You cannot deny what is to come to your life, but you can delay it. Our destiny is written in the stars, whispered in the wind, seen in the trails beneath the trees. Our willingness to accept what life offers is a reflection of our fearlessness and faith, our courage, and surrender. The virtues that help our soul evolve fertilize the soil in the depths of our heart. In cultivating virtuous thoughts, words, and actions, we change the vibration of our frequency.
The world is made of sound and vibration. Each emotion felt, each thought that comes to our mind, each action performed with our hands carries its own message, through unheard and unseen waves and frequencies. Those who are sensitive to this invisible are said to have a strong intuition. They are attuned to their non-intellectual mind.
For millennia, the mind has been studied and examined in the forests, atop mountains, near rivers and in the deserts of past civilizations. The most visible record of this study is in India. The modern flowering of yoga and meditation is the result of seeds planted many millennia ago and spiritual revelation further back. For many centuries, these insights into the spiritual nature of man lived in ashrams and monasteries. Buddhism left India for over two thousand years, surviving in temples and forest communities throughout Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. When the British arrived in the late eighteenth-century, their program of colonialism attempted to wipe out much of the ancient yogic knowledge that remained. In its place, ignorance arose.
Truth is a candle that lights a dark world. Like a moth attracted to a flame, the darkness in the world actually seeks out the light. Vices and virtues vibrate in a symbiotic relationship. Darkness and light have an inverse, not oppositional, nature. When darkness and light meet, light does not dominate and force darkness to submit, it removes the possibility of darkness to exist.
Meeting darkness with a force of resistance creates disharmony. It exacerbates what is already out of alignment. Like a mother who speaks with love to her angry child, light changes the vibration of darkness, creating harmony and union.
As a parent, this reality is ever-present in the daily trials of childrearing. The calm, peaceful union of father and mother is necessary for a newborn, infant, or child to feel safe to grow. The connection between the parents is the primary vibration felt by the child. The day-to-day environment is established by the adults to enter into a relationship and agree, despite the strains of sleep loss, economic challenges, and personal grievances, to maintain a vibration of peace and harmony for the sake of the children.
In this way, parenting is a spiritual path. The transformation of a boy into a man is truly from a boy into a father, for while one can become a man without becoming a father, you can not be a father without being a man. Being responsible for one’s self in the world is a primary necessity to be available to others the way being a father requires.
The faiths of the world offer instruction, guidance, and techniques to unite the darkness and the light within each of us. The truth of a path can only be measured by where it leads, and in the case of spiritual work, the degree to which transformation is possible. The results provide evidence for faith, but faith requires belief.
Personal transformation is not bound by time. One may experience a flash of revelation that redirects their life from that point forward. Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is an archetypal example of this. More often and more common, however, is the slow, arduous, and difficult work of transformation that takes place over years, decades, and lifetimes. We can be sure that whether the transformation appears to take place in a moment or over many moons, it is a culmination of many lifetimes of the soul’s journey.
For many people today, the soul is not part of the constitution of man. Generally, we think of ourselves as the physical body and the mind, the thoughts and ideas that we think. As a result of Euro-centric rationalism, the mind has been elevated in most people’s image of what it means to be human. Not only what it means to be human, but by limiting what is real to what the mind construes of the world through the five senses, what is reality. By means of colonialism, these thoughts and ideas have spread to nearly every corner of the globe. Except in rare and occasional places, resistance only slowed the adoption of white-centric, European rationalist conception of the world. This campaign of dominance was carried out in the name of Christianity and with many acts of brutality and inhumane violence to the land, the rivers, the animals, and all of creation. Even though colonial expansion grew based on an ethos far removed from the teachings of Christ, or any other spiritual teacher, the ugly history has led to most separating themselves from notions of faith or spirituality. The wrongs of history are self-evident and we live with the consequences today. They are scars on the collective soul of man.
Today there is a battle of dominance and demonic dispossession of the soul happening within each of us. One does not need to look to the past or global affairs. Indeed, looking into history or the present actions of world leaders absolves our role in what the world is today. It is a form of denial, deeply rooted, like a weed that has grown tall with a strong and thick trunk. It is of little help to prune the leaves or cut the branches of an unwelcome or invasive plant. One needs to go beyond cutting the stalk at the base. Even digging the dirt and exposing the roots is not enough. One must remove the plant at the root. In life and in the heart, this transformation requires purity.
Through observation transformation is possible. Observation is a state of separation between the constant judgment, justification, and self-assuredness of the rational, conscious mind. Our perceptions are colored by our experiences, our likes and dislikes, our attractions and aversions. When we are entangled in these old patterns of the mind, we are closed to what life is offering us at that moment. When we are unavailable to what life is offering us, we are lost at sea.
