I've been thinking lately that everything happens for a reason. I don’t mean fate, or destiny, I just mean that everything has a reason, or, you could even say that nothing happens in isolation. Nothing in the universe is independent of everything else, everything has consequences, and everything has causes.

This means that, at all times, everything acts exactly as it should, if you take ‘should’ to mean, in response to a particular set of causes, as opposed to ‘as per our expectations’. For example, a wire on the television goes and we can no longer watch anything, all we get is that funny grey fuzz, whatever that is. Our first reaction in this situation is that the television is broken, but by broken what we mean is, it’s not doing what we want it to do, but as it is in the moment, it is doing exactly what it should be doing. I.e. broadcasting grey fuzz, because that is exactly what that layout of wires determines that it can do. What it was doing, and what it might do again are irrelevant, in the moment it is doing all it can.

Think back to a perceived mistake that you made, something that made you wish you’d acted differently. Now realise that there was no way you could have acted differently, nothing happens in isolation, and our actions are determined by millions of influences on us, just one of those things being different could have made that moment different, but it wasn’t. It was as it was, and now that it has happened it could not have happened any differently. Our perceptions make those moments wrong or right, but if we remove those perceptions then they’re just moments that were played out as circumstance dictated.

Does this mean that we should stop taking responsibility for our actions? No, it just means we should just stop fretting about the past. We can’t change the past, nor can we change the future. We can only change ourselves, in the now. Once we start to do this we change the circumstances we find ourselves in, because we are better people than we were, and we’ve started to make the now a better place to be in. 

Impermanence

All things are impermanent; this is, perhaps, one of the most central principles in Buddhist thought. Every “thing”, every little piece of form that exists cannot last. Our possessions get disposed of, they get recycled, turned into other items or are left to decompose back into the earth. As for ourselves, eventually our bodies will cease to function and they will change too, like the things we cling onto in life, we will decompose, and head back into the earth. Mountains will be eroded, and the oceans themselves are already part of a continuous cycle of change. And all of this occurs on a seemingly permanent world which one day will vanish also, when it is engulfed by the sun.

This is how time is created, time only exists because physical form exists, and it would not exist otherwise. If all were nothing but a vast emptiness time would not exist, how could it? I heard somebody say the other day that time is infinite. And my immediate reaction was that this was wrong, but it has taken me two days to figure out why, time cannot be infinite, because it is intrinsically tied up with the physical world, with the “things” we were talking about above, they are impermanent, just as all the physical form of the universe is impermanent, therefore, so is time.

But all things are binary and everything has its opposite, this is true as far as it goes as every opposite is intrinsic to the definition of the thing anyway. And this is certainly the case with the universe. I have mentioned the physical world of the universe, which is a suitably mystical sentence, but the universe is also made up of this binary definition. There is the physical side of the universe and the empty side of the universe. That is the side that everything exists in, it is the space in which the planets and galaxies move, and it is eternal because it is empty.

Imagine and maze, and ask yourself, what defines it? Is it the walls that make the maze, or is it the empty space in between them that allows you to walk through it? The answer is both, I think, although these things are opposites they are also dependant on each other for shape an definition. Which leads me to wonder, are there really such thing as opposites? Or are all opposites just there to give the universe shape.