The Three Characteristics (Also called the Three Marks of Existence)
Experiencing the Three Characteristics is the goal of meditation (and mindfulness living). It is said that understanding any one of these through enough experience is a doorway to Awakening.
Impermanence:
Nothing in the world is static. Everything is changing all the time. Everything in our conditioned existence comes into existence and dissolves. The car in the driveway is rusting or decaying. The yogurt in the fridge is going ‘bad’. The Sun will burn itself out. These are examples of gross impermanence - everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As one practices, they understand more subtle impermanence - in between each beginning and each ending there is only transition occurring. Everything is becoming other than it was just a moment before. There is absolutely no stability or permanence at any point within any experience.
Nothing is a noun. Everything is a verb. There is no solid tree, only phenomenon that is ‘treeing’. This leads to a highly misunderstood term (some say the most misunderstood term) - Emptiness. Emptiness is not nothingness. It means that since nothing is static, even for a second, it has no existence as an object. Again, there are no trees, only phenomenon that is in the process of ‘treeing’.
It is our conditioning that makes us believe ‘objects’ truly exist. With meditation and mindful living we are trying to see through and break that conditioning.
Impermanence leads to the other 2 Characteristics.
Unsatisfactoriness (dukkha):
Per Wikipedia - “a basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all existence, all forms of life, because all forms of life are changing, impermanent and without any inner core or substance.” One knows of pain and suffering but there is also a form of suffering when good things never last. (They can’t because of Impermanence.) That is why you may have heard that ‘attachment’ is so important. The suffering comes by be attached to something that is impermanent. The flip side of attachment is aversion.
We also make painful things worse by what a psychologist might call ‘rumination’. The Buddha called it the “second arrow”. From Huffpost - “Apparently, the Buddhists say that any time we suffer misfortune, two arrows fly our way. The first arrow is the actual bad event, which can, indeed, cause pain. The second arrow is the suffering. That’s actually optional. The second arrow represents our reaction to the bad event. It’s the manner in which we chose to respond emotionally.” To repeat, suffering is how we react to events, not the event itself. I have found this ‘second arrow’ idea extremely helpful. When I am feeling that I am suffering in some way, I look for the ‘second arrow’ I know that I must be creating, which is my reaction.
Selflessness:
If Impermanence is realized at the experiential level one realizes that the Self cannot exist as a permanent, stable object either. The idea of a self (or soul) can be considered part of metaphysics. I cannot prove or disprove it. Therefore, my teachers talk of not eliminating the Self but changing one’s relationship to the Self. So, what we say is that the ‘I am’ experience (the perceived Self) you have is a conditioned response and there is no ‘I’, aka perceived Self. The perceived Self is an ‘illusion’ in the same way that all objects (like trees) are ‘illusions’. This can be the most difficult thing to experience because we can be strongly attached to the Self.
One goes through an ‘order’ of Selves, each getting more subtle.
My teacher’s teaching is mostly around seeing where one is ‘identified’ with something.
At its core, Awakening is the dropping, the letting go, of the perceived Self. What happens then is that there is no distinction between you and the Universe (or God if a Christian, or Cosmic Consciousness in other traditions ). ‘You’ are the expression of the Universe/God along with everything else. At the mundane level the ‘I’ still exists. We still answer to our names :-).
If ‘you’ are part of the unfolding of the Universe, the Universe cannot ‘hurt’ you because you are part of it. I like to say that “fire cannot burn fire”. This is all well and good to talk about, but remember that to truly understand it, you must experience it.