THIS TOO SHALL PASS
The Certainty of Impermanence
Do you, like most people on the spiritual journey, have a deep desire to completely awaken? It’s been the focus of my attention, my north star so to speak, for the majority of my life. But what is awakening, truly?
While we can awaken from a sleep, we can also awaken from ignorance, ignorance of certain narratives given to us over the years by figures of perceived authority, we can awaken from the ignorance as to the true nature of religion and scientism, of the world around us. We can see there are many levels to awakening. At its heart though, spiritual awakening is the realisation of the true self, the eternal being, and with it, the dissolving of the illusion of separation from the Divine Source.
Awakening brings a liberation from the judgements and preferences of the conditioned mind. It’s best not to see Awakening as a ‘destination’ but rather as a journey to be savoured – a journey of remembrance – remembering who and what we really are.
Yet here lies an honest question worth considering: are we genuinely now ready to release our egoic attachments? Do we have the courage to surrender our identity that is derived from the impermanent forms of life and experiences? Or, do we simply want the uncomfortable things in our life to pass – the painful feelings, the difficult circumstances, the parts of life we find difficult to accept?
There is a subtle, but crucial difference. For while we may wish for the so-called ‘bad’ to pass, we tell a very different story about the ‘good’. We cling, often stubbornly, to our achievements, our possessions and our precious memories. We hold tightly to our loved ones, both present and lost. We reach backwards into the past and forwards into an imagined future, and call this reaching ‘me’ and ‘my life’. In order to awaken, we have to have the courage to release the belief in the solidity and reality of the dream, as well as any need to change it in order for me to be at peace in this moment.
Awakening, for me, is the releasing of the belief that “I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what others think of me.” It is the recognition that what I truly am lies beneath and beyond all the unstable passing forms, all relationships, all understandings and beliefs. What I really am is untouched and undiminished by time, and the wisdom contained in the understanding and acceptance of “this too will pass” I have found to be a powerful tool in releasing my mind’s clinging to a form identity, helping me to recognise that which never passes.
We are not the contents of our lives – we are surely the awareness in which those contents arise, stay for a short while, and inevitably dissolve.
For example, consider deriving your entire sense of self from the furniture your home contains. When the furniture is removed, what remains? What is left when you set aside your ‘contents’, all your memories, your beliefs, your accumulated stories?
What remains is spaciousness – a luminous, open awareness that no circumstance can diminish and no loss can take away. It does not cling, because awareness has no identity to do the clinging. It is all that is in this moment. It does not fear loss, because it is eternally complete and whole.
What we in the past have been really clinging to, beneath all of it, is a time-built identity, separate from Source. The Buddha saw this with insightful clarity. At the heart of his teaching lies a simple but radical insight: it is not life that causes our suffering – it is our attachment both to physical and psychological stuff as well as to how we think life ought to be.
He identified the relentless grasping of a mind that has forgotten its connection to wholeness – the desperate desiring for what we don’t have, the clinging to what we do, and the refusal to accept the inevitable passing of what we are attached to. The Buddha’s prescription was not indifference, but rather to hold all things lightly – to be fully present with what is, without needing it to be otherwise, or to last any longer than it does. I see this as enjoying the flow of life irrespective of the contents.
Here is the truth – no amount of clinging can alter the fact that everything that arises in time will, in time, pass away. The painful and the beautiful alike. The loss and the triumph. The beloved face and the cherished memory. All of it moves through my awareness, but awareness remains unchanged through it all. And the seeing of this is both beautiful and liberating.
For Jesus (Yeshua), awakening was the direct realisation of one’s unity with God – not as a theological concept, but as a living experience. His teaching “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” points not to a future reward but to a present reality available here and now. His statement “I and the Father are one” was not, in this reading, an exclusive claim about his own unique divinity, but a revelation of what every human being truly is. Awakening, for Jesus, can be seen as the return to the Father – the dissolving of the illusion of separation from the Divine Source. It was, essentially, a homecoming.
There is only awareness itself – eternally present, timeless and free.
Here is a link to a beautiful song which highlights the power of ‘This too will Pass’. Do take a listen.
This awakening tool of This Too Will Pass is one of the 7 Golden Keys Michelle and I will be working through in our two upcoming in person retreats – one in Stellenbosch later this month, and one in Hogsback next month.
We would love to have you join us. Details here
