Excerpt from "In Unexpected Places: death and dying – building up a picture"
by Ray Brown
Chapter 4
Things that Pass Away
Permanence and impermanence
The flat lands of south eastern Mali, near the borders with Ivory
Coast and Burkina Faso, is a region of peasant farmers.
Historically it has been a major cotton-producing area and while
cotton is still grown there it is more and more difficult to compete
in the world market. There have also been some recent gold finds
but it is uncertain how much of the income earned from this
mining finds its way back to the indigenous communities. In
colonial days and in the years that immediately followed, the
main cash crops were cotton and rubber which as well as
enriching the trading houses of France allowed some profits to
filter down to people in the region, making it one of the economically
richest in the country. Apart from cotton and mining
nowadays you will find mostly groundnuts, fruit such as
mangoes, river fishing, cattle rearing and mainly subsistence
farming. The Senoufo who live there, and in northern Ivory Coast
and western Burkina Faso and who number around a million and
a half, have the reputation of being hardy and courageous,
strong-willed in the face of adversity. They were the last in Mali
to hold out against the advance of French colonialism in the
nineteenth century. The Senoufo have become well known for the
quality of their art especially the carving of their wooden masks.
These are always associated with the beliefs of the group which
are passed on through the generations by a secret initiatic society
called the poro. These beliefs are extremely sophisticated and
merit study. The Senoufo believe that we possess an immaterial
body, invisible usually to the naked eye, called the nyil which can
travel outside you when you sleep. When you die you lose the
nyil just as you do the physical body. But there is a part of you
that cannot die, which they call the pil. The pil is part of klé or
God. After death the pil goes to the village of the ancestors but
we have to help it to get there by protecting it from the nyil now
separated but still a threat.
Now the key points here are that there are three bodies, the
physical body, the nyil and the pil. The pil is part of God, and that
is important; they don’t say it is the personality of the departed
person or that it is a soul separate from God but that it is PART
of God. (Note that in the Bhagavad-Gita – that very old, Hindu
poem – we have Krishna saying: ‘A spark of my eternal spirit
becomes in this world a living soul.’) Also the pil alone, not the
nyil, goes to the village of the ancestors, the permanence of
which is clearly implied. And the third point is that the nyil is
somehow a threat after death. (The Bhagavad-Gita again: ‘For
thy soul can be thy friend and thy soul can be thine enemy.’) We
need to be protected from the nyil after death: it is something
that can stop us from reaching the ‘village of the ancestors’.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thötröl to give it its
Tibetan name, is a guide to dying for us to be able to help a
departed person in getting through the bardo, the phase after
death when the departed finds him/herself in an unfamiliar,
strange and somewhat frightening world (a more detailed
account of this is to be found in chapter 2). The dying are
constantly told in the Bardo Thötröl to avoid the soft lights of the
jealous gods – the nyils? And the overall aim is to allow them to
attain ‘liberation’ – like the village of the ancestors of the
Senoufo? We find the same idea reflected in the Hindu masterpiece
recounting the meeting of the Prince Arjuna with God,
Krishna: ‘The unwise think that I am that form of my lower
nature which is seen by mortal eyes; they know not my higher
nature, imperishable and supreme.’
Many belief systems or religions make a three-fold division of
the human being (indeed of everything):
* Body
* Psyche, comprising feelings and intellect
* Spirit
And a distinction is made between the body and psyche which
are said to belong to what is often termed the personality, which
is transitory and impermanent and dies at death, whereas the
spirit, in contrast, belongs to what we may call the individuality: it
is what is permanent. In the beliefs of the Senoufo, the spirit is the
pil, and it is part of God, part of the permanent. And the psyche,
combining feelings and intellect, is the nyil. The psyche is not
permanent and the nyil eventually disappears. But curiously it
remains a danger for some time after death. Do we need to be
told that our feelings and even our intellect present dangers? Our
feelings and our intellect are not material so it is not unreasonable
to suggest that they dissolve into nothingness more
slowly that the material, physical body. The big issue is to know
and to distinguish what is permanent and imperishable from
what is doomed to pass away.
