Thoughts on Transformation
Maybe there's hope in between the chaos of destruction?
I’ve been rather busy, travelling and ill lately… making writing difficult. Excuses, excuses. I have ten drafts in the works, but I end up doomscrolling the end of democracy, and don’t get around to finishing anything for my dear readers here. Good thing I’m still proud of this essay that was published in the sold-out Winter Edition #I-24 of the Berlin Kinbaku Magazine (NSFW 18+) for the theme of Metamorphosis. So I share it with you now, with a nod to the editors and folks at Berlin Kinbaku Magazine. They’re accepting submissions for the Fall 2025 edition.
This essay was inspired a bit by my recent experience of losing my father to cancer, which I wrote about last year, here and here, and my trip to Japan. Have a read.
In ancient myths, the cycles of death and renewal play a prominent role. Japan and Ancient Greece have similar katabasis stories of descent into the underworld to rescue a lover. Orpheus, the musician-poet, is distraught when his wife Eurydice dies, and he goes to the underworld to get her back. After charming Hades and Persephone, the rulers of that world, with his music, he is allowed to take Eurydice with him—but on the condition that he walk ahead of her and not look back until they have passed the threshold. Alas, his faith falters, and he turns around to be sure, upon which his wife vanishes. The loss of the beloved and death induce the next phase of the hero’s journey.
In the Japanese creation myth, Izanami and Izanagi, the primary sibling gods, produce the Japanese archipelago and various deities. Izanami was fatally burned in the act of giving birth to the fire god and went to Yomi, the land of darkness. The grief-stricken Izanagi follows her there, but she has eaten the food there and may not leave, so he stays with her. However, Izanagi doesn’t trust that their love is what remains timeless and wants to see her body. He lights a fire and sneaks a peek—but sees her corpse being eaten by maggots and runs away. She curses him, sending warriors after him, but he escapes. He seals the entrance to the underworld, thus breaking their union. In the ruckus and aftermath, various other creator gods are born from Izanagi. This includes the moon god Tsukiyomi and the sun goddess Amaterasu.
Izanagi’s inability to comprehend that things have changed, to shift mindsets, sets into motion a new cycle of creation. Amaterasu becomes the main god of the Japanese pantheon and the ancestor of the Imperial House of Japan. These archetypal stories can be seen to reflect what is known as an initiation into higher stages of knowledge and wisdom. Either we see the step that needs to be taken, or we are forced to take the longer, less efficient route.
Transformation can be long and painful or short and painful, like the proverbial band-aid tug. The end result is a changed state. A scar, even. Destruction is only a phase in transformation. What appears to be eliminated, broken, ruined, or gone is merely a moment in a process of continual change that everything under the sun is subject to.
There are exceptions to this natural law, depending on how wide and long a lens we use. Are we looking at days, months, or lifetimes? Cycles of change may remain obscured by the shortness of our vision. Looking mythologically, there is an evolution of consciousness. If we consider a human lifespan, the change may not inspire hope.
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The capital city of my adopted land, Berlin, practices destruction designed to bring renewal. This city constantly reinvents itself architecturally and ethnographically. Where palaces or parking lots once stood, now museums or concert halls loom. Clubs and holes in the walls cede to shopping malls—the ever-maligned gentrification is underway. In the last twenty years alone, the population constellation has changed from mainly Eastern Europeans to Russians, returning Jews, Italians, Turks, Americans, now Near East, Middle Easterners, East Indians, and Ukrainians. Given the corollary law of the constant of change itself, what makes a people who they are or gives a city its identity?
Destruction doesn’t always bring renewal in every modern culture. From unprocessed trauma on the individual psychological level, which blocks further growth, or to wars ongoing. The streets of Syria, Gaza, and Afghanistan remain in ruins, crumbling under human-wrought terror. An entire intricately crafted wooden room from a Syrian house from the Middle Ages was moved over 100 years ago from Aleppo, and preserved in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Many cultural treasures of the East are now only available in Western museums. The seeds of renewal may be planted in destruction, but we humans must water and care that it happens. Sometimes, the earth has been too salted with the sins of our forefathers or even our generation that renewal will have to wait for a different era. Yes, wolves may be thriving in Chernobyl, but it will be literally eons until humans do so again.
