On Impermanence and Endedness
Why seeking permanence and trying to control your life keeps your consciousness small
The way you experience your life and your personal reality is shaped by many interwoven qualities, but two in particular determine your experience of time itself.
Many people have a poor relationship with time. It’s either too slow, too fast, too much past, or too much future. When things are unfolding correctly these people scheme because it’s not happening quickly enough. When something is happening too quickly they do everything they can to sabotage what’s unfolding and slow it down.
What underlies this is the inability to handle the discomfort created by things being the way they are. If it’s too slow, you’re uncomfortable. If it’s too fast, you’re uncomfortable.
And this discomfort is what propels you to seek endedness and permanence. These are one of the two qualities I mentioned earlier. They form a spectrum of avoidance in which you avoid the discomforts of life by attempting to shape your life into one that only expresses non-challenge or sustained good. So you wish for that one relationship that checks all of your boxes so you can finally start living your life. You wish for that one job that gives you financial stability so then you can start living your life. You wish for “this one problem” to be solved so that you can finally move forward the way you want. And all of these games have one thing in common: they are an avoidance of discomfort while seeking permanence and endedness.
Relationships are often judged as successful only in the light of their permanence, rarely examined for the growth and lessons, fun experiences, and accumulation of significances that happened during the relationship. In this light a short magical relationship is a failure, but a long miserable one is a success you can’t let go of. People then chase this idea of permanence in their relationship because it gives the apparency of resolving a type of insecurity one thinks is in their way. They get stuck in a sunk cost bias even after something is dead, or they hold on forever because of the idea the relationship represented.
Permanence and endedness are attempts (and failures) to control something that is inherently impermanent. When you try to make something last, stretching out a good sensation as long as possible, that sensation ceases to feel good.
Imagine an orgasm. This is a beautifully pleasurable sensation that lasts mere moments. Yet if you were to draw that experience out for hours, days, years, you’d quickly see how easily that pleasure turns into pain and misery. A shower is nice for 20 minutes, but when that pleasurable thing extends beyond an hour you realize that a good thing lasting forever without change isn’t a positive experience, but instead a negative one.
We often try to control people in relationships and control situations in our life to make them permanent. We do this to avoid discomfort, but also because we still outsource our sense of safety and stability to that permanence. It’s like trying to continually refortify a sand castle that is meant to be washed away by the ocean over time. You have mistakenly thought it was wrong for that sand castle to be washed away, that it would make your life better to make sure that sand castle could withstand the “currents” of time. And you thought that in making sure that sand castle was strong that it would eliminate the instability of the unknown you so deeply dread.
The antidote to the feeling of insecurity and instability in your life isn’t making everything fixed and permanent such that you never need to worry about it. It’s about learning to lean into the instability itself so that you can stabilize internally.
Imagine standing on a bosu ball, which is one of those blue stability devices you often see at the gym for training balance. The first time you ever stand on one you feel it wobble all over the place, your legs overreacting to the sway leaving you one step behind unable to find balance. But as you practice, it’s not that the ball itself becomes stabilized, but instead you become stable on an unstable surface. You stop overreacting to life’s inputs. The early experiences of the bosu ball are how you interact with the unknown. You might put towels under it and hold onto a railing in an attempt to make the bosu ball permanently stable and easy for you to access, but this only weakens you to future instabilities due to inexperience and lack of exposure.
This same thing is done in your life and in your relationships. You get stuck trying to make everything stable externally, everything the same forever, that you never allow yourself to become familiar with the inherent instability of life.
This is where the idea of impermanence, the second quality, comes into play. Life is change. It is both impermanent and unpredictable. At any given time you can choose to seek permanence out of life as a compensation for a lack of skill, but at all times you are merely creating a fake overlay upon the more fundamental characteristics of reality.
Impermanence is the ACTUALITY, permanence is an apparency. An actuality is what is actually real among everyone. An apparency is your personal reality, what you agree to, and what appears to be real to you. You overlay apparencies upon the back of Actuality and these apparencies either augment your experience of life or act as counter creations against life’s beautiful unfolding.
People get stuck in a state of failing to control life. Wanting to determine all outcomes, wanting to set goals, wanting to be certain about various outcomes. But this desire for permanence and predictability is cowardice in disguise. It isn’t true power, which reveals itself in how you respond to life, it’s fake power built on attempts (failures) to control yourself, your reactions, and your surroundings. An attempt to control is “Bad control” and is not control at all. And you attempt to control your reality through your emotional reactions, through procrastination, through demanding someone be the same tomorrow that they are today. These are cowardly because at all times you can choose how you respond through the stories you tell and the apparencies/judgements you accept as facts about reality.
Life is inherently optimistic. But this optimistic frequency is modulated by your counter creations against it. Your insecurities, judgements, agreements, beliefs, all give the apparency that life is only sometimes optimistic and therefore must be battled and made permanent in order to make it optimistic again. There’s a humorous irony to it. Because you either live in impermanence and align with life’s optimism, or you seek permanence to try and make it optimistic.
