Jump Rope, Jacks and Stickball
The great anthropologist Angeles Arrien reminds us that we Westerners conceptually frame, and experience change as loss. She used an example that most Americans could relate to. It went something to the effect: A friend asked another “I hear your
relationship is changing?” The other, in a concerned voice, responded “Oh my God! What have you heard?” Those of us in her workshop laughed in recognition of our pattern.
I love what Dr. Arrien gives us. Her work has contributed to me professionally and personally. I no longer agree with the inferences I once drew from my understandings of Westerners linking change with loss. I once believed I needed to break the connection of change with loss. That I needed, instead, to understand the reality that change is constant. It is always occurring and I need not associate it with loss.
I know the constancy of change. Yet, I think differently now. Change is loss, and much more. Although we are politically correct in using the word “loss” via-a-vis change, it is the wrong word to use. It is a softener, ostensibly making our lives easier. Yet it does not. The word “loss” misrepresents and distracts us from the direct and raw experience of what is actually happening and what it offers us. The word “loss” takes us away from the experience that will best grow, move and change us. So too does the word “change.”
We Westerners cringe even more strongly with the word I am about to use, the word that can move us toward and into the experience that serves our becoming: This word is death. Change is death. Death is what is happening in every change. Death is the constant in our lives. Death and life are one indivisible whole. We do not recognize the experience of death for we have been taught to distract from it. We fool ourselves pretending to attend to death, but we are instead attending to loss. The energy of death differs from the energy of loss. Experiencing loss in our lives changes us less beneficially than the giving of ourselves over to experiencing the many deaths occurring constantly in our daily lives.
Whether the deaths involve a hoped for future, a change in dinner plans, the death of a loved one, or the change in a summer day from one of warm sunshine to an approaching rain storm with thunder and lightening – like the one happening as I write this piece – death is occurring. Today’s sunny day is dead. What lives here, now, is an increasingly darkening sky with significantly cooler temperatures and blowy winds. A lovely death, and a new birth.
What I invite is this:
- Consent to change. Consent to death. Say YES to the changes death brings us in each moment.
- Experience the psychology and physiology of loss when it arrives, yet, know, too, that these experiences are distinct from experiencing the phenomena, the empirical rawness of death. It is this experience of death that changes us in beneficial ways.
Years ago the anthropologist and author Carlos Castaneda introduced us to his take on the ancient wisdom of Mexico. One of his invitations involved having death sit on our shoulder. He was fostering the beginnings of our developing a consciousness of death. One that would enable us to more fully live. Few if any of us have done so.
I, myself, have no death consciousness. I sense however it is wanting its place in me.
I agree with your observations and those of Angeles Arrien that change means death and loss to the ego. More importantly perhaps, it suggests that your current beliefs are challenged as incorrect. That is a big hit to the ego., and fear of change to the unknown follows.
I have never taught my children that death sits on your shoulder though I am familiar with the idea. I have taught my children something similar, “we are in something like a summer camp. We came (were born) here to learn important things and from the moment of our birth the clock has been ticking away our hours here. The time we have here before we must return home is short and equals the time we have to complete this school and that each time we complete a step, we must look for the change (street signs) directing use toward our next step. When our last step is completed we go to sleep (die) and awake back home.”
My youngest daughter has Mutare ( Latin Verb. present active infinitive of mÅ«tÅ “to alter, to change, to modify, to transform” “to vary, to diversify”) tatooed across her chest. Her idea at 25 not mine. The others are not so blatant but who really knows what they think and believe. Certainly not me, but they are world travelers, skilled in many disciplines including: medicine, music, art, physics, animal husbandry and psychology. They also participate in several religions (Buddhist, Mormanism, Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist). To my knowledge they belong to none. They move to a different state or country about every 5 years or more often. I was that way too, 32 schools before I completed my undergraduate degree in engineering at 17 so wonder lust could also be genetic. There are only three of them, one in England or Africa at the moment ,one in Maryland and one in Colorado. Did it help. I don’t know, but they do seem to feel free to jump into anything , travel anywhere and search out change and give it a try.
Stephen, thanks for this post, as always you awake thoughts and perspectives and this one is too a great reminder to us how attached and dependent we are to words to live our lives, to interpret what is happening, to experience what we think is “reality”….To feel “sane”…
Too, how difficult it is to open up space in between so we can interpret and meet life without words.
