Everything changes, every second.

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10 Painfully Obvious Truths Everyone Forgets Too Soon-4

10. Everything changes, every second.

Embrace change and realize it happens for a reason. It won’t always be obvious at first, but in the end it will be worth it.

What you have today may become what you had by tomorrow. You never know. Things change, often spontaneously. People and circumstances come and go. Life doesn’t stop for anybody. It moves rapidly and rushes from calm to different identities, casting us into roles like ‘boss,’ ‘parent,’ or ‘chic girl’, thereby affecting how we behave and what we expect from life. But, most of these roles are poor complements to the fullness of who we really are.

The dharma types, on the other hand, are personal myths that have existed since time immemorial and will continue to be useful so long as human kind exists, because they are the unseen matrices that guide how human beings express their destinies. Though invisible, their effects can be readily determined: a warrior behaves like a warrior and a merchant like a merchant in organised, predictable patterns.

A person’s archetype is like an operating system, the internal software that runs a computer. Regardless of the color, size or manufacture date of its hardware, it is the OS that gives a computer its most basic expression and instructs it to work. Likewise, the dharma type informs every human being regardless of race, sex, age, or nationality.

We shall consider five dharma types, or operating systems, and how they affect us in specific ways. To get the most out of the systems we were born with, we must become familiar with how they work.

The dharma types are Individual Archetypal Myths, the ‘I AM’ identity inside that guides each of us in subtle but definitive patterns. Today, we associate the word ‘myth’ with something unreal, but to our ancestors, myths spoke to an enduring truth that lay beyond the ken of the senses. Consider that our everyday world is in perpetual flux — coming into being, changing form and dying. In Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, this was termed samsara, ‘constant movement, and constant change’. But myth is eternal, driven by the intelligent blueprint that underlies the mundane world of name and form.

Our ancient ancestors thought in mythic terms.... They understood that what would survive their bodies, societies, and even civilizations was made not of earth and stone, but of something more subtle and permanent. Their personal myths helped them to find purpose and obtain an everlasting life beyond the parenthetical existence of the human body. The dharma types are alive today even as they lived 5,000 years ago.... They are considered apaurusheya, a Sanskrit word that means ‘not invented by the mind of man’. And to this day, though it may be impossible to localize one’s warrior or educator genes, these continue to influence our lives in every sphere — from the most mundane, such as relating to a lover, to the most spiritual, such as relating to God.

In this context, ‘spirituality’ does not equate to religiosity. Myths delve deeper than religion, and spirituality here simply means that:
There is purpose to life,
There is order and justice in the world,
There is more to it than material existence.

These three points — called dharma, karma and duhkha in Sanskrit — separate the ordinary believer, or the materialist, from the true spiritual seeker. ‘Duhkha’, which means suffering, suggests that it is impossible to have lasting peace from physical existence alone, because of the difficulties inherent to balancing the material needs of life.

Ayurveda illustrates this by depicting three bodily humors constantly vying to pull us out of balance, and states that health is tantamount to skillfully juggling them to minimise their effects....

Nothing is permanent in the physical world, and nothing endures; change is the only constant.

The next concept, karma, means universal justice — nobody escapes the laws of cause and effect. Knowing this a wise person practices the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — not out of some pious obligation, but from an earnest desire to have an optimal life experience, and ultimately, to free him of samsara. Everything you do rubs off on you.

Finally, dharma is the sense that there is purpose to life.... Our ancestors were secure in their belief that there was more to life than the transitory material; that life was governed by inextricable laws, and that these laws were organised to serve the purpose of our evolution.

Om Namah Shivay