All is metamorphosis...

Alan Lightman on Our Yearning for Immortality and Why We Long for Permanence in a Universe of Constant Change

by Maria Popova

A heartening perspective on mortality by way of the physics of the cosmos and the poetics of the night-blooming cereus cactus.

“We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms,” Alan Watts wrote in contemplating how our ego keeps us separate from the universe. “It is almost banal to say so,” Henry Miller observed,“yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.” But banal as it may be, it is also intolerably discomfiting to accept, which is why we retreat into our hallucination — we resist change, we long for immortality, and we cling to the notion of the self, despite its ever-changing essence, as anxious assurance of our own permanence in an impermanent universe./.../