This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Insight into the Three Characteristics (3 of 5): Impermanence - Mei Elliott. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, dear ones. Let’s get started. Good morning, all. My name is May Elliot, and I am beaming in from Santa Cruz, California. Today, we will begin our investigation of the three characteristics. In our meditations, we’ll start each day for the upcoming three days by cultivating some of the supportive conditions for insight. So, we’ll begin each day by connecting with contentment. Then we’ll cultivate samadhi1 by settling with the breath, by inviting the mind to stabilize, and then we’ll open to whatever our insight theme is for the day. The theme for today is anicca2, or impermanence, inconstancy.
While I’ll be offering a practice that deliberately cultivates the perception of anicca, of impermanence, know that you can still have insight into it without doing this specific practice. There are many practices that aren’t even intentionally or deliberately cultivating insight which still reveal insights. For example, you might be doing a basic mindfulness practice like open awareness, also called choiceless attention, and just noting whatever arises in experience. A practice like this can reveal insights even if you’re not looking for them, even if you’re not directly trying to cultivate them. So even though we’ll deliberately cultivate each of the insight themes in our guided meditations each day, know that this isn’t the only way to open to insight. You don’t need to go looking for it. So with that said, let’s get started. Go ahead and find your meditation posture.
Connecting with a position that is both upright and relaxed. Taking a moment to connect with the body, allowing yourself to soften. Connecting with whatever is here for you, whatever is happening in the heart, in the mind, in the body. And what you find, it might be pleasant, it might be unpleasant, it might be neither, somewhere in between.
Can you connect with some modicum of contentment, regardless of what you find? Even if it’s a very quiet contentment, a very subtle contentment. So actively bringing forth this sense of goodness, remembering the goodness of just getting to be still. I have this opportunity to train the mind and the heart. Maybe sensing a sliver of gratitude.
Let’s place a simple contentment, however slight. We’ll connect with our home base, our anchor, whether that’s the breath or the body, allowing yourself to land. If it’s supportive for you, you can continue the practice we discussed yesterday, connecting with the moment an inhale begins and coasting on the rest of the breath, almost like a bird flapping and coasting, gliding in the air.
Allowing the blizzard of the mind to settle.
Maybe recalling the image of the sun cresting over the horizon as being like that first moment the inhale begins, seeing the sunrise.
Having taken some time to open to the breath, to settle with the breath, we’ll now shift our attention to the changing nature of experience, to anicca, inconstancy. While there are many ways to attend to anicca, today we’ll do it through the changing nature of the body and the soundscape. Starting with the body, rather than having a narrow focus of attention on the breath, allow yourself to widen the attention, almost like widening the aperture on a camera, so that you can take in the whole body.
And when you do this, you’ll notice other sensations come into view. You might notice that some sensations are more predominant than others at any given moment. If you do notice a predominant sensation, allow your attention to go to that sensation, to really sense it and explore it. Maybe it’s in the palm of one hand, so you’re sensing and exploring the sensations in the hand as long as they’re predominant. You might notice this tingling, pressure, temperature. You’ll notice that the felt sense of the body, of this sensation, is different than our mental image of that part of the body. It’s different than our thought about that part of the body. We’re staying with the felt experience, the felt sensations.
It may be that that area of the body is no longer as predominant, or there’s another sensation that draws the attention, in which case you can allow your attention to shift to the new area. So being receptive, receiving sensation, allowing the attention to move where it’s called.
It’s fine if the breath becomes predominant and that draws your attention back.
Wherever you are in the body, noticing tingling or pulsing, can you sense the changing nature of the experience, the fluxing, shifting nature of experience?
Staying with a sensation until another draws your attention, and seeing the way sensations arise and pass as the attention shifts.
Even though the body is our primary focus for the meditation, you may notice that emotions or moods or thoughts come through. These other experiences may draw the attention for a time, and if so, rather than relating to them as intruders or distractions, can you include them in your perception of anicca? Can you see them arise, flux, and pass away as you return to the body?
Even sensations that seem to be ongoing, see if you can notice any pulsation or vibration. If so, this is revealing some change, some inconstancy.
You might also include the soundscape now, noticing any sounds that arise. Those sounds might be near, maybe within your own body—breath, digestion, maybe even the sound of the heartbeat. There might be sounds in the room you’re in, the sound of my voice, or sounds beyond, maybe outside coming through. Noticing sounds coming and going, arising, sustaining, and passing away.
