Chapter 22 - Viagnostic

The completion of life is marked by its death, and death is the limit that drives life itself. But while impermanence ensures the overall continuity of existence, we all more or less learn from an early age that life is impermanent when we view it through the lens of any individual entity. Since all things are imperfect insofar as each thing is incomplete and dependent on other things to exist, nothing can remain permanent in the world, including the world as we know it. This is absolute because it is inevitable. Yet we could also say that it is inherently built into us and ticking away silently to its finale. This means that from the moment that we were born or even from the instant we were conceived, we were already in a state of dying, despite our self-validating sense of being alive and our increasing capacity to extend life further into an unknown future. Hence, while we live, the gambler of death is our constant companion. And given that we all ultimately share the same undeniable fate, the impermanent state of existence is the second reality of life we cannot evade. It is only our perception of it that is always changing as we slowly come to notice its harmonic connections in a cacophony of events.

Although there are many ways in which we may experience or understand connection, we can simply view this as information being transmitted between entities. And it is the process of repeatedly sending and receiving information in both directions that conveys the universal truth throughout the cosmos by declaring how things are and negotiating what things can be and their likelihood of being based on all pre-existing conditions at any given point in our space-time continuum. The truth encompasses the principles applied to these conditions to produce the probability of outcomes and the events that eventually transpire. All of this is stored and communicated as information. This includes feelings, which qualitatively describe conscious states and when expressed, they either complete the connection or trigger the call for connection. This is all part of the fundamental longing of existence for the fulfilment of function and the emergence of structure built on organized units of matter and energy, which agreeably reconfigure and align with one another, and which in unison project an animated presence in the universe. It is the movement out of and into form, as it occurs or as we witness, that highlights connection as a flow through endless chains of relationships.

The things that constitute the world must be in constant flux or else they cease to be. Given this verity, we will always see the cosmos in transition whether it is within a full cycle that has an upside followed by a downside or it is between cycles where one closes as another opens. This suggests that connections not only manifest concurrently as instantaneous exchanges, but also as temporal sequences of steps bouncing between order and chaos as they act upon one another to reveal the underlying order of a greater truth. Nature is itself a fundamental expression of this truth and it is treated as being synonymous with an all-encompassing power indiscriminately imposing itself on all things. We can tap into its power and harness it, but we cannot steal or possess it. It cannot be conquered or controlled in the way that we want to believe that we do. This is the illusion of supremacy that surfaces when we confuse this with our utility of nature that reinforces our false sense of autonomy. We can add to nature or build upon it, but we cannot fundamentally alter what it is that defines it. Consequently, we should avoid fighting a losing battle with the forces of nature, and learn to work within its boundaries to prevent needless frustration and being drained of our vitality. Moreover, we should be wary of playing God when attempting to expedite, delay or redirect the inevitable course of life because we are only empowered to pave the road we choose to our common predestination. Life cannot have significance without its ending, and the morally soulless rise of any purportedly indestructible machine will eventually confront its own meaninglessness when all else is destroyed or seemingly controlled. Having a supremely single-minded goal, such as the consolidation of power and wealth, only postpones our acknowledgement of a fundamental reality that is necessary in our search for meaning.

There is no life without its vicissitudes. It is the variations we perceive that animate our experience and connect us to existence. Serving as the current of change, nature reflects how and why things are always moving into alignment. Something must seem chaotic to find its way back into order just as we cannot fully appreciate what is present until it is absent. But the ephemeral quality of life goes beyond the shifts in its appearance as it comes in and out of the void. We also learn that while most things keep changing, others remain still or stable at least long enough for us to grow. This is the dichotomy of change, where it provides stability through its predictably routine events and the possibility of something new precisely because things vary. Hence, although the consequence of change for all of us and all things may be impermanence, the gift of impermanence is creation itself.

