Fear is a god. Gods are powers of Nature we can’t afford to disrespect. Fear wakes us up. Fear heightens our senses. When we face our mortality, it is natural and wise to have fear arise. What it is saying to us is, “Be wakeful to life, the whole of it”. Death is the crucible of life. Death is what allows Life to come into being. It is the great cauldron that births the world. Yet we fear it because we have lost our connection to the whole, to the world, to the universe. We are trapped in our human ego, in our individualism. This is the great tragedy of our culture, the teaching of the rugged individual. We are seven and a half billion individuals, all terrified of Death.
Humans ego keeps us disconnected from the whole. All other species seem to find a balance within the natural world. We humans are doing everything possible to strain that balance, to take more than what Nature can support. We aren’t willing to say No to what we want, to what we feel we have a right to. We’ve lost touch with the whole, with the continuity of life. Whether we speak metaphorically (feeding the ego), or literally (piling up of national debt while infrastructure crumbles), our life out of balance is stealing from the next generation. Ours is a culture of thievery.
So back to Fear and Death, our death is the end of ego, the end of the self. Yet, we know the whole continues on. So the Fear is telling us to identify with the whole. And that is the whole purpose of the spiritual path. We don’t live in that state of mind/soul oneness with the whole. We are a paradox as we need to have self-identity to function, and oneness to keep fear at bay. The challenge is, it is impossible to carry these at the same time. So we practice being able to shift from one state of consciousness to the other. Stephen Jenkinson said something to the effect, our death is medicine we need to carry in our medicine pouch. What this means is, our death is a spirit and a force of Nature that we need to befriend, understand, and make relationship with. It is medicine that allows us to live fully and have a purpose in our living. The purpose of our life is directly determined by our relationship to our death. If we view our death as a gift to life, to the ongoing flow of generations, to our family, to our friends, those we love, then we see it is part of the whole of our life. Dying well is a gift to the next generation, to the continuity of life. It is a gift to eternity. It is the ultimate expression of gratitude for this ridiculously amazing experience we call consciousness.
Pain pulls us into selfishness. That is its purpose. It is needed so we can give attention to our wounds. But selfishness pulls us further from integration with the whole. Pain is interesting as it lives on the cusp between the ego and the whole. It stands at the edge of the self and ecstasy. When I was younger. I feared dying because I would have felt cheated that I didn’t get enough of life. That perspective is so common because we were never taught about death being medicine. Even if we may have read it and held it as an intellectual construct, it wasn’t in our medicine pouch. Medicine hums on the soul level, not just the intellect. We’ve never been taught how to embrace death as medicine. And our ignorance brings us more and more pain. It is a terrible feedback loop.
Ours is a broken culture where we have no mentors, no elders. We are all trying to figure this all out on our own. We have never seen anyone embody carrying their death as medicine, someone who lives with a community mindset. We’ve never seen elders who know in their soul, death carries them into oneness, whose personal death is a gift the next generation. We’ve never seen elders whose life hums with this wisdom. So after all these years of spiritual seeking, we are healthier than ever, and we still feel like we will be cheated if death comes for us now. The harsh truth is, we will always feel this way unless we embrace our death as medicine, as a a gift that allows life to come into being.
Death is a creative act. We won’t fear it if we see our death as an act that let’s the future come into being, to see our death as an act of magic that creates the future. And one of the mysteries is, our life does the same thing! So we have to life fully, awake, with purpose, and try to carry a community mindset. We have to have spiritual practices that allow us to move into ecstasy, into feeling integrated into the whole, into oneness. These practices have to teach us how to pull back into our body, into our sense of self, so the oneness experience can be integrated into our daily life, into how we move in and engage with the world. Anything less than this will leave us pursuing a life with a “less than” purpose. We may develop a purpose but it won’t be on a soul level. So if we don’t work to find ecstasy and see our personal Death as our medicine, we will live in a state of Fear. We will live in despair.
This is all I have been able glean. We have a choice. We carry our death as medicine and as a creative force, or we have despair. It is really that simple. How to do this, well that is something we haven’t been taught. So we work at it :>)
We have to find the sacred in this virus. It is a force of Nature that is keeping the oneness of our Earth strong and healthy. We have stolen energy and life from future generations to fuel our ego (I am speaking of all of humanity here). And the Earth is putting an end to that thievery. This one virus won’t do it, but this is just one thing unfolding as consequence. The spiritual act of bypassing the ego and finding oneness, changes our behavior. And we are all lacking that experience to guide our lives. We are out of balance. And we are causing harm with all that we do. We have to change the road we’re on. We all understand this. It is why we are all seeking paganism/animism. There is something in there about living in harmony with Nature. There are practices that teach us how to bypass the ego and experience communion with the gods. Our current traditions are weak, but we have an ancestral memory of life being different, of strong traditions, or elders who carried real wisdom. And we are drawn to it. This is where we are at. And if we hold true to relearning and reawakening our spiritual practices, we can gift that to the next generation. And that is a strong purpose :>) That is carrying our living and our dying as medicine.
Peace, beauty, and inspiration,
Kevin /|\
The Animist Druid 