And I wonder how we got that programming, relating change firstly to loosing something and not to getting something. Change is something not good, something to be feared. Change is something that hit us, coming from somewhere else, and out of our control. How brain washed have we been for generations that what we want and need is “safety and status quo” even if the life we life is killing us in different ways. But better that than change…
As you wrote there can be a loss in change but not always. But there is always a death…and there is always new life. Most people are so afraid of death…and yes of change too. And afraid of life. That flowing ruthless force that flow in us and outside us and has its own pace and rules and can no be controlled by mind.
I think it is fear that is the “core issue”.
Why do we focus so much on death? Why do we so often jump down into black holes and suffer there because something in our lives has died, instead of saying thank you, now it is time for graduating from this phase, or relationship or job or situation, and I am grateful but now it is over. Now I invite something or someone else, something that makes me grow and shine brighter, something that makes me contribute more and better to my self and others, to the world and the Mystery…
Life is change…all the time…a beautiful dance..
In Swedish the word for change is “förändring”. It is made of two words, the first “för” – is a short form for “före” which means before in the meaning of pre-.
The second word “ändring” means change in itself but together with “för” it is used in some other situations. When we talk about changes in life and circumstances it is “förändring” we use.
What I find “interesting” is that this word “för-ändring” indicates that something has happened before we are doing/manifesting the change, a before-change, a pre-change that causes the necessity of change. That pre-change is the death of something…
Hi, Stephen,
Twenty years ago, it was time to leave booze behind me. This was a time of loss for me, physical, psychological and sociological loss. I had never freely accepted change in my life, and I would fight change tooth and nail. This time, I had no alternative but to choose change, because the alternatives, death or insanity, were not an option!
Finally, over the next two years, (I was a slow learner) I came to realize that the only certainty in life is change! Yep! There’s that dirty word again!
I was very fortunate that I accepted change when I did, because over the next few years, in close succession, my parents died. Then four, and five years ago, I lost my two brothers.
I do not see change as being the death of anything, because for every loss, I have found a gain. With death, the only gain is the hopeful dependance on continuity of the spirit.
I have seen death up close, in my own life, and I’m still around for some reason. I guess my job here isn’t finished yet!
I have no fear of death, whatsoever, but I don’t agree with the idea of living as though death is on my shoulder!
In my own life, rather than saying “yes”to death, I accept death as a part of life, and when a friend or relative dies, I celebrate their lives, rather than mourn my own personal loss.
Thank you, Stephen. I am experiencing this now. Your words are actually comforting because my soul has been experiencing all this change as death.
Please keep writing!
Thanks, Irene. Wonderful contribution.
I find this kind of odd, I was saying to myself that the only way I can get on with my life was to put to death my loss of a soulmate. To think of him as dead and not out there somewhere, eventually my tears will stop and my heart will stop aching and my soul will stop grieving. Just as if I’d experienced a death on the family. Death seems to be the only chance at relief from wondering everyday, not seeing beyond your pain, allowing your body and brain to function properly. Yes, I guess you are correct on thinking death is what happens at the end of every, moment, second, minute, hour and day. We lose what is past and step into a beginning of a new life.
Thank you, Stephen! As your other friends have noted, this seems to come at a good time. It is challenging and stimulating.
In my early thirties — the most dramatic period of constructive death and rebirth in my life to date — Casteneda’s writing was an enormous force in my life. I was enthralled by the idea of death as an advisor. Once, on my morning commute, I happened to look over my left shoulder suddenly, as don Juan advises, and actually did see a little black figure in the
shrubbery on the side of the highway. In retrospect, I remember amazing clarity of purpose in that time of my life (along with lots of drama, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, which I probably minimize from the perspective of twenty years out).
But there is also this question of skillful means. There are times when facing the reality of death is an incredible tonic. There are other times — notably now — when it seems to sap me of my energy and leave me passive and acquiescent (a very different feeling from what
I think you describe as “consenting”).
Sometimes, consenting to death around me or in me fills me with great clarity, and
the wonderful, burning tears that honor a finished life of any form, and purify the heart that sheds them; at other times, it leaves me wondering, “what’s the point?” Or, “When is it going to be my turn? Can I just lie down and go to sleep now?”
I think there’s a difference here, and it’s worth exploring. What are the skillful means? Are there different right ways to approach death depending on one’s state? And why is it that we ignore death? Is it really neurosis? Or, is it one of the essences of life: to concentrate on living?