A life of permanence dictates that some emotions are ok and others are not. That the “bad” emotions must stop rather than being listened to. A life of permanence sees pain as a problem rather than the healing phase itself. All discomforts and pains are seen as the enemy of life, rather than the culmination of energy and information that bring change and healing.
Let’s say you get headaches. Most people see their headache as a sign of a problem. Their desire is to never, and permanently, have a headache because that indicates a failure of health. So they seek this endedness, looking for every remedy to safely and permanently cure their problem. Their very perception of the headache is that it’s an enemy that must be permanently stopped. Someone who understands the principles of impermanence see a deeper energetic dance occurring. They recognize that earlier that day they had a particular emotional experience that was temporary. The energy of the emotion anchors into the organ it’s associated with, and the corresponding region in the brain that controls that organ’s physical function bursts with energy (lights up/explodes). If we stop at the scientific level we merely see a coincidence of light, the brain lights up, the organ’s enzymatic activity changes, it’s purely a physiological occurrence. But the emotion is energy, the beliefs about that emotion shape how it enters the organ and is felt by the nervous system. The belief-story modulates the signal that the nervous system receives. And as emotions anchor into the organs they cause a type of activity-damage. The same way working out a muscle damages it, yet encourages change and growth. It is not damage in the sense of wrongness, but instead damage in terms of change. It is a new creation. That new creation cuts open new pathways in the brain creating physical lesions. So now we have an emotion encouraging change, processed by the intellect, and released. Once the change has occurred, the muscle or personhood have been signaled to grow, the healing phase begins. During the healing phase new energies and information flood the area. The physical manifestation of these energies is inflammation and fluid. The inflammation occurs because energy is hot. The swelling happens as new information in the form of structured water and nutrients is held. You get a headache not because something is wrong, but because something is healing. The micro lesions from the emotional experience or stressor is healing, receiving inflammation (energy) and edema (fluid/information) which push against the nerves and signal pain.
A person who lives a life of impermanence isn’t problem hunting. They aren’t seeing every input as a failure to create that which they want, but instead see it as the intelligent and proper unfolding of life. Each pain, each swing of emotion, each challenge faced in life isn’t a failure of creation, but the unpredictable creativity of consciousness fulfilling your desires. You cannot have your desires met without changing. When you don’t have the circumstance you want it is because you have the circumstance you ARE. By “ARE” I mean to imply your identity, its beliefs and agreements, its stories, and the templates you utilize to create reality. You are a mismatch for anything other than what you currently have, otherwise you would already have it.
This means change isn’t just a thing you need periodically, it’s a fundamental expression of consciousness itself. It is constantly exploring new aspects of identity, if you let it. And those new aspects of identity create an unfolding that leads you to becoming the thing you want to be. One who has the experiences you want. But the more you lean into permanence you create innumerable counter creations against this natural and intelligent unfolding. You see all contrasts as wrong and seek to solve them, rather than just seeing them as part of the unfolding. These challenges and contrasts carry the solution on their backs, and yet you try to fight them and return them to a baseline you are familiar with. This is what keeps you looping in your old stories, your old programs. Your desire for familiarity, thinking you must know before you change, not recognizing that change is only change when it is unknown and unfamiliar.
When you lean into impermanence, everything becomes easier to release. Nothing needs to be kept forever for it to be valid.
In relationship when you get jealous, recognize this jealousy first as a quality of insecurity. You seek to remedy this insecurity by expressing jealousy, which you use as a tool to attempt to control the situation. On one hand you think “if they’re talking to that other person they may choose that other person over me.” Not wanting someone else to be chosen over you, you use jealousy to make permanent an instability you feel. The instability is “will they stay or will they go?” You try to make “they will stay” permanent to compensate for the discomfort that arises in your belief in not enoughness. A belief that they choose something “better” rather than life always choosing for them as a result of their templates. You seek to make “good enoughness” permanent, which makes it impossible to be normal and human.
If you recognize impermanence you see these relationship dynamics are manifestations of apparency. It APPEARS that someone will choose someone else, you keep telling that story, and it keeps appearing to be true. It must be true then, right? Or is it just something that appears to be the case and was never questioned? Never created in a different way?
Impermanence in relationship is a deep understanding of the interactions of your templates. That your programs about what love is create themselves on an ongoing basis unknowingly. It appears real because it is being created unknowingly. What is created unknowingly can be created knowingly, and once you see that it is knowingly created you see how malleable it really is. This underlying malleability hints at life’s inherent impermanence. As beliefs change, identities change, the conversations you have change, the quality of interaction changes. And suddenly you’re dating a different person. You think that seeing that different version is what pushes you apart, but at a deeper level these templates either match or mismatch, driving you together or apart, increasing and decreasing your affinity for each other. You think it’s your choosing, your scheming and your actions, but these things are orchestrated on broader levels of intelligence that are the driving force behind how you think to act and what words arise for you to speak.