MEANING IN THE NECESSITY OF CHANGE

The paradoxical condition we face in life is that nothing would exist without change. How could anything have emerged into the world if there was no such thing as change? The universe would be empty or, at the very least, go unnoticed. While the unanswered question of origin lingers in our consciousness since it is synonymous with the mystery of existence itself, we all instinctively know that the great play of life must go on and it is only made possible by the actual presence and movement of things through their space and time. Events occur because things alter from their previous states, and without these natural or deliberate modifications, there is nothing to record and there is no story to tell. However, in an environment where constant and rapid change becomes the norm, we easily forget that we find meaning in the necessity of change as a fusion of familiarity and novelty that complement our experience. This variability requires our exposure to both the agreeable and undesirable circumstances we encounter in order to grasp the whole of reality. And when our adaptation mimics a fundamental alignment to the universally stable truth, it reveals implicit and ineffable principles through the stories of our lives, which serve as a testament to their veracity that have been tested since time immemorial.

While change in general is inevitable and necessary, the majority of events that transpire are not. They are merely steps along the countless trajectories that our existence may follow, and we have varying degrees of influence in adjusting their course. Undoubtedly, we suffer through many events that we cannot change, and we do not know the real impact of those that we do affect. Yet it can also be difficult for us to admit that many seemingly positive and negative actions take place without making any real difference in the world. Nevertheless, there are innumerable destructive outcomes that we could have avoided if the lessons of life had not been lost, ignored or suppressed. Although mistakes are unavoidable and even necessary, our tendency to fight nature, and especially our own, unfortunately results in many more blunders than are required for us to understand life. This is because while we are learning what may be true, we desperately want to believe things that are untrue in defiance of a reality we do not wish to accept and this includes aligning with the very essence of who we really are.

Nothing is carved in stone except for the principles that guide the nature of all things. This means that there are always options over time and place where conditions expand our range of choices and open up the possibility for decisive action and transformative change, but this requires our timely participation and making the connections we are able to perceive that can influence the shape of things yet to come. There are always larger forces at play that make our decisions seem irrelevant as far as we are able to measure any impact, or any change that we deem sufficient or valuable to us. However, it is not about the size and scale of our impact but its quality in how we perform our chosen roles at their opportune moments. It is about the contribution of our own stories to the greater narrative.

Sadly, many of us are too preoccupied with a desired vision of our future and the socially endorsed practices necessary to attaining that vision. And we either obsess with getting to a place that will never give us the answers we seek or we get to where we apparently want to be but never grasp that the real meaning of sentient life is found in connection rather than success. If we understood this, our motivations would shift and extend beyond crude survival and relative status. However, we tend to point to the inevitability of unstoppable events as a way of relinquishing any responsibility for dealing with the realities they represent. And as we narrow our concerns to minimize stress in our lives, we simultaneously diminish the stress required to ignite our awareness of the connections we need to unleash our essence, which fights within us to be realized in the outside world. Yet we still seek meaning in the truth because it is what remains stable across the variability of our experience just like our essence is what we sense even when there is no change at all.

Not surprisingly, our perception of change affects our sense of meaning and our response to the world around us, and our beliefs can either facilitate or inhibit how we utilize change to develop or alter our viagnostic narratives. We all more or less know that we have to permit and accept change to gain something meaningful, but many of us overlook our misconception of impermanence as purely being an expression of permanence. This understandably stems from our encounters with death and tragedy. People and things cease to be as if to be a permanent or an absolute feature of life. And while this is undeniable from the perspective of individuals when we suffer the biological or neural departure of a person who mattered to us, impermanence is less about death or the end of things than it is about the fluctuations of life where things come and go, and often come back again in a different form. Impermanence emulates a cycle or a wave that rises and drops in accordance with a particular frequency. We notice this with feelings as they vacillate with the tide of good and bad moments as well as the way things continually enter and leave our perceptual field. We do not consider these things permanently gone when they exit. They seem to transcend our present state as if they simply went somewhere else. It is like when we play a common game with young children, or even highly social pets, that involves briefly hiding from them only to quickly reappear. This may trigger their curiosity and sometimes fear, but ultimately we test their sense of reality to impart this basic trait of impermanence.

Realizing that the universe is in constant flux does mean we should treat death or loss lightly. Such an event can wound us deeply and leave us feeling especially vulnerable and incomplete depending on its significance to us. And when we endure an emotionally severed connection, we are quickly reminded that this is an important part of how we define ourselves. But when we use term passing as a euphemism for death, we suggest and imagine that the person who is no longer with us to have gone through a transition and moved onto the afterlife as recognized by many time-honoured traditions. It is a venerable change in state that equally applies to our own lives because a responsibility has necessarily passed onto us to carry the torch of life forward among the living and in memory of those whose time in our shared history has elapsed. When we place bereavement in this broader context, we comprehend that the lesson of death is not about loss and suffering, but rather about being part of a greater cycle that supports the continuity of sentient existence where meaning is realized through the permanence of our connections in the impermanence of living.

