On Processing Deaths

An empowering new way to experience grief, loss and letting go

People would be a lot happier if they judge the value of a life by its purpose and not on its duration.

Most people experience someone’s death through the lens of “not long enough.” Death is turned into an abandonment wound masquerading as compassion and grief. So someone hangs onto the emotional response to abandonment and sometimes feels grief endlessly.

Ordinarily grief would be the feeling of a healing process, not a devastation process. You were told what sad was as a kid, told what to feel sad about, and you then go through the automatic program of sadness when the system calls for it. Sadness isn’t even a feeling, it’s a word that generates a particular qualitative state. Your energy lowers, you filter out more of the outside world, and with this decrease in vitality you feel the word “sad.”

So people “know” to feel sad about “certain things.” What fits into that category of “certain things” depends on what their parents told them sadness was and what their culture tells them a good person should be sad about. And their parents were programmed the same way. And this program creates a massive tunnel vision about death. People can only see it through the lens of their religion and the lens of their abandonment programming. I use abandonment programming loosely to mean “how one is programmed to deal with change and loss.”

Your experience of death is only one level of it, one view, one skin deep layer. If you believe there’s life after death you can only think in terms of what your culture programmed that life looks like. You see it as a physical life because you have no awareness of your own private non physical inner life. It’s physical because you still think in terms of physicality and extended physical experience after death, your entire perception is an external one so you’re missing 90% of the bedrock of reality itself and it’s mind-first nature.

I believe that consciousness creates reality, not that reality became conscious. Because of this I think of life in different terms. I see that all things create, survive, and die. Your cells live a full life as part of a greater cooperation in that cycle. As do leaves on a tree. And a great part of that cycle is change and fulfillment. First consciousness creates, then it creates continuously, and then it creates against (changes). When you die, when your cells die, when anything dies it’s a result of a counter creation against life. And that counter creation continuously creates the aging that leads to death. That continuous creation we call aging creates against the natural vitality of youth for a meaningful purpose. A desire that starts small and grows until it becomes the primary creation in a beautiful way. Both the desire for vitality and the desire for a new framework exist at the same time, both are full of their own kind of vitality. And initially the vitality for life is great, it seeks to fulfill a particular type of desire and psychological exploration. And it pursues that purpose with great zest, experiencing the contrasts and angles that gives that psychological exploration depth and meaning for the individual. When that exploration is complete a new exploration begins non-physically. It starts as an unconscious idea construction on the part of your inner self. And that construction in its own intelligence and desire to fulfill itself creates itself further. That new creation creates change in life such that the consciousness, the person, is moved through events and physiological changes that lead to meaning.

People who don’t feel their life has meaning will use their death to finally make a mark on the world through the impact their death has on others, the changes their death catalyzes. Others will live a long life and move on when that path feels complete. Others will die at the peak of their youth, wanting to revel in the numerous possibilities of their potential while not living any particular one out. At all times these deaths are contextualized and ripple out, having meaningful effects on all those involved. No one dies alone, for the entire species is touched by each death. And no death comes unbidden. Each fulfills meaningful purposes and intents of the individual while perfectly balancing within the internal creative process of the self. A person may die when their spirit realizes there’s nothing left for them to accomplish, but even when they are “sad” and “feel like there’s nothing left to accomplish” their soul sees a much larger fulfillment path. One that has a deep understanding of what you are accomplishing by seeing yourself in sadness and changing as a result. Sometimes “accomplish” isn’t physical at all, but a development of a psychological and personal nature. Sometimes accomplishment is the journey from victimhood to empowerment and exploring all of its nuances on repeat. Sometimes it’s a peak of physical accomplishment and the personal trials that creates, and your nuanced counter creations within those trials. In each case all activity has meaning, and all death has meaning as a part of this cycle of creation.

So I find it odd that people are saddened when a child only lives for 7 years. Judging the purpose of that spirit as “needing to be as long as possible for it to be correct.” This doesn’t mean become a sociopath who doesn’t value life, who doesn’t want people to have a rich, optimistic and full life. But saying “this child died too young” is meaningless. It’s an apparency. It only appears that the child died at the wrong time because of what you believe and the amount of reality you see. It might coexist that you thinking the child died too young is part of the message their death sends you. The way it brings a rearranging of your perception and how it dips you into powerlessness. How it actually brings you a lot of attention for dipping there, which is why some people stay there far too long. What if the child died at the wrong time as a wise setup for you to experience the story-experience of a child dying too young and your journey through that? What if at the same time that was done for you, it was also done as a fulfillment and method of the child’s own purposes and intents?

