From classical physics to culture, we’ve discovered that nothing really dies, energy can only be transformed. Our memes within culture can only evolve. Our bodies made up mostly of energy, moving around in 99.9999999 percent of the empty spaces within our cells.
And so it is that we’re moving through a great period of death, some are calling it the death of a civilization. We tend to shy away from talking about the topic of death, this eminent rite of passage we will all eventually face. Perhaps our awareness clings too tightly to our biology. With the death of a civilization perhaps it is our perception that clings too tightly to our preconceived notions of how life should be.
The ability to look death straight in the eye opens up the conversation to how we wish to die.
Ah! Can the way we choose to die become a choice? Perhaps not in all cases but in many yes. Even down to the minute details of end of life care, we can set clear intentions. My strong belief is that the way we wish to die shapes the ways in which we choose to be reborn. I’ve spent the last three years accompanying a dear client with brain cancer and a friend of thirty years through the stages of death.
Swiss psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross offers us five main stages to death after working with hundreds, if not thousands of patients: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Perhaps the more attuned we are to the sweetness of leaving (transforming) the more selective we can become to the ways in which we wish to be reborn. Death is a sacred process and should be treated as such. In some ancient civilizations we would honour the death process to such a large degree that we would spend our whole lives actively participating in extensive death rituals for those in the community that were dying and had died.
To be present with someone dying is to awaken dormant senses. Equally to separate ourselves from the process of death is to separate ourselves from the process of fully living. As one awakens to human evolution on this planet even in just the last ten thousand years and awakens to where it has brought us, one naturally moves through the stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
If we can consciously be aware that we are moving through these stage while our civilization is dying, perhaps we’ll have a better chance at placing the chess pieces in the right position for those to come. Altering the ways in which a new civilization can be reborn.
It only takes one generation for everything to change. We’ve seen this take place in many forms throughout history. Human evolution being the chicken and the egg to things like the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and now our technological revolution.
How do we wish to die into the changes that are calling us forth? Can we let-go of all that isn’t serving us with humility and acceptance? How can we adapt to the rigid grind of the global economic reform or the asymmetrical power of evolving artificial intelligence? How can we sprout a new design for life through the cold hard cement of what seems like a fixed race?
I’ve spent the last four years seriously looking into all the problems impacting the world. How they came to be and how we’ve come to find ourselves at the edge of so many global disasters. I can assure you it dragged me through denial, kept me festering in anger, wasting much of my time in spiritual bargaining and lingering in a sort of drawn out inert depression.
As I began preparing for death with my dear friend, my greatest offering was to stay present with her. Her request was simple yet complex: to be assured that her family would carry on being there for each other throughout life. Her feelings were rooted in the wellbeing of those she would be leaving behind. Her personal needs grew less and less each day as her spirit grew stronger and stronger.
As I held her in as much gentle kindness as possible, nurturing her body and spirit to the best of my capacity, she taught me one of the greatest lessons, what it feels like to move into acceptance in the face of the unknown.
Space and time began to shift our awareness towards all of those things that were truly meaningful. In accepting all that had come before those last breathes, I witnessed her develop a new relationship with consciousness.
The evening before she passed away I felt her spirit come and remove many of the burdens I had been carrying. She was a healer too and just like death they were both telling the story of a strange inversion. Perhaps a prediction of the incredible times to come.