Ultimately, my favorite advice from don Juan is to try to live “wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.”
Thanks for the push, Elder Brother!
Hi Carl. I am heartened with the gravitas imbued in your query. I promise to respond with equal weight and dignity. I will insert my responses within the text of your comment in this font.
Carl’s comment:
Thank you, Stephen! As your other friends have noted, this seems to come at a good time. It is challenging and stimulating.
In my early thirties — the most dramatic period of constructive death and rebirth in my life to date — Casteneda’s writing was an enormous force in my life. I was enthralled by the idea of death as an advisor. Once, on my morning commute, I happened to look over my left shoulder suddenly, as don Juan advises, and actually did see a little black figure in the shrubbery on the side of the highway. In retrospect, I remember amazing clarity of purpose in that time of my life (along with lots of drama, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, which I probably minimize from the perspective of twenty years out).
But there is also this question of skillful means. There are times when facing the reality of death is an incredible tonic. There are other times — notably now — when it seems to sap me of my energy and leave me passive and acquiescent (a very different feeling from what I think you describe as “consenting”).
Stephen’s response at this juncture:
I offer two challenges: The first involves “skillful means;” the second, “reality of death.” I do not know what you mean when you use the concept skillful means however I suspect your usage involves something psychological and behavioral. For example, actions born of a sound conceptual model and executed behaviorally with more than a modicum of elegant competence – possibly with feelings and emotions in check. Is this skillful means?
If your usage of “skillful means” implies something akin to this, I ask you to set aside all questions and thoughts regarding skillful means in the context of developing a death consciousness. If however your usage implies a shifting of your attention away from your body, its actions, perceptions, and your thinking mind – and to instead perceive via your non-physical energetic senses – to switch off your denial and energetically experience – the actual here and now in the moment of a being’s death – experience the raw energetic movements and changes in the energetic realities in which our physical reality exists…and in these moments, with your attention on the energetic movements present around the body whose life is leaving it, you will be changed. Death consciousness begins to form.
In this context “skillful means” is remaining present and experiencing the energetics of another being’s death – its departure from the physical. This experience is distinct from one’s psychological experience. I am talking about the phenomenology of death – the energetics in the moment – not before nor after – during. I am not talking about the “concept” of death, nor the concepts of or psychological and physical experiences of loss, grief and pain accompanying a death. Experiencing the changing energetics and fields around the physical. Having this presence and direction of attention, to me, is skillful means.
As you see I have shifted from the topic of “skillful means” to “reality of death.” Is your use of “reality of death” psychological? Is it conceptual? I propose that consenting to death and the development of a death consciousness is neither psychological nor physical at its origins.
The reality of death is the non-physical energetic changes occurring when a being is leaving its physical body in a process we call death. Everything else, to me, is not the “reality of death.” Everything beyond the moment of one leaving a physical body during its death is psychological experience, and the physical experience born of one’s cultural and personal psychologies.
The only way one can learn this is by being present at the deaths of other living animals and people. To experience the energetics by attending to and perceiving not with your physical senses but instead with your non-ordinary array of senses.
Carl’s comment continued:
Sometimes, consenting to death around me or in me fills me with great clarity, and the wonderful, burning tears that honor a finished life of any form, and purify the heart that sheds them; at other times, it leaves me wondering, “what’s the point?” Or, “When is it going to be my turn? Can I just lie down and go to sleep now?”
Stephen’s response at this juncture:
This prompts my curiosity hugely. I welcome an exploration with you here.
I think there’s a difference here, and it’s worth exploring. What are the skillful means? SV: This has been addressed. Are there different right ways to approach death depending on one’s state? SV: I do not buy-in to “right and wrong.” Beyond this, I do not understand your question. And why is it that we ignore death? SV: The energetic constituencies of a self do not ignore death. We are acculturated to fear, and by extension, ignore death. We can outgrow this imposition of cultural intent. The physical bodies of the living are hard-wired to fear death furthering individual and species survival. Is it really neurosis? Or, is it one of the essences of life: to concentrate on living? SV: One cannot truly and honestly concentrate on living without possessing a death consciousness.
Ultimately, my favorite advice from don Juan is to try to live “wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.”
Thanks for the push, Elder Brother! SV: Pleasure! Take good care.