Each death involves the whole planet. It has meaning and purpose and is intelligent. Especially when it dramatically calls your attention to something, it is meaningful and meant to change you. It is not grief and sadness that show you receive someone’s death. “If you just feel bad enough and cry enough it will become OK that they died.” While at the same time you don’t even know what you feel. You put yourself in a frequency state of powerlessness until something else gives you permission to come out. And while that might be a fulfilling experience, full of the vitality of emotion, it is also a low tone emotion loop. And surely a low tone emotion loop is not what the dead would want as the type of attention you’re giving them.

Some cultures celebrate a person in death, which is probably better than gathering together to feel “sad.” But loss leads to a feeling of powerlessness. Powerlessness is a type of frustration. And you ventilate frustration by crying. Getting a bunch of people together to help each other out of powerlessness is also beneficial, though more often than not they just add more to the same emotional climate and the healing comes after. Like stirring the wound before suturing it closed claiming the stirring helps with the healing process. Sometimes the goal is more than just getting over it as quickly as possible, for some reason. People like to hold on and have that experience, they don’t get to have it very often in life (thankfully). It’s maybe a few times in a lifetime that you get to feel that, it’s special in that way too.

For me, my life is an exploration of letting go in all of its forms. Little deaths here, physical deaths there, symbolic deaths too. And the interesting thing about grief is it lasts until you actually look at it. Most people think letting go of something is ignoring it, looking away long enough that it disappears. But this leaves it creating itself in the background. Processing, for most people, is ruminating while they wait out feelings. So they leave their sense of touch active until it goes numb and then they call it done with. People think “feel it to heal it” but that is the equivalent of rubbing your dick until you can’t feel it any more and just calling that complete. You’ll get super stimulated but it doesn’t change any energy. Feelings are part of your touch sense, you FEEL them. And a feeling is only special and pertinent when it is impermanent. The CHANGE in feeling is what tells you what something feels like. Continuously feeling anything just creates more of the feeling until it overloads the sense gate and you can’t feel it any more. And there’s a lot of emotional people who become numb instead of joyful.

Letting go involves paying attention, absorbing your mind into the experience and getting to know it. Learning what you think it means, redefining what you think it means, figuring out what you believe, and letting it change you. When you look at it you will find it naturally changes immediately. It isn’t something that takes any length of time. Change IS continuous creation. So when you really look at what a death means to you, what you believe about yourself, your health, your life, the way you live, what you care about, what their absence implies, you get to know and understand yourself better. You can understand what grief contains, the creative energy of all of this information being shown to you on a silver platter.

And to me, learning all of that is the gift an impactful death brings into my life. It hurts when you are more energetically involved, when there is more fulfillment substance that ripples out of it. And if you can reorient yourself to seeing these things you will find yourself more grateful for the person, their life, and the meaning it is bringing you. In that sense, living a lot of your life with someone and having them gone is a major canon event in your story, let that change you so your next “act” begins. How much more meaningful is their death when it changes you? And you look back at the film strip of your life and rather than it being entirely filmed in the color of grief, resentment, powerlessness, it was filled with change and joy and possibility? How long will you color the film strip of your life with colors you don’t want to see?

When I see a death that “should not have happened” I wonder what rich meaning and purpose it fulfills for the individual and all of those connected. I see this process unfolding in animals, their experience of aging and death quite unlike our own. When a friend dies you see them reorganizing themselves to a life without what they lost, the confusions involved, and the organization happening in their consciousness. I see the experience the human gets to have as they watch their pet die, and the expressions of connection that are born out of a purely non-judgemental relationship changing. We all know you speak and play with your pets in ways you entirely filter out of your interactions with humans, and the changing experience of that relationship is also meaningful. People love their pets because their pets are a reflection and creation of their own consciousness, non-judgementally expressing itself while at the same time giving you a place to non judgementally express yourself. And these creations are meaningful because of the cycles they follow. From growing together, to the continuous creation of the events of the relationship, to the counter creation against life in old age in the form of arthritis and lethargy. That story IS consciousness and becomes consciousness. And the collection of these stories is vast and varied, each being an expression of fulfillment and the mechanisms through which consciousness creates itself.

Death is only the end of one organization that is in the midst of changing. Where attention goes elsewhere to fulfill other purposes that it felt it could not fulfill under the current constraints. Sometimes the current constraints are exactly what allow for your greatest fulfillment. Sometimes the consciousness only wanted the experience of pregnancy and not childbirth and that fit in with a mom who secretly felt obliged to have a child, but not with this person and not at this time such that the outcome, while heartbreaking, fulfilled the purposes of both parties. A child might die at 7, too young, because internally wanted to experience the sparkle of youth and nothing else. Not all deaths are obvious to the ego, not all are completely conscious, but no death comes unbidden, and all deaths are meaningful.

My goal with this is not to downplay your experience of death, but instead add depth and a sense of optimism to it. To give you a greater context in which to understand loss and change. And to give you something to do as you work through whatever comes up.