventually, as the light fades and it becomes too cold to keep the window open, I turn my cushion to face a small desk with a beeswax candle, a practice known as “fire kasina.”

This deeply concentrative practice is narrower, more full of intent, and intensity. In some sits, the disparate inputs … visual image, mental formation, bodily sensation, sounds … become highly fractionalized and pixelated, and I can become lost in the excruciating detail and buzzing vibrations of the very tip of the candle flame. Somewhat inevitably but without intention, Jhanna states emerge — discrete, definable cognitive states, which, after a lot of paying attention, I can now subtly discriminate between in the moment, like feeling a worn path under my feet on a moonlit walk.

This kind of practice feels like “practice” — literally working on a skill to get better at it and explore its boundaries. It feels like flexing and stretching muscles. Winter Ango has, at least these past few years, been much more “intensive” than other times of year.

In Between The Pendulum’s Swing is Opportunity

For years, some version of this cycle has just naturally emerged: peaceful dwelling leads to hard concentration leads back to peaceful dwelling.

But most of my “aha” moments have come in the swinging of the pendulum between what might be seen as “poles” of practice. Both the awful, disruptive “aha” moments that coincided with real misery in a “Dark Night of the Soul”, and in “dabbling” in narrower, more niche practices.

To the Seeming-Me-Now, these small moments — where the pendulum hauls ass across the centerpoint between seasons — are valuable, hyperplastic opportunities, loaded with imaginal power and open to suggestion.

In short: it’s when I try new stuff.

I used this last one to watch the Pitt.

The Gore of the Real

I’m not really squeamish in the traditional sense. Growing up on a farm, you learn to deal with all of the “gross” stuff pretty quick. Death, in particular, comes at you fast. I saw my first dead animals before I could walk. I held my first animal at the moment of death — a horse we had to put down — at around 7. I took my first life — a chicken with a broken leg in the coop — at maybe 9. I’ve been cleaning trout since I could hold a fishing rod.

But I’ve always felt death and gore differently when it’s people. I can watch a horror movie if it’s not too gory, or if it’s ridiculously gory, but I nope out of anything smacking of “real world” gory.

And yet … my son works in a Mega-Trauma-Center, and works week after week right in the middle of all the stuff that I find hard. So when he said “Dad, if you want to see what work is really like, watch the Pitt, but you should absolutely not watch it because I don’t think you can…” (He knows me well.)

I had to find my way.

Luckily, There’s an App for that. An old one.

Death and Foulness Meditations (Maranasati and Ashuba)

During the pandemic, I did a decent amount of meditation on death and dying. Maranasati is covered in at least two different piles-of-writing from around Buddha-times (Suttas/Sutras), but this is the good one. The instructions are pretty simple: Really imagine all the ways you could die, and see what that brings up, like, say, fear, or panic, or aversion, or sadness. Congratulations, you have a new object of meditation. This constant mindfulness of death — truly memento mori — is straight up Marcus Aurelius, It’s also Zen monastic. Every night the monastics chant:

Let me respectfully remind you
Life and death are of supreme importance
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost
Each of us should strive to awaken
Awaken!
Take heed, do not squander your life.

But Maranasati takes this way further than simply “recognizing” our mortality. It asks the meditator to visualize, profoundly, their own body dying and decaying. There are lots and lots of resources for the modern Maranasati meditator, I used this simple set of “themes” to meditate on:

1. Everyone has to die;

2. Our lifespan is decreasing continuously;

3. The amount of time spent during our life to develop the mind is very small;

4. Human life expectancy is uncertain;

5. There are many causes of death;

6. The human body is so fragile;

7. Our possessions and enjoyments cannot help;

8. Our loved ones cannot help;

9. Our own body cannot help; loved ones cannot help

Written like this, it’s more a contemplative map than a meditation map. But contemplating say, the decreasing of your own lifespan in each moment, allows the feeling tone itself to become the object of meditation. To be blunt: you just sit with the absolute deepening, clarifying misery of each step until you recognize how little power it has.

I spent a good month or so with this during the pandemic, and it was a really powerful bridge towards some lasting change. But I absolutely took the fluffy intellectual Western-buddhism path. I avoided the hard part: Foulness, which in Sanskrit is “Ashuba.”

Ashuba meditation, is a lot less fun than thinking about death real hard. Ashuba meditation challenges the meditator to dwell fully in the grossness of being human. In olden-days, a good Ashuba meditation would be breaking into a fresh charnel ground or morgue, doing a lot of direct seeing/smelling/feeling the reality of human decay.

I did not do this.

Instead, I took the modern, less legally-challenging approach, using visual imagery to dwell in the horror of the 32 different parts of the body falling apart. (I will reluctantly link two PDFs here with the hard-warning that are probably visually disturbing).

I’ve avoided Ashuba like … well like the atrocity exhibition it is … until the this liminal inter-Ango season rolled in with the geese and the rabbits. Until my aversions became a barrier between my son and myself.

Until I wanted to watch a dumb TV show.

Dwelling in discomfort (and initially nausea), hour after hour in the fading days of February into Early March was honestly liberating. By focussing — with deep concentration — on the face of a corpse, or images of a diseased heart, I haven’t developed some switch-flipping ability to dissociate. Instead, bathing in aversion eventually seemed to burn off more of my sense-of-separate-self. I suppose it’s probably just phobia-exposure from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, with a woo-cake layer on top.

Peace Weeps With Joy at Impermanence

But here’s the surprise. Here’s what I find at the bottom of the well.

When there is no longer any knowledge of the difference between corpse and self, when the broken body on the screen becomes my body, aching with pain, disconnection, rot and decay until neither body remains, only one thing seems to be left: the sense of compassion, wonder and gratitude that humans have tried to label forever: Brahmavihara, Agape & Aloha, Chesed, Buddha-mind, God’s Grace.

Watching the Pitt, as the cold, grim reality of a mass casualty incident unfolds in my living room, all that repulsion and rising-gorge has somehow been replaced with all that’s left when everything else burns off.

Love

And when the markets crashed? How can this compare to the time sitting in Ashuba? How ridiculous to let angst, greed, anger and fear into my being, Trojan-horsed inside this imaginary scorekeeping system?

This too shall pass. To dust we shall return. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Boy! Markets! Amirite?

Watching the atrocity exhibition that is a pure red tape and hair-on-fire CNBC hosts, the angst, greed, anger and fear simply never arose, leaving me with the subtle witnessing sadness that often holds the seed of compassion.

All things are indeed impermanent. And yet, somehow, throughout each flicker of reality, each print on the tape, each body in the morgue,

Love seems — if not permanent and undying — insistent.