Life, aliveness, engagement with what is in front of us require disintegration
My own journey to the bottom of the bottom of the very bottom took well over 10 years.
Many times I thought I had arrived, that my undoing was complete. But no, there was more.
I needed everything stripped away. To be reduced to a place where every story told, the intricate fabric of my beliefs, what I trusted as real, the gods I cried out to, the ground I stepped upon, was all to be thrown into the flames of the hell I found myself in.
The bottom of the bottom of the very bottom is no-thing-ness. No hope, no expectation, no belief, no saviour, no rescuer coming..no future possibility…in this place the stink of my own thinking was too much…the only place of peace was stillness, the same place we visit in deep dreamless sleep.
This is the place people mistake too often for death. The silence of non-existence, a place we can all visit every night. A place where there is nothing. Its pull is addictive, the desire for everything to stop.
My mentor Bucky Fuller would say that we cannot be sure that the person who returns in the morning from visiting deep dreamless sleep is the same person who went to sleep.
We are not the same when we wake. The no-thing-ness is our composting place. Alchemy of transmutation happens here.
And in waking, we get to choose again. This, not that.
And so for me, having returned from composting all those things I had accumulated as stories and beliefs, expectations of what my life should and should not look like, how I wanted myself to be, in distinction to how I am, my relationship with Universe, and the magical, I chose with ‘for-the-first-time’ sovereign choice the beliefs I wanted to hold that were mine, the reason I trusted the ground to hold me as I took a step….
It was one of the hardest journeys of my life. Worth every step.
PS. I recommend having a mentor-guide for this type of journey. Someone who has been through and emerged better for the experience.
Photo taken July 26th, 2015
