The Crucible~ Thoughts On The Dark Time Of The Soul.
Every fine thing, gold, the greatest swords, souls, the most incredible technological devices the modern world has seen, all of them, must pass through the crucible. The melting pot of white hot burning.
All things are formed from the death of their former selves.
The crucible burns away the things that are not of true essence. Its a distillation. And its a necessary one. The Gods of death seem cruel, but their inner essence is love.
Our ancestors survived Ice ages, great beasts, mysterious illnesses. All painful, soul-rending, impossibly demanding obstacles that ripped and hew from people things even more painful than we can scarcely imagine. Losing everyone they love to Cholera, children raised by their siblings when both parents die, polio, genocide, and to what ultimate end? We, all of us, everyone that you hold dear, everything beautiful about them, was forged over and over by the hand of loss. Without which, nothing today would be what it is.
Even babies in the womb, are sculpted by the hand of death. Their vestigial tail, their webbed fingers, their literal line of survival slowly cut off, they are slowly forged in preparation, forced finally to breathe on their own or DIE, all for their launch into becoming.
Every great person I know that is great, is heroic, is legendary; is so because they spent time in the crucible. There is a direct correlation and causality between the greatness of the heat they melted under and the shining of what they emerge as. The purest metal, the finest ore, and the purest most powerful souls are those that, when in the crucible, most readily give up what isn't their pure essence.
The noble truths of the Buddha. All existence is suffering. Suffering is the result of clinging, right down to the clinging to your very life. There is no beauty without suffering, there is no suffering without beauty. This is the sacred mystery. The crucible melts all things to their basic elements. The impurities break free of the pure essence and float to the top, waiting to be skimmed, removed, leaving behind an authentic, whole, purified self. The greater the heat, the more effective and thorough the purification. Anything of essence left behind, anything that is clung to, will only weaken the strength of the new blade. Perhaps leading it to break, and leading it to be placed back into the crucible, and burned again. Let go. Choose your suffering or your suffering will choose you. It is the only way.
The harsh desert winds of Set turn the cool oasis of comfort into a raging inferno, a scouring sand blaster that strips everything to its bare essence. The wildfire burns away all the tangled growth, and leaves nothing but the rootstock buried deep beneath the earth, a blank slate and many inches of purified, nutrient. Ashes. And from the ashes all new things grow. This is the opportunity that can only be created by loss for new things to emerge. We live in a closed, perpetually recycling system. This is the only way. It is the experience for all life, indeed for all nature. The fertile valley is created from the relentless shaping of the majestic mountain. Does this hurt? Of course. But it is the way, and it is WE that do the clinging.
Forge yourself, let it burn away, become a weapon that protects your pure self that relies on nothing but itself to shine.
In my experience, all other ways ultimately lead to weakness, madness and despair.