Sidestepping Impermanence

 There are times when people try to use spiritual practices to sidestep impermanence. I am talking especially about forms of spirituality which cling to notions of gain and loss, emphasizing gain over losses. Every so often I see this on the occasional telephone post: an advertisement which reads, "learn your true destiny- money, fame, fortune advice", and so on. It's interesting to me because the lure is always about power: if you do something, you will gain more happiness, more peace, and more progress in life. It's hard to understand, in a society that prizes and advertises 'gains', that spirituality is more about losing than it is about gaining. In fact, if there was some kind of advertisement which read, "learn how to lose your attachments", people might start to panic and not even step near spiritual practice. This is because our society has conditioned people to put all their identity and effort around the sense of a substantial 'self' that gains or progresses over time.
   I have no doubt that powers like this can and do exist in the world. Even in Buddhist texts, disciples of the Buddha are said to manifest supernatural powers, which can work to a person's advantage in some form or another. But actually, this kind of spiritual practice can be quite harmful, because there is an illusion that a person gains a permanent sense of power over themselves and the world. It's as though tomorrow, I won the lottery and didn't have to work again for the rest of my life. I would believe at that moment that I have a special power because I compare what I have now to what I struggled to have in the past. But is this current state permanent? It's not really so.
   Consider that many who have a significant gain eventually adapt to the new kind of happiness relatively quickly, and then it's no longer a source of joy for me. If I retire and consider how relaxed I feel compared to when I was working, eventually I will realize that I no longer experience that comparative ease. Something else has replaced it, such as a new hobby, or a trip, or another responsibility, or even boredom. The brief feeling of happiness or control was only so great because I compared it with another moment that felt more like a struggle. It seems good at the time, but it wears thin later, because the previous memory is already faded away.
   Another example that I can think of is the illusory sense of power that comes from hope and fantasy. Sometimes it seems that something good is about to happen, only later one realizes that this hope was only a projection of one's desired state of things. In fact, that might have been an observation of a minor condition blown out of proportion or over-interpreted. This then becomes a source of suffering. The reason I categorize it as like supernatural power is that hope can give a person false impressions of greatness or infinite power and control, as much as any kind of mental powers might. But at the end of the day, hope is also impermanent, and so one needs to learn to navigate these feelings without getting drawn into them excessively.