Everyone suffers. The best we can do is make meaning out of it. In this way, crisis is, in large part, redeemed. But in order to fully redeem a particular crisis, we must understand the purpose of crisis in general.
“Crisis” is an accelerated change of season: a moment when the wheel of birth and death spins (or threatens to spin) faster than anticipated.
This explains the shock, but not the darkness. The collapse of faith. The gnawing nihilism.
Crisis-induced states like these arise from existential dread, which is rooted in unexamined materialism– the voice of the devil:
You are nothing but a blip of electrical brainwave activity, on a countdown to absolute extinction.
In this sense, crisis is essential. Without it, our primal beliefs about death would remain buried beneath a pile of heady dogma.
The job of crisis, then, is to expose our “time-tethered cynicism” so we can lay it down, like a flower, at the feet of what is not in crisis: deathless Being.
If crisis is a catalyst for death-reckoning, then the more proactively we meditate on impermanence and death, the less likely the angel of crisis will pay us a bitter and untimely visit.
But this Angel doesn’t stop there.
Something sees death, which means we are before it. The more we relax our “selfing” and return to our true position as edgeless, interpenetrating consciousness, the more capacity we have to notice, in real time, the color and texture of our inner atmosphere and adjust the way it vibrates the beings around us. In this way, we cultivate soul-esteem.
Having developed an ability to shrewdly manage our ego, we can then go about confronting the subtle existential guilt we feel when we allow orphaned ego states to spill out onto others. Only then can we repent, “choose again” and become contagiously at home in the heart of God.
The loss of soul-esteem, then, is the innermost crisis that outer crisis comes to expose; a subliminal trauma that is healed by two interdependent practices: Death-reckoning stillness (meditation) and the savoring of deathless Being in others (meditative relating).
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