Even sounds that seem to be ongoing, is there an inconstancy to them? Maybe a pulsing, a vibration. Or sounds that may seem constant become inconstant when the attention shifts to a different object momentarily, maybe sensing the body for a moment before noticing that same sound again. Seeing this inconstancy, the shifting of the attention and the shifting of the object itself.
Welcome back, and welcome to those of you just arriving. Again, my name is May Elliot, and I’d like to start with a brief story. I spent about eight years living at Zen monasteries and temples, which were all in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi3. And once, a long time ago, Suzuki Roshi was giving a lecture, and afterwards in the Q&A, one of the Zen students asked a question. He said something like, “Suzuki Roshi, I’ve been listening to your lectures for years, but I just don’t understand. Could you please just put it in a nutshell? Could you reduce Buddhism to one phrase?”
So of course, everyone laughed. Suzuki Roshi laughed, and then he said, “Everything changes.”
So this is our one constant: everything changes. This is Suzuki Roshi’s Buddhism in a nutshell: everything changes. So today we’ll be discussing anicca, translated as impermanence or inconstancy, and this is the first of the three characteristics that I’ll be discussing over the next couple of days. As I shared yesterday, when we’re not lost in the blizzard of our thoughts, when the blizzard settles, we’re able to see more clearly. And what we’re able to see clearly are the three characteristics: impermanence, suffering, and not-self. In other words, we’re able to see the changing nature of things, we’re able to see that clinging leads to suffering, and we’re able to see that there’s no fixed center, fixed core, no fixed abiding self to this being that we refer to as me, myself, mine.
So as we enter into this territory, I really want to be clear that these three characteristics, they’re not things that you need to believe. They’re not views you need to hold about reality. I’m not here to convince you that the three characteristics are true as a belief system or view, but rather to support you in seeing them for yourselves. That’s what becomes transformational. So not beliefs you need to hold, but insights that are revealed.
So let’s focus in on anicca, impermanence. Many of us hear about impermanence in relationship to the Dharma; this is a common teaching. So I’d like to discuss what it is and why it’s significant. Insight into impermanence is often considered the core, most important insight of the Buddha, and it creates the groundwork for the two other insights: insight into suffering and not-self. The Pali word nicca means constant. Anicca means inconstant. So this is one of the reasons we can translate anicca as inconstancy. We’re having insight into inconstancy.
But when we live in the thinking mind, the mind that’s dominated by concepts, our reality can seem pretty fixed and unchanging. So for example, we can live in fixed concepts like, “my parents are unsupportive,” or “my spouse is unreliable,” or “I hate my job.” And there can be this sense that this is how my job is, and it’s always going to be this way. It’s a fixed idea. But really, there’s what’s happening and then the story that we tell ourselves about what’s happening. So two things are happening at any given time: what’s actually happening and the story we tell about it. And what’s actually happening is always changing, but our stories tend to calcify our experience. The stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening often hold a fixed view. So we end up creating a story that ultimately we feel trapped by. And this is how, as some say, we can build ourselves a prison in paradise. Our stories, they’re like conceptual overlays made up of thoughts, of ideas, of beliefs, and we can feel imprisoned by them at times.
So when we’re not living in our thought world, when we’re not lost in our thought world, we can begin to get in contact with what’s actually happening beneath the ticker tape of our narrative, beneath the ticker tape of our storyline. And when the thinking mind has settled and the mind is clear, what we see is that phenomena is arising and passing over and over and over. And this can facilitate a lot of freedom.
There are two primary ways impermanence is discussed in the Suttas4. First, there’s the repeated arising and passing away of experience, what I think is easiest to refer to as inconstancy. And then secondly, is the way that things change over time. And this latter point, the way things change over time, is what most people typically associate with impermanence and what most people can very easily perceive. You know, it’s seeing on a more gross level that things change for good. Our body looks and feels different when we’re 70 than it did when we were 17, and we’re not going to get that 17-year-old body back. Or when a loved one dies, they’re not returning to us. When we break a teacup, we see its transitory nature. So this is all demonstrating this more gross level of impermanence.
So some people think anicca only refers to the way things pass away for good, either dying or ending. But the core insight of the Buddha has a little bit more to do with the inconstancy of things, which is that first type of impermanence that I mentioned. For example, if you feel the sensation in your hand, you might notice tingling, pressure, fluctuation, like a kaleidoscope of changing sensations. So there’s change happening there, right? There’s flexing, arising and passing of sensation.