The deeper significance behind the transient nature of change is that things come in and out of being without losing their connection to the universal truth. Understanding connection as vibrating between presence and absence, or attachment and detachment, allows us to appreciate the meaning of authenticity when we realize that genuine relationships express this fundamental quality through their perseverance. It is the notion that something functions without directly being seen or felt at all times, and this is easily illustrated in a spousal relationship where both partners can individually go about the business of the day and not meet again until the evening. The couple undergoes a basic process of attachment and detachment without losing connection, which its momentary separation or change ultimately demonstrates. Without that invisible bond, all partners would potentially rejoin relations with others. Connections that signal the truth remain intact regardless of what may shift or alter, and this is equally applicable to our true identity and the essence of what we really are as we struggle with the things we possess and the relationships we build that define and complete who we think we are.

TRUSTING CONNECTION IN A LIFE WITHOUT CONTROL

We sometimes view change in terms of what we can and cannot control. If we deliberately take actions that result in intended outcomes, then we see ourselves as being empowered in some way. Conversely, if our efforts generally lead to no improvement, then we begin to descend into a state of helplessness, especially when we are unable to prevent significantly negative events from occurring in our lives. But in either case, whether we feel invincible or powerless, we forge beliefs based on the stability or consistency we see in our relationship with the world that affects the way in which we relate to it, and consequently, how we respond to events and form attachments to the things we need or desire. Our identity grows from and fuses with the objects and patterns we meaningfully perceive and trust in our surroundings, which includes other beings and our own bodily constitution. And as our constructs of the world take shape, we begin to distinguish ourselves as autonomous entities while seemingly being forced into a prearranged marriage with a universe that subjects us to undesirable conditions from which we learn to make our lives more favourable. This unmistakably requires the acquisition and handling of resources to improve our circumstances, but in the process of doing so, we stumble upon the concept of power along with related notions of property and ownership.

The possession of tools, materials and energy sources heats and expands our desire for control to provide us with a sense of security regarding our subsistence and advancement. We possess what we control, but we are possessed by what we cannot control in a world that seems to dominate our lives. However, this possession of power, which does not extend to the dominion of the whole universe or the conquest of nature, is an illusion because power is something we can harness and exercise, but we cannot newly produce. Hence, to assume that we can create what is already in existence is as delusional as believing that we independently fed ourselves when we were infants. Furthermore, since it varies in its distribution held by people including ourselves, we measure it in terms of our relative influence over one another. Yet many of us remain oblivious to the advantage of having easily accessible resources or to the role of others in supporting the perceptions that we form about ourselves in relation to the world of physical things and conscious beings that inevitably mould us into what we become. Although our innate potential is an unknown before we emerge as living creatures, our fate and the overall impact we may have critically depend on what we are given and on the setting in which we are placed.

Our identities are bound to our experiences and their memories as well as the beliefs we cement about the past, present and future. They are also tied to the associations we conceive and preserve between animate and inanimate objects that facilitate the relative comparisons we make between others, and between others and ourselves, to the point where our value is correlated with the things to which we become attached. For instance, if we determine our worth based on material wealth, then the wealth we gain and lose reflects the value we gain or lose as individuals. The same is true of our relations with others. We tend to interact with those who boost or reinforce a persona we want to maintain while distancing ourselves from those who do not fit into our prescribed social circles, especially when we desperately wish to conceal our actual self-image. But after we mistakenly fall into the hypnotic trance of engaging life as if society were the real world, we rarely break out of its spell because we assimilate external beliefs as our own by internalizing the perceived expectations of others and particularly those who preceded us. And this process germinates a culturally deformed version of the person we really are with whom we begin to identify that sometimes appears as a photo negative of our true self. But as we give up authenticity by sliding down the slippery slope of being addicted to the anonymity of a counterfeit life, we let a charlatan take executive control of our choices and relationships to relieve us only briefly of threatening or debilitating feelings such as shame, anxiety and depression.

