Gary Peterson - November 15, 2024
Week 2 – Nov. 5, 2024
This covers Session One in the A-Tri text and includes sections 1.4 – 1.4.1.2.1.3.
This lesson on impermanence is intended to develop the skillful means to turn away from attachment. This is text from the meditation:
“All appearances arise as illusory. The compulsion to be attached to (external) reality is cut off. We turn away from the thoughts of samsara. Worldly activities are realized to be without essence. Distinction between friend and enemy diminish and disappear. The knots of attachment loosen. What is genuinely true comes of its own force and you become more mindful of that.”
The skillful means to turn away from attachment are various. At first, the fear and dread of death are utilized, along with the suffering entailed in the endless cycle of rebirths. Then the impermanence of every aspect of our lives is explored, whether it be sense of self, our relations to others, our bodies, the thoughts of our mind-streams, our emotions, our possessions, our loves and hates, our wants and needs, the contexts of our lives, our roles in life, the march of time, the different seasons, etc. There is nothing in our world that is always good, nor always bad. All these are forever changing. Impermanence is truth, it is our reality, yet we crave permanence. We usually resist change and nearly always abhor loss. The desire for permanence is the source of our anger, dissatisfaction and suffering. This knowledge of the truth of impermanence should also be used to remind us to be continually present and to be diligent in our practice. Only by having possession of a precious human life can we end this attachment to external reality… and that life could end at any time. Knowing all this and being mindful of this becomes our skillful means to help us turn away from attachment.
Applying McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis to this teaching can be explored at many different levels. To start, the left brain hemisphere’s framing of reality is the source of the illusion of permanence. It creates stasis out of the everchanging flux of reality. The world of things (nouns), the sense of an isolated self, and the segmentation of time are all creations of the left hemisphere. Samsara is the result of the left hemisphere’s take on reality.
One the other hand, the right hemisphere’s take on reality is one of impermanence, continually sensing a unified whole that always is changing. McGilchrist says the true nature of reality is a Becoming, where experience arises, where consciousness unfolds the implicit into the explicit, and then enfolds it back again into the implicit whole. As such, this genuine reality can never be definitively known… or manipulated.
The left hemisphere specializes in decontextualizing the implicit content of the right hemisphere and then creating simple representations that it knows how to manipulate. Just as a single frame of film is the limit-case of the entire movie, the left hemisphere’s creations are limit-cases of reality. We take these representations to be real when in fact they are just shortcuts we developed to improve our ability to think and act faster.
In trying to move our ‘base of operations’ from the left to the right hemisphere, we must understand some basics about the hemispheres’ relationship with each other. The left hemisphere only knows its own creations, and once having created them, it will do everything it can to maintain them as real. It creates a self-referring hall-of-mirrors. It is like defining reality by only using the words in a dictionary and ignoring our present experience and new information. The left hemisphere also cannot understand the right hemisphere’s take on reality, so it works to suppress it through interconnecting neurons. The right hemisphere can understand and incorporate the left hemisphere’s creations into its wider view, but the right hemisphere’s view is easily overridden/overwritten by the left hemisphere whenever it creates its limit-case content by decontextualizing it from the whole view. Learning to control this dominating suppressive power of the left hemisphere, and developing our right hemisphere’s capabilities, are essential parts of our path.
A story in ancient Western thought may be helpful in bolstering the importance of impermanence. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus didn’t want to die and he manipulated the gods twice to cheat them of his death. As punishment for his unwillingness to accept the impermanence of life, Sisyphus is tasked with pushing a huge rock up the hill every day, which then rolls back down the hill every night… for eternity. Our left hemispheres create stasis, which is incompatible with both impermanence and life. Thus, the left hemisphere’s exhausting work is never be completed. It must continually jump here and there creating stasis and a world of limit-case content so it can manipulate and control this world that it creates. This is the source of the endless, tiring narration in our mind-stream. It seems that our punishment for going too far with our left hemisphere and trying to deny impermanence… is samsara.
Thought provoking discussion! Recognizing the impermanence of ‘things’ seems so essential to the opening up to what is truly permanent and unchanging-ie; the ground of being, awakened awareness, rigpa, consciousness, our true nature. I like McGilchrist’s analogy of the whirlpool in the stream-it seems to occur, but you cant take it from its context , and it is really nothing other than a modulation of the underlying water. The left hemisphere’s attempt at creating stasis is futile and frustrating. The perception of apparent things and occurrences is nothing more than a modulation of the underlying ground of being. This understanding of how things are impermanent is crucial to realizing the non-dual nature of reality. All too often samsara is seen as separate from nirvana. Neither one is real. And both are.