The Great Work - Dying before Death

 I've been away for some time.  My apologies to those of you who have reached out to me and to whom I owe a reply.    We are in the deepening autumn where I live, and preparations needed to be made for the dark half of the year.  I heat with wood, so there is the chopping, stacking, etc.  I grow most of my food, ergo the harvest.  I am well, thankfully, and grateful to be alive, and sorry to have been away so long.

Of particular interest to me now - since this is a reflective time of year - is the concept of the Great Work.   I'm sure a few of my readers have heard of it.  It is a concept referenced in hermetic texts and hermeticism in general, and is symbolic of the transmutation of base metals into gold.  You can read more here.    However, modern hermetic movements (and likelly all of them, even historical ones) are concerned with the Great Work as it applies to humans directly: meaning, transmuting base nature into a loftier nature entirely.   And it is this application of the concept of the Great Work to which I  refer now. 

A reader of mine - someone who actuallly lives in close proximity to me, ironically - reached out during my absence to express her disdain for the current mode of living in the United States, and the decadent and debauched approach to politics here.  She is not alone in her thinking. Nearly everyone I know feels this way, whichever side of the political spectrum they're on.  But more importantly, she asks in her email to me: "what can we do about this?"

It's a loaded question, really.  The academic (and most widely accepted) answer is activism.  Join a group. Start a protest. Donate to a cause.  The list goes on.  And to be sure, activism will ignite the human spirit under a common flame, and participants feel useful and meaningful - since they're contributing to something larger than themselves and of which they are only one part. Activism definitely has its place.  However, the argument could be made that for all our activism in the modern era, very little has been actually accomplished to alleviate poverty, eliminate disease, raise equality (insert meaningful cause here).  To take it a step further, all of our charitable giving (which aligns with activism in many ways but is not exactly the same thing) has done nothing to actually eradicate the causes to which these large sums have been donated.  Furthermore, within the United States at least, nonprofits make up a significant portion of the total population of employers within our borders.  So what does this mean?  If these causes that our nonprofits tout as their reason for existence ceased to exist, those organizations would have no reason to continue on.  Good for economic growth? You already know the answer.    

But there is something else we can do that may help create meaningful change, that has little to do with activism.  We can engage ourselves in the Great Work - the magnum opus as it were - of our own evolution.    We can begin the process of dying.  

The greatest activism in which we can ever engage is the process of our own Great Work. 

I'm not talking about the process of the cessation of biological functions here.  I'm talking about taking the time to look in a fucking mirror and examine yourself. Who are you? What do you leave behind? How do the actions that you take and the reactions you have to things make work or difficulty for others? How quick do you anger?  How quick do you forgive?  Do you expect others to validate your interests without you validating theirs?  Are you a selfish human being? These questions are the beginning of self-reflection.  And what the world needs most right now - more than protests and boycotts and the like - is for her people to take up the habit of self-reflection. 

I recognize that this is an unpopular axiom.  I know that what people want to hear are more prospects for external validation.  But that isn't what we need.  We need to find our center - the place inside of all of us that guides us to what is right and good.  It's there.  It may be hidden very deeply, but it's there.   It starts, I believe, with self-reflection. It starts with this Great Work - the work on our internal selves.    That's how we can improve the world - one heart at a time.  

It also leads down a very difficult but necessary path - most likely toward the death of all that's ever been important to us. Because what self-reflection does is it strips away the meaning and value assigned to things by culture, and allows us to find meaning and value for ourselves.   Make no mistake: it's a path that leads to certain death.  But you'll find, once you're well on your way, that its a death that becomes welcome and necessary, and leads only to a renewed sense of life and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.   

I want to take a minute to thank all of you who read my work. It means a great deal to me, and its important to me that you recognize the concepts I'm attempting to disseminate.   I'm sorry that I'm not more accessible - but I find social media ever more abhorrent, and have no desire to make myself popular.   I appreciate all of your emails - and I really do read all of them.