Unlike genuine relationships that bond with the truth, false connections link to what we want to believe is true and persevere only until their misperception is challenged or their deceit is exposed. They exhibit a transient property that we associate with illusory thoughts and pretensions that evaporate when tested against reality, and their fleeting nature triggers their compulsion to persist. Moreover, these contrived identities and artificial relationships pose a mortal risk to sentient life by replacing spiritual enlightenment with intellectual abstraction and shallow wisdom confined to solving narrowly defined problems and achieving materialistic progress with an air of moral authority packaged as rationalized dispassion that is devoid of any sincerity in a mechanized world. This sanctions us to act arrogantly with impunity as it separates us from our deeper self-knowledge and discourages our virtuously humble search for meaning. And while a pure identity describes who we really are and gives us a preview of how our stories can evolve and contribute to the greater narrative that permeates all of our lives, we instead permit the insecure ego to block, distort and even possess our inner nature.

We sometimes misunderstand attachment in the context of connection because we cannot reconcile two seemingly contradictory views. While we should recognize our inseparability from the universe based on our fundamental dependence on our environment that includes others, we should also practice emotional detachment from all impermanent things as a form of disillusionment and as a means of avoiding suffering, but only if we treat detachment as something impermanent as well. We can barely comprehend half of reality by divorcing ourselves objectively because the other half of life is only accessible subjectively. We need passionate connection to live meaningful lives, where the positive and the negative complement each other to complete our experiential knowledge. Otherwise, it would be like trying to understand light without already knowing darkness or vice versa. The pain we endure in relation to the inevitable loss of or separation from significant others is necessary to fully appreciate the importance of these sacred relationships and commitments we have that transcend ownership such as our spouses. Hence, we cannot totally detach, but we can learn to oscillate between attachment and detachment where we fuse with what nurtures us and disengage from what harms us, which often involves the same entity that is also fluctuating between serving as sustenance and as venom as well.

The concept of letting go is often raised in reference to our excessive attachment to things, especially impermanent things, and this includes letting go of our possessions as well as relinquishing control or our desire to control predominantly the things that are uncooperative in nature. Our refusal to let go is a response to a belief about something we think we have or had or something we want to have or think we should have. And this extends to the idea or feeling that we are not able to live without a specific person or thing or we are not able to function outside of an accustomed set of conditions. Hence, many of us assume that life would end for us if we were removed from what we have designated as giving us meaning or defining our lives. And while this means that this is about letting go of a belief about the world or ourselves rather than about an object of importance, we must recognize that belief in this context revolves around our sense of control, particularly in relation to our experience with depending on the undependable. Trust and control have an intimate relationship, and this reveals that detachment or letting go is really about placing faith in the things that we neither control nor know if we can trust. Faith is a kind of submission to the unknown that requires the courage to overcome our fears.

While blind faith is one of the greatest threats, faith in a true linkage that we cannot prove is essential because we would otherwise do nothing given that we do not know or control anything absolutely. Thus, trusting connection in a life without control is the ultimate test of letting go of the beliefs and doubts that fuel our fears since what we release will eventually spring back if a real underlying relationship exists. But it is insufficient to say we need to let go. Our obsession with control as an antidote to the anxiety of our distrust ensures that we remain possessed to the point that we inadvertently cause more harm than good. We need to be cognizant of which beliefs and associated fears affect our trust, and for whom or what we should allow ourselves to take that leap of faith. True connection is an expression of pure love, and genuine love fundamentally challenges the idea of complete detachment and our false notions of letting go. For instance, feeling pain resulting from loss or our empathic sense of another’s pain is not attachment. Instead as compassion, it reflects the value that others hold or once held for us, and we sustain their value by bearing witness to it or by recalling their memory. The dilemma we face is whether we truly love someone or merely love the image or idea of what that person or thing represents to us. If it is pure, we continue to love, despite all of the darkness and suffering that may come to test that love, by letting go of the fear of it being unrequited. If it is not pure, we should let go of the fantasy and persevere in finding and building authentic connections.

