The Cycles and Transformation of Life

Life it is a mysterious as well as intense ride, but there seems to be some predictability in the mist of the uncertainty. By finding out these predictable moments in life we are in a better position to empower our own lives and not only, play by the rules of life but align our goals with these moments of predictability. The first thing we should go over is the issue of death and what we can do about applying the lessons of death, in our lives. Why we are so fearful of death and how we can become liberated and associate death with liberation instead of loss. The next thing we should go over is the concept of new beginnings or a new life, after all death itself is the beginning of something new.

We will begin to see how the lesson of new beginnings can be applied in our lives and its nature. Afterward, it is important to go over the balance that we should maintain when living life, this is the middle ground where we live our daily lives, where death and life come together and we must be able to see the system as a whole from this position. It is my hope that you can take out from this a new perspective on such profound issues and in doing so, liberate yourself from the ebbs and flows of life. I often trying to consciously live subconsciously, in other words, I try to see the symbolism in life where most people only see what they literally see in front of them.

Death

Death is the negative aspect to living. We react to death, endings and loss, sometimes for the best or sometimes for the worst. The time of death is equivalent to pain and suffering but effectively allows us to introspect and reflect upon our lives.

We all know the feelings of pain and suffering that occur often after losing a loved one, or the loss of sometime in your life. Endings are hard if they were pleasurable and easy to overcome if they were something that brought about discomfort. However, something that is very real and very close to reality is pain and suffering. This is not because the nature of reality is like that but rather because we have become cut-off from the reality (whether worldly or spiritual) of things.

Consider this, you once had a line of thought that often gave you reassurance about the world you lived in, it was a worldview that made you feel comfortable about living. Suddenly your line of thinking that once gave you re-assurance in your life was proven wrong, through some event, anything like losing someone very close to you to reading a book that just blew you away. This triggers a miniature death through ending something that once made you feel safe. This causes much pain and suffering.

The question for you of course is, how will you respond to this event? Will you respond in a healthy manner or unhealthy manner? In this event, at least in my personal experience, the healthy manner with dealing in this event would be to investigate and go deeper than what you once thought was true. An unhealthy manner to respond, at least in my experience, would be to become completely nihilistic.

Thus death, endings, and losses are designed to trigger a reaction in your life. In my own time, my experience with the loss of two loved ones, close in time was enough to trigger a reaction in me to wake up, grow up and stop living like child. Of course, looking back on it I felt that I had preformed the right or healthy manner in responding to loss. If you lost your mother, father and siblings that would make you act in a seriously different manner than before the event happened.

If you lost your job, you would act differently and that different acting is the reaction to loss. If a time in your life ended, and you continued to act like as if it still exists than you will most likely only feel the pain and suffering of trying to bring back to life something that was meant to end.

Death brings a time for Introspection and Reflection upon everything thus far and makes you see who you really are at this time of death. Introspecting is the act of questioning yourself, to see your faults and weakness and trying to find a new way to overcome these lower parts of you. The act of Reflection allows you to see the good times you had before death came around, but also allows you to see the causes and effects of your actions.

By Causes and Effects what I meant to say is, when you look at what you are thus far in your life (effects) you take the time to explore why and what made you act this way, which are the causes. Now that death has come, in some way or form, you can use that power to really figure why you are the way you are and act the way you act. By looking at the causes you are in a position to change your life for the better and begin to move on.

Once you have finally explored the causes and effects of your actions you should now begin the work of reconciling the Old to Embrace the New. This is done by, turning a current disadvantage into an advantage. If for example the events of death had made you realize that you are always angry all the time, than remind yourself of your own death and ask yourself, is it worth it being angry all the time, throughout your life? You reconcile the old to embrace the new by simply strongly desiring to do something against your old behavior, by using the energies of death as a means to do so, until you find a reason to do it for its own sake. (REMEMBER, that last sentence!)

You need to cancel out old thoughts to essentially die to old/destructive self that has held you down. By doing this you begin to take the real work and apply it successfully to anything. So peace replaces anger; vice is replaced by some virtue -- etc. You see how you are putting an end certain things about yourself, that once held you down from living life all the more, the reminders death brings us, tells us all the time to better appreciate life and living and I hope this has done that for you.

New Life

Life is obviously the positive aspect to living. Full of novelty and potential, this side of life overall is pro-active in which we see things we would want to go towards. The new life aspect is ruled and largely determined by introspection on current events and future goals. The new life aspect is one in which we seek to live life to the fullest, in this step we essentially have accomplished the death stage and overcame that which held us back, the focus here is now upon asking what do you want, that you never experienced or felt closed to experienced before?

