“You have to die a few times before you
can really live.”
- Charles Bukowski
Indeed, as we live on we repeatedly die and we die again, as we bring
birth to a renewal of ourselves, our ideas, our identity and the meaning that
lies spread out like pebbles on our path. In the resurrection we cast of our
skin and we forge new bonds as the old is laid at rest in some chest or burned
at the pyre of renewal.
But the living will always resent, hate and envy those who hold hand
with death, because transformation
- for specie, like ours, that seek to be still in permanence - is a threatening possibility. Death is everywhere,
it be in the death of a conviction, a thought, dysfunction or the Batillian
orgasm. Some of us just push this fact over to the pages yet to be read in our
little book of life, truth and lies.
Those of us who have found peace with Death also find that life is a
journey of wonders and we open up to these wonders in a spirit of interest,
peace and will to engagement (oh well, often a reluctant engagement I guess,
yet…)
Castañeda wrote in Journey to Ixtlan
the following: “Death is the only wise
advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is
going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if
that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really
matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you
yet.”
In this little phrase there is so much to extract, but in the scope of
this article series let us give attention to a particular form of dissonance,
the one that occurs in relation to goals and milieu, Self and collective,
station and expansion. This field is regulated by the Self questioning its
essence, place and expansion and in doing so we are automatically brought to
the crossroad of choice. You know that place where the Devil lives… As you
choose death in the shape of another route this holds consequences and some of
us blame the Devil, others scapegoat and yet a few of us do take responsibility
for our choices. In each choice we find a death and in each death we find resurrection,
and resurrection is only possible by the force of transmutation and
transformation. We go from a given temporal form to become dirt and on this
reorganized dirt we raise
again, hopefully with less of the dross we held prior to the trial of the
crossroad and leave behind what impairs our life… The grace of death works in
such ways that we can salute the new in honouring what was once.
Your ‘self-transmutation’, to borrow a word from A.O. Spare involves all
things or as the Kybalion phrases it:
"Mind may be transmuted,
from state to state; degree to degree; condition to condition;
pole to pole; vibration to vibration.”
from state to state; degree to degree; condition to condition;
pole to pole; vibration to vibration.”
In other words, as you change, so does everything around you and in a
world seeking permanence and ambition, your ‘self-transformation’ will also
relocate and confuse the world around you. We are cause and effect, just as any
other organism that holds motion works in the same simple reference of
becoming, death and stillness.
The friends of Death are lovers of transformation and transmutation,
they do not look favourably upon permanence, knowing it is just the stillness
between breaths and if the pulse is not beating a death more sinister awaits, because
to change your mind, to change your heart is as human as safeguarding still
waters until it turns dirty and poisonous. Because if it is one thing the
friends of Death do more than any other it is to refresh the waters of life.
Doing this in a world like ours lead to the predominance of a given sentimental
reaction, a state of being that the early Church father deemed a cardinal sin,
namely invidia, or envy.
Envy can be understood to be a form of resentment that ends in hatred of
another man’s good fortune. Schopenhauer took great interest in this sentiment related
to his ideas of will and being as the two feet’s of our Self. In his discourse
he ended on envy being termed Schadenfreude that is usually translated
in taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, but particularly the misfortune
of a friend. Sure envy is about desiring what your friend or neighbour has, feeling
they are undeserving of their good fortune, but ultimately it is speaking of a
lack you yourself have and in seeing your lack presented in blossoms in your
friend you develop a form of wicked and weird instant hatred, a reaction and a
projection that is nothing else than an escape from your own misery,
Self-loathing and fear of Death.
Personally I find such things curious and annoying, because I truly believe
that if my life gets better your life gets better, so your success becomes my
curiosity and celebration. And of course in finding this strange I am reminded
that the human race seeks permanence and affirmation of whatever they are.
I know it is more easy for us to affirm our low self-esteem than to deal
with our appreciation of one another as it is equally hard for us to deal with the
multiple deaths that brings on other version of what we once were. It is truly a shame and we all know it should
not be like this, but yet in the name of sentimentalism it is.
Hopefully there will be less dross in each resurrection, but
nevertheless the souls of sentiments also seek to engrave and imprint... But
when one man’s life is dross and your dross was its mirror, well there is no
easy way out from that hall of left mirrors, but leave it true to yourself in
the breath of nagging teeth’s of the others and see yourself free from that old
hue.
But life must curl on, and so we do like a viper, hibernating just to
shed its skin and see the word with new eyes each new awakening. If you don’t
like the new form, leave it, if you hate it, retreat and if possible, shed your
own skin because the dross you once loved is no longer there and if you still
love the dross perhaps the time has come to accept Death and transform yourself
in such ways that gives you yet again appetite on life?