We all like to feel at peace with ourselves and with the world
around us. While certainly there are times when we enjoy noise
and being in a crowd we all without exception feel the need to be
alone with ourselves and with nature, and feel that need to be
something important. Whether we feel ourselves to be ‘religious’
or not, we are all sensitive to the feelings of peace, tranquillity
and well-being that we experience on a mountain-top, by the sea
listening to the sound of the waves, by a slow-flowing river, held
in the spell of its unceasing movement and stillness, or contemplating
the infinity and eternity of the night sky from a lonely
country field.
At such times we experience a sort of escape into the present
moment. Past and future cease to command our thoughts: so
much of our time is spent obsessively reviewing the past and
calculating the future! To be able to spend just some time contem-
plating something in the present without thinking of future
results is a relief, a kind of bliss. The same can happen when we
listen to music. We have the impression that we are finding
another Ourself, not the one that is assailed by problems and
demands, that is dissatisfied with what it does, is aggressive
with colleagues, jealous, obsessed with success of different
kinds, short-tempered, weakened by fears of many kinds.
We have to admit, however, that we generally do not dig very
deeply into all these feelings. We suffer from a sort of ‘laziness of
the soul’. Something holds us back from looking more closely at
our inner thoughts and feelings. The term was used by Steiner
and this ‘laziness of the soul’ is part of our human condition. We
have these feelings that seem transcendental from time to time
but in the end we remain indifferent to their potential to affect us
in any way that may change the way we see life. The truth is that,
in our heart of hearts, we do not intend to spend a lot of time
considering that kind of thing.
‘When one sees eternity in things that pass away and infinity
in finite things then one has pure knowledge.’ We find those
words in the Bhagavad-Gita, that dialogue already mentioned
between the God Krishna and the prince Arjuna in which
Krishna tries to get Arjuna to see what is true and real in our
lives. But how can you find eternity in things that are impermanent
and infinity in things that are finite? When I was a
student, as I was leaving my room one afternoon in winter, to go
to a lecture, a leafy branch on a stone wall in a lane I was walking
along shook in the wind as I passed. It drew my attention; how
or why I don’t know but I was suddenly transfixed, for how long
I don’t know, experiencing infinity and eternity in those shaking
leaves. An excursion into the present moment through a narrow
opening that led to a different dimension of awareness. In a few
leaves in the wind I saw all the continual movement, the constant
becoming and unbecoming of everything that exists in the world
we live in, and its eternal reality. Looking back on that
experience what I remark now is that it began IN the world, in
the world of impermanence, not in introspection or meditation or
prayer. We have here a case of impermanence and eternity in one
and the same object of perception. This paradox is of vital importance.
But it is something that is impossible to express in words.
There is something here of the paradoxes you find in Zen puzzles
or koans. Zen Buddhism has its roots in this impossibility. Zen
teachings and techniques abound in paradoxes and apparent
nonsense. As Fritjof Capra pointed out regarding Zen: ‘More than
any other school of Eastern mysticism, Zen is convinced that
words can never express the ultimate truth.’ The underlying
reality can only be reached through experience.
It is easy to describe what is impermanent in our lives, and it
is possible to apprehend that in the impermanent, the movable,
there is the buried, invisible presence of the permanent. It is quite
another thing to describe the permanent. Perhaps it is best
described by what it is NOT. We can try… It is not the physical
body, of that we can be sure, the physical body like everything
physical around us is doomed to disintegrate and disappear.
Averroes, in 12th century Moslem Spain, spent much time
meditating on whether we are to be resurrected in the physical
body. With a feeling of some relief for he saw that could be a bore,
he came to the conclusion that this was impossible and that resurrection
must be in some other form. What about our feelings? Are
they permanent? Hardly, judging by the way our moods and our
affections and even our loyalties can swing. I think it was Jung
who said: You are not your emotions. And indeed this point is used
by councillors in helping people handle psychological trauma,
such as sudden death by accident of a loved one. What about our
thoughts? We tend to think our thoughts are a real part of us but
are they? What is the reality? Is it not that when we are by
ourselves we are constantly chattering to ourselves internally
about this and that and all of those thoughts simply disappear
and die, and from one hour to the other we would be incapable
of recalling them? But we have more serious thoughts, of course.