Life, we know those moments that are just great, they transcend our worries and cares and we wish we could live in these forever, unfortunately we cannot. But perhaps we can transform our lives in a way that would allow us to have these moments more often. In order to those moments we must understand first that these moments are positive and substantial in our lives, despite how transitory it maybe. Next we must grasp the substance of these experiences.

The first one that all should be able to agree with is that these moments are filled with novelty and life and because of that we feel invigorated by them. Novelty is the key here. With a new life or new beginnings comes with it, new experiences. You need newness, but one should not be impatient to have it. When you have experienced something new it is not meant to be held and then quickly made bored by it, only to turn your attention to the next newest thing. Rather, you are meant to enjoy it and think about it, both consciously and sub-consciously or what it literally does for you and what it does for you symbolically or underneath the surface.

The next half to life is aspiration; it is what drives us to live and live not just with what little we have (I'm speaking of material possessions). The truth is when you have these awe-inspiring moments you are filled with a sense of completion of your goal(s). The almost orgasmic state of "It's finally done" brings with it a release of energy that allows us to transcend all the hardships of our time, making something worth our time. You have climbed the mountain of your aspiration, and from the mountaintop you see everything below you clearly and above you only the sun shines down upon you. You have made it, the completion of your goal and the struggle of your dream to realize your goals has reached its highest point and in that moment all seems as it should be and good.

Thus it has become apparent, that the new life you lead is meant to be lived pro-actively and not reactively. New goals and aspirations are laid down and with those being realized you live life all the more. In the previous section you looked at the example of someone who had to deal with death and associated loss with anger and rage, they sought to make amends after realizing through the loss that life is not worth being enraged all the time or every time you loss something, they then sought to make a change in the way they think (reaction) by seeking to replace anger with peace and love. Now in this section, let us use this person's suffering, change and desire to live a new life in the context of what they can potentially experience from this new life.

This person now has peace and love and although anger is part of the human personality, it has been reduced in its power to affect his life negatively. Now this person must ask the question, "With my ability to love and make peace in my life, what things can I do now with this love and peacemaking gift?" Let us assume this person finds out they wish to make amends with a friend or family member or perhaps find a new activity that they wished to do in their life that they thought they would love to do but always felt held down when it came time to do it. Whatever the choice is here, it will lead to this person to have at least one new experience with many mini-experiences within it, thus increasing novelty in one's life and leading to the realization of goals.

Personally if I was that person, I would most likely have sought out to make amends with a friend or family member, to me I would feel like that is the least I could do after experiencing loss, in my mind it would be symbolic as well as a real gesture of letting hatred and difficulty with a person be dissolved and effectively end a time that was associated with the person or thing before the loss occurred. This would also effectively liberate even more energy, releasing anger and rage and acting upon the persons desire to grow in love and peace.

Thus it becomes apparent that the goal of the individual is to know who you are while on the new life side. Do not get me wrong, our real selves come out when hard times, suffering and struggling emerges, those are tests of our true character and strength. But by knowing yourself you breathe new life into yourself as you become more aware of the reality that is yourself. With new goals and aspirations comes with it a new way to know who you really are. Of course knowing yourself takes honesty and introspection, or the ability to question your views about who you are and the abilities you have.

You need to be able to see your future when planning out these goals. They should be believable to you. Sometimes we think our goals are different and separate from each other, but this is not true. Every goal compliments or affects another goal in some way. If you have two goals and they seem contradicting, reconcile the differences or arrive to a new higher position that has both goals in mind. You need a plan, remember you are trying to plan your future here; you want to make sure everything in this plan compliments everything else. Keep in mind, it is alright to leave things to chance, life will manifest what you are looking for, do not feel like you have to micro-manage how and when but just be general and open to any new experiences that float your way and try to tie them to your goals, in order to maximize your ability to learn from the experiences.

Part of the novelty experience is the desire to be open to new thoughts and feelings. If you always felt bad when something (you see as) bad happened to you, try to see how it can be good and try to see what thoughts go through your mind if you felt good about it.

The goal here also is to build a life that is pre-dominantly based on going towards something not running away from something. This is largely because when you go towards something (love) you will not stop until you get there, this is life which is a constant striving. Whereas if you are based everything about your life on the idea of running away from something else (fear) than you will stop as soon as the fear has resided, but if it returns than you will only runaway until it resides, this process will repeat itself but you will not be living but rather dead, because you are enslaved to your fears.

The Balance

The trick to living is balance. We live in world in which we are always walking between the extremes. The ultimate walk we make is between life and death, whether these are the literal interpretations or the metaphorical interpretations for our lives.

