Ironically, death can help us with this conundrum. Death can help us live life more fully. It can help us go from mere survivor to resolute thriver. It puts life into perspective by teaching the living that everything is dying, everything is fleeting, everything is changing. Nothing is set. Nothing will last. This includes, most especially, the self.
When we realize that the self is not fixed, we see how living life half-alive is correlated to clinging to a fixed sense of self (rigidity) and how living life more fully is correlated to embracing the unfolding, evolving, ever-changing self (flexibility). We see how embracing the life-death-rebirth cycle of the self is the key to vital thriving.
Embracing the unfolding self is an initiation into wholeness (individuation, self-actualization, enlightenment). Sometimes, the unfolding of the self must be put into motion by the initiate. Other times, fate, destiny, and the vicissitudes of life force the initiate into unfolding. Either way, the death of the old self is an important experience as it becomes the compost from which the new self is reborn.
Deathproofing is a profound way of creating the ideal environment for the life-death-rebirth process to unfold into wholeness. The fractal self fractalizes. Deathproofing is a way of gleaning wisdom from the fractalization.
Deathproofing is a hard reset. It’s an existential overhaul which causes spiritual upheaval. It’s a kickstart toward wholeness, a tripwire out of comfortable self-preservation and into self-improvement.
Heraclitus proposed the idea that all change comes through contradiction. Referring to the idea of opposite thinking as a Becoming, in which opposites are related, he wrote, “opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.” So too with deathproofing. Out of metaphorical death comes a more harmonized life.
As the great Virgil analogized, “Death twitches my ear. ‘Live,’ he says, ‘I am coming.’”...<<<Read More>>>...