Lifedeathlife

death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones. Rather than seeing the archetypes of Death and Life as opposites, they must be held together as the left and right side of a single thought.

Estés delivers the definitive thesis statement of the term: Death and Life are not opposites but complementary phases of a single cyclical force, and their cultural splitting constitutes the core pathology the concept is meant to heal.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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While one side of a woman’s dual nature might be called Life, Life’s ‘twin’ sister is a force named Death. The force called Death is one of the two magnetic forks of the wild nature.

Estés introduces the Life/Death/Life nature as a structural duality within the wild feminine archetype, personified in Skeleton Woman and presented as the essential condition of deep love.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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At first we all think we can outrun the death aspect of the Life/Death/Life nature. The fact is we cannot. It follows right along behind us, bumpety-bump, thumpety-thump, right into our houses, right into consciousness.

Estés argues that the Death aspect of the Life/Death/Life cycle is psychically inescapable and that consciousness of its cycles — desire, ennui, renewal — is itself the curative knowledge.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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The first Kathy died during dialysis. She could not make it long in the face of death. A second Kathy had to be born. This is the Kathy that was born in the midst of death.

Yalom’s clinical material illustrates the lifedeathlife pattern as lived psychological reality: confrontation with death precipitates the dissolution of one self-structure and the emergence of a renewed one.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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I was refilled with a new hope and purpose in being alive… I experienced a feeling of unity with all things and a oneness with all people. After my psychic rebirth I also feel for everyone’s pain.

Yalom documents the phenomenology of psychic rebirth following proximity to death, providing clinical corroboration for the regenerative arc central to the lifedeathlife concept.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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The encounter with death on the perinatal level takes the form of a profound firsthand experience of the terminal agony that is rather complex and has emotional, philosophical, and spiritual as well as distinctly physiological facets.

Grof establishes that the perinatal encounter with death — structurally homologous to the lifedeathlife passage — triggers transpersonal opening and spiritual reorientation even in hardened materialists.

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting

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Life as the parent of death, hunger and incapacity, is only a dark figure of the divine superconscient Force whose highest terms are immortality, satisfied delight and omnipotence.

Aurobindo situates the life-death polarity within a cosmic evolutionary framework in which manifest death-bound life is understood as a contracted form of an immortal divine Force, structurally parallel to the lifedeathlife circuit.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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the technique of dying makes Death the entrance to good future lives… unless and until liberation (Nirvana) from the wandering (Saṃsāra) is attained.

The Tibetan tradition, as mediated by Evans-Wentz, presents death as a threshold of renewal rather than terminus, reinforcing the lifedeathlife cycle within a soteriological cosmology.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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Within certain limits that which is dead can be revived; the habitual operations, the response, the circulation of active energy can be restored; and this proves that what we call life was still there in the body, latent.

Aurobindo’s philosophical biology of latent life-force within apparent death provides a metaphysical analogue to the lifedeathlife principle, though without direct deployment of the concept.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939aside

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