I read an article in the news that really intrigued me. It was about a new biological law, the law of ‘selectively advantageous instability’. In sum, the law proposes that, “instability in biological systems, like cells, may be beneficial to our survival. Afterall, it is what lets animals adapt to new environments, it allows growth and repair as well. Unfortunately, this great biological advantage comes with a serious disadvantage: Cellular instability brings aging, wear and tear on the system and the tendency for mutations that cause cancer.  

In my early days studying at the Wat, my teachers used to emphasize that everything has two sides: This fact is just one face of impermanence. It is also, quite clearly, a face of dukkha as well. As I considered the article a bit more, it struck me how two-sidedness could even be hardwired into our biology, rupa: For life, a body, to form for a time, there needs to be instability, sickness and death.

I am someone who craves stability: Instability is fear provoking, dangerous, it is a state I associate with loss, sickness. Stability and survival are of course deeply intertwined, but they also exist on a continuum. More and less stability, more or less hospitableness to survival.  There actually does need to be enough instability to create a form, enough to keep the form adaptable to the environment — but not so much to lead to dissolution, ‘too much’ and poof, anatta.

This was really an aha moment for me: Since I started considering anatta, I realized it had to be just like impermanence and dukkha: Everything is impermanent, there is just longer and shorter duration.  Everything is dukkha, there are just different degrees. As I considered this biological law, I realized it is proof that everything is also anatta:

Afterall, everything is always shifting. Balancing between adapting and stabilizing. That is a constant as basic as the elements and nature. For physical birth to even happen there needs to be this interplay: Elements need to be adaptable enough to take the shape of a fetus, and then need to be stable enough in that form that it can be born before disaggregation. If we look at this through the lens of Mae Yo’s definition of atta –a clump—its pretty clear how atta also exists on a continuum, a continual tension between fixedness, stability, and flux, instability.

The problem is I get confused. I look at a form in less state of flux, or one in which I can at least identify continuity –a baby to a kid to an adult –and I assign it an identity. I see the sammutti I imagine and I superimpose an atta onto a continually moving form just because, for a time, there is less moving, more stability. Only when the instability gets to be so much that the form changes past my ability to credulously call it by its name, its samutti, its identity, I have to concede anatta.  

Of course though,  anatta has been there the whole time; a continual interplay between stability and flux that allowed for arising, and that preordains cessation. Form, clumping, stability is actually conditional on instability, and what is conditional can’t be self. Atta, identity, sammutti of objects must exist in my mind alone.