If you’re afraid to die, you won’t have the cutting-through energy you need to be great.
You’ll hold yourself back. A part of you that is POWERFUL will impose a “success wall” around your behaviors, so you can’t put yourself in danger of death – ego or physical death – and therefore you will stay “safe” but mediocre.
Watch this clip of Will Smith on death & success:
What he’s saying sounds pretty simple: he is willing to outwork anyone.
But listen more closely.
“I’m not afraid to DIE….on a treadmill.”
What he’s saying is profound. He’s not afraid to DIE…period.
The fact that he adds “…on a treadmill” is almost irrelevant. Can you think of a more banal place to die than on a treadmill? Maybe on the toilet. Okay, in that light, a treadmill is a much better place to die than a toilet. (But I’ve seen how you eat, and if you keep it up, you stand a better-than-average chance of dying on the toilet.)
The point is, Will Smith is not afraid to die in a totally pedestrian place, which means he’s not afraid to die anywhere. His drive for success became so great that it OVERSHADOWED his fear of death.
And in the face of death, what’s failure?
If you truly want to gain access to your greatness, you must get to a point where you are prepared to die.
I got to a point in my life where I was ready to die. The pain of the patterns in my present got so great that I was ready for my existence to end. This sounds extreme, but because I believe in reincarnation, it was less so — I was fine with the idea that I’d be loaded up into a new body and re-inserted into the Matrix (so to speak) with only my karma to keep me company.
But as soon as I hit that psychological turning point, something really powerful happened: I was now willing to make the decisions, take the action, and make the sacrifices necessary to change the pain of the patterns in the present. I was truly ready to change the patterns of the present. This is what you must be willing to do: change your patterns, or die trying.
When we are ready for death, we are ready for death of a part of our self. The ego, or the lower self, is clutching so tightly onto the patterns that are keeping us stuck: deadening jobs, gloomy cities, dead-bedroom relationships, in vitality-sapping coping habits.
To kill a part of yourself is an initiation. You know that your “self” will not be the same afterward. You accept that. You even desire it. You are ready to slay the inferior self, to shed the skin that has kept you bottled up and stifled in mediocrity, smothering you with smallness.
When a part of you dies, you become initiated. You enter the liminal space, the borderlands between selves. You journey through this space and when you come out of the other side, you are re-born, purified of the “sins” of your old self.
The word “sin” simply means, “missing the mark.” Your old self had a habit of missing the mark deliberately, to keep you safe. When you kill that self, you kill that habit, and now your arrows can fly true, every time.
The turning point is when the pain of present patterns overwhelms you.
If you have a big tolerance for pain, it may take you longer to get to this point. Some people hit this point very quickly and others are cursed with relative comfort in their lives. Comfort makes you soft. It keeps you in a dull holding pattern, using coping habits to salve the emotional pain and prevent it from getting sharp enough to goad you into the radical action that would save your life by taking it.
Your life can change drastically, but before it can, a part of you has to die. A part of you has to be sacrificed so you can grow into your greatness. You can’t keep all the old habit patterns and maladjusted coping skills, AND become great. The two selves don’t go together. They can’t co-exist. One dies, so the other may be born.
Sacrifice is an ancient holy word that literally means, “To make sacred.” By allowing the old self that is no longer serving you to die, you are giving it as sacred food to the new higher self that is about to be born.
This resonates all through nature and is reflected in our modern mythology. In The Matrix, Morpheus says in the machine’s system “The dead are liquefied to feed the living.” In our own society, we increasingly realize the wisdom and even necessity of recycling. Nature recycles 100%. Mushrooms feed on the decaying matter on the forest floor. Lotus blossoms are nourished by the mud at the bottom of the pool. We are all food for something else.
There is a person you were meant to become. There is a mighty Purpose that YOU were meant to live on this Earth, in this incarnation. But just because you were sent here with a purpose doesn’t mean you will fulfill it. You could ignore the call. You could fail. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” I’ve seen it happen plenty of times.
If you haven’t been initiated yet, your Purpose is stifled. It’s smothered under fear of discomfort, fear of failure, or fear of success. It’s closed into a tiny, little box. Getting it out isn’t going to be easy, comfortable, cheap or fun.
But if you want to be great, getting it out is what you must do. And in order to do that, a part of you – maybe a big part – is going to have to die.
So, are you prepared to die?
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Also published on Medium.