For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes…— W.H. Auden
The wisdom part consists of the recognition that everything is impermanent (annica), that I am among the impermanent things (anatman or no-self; annata, Pali), that everything that happens is caused to happen by prior events and processes and will yield other events and processes (dependent origination), and that if you try to find where things bottom out, you will be led, Zen-like, to find that they don’t bottom out, analytic deconstruction never comes to an end (sunyata, emptiness). Buddhist wisdom says that everything is becoming. What there is, and all there is, are events and processes. Things and substances insofar as they exist at all are simply slow-moving events and processes. Compare: many scientists think that glass is a slow-moving liquid.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the telling reference to liquid betrays the panta rheist origins of this so-called Buddhist wisdom. You see this a lot in other derivative philosophies as well.
September 6, 2013 @ 4:00 pm
Glass has a liquid-like structure (non-crystalline)that led people to believe that it actually flowed very slowly. Old glass window panes are sometimes thicker toward the bottom, but it turns out this is due to the fact that old glass was not uniform in thickness from the start.
Liquid is actually a rare state of matter in the universe at large, but matter is mostly empty space, so we can say that everything flows together anyway, connected by the empty space we all share in.