everything changes

Everything changes

I'm back at the waterfall. This is the place that inspired a separate series of talks, called the waterfall. It's really a steep mountain valley with a whole series of cascades. And the water is cascading over boulders, boulders of all shapes and sizes. The largest ones are as big as a house. But there are many, many boulders, about the size of a car, say. They must weigh several tons each. And because of this solidity, one would normally, perhaps rather unconsciously, think of them as being unchanging. But of course, the water is very slowly wearing away at them. But they're made of some hard rock, and that molding of the rocks by the water must take hundreds of years, thousands of years – so slow by a human life scale that its imperceptible. 

But the other thing that happens here is that, in the monsoon season, the level of water rushing down the valley increases dramatically. I've never been here at that time of year, but I'm told that the valley fills up considerably and that increased power of the water moves these boulders around. I used to come pretty much every year to this area for a few weeks. And seeing the boulders after only one seasons monsoon I could spot which ones had moved. They're like old friends to me. I love clambering about on them. And as soon as that clambering has changed a little, it's very evident.

But this time due to the covid pandemic and other travels and work, it's been five years since I was last here. That's five monsoon seasons worth of upheaval. And the boulders have been massively reconfigured, redistributed. So much so that in places I struggle to recognise where a boulder has come from. And this has made me realise not only that everything changes, but also how easily the mind unconsciously assumes that things won't change. And I think recognising this fact is a big step on the spiritual path.

Central to Gautam Buddha's teaching is that the cause of suffering is craving. I think if you look carefully, you'll see that a big part of that craving is actually this unconscious desire for things to be the same as they were before, especially if those things have given us pleasure, or a sense of security or comfort. Of course, we want to repeat such feelings. And we assume that if things have not changed, then those feelings will be easily repeatable. I'm not entirely sure that even that is true, but that's a subject for a different talk, perhaps. Here today, I'm really focused on this fact that whether we like it or not, everything is changing – even massive boulders that seem more or less immovable. Yhey are, in truth, movable, changeable, and they too will change. Everything changes.