LOVE BEYOND FEELINGS OF DESIRE AND SUFFERING

Many of us tend to assume that pain and struggle indicate something negative or that the only positive pain is that which we associate with future rewards, while others still believe that suffering in itself is a kind of virtue or repentance for being born out of or born into sin. However, none of these beliefs help us find real meaning and only serve to confuse our relationship with suffering. Moreover, suffering itself is not central to the discussion of meaning since it is simply a consequence of living and often seems senseless because it is. We do not derive meaning directly from suffering, but rather from what we learn from it. Naturally, we lean towards pleasure and away from pain, but it is our higher, broader and deeper awareness of life that allows us to place the complementary relationship of pleasure and pain into perspective and expand it to breathe significance into our lives as we illuminate our feelings of joy and sadness, anger and indifference, and fear and tranquility. But while pleasure is fleeting, pain can be enduring and indelible in its trauma that can rob us of our peace of mind by leaving us in a state of unmanaged trepidation and suppress our capacity to sincerely love by driving us to live fictitious lives. Some of us may even withdraw from life because we feel no sense of control over outcomes, or at least not the outcomes that fulfill the expression of who we really are.

We do not want to recognize that we are not in control of things. It goes against all instinct that is tied to our survival and against our bodily identity, which exerts some influence and negotiates its existential place in the universe. However, we are not necessarily in conscious control of those actions and interventions, at least not fully or even partially at times. We are habitually responsive and perhaps more calculating than we care to admit, but trying to determine from where that control truly emerges is a question that lingers without a satisfactory answer. We indeed can and do act to reduce suffering and increase the pleasantness of our lives, but there is always a cost incurred with our measurable improvements, and sometimes that cost is greater than what is gained. This is because we underestimate the complexity of life and dismiss the consequences of our allegedly noble pursuits grown out of the hubris of our progress that dwarfs the humility of our nature.

As emotionally sentient beings, feelings are integral to our functioning since they inform us of our corporeal conditions, from physical pleasure and pain to social cohesion and conflict, and from our sense of security and belongingness to our judgment of morality and aesthetics. They provide feedback to our expectations of the world and the perceived outcomes of our actions, and they influence our decisions to act and not to act. In addition, many of our feelings are in pre-existing charged states that expedite our response to events or circumstances by interpreting their relevance before we are able to consciously process them. This means that there is a kind of preliminary ruling that sways our view of things and locks our perceptions and emotions into a reinforcing cycle that can only be broken by purposefully questioning our assumptions, interpretations and attitudes with the hope of surfacing our biased tendencies and correcting our erroneous opinions.

As our awareness of the world and of ourselves expands in its elevation, breadth and depth, the quality of our feelings and intuitions increase to degrees that affect the way we develop our narratives and discover meaning in our lives. This impacts how we perceive happiness and pursue gratification as well as how we respond to desire and suffering. And although we expectedly aim to actively improve the conditions of our lives, our sentience also seeks to fill its existential void. Yet somewhere along our evolving history, we seemingly hit a tipping point where our advances in technology accelerated at the expense of personal enlightenment and moral maturity. While progress makes us feel like we are moving closer to godly autonomy, it will only ever be a refinement to the convenience of living until it begins to invade, replace or assimilate our organic constitution. And even if or when it finally does physically transform our existence, it still will never answer the question regarding the meaning of life because it is not a problem to be solved, but simply an experience to be known.

Unfortunately, our preoccupation with a pleasant and prolonged life enabled by a misplaced faith in technological salvation opens us up to unlimited desire and neglects the significance of real suffering as a fundamental part of life. While we do not want and should not want to deliberately seek out pain, it does characteristically remind us that we are alive. We cannot separate misery from happiness because experiencing the joy and wonder of life give us the will to endure suffering, and undergoing distress makes us appreciate its absence. We may know that we exist, but we find meaning through the cycle of impermanence. Otherwise, meaning is lost. When we retreat from the duality of our experiences, we surrender to one side that materializes as veiled addiction or conceited discipline. And when we fail to submit to the whole reality of life, we unwittingly corrupt the soul.

We mistakenly focus on the pursuit of happiness as our ultimate goal because we confuse this with being one of the desired outcomes we seek in the pursuit of meaning. It is by pursuing a meaningful life that we are better positioned to experience genuine happiness, whereas seeking happiness without meaning at its core can only offer us a life of ephemeral pleasures. Even if we live in blissful ignorance, we will never mature beyond our basic biological awareness, which is confined to the intelligence of consumption that paradoxically perceives its environment as boundless and ensures its indulgence becomes limitless as well. The hunger for more overtakes the will for the pure, and meaning is engineered to be as transient as the gratifications that feed our cravings.

