A life is rarely one life. We evolve through countless small endings and beginnings — each one a quiet death, each one a rebirth. Transformation isn’t an event but a continual unfolding, a long remembering of who we truly are.
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“Every transformation demands as its precondition the ending of a world — the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” ― C. G. Jung (all quotes in this article are Carl’s)
We don’t need to live many lifetimes, cycling through endless, repeating, and likely similar routines of birth–life–death. Within a single, brisk, brief, material, earthbound sojourn, we may in fact live out many lifetimes.
As with all things, it’s a matter of perspective.
In the Beginning
Upon conception, one might argue that the spark of life is already engaged in this earthly plane. Some insist the “soul” arrives later, or comes and goes during early development — but that is, in my view, entirely speculative. Near-death and life-between-lives experiences appear deeply influenced by our living narrative, and I suspect we tend to experience what we expect to — at least until we’re well beyond the confines of this realm.
Even the law recognizes a form of life before birth, our zygote being our officially recognized “birthday.” As with most commercial contrivances, this creates an asset-based construct meant to precede what eventually becomes a forgetful, truth-seeking, loving, hating, unpredictable, messy, adventurous human being. We are, in effect, “born” before we are born.
And perhaps worse, through the commercial (cult-like) practices enforced by the medical establishment, we are severed from our complete selves (the lifeboat that is the living placenta) as soon as possible. Dark, convoluted, and not for the faint of heart — yet part of the mechanical reality of modernity.
Even before our first breath, then, we are treated as a product, a resource, a participant in a system. How can these experiences not leave an imprint? Even in utero, our path is marked by transformative events many of us later spend decades unwinding.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
At birth, we enter an entirely new adventure — breathing, shaking, waking, confused, naked, and shocked by the brightness and coldness of a new reality as we cry our first cry. We meet our mother and father. It makes no sense, because everything is intense and chaotic — and yet somehow we know them. Instinctively.
The process of othering begins. One version of our existence ends; another begins in earnest.
It’s said that much of who we become is shaped between ages 0 and 12. These core imprints — emotional, physiological, narrative — often remain with us until our last breath. Some we’ll outgrow. Others we’ll drag reluctantly or defiantly into each new chapter, sometimes knowingly, often unaware.
Many personal transformations slip by quietly, unnoticed. This seems to be the more natural, unplanned, organic, way of things. We’re not keeping score, not comparing ourselves with that brutal self-criticism to others, but simply living as authentically as we can. Some of us feel the need for the bar to be forever raised higher — never quite good enough in the process. Only later, perhaps decades later, when someone says, “You’ve changed,” do we finally realize that something has fallen away.
And on the other side of that, we can become so perpetually wrapped up in “shadow work” and “healing trauma” that we forget to actually live our life in the present.
Most transformations in adulthood are cumulative, emergent, and easily drowned out by routine. Daily responsibilities become a way of muting meaning — obscuring the wisdom that arises from introspection and the integration of first principles we gather along our winding path.
Still, we change. Sometimes gently. Sometimes violently.
Some changes arrive through loss: the death of a partner, a friend, a parent — and then another.
Some come quietly, revealed only when we pause long enough to notice.
Others come by choice: reshaping ourselves for practical or professional reasons, or to challenge the story we’ve been living. These shifts we feel viscerally — uncomfortable, disorienting, necessary.
Do these changes stick, or do we revert? Perhaps both. Perhaps every transformation is a dance, tension and release, as we circle back again and again to what is real.
Dying to Transform
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
The longer we cling to a particular story or belief, the longer we remain bound to it — spiraling outward and away from our true self, yet never fully severed from that original source. Eventually we circle back. We always do.
Change is life, and thus transformation is life. I don’t believe we came here to idle, or simply go along to get along. Life doesn’t work that way — not here.
They say life abhors a vacuum. When we defer or delay, our bodies ache, our hearts tighten, our minds spin. We seek escape or distraction in ways that can never satisfy a spirit that demands expansion, meaning, mystery. That energy needs to go somewhere, and the world will offer all manner of parasitic and predatory outlets. Be aware.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
As we shed the skins of past selves, we learn to grieve. These losses can feel intimate, unsettling — a version of us we once trusted dissolving into irrelevance. But if we refuse to let go, or fail to honor who we once were, we generate suffering where gratitude could have softened the fall.
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
The darker or shadow aspects of our potential visit often — temptations, projections, distortions — each offering material for transformation. Progressive or regressive, the direction is ours to choose. Everything is an offer.
Ultimately, we’re returning home — whether that means a metaphysical realization or, finally, a release of spirit. This is the remembering.
Forgetting, oddly enough, may be the requirement in this place. Entering this life fully aware would strip our experiences of meaning. Illusions, traps, and distortions are part of what enriches the human story, uncanny as that may sound.
By fully accepting responsibility for our lives we defuse the effects of polarity, and reclaim what may be lost to the negativity that inevitably arises. We learn to navigate cynicism, apathy, confusion, anger. Each encounter becomes another ingredient for growth.
We reclaim agency. We reclaim authorship. We move toward natural autonomy, remembering again who and what we are.
This is the root of transformation. This is the root of human capacity.
In the end, we shed skin and bone, returning the materiality of our story to where it came from — constituents that can operate only in this realm.
And perhaps we continue on, returning home. Or perhaps we dive in again — another character, another language, another time — transforming once more from this to that, and back again.
But it’s never merely one life we’re living. It’s a multitude, whether successive and orderly, or nonlinear and seemingly chaotic. Each signpost, milestone, and on- or off-ramp offers us variety, novelty, mystery, and wonder from a vast sea of potentialities — opportunities to shift our paradigm, alter our trajectory, and reframe anew the stories we accept and play into during this one short life.
Own it.
Solvitur ambulando