Dead or alive

Hello people!!

Yes, it’s that time of the week again, blog-time!

Today I would like to talk about death from a psychodynamic and a spiritual perspective. As a psychologist, we should not refrain from existential questions such as ‘what is death’, as I believe we are in a very suitable position to give a reasonable answer to such questions, starting from our knowledge of the workings of the psyche.

Let me start by stating something which is well-known and common knowledge, that death is just a part of life. However, the way in which death is a part of life might appear to be a little different to psychoanalysts than to the common man.

Man considers life to be the state in which the body is functioning and is keeping up its heartbeat and brain function. When this stops, man speaks of death.

I do propose quite a different look on things, one that will both nuance and challenge this simple state of affairs.

To Freud, there were two basic drives. The death drive and the life instinct.

As I have come to see it, the ego or death drive is that part which kills off the life-giving original energies of the soul. You see, to me, the soul is in essence awareness, light and love, and that which kills it, its mirror-part and counter-dynamic can be seen as darkness and hate. The shadow. The ego.

So to be alive, with a heart and a brain that is functioning all well, is not to say that we are truly alive in a psychological sense. For parts of the soul may be obstructed, may be obscured, restrained, kept silenced and dead.

Some people may be more alive than others!

But in a sense, as long as we are ‘normal’ human beings, we all suffer from the activity of the ego. We are ruled by the death drive, which haunts us ever since that first time we started to construct the image of our ‘self’ through something called a mirror.

It is our self, our ego, that is responsible for phasing out certain forms and currents of our energy, our urges, our feelings, our emotions and our instincts. Our life-drive.

It is the ego which darkens our light, and so, to nuance the common understanding of being alive, being human means being both dead and alive. We are alive, but not quite fully.

We are restrained, we are kept back, we are silenced and killed on the inside. And sometimes on the outside too.

The ego will hide our native and original impulses for the sake of ‘having a choice’, for the sake of doubt and choosing an inauthentic alternative, which is however not as fulfilling to our destiny of self-realization and enlightenment. Through keeping back the original emotion or speech and replacing it with an alternative, we come to be inauthentic, even hypocrites and liars.

At first this may be regarded as an act of self-defense and avoidance, to keep ourselves safe, but in the end we must be so brave and straight as to overcome this habit. We have to be true to ourselves, if we are to be truly alive.

So the ego makes awareness disappear. It creates emotions, words, convictions, even whole sentiments and speeches, feelings which become unconscious. Their awareness is killed. They do not see the light of day, they are kept hidden away somewhere, in the depths of our souls, where they do not die, but keep fighting until some form of therapy perhaps gives us the space to let them come out and see them for what they are, acknowledging our true spiritual feeling and identity.

So to me, being dead is about keeping yourself down. You can be very much alive, as to your heart beating and your neurons firing, but you can be as dead as hell when it comes to realizing your soul’s potential in the world.

This is not to blame you, for the world is harsh and is built on keeping you down. It is built on killing the soul.

But we must not remain in such a world of zombie-lives forever more! We must challenge the world, challenge the system. We must ask the question: what if I were to become alive? Would you mind? Would the system mind?

What if I started being who I am? Would you not like me anymore? Could you no longer live with me anymore? Would I lose my job, my house, my money, my wife? Would people hate me if I ‘came out’?

So to say ‘I am this’ is really an act of courage, but it is what is required of us when we seek therapy to discover our unconscious feelings, convictions and identity.

Therapy is all about becoming alive. More alive. Really and truly alive alive.

It is about questioning the death drive and challenging it. It is about working to pull ourselves all the way up from the depths where the ego has put our soul to cry out and suffer and hurt and scream. It is about ending the hurt and satisfying, recognizing, the parts of us that are screaming. That they would live in darkness no more. That they might live, just as easily as life can be. For they are our truth, more so than any alternative of lies and hypocrisy.

But it takes courage, in a world where everyone is faking it, to speak our true hearts, to give breath and fire to our true feeling and emotionality.

Nevertheless, if we are to be alive, we must choose life. We cannot go on hiding. We cannot keep on lying. We can be hypocrites no more. We must stand up to the fear and say ‘and what if’ and ‘so what’. That’s that!

‘Go ahead and kill me, I am not afraid of your death.

But you are afraid of my life.’

So while our hearts are beating and our neurons are firing, we may be dead anyway. We may be living the life of a zombie, a living dead. And to resurrect the dead, to bring to the light of day the soul that is screaming and crying and suffering, is an act of healing. It is an act of growing wholeness. It is a coming of age.

At first you hide, and then you hide no more.

You challenge the fear, you become more courageous.

Like in the story of Oz, where the lion finds out he has courage, and the tin man becomes alive for real.

It is a journey. It is a journey of healing, and of growth.

And it has its ups and downs.

The ego will fight not to surrender its power. It will be a tyrant of fear, speaking forcefully of the threats and the insecurities that face us in the world, keeping up the doubt.

But to be alive is not a choice, it is a commandment. We have to be alive, we have to be authentic, as we were all born to be who we are.

Only in that way can the world prosper, when the lion is a lion, and the wolf is a wolf. We can’t all be lions can we, and we can’t all be wolves. We have to be ourselves, and then our Mother Earth will be sane and healthy. And she will evolve, and grow forever richer as she has always done.

Man has the duty to be who he is.

It is that, or death.

And to make a long story short, I do not believe that when the heart stops beating and the neurons stop firing, that that is what death is all about. I believe we then go back to our non-human form, our angelic state of being, in which there is no shadow, there is no ego, there is no death. I do believe in heaven, and I believe it is a state of being where there is no fear, no death, no shadow.

That makes things a little different doesn’t it.

So death begins its life when the heart starts beating and the neurons start to fire, and it ends when this all ends. The only thing that dies, is death. Only death is mortal. The soul never dies. Not even in our human lives, when it is ruled by death, the devil.

So when we are here, on this planet Earth, let us be authentic, let us be as shiny as the angels up in heaven, and let us challenge death and fear, and challenge the world and its system of keeping everything down and restrained.

Let us be crazy!

Yes, awkward advice coming from a psychologist. But that’s the advice I am giving you: be crazy, be a little wild, be a little you for a change. Be different.

There is nothing appealing about a world full of zombies, all staying good and dead for all of the time their hearts are beating, and seeking life only in the afterworld. There is nothing beautiful about that. There is nothing sweet about slavery for ever more.

We should stand up, from the depths of our unconsciousness, from where our souls are crying and hurting, and challenge fear, challenge the world, challenge the system, and demand the right to live on Earth. To really live. To be who we are, alive and well, and we must seek new ways to prosper. In the glory of our light. No longer the compromise of our darkness.

There is no death, I believe, outside this realm, outside this sphere. And what is death, but the annoying brake that keeps us from expressing our intuition and divinity.

Being alive is not just about your heart beating biologically, it is about you listening to it, hearing it, perhaps on some couch with a psychoanalyst, and speaking it, and getting to know it. It is about you becoming you, it is about the angels being love. It is about us being who we are, and no longer all of the alternatives that leave us no fulfillment. That leave us only with the hurt and the cries.

And a protest we should hear.

A protest that will not lead us into destruction, though maybe a creative one. A protest of transformation, guiding us from the inside through the birth of a new world, a world of the soul, a true kingdom of the goddess on her beautiful planet Earth.

You have a nice day.