Walking Through Fire

 I have recently been listening to a song by Peter Gabriel, "Walk Through The Fire", which comes from the soundtrack for the movie Against All Odds. It was a song which I heard a few times when I was younger, and it came out in the mid-80s (1984, to be exact). This singer and songwriter is brilliant for the way he uses poetic metaphor and imagery to evoke an emotional idea or even a spiritual one. The song uses the metaphor of walking in fire to describe how we can walk into destruction and be able to survive it. "Destruction" in this sense does not necessarily have to literally mean a car chase or running out of a burning building. It means being able to witness something that tears out of the supposed "buildings" that we construct around ourselves, which are designed to protect us from harm. I sense that the song is evocative of an instinct to tear down the things that we have built up around us for such a long time, be it a sense of safe or secure identity, or perhaps a general expectation about how one thinks life is supposed to be or to mean. It is also a call to adventure: what would life be like if I didn't need things to feel safe? How would it be if my worst fears were realized, and yet I could do nothing but run right into it and embrace it?
   Does this idea accord with the previous notion I discussed about karma? Can the view of karma from a Buddhist view be going the opposite direction of imposing more restrictions on the sense of what a person can or cannot do? I don't think that this is what the idea of karma is about. I think the sense of danger that karma sometimes evokes, especially the sense of risk, can be seen as exciting and challenging, not necessarily restrictive or daunting. If people only see themselves in terms of their standard "boxes"--self-imposed, confined identities---then they might think that their lives are predictable and going only one way. But to know that this is not the case and that identity is essentially porous and subject to all kinds of permutations, then there is definitely more room to breathe and create. Destruction, here, is not nihilistic, but it part of a bigger cycle that includes periods of both construction and destruction. The point is, one is always creating, and that creation has such a potency in an interconnected world: it multiplies and breeds. What a person says, thinks, feels, is so profoundly implicated in the things around oneself that we can no longer take their impact for granted. In this way, tearing down the things around oneself can make way to new forms of creation.