Written by Noel Coakley

In Buddhist practice, learning often unfolds in a sequence: hearing, contemplating, meditating, and realizing.

Imagine you’re deep in a YouTube hole and stumble on an Alan Watts talk. He says: “All conditioned phenomena are subject to impermanence. Everything is impermanent.” That catches your ear. Now you’re not just hearing, you’re listening.

You start to chew on it — that’s contemplation. Is this true? Everything? Can I think of anything that isn’t changing? You talk to a friend, turn it over in your head, maybe even argue with yourself about it.

Then you take it into meditation. Instead of analyzing, you sit with the view that everything is impermanent. You notice sensations, thoughts, emotions, even seemingly solid things all rising and fading. You’re not just thinking about impermanence, you’re directly experiencing it.

That’s when realization starts to flicker. At first, it’s just blips: moments where the truth of impermanence is undeniable. Then it fades. Habits return. Later, another flash. Slowly, the recognition comes more often, stays longer, and begins to shape how you move through the world.

But realization doesn’t mean you’re immune. You might “know” impermanence, and still have a meltdown when you drop your ice cream cone on the ground and, in a fit of rage, slap the sundae out of the hand of the toddler next to you. Realization momentarily lost.

That’s part of the path — losing the realization, not slapping sundaes. It’s not about never losing perspective; it’s about remembering more quickly, and returning with less resistance each time.

At the end of the day, the only measure that matters is whether a realization has reached a point in which it is fully integrated into someone’s being such that it affects their conduct in the world. You may have been to every retreat center from Tucson to Tulum receiving direct instructions from His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, but if you’re a jerk in traffic then you’re still a jerk in traffic.

Every moment is another chance to hear, contemplate, meditate, and realize. The curve keeps looping back, deeper each time.