Or say we have a difficult mood. Maybe we wake up feeling sad or depressed. And at first glance, that sadness or depression can seem like a constant, ever-present state. But often when we look more closely, we can see that there’s some fluxing from moment to moment. The mood might be very strong, say, the moment we wake up, and then we have a sip of coffee and the attention goes from the mood to the coffee, and there’s a glimmer of pleasure in the mind. And then the attention goes back to the mood, which might be a little lighter now. And then maybe the sound of rain falling on the rooftop starts coming in, so the attention notices that, and then it goes back to the mood again.
So this is just like a tiny little snapshot showing the way there can be both a change in the object and a change in what we’re perceiving. So a shift in where we’re paying attention. The attention goes from the mood to the coffee, back to the mood, to the sound of the rain, back to the mood. And so there’s inconstancy in the object of attention, where the attention is going. And then in each of those objects, the sound of the rain is flexing, the flavor of the coffee is flexing. So this is pointing just to the way that there’s so much inconstancy in any given moment. The mood itself is changing, and the objects of attention are changing. So rather than a mood being a monolith, it’s a little bit more like Swiss cheese. Like moment after moment, there are holes being poked in our fixed perception of what’s happening. So our sadness is punctuated by other experiences. It’s arising and passing.
So anytime we think something is fixed, we’re typically not seeing all the change that’s present. And on a really subtle level, our experience of the world is inconstant. Seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, always arising and passing. Every moment of hearing, there’s change. Emotions and thoughts always arising and passing. So even things that we might initially perceive as stable or as fixed, something like pain in the body, when we investigate it more closely, we often find that even pain itself is a fluxing kaleidoscope of changing sensations.
So why is this important? Who cares if things are impermanent? You know, what’s the big deal? Well, when we know on a really deep level that everything changes, that everything passes away, we’re much less likely to crave and cling. So if we know that everything will be pulled through our grip, we’re not going to hold on so tightly. And this is really important. Remember the Four Noble Truths. First Noble Truth: there is suffering. Second Noble Truth: the source of suffering is craving. Third Noble Truth: there’s an end to suffering, the release of craving. And the fourth: the path to the end of suffering.
So I’d like to just zoom in on that second and third Noble Truth: the source of suffering is craving and clinging. So to let go of craving and clinging is to let go of suffering. So this inextricable link between craving and suffering. How does this relate to impermanence? Over time, when we see closely, impermanence pulls everything through our fingertips. We see that if we hold reality really tightly, if we cling, we suffer. When we hold a rope really tightly, if it’s pulled through our grip, we get rope burn. The same thing happens with anything we cling to with our heart and mind. If we grasp anything really tightly, when it’s pulled through our grip because of impermanence, we’re going to suffer, and the heart’s going to get rope burn.
And ultimately, insight into impermanence supports a deep letting go. It teaches us to let go. In other words, it conditions non-clinging. So when the mind is steady and we see change over and over and over, the mind learns on a really deep level that there’s no use holding on. When it sees this, it learns to let go. And it also learns not to cling to begin with because it knows better, right? It knows that clinging doesn’t work. It knows that clinging hurts. So the mind-heart knows this as deeply and as intuitively as we know not to put our hand into a pot of boiling water. It’s like, “clinging, ouch, that hurts,” right? So when we see inconstancy over and over, we learn to let go. We learn not to crave and cling. And this wisdom that develops is liberative.
Now with all this said, I want to acknowledge that seeing impermanence doesn’t always feel good. It can even be destabilizing to see the inconstancy of things because when we see this really clearly over and over, we see there’s nothing lasting that we can hold on to. There’s nothing reliable in the way that we thought it was. And while this can be challenging, if we’ve sufficiently cultivated stability and well-being, samadhi and contentment, we’re not going to be as unmoored by it. We’re not going to be as unmoored by seeing the inconstancy of things.
And of course, the gift of impermanence is that our suffering can change too. So our neurosis, compulsion, our depression and anxiety are also impermanent. You know, these aren’t immutable. As Rainer Maria Rilke5 says, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Because things change, unwholesome qualities of mind can diminish and wholesome qualities can grow. We all have the capacity for change. And as we see the changing nature of things over time, our impulse to crave the next object or experience begins to fall away because we’ve seen for ourselves how transient they are. And through this process, our suffering, our dukkha6, can come to an end.
So today, may you be aware of the changing nature of things, and may it condition a mind that is free from suffering. Thank you all for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Take care.
Samadhi: A Pali word for concentration or a state of meditative absorption. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for impermanence or inconstancy. ↩
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971): A Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. ↩
Suttas: Discourses or sermons of the Buddha. ↩
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926): A Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” ↩