What surely appears upon realizing the nature of impermanence most personally, is to wrestle with regret and a desire to clean up unfinished business. We want to sweep into the deep corners of our personal drama and come to peace with it all. We want to take advantage of our last opportunity to clean house before going on a long vacation. We might examine our relationships and determine if there’s truly a way to resolve lingering conflict, breaches of trust, to break through old resentments, hurts, ethical lapses or even betrayals, to recover and know our original face at the most important moment of our lives.
Our self-perception as this body and this identity is, mostly unconsciously, constantly reinforced. With time and diligence, we may even lift ourselves out that ongoing process. But eventually, in the final non-negotiable moments of feeling the dissolution of everything we thought we were, the linkage between mind and body will be severed. To explore the meaning of death, we come face to face with misconceptions, ignorance, different views about spirit, life, love, and the final mystery. To come face to face with impermanence is to realize the arising and disappearing going on at every scale of existence in every nano-moment. Impermanence brings the paradox of faith, which seems to have a source, but for which we have only scant evidence, into the moment. It is both the interdependent nature of Being and the empty nature of everything we will encounter.
Efforts to resolve unfinished business require us to recognize that seemingly intractable conflicts, including ones in which we believe we are the injured party, arise from a defended identity. We are entrenched in the illusion of a separate personality, seeking to preserve what Stephen Levine calls our flawed models of life. We are climbing about on some island of belief and can’t figure out how to leave. All of it is attachment in some form or other. All of it is rooted in ego, in the survival mechanisms of a defended heart. They are not sourced in a transpersonal view or in the Ground of Being.
Healing such conflicts mostly occurs at the relative level of conventional psychology, which depends on the existence of Others and offers prescriptions to heal our relations with Others. But that is not the only healing we seek, not the only one that will serve us as we approach the end of life. Even if we were all capable in any given moment of sourcing the Ground of Being, which means recognizing a non-dual view, we remain imperfect at it, regressing to speaking from the past, from behind the ramparts of fear and defensive patterns, unresolved emotional issues, or committing ethical errors.
Feeling trapped in a recurring pattern of such suffering can be shocking and deeply unsettling. It defies rational explanation. It can cause deep and seemingly intractable rifts with friends, family or even strangers and become a bottomless source of emotional distress. Recovery from such moments may seem impossible. And it will be if we continue to cling tightly to what doesn’t even truly exist. Yet the healing impulse cannot only be concerned with recovering mutually agreeable and nourishing relations with Others, like cleaning the stables. Instead, we must deconstruct the stable itself, the core belief in the very existence of Others, meaning that we are always and only encountering ourselves in the world ‘out there.’
From this view, what does unfinished business really mean? Is anything ever finished? No single act stands entirely alone either as an emotion or as a thought. In a non-dual universe, everything we believe is ‘out there’ is a projection of our own mind. And as the teachings say, mind itself is empty of existence, including all the demonic and tortured apparitions that appear in the wake of interpersonal ruptures. So, our task in this life is to befriend the monsters of our own creation. As Stephen Levine (among others) also says, “We are not in the world. The world is in us.”
If nothing can truly be separate from anything else, whatever we do that feels like completion is a micro-event deconstructing the bewildering model that there is such a thing as Otherness. In the resolution of our dualistic view, we make a small correction, another small opening of the heart, another small step in our journey into Oneness. We can never fully comprehend the full impact of that healing in all its permutations. So, in a very real sense, there is no such thing as completion. It’s only our limited view that believes so. If we look closely at the flow of feeling or thought, the imperfections of our open-hearted intentions, we can see it all as the continuous random activity of discursive mind, a never-ending flow of change, only partially within our control at any moment. As each moment passes, we are only nominally capable of sustaining a wholistic perspective, depending on our ego investment in the outcome, which is to say, our pre-occupation with the past or the future.
From a deeper view, we can say that each moment is both a birth and a death, a rising and a passing, because that’s how quickly everything happens. As we look back over what we consider to be our transgressions of the past, the influence of our ignorance and struggle, the karmic package we are carrying that may never be fully resolved, the moments when we fell helplessly back into defense or a multitude of addictions, we must realize those moments are already finished. There was a birth and a death in those interactions we still carry with us. So, on one hand, time and memory have nothing to offer us as we navigate this moment. We can only bring our intention into the present. We cannot change the past and we do not control the future.
Which is not to say we are helpless, because every appearance of Other is also real, every act in the past, even in past lives, is influencing who we are right now. We do still have an opportunity to restore our capacity for connecting and acting from the Ground of Being right now. An open heart is available in this moment without having to negate the past. In fact, it’s only possible if we fully accept the past. We remain imperfect, yet we can also ask if the one who came up short in the past is the one we are now? In the sense of Stephen Levine’s asking, who is the one attempting to address this unfinished business?
Regardless of any psychological perspective, the real unfinished business for me is the journey ever deeper into the nondual view, exploring its meaning, import and guidance. I have been increasingly satisfied with the results of that journey. I am discovering its true rewards. As I go forward, to be responsible for the outcomes of my actions, I am holding the paradox that there is no such thing as ‘unfinished,’ and…there is completion in every moment.
If this is true, then we cycle toward the end of life, having no reason for regret, knowing there’s no end of rehabilitation possible. No relationship is a dead end. Opening the heart is an un-ending flow. It will never be finished, even as we ultimately lose everything. At some point, in profound humility, we will arrive at a moment when nothing further can be accomplished. We will have to let go of what tugs at us for further attention and dissolve into our journey into Oneness. We remain until our last breath embodied (embedded) in an impossibly vast matrix of causes and conditions into which we can only cast a few final pebbles. That is the moment when total self-compassion can become pure and unlimited compassion for all beings.
Everything is returning to unity.
There is no separate God to unite with.
There is only this single condition.
Everyone is heir to it.
All the complexities of the world cannot diminish it.
It is almost nothing, yet it appears as something, as everything.
When life is just life, death is just death; both are expressions of simplicity. Neither life nor death can detract from simplicity itself.
Some masters refer to this as Dzogchen, the great perfection…
the perfection that doesn’t depend on any condition to be so.
It may take a lifetime to see this, yet there is in truth no lifetime.
There is only Dzogchen.
---©Zachary Horvitz, 2022