As you lean into impermanence you let go of needing to control these circumstances. Change is no longer dangerous, but constantly organizing itself to our benefit. That the direction we move in organizes itself optimistically, like a whirling floor that plants itself beneath each step. You don’t need to keep a relationship that isn’t it, you trust that the unfolding is always bringing you towards what you want. To have what you want you must become “one who has” and that person may have different energies than you. It’s not a matter of finding what those energies are, but instead allowing the unpredictable creativity of your life happen such that you are organized that way. Your challenges aren’t blocking you, they’re shaping you. It’s not the right direction that matters, it’s the shape of the one who walks in any direction. And your life doesn’t just give you a direction, it aims you toward becoming the shape you’re asking to be. That shape match happens to also carry the qualities of life you are attending to (paying attention to).
There are then two layers here. There is the present moment “showing” of your current energy shape. This is the manifestation of your templates, your identity, your beliefs, and your creations. This gets reflected back to you in the form of the interactions and apparencies you experience every day. Your energy organizes to form significances, those significances form events. That event is shaped by the psychic weather that created it, so when part of your energy shape is a template of self disapproval, cowardice, insecurity, you create significances in your life that prove it right. Your reality then provides the conversations, events, stories, and circumstances to fulfill your energy shape. This is “the happening” of life and why internal change can create such immediate changes in your outer world. It is always emanating. The second layer is the experience of time. If your present moment energy shape is showing you what you are creating, time is positioning what you are creating as a frame of reference. The idea is that you want to not just blindly create, but instead use your creation to understand how it relates to what you actually want to create. Your present moment emanates 1000 frequencies of compassion, this culminates into 1000 different versions of compassion delivered to you on the conveyor belt of time. One may show up as you trying to be compassionate for someone else and it being poorly received. One might be you experiencing resentment because it appeared that someone lacked compassion towards you. One might be letting someone figure something out for themselves. Your one energy shape creates all of these angles for you to look at and understand “compassion.” Time lets you look at all of these versions of compassion and from that adjust your energy shape toward the frequency of compassion you want.
You might learn about unavailability because your energy shape is one that explores degrees of availability and unavailability. You first face the mirror of flakiness, not because you are flaky, but because it reflects your own unavailability energy in a particular way. It is a perfect mirror without being an exact mirror. You might be unavailable because of a seemingly unrelated desire that creates against availability. You might be too available and explore the consequences of that. And the resulting energy shape changes as you explore these angles.
This change of energy shape, experienced over time, is how your life not only organizes itself to show you who you are, but adjusts your course toward fulfillment. You say “I want to be compassionate” or “I want a relationship with an available person” and your energy shape, your templates, create significances that match your energy. This creates in participation with all consciousness involved utilizing a dynamic web of activity you can’t even begin to imagine. The events that arise both reveal to you your current energy shape and catalyze new information to enter your energy shape. Codes are continually exchanged such that nothing is ever the same, nothing is ever stagnant.
So when you seek permanence you are saying “this one energy shape is the only right one, I’m safe here, I want everything else to change without me changing.” And that’s why you end up getting stuck, because the outer world changes with you, not for you. What it is shows you what changes you need to make, and those subtle changes are always your responsibility and they’re always semi-conscious. If the change seems big and dramatic like whether to leave the job, whether to change a relationship, you’re probably being a coward mistaking a big change for being the real change. Most often the change you need to make happens internally, a belief about yourself, a change in behavior, but rarely does it involve making broad external changes. The broad external changes, like whether to leave the job, whether to change a relationship, happen automatically through the underlying organization process.
As you gain the ability to zoom out in your life, you start to see this creative and optimistic interplay that goes on at all times. All of your resentments and conflicts and personal challenges are the healing phase, showing you tensions you must release. In this way change can flow without restriction. You harmonize with life, not as a monotone signal, but with a deep experiential knowledge that life is impermanent and constantly changing. Any tension is a creation against the flow of this underlying change, it’s a creation against abundance and optimism and trust and safety.
At all times you are the creator of your personal reality. When you lean into impermanence, trusting the intelligent system as it unfolds, you need not grip and hold onto controlling any outcomes. Your attempts to control break the experience of feeling in control-- which is one of release. Any time you push against what is happening, it gains control of you and dictates you back into familiar reactions. You attempt to make permanent and prevent change every time you look for what is wrong about it.
As you stand on that bosu ball, it’s not that the ball stops moving, you simply become better at releasing against all of the micro tensions. At the lowest level of skill you have big tensions, big wobbles, big reactions, and big discomforts. As you get more skilled it’s not that you have no tension, but that you get faster and faster at releasing it at subtler and subtler levels. At higher levels of skill it’s not that you don’t have no wobbles or swings, but that you trust in their organizing principle and inherent optimism. A big swing or drama or problem isn’t a wrongdoing, but a very right doing. A clearing of old energies and a propulsion into “never again.” Because the louder something bad is, the more likely you are to change away from it. And sometimes you go so long without listening to the signal that it needs to get very loud to break your stagnation. This is why it’s always more skilled to become a creature of release. To have desire, but trust that the path getting you there is visionary and intelligent. The arguments, conflicts and personal challenges are not something to avoid, but instead something to be curious about.