XIII-Death

I need you to come to a very basic understanding and a very challenging acceptance. You don’t have to hold onto it as belief, but you do if even for just this moment, have to know that it exists in the full realm of possibility—even probability—and during that one moment of knowing, you cannot run away from it.

Ready?

You are going to die.

And there is a distinct possibility that when you die there is nothing else. That’s it. Life lived. Game over. This being that you are ceases to exist and becomes something else.

Maybe your energy moves forward in a recognizable way. Lets call that the soul. But maybe your energy becomes something else entirely and your elements get digested and pooled into the common continuum of universal usefulness. You could be the next star. Or the next drop of water. Everything that was you could very easily disappear and you as you understand you vanishes.

Scary thought, right?

As humans we tend to stop right there and start to make excuses. The mind is not built to process extinction of the ego. It is, for the most part, a system of preservation. It does not have an innate understanding of becoming anything other than what it is in this reality, therefore any possibility that it may end completely must be rejected. Systems of faith are built around transcending death with the ego intact. Mundane systems are created to attempt to deny death its power. Slowly but surely we humans have cast death as an evil that must be eradicated so that we can prevent the process for as long as possible—possibly forever.

Life is everything. Death is nothing. It is a war that we fight with every bit of our mental and egoistic power. But remember…

You are going to die. And the thinking that we can somehow negate that reality thrusts us back into lower mind duality. Which we have now spent most of the Major Arcana learning to transcend. All spirituality revolves around learning to move beyond base ego and into an understanding that duality is just an operating system. Unity is the reality. We already saw that all of creation is the Wheel—Death is just a piece of that.

You are going to die and everything that you are is going to become something else. There is no escaping this, and the effort to do so limits your evolution on a massive scale.

If you take this macro concept and dial it down to micro behaviours, you can see that our fear of death is what keeps us locked into sets of circumstances and behaviour patterns. We tend to calcify and start to view all change as bad change. We start to believe that if only, somehow, we can keep things from dying—be they physical, situational, economic, relational—that somehow we can muscle things into being precisely what we want. Things can stay the same forever.

But here is the problem with that. Life is a cycle, one. And humans are notoriously shitty at knowing what they really want, two. All that mental processing power and we tend to use it to create static situations that don’t allow us to evolve. Because its scary. And we don’t know what is on the other side of that evolution. Zero control.

I get it. But collectively (and very much individually), we have to take Death back. We have to befriend Death. We have to see it as the great Recycler and the one process that we can absolutely count on to clear the way for something utterly new. It has to happen. So whether Death shows up for you as actual death or as a symbol of a major clearing and release, take heart. This is part of our evolutionary process and it needs to show up for you as both a joy and a transition.

Death is our first test where we get a breath to be the Fool one more time. Only this time we know so much, and yet, we know jack shit. Nobody knows what is on the other side of death. And that’s fucking amazing. You get to be freed from a certain type of bondage—the bondage of doubt. And you get to move into a real trust.

Nobody knows what lies ahead. But there is no way to go back. So close your eyes, and be scared, and do it anyway.