We need the reminder of death, pain, loss, and suffering to remind us of what really is important in life and to humble us. In our current society hedonism runs rampant and so does the fear of death, this fear cripple our ability to appreciate life. Fear of death is equivalent to being fearful of pain and loss, I do not see our fear of death just at surface level, and I see it as an ongoing metaphor of our lives at this point in human history. Mixed with the western society's desire to escape pains and enjoy pleasures, this only adds fuel to the fire. We are a dead society if we cannot appreciate death and the power it has it affect us in a positive manner.

Likewise we should not be as serious and concerned and should remember that we are still living and because of this fact we have the ability to change our lives for the better. However, life, pleasure, and gains are only part of the equation to enjoying life. Our society wants instant gratification, and over-indulgence in pleasure and gain, we always want more. This desire for instant gratification, like death, I choose not to see at just the surface level but also as a sub-conscious and in effect metaphorical level as well. We want more, more sex, more money, more possessions, and more violence. This is impulsive and animalistic behavior. We think we are humans, but we are acting more like a super evolved rational animals, that might I add is being de-sensitized with each passing day through the bombardment of subliminal and implicit propaganda of our time. The old threshold's that our great-grandparents once had have been risen so much in today's world that if our great-grandparents were alive today they would have been taken back a whole lot. Thus an impulsive over-indulgence in the pleasures of life does not make us really live but kills us as human beings!

Thus you have come to the new awareness, that life brings death and death brings new life. I do not want you to be fooled obviously life is a wonderful and mysterious thing, but by indulging too much in it makes you numb to reality and kills you, even if not physically but in your psycho-spiritual capacity to truly be grateful for life. Likewise I do not want you to be fooled; you should not be a sadist finding pleasure in pain, for this than is still a pleasure and will make you numb to reality. However, you should be able to appreciate things that you lost and struggles that you endured, regardless of the pain. You must find a balance, what I have outlined below is a little technique I created to help in that process of doing so, for me it was inspired by contemplating the spiritual journey of the New Testament.

A Technique to a New and Balanced Life:

Step 1: Looking Back from your current position in time to a pre-determined time in the past, look at the person you have become, in particular look at the parts you do not like, the parts you wish to let go of in order to end this time in your life. For example, let say a person had experienced death of a loved one 7 years ago and this death trigger immense change in that person. Now that person seeks to change and grow again, what that person may seek to change is not what is good about them but what holds them back, say an addiction or an old way of thinking and acting that is becoming immature or destructive in some way, this is what that person will seek to put an end to.

Step 2: React to your old way of thinking by Canceling out the old thoughts and actions with their opposites. Once you have looked at the person you have become, in regards to your bad side, ask yourself if you really want to be that or want to be better than that. This is often the opposite of what you have become. For example, let's say the same person who had experienced the loss of a loved had turned that grief into rage and now anytime the person experiences any form of loss (whether trivial or profound) that person will experience rage as well. What this person will seek to do in order to cancel out this destructive thought pattern is simply associate loss not with rage but with openness to learn from his experience of loss. This fulfills the time of the death stage; of course there will most likely be more than one problem that we would find that we had developed over the course of even a year let alone 7 years. Now once you have replaced or changed your thoughts and actions you should begin the process of seeking a New Life.

Step 3: The New Life Stage begins here, this is a time of asking yourself what you want to experience or wish to have that while in your old life you never could get whether your thoughts and actions and in effect your circumstances didn't allow you or because you were not interested in the experience at the time. For example, now that the person has associated loss with learning instead of rage, that person can now be open to a new experience of something they had failed to master in their old life, like say, fishing. If the person always failed and experienced the loss of never catching a fish, he now devotes his energy to learning how to better catch a fish rather than just being enraged and frustrated over it.

Step 4: Act on your new life goals, work towards them and not only will you get out of the lowest valley but you will achieve to the highest mountain top. Now the new goal is set, not only will the person learn how to finally catch a fish but they will now be the best fish catcher around. The results re-affirm the means and stronger bonds are built with the new life and the thoughts and feelings there in.

Step 5: The New Life of positive experiences brought together with the old life of negative experiences create a whole life in which the individual's energy and creativity becomes liberated. At this final stage it simply becomes a time of "trimming hedges" and "tying up loose ends" but it is nonetheless a time of success. So for example, the great fisherman that person has become remembers the loss and the associated rage and after all this time they will be awe struck that they managed to actually free themselves from the destructive actions of rage, because of this they will be humbled. So not only are they successful but now are able to maintain a degree of humility, this is all of course based on their goals and decisions.

Conclusion

The conclusion to draw here is that life is a series of events that are covered with Death-like events and Life-like aspirations. Death is a new beginning and life is a higher level of awareness. Death brings new beginnings, and life brings death. The two works together, fear them not, rejoice in life and preserve in death. After contemplating upon the mechanism or substance of change, this little technique will hopefully bring to you a life worth living and experiencing.