When choices come to us as the result of a critical moment and the possibility of a new choice in our lives appears, we can fear that moment. The fear almost if not always rises out of a meaning perspective of identity defending itself against dissolution and a kind of death. Because these elements of identity define themselves so completely against the material and the dominator, they feel that if they don't maintain that materiality and superiority, that kind of power, it means the end. In their transfixed state, they do not sense the transformative and liberating possibilities of choice and becoming. We can feel compassion for this element of our being, and we can help that element of our being not through despising it and wishing its end but by our knowing there is no death or dissolution within our whole being and our becoming self. Transformation denies the very idea of death and dissolution. No matter what ashes we feel we might come to, we will rise out of them in transformation to reach into new choices and into new becoming. Even as the universe itself continues in its own creative state, we can also continue in our own creative state.
Eugene O'Neill, a man who testifies often and eloquently to the pain and confusions of life, wrote a play in which he seeks to find something transformative in his and our experience: Lazarus Laughed. In that play, Lazarus says the following: "Death is dead! Fear is no more! There is only life!" Lazarus had come to that transformative revelation because he experienced an actual resurrection through divine intervention. Such transformative moments can come to us with or without what we feel as an existent Divine. It can come to us because such an experience and thus belief forms an integral part of our lives and living. It forms in our beginning and becoming, our birth into life and living out our lives wherein we each undergo transformations that bring us from one state of consciousness and becoming into another state of consciousness and becoming. Each stage might seem as if the previous stage or stages die, but that never happens. There is no such death, no such dissolution. It is an illusion created by meaning perspectives and their illusory interpretation of life and the world.
Such an experience came to me just last year, and I attempted to sort it out for myself then and now in this writing.
It seems to me now, that I can't believe as much as I do in the inherent and essential value of every human life without having a belief in the Divine and in the survival of personal identity beyond material death. It occurs to me now that we have already survived such death or deaths within the material web of life and its connection to the eternal Divine and the eternal self.
I remember my past in a very fragmented way. This has not come to me through aging. I cannot remember remembering which rather makes it own tautology of validity in its own terms.
At some very early age, well before twenty and maybe before my teens, I thought about identity, my identity, and its survival. What a paradox. I felt deeply that death was preferable to the suffering I felt, and simultaneously, I wanted desperately for my identity to survive that very death. Did I feel some unspoken but intrinsic belief that some essential quality of identity would survive and find itself stripped of the nature of my suffering? Did I feel an instinctive or intuitive sense that my suffering was connected more with my life as one of having and what would survive after death would emerge with my full sense of the being of my life? In any case, I lived in that inchoate paradox of immediate and liminal survival and wondered if any time in the future, I would have changed so much that the then current sense of my life would, to all intents and purposes, be dead in some very real way. In all the suffering of my daily life, I dreaded and feared the idea. All that suicidal ideation, as the phrase goes, and I still dreaded the illusory dissolution of that same contemplative self even as I wished its conclusion. I didn't want to be dead in one way and alive in another. This thought reoccurred many, many times, and it has come to visit me again.
This early and deeply painful and confused and depressive contemplation, our contemplation, my contemplation on the nature of a real material death and extinction and the illusory material pretense of life and continuity returns to me at sixty-four although it has never left me.
I was and am right. We die even as we live. I do not feel and think in the very way as I did as this person in memory. That person did die in the real sense he feared. Yet his fear was founded on his fear of losing the very thing he wanted to lose: endless, immediate, and crushing suffering with nothing compensatory but the hope of something after suffering, after death. It did come, the kind of death and release from that kind of suffering and turned to be the long process of dying and rebirthing out of which life, my life, can come and has come to be lived. Death happens all the time as we move more fully and inevitably toward living. Death comes when the detritus of our having self transforms and forms part of our being self, the self that the young and deeply pained and lonely me and the older and freer and loving me were and are the same self. He lives in me as I once lived in him in some sort of escape from space and time to make a connection in the eternity to which we all were and are bound. In that eternity, the selves, identities, egos, of all our desperate, disparate, and distanced times of life will find themselves as the one, the unity they have always been.
We are reincarnate in ourselves any number of times, too many to imagine and perhaps even want to imagine.
I feel such compassion for that young person and his pain, for the me I was and am. He and his pain are not alien to me even now, and I can understand that in all the scattered, shattered, and tangled memories I find, my first happy moment in memory came at twelve when he and I were drunk for the first time, and all that pain seemed so far away: life from the wrong end of the telescope. I no longer need a telescope, or want a telescope. Now, I immerse myself in life and living, in the joy of being. In that joy, all of the suffering manifestations of my earlier life find their place in the unity of my and our whole being.
It's not that life in the material world is an illusion. It is our response to it, how we think and feel about that world that constitutes the illusion. It is the having nature of the material world that is the illusion not the being nature in the same world.