The pursuit of dying every day

Depending on the context, death can be a fear or an obstacle.

This is because it doesn’t always have to refer to our physical death. Death can happen to our identities.

Our identifications become entangled in who we are and to change ourselves we have to untangle those identifications.

This requires self-reflection and a path inward. As Alan Watts says,

“The person who is going to do the improving is the one who needs to be improved.”

He is saying that the identifications we have, sometimes summarized as our Ego, are just window dressing.

The journey beyond this window dressing is to detach ourselves from our identifications. Each day we have to be willing to forego our identities and experience death.

And the most important part isn’t the death, it’s the rebirth. What can we learn from this dying experience so that we can be reborn anew?

Joseph Campbell calls this pursuit of dying and rebirth The Hero’s Journey. In Campbell’s book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, he describes a common theme found in many mythologies and religions worldwide that can be represented as an external or internal adventure.

This adventure involves three phases: departure, initiation, and return.

• Departure is when people withdraw from their current state and prepare to move to another.
• The initiation phase is where the hero experiences many trials which must be undergone to begin the transformation.
• From these trials, a greater understanding is achieved.
• Then, armed with this new knowledge, the hero is ready for rebirth and to enrich the world with their discoveries.

Mr. Campbell goes on to say,

Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be — if we are to experience long survival — a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.

Some of this terminology may feel new but we are all familiar with the process as it is embedded symbolically within all of our cultures and religions in the forms of rites of passage. Think of a Bat Mitzvah, a Baptism, graduation, or the cutting of the hair of a person who has just joined the military.

Furthermore, you can think of all learning as a hero’s journey because every time you learn something new it changes you. Learning is a challenge, yes a minor one, but it requires a departure and return to integrate those learnings.

Campbell draws on the parent and child relationship as a representation of the importance of the hero’s journey:

One is bound in by the walls of childhood; the father and mother stand as threshold guardians, and the timorous soul, fearful of some punishment, fails to make the passage through the door and come to birth in the world without.

In order for children to grow, they have to experience this physical journey beyond their parent’s reach. Of course, this journey comes with risk so we aspire to protect but protection can stunt the child’s growth.

We all face this same journey internally. Our identities, or Egos, are the metaphorical parents keeping us safe and secure. They are also what may be stunting our growth.

Leaving our identities behind is difficult. It takes courage to die, resilience to be reborn, and a willingness to return to integrate those learnings.

It takes an endless pursuit of dying every day.

The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.

-Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces