Death's Evolutionary Initiation Into Life
A Winter Solstice Reflection
As our planet exhales its breath in the Northern Hemisphere, in the stillness of the descent into darkness, we can viscerally feel the absence of breath and the absence of light. In the negative space created by that absence, we come to know what gives us breath or inspiration, and we learn what is our true guiding light. In the process of dying, we are remade through the resurrection, refined by our journey into death, and learn what gives us Life through our experience of its absence.
What returns after dying is eternal. This is the Christ-nature of Life Culture. Earth’s natural cycles are a repeating fractal of the evolutionary process that is iteratively refining our Christ nature and, as a result, drawing us towards the creation of a Christed planet. Through death, we learn how to serve and align with what is living.
There is a material reality that sustains and nourishes Life, a reality to which we all intrinsically have access through our immanent experience of being humans in bodies. When our breath is taken away, our natural impulse is to go toward breath. In the absence of light, our natural impulse is to go towards the Light. In that sense, the light and dark are not separate at all, they are part of an evolutionary process that is refining us through the cycles of death and rebirth. Each time emptiness and darkness knock at the door, we offer them the food they seek. They seek to decompose and recompose the components of Life that are no longer most fitted to sustain beauty, goodness, and more Life.
Stripped away of that which is no longer Life-giving, we are free to become more of what we truly are. Paradoxically, we’re already enough, exactly as we are, and yet there is always a horizon of more life, more beauty, more goodness, more truth, and more of our soul’s essence in form.
Held within that context, death and darkness are not the enemies that we’ve been taught to fear. Though our mortal selves are right to be terrified of death’s awful power to strip our souls naked before God, this awful power is what makes them our friends and allies.
The Vedic goddess Kali is a bringer of death because of her mercy and love. She can be ruthless, but she will never cut off your head to harm you. She’ll always make a clean cut because her cutting is the result of her compassion. Her desire is to liberate humanity from the ties that we have created to bind ourselves to the false beliefs that what we are now is all we might ever be.
In this particular Solstice portal, it may seem as though the humanity we see reflected back to us in the dark mirror of our mainstream culture, our races to the bottom of exponential technologies that threaten Life on Earth, our continuation of wars and genocides and brutality and greed and corruption, is all humanity can be.
But the promise of death is that resurrection is possible. We can rest into the knowing that everything that lives will die, including our current human civilization. And yet, Life is the process of the Universe resurrecting itself on the other side of its own demise. How that process of rebirth expresses itself on the planet will be the direct result of each of our own processes of transfiguration, our choice to find the eternal Life on the other side of death’s initiation.
