# Death and resurrection as metaphors for life



## DustyDog

I've been reading books and listening to lectures about comparative culture. Until the past 100 years, you can learn more about a culture by its stories and beliefs than through any form of press or scientific journals. Although, in fact, until the 12th century, the scientists were the priests - it was their job to observe the cosmos and explain it in terms that allowed people to understand their roles in it.

Anyway, a common theme, it seems, in belief systems going back 5,000 years is death and resurrection. Not of the deity figure - but of you. And not your physical birth and death, but all your life transformations.

Since the earliest evidence of human belief systems, they have all viewed life as a cycle. Not something that begins and ends, but something that continues. All life depends on other life dying to survive. The forest only survives because trees die and nourish younger trees. All animals subsist on dead plant and animal matter. To early humans, this was a ghoulish paradox and they had to come up with reasons for it...if life is so precious, why must it end for other life to continue?

Well, they watched and observed. The sun dies at night and is born again in the morning. It looks different every morning, so it's probably not the same sun. And so does the moon. The seasons are born and die, then resurrect into a different season. So, they reasoned, all life must be this way. The word "death" in some languages, means exactly "preparation for resurrection".

In the lifespans of most animals, there is but one death and resurrection - the death of the child and birth of the adult. Large adult cats, such as the cougar, require enormous space of their own. A 100 pound cougar in the US Pacific Northwest needs 25 square miles to ensure adequate supplies of rodents, coyotes, elk and deer for her eating needs. And yet she has an inborn instinct to reproduce, so somehow a male and female get together. Here, five years ago, a cougar had a litter of five kittens. As long as they were children, Mom fed them and taught them to hunt. But as soon as they were deemed adults, Mom treated them as adversaries and physically attacked them, driving them away. This is an example of a natually-occurring ritual in which a child is told "the child is dead, you are reborn as an adult".

The sense of this resurrection is this: nothing is the same and never will be.

As children, we are to obey and accept all we are told. But a person who does all that can hardly make a contribution to society. So, upon entering adulthood, the rules are all different. Now, we must question every rule we've ever been given. Some, we will decide are useful in helping us become the best person we can. Others, we will decide, were only placed there to help us through childhood and are no longer required. Still others were planted by parents whose childhood recollections of how the world worked are no longer true, so we exchange those for rules that serve in this new world.

Many philosophers observe that the majority of crime in Western countries is perpetrated by people under 30 and say that if we'd retained some dramatic ritual signifying the death of the child and resurrection of adulthood, this crime problem would not exist. 

Once an adult, we will undergo more death and resurrection experiences:

The single person dies and is resurrected as a married person. Think of that one - before marriage, your objective was to "play the field", to find out what personalities you were most compatible with, and to experience variations in partners so that you could get concrete evidence of what values you need...does the partner need to copy your values, or do you see a value in opposites joining in order to create something greater? However you handled single life, that way of living is dead, forever, when you marry. Now, your replacement rule is to do the best you can with this one, and now you start evolving to be his/her best partner as they do you. A complete termination of the old and creation of a new that you have never experienced before. This is an important death and resurrection.

Likewise, when you exit the school system, it is a death and resurrection. When you have your first child, oh what a shock that is to those who don't realize it's an important death and resurrection!


I can understand this stuff intellectually, and I can certainly see from my past that much of my self-induced problems stemmed from not realizing the magnitude of the life change I just experienced.

And here I am now, very tangibly handling another death and resurrection.

I dropped out of the working world, and one of my old messes that I'm cleaning up is email. I have been an email user for over 20 years. Being highly disorganized, I never know if something I received will be useful. So I make email folders and stash them.

Oh, wow, have I missed some important life changes!!!

I set a filter to list emails older than 1996 (21 years). Wow. I had 12 folders left over relating to topics that had to do with women I dated before marrying (at an older age). I have been in a number of bands over the years, and each band got a folder for "songs chosen" and "sheet music" and "rehearsal dates". I swear, simply setting a filter to delete anything over a year old would do it.

I am, quite physically, experiencing many many deaths right now - and it's good, because I will be resurrected into a person who has most definitely and completely, tossed all the baggage.

Life is now and only now. The past is done, the future isn't. I know this - but my email says I have not been living it.

Hopefully, this hastily-written mini-essay is useful to enough that it was worth doing.

May you find your best way
May you become the best You that you can
May you live in peace and harmony

DD


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