There’s the aspect of death, where a part of ourselves is no longer able to accompany us and must fall away: the putrefying of an old dream, of me and my life and how it was all supposed to turn out.
At the other pole is rebirth, renewal, and the emergence of new life.
It’s understandable that the rebirth aspect is the one we most welcome and are drawn to: healing, union, the coming back together of what which has fallen apart.
To embrace dissolution as path, as initiation, as a manifestation of the ally will feel contradictory and counter-instinctual. It will ache in the heart.
However, in many alchemical and mystical streams, dissolution and the death of the material (the known) is the very essence of the path and required for our perception (and subtle body) to be cleansed.
Rebirth is not possible without full participation in the process of death. There is no doorway in and through without embodiment to the cycles of grief. There is no union unless and until something has first been separated.
We see this experiential discovery for example in the writings of Rumi, St. John of the Cross, in Teresa of Avila’s vision of the interior castle.
This energetic movement of putrefaction, or of reorganization, is the Kali aspect of love, the body of a figure like Vajrakilaya in Tibet, or Mercurius in alchemy, the shadow side of God and the transpersonal Self.
This activity and specific manifestation of the Divine Ground plays a vital role in our individuation and awakening, but is not easy to be in relationship with. There’s no real reference point for that, including in a lot of our contemporary traditions, which remain oriented exclusively to the upward, clear, and ascending currents.
In addition are the currents of the divine descent, the illuminated black sun, the lunar cycles that unfold within the somatic unconscious as well as the soil in the deep earth, extending down into the shadowlands and underworld, with Persephone and others.
