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Mortal Fear
CHAPTER THREE
TRANSCENDENCE REQUIRES overcoming fears. In psychology we observe how people defend against experiencing the fears associated with early childhood traumas. In the course of a treatment we see how difficult it is to overcome these defenses so the fears can be resolved and transcended. Confronting what Becker and others have called our most basic and pervasive fear, the fear of our own mortality, the fear that blocks full transcendence, may prove an
even more complex and difficult matter. But it is time to try.
Man shares fears with the lower animals—fear of bodily pain, of hunger, of any threat to body-self preservation. And by virtue of his more highly developed mind he holds some exclusively human fears as well. Most fundamental, pervasive and frightening of these is the
fear of mind-ego dissolution, or what I will call mortal fear.
The ego referred to here is what spiritual systems regard as not only an inflated sense of self-importance but, more fundamentally, an
aspect of the delusion of duality: the sense of one’s being separate,
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