What is transformation?

I assume one thing before we start– I assume you know about the existence of transformation. That you have a sense for it, have experienced it perhaps, or have witnessed it in others. We are not in the abstract with transformation. It is a very tangible thing. It would be missing the point entirely to think that it was only a spiritual concept, when it is both that and an active physical process. So bear with me as we jump both feet in and as I start by saying that transformation is a brutal thing, a violent act of nature, the crashing of heavy waves upon a breaking dock that is our present life... 

I will spare you the cliches. That the “only constant is change”, or that you should “live in the moment”, etc. These things are true, but they are not helpful in understanding transformation. In deeply understanding it. In learning to anticipate its inevitability in our life. But what I will say now is that transformation is directly linked to something we do not want to know anything about. Something of great import, but of great taboo. 

Death. 

If I were to tell you that death is a “wonderful” thing, a “useful” thing, you might nod your head in agreement, but perhaps you would only do so out of compliance as automatically as you forget about death in your everyday life. I imagine... I magien that you think death is a horrible thing and that you feel that way first before pretending to agree with me. 

Death is portrayed in every single way imaginable as decay, stench, morbidity, obscenity, violence, sadness, evil, darkness, and only the madman would be the one to say its inverse; that death is not those things! That it is good. And yet, here we are, at the crux of it all. That transformation is about death. Death is the mantelpiece of transformation. Transformation gives death room to have meaning inside of it. Or otherwise, I mean, without this alchemy that is transformation, death would indeed only be an evil, bad, and sad thing. But we know that death is a natural element of life, that it is somewhat neutral. We know it when we eat dead meat. When we eat dead plants, when we use dead trees to build. We uphold societies built by men long ago deceased. We are in the business of death every single day as life is allowed to go specifically because it is death that allows it to go on. 

The old feeds the new, and the new is born from the dying. And we offend nature, our own nature, when we forget this noble pact. When we forget this pact, we pay the cost when its emissaries inevitably come knocking at our door to balance the account. Yes. We are indebted to death during life. Indebted with life. What a burden. It’s a responsibility we all carry. Do we pay that debt as we ought to? More on that later, because let me say that it is because we seldom do pay that debt, that we suffer greatly. And I’m not talking about the sort of suffering that is imposed on others through the acts of unjust men. I’m not talking about evil. I speak of the tyranny which we impose on ourselves to appease whatever god we bow to… 

Transformation is a tragedy. Because in a tragedy, someone will die. Something must die. It is meant to happen. It is an assurance in fact, a parameter of the entire playbook. Life is not guaranteed. We confuse the two things, we flip it out of negligence or obedience to some authority.

It has become a long winded discussion on my part now, and I am tired and I apologise. But I am tired in the sense that I only know so little about death, how estranged I am to it. Of how much fight is still needed to teach that death functions as a tool for the living, for you to live better, more fully. That it will catch up to us unless we give it the space we can in our lives today, especially when that life is not yet lived, to spawn greater living. 

We know we cheat death every day through trickery, through our obstinance. Like a toddler we spit in its face and smear it with our excrement. And we resent those who live unlike us, when deep down it is us we do not like the look of. And so imagine now if I came to such a man, who resented his own inner world and was finally made aware of this fact after much resistance to my probing, he would then say to me “But I didn’t know! I just did not see it.” And I would say that it is only the beginning. That to save his life, he will need to start over from zero, with nothing, as an embryo, perhaps even less than that. An ill defined, formless entity, floating, without attributions, nameless. Everything that a man like him would look at with pity and mismay. What a man like him would have nightmares about. The very things he’s been told all his life not to be, he would have to become those things. And only if he did, and truly went through this spell, this loss of identity in other words, only then would he have undergone the pre-requisite to seeing the world as freely as he possibly can. 

This man is you. And the power of that moment of sudden awareness and the extinguishing movement into becoming that follows what that previous man would have called “hell” or “impossible” all of that is transformation. All of it. 

That is why we seldom do it on our own. That is why we are usually thrown into transformation against our will. Sometimes it happens when we least want it, too.  A divorce, a handicap, ruin of all sorts. “Nature” imposes it upon us like the cold water of a winter lake feels like if we are brave enough to dive in. It takes away our warmth– the comfort of warmth. It neutralised our sense of control as we realize we never were in control. We are humbled into a sudden redemption. And our salvation becomes a building block, new. A discovery. Our true nature revealed, at last. And we resent the world for having imposed this upon us, we resent not being able to go back. That it’s all over, too soon. We are ripped once again from our mother’s womb which we had tried all this time to re-create in the form of a life, the nest of her bosom always there, as a second plan, the safety of which nursed our despair.