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“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” Jesus from John Chapter 11.
The concept of personality malleability, or impermanence of self, is as old as humanity itself. It’s one of those ideas that is supremely beneficial to keep in mind but often forgotten. The power of impermanence is too often underestimated. The more we learn about our universe the more obvious it becomes that nothing is fixed. Not our body. Not our mind.
Not even the rate at which we experience time.
Everything is in constant motion, evolution, and flux.
This can be disconcerting for those who find comfort in control and constancy, but it’s actually a blessing. Our bodies and minds are literally constantly recreating themselves. This means that every day we have the opportunity to choose who we want to be and that we can be a completely different person from one day to the next.
I said this was supremely beneficial to keep in mind, and there are a couple reasons for this. One is that the psychological trap of depression and addiction are such that they slowly and continuously narrow people’s field of belief until they feel like they have no options, no opportunity for change in behavior or feeling.
They feel stuck.
Like they are doomed to repeat the same destructive cycles over and over. And it is true that inertia is powerful.
However, change is always not only possible but inevitable. With a nudge in the right direction and with the right force those cycles can be broken and a whole new evolutionary path begun. The path of love, or continuous opening. If we remember the power of impermanence we can have compassion for ourselves when we fail to be the person we want to be and prevent ourselves from getting sucked into those cycles.
We can also have more compassion and love for others when they fail us. Love is the path of continuous opening and is also the force that can break cycles of continuous narrowing.
Love is the light that pierces through the darkness.
Love acting upon Impermanence creates Beauty.
Knowing this allows us to avoid a common human tendency to be highly judgmental and see others as static, one-dimensional, and unchanging. It is easy for us to quickly come to conclusions about others, and hard for us to accept that our hasty conclusions could be wrong, or that they were once right but are now wrong, and that we should change our opinion.
In primitive times, it would have been very helpful to make hasty conclusions and judgments to quickly assess threats, but in our modern society that neurological mechanism seems to cause more harm than good. However, since it belongs to the class of subconscious mental processes it is naturally difficult to adjust.
Bringing subconscious processes into conscious awareness and altering them is possible but difficult (Meditation, NLP, CBT, etc.). It is also possible to affect subconscious processes without first bringing them into conscious awareness by using habits and rituals, but that is potentially even more difficult because it may take a very long time before someone realizes the subconscious effect they have made and people are prone to giving up.
But there is another way to affect substantial change to habitual thought patterns and subconscious mental processes, effectively transforming a person’s personality. It has been known for most of history as spiritual death and rebirth.
Death rituals or mysteries were incredibly common in early cultures. The concept of spiritual death and resurrection is found in almost every modern religion and spiritual tradition as well, but is often shrouded behind mystery or initiation. People have long feared that it would be misunderstood, and for good reason, it almost always is. There are even recorded accounts of people committing suicide thinking they would be physically reborn because they didn’t understand that the death that mystics speak of is not a physical death of the body, it is a spiritual death of the ego or personality, potentially of the entire psychological self.
But this death is always followed by a rebirth, and, if we are properly guided, we can intentionally shape our new self. If we have the example of a sage, such as Jesus, we can choose to use their example as a framework upon which we can build our new self. In this way, Jesus can take his rightful place in our lives as “The Way, the Truth, and the Life”.
There are a number of things that can bring people to this point of profound personal transformation. Yoga, meditation, near death experience, deprivation of food or sleep, ritualistic ceremonies, religious ecstasies, and entheogens have all been used successfully, and in other cases it seems to happen spontaneously. Whatever the cause or circumstances surrounding it, the pre-mortem-death-rebirth experience has always been an essential and beneficial part of human society and the ultimate example of the power of impermanence.
As St. Francis said:
“Praised be You, my Lord,
through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whom no living man can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin.
Blessed are those who will
find Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.”
When we die and are reborn we can “find” God’s holy will for our lives after which the “second death” or “Sister Bodily Death” will do us no harm.
For those interested in testing the waters of spiritual death and resurrection, I’ve created a Death and Rebirth ceremony of my own called the Ceremony of the Rising Sun which is essentially the pinnacle of my system of Franciscan Christian mysticism and it will be coming out on the blog later this year!
I can’t wait to share it with you all.
Love,
Justin
