Worldviews In Crisis: Nature's Fatal & Formative Blows

Seminal events happen to each and everyone of us. In one way or another there are births and deaths--beginnings and endings, findings and losing, gains and losses--that forever alter the topography and trajectory of our lives. Someone is born into our lives. Someone leaves us unexpectedly (which forms the underlying emotional tone of my last published work, Buddha & Shakespeare: Eastern Dharma, Western Drama). In either case, whether through emergence or departure, our world is thrown into a state of crisis. And by crisis I mean that which is both upsetting as well as potentially transformational.

To paraphrase the Buddha, 'Birth is crisis. Death is crisis. Sickness is crisis. All of this is crisis.' Or, to quote a lady that I happen to be a fan of, Victoria Lansford www.victorialansford.com 'The truth hurts... and sets you free.'

But why should the truth hurt in setting us free? Why should that which leads to freedom be so upsetting? Why should being stripped of our illusions be so painful? Is it because 'ignorance is truly bliss' and we adore our beloved ignorance? Isn't that why people can often be heard saying, 'I don't want to hear it?'

Perhaps it is because we are more the creatures of habit than we like to confess in all honesty. We grow comfortable in our little traps. Growth is painful. We have to 'let-go' of certain things in order to be capable of embracing others. And yet, while we are being asked to 'let-go,' by the seminal event in our lives--a crisis--we see nothing on the horizon to fill the space of what we are being asked to give up; which can quickly result in making our grapsing and clinging all the more tenacious. We may even feel like we have to 'hang on for dear life!'

The metaphors of death and sacrifice in terms of our being initiated into 'new ways of being' are not without considerable merit. Those metaphors exist--and have existed--for a reason. Psychologically speaking the death is real. I repeat, psychologically speaking the death and dying process is a literal one in terms of world-views, emotions, feelings, images, and self-conceptions. A crisis brought on bu birth and death literally forces us into a place of deep re-imagining. We become a father or a mother, a husband or a wife, a widow or a widower, and in doing so we have to re-imagine who we are. We have to die, in so many ways, to who we have become prior to this one event we cannot so easily dismiss or deny. And, in spite of all the sweet talk of 'transcend and include' ala Ken Wilber and Integral Spirituality, the process itself can be far more harrowing than what those cute little words would seem to indicate. There are parts of us--sub-personalities, if you will--that refuse to move on... that don't want to leave our psychological New Orleans. That don't want to evacuate. That don't want to change with the times. That resist the impetus that is the crisis: that is the painful, hopeful, challenging, difficult, enlightening, transformational, death-dealing and death-defying opportunity brought to bear upon our whole being via a seminal event.