Ecclesiastes 3:2 Meaning A Time to Be Born

To be born and to die is the constant motion of a person between states of consciousness. Every time you assume a new state you are born into it, and every time you leave an old one you have died to it. No condition is permanent. A mood held becomes a mood lived, and when it has served its turn a person vacates it and enters another, dying and being born without ever leaving the field of his own awareness.

To plant is to place an assumption in the deep self, and to pluck up is to withdraw one that no longer serves. States are not forced on a person from outside. They are entered and left at will by the one who imagines. The seasons named here are the seasons of the inner life, all of them turning inside a single being. A person is always dying to what he was and being born into what he now assumes himself to be.

Anicca: Impermanence Everything keeps changing, and nothing holds its shape for long. Coming into the world and leaving it, pressing a seedling into the ground and tearing it out again, are one tide moving in and sliding back out. Nothing here stays still long enough to be kept, so each thing is handed its season and then must hand it on, and the ache of loss is only the grip refusing to open.

Jātimaraṇa: Birth and Death Birth and dying arrive bound together as a single pair, never the one without the other. Every hour of being born already carries its matching hour of dying folded inside it, the way a lit candle is a candle quietly spending itself down. So the cradle and the grave sit at the near ends of one short arc, far closer together than they ever look from the middle of a life.

Saṃsāra: The Wandering Round A turning wheel of birth and death that keeps coming back around. Born and dying, planting and pulling up, these paired times bend into a circle you have walked before and will walk again many times over. This birth is one more turn of the wheel rather than a first morning, and the seasons keep returning for the plain reason that the wheel keeps rolling under them.

Kamma: Action and Its Fruit Every deed drops a seed that ripens in its own time. To plant, and later to pull up what was planted, is the whole law drawn in one picture: the hand that sows is the same hand that comes back to harvest. You gather the exact crop you once put in the ground, sweet or bitter, whenever its ripening hour finally comes, and no other field's yield can be charged to your name.

Kāla: The Appointed Time The due hour, the season when a thing is ripe to happen. "A time to" points past the clock toward the ripe moment each event quietly waits for, the way fruit falls only when it is ready and not a day before. Even dying is called one's kāla, the hour that was always on its way; when it comes it is simply time, and no season can be rushed forward or held back.