as impermanence and mindlessness

Towards the Dynamic Art of Partial Comprehension (Part #3)

Impermanence: Insight into the nature of impermanence is a key focus of Buddhism (as annicca), whereby everything is recognized as in a state of flux, of increase and decrease. Within this framework it follows that attachment to any form engenders suffering as a consequence of the change to which it is subject. An equivalent insight at the origin of Western philosophy, is that of Heraclitus, famed for the alleged assertion: No man ever steps in the same river twice or Everything flows. Curiously Siddhartha Gautama and Heraclitus may well have been alive at the same time.

Paradoxically, for Buddhists, it is the incomprehension of impermanence which engenders suffering. However paradox is also evident in the assertion of impermanence being a form in its own right.

The challenge of (in)comprehension under conditions of impermanence -- as in recognizing shapes in clouds or flowing water -- has been variously recognized. With respect to a play by Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro note that in the response of Oedipus to Theseus (who cannot understand how his initiative should bring his city into conflict with its closest ally):

His belief in the permanence of the laws of his city and the alliances it constructs with other cities prevents him from seeing the same limit to his city's power that he sees in himself. Yet for the audience, in their current political situation, that limit is all too distressingly apparent. This incomprehension evokes from Oedipus one of the great speeches of the play, in which he points out to Theseus the inevitable pattern of change and transformation that underlies all aspects of human life and that gores to the heart of the limit of human power:

Dearest son of Aegus, none but the gods
escape old age and death; all else
time in its relentless flood sweeps away.
The strength of earth and of the body fades,
trust dies and distrust flourishes,
and the same spirit never endures
between friend and friend, city and city.
For some now, for others later,
joy becomes bitterness, then bitterness joy.
(671-79/607-15)

Essential, then, to the kind of understanding Oedipus has, giving him the ability to judge both himself and others, is an awareness of the fundamental impermanence of the natural and the constructed world in which humans live. In the face of that impermanence, the challenge is to find the solid ground on which to base the choices we make and the actions we perform. (The Complete Sophocles: The Theban Plays By Sophocles, 2010, p. 314)

The argument is remarkably applicable to the current challenges of global governance and the assumptions typically made by superpowers confident in their dominance. The intimate relationship between impermanence and incomprehension is evident in the manner in which both comprehension and incomprehension may increase and decrease within the pattern of change -- as with recognition that this is so.

As an appropriate metaphor of illusions of permanence, a remarkable discussion of impermanence is offered by Simon Gregg (Some Notes on Impermanence, 2008, pp. 6-17) in relation to a city (Simon Gregg and Peter Andrew Barrett, The Impermanent City: the rise and fall of Melbourne's skyline, 2008). The focus is not about architecture in the normal sense, but cultural memory as manifest in architectural residue:

In this it echoes the sentiments of noted epistemologist Michel Foucault, when he said, My object is not language but the archive, that is to say the accumulated existence of discourse. Buildings and building fragments form the symbolic framework of this discussion. Here, the spaces around fragments are not merely empty voids but charged, highly contested and politicised bodies.... The ruins and fragments of contemporary society, as noted by writer Dylan Trigg, are privileged spaces, which simultaneously invoke reactions of repulsion and sublimity [The Aesthetics of Decay: nothingness, nostalgia, and the absence of reason 2006]. Other buildings step politely over ruined fragments, or shuffle nervously around them, not quite sure how to approach them and confused as to why they linger on, when they are clearly no longer wanted or needed....

Fragments are like the empirical footprints left from former building epochs: the visible tip of a larger body now ghostly and spectral. Their protrusion into this reality is with the apparent improbability of having emerged from another, representing the impact point of two colliding universes. They are at once surreal and concrete, and curiously seem to attract a degree of embarrassment from those not in total ignorance of them.... Further, revelation of the fragment restores cultural memory to the public consciousness. For this reason it is often actively banished, obscured and belittled by political forces, for fear it may expose the flaws and weaknesses in society. The process of historical transformation revives memories which, as Chris Townsend has noted, the dominant discourses that motivate such transformation often would have rather remained invisible.

Such articulation serves to highlight the complex relationship between (in)comprehension and (im)permanence -- and the challenges to collective memory.

"Mindlessness": Whether in the light of Western or Eastern inspiration, an unusual mode of (in)comprehension is seemingly required to engage with impermanence and change -- one which does not grasp at temporary forms, as with attributing permanence to the forms of swirls in the river or clouds. Buddhism has given much attention to the nature of this modality, most notably exploring notions of "emptying the mind" of questionable forms, of "mindlessness", and of "emptiness" (Jeffrey Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness, 1983; Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence is Buddha-Nature, 1990) .

As translated by Christopher Cleary (On The Way by Zen Master Ta Hui, Daily Zen Journal, 1977):

The path of Mindlessness is easy to seek out. So-called Mindlessness is not being inert and unknowing like earth, wood, tile, or stone. It means that the mind is settled and imperturbable when in contact with situations and meeting circumstances. Such a mind does not cling to anything, but is clear in all places, without hindrance or obstruction. Without being stained, yet without dwelling in the stainlessness this mind views the body and mind like a dream or illusion, yet without remaining in the perspective of dream's and illusion's empty nothingness.

In Western terms it might be framed as cognition "with a light touch", or through the cognitive equivalent to the adage "don't push the river, guide the canoe".