Blood & Ink: On Self-Sacrifice

“To become who you want to be, you must sacrifice who you are.”

I talk about transformation in an intense frame…

Part of it is my personality, it’s what works for me. Part of it, I feel, is ‘true’.

I’ve spent over a decade work-playing in the “conscious, spiritual, healing” space. Sometimes, how I talk about growth work rubs people the wrong way.

• “Not everything is so serious dude.”
• “Too much masculine, not everything is a test/lesson/battle.”
• “But you don’t have free will and all change is the grace of God anyway.”

There is truth to be found here.

In fairness, I have been overly hard on myself, my heart has been given less priority than my mind, and a core part of me clings to the illusion of control and the power of will.

But despite valid critique from fellow sparring partners, this energy in me has never left.

The person you are becoming will cost you no less—and no more—than the person you are today.

Your current life is the cost of entry to your future.

You can’t “have your cake and eat it too.” The confidence you’re trying to cultivate requires sacrificing your timid tendencies. You bring yourself to the altar of Life as a devotional sacrifice, releasing yourself, and allowing the metaphysical transmutation to happen on its own.

Oddly enough—and somewhat counterintuitively—I think it’s the laissez-faire, go-with-the-flow, soft spirituality folk who cling too tightly.

Starting at ~18, I was violently thrust into a death/evolution process. Everything around me crumbled. My vision of my future cracked and disappeared, my psyche went to war with itself, and my understanding of reality flipped completely.

To be clear, I didn’t want, or ask, for any of it. I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t pretty, empowering, or welcomed. I struggled and suffered for years. Cocktails of pharmaceutical medications, one faceless, monotone therapist after another, battling side-effects with different side-effects.

But the other side of it is brilliant. The psycho-spiritual death process, the sacrifice of who I was for who I am, was the most brilliant gift I’ve ever been given.

Now, I have (as much as possible) a warm, positive, open, welcoming orientation to this profound, humbling, and existentially challenging process of change. When everything crumbles down inside of and around me, my response now is, “Ah excellent, the seed of this stage is cracking open, and a more powerful Self is now ready to grow out of it.”

Natural Law is metal AF.

Nature is immensely powerful. The flow of the Tao generates volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate shifts, and the suffocating death grip of a boa constrictor as effortlessly and passionately as it creates butterflies.

The process of profound self-transformation can be intensely and acutely challenging. I believe the more challenging, raw, and visceral it feels, the deeper you’re going. Because while it’s easy to sit on your cushion and say you want to feel confident, inspired, loving, and joyous, it’s harder to place yourself on the sacrificial table.

• Are you willing to let go of your self-concept as a good person?
• Are you ready to sacrifice your lack of absolute responsibility?
• Will you admit that you have precisely, profoundly, and absolutely no real idea what is going on here?

The life that you want, the person you want to be, asks for only one simple thing from you: give me everything you are.

This is not negative. Give yourself fully to the Great Process of Change, and align yourself with the flow of Natural Law. Allow destruction, creation, and evolution to merge into a single, indistinguishable, ecstatic whole—and realize that you are that.

You have never been anything other than that. You cannot ever be separate from this endless process of flux, change, evolution, and adaptation.

The Tao doesn’t worry about you losing your self-concept of good/bad just like it doesn’t worry when you trim your fingernails.

Put yourself as a willing sacrifice upon the altar of Life.

Set your life on fire.

And as mysteriously and magically as sound arises out of silence, you will rise from the ashes anew, reborn into and through the most ancient mystery in all of existence.

Because this is who you are.

You are that.

You are the Timeless, Eternal, Mysterious process of inevitable and endless change.

Trust. Let Go. Be Open.

I love you, well done, keep going!
EB