Despite our hedonic tendencies, it is clear that we want something more in terms of quality over quantity because we know that having all of the material things in the world can never quite account for what we intrinsically seek. For many of us, love is probably the best affirmation of this truth because we are willing and able to struggle through the misery of life and face heartbreak in order to find and preserve its meaning. Moreover, love has the power to dilute or alleviate our raging desire by revealing our deepest yearnings in our loftiest quests and guiding us like a homing signal to identify or form uniquely significant connections. And since neither maximizing bliss nor living an ascetic life brings us closer to the meaning of what we unconsciously pursue, a philosophy of emotional dissociation only risks removing any depth to our experience while suppressing our empathic nature and rationalizing the violence of our policies. But while our feelings can bring out our most irrational behaviour, they also connect us to the underlying and indescribable truth of life with love as its ambassador.

Although we can view love as covering a wide spectrum of affinity for animate and inanimate things that give us pleasure or meaning since they all share the same origin, love is not a quantifiable state as much as it is a qualitative experience. Different forms of love carry different types of quality, and that quality defines its level of significance. We can think of love in multiple ways that layer onto one another or that transition from the most consumptive to the most connective. In its most basic form, we experience consumptive love when we perceive something desirable that we are drawn to mainly with the intent of consuming it. It is short-lived because it has to be destroyed in order to experience it. Food is perhaps one of the best examples of this. But we also see this when we are drawn to the thrill of something novel such as when we visit a place, read a book or watch a film for the first time unaware of what to expect or what will transpire. This extends to sex and losing one’s virginity, but there are seemingly endless scenarios where we directly or indirectly witness the loss or destruction of something. Contrastingly, connective love only grows like the act of lighting candles. We can keep lighting more candles from the same flame until the original candle burns off and new candles take its place. With respect to intimacy, something is always renewed when two individuals love each other. There is not only no loss, but each experience builds upon the next with that same person. It gains by its voluntary offering or reception without obligatory reciprocation and moves us towards being essentially pure or faithful, while consumptive love is definitively conditional or preferential in its expression.

It is between these two boundaries of love that we describe its diversity along a continuum of feeling, and this ranges from the most addictive or possessive to the most compassionate or untainted and from the most damaging to the most nourishing. Moreover, we realize that nothing is quite black or white since we can perceive both consumption and creation to be equally destructive and prolific. Destruction is inherent to the production process as demonstrated by the raw materials we may use to, for instance, carve a sculpture or prepare a meal. However, love is generally something we give back as an outcome of what is taken or provided to us. And aside from procreation in the broader act of raising children, this can include anything we design, construct or duplicate as long as it is something newly produced, whether it is a product of art or engineering or whether it is a physical object or an intangible idea. In every one of these contexts, this creative force results in bringing something into existence that we manifest as love beyond feelings of desire and suffering through the narratives of our lives.

In the film adaptation of Doctor Zhivago [22], the lead character’s romantic longings and loyalties bleed into one another to exhibit the gradients and complexities of love in the backdrop of social upheaval. It all intersects as he endures the vivid hardships of wartime and political revolution in the passing company of the innocent and the defiled and of the just and the disparaging. This is the tale of a man moved by beauty and compassion and of a people divided by class and forcibly joined in the marathon of their survival, where the intimate connection between desire and suffering is exposed, and where every beginning is a foreshadowing of its end in the literary logic of its own impermanence. But its story is outlived only by the poetry in which it is preserved, and the perpetuation of existence requires unending sacrifices that make agony inevitable in our struggles to sustain any significance in the lives we live. We persevere through our distress to ensure the opportunity to gain the freedom for which we yearn, and that freedom is to unleash our essence unto the world. But in order for its meaning to be realized, it must ultimately move beyond us through love and rise above our deciduous beliefs.

