Navigating Death and Transition
Episode 31 - Moving home and the dissolution of the Future
Hey,
It’s been a while. Again. I’ve been busy dying.
I’ve also been busy understanding what that’s like. I will tell you a story, if you wish to listen. But stay close to the fire, for the cold is upon us and the solstice is behind.
And dawn is still far away.
What happened?
It is said, and I happen to experientially agree, that life unfolds on many levels. On one level, let’s call it the ‘physical’, events happen. Circumstances change; things appear and disappear.
On another level, let’s call it the ‘mental’ (as occultists may relate), interpretations occur: the mind judges and categorises things. On yet another, the ‘emotional’, energies move; feelings are felt.
On yet another, higher still, energies and forces interact in ways that are beyond the intellect’s understanding. This, we may call the realm of ‘karma’, where consciousness dances movements that are the same, I believe, as the movements of the cosmos itself. Where stars dying and planets forming are merely physical expressions or effects of these phenomena.
On the physical level, circumstances forced me to change my house, to relocate to another place. This ‘house’ however, was a home - the first one I truly ever had. A ‘home’, as you well know, is an abstraction - it’s a concept that lives on the mental and emotional levels. By this I mean that you ‘feel’ a home, you don’t live simply in a space - the physical space is the outer shell protecting the core which is emotional/energetic.
Anyway, being forced to leave it behind felt like death. Because it was. Of course, it wasn’t the only one either.
Home aside, I’ve been feeling this dreadful pull of anxieties and fears all throughout the past year. On one level, they were mostly associated with various practical things I’ve been trying to achieve. These things involved my art, my business, my way of surviving inside a world that seemingly became increasingly more indifferent to my existence as an artist and creative (AI is one example I’m sure many creatives can relate to; for despite us creating for ‘art’s sake’, we are still human and have strong needs to feel appreciated, seen and valued by a collective).
The fears spoke of ‘failure’. This ‘failure’ happened. And it was nowhere as dramatic as I thought it would be, but it somehow happened. I think. I’m frankly still not sure, but it feels like something came to an end. Something died, kicking and screaming.
Now I seem to have lost many of the previous ambitions and drives that pushed me forward into the future. My dreams, hopes and aspirations are… gone. My visions for the future are gone. There is, in fact, no more future. There is no more vision.
All is dead.
The meaning of Death
It sounds overly dramatic, but what this translates into is a collapse, perhaps, of illusions (some conscious, some not) that kept me ‘going’. There is no more future to look forward to. There are no more plans, no more ideals, no more aspirations. There is nothing that I’m ‘looking forward to’ anymore. There is nothing that I want to achieve, strangely enough.
Perhaps I will write another book. I am almost sure I will, but the drive to do it in order to get something out of it, or for the world to suddenly love me ‘because of it’ is gone.
So what is death? It is peculiarly enough both an ‘ending’ and a ‘transition’ at the same time. I think, at higher levels, concepts such as ‘life’ as opposed to ‘death’ become meaningless. Is death ‘pleasant’? Is it painful? Is life? Are they both not the same things? When you stop struggling and let go, perhaps they do become one.
I have struggled to let go and surrender to the process, as all humans throughout history have, but as I stated before, Faith has been my only guiding light. And it still is, in the absence of a future.
When the future dies, the mind sees only ‘darkness’ ahead - by this I mean that the lack of vision or goals appear as ‘darkness’ because there is seemingly nothing there. At least nothing the mind can see. No mind likes this, because the ability to control and predict is actively diminished. This means that survival is put into question. And ‘survival’ is the same thing as the ‘future’.
I have noticed just how much suffering arises whenever survival comes into play. The recent AI news is an example of this, one that we can all relate to because it’s so prevalent: AI will take your job and replace you. But if your survival/future is completely removed from consideration, then what’s there to worry about?
The spiritual path, as well as (Socrates would say) philosophy, is a preparation for death. Plato says through him:
“Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.” (Phaedo)
I wrote much more on this subject through the letter THETA in the Grammaticon. You can find it HERE.
So what now?
Well now I find myself in a new home. Things have settled. The new place is actually a lot more quiet and surrounded by nice, quiet houses close to the edge of the city. I also have a garden. Quite symbolic.
But this change isn’t enough, and I feel it has to extend further, also into my art and my relationship to it. I think it has to extend into my very identity itself. I feel, at the moment, disgusted with various ‘chambers’ of the internet, such as all social media and most forms of ‘content’. This could all be perception and projection but, even if it is, I can’t just ignore it and carry on as usual.
But most importantly I need to be completely and entirely honest with myself. It seems that as I progress on this path, evolve and grow, something akin to complete honesty becomes not only important but as necessary as air. Art and creativity have to become completely aligned with a deeper truth within the ‘Soul’, as cliché as that sounds - it’s experientially true.
Concluding
I said that Vision was dead.
And yet…
Vision is required to see that Vision is dead.
As Shunyamurti says: “As you approach the Real, things become increasingly hyper-paradoxical.”
These are, of course, the edges of the Mind. The fringes of linearity. And, perhaps, the end of Time.
I have no clue what comes next, nor is there any plan to make something specific happen. Maybe there’s freedom in this.
Blessings,
