A Sense of Dying (or Awakening)
 

A little bit of background on myself: Since I was a child, my doctors and therapists have said that I experience what's called existential depression or crisis. Very early in life perhaps in part due to various traumatic and life altering events and challenges culminated in the desire and desperation to understand and perceive the human condition and inquire about the meaning of it all. This of course led to many wonderful discoveries along the way while I study a wide variety of spiritual, religious, metaphysical, occult, esoteric, etc. topics. I am sure my background and upbringing is not unlike many others here in that regard.

However, my mind was insatiable and nothing can make me feel whole for too long. No teaching, no ideological/spiritual theory, no religion, no philosophy, no teacher, no books, no practice, no travel, no relationship, no worldly goods/wealth, no food/drink/partying, no sobriety/austerity, etc... I crave and desire something far beyond all that I have experienced and yet I have absolutely no idea what it was. What was this elusive THING that I am to meet, to acquire, to understanding, to experience, to... to what? I don't know.

Throughout my life of three decades, I have felt the discontent of life because I felt a disconnect from that THING I have been missing and in turn often times I grow hopeless and suicidal. But with each time of crisis, I walk forward with uncertainty, but I knew that I just have to be patient and wait.

Last Saturday, I went through another suicidal spiral of distress and it culminated in some sort of understanding. I hadn't truly wanted to die, but I truly wanted to TRANSFORM. There is this incredibly powerful drive and need to transform and the depression the distress, the emotional/psychic pain is the birth pains to the realization. To shed the skins (old ideas, beliefs, though process, way of perceiving, etc.) of what is no longer necessary and to stand in the light and awareness of something new and AWESOME. Something that I have never been before, something I have never encountered. And yet however, this is something that is totally, completely, and most authentically mySELF.

So I suppose I had been dying a thousand deaths, much like everyone else on the spiritual path. We change and transform and grow continuously. This ever blossoming of awareness and consciousness is like an eternal blooming of a lotus flower. The THING, the magnificent THING that truly cannot be spoken or named, or captured in a net is essentially who I AM, WE ARE. It is one thing to understand it in theory, but quite another to have it explode within like a thousand super novas of laughter, joy, and tender eternal LOVE.

High five!
Woo! :smile:

I've been wondering similar things lately.

That maybe the final stage is simply the deep realization that all the stuff in duality isn't it, and never can be or will be.

Only in such an existential dissatisfaction can one truly let it all go and transform.

You have put into words what I've been trying to explain for so long! Thank you for sharing this insightful wisdom, Imzadi! It's difficult to explain why nothing seems to stick, I always want to find out "why" and when I get it, it never lasts for long. Your last paragraph: "So I suppose I had been dying a thousand deaths", this is it, I call them brain dumps, it feels like my patterns die and it's been happening at an increasing pace this past year...extremely frustrating, but this is it as you've explained, like everyone on the spiritual path! :hug: