About Death and Rebirth Cycles

Lately my life tends to work in cycles of about a week of contraction/darkness and about the same amount of time in expansion/light. During the contraction phase, I usually get faced with "problems" life is throwing at me. Fears, self-doubt, insecurities, for example about an upcoming performance or my financial situation and future. Rather than pushing it away, it tends to be my habit to see if I find the bottom of it, usually some deep layered attachment I have. For days, I get into this "zone", of low energy, no motivation, no space, different uncomfortable sensations in my body. My mind goes to dark places and can resonate with suffering happening in other places in the world - the recent escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, new atomic threats from Putin in response to Ukraine's new plans. It's uncomfortable, and usually the mind tries to distract itself, run away from it, not feel it.

However, when I get to the expansion phase, I suddenly feel like something has lifted in me… suddenly I see new possibilities, new doors start to open, I can tap into emotional states that are new to me and often resolve the issue I was facing beforehand, I get a new understanding of different topics. In a sense it's a pretty radical surrendering to life, where I surf on the waves of some greater powers, and while it goes one step at a time it seems to bring me closer to the things I truly desire.

Often I feel we have been taught that we make progress in a sort of quantitative way… add more knowledge, skills, and you'll get "better". The process in me seems to be rather the opposite, distract anything that's holding me back, and at the bottom of that hole lie all the answers.

For me, it seems the most powerful thing can often be the "non-doing", the "surrender". Simply fully being with "problems", until you found the bottom of them and come out at the other side. To my surprise, the resolving action afterwards can often be pretty effortless. A short talk, a simple but much needed decision, whatever it is.

This approach of subtraction is what I mean with "positive disintegration", and I believe that this approach is on a grand scale much more capable of dealing with our numerous societal problems than the approach of "adding". To me, it seems our "adding" is often coming from a flawed and biased view on reality (you could say stemming from the ego), which often does not address the root issue and therefore only masks or adds to the problem itself.

I experienced that depending on the issue, or how deep we decide to look, this process can take days, or years or anything in the middle. As we, as a humanity, are currently on the path to absolute catastrophe, I believe we have no choice but to collectively go into this surrendering process, to touch the bottom of our collective worldview and fundamental perceptions, and to re-evaluate and find solutions from there.

However, this subtraction or surrendering approach takes courage, patience and ultimately faith into a bigger intelligence of this universe (you could name it god, or emergent intelligence of complex systems, or whatever other names there are for similar concepts), which is in our materialistic/ (mechanistic-scientific) worldview not apparent. But how do we gain faith then? I believe one little step at a time, letting go of the control we believe we have over our lives and simply observing the intelligence that unfolds. In this way of observing we get a taste of the interconnectedness of life, and faith is build on understanding, rather than being based "blindly" on beliefs or ideologies.

And if we run too fast, we will miss it all together.