The first time I watched Fight Club what stood out to me was a line from the movie where the narrator is told he had a near life experience. It was a powerful inversion of the near death experience, calling in how vivid a person feels when they nearly die and experience that clarity of still being alive. It’s a Tower Moment and its an imaginal portal that changes everything.
I want to be clear here: I’m not advocating purposely seeking out near death experiences or randomly crashing into cars so you can have a near life experience.
And I’ve had more than a few near death experiences. Each of them has created an indelible imprint on my life that has transformed my life in the moment and my overall appreciation of being alive. I even had one recently, almost a year ago, when I hit a deer and my car was totaled. I’m grateful I was able to walk away from that experience and it definitely was an existential Tower Moment for me.
There’s something transcendent about going through a near life/death experience that is reminiscent of going through a Tower Moment. When the Tower falls, your life changes, usually in the form of a loss. Maybe it’s the loss of a job or a relationship or a loved one. Maybe it’s something more interior, such as a feeling of confidence or joy. Whatever it is, the experience of the Tower is one that people try to avoid.
I don’t think the Tower can be avoided
It’s an experience all of us have at some point, losing a structure in our lives that we thought would last forever. The lesson of the Tower is that instead of avoiding the fall, accept it. The deeper lesson, however, is that what you lose also paves the way for opportunities to come into your life that the Tower was blocking you from.
I’m not sharing that as a platitude. It’s a reality I’ve lived first hand. When I got divorced, I lost my home as well as the marriage. But I had a lot of opportunities open up as well. The Tower fell and in it’s rubble I found a new path forward, which gave me options in multiple ways. The Tower challenged me to stop settling for the status quo and actually discover what I really want for my life. In that way, it was also very similar to having a near death experience.
Tower Time is imaginal time. You are experiencing the breakdown of your reality as you know it and if you are wise you are inviting your imagination to come and play. At one point, several months into my divorce I had a realization: I could choose to uproot and live somewhere else. I had a few friends still in the area I was living, but I wasn’t attached to the area. I had lived there a long time and I began to wonder what it would be like to move somewhere else for the sheer sake of choosing to start over.
I explored a coastal town and ultimately decided not to live there. Then I moved 2 hours south to a college town, where I still live now. I was drawn down here for the wrong reasons, a rebound relationship, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I left the familiarity of what I knew, the Tower, and embraced the unknown. It wasn’t easy. There were a number of times I questioned my choices and that’s the point of the Tower. It challenges you on an existential level. In one form or another you are having a near death/life experience that causes you to question your existence.
When we question our existence as we know it, the fall of the Tower offers us glimpses of the possibilities we blocked out of our lives. In my case, it was having adventures and traveling. I had spent so much of my life not doing any of those things, and as my Towers fell, I started doing the activities I had denied myself. I got into martial arts, finally, after many years of wanting to. I traveled internationally and I chose to pursue my professional life as an occult author and magic coach in a way that was in alignment with what I really want for myself and my community.
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The Tower isn’t just constructed by you.
It’s also constructed by the people in your life and the compromises you accept to have those people in your life. Sometimes it’s worth it, but a lot of the time you are making agreements to keep the peace or accommodate someone else while costing yourself something essential in the process…and that’s when the relationship becomes a tower.
Towers fall because you need them to fall. You tolerate a bad job or go with the flow in a relationship even though you are deeply miserable. You settle for less and it costs you, because while that tower may feel safe, it’s actually crushing the life out of you.
When the Tower falls there is a strange exhilaration that is simultaneously terrifying and liberating. It falls and you see the stars and sky that you forgot was there. You discover the possibilities that you put aside.
Now you can claim them, or you can rebuild the Tower. I’ve done both. I rebuilt a Tower a few times over, but it always collapsed. The foundation is faulty and cracked. I’ve walked away from the Tower, leaving the rubble behind and discovered a new path, leading me onto the next adventure.
When your Towers fall, embrace the fall and walk boldly forward. You deserve the opportunities you’ve denied yourself and your Towers will keep falling as long as you deny yourself your essential truth - that messy, inconvenient one that makes you feel alive.
The path forward, scary as it may be, is also the choice that your soul is singing for. You can deny it only so long or you can use the fall of the Tower to be a clarion call of discovery. Get curious, rewrite your life and discover what you really want, unshackled of your fears and the limitations of others.
Choose your Star…it’s calling for you.