Rocket Man

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

(Mark Twain)

Freud discovered a second driving force of man besides libido in his later professional career, the death instinct. In this case the expression "driving force of man" should perhaps be taken literally, given that women tend to be a bit saner than we are. Yet, whether his theory applies to everyone or not, Freud was probably on to something.

My own understanding of the death instinct is that in the first part of our life, we are simply too busy to realize that we are not the voice in our head, or some misleading feelings in our belly. We are who we perceive to be, and we take who we perceive to be for granted. For many it is only in the later stage of our life that we perceive a strange emptiness, and that we become aware of the distracting voice in our head. It is only then that we wake up to the fact that we are adrift, that something has to change, for otherwise we are on a meaningless odyssey into outer space.

The note is titled "rocket man" because I had the vision of a rocket that was blasted off into space with an idealistic destination, but somewhere in the middle of the journey it somehow goes off-target. We realize that we need to adjust, or rather, that we need to get rid of the interference that put us off-course, otherwise we and our mission are simply doomed.

The moment we discover the death instinct in us, we have in fact an encounter with the ego - the alien part inside that led us away from our SELF. The nice thing though, whenever someone confronts us with a life or death decision, many of us choose life. So what if it is a little painful to repair the rocket ship. We have life to look forward to and can finally wake up to our true mission. As Mark Twain was right to point out, this mid-life crisis awakening should be considered a happy event that has the same spiritual significance as our birthday.

It is a happy day indeed when we wake up to the SELF inside. Cut out all the interferences, brush off the dust you accumulated over the decades, and let the WAY lead you HOME.