Life seems to haunt us with lessons we are not prepared to meet with grace or the passion often required to rise to the occasion. How so? How can passion and haunting lessons be mixed together in the same sentence? It should be no surprise to any of you that lessons are there for our own benefit, otherwise we'd call them something else, like tragedies. But what could be more tragic than a life without lessons? A life devoid of growth? Such things do exist, and never so much as now, for at the same time we are capable of living lives devoid of choice, following a prescription that one facet of society or culture has set, we are also creating machines with unchangeable programming that act in our world, changing it as programmed. Yet we are not so perfectly static as them, not yet. Our programs can change the moment we recognize them as merely that and chose a different way.
Every storybook character we know and love got to where they were through challenges they were seemingly unprepared to meet, some truly weren't and failed and that itself was the lesson. Yet throughout the friction growth in one direction or another is inevitable. Either we chose to rise, or to fall. While sidestepping it also possible, it is only a temporary reprieve. Everyone must return to the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Can you think of any symbol or idea in our common lexicon that more perfectly illustrates this cycle than that of the Phoenix? The mythical bird of fire who lives only to die in a blazing flash, returning to ash before rising again, and again.
While in Tokyo I found many things to do and see, but one of the most captivating of them was an exhibit high in sky of one of the cities many skyscrapers. An exhibit dedicated to the God of Manga, Osamu Tezuka, the creator of the famous Hinotori, or "Phoenix" series. In this work which spanned his entire life, Tezuka goes through the many stages of life, love, loss, struggle, fear, anger, death and so on, though he died just before finishing the series, whose final chapter was the Sun. Which for me is quite telling, and fitting too. The ultimate unknown in life is where the light comes from and what happens when the lights go out, and no one can say for sure what they'll find. We assume through our plurality of religions and theological doctrines that life after death will either be very good or very bad. While the Buddhists maintain a simple return to the same kind of life in a different body. Picking up where you left off based on your karma. This is how I see it, for I can't imagine a anything being more fitting.
This theme of rebirth and karma is central to the series, and spans aeons not just on Earth but across the universe and even time itself. Though the characters are different, one gets the sense that each new era in which the story takes place is simply the continuation of the characters that came before. Though the lives they lead and the way they look are very much different. Very few artists can manage to tell stories as compelling as this, flowing seamlessly across all ages, while holding the thread of every character which came before. People often ask me about the soul and its role in life when reincarnation is in question. If we keep a part of ourselves from one life to the next. My answer has varied just as much as the questions and questioners, but today my answer is, Does the forest which burns to ashes and grows again remain itself after a fire? Does the ocean, when dried to nothing and frozen into the mountains, become the ocean again once the ice melts back to its resting place? How much of who we are is what we are, instead of what we have gotten used to?
The following are pictures of the exhibit as well as of the work itself.
Not only are the works Tezuka created an analogy for life in general, it seems it is analogous to my life at present. In truth I've felt it my whole life, but nothing compares to the intensity that I feel now. Every moment of the day brings me closer to the ineffable, to the source, and every time I do I feel a part of me die, only to be reborn again, stronger and better than I ever was before that mini death. So much of our lives we fear death, fear the end, but as I've already stated, we know nothing about it, only that it spells doom for what we know, or believe we know.
I used to want to live forever, I'd dream about it all the time. I'd imagine going from one end of the universe to the other, witnessing all that ever was or could be. But those were the dreams of a child who feared death, while knowing nothing of life itself. This is the disease of humanity at large, wanting to avoid the unknown so badly we become incased in smaller and smaller bubbles of illusionary protection, our satisfactions with life becoming ever smaller as well. Until one day we find ourselves at deaths door anyways, blinking awake for the first and last time before it all goes dark.
Yet still the cycle continues, and we with it. Another turn in the great wheel of Samsara, the illusion of time and creation. It seems odd to call it illusion, when it is the very vessel through which we find ourselves, again and again, through thick and thin, through good an evil. What else to call it then? What other term can we give to that which is and isn't? Surely fire itself is a perfect analogy for it. What else can spring from nothing, bring light and life, pain and death, only to bring life again from the ashes?
This very question is the root of all beginnings which seeds its own end. Will you rise and fall like the sun? Living for the moment and dying for the same? Can you drop your baggage and join with the eternal, only to pick it up again on your next turn, knowing it shall consume you as it had before? And more still, knowing the need for that consumption, that illusion? Consider your answer carefully, and over and over again, for nothing brings peace in this life as surely as contemplating these things honestly and without fear. A state one can only reach by facing ones end with a smile and a laugh, the very reverse of how we came into this world, completing the cycle on our own terms, ready for the next part of the play. A willing participant and co-creator in the grand tapestry of Creation.