Death
_I: I remember it as if it were yesterday... My whole family accompanied me, but there was a lot of silence on the way. I was 21 years old, or rather, I had completed 21 orbits around the Sun. When the priestesses arrived, they covered me with orange cloths, the color of mourning, the color of regeneration. In that building in front of Lake Habbadabtra, now called El Karum, they stripped me of all my belongings and clothes, leaving me naked, they submerged me in the pools connected to the lake, and they gave me a bath. They put ointments on my skin, oils with strong and rich aromas, and arranged my hair in fine braids. Thus, from within the water, the high priest received me, with his face painted black. His eyes stood out, clear, like a specter at sunset. At sunset, his words still resonate within _I: "Buhub hishán" (the time to die has come).
_AM: What did you feel?
_I: Honor. His left hand stretched towards the west, as if grasping the last rays of the sun beginning to touch the waters and reflecting beautiful colors on the gentle waves. His other hand rested on my forehead. His chants and mantras spoke of liberation, of letting go of something to give birth to something new. "Ñavoch-Chovña," he invoked the name of the Divine, the one who lets go of the old to allow the new to enter. "Eh-buhub sör’es, Eh-vakhub sör’eu" (Let your soul die, Make a new one wake up). "Nab-uresh erbak, ian Tob-urah esbak, sü-ku tep’enk inn-hai" (Under the shadows you have walked, so you can walk on the light, and both live in each of your steps). The priestesses gave me the sacred drink, a kind of narcotic, which would allow me to travel better through the underworld. I had completed my initiatory journey after years of traveling along the Nile, after going through hundreds of tests, I had to go through the last and most difficult of all: to die. Facing death was the last of the great steps of shadows and the darkness of the soul, where we had to learn to let go of everything. In the Khemul culture of the Atlantean Nile, one had to learn to die many times in life, to understand that life itself was nothing more than a journey. The word Death was said "Buhub," which could be translated as "the path you make from one house to another," considering that being said the same from the front as from the back, a palindrome, this journey is constant and cyclical, an eternal journey. We used to welcome children into the world by saying with love and sweetness: "Waershu Hai-ti, atum Buhub-het" (Welcome to Life, the path to Death). From the womb of the Mother to the womb of the Earth. Every step we took thereafter would be a practice for death. Every 7 years we had to review our lives, and know if we were ready to die or not. The way to know it was by practicing death, reviewing emotions, ties, dependencies, beliefs, attachments. After completing the initiatory path, the test at 21 years old was to swim with the gods. Habbadabtra was the Mirror to the beyond. In its waters, the stars were reflected, and sailing through them, you seemed to be sailing with the gods in the skies. But beneath its waters lay the underworld, ruled by Sh'rabeb (Sobek), the Crocodile. Legend had it that the crocodile would only attack you from the depths of the underworld, which we now call the Subconscious, if you were not at peace with your soul, if something in you pulled you with fear to the shore. As I stood with half of my body in the water, around me, in silence, were all those I loved, my family, my husband, my closest ones. I had to look at each one in silence, without the possibility of saying anything, not even a gesture, just identifying what bound me to them. Where were the ties, and if they pulled me towards life or accompanied me to death. At the end of the looks, the night had come, and the stars covered everything. Anubis was heard in the desert in the voices of the jackals, calling my soul, claiming it for the inner world of shadows. I climbed the steps that separated the square pool from the lake, and climbed onto the long boat, where two priestesses and the high priest accompanied me. Four rowers began to push towards the center of the lake, towards a clear horizon covered by the night. I couldn't look back, I shouldn't. Looking back would only bring me trouble, it would show that I wasn't ready to face the new. When we reached the center of the lake, the most intense part began: plunging into the water. Naked, without any clothing, nothing, I had to swim with the gods, floating in the sky. Knowing that below me was the realm of the crocodile, that at the slightest doubt, they could smell my fear.
_AM: Real crocodiles?
_I: Yes, of course, a lake infested with crocodiles. It's the most direct way to confront the subconscious, which instantly awakens. The shadows, the night, the fear, the attachment, everything that holds us to the security of life. The worst thoughts cross your mind. The heart races, just like breathing, and everything is altered. And you need to remain calm, in meditation, looking at the stars even though you feel the chill caused by your mind thinking about what might be beneath the water.
_AM: A perfect allegory of the subconscious and the conscious made real.
_I: But I did it... I made it to the other side. And there was the Temple of the Crocodile. There, every 7 years, we had to be present to renew our vows with existence. Inside, 7 small chambers welcomed us, with just enough space for our bodies to lie down as if it were our wake. The companions dried me again, put on the ointments, the perfumes, and discovered the chamber corresponding to the age I had. There, I received the funeral chants, there I was on the other side of the realm of the living, I was in the underworld, daydreaming about what I had drunk. "Eihai emgor lanli shu?" (Do you wish to return to Life?), they asked me at one point. I hesitated for a moment, but I remember my answer was "Ahai-ti" (I am in Life). "Amma hai-hah" (for I am Life Eternal). To which the priest replied: "Aeyeh" (so be it). We returned in the boat, and this time, again with no clothes on me except for a fine and translucent veil tied by a beautiful colorful collar of wings over my chest, fluttering subtly from my shoulders to my feet, I arrived again on the shore of the living, standing firmly at the bow of the boat looking at the horizon, where my loved ones welcomed me, having waited for me for hours on the other side until dawn. The first sunlight marked the beginning of the new stage. I was reborn.
_AM: ...Shiw...
_I: And since then, Shiw was my name.
_AM: Death and Resurrection.
