Impermanence, Interbeing, and Why Nothing Transforms Alone
What if transformation is not something that happens to reality, but the very movement of reality itself?
At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, stands a two-meter-high statue of Shiva Nataraja—the Hindu representation of Shiva as the cosmic dancer.
It may seem like an unexpected presence in one of the world’s most important centers for scientific research.
The statue was a gift from the Government of India in 2004, in recognition of the country’s long relationship with CERN. Beside it, a plaque draws from physicist Fritjof Capra’s reflections on Nataraja and the dynamic nature of matter described by modern physics.
In the traditional image, Shiva dances within a circle of fire. In one hand he holds the damaru, the drum associated with creation; in another, agni, the fire of destruction. Creation and dissolution, emergence and disappearance, are held within the same movement.
Capra saw in this ancient image a powerful metaphor for the world encountered by modern physics: not a universe of inert and isolated matter, but one of continuous activity, interaction and transformation.
I find this encounter fascinating.
Not because an ancient spiritual tradition somehow anticipated the discoveries of modern physics. And not because science has now confirmed what spiritual traditions have been saying for centuries. They are different ways of inquiring into reality, with different methods, languages and purposes.
What interests me is the resonance between them.
Across very different ways of looking deeply into the nature of things, our ordinary perception of reality as something solid, separate and relatively permanent begins to soften.
What emerges instead is a world in movement.
A world of relationships.
A world continuously becoming.
Impermanence: life is movement
We tend to perceive the world through things.
A tree. A mountain. A body. A relationship. An organization. A self.
We name them and, by naming them, we inevitably create boundaries around them. They appear to us as distinct and relatively stable entities.
And yet, when we look more closely, what seems stable reveals itself to be in continuous transformation.
The tree is exchanging water, minerals, gases and energy with its environment. Our bodies are breathing, digesting, repairing, shedding, regenerating and aging. A river can carry the same name for hundreds of years while its waters never stop moving.
The form is there.
And yet the form is continuously becoming.
In the Buddhist tradition, impermanence is one of the fundamental ways of looking deeply into the nature of reality.
Thich Nhat Hanh—Thầy, as his students affectionately call him—often taught that impermanence should not be understood simply as the unfortunate fact that everything eventually comes to an end.
Impermanence is also what makes life possible.
Because there is impermanence, a seed can become a tree. A child can become an adult. A difficult emotion can soften. A situation that seems impossible today can become something different tomorrow.
Without impermanence, there could be no transformation.
This changes the way we relate to change itself.
Change is not simply something that occasionally interrupts periods of stability. It is woven into life.
It is happening now.
Looking more deeply: from impermanence to interbeing
But there is another layer.
Nothing changes by itself.
One of Thầy’s most beautiful teachings begins with something extraordinarily ordinary: a sheet of paper.
If we look deeply into the paper, he tells us, we can see a cloud.
At first this sounds poetic. But it is also very concrete.
Without the cloud there is no rain. Without rain, the tree cannot grow. Without the tree, there is no paper.
And if we continue looking, we find the sun, the soil, the logger, the logger’s parents, the food that nourished them, and innumerable other conditions that allowed this sheet of paper to come into existence.
Take away any of these conditions and what we call “paper” cannot exist in the same way.
Thầy used the word interbeing to express this understanding.
Things do not simply exist and then enter into relationship with other things.
They exist through relationship.
To be is to inter-be.
This is where impermanence becomes even more interesting to me.
If everything is continuously changing, and everything arises through conditions, then there is no isolated thing undergoing transformation entirely on its own.
The seed does not simply “turn itself” into a tree.
There is soil.
Water.
Sunlight.
Microorganisms.
Temperature.
Time.
An entire field of conditions participates in what we eventually call a tree.
And the same is true of us.
Our bodies contain the air we breathe, the food we eat and the microorganisms with which we coexist. Our ways of seeing the world have been shaped by families, cultures, histories, places, relationships and experiences. Even the ideas we think of as “mine” have emerged through countless encounters.
This is why impermanence and interbeing cannot really be separated.
Everything changes.
And nothing changes by itself.
Or said another way:
Nothing transforms alone.
The dance
And this brings me back to Nataraja.
Perhaps there is a reason the image is a dance.
A dance exists, but it cannot be located in a single movement.
Freeze the dancer for an instant and the dance disappears. What remains is a posture.
The dance exists in the movement from one moment to another.
But it also exists through relationship.
There is a body and there is gravity. There is ground beneath the feet. There is space. Rhythm. Breath. Time. There is everything that has shaped and nourished that body before this particular moment could arise.
Even a dancer dancing alone is not really dancing alone.
Seen this way, the dance of Nataraja offers us something more than an image of constant change.
It gives us an image of relational transformation.
Creation and destruction are held within the same movement. Forms emerge, endure for a time and dissolve. What disappears becomes condition for something else to emerge.
There is no single moment that is the dance.
There is only the unfolding.
And perhaps something similar can be said about reality.
What if transformation is the movement of reality itself?
Our minds naturally seek solidity.
We want to know what something is. We create categories. We establish boundaries. We hold onto identities. We look for certainty.
These capacities are necessary. They help us navigate the world.
But they can also make us forget that the boundaries we perceive are not always as solid as they appear.
A forest is not simply a collection of trees.
A community is not simply a collection of people.
A person is not an isolated self moving independently through the world.
Look deeply enough and we begin to see processes within processes, relationships within relationships, conditions giving rise to other conditions.
And perhaps this is where the image of Nataraja standing at CERN becomes so compelling.
Not because physics, Hinduism and Buddhism are saying the same thing.
They are not.
But each, through radically different forms of inquiry, can unsettle our assumption that reality is composed simply of fixed, independent entities.
The Buddhist practice of looking deeply invites us to encounter impermanence.
Interbeing invites us to see that what changes has never existed independently.
And Nataraja gives us an ancient and extraordinarily powerful image for holding both understandings at once:
the dance.
Perhaps transformation is not something that happens to reality.
Perhaps transformation is the movement of reality itself.
And if reality is relational—if things emerge through innumerable conditions—then another realization follows:
Nothing transforms alone.
I find this insight both humbling and hopeful.
Humbling, because it challenges the idea that any one of us stands outside the web of conditions shaping the world.
Hopeful, because if things are not fixed, something different can emerge.
And if nothing transforms alone, then relationship itself becomes part of the possibility of transformation.
Which leaves me with another question:
If this is how life moves, what might it mean for the way we understand—and participate in—the transformation of the systems we are part of?
That is the question I would like to explore next.