Every culture celebrates rites of passage, marking the various human stages of life development. From birth, adolescence, marriage to death, and the life thereafter, these human cycles often mirror earthly natural cycles of fertility, fructification, and decay. For individuals, there are other rituals for self-individuation and deepening of wisdom, the “baptism by fire” being the fast and painful route. The ancient Greeks had many centers for wisdom initiation. From Delphi to Ephesus, Eleusis, and Samothrake, the so-called “mystery centers” were places where candidates for initiation were inducted into higher knowledge through extensive rituals accompanied by hierophants guiding the process. “Know thyself,” admonished the words atop the entry to the temple of the oracle of Delphi—woe to those who did not heed and assessed their preparation for initiation incorrectly. The consequence of failure to pass the initial trials of spirit was death.
Absent ancient mystery centers, today, we still have paths to initiation. Some slow and painful, whether through a conscious process of inner seeking resulting in some form of occult knowledge of the cosmos, to a sudden flash of insight through a journey, a great loss, illness, or near-death experience, whereby a person’s consciousness is irrevocably changed. “You had to have been there,” goes the line. By definition, rites of passage or initiation cannot be learned, but must be lived. Spiritual truths cannot be proven once and for all; they can only be experienced, said the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner.
All descriptions pale in comparison to the lived experience. I remember when I began to be annoyed by people asking me how something was—expecting a full report of a show, trip, or event that they didn’t attend. No words could describe it anyway because they wanted my thoughts and conclusions about the event, the wisdom of my interpretation itself. That was something I couldn’t really share and didn’t want to—there are no shortcuts to initiation. Everyone has to go on their own path. What happens in Vegas stays not just in Vegas but in the hearts and minds of those who went there, whatever level of debauchery or profound insights result from their trip. You can’t just read about life on Earth; it must be experienced. And living life on earth, especially for recent generations, if you are born into a family in Syria or Gaza, will be a trial by fire. This is a paradox: We must be on earth in physical bodies in the material world to have spiritual and supersensible insights into the cosmos.
In Berlin, the structures of power, from palaces to walls, are renewed or torn down to signify and manifest change. In Japan, there is still a ritual of natural and cosmic renewal, reflected in the eight-year cycle of rebuilding the shrine grounds of the imperial ancestors. The past is kept alive and honored but renewed. The divine body of the Sun Deity Ameratasu, represented by a mirror, is housed at the Ise Shrine. “Through the Shikinen Sengu, which in structure resembles one agricultural ritual year extended over eight years, natural time—time perceived as the eternal return of the seasons—is renewed by the cyclic reconstruction of Japan’s supreme sacred space, the shrine grounds of the imperial ancestors.”
When people undergo major changes in belonging or status, it is not always visible to the outside world, hence the need for a ritual or ceremony to mark and accompany the occasion. In the Christian church, babies are baptized, children are confirmed, adults are married, and the dying receive a last anointing. Similar rituals and ceremonies exist for such major life events in the non-Christian world.
Every transformation is a creation, and every creation births a new reality, from the mythological level to the personal narrative. In the presence of death and apparent destruction, we can feel most alive and conscious. Soldiers on deployment, fearing death daily, experience a heightened sense of reality, a falling away of the curtain of daily life to reveal another layer of consciousness. My father’s recent transition from earthly to spiritual life, through the death of his body and the birth of his spirit, broke open my consciousness. I could feel the narrowing of the eye of the needle as his earthly life shrank and as the expansion of consciousness he was undergoing spread to those close to him. There was an involution of awareness of the physical—Umstülpung in German—to a turning inside out of what we know to be reality, now expanded to include another level of existence and consciousness. Nothing is gone; it is only transmuted. Ovid, the ancient Roman author of the famous work even so titled “Transformation,” still has the last word. “Everything changes, Nothing is truly lost.”
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