_I: That time in 2016 when we came to Egypt to carry out the first Khem 999 journey, days before I told Ahmed, our guide, that I needed to return to the place where I had practiced dying so many times. After hours wandering along dirt roads in the desert, in a geography very different from what I remember, I found it. There, in the middle of nowhere, kilometers away from the lake due to the droughts of the last millennia, the great Habbadabtra was reduced by 70% surely, was what they now call the "Temple of Pearls." Upon entering it was like facing many deaths, it was like dying again. I realized that I remembered many deaths, in many lives, and that all of them had now left me with the clarity that we take with us to the other side everything we are attached to, and it is precisely the same thing that pushes us to continue living in the past. Emotions, loves, are like an anchor... Dying hurts because of it, but it is a liberation for the Being.
_AM: Death is the most despised universal gift by the living. Death is a physical concept that helps energy to be released and adapt to new forms and realities. The cosmos is a set of vibrations moving like waves. Each convex movement is a moment of integration, of going inward, of letting go, of dying. Each concave movement is a moment of expression, of going outward, of manifesting and living. What a human sees as life and death, the universe sees as a simple wave. Thus, a wave is eternal life, from incarnation to incarnation, experiencing different realities according to different frequencies, and each wave will condition the next with its strength. In the universe, everything is continuous, there is no separation, life and death are nothing more than an illusion from the distorted and limited eye. Every day you are born when you wake up and die when you sleep. When you make the dream of each night conscious with the death of each life, you will realize that each day of your life is a practice for the next. There you will understand that what you do not resolve today, you will have to resolve in the next one, and that depending on how you sleep, with what information or emotions you go to sleep with, your dreams will be related to it, determining your dreams or nightmares, what you will call Heaven or Hell. Death is letting go of control of limitation to enter the freedom of expansion, in the mind and imagination, where there are no limits.
_I: The death is related to all the bases of the human and animal subconscious. In the construction of the being, the struggle for survival made fear, anguish, terror, battle, anger, tools of life to defend oneself from death. Organic construction, then, is based on the denial of death. The physical body is a being built mainly by patterns that seek to reject death, and it is logical, since the design manifested itself with the will to give all possible opportunities to a being to experience as much as possible. That is why bodies became increasingly limited, to allow greater capacity for release of said patterns. Letting go is so difficult that the same system forces us to let go through the concept of physical death. But on the other hand, we have the death of the emotional soul, related to traumas and the dark night of the soul. Souls also die, although it takes lives to do so.
_AM: How does this happen?
_I: The soul is energy, and energy transforms. When it has limited and rigid energy, like a body, the energy is forced to transform faster, but when it is more relaxed and subtle, it can take millennia to transform.
_AM: This explains why we can live so many lives repeating the same stories and feeling the same emotions...
_I: Exactly. The soul clings to emotions and stories like the body clings to the life it is experiencing. Death, then, is the concept of the convex wave that strips us of those attachments and forces us to transform in order to continue moving forward.
_AM: Although it hurts, death is a liberation. That's what all our education was about 12,000 years ago, to understand that we had to smile at death, and that when we died we would take with us what we are today, so we had to work so much on our being, to be able to arrive coherently at the time of leaving this plane towards the next.
_I: The body doesn't want to let go, and that's why it needs a lot of education. You have to identify which pleasures and desires are the most addictive for you. What emotions are you addicted to in your life? That's why this month of Scorpio we've tried to delve into that crocodile subconscious, to face our desires, attachments, beliefs, shadows, pains, everything we drag hidden inside us and that only makes us slaves at the time of our death. Like that slave in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, he will return again and again to see the same shadows for fear of facing the light and the truth.
_AM: So all is one, and when a part of us descends, a part of all descends, and if you are not aware of it, you will be dragged into the abyss. When your task is to live, and to urge the dead to remember that Life is Eternal.
_I: The Eternity... Everything is eternal, never ends, death is not the end, it is the transformation of matter, the liberation of all shadows... It is leaving the Cave and seeing the Light at the end of the tunnel.
_AM: And when you manage to see the sunlight with attention, you will see that your brain and vision find in its center a black point, which absorbs all the light, leading you to the maximum divine consciousness, where everything coexists in harmony, in the world of ideas.
_I: ...The Void...
_AM: The Eternal Void, where all the shadows of matter, where all the distortion of light, find their meaning, their logic, where all the pressure on you only awakens the diamond that you are, where all low emotion is the fuel of your being, where each negative idea is a new perspective to resolve a crisis. In the Void, darkness becomes clear, in the Void, you rest from wandering aimlessly through the paths of existence, swinging in polarity. In the Void, you find Peace...
_I: That's why the great test is to face Death...
_AM: Death is the ultimate practice of the Void, it is a reminder that we can be free from our own creation, and that we can live the dream we desire.
_I: Living the own or others' experience of death is the ability to awaken the consciousness that we are eternal and subtle, that we live in a dream, and that when we die we only wake up in the expansion of existence.
_AM: Tomorrow begins that journey through existence, to remember the magic of what you have created for yourself, but before that, you must let go of everything that weighs you down in the Subconscious... So... This month has been your Habbadabtra, you have crossed the crocodile lake, you have lain in your deathbed, you have seen your fears and your shadows, to begin to see the sunrise again. But before, you must ask yourself: "Are you ready to Die?".
_I: ...Yes... I am, now I am...
_AM: Immerse yourself in the mud then, do not fight to breathe air filled with toxic shadows for your soul. Bury yourself under the Tree of Life, and let your seed germinate.
_I: I Am the Eternal Void, and in the dream of Death, is where I can rise again and create Life.
_AM: ...Rest in Peace...