Guru Purnima Celebration

Saturday July 25, 2026
IMPERMANENCE

“As meditators our aim is to reduce the intensity of the five afflictive emotions: mental dullness, desire, aversion, pride, and jealousy. With this we can start to see appearances without being carried away by strong reactions. Then we can begin to focus on the empty nature of phenomena – the startling fact that there are actually no self-existing objects although we talk as if there were.

    The more we see the actual impermanence of phenomena, the more the delusional nature of the belief we have been operating under becomes apparent. We have been grasping at clouds, falling in love with echoes, feeling aversion towards mirages.”

— James Low

We come, we play, we pass away. Impermanence is ever upon us, filling our senses with grief and dread as well as a profound appreciation for the inherent beauty of our ever-changing world. Remembering impermanence has long been a recommended spiritual practice in both Hindu and Buddhist schools of thought. The Buddha is quoted as saying:

“To remember for an instant the impermanence of all compounded things is greater than giving food and offerings to a hundred of my disciples who are perfect vessels.”

Impermanence when fully accepted and embraced enlivens our sense of presence in the moment with appreciation and even wonder. Join us this Guru Purnima to meditate, sing, feast and consider the implications of impermanence for ourselves, our community and the world itself – the world that the Indian tradition wisely calls “Jagat” – meaning constant change.

“Impermanence. A great theme and a great ‘reminding factor.’ A reminding factor is a catalyzing stimuli that reveals to the catalyzee the underlying nature of Reality, which is emptiness. If the catalyzee is sharp – as in perceptive and mature, both as a practitioner and as a human adult – the vision of emptiness, far from being scary, dark, depressing or hopeless…automatically reveals the nature of form, exactly as it is, without seduction or identification. The vision or direct knowledge of form as-it-is returns one to emptiness, the only perfect formula in existence.”

— Lee Lozowick, Words of Fire & Faith, April 6, 2008