by 
Carmella
ANSWERS: 4
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Indeed. Nothing stays the same. In 5 billion years time the galaxy Andromeda will collide with our own reshaping the local heavens in unfathomable ways. Even the universe itself is not permanent, and will either suffer entropy death, or a final crunch into nothingness.
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Hi Carmella - excellent question! "Our lives are ruled by impermanence. But simply realizing that changes nothing. There is no value in bleak pessimism. The challenge is how to create something of enduring value within the context of our impermanent lives. (Buddhist study) teaches us how to do this." Buddhist Quote
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Impermanence isn't permanent, it's a concept, and we say it's the nature of reality... But to call it "permanent" in the common-sense way is to mistake it for a thing: some object with identity, boundaries, attributes, and relationships. It's less confusing to think of impermanence as "the absence of permanence" -- something missing, rather than something present. Then one is less likely to "reify" permanence as (for example) "the only permanent thing". The point of the impermanence discussion is to disrupt the mind's naive clinging to ideas of permanence, not to posit some model of ultimate reality which should be believed.
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I think everything is permanent. What is a thing? To us, it's how we perceive it. It matters not if my cat is actually a vicious, germ-infested mouse-killer; to me, she's a silly little fuzzything. Is my mousepad actually blue? Does is actually exist? Who knows? What I do know is that, at some point, there was a memory of that mousepad. There was, at some point, a perception of my cat. Since time isn't continuous and linear, my cat and my mousepad will never go away. At any time in any place, it is possible to restore the memory or the idea of my mousepad. Thus, it always exists.
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