THE VOLATILE BELIEFS OF A PREMATURE IDENTITY

A great barrier to unlocking who we really are resides within our own sense of self that is enveloped by the beliefs we hold about our perceived universe and influenced by the society that shapes those beliefs. Our core identity shares a cultural nest with other incubated eggs representing various elements of who we are to become. Unfortunately, too many of them hatch before we realize what part of us best describes our essence as a petite tranche of the universal truth, and this contributes to the volatile beliefs of a premature identity where the mature façade of our undeveloped self conceals the reality of life and disconnects us from our environment as well as others. And although we may misalign with our world because it is constantly changing, we too are always altering our views and approaches to align with what we need or what we think offers our lives meaning. This leads us to chase visions and prophecies that we involuntarily plant in our congruence-oriented minds or passion-seeking hearts and eventually convert into goals and measures of our own worth that come to define our lives. Consequently, we rarely examine their deeper significance to see if any exists beyond our uncontested faith in an idea or a personality inadvertently engineered in the secret lab of our unconscious.

Although we hold onto our beliefs as if they are a matter of life or death, their real value lies primarily in their formation. We need beliefs to navigate through our world, whether they are right or wrong, because they routinely adjust enough to adapt our efforts to the obstacles we face. Many beliefs predictably endure because they approximate reality to the extent that they effectively apply to our immediate interests, but many persist because they are shared by others as reassuring validation of a worldview that protects us from the troubling inconsistencies in our thinking that we tend to ignore in order to maintain our mental stability. The more aggressive or stubborn we are in our convictions, the more likely they point to what we interpret to be most critical to our subsistence or identity. Thus, it is not surprising that we go to extreme lengths to rationalize our conflicting beliefs and decisions as well as appear self-aware and self-assured while avoiding introspective questions that can undermine our whole way of life and rock the very foundation of who we think we are or supposed to be.

We prefer to focus on the transient quality of our environment because it conveniently serves to overlook the fragility of our existential understanding that may expose unsealed vulnerabilities in our dubiously described selves. We are raised predominantly in cultures that discourage us to openly manage our uncertainty. Consequently, many of us either avoid testing and steer away from what we do not know or feel compelled to act confidently about everything, which includes burying our errors in judgment and ignoring the contradictions in our core beliefs and social customs that we treat as sacred. The system we have created is too complex for most of us to challenge, and any dissension risks being stigmatized with restrictions to our social mobility or being ostracized altogether. This is in addition to the mentally penetrating abuses of trust and attacks on reason we sometimes see within our own families and communities unable to deal with its intergenerational transmission of shame that sends even the most affluent down a path of addiction hidden in its many unsuspecting forms.

However, simply accepting the world in the manner in which others describe and present to us without reservation is to approach insanity. This is especially true in a society that declares us mad if we question our cultural inconsistencies or reject the mass indoctrination of our alleged knowledge as well as our history, which is often rewritten to erase our transgressions and position our means in alignment with a justified end. We see this inclination exemplified both privately when unrestrained adults, for example, excuse their mistreatment of defenseless children under their care and on a public scale where we collectively turn a blind eye to atrocities or deplorable patterns of behaviour that tear away the moral fabric of our culture. As we pull away each thread, we retreat to a rose-coloured wilderness where hypocrisy is a censored word removed from our vocabulary and we hide behind the mask of liberty to renounce any principled commitment to our community or even to ourselves. As a society, we do not want to admit to the irregularity of our beliefs or recognize how our unstable personal views sway with the political wind over the economic current of our lives as long as there is some measure of predictable outcomes that we think we can control.

We also grant ourselves the freedom to be clever or creative enough to forsake any degree of awareness or imagination that could successfully breach the walls of our spiritual ignorance and return us to our essence. Real meaning requires us to cross over the threshold of our minimal tolerance for existential suffering. We cannot address this by simply manufacturing pleasure or value in easily digestible packets and dissolvable capsules that can blur the discrepancy between the fabricated self and our inner nature. But if we want to believe our madness reflects our own instability rather than our uninhibited and starving spirit trying to make genuine connections and fill the emptiness we feel, then we will likely fade away in our sleep breathing in the deleterious fumes of a synthetically modern culture. And we will continue to ingest moral toxins that we are fed to give us a predefined significance we are assured we need not question, at least not until we realize that we have kidnapped and replaced our most profound feelings with sanctioned states of euphoric sedation. In order to regain who we really are, we need to allow the volatility in our beliefs to provoke us into revisiting our false or immature identities since it is unlikely we have become who we really are. And then we can redirect our narratives towards those meaningful roles and deeds we intuitively sense we must perform before our allocated time in this universe has elapsed.

