One of the more startling things, as I age, is understanding more and more about the dimensions of transformation.
If it were to be a holistic thing, transformation really could not be uni-dimensional anyway. It is not hard to observe that decline, of one kind or another, is simply evidence of a much longer process — one that is actually creating or re-creating, or perhaps even better said, rebirthing…something new. Even death, then, is just one of the steps in such on-going transformation. Or, perhaps to put it this way, death is simply transformation.
But, you can almost viscerally feel a culture reactionary thud to this notion, can't you? So, why is it that we resist understanding death in this way?
Most of human existence, including its main historical religions, have ended up accepting some version of this reality. But, a lot of Americana is organized away from this reality. YOLO is just one version of that resistance. Obey Your Thirst is another. There are many more, actually. And, the stacking effect of them all truncates something important about what it really means to live or, at the very least, to understand what it is that is really alive.
We do not, in fact, live this independently. We are not only totally immersed in moment-by-moment inter-dependence, but also in a time-transcending inter-dependence. But, unfortunately, it is quite true that we are not trained to see this, nor to accept it. It is as if such an idea would be too limiting against the fantasy we maintain about our self-importance.
Our western-leaning inability to acknowledge this directly translates to our disposition of consumption as a measure of success, which thereby shapes our working definitions of what a good life even is. A good life, to so many, is simply what we can get out of it — what we can consume in it. Not to what we can give to it or to what we need to do to nurture it, for the sake of something much larger and longer in frame of reference. We primarily live for the now. The past is primitive or stupid. The future is likely unknowable and foreboding. So, all we have is now and let's, therefore, seize-the-day and consume it...or, so it is said.
Transformation, though, is a kind of longer-term participation in something that, accordingly, is often hard to track, particularly within the confines of things like time. But, the limitations are really more on the instrumentation we tend to use than on the reality itself. We all are in process of becoming something. Some see it in the reverse; that we are all in the process of un-becoming something (which also seems descriptively accurate). If the thing that we think we have become is actually in need of some degree of disposal, we find that we more largely are only discovering what we always have been (once that process really gets going). All we've ended up doing, along the way, is disguising it for one reason or another.
The process involved, though, seems to require (if not assume)...continue here.
