The Mystery of Death and Rebirth
Mindful Mondays: Easter Edition
Good morning, and welcome to Mindful Mondays. I wrote last week about St. Patrick’s Day and Easter as Christianized versions of ancient festivals celebrating the return of spring. (Indeed, Eostre was the name of a Germanic spring goddess). It makes sense to celebrate rebirth in the spring: after the darkness and cold of winter, we see flowers blooming, animals giving birth to their young, and other signs of life returning to the earth.
The Easter story of Christ’s death and resurrection also parallels older stories of dying-and-rising gods like Osiris and Dionysos. While many of these deities were associated with vegetation and the annual cycle of the sun and the crops, there is also a deeper psychological meaning in this pattern.
For Carl Jung, Jesus’s story was a symbol of the individuation process, the developmental process we go through as humans on our way to a higher level of consciousness and wholeness. That transformation of consciousness would be impossible without the experiences of suffering and even death.
According to the nondual spiritual traditions, our true nature is pure awareness or consciousness. This awareness is of the same nature as God, the divine, or ultimate reality. Carl Jung referred to it as the Self (with a capital ‘S’). And yet, this pure awareness incarnates in human form and goes through all the experiences of life, love, joy, suffering, death, and rebirth.
The poet John Keats wrote that the world is a “vale of soul-making” in which each of us, imbued with the divine spark of consciousness, has to go through all the myriad experiences of life in order to take that spark and make it into a soul. This soul-making would be impossible without the experience of suffering. (Even the Buddha would not have pursued spiritual awakening and the end of suffering without encountering old age, sickness, and death outside the walls of his father’s palace.)
Similarly, from a Jungian perspective, the story of Jesus symbolizes how the divine incarnates in human form (that is to say, as us) and goes through all the experiences of human life in order to ultimately redeem it.
On an individual level, we can’t reach wholeness by avoiding suffering. We need to accept and integrate all our human experiences, especially the ones we don’t like and don’t want, in order to reach a greater level of understanding and psychological maturity. Often, that means dying to old self-concepts or ways of being before we can experience rebirth into something new. That experience can be painful, but ultimately it’s necessary in order for us to grow and become the individuals we are capable of being.
Book I’m Reading
AWE: The Automatic Writing Experience by Michael Sandler. With his highlighter-yellow glasses and trademark “Woo-hoo!” demeanor, Michael Sandler can be a lot, especially if your personal aesthetic is a little more… subdued. However, if you can get past that, Sandler’s approach to the timeless practice of automatic writing can be a powerful tool for psychological and spiritual exploration—and his personal story, involving his sporting career and multiple near-death experiences, is compelling. In a nutshell, automatic writing is a way of tapping into guidance from your unconscious, higher Self, or higher power(s) through the written word. I’ve recently started experimenting with this practice myself and am getting a lot out of it, so far.
TV Series I’m Enjoying
Shōgun. I remember renting the original miniseries years ago (back when Netflix sent DVDs in the mail) and enjoying it thoroughly despite its somewhat dated 1980 production. I was initially skeptical that this FX/Hulu remake would hold up, but three episodes in, I have to say that it does, beautifully bringing to life the aesthetic delicacy as well as the brutal reality of war and politics in 1600s Japan. Recommended for fans of The Seven Samurai and Game of Thrones.
Quote of the Week
“What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me. This task gives me so much to do that I have no time or any other. Let me point out that if we were all to live in that way we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now—madness. What nature asks of the apple-tree is that it shall bring forth apples, and of the pear-tree that it shall bring forth pears. Nature wants me to be simply man. But a man conscious of what I am, and of what I am doing. God seeks consciousness in man.”
—Carl Jung
That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? What would you like to learn more about? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment below.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
PS: If you could use some guidance and support in integrating challenging experiences or bringing forth your unique gifts into the world, 1:1 coaching can help. Just reply to this email with “coaching” and we can set up a free phone consultation to see if if working with me might be a good fit for you.
PPS: Not subscribed to Mindful Mondays yet? Enter your email address below to get my latest writing delivered straight to your inbox. One email per week, no spam ever, and you can unsubscribe at any time:
If you enjoyed this week’s edition, please consider sharing it with a friend. Personal recommendations are one of the best ways for me to grow my readership and share the benefits of mindful living with the world. Thanks!
Gem of a final quote from Carl Jung.