It’s tempting to live in a world of black-and-white, yes/no, on/off. I’ve been a big user of this type of worldview over the course of my life, with varying results. It seems, for me, to be most common at the early stages of things. When I’m learning something new, or just starting a project. At that point, the only thing I can rely on is my past experience, and it is much easier to deal with the new thing in a binary, all-or-nothing fashion. It automatically excludes certain possibilities, and makes action easier.
Later, when doing that no-longer-new thing, the relationship has become more complex. Intricacies have been revealed that won’t allow for that dialectical approach.
This is true in any relationship I’ve had, hence “relationships” in the title. I mean personal relationships, relationships to my culture, myself, ideas, or activities.
I recently started reading the Yuan Dao again, which really highlights a concept central to “Eastern” philosophies – change. While the Tao Te Ching does the same, to me, it doesn’t expose an aspect of change necessary for change to happen a well as maybe the Yuan Dao (a commentary on and exposition of the concepts in the Tao) does – the constant underlying change.
There are two ways I look at this – First, there has to be a “ground” or framework from which something can change. There has to be a “normal” for you to notice “abnormal.” The second point, though, is that most of the distinction that we make between something in its original state, versus the “new” thing we end up dealing with is based on ideas of constancy we get from the way we use thought and/or language.
The trick, it seems to me, is that even the “constant” undergoes change. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, said “everything changes, and nothing remains still,” and “you cannot step into the same river twice” (because the river changes before you’ve stepped into it again).
Many Western approaches to his statements take the black/white approach – “oh, he only believed in change,” or “oh, there was nothing constant.” But if you read the rest of the fragments of his work, there is the concept of Logos, which seems to be the fount or wellspring of all things, and the “logic” of the process of change. I’ll mention this again in a second, as its something I think we need to start considering and teaching in our lives/practices/schools.
In the river example, by calling/naming it a river, we’ve created a static “thing” in our minds that we can refer back to. I think this is the “tool-making” process of language. By creating “things” out of processes, we create static entities that we can manipulate, that we can use or try to change the way we want to.
The reality is much different, however, because these “things” never truly transform into static entities. They continue to change every second, which may (or may not) cause us problems down the road, when we want that “thing” that we’ve defined in our mind to behave a certain way (the way it was defined when we “thinged” it), and it does not comply. The river changes course, constantly shifts, seeks its own path, and overflows its banks or bursts the dykes or dams we make to contain it. At the very least, the river’s flow wears down the things we put in its path, and we have to constantly do maintenance to our methods of control.
I think this happens sometimes for people as they age. They may have defined themselves based on the look of their face at the age of 28, or 18, or how fit they were then, or their athletic accomplishments (or failures). As they grow older, those things change, they fade, they become impossible or possible only in different ways.
By remaining attached to the earlier concept, the person causes themselves emotional pain and eventually they begin to suffer.
In our culture, now, when that happens, the response is often to continue to exert control. Get botox injections, take hormone replacement therapy, plastic surgery, etc.
In that approach, the lesson is lost. The meditation on change never occurs, except in a black and white mode, where change is the enemy to be destroyed.
Unfortunately, as with a couple of other things I’ve been talking about with friends recently (like the ability to create interest in yourself for certain things) we aren’t taught much about change in our schooling, or our culture generally speaking. Maybe it’s because it makes it more difficult to govern, our societies or our lives. Maybe the subject-matter is too deep (Heraclitus was called “the obscure”). But I wonder what would happen if we did begin to meditate on change more frequently, and the constant underlying change.
Not only that, but what would happen if we began to understand that our “constant”s could be malleable. That we could shift our understanding of some “thing” that we thought we understood…that we weren’t tied to the opinion or approach we first formed when we started something…
…that we could change.
