{"id":3797,"date":"2013-10-31T20:37:35","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T01:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3797"},"modified":"2014-08-26T20:59:16","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T01:59:16","slug":"halloween-celebration-of-impermananence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3797","title":{"rendered":"Halloween, Celebration of Impermananence"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\nAh, Halloween, that secular celebration of impermanence. People in my town do up their lawns will all sorts of cheery things like mock tombstones and skeletons. It’s mostly for the kids of course, a celebration of “spookiness”; a reflection on the return of early darkness, sunset shadows, long nights and cold weather. That the decorations relate to human decay and death is irrelevant to them; they are young, and they are going to survive every winter and live forever. At worst, they might need to ponder the possibility of tooth impermanence from all the trick-or-treat candy. <\/p>\n

For us adults, however, especially those like me pushing past the 60 marker, it’s not a game anymore. Impermanence is staring us in the face. The Buddha said that “all conditioned things are impermanent \u2014 when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering”. So, the Buddha with all his wisdom could walk the streets of my town in late October with perfect equanimity; the skeletons, spiders and black cats wouldn’t bother him in the least. (And who knows, with his yellow monk robes and begging bowl as a “costume”, someone might give him some Halloween candy!) For the rest of us . . . oh well, just keep whistling past the mock graveyards. And Happy Halloween!
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  Ah, Halloween, that secular celebration of impermanence. People in my town do up their lawns will all sorts of cheery things like mock tombstones and skeletons. It’s mostly for the kids of course, a celebration of “spookiness”; a reflection on the return of early darkness, sunset shadows, long nights and cold weather. That the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3797"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3797"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3800,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3797\/revisions\/3800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}