THE INEVITABLE CONCLUSION OF OUR IMPERMANENCE

We all know that we are going to die. We may not necessarily know when, where and how we will pass on, but we cannot dismiss the inevitable conclusion of our impermanence, despite our best efforts to delay that moment. Yet as sobering as it may be for all of us to contemplate our mortality, no one really wants to consider its prospect unnecessarily. At most, we generally hope that our exit from the life we have known transitions with little or minimal suffering. However, if we wish to cease our prolonged struggle with finding meaning and inner peace or happiness in the clarity of living and being at ease with what we really are, we need to invite this fateful reality into our lives. This is because it solidifies the contextual significance of impermanence within the greater continuity of existence and because it brings us back to the precious quality of the present through the pertinent review of our past to magnify the immediacy of our own future that hinges on the patient determination of nature.

Whether or not we continue to exist in some form after we biologically die is a matter of religious and scientific debate that also exposes our personal fantasies of immortality. Nevertheless, death does reaffirm the value we place on life regardless of what we believe, and it does give us cause to consider living our lives as if we were never going to return to this world or any world. And if we believe this to be true, how differently would we live our lives if we knew when and where we were going to die and there was nothing we could do to change that? Would we choose to be as frivolous as possible with our remaining time and dispel with our previously held values, or would we strengthen our resolve to be who we truly are and live by our principles? What critical decisions and desired experiences would suddenly rise to the top of our priority list and how would we reprioritize our shortened lives? Such inquiries can easily trigger more profound questions about life and their evocative answers would undoubtedly come into much sharper focus if basic assumptions we once instinctively made were abruptly reset.

Many of us do not realize that we have traded in our chance to develop a meaningful narrative through an unavoidable minefield of unknowns for a predictable existence of false security leading to a potentially insignificant end. We all want change, but we generally prefer it to be foreseeable and periodic so that we can plan and manage our lives accordingly like a seasonal cycle. We aspire to remove the unknown from the impermanent to make it less unstable and more forgiving. But in the process of doing this, we become so preoccupied with our relative success and longevity that we neglect what we are afforded by our health and our leisure to presume that a higher standard of living is equivalent to a quality life. While it is entirely understandable that we want to minimize our suffering and expand our ability to do what we previously could not do, we are still left with this quest for meaning that the ease of living cannot fulfill. We think it is about increasing our degree of control in the pursuit of our desires, but it is only through our sense of connection that we find the answers we seek in defining a significant life. And it is not our sense of power, but our connection with the truth that lets us align with nature to be adequately stable to grow yet never unwavering enough to remain the same. Change is an existential constant and a permanent feature of an impermanent life that essentially makes it possible for us to have control or freedom before we ever had any control or freedom. And despite all of the death and destruction that accompanies the forces of change, life persists as if it supersedes its impermanence to tell us a greater story.

Although life may be impermanent, the notion of it being discretely ephemeral is just as much as a figment of our imagination as the idea of things being everlasting. Our binary assessment of the world as being exclusively black or white slips into our comforting need for certainty. But just as we cannot have light without darkness, we cannot have transience without perpetuity. Each complements the other to provide a more complete picture of the universal truth as a motivating force. And it is the transient element of our imperfection defined by our limits and fundamental dependency that drives us to express the interminable quality of our essence that remains long after our cosmic departure. The meaning of our impermanence is found in our metaphysical endurance to sustain what is beyond our material being, and this is conveyed through the deeper sense of love we feel for life and those who become significant to us. Given that we will neither escape death nor attain perfection, we can only pass on what we learn and refine to those who succeed us and to whatever withstands the test of time. When we realize this, we easily come to appreciate that determining how we should live our lives actually matters. Since a great deal of change is irregular or unpredictable like the sudden, accidental loss of a loved one, nothing can be taken for granted. Indeterminate events and unknown risks emerge from the chaotic complexities of existence to expose uncertainty as being infused in the framework of life. And this demands that we acknowledge the inherent flaws and gaps in our transitory beliefs in order to enhance their relative veracity as we disentangle meaningful lessons from the realities encountered during the development and staging of our viagnostic narratives.