How Suicide, Death & Grief Revealed Love & Beauty
The challenge of writing this seems immense, beyond my ability to put it into a coherent stream of thought. I am motivated/inspired to write and wonder, why? What sparked this impulse?
It is autumn. Leaves are turning brilliant. Beauty is everywhere, always. Today, yellow, gold, red and orange blend with the shades of green she has worn for many months now. Is it the change of seasons that rekindles the journey into the heart of darkness?
Perhaps it is the fear, panic and depression that is gripping many. Unemployment, investment losses and economic woe beset us from all sides. Is the ubiquitous cynicism getting to me?
Maybe it’s the challenges of personal happiness and fulfillment I see many suffering for.
No matter, the dismal, dark shades of despondency and hopelessness are arising and my soul is afire, blazing with love and beauty.
How is this possible?
Whatever Happened to the Cynic?
Where did the cynic go? I’ve been cynical for as long as I can remember. I recall an exploration into my cynic. It was maybe 8 years ago. That rascal lived in a world view that had an atmosphere like 18th century London – skies dark, gray and sooty. A haggard and hackneyed self suffering the dismal and dreary.
Don’t get me wrong, this view was not conscious 24/7. But it was there, in the velvet underground of my unconscious sapping energy and blurring my vision. Without even knowing it, the quality of my life was being diminished.
Today, I notice the cynic is like leaded glass. I can see the light coming through and it is the light that I resonate with not the opacity.
That Pain is Our Best Friend
My best friend was beautiful. When we met, the connection was deep and immediate. The type of experience that gives the notion of reincarnation a strong foundation to stand on. The freedom in the friendship was beyond our combined imaginations. Acceptance and appreciation were in every interaction and the quiet delight in our friendship only grew though we lived thousands of miles apart.
Her experience with ovarian cancer, was challenging and life-enhancing. Though her body withered and suffered both she and her body became more and more radiant and translucent. When she died, all hell broke loose in me.
Oh, that pain. I believe it takes us all by surprise – our capacity to feel pain and loss. There were many, many moments of remembering and love and appreciation AND then the pain, a grief and grieving to a depth of self unknown to me. I came to understand that the depth of pain spoke to the depth of the love.
I became curious about that pain, about why it seemed to be easier to stay with the pain than the love. I came to see that my self, who I knew myself to be historically, could stay intact with the pain. I could suffer with the pain.I could lament, and mourn, feel loss and devastation – the ruin of my heart. But, the love, when freed from the constraints of a remembering mind was of a whole different dimension.
With the love, I glowed. And the glow became a radiance. And soon I was not there, there was only radiance and radiance is more of what I really am than this person writing these words, the mind that knows the words, or the body that can be seen and felt. Love will disappear us and though that sounds lovely, it is anything but to a self that wants to survive, choose and control.
The Curious Experience of Self-hate
Before discovering the cynic or the transformational power of pain, there was the death wish. Times were were not bad, there was no time. There was just the endless pit of shit that I seemed to have gotten myself into and the hopelessness of life ever being anything else but a pile of shit. Of course, this was because I was seeing and experiencing myself as a pile of shit.
Self-hatred is a very powerful force. Rarely do we allow ourselves to explore self-hatred and understandably so. Without proper support and guidance we might act out the self-hatred and damage or kill the object of that hatred – ourselves.
It was a curious experience for me to be shaving one morning and have a suicidal thought pass through my mind. I grew up in a family that had a lot of judgment around suicide. In fact, there was a lot of judgment around a lot of things and very little curiosity about anything real. We preferred the known to the not-known. It feels more secure to believe we know. Sadly, most of what is known and taught is limited, distorted and disorganized safely within the comfortable, familiar realm of ignorance.
That suicidal thought captured my imagination. I began to dwell on it. And soon, I discovered myself going into the heart of darkness – not a very safe place for someone in such a vulnerable state with a lot of self-hatred running amok.
I was having a very interesting experience. In a way, I was two people. One of me was a curious observer, a me that really wanted to know more about these powerful dark forces assailing the other me. The other me, was the part that identified with the self-hate messages. I really am a pile of shit. I’m bad. I’m evil. I fall far below worthless on the human scale of value.
Having been so defended against my feelings for so long, it’s not surprising that I soon found myself like Marlow winding down a river into the heart of terror. The stream of self-hatred seem to flow like a river following the force of gravity and the contours of the earth as it makes it way inexorably to the ocean which annihilates it through absorption.
That was where that part of me knew it was heading – gravity and contour – flowing to self-destruction. The part of me observing all of this understood how people can get lost in this river of self-hate and pulled/flow into annihilation.
What happens if I feel the self-hatred fully and don’t act out the self-destructiveness inherent in it? A person with some humility and common sense would have help and support for this process. I really am blessed to be able to report back to you.
We live in a world of incredible beauty and potential. Mostly when we experience joy, happiness, love, majesty, and the wonderful – we associate it with something external – some event, some happening, some action or choice. This is not what is really going on.
This is one of reality’s most open secrets. What is happening is much simpler, but even more mysterious. What is real exists to be known. Life reveals. It’s not our experience that matters, but the experience of our experience.
It’s Autumn
The crazies are threatening to do harm to Obama. The cynics are active. People are suffering. How do we explain all the love and beauty?
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