Transformations

     I suppose we must accept the physicists’ telling us that everything is drifting toward a meaningless entropy, but that is the long long view and provides all the more reason to feel pleasure at finding within the ineluctable galactic tides eroding ordered patterns now and then contrary eddies within which little miracles of creation occur.  Floating with the current and struggling always as we do, against breakdown, dissolution, and the horrid odors of decay, we welcome the solace of something that, instead of simply rotting, mutates, or, better still, we rejoice at what seems a creation ex nihilo.  Surely William James, the pioneering investigator of mysticism and revelation, had something similar in mind when he recovered from despair with a new determination: “I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.”  The individual may be doomed to lose but surely that fact only makes resistance more heroic.  Each of us is Achilles, striving to do great deeds while under an unappealable death sentence. 

    One need be neither a philosopher nor a warrior, though, to delight in transformation.  What young child is not charmed upon learning how a wormlike caterpillar can shut itself up in a chrysalis and, after a bit of thought, emerge a fairylike butterfly?  Perhaps others, like me, had a chemistry set in elementary school years with a booklet of experiments designed less to teach scientific principles than to miraculously turn a clear liquid bright blue when a white powder was stirred in and then red with another additive.  I recall as well watching with the same quantum of amazement (though over a longer time span) an intensely green shoot venture out from the inside of a bean, then grow and curl and bask in  the sun and eventually make a hundred more beans. 

      Once these phenomena become routine, we manufacture new marvels woven wholly of imagination.  Stage magicians make theater of such wonder for children and adults alike as they produce silk handkerchiefs out of thin air or saw a person in two only to restore her a moment later with a flourish.  Similar spectacles accompany those we consider more or less holy whose miracles are to believers their surest bona fides.  (Their acts most safely remain well in the past to avoid the scrutiny that has marred the reputation of recent practitioners such as the late Sai Baba who liked to materialize wristwatches, coins, and ash for his devotees in a formula I suspect was dependent on their level of donations who in retrospect seems more an adept in prestidigitation than miracles.)

     Fictional metamorphoses like Apuleius’ Golden Ass or the Monkey King’s Journey to the West, at once amusing and profound, point toward spiritual enlightenment, while Ovid’s brilliantly retold tales of mythic changes is a virtual encyclopedia of permutations, but equally astonishing phenomena have shaped the world and continue to take place daily. 

     We smile when we read that Aristotle thought that oysters emerged from slime in a process of spontaneous generation, but, of course, life did at first appear from nonliving components.  The family tree of all plants and animals began about four billion years ago, though there remains a good deal of controversy about the details.  Surely the story the scientists tell is as weird, poetic, and profound as the versions in Genesis and Hesiod’s Theogony. 

     A miracle occurs daily as well when life fuels its survival with food, which is always organic.  Life lives exclusively on life, even for vegans.  What we eat is broken down until in the series of reactions called the Krebs cycle sugar is metabolized and becomes available as energy.  Inert matter is thereby brought to life and transformed into action, and the process is taking place right now.

     The most momentous transformation can only be the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, the starting point of everything.  As mysterious and mythic as creation by fiat, the physicists say the universe sprang into being where once was nothing, not even, it seems, time.  If this event seems remote and speculative, it is equaled countless times  in the present era by the quantum fluctuations that, even in a vacuum, generate virtual particles in pairs which, after arising out of nothing, almost instantly annihilate each other.  Whatever the physicists say, I would like to think that positive and negative charges in the cosmos,  matter and anti-matter as well, are precisely equal and thus combined add up to precisely nothing?  The universe is a void, sufficiently bored with its emptiness to play at pendulum swings between existence and non-existence.  It sounds like a science that Nargarjuna would have understood two millennia ago. 

     Though the fact is counter-intuitive, solidity is the illusion, flux the rule.  Matter never ceases transforming from one form to another.  People may feel uneasy about their bodies’ physical dissolution, but our present form is merely a moment in the dance of the elements, which briefly resulted in the formation of this particular sensitive burden of human flesh with the ability to contemplate itself.  Presto change o!  Our cells are constantly sloughing off and being replaced by fresh recruits. 

     In social life as well as biological, we are repeatedly rechristened in new roles.  During each stressful change we protect ourselves with ritual: birth, death, puberty, marriage, even the acquisition of academic degrees, every change requires the blessing of a ceremony.  One may try to cling to a handful of the river of time, but the water passes through our fingers and heads quietly downstream without recognizing our silly anxiety and we are carried too and know that in the end we all will arrive at the river’s mouth where we will rejoin the wine-dark seas.  No need to hustle; no need to hesitate. 

    We admire without ever attaining the enlightened views of Heraclitus who tells us that the cosmos “rests by changing” and that “all things are a-flowin” (though that latter phrase is not attributed to him until a thousand years after his death).  Had they not lived on opposite sides of the globe, the old Ephesian might have embraced Laozi whose sages contemplated the cosmos with neither illusion nor distress.

   

By attaining the height of abstraction we gain fullness of rest. 

All the ten thousand things arise, and I see them return.

Now they bloom in bloom but each one homeward returneth to its root.

Returning to the root means rest.

It signifies the return according to destiny.

Return according to destiny means the eternal.

Knowing the eternal means enlightenment.

 

 

 

 

The line from William James is part of his journal entry for April 30, 1870.  See The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott.

 

Heraclitus’ most famous aphorism first appeared in Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle though Plato had put a very similar phrase in  his mouth in  the Cratylus.  The lines from Laozi are from poem 16 in the 1913 translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul, Carus.