A quiet assumption hides beneath most human searching: something out there must last. Something must remain untouched by erosion, loss, time, or collapse. That assumption fuels religion, philosophy, science, self-help, and even despair. Yet careful observation reveals a startling reversal; everything we try to secure as permanent is precisely what cannot stay.
Bodies age. Identities shift. Beliefs mutate. Civilizations rise and fall. Even universes, according to modern cosmology, are not exempt from birth and dissolution. Permanence refuses to appear where attention habitually looks.
What does remain cannot be grasped as an object.
Change never pauses. This is not a poetic statement but a structural fact. No phenomenon has ever been observed to freeze itself into finality. Even stability is a form of slow motion. Even stillness contains motion beneath its surface. Change does not fluctuate. It does not improve. It does not degrade. It simply is.
Impermanence, often misunderstood as a gloomy conclusion, turns out to be absolute. Nothing violates it. Not matter. Not energy. Not thought. Not consciousness as an experience. Impermanence itself never wavers.
Awareness appears constant, yet experiences within it rotate endlessly. Sensations replace sensations. Thoughts override thoughts. Emotions dissolve into others. What remains is not a personal witness but the bare fact that experiencing is happening at all. That fact has no texture, no color, no personality, and no history. It does not evolve because evolution belongs to what appears within it.
Absence plays an unexpected role here. No thing possesses an independent core. Every form depends on conditions that are themselves dependent. This lack of inherent selfhood does not come and go. It is always already the case. What seems solid holds together through relationship alone.
Separation feels real, yet it never completes itself. Subject and object arise together. Observer and observed cannot be pried apart without collapsing the experience entirely. Duality functions, but it does not fracture reality. Division appears without dividing.
Nothingness, often feared or romanticized, is better understood as openness. Forms emerge, interact, and vanish without ever crystallizing into fixed essence. Emptiness does not negate existence; it allows it.
What never changes does not announce itself. It cannot be defended or achieved. Seeking it as an attainment guarantees frustration. It is not hidden. It is overlooked because it lacks features.
Everything changes.
That does not.
Recognition of this does not erase life’s texture. It sharpens it. When permanence is no longer demanded of form, form is finally allowed to be what it is; temporary, intimate, vivid, and sufficient.
Nothing needs to be saved from change.
Nothing needs to be added to what already remains.
Morgan O. Smith
AI for Wellness and Spirituality Summit
February 9 & 10, 2026
Morgan O. Smith 