We have ideas and theories. But then scientists and researchers
have observed that certain theoretical discoveries take place at
the same historical time and in different places by people who
have no contact with each other. The work on describing quanta
done independently by Heisenberg and Schrödinger is
sometimes quoted as an example, as is the simultaneous rediscovery
of calculus in England and Germany and elsewhere. A
less known example is that of the Russian engineer, Popov, who
successfully carried out an experiment in wireless telegraphy in
the Russia of Tsar Nicholas in 1894, almost a year before
Marconi. As if ideas were around and about us and, at a certain
time, became ripe for capture. So what we take for OUR ideas
may not be ours at all.
There is a Buddhist meditation which goes like this:
The physical body: this is not mine, this am I not, this is not
my soul.
My feelings: These are not mine, these am I not, these are not
my soul.
My thoughts: These are not mine, these am I not, these are not
my soul.
My mental states: These are not mine, these am I not, these are
not my soul.
My ego: This is not mine, this am I not, this is not my soul.
Fifteen or twenty minutes’ inward repetition of this formula
leads us on a path away from the changeable and the impermanent.
For it focuses our mind on the fact that the body will
eventually die and decompose, that our feelings come and go,
our thoughts likewise (and with great rapidity), and our mental
states such as animosity, well-being, depression, jealousy are also
subject to change. That even our ego, our personality, cannot be
permanent in any sense.
The Cabbala, the esoteric philosophy behind Judaism, has a
neat way of representing impermanence and permanence. And it
represents the difference not by showing them as black and
white, binary opposites, but more of a sliding scale. If you look at
the diagram (see chapter 3, page 31) of the ten sephirot (plural of
sephira) you will see that they stretch from the lower one,
Malkhuth, which is our physical world, through Yesod, which is
our emotions, Hod which is our thinking processes and further
and further up through Heshed which is our ideas of justice and
universal love, to the creative principle, God to Christians,
Brahman to Hindus, Yahweh to Jews, and Allah to Muslims. So,
just to take the sephirot mentioned, what is in Malkhuth, the
physical world is obviously impermanent, what is in the
emotional world, Yesod, is also impermanent but less material.
Our thoughts in the world of Hod are more long-lasting but also
impermanent in time, our ideas of justice, universal love in the
sephira Heshed are more permanent still, but it is only when you
get to Kether, the creator, the Emanator, that we reach any idea of
a kind of genuine permanence, of eternity. But, and this is interesting,
it doesn’t stop there. Beyond the highest sephira, Kether,
there are other levels which are:
Ain Soph Aur: Light without End
Ain Soph: Without End
Ain: Without
So there’s the answer. Real permanence is nothingness! Nothing
we can see, hear, touch, smell or taste. And indeed that’s all it can
be. If it were something it wouldn’t be permanence!
Obviously we are up against the question of what is meant by
‘something’. To return to paradoxes there is a sense in which
something can be nothing and nothing something. If you
meditate on the Buddhist prayer on page 43 and slowly divest
yourself, so to speak, of your physical body, its pleasures,
illnesses and frailties, of your feelings, of hates and loves, of
obsessions, of enthusiasms, of shame, of fears and hopes, of
wishes and urges, of your complexes, your ego and your self-importance,
your disappointments and resentments, passions
and affections, grudges, jealousies, thoughts, ideas, theories,
ideologies and causes, your education and erudition, you are still
left with something. Something very difficult to define but which
is the something that underlies all existence. I think that is a first
step to understanding permanence.
Ray Brown was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, ,and educated there and at the University of Oxford and University of Reading, He spent many years as an English language teacher and consultant and during that time lived in Europe, Ghana and Mali, the Central African Republic, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Egypt, Colombia, the former Soviet Union and China. This has given him a wide knowledge of different cultures and different value and belief systems which contributes to the authority he is able to bring to his writing. He now lives in France and devotes his time to reading, writing and to country walks.
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REFERENCES
1. ‘Kénédougou’ by Roland Colin, Paris, Présences Africaines; 2004..
2. Bhagavad-Gita 15.7, 6.5, 7.24, 18.20 trans. Juan Mascaro, Penguin
Classics, 1961.
42 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, p. 122, Shambhala, 2000.
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