The first step of cultivating the awareness of observation is to create a connection with the breath. And here lies our first lesson. Awareness and connection are not to be conflated with control. You do not actually need to do anything. As soon as you are trying, your mind begins a journey away from the present moment. Effortless effort. No mind. Sit like the Buddha. A firm resolve to be still. Enter into silence. Resolve is different from effort. It is a knowing from deep within.
The path of transformation takes place inside. Inside, it is dark. There is light, but when you start on the path, you cannot see the light. It is dark, and the path is unknown. What is unknown frightens the mind, becoming full of fear and doubt. To be transformed, the fear and doubt that resides in our hearts must be brought to the light.
Transformation of the mind is an unraveling, like a thread of a blanket being pulled. The unraveling can happen quickly or slowly, but one must surrender to it for the effects of the transformation to emerge. What must be surrendered is fear.
What is fear? Fear is a state of mind that is constricted. It feels unsafe. It does not trust. It looks for what is unsettling and magnifies it. Ultimately, each of us fears what we do not know. What we do not know lies in the limits of our awareness. We are aware that we will one day leave this body. Death is as assured for each of us as anything in life. But we do not know when death will visit us. We do not know when we will receive a reminder of death, through illness or the loss of a loved one, whether death will come for us swiftly or through slow suffering, and we hope when our time comes we will be at peace.
When death comes, all our attachments, conceptions of ourselves, ideas of who we are, lose their meaning. So the path of transformation requires us to begin the work of death while we are living. Otherwise, we will make truth the old axiom: we will die having never truly lived.
Death is the great remover of illusion. It brings awareness to our consciousness of what is true and real. In this way, death is a great teacher. It comes to us only when it is time for us to transform once again. It does not come a moment too soon or too late. From the moment we incarnate through birth, we are walking towards death. And since death is the remover of illusion, death brings us to freedom.
We can choose to become partners with death. While we are living, we may develop a relationship with death, in the small and big ways it visits our life, in the cycles of creation and decay we all experience. We may learn, grow, transform, and truly live through the knowledge gained by death.
Birth is only a form of death. The birth of a child is a form of death. No longer is life experienced in the safety of the womb, in the comfort of the embryonic fluids, in the experience of the upside-down nature of a fetus. Before a child is born, they know nothing of the moon and the sun, of the rain and the clouds, of the mountains and rivers. To experience the beauty of life on Earth, the child-to-be must choose to leave the known and enter into the unknown. In this act, a fetus transforms into a baby. As life moves towards death, as the soul gives up the body; it is no different.
Death is a passageway. Through it, we enter into the possibility of freedom. Without it, life would lose all meaning. For it is when something ends that we gain an understanding of the experience.
None of us know what the experience of death will bring. Our ideas of death are colored by our belief, our faith, our ideas of ourselves, and the nature of reality. These ideas are ultimately individual. Nonetheless, we know that despite our not knowing of the true nature of death, it is a reality we will all experience.
The true power of death is one of transformation. What was once living is dead, what was moving is still, what made noise is now quiet. And being aware of the balance of life, the cause and effect nature of things, we can see that with death, life returns. Death is not an end but a transition to a new form of life.
Death is our ever-faithful companion. As a baby grows into a child, they are constantly shedding an old self, replaced with something new, at once more full of life. Crawling transforms to walking, coos turn to babble which becomes speech, nursing becomes the taking of food. Without the end of one behavior, the baby would not grow. What we see as growth is brought forth through a kind of dying.
Perhaps a more useful image is that of a seed, planted in the earth. Below the ground it is dark, and buried deep the seed is still. If we could see into the soil, the seed would appear lifeless. But in this cocoon state, the seed transforms. In the darkness, shoots, and roots emerge, and without having seen the light, something within seeks the light. By the time the first green breaks through the earth, the seed no longer is. The seed has died, but the plant now lives.
It does not seem the seed, or the plant, is aware of what has taken place. Human beings, gifted with consciousness, can witness this transformation of the seed; each in oneself. Awareness is required for transformation to take place.
We become aware through observation of what is dying and being born in our life. We can see what once frightened us no longer holds us in fear, and recognize the change that has taken place. We can hold compassion where we once felt anger, joy where sorrow once lived, attention replacing distraction. Through this recognition comes our own transformation. This may not represent a great change, but many small changes can result in a wholly new life. By relinquishing the small, mundane moments of life, we prepare for the great transformation that is death.