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Mortal Fear 23
successfully in the outer world—but also the deeper insight that true peace and happiness lie beyond it.
The aware individual knows what’s at stake in this cosmic gamble. In order for union, one has to be willing to chance the loss of the hard- won sense of a separate self. No thinking person would simply throw this away, even when driven by the dream of celestial union. The threat of relinquishing one’s personal identity brings with it the second and most profound aspect of mortal fear: the fear of ego disintegration and loss of integrity—the terror of one’s total vulnerability in a fathomless cosmos without boundary or meaning. This is nonbeing: nothingness.
The death of the ego swallows up not just our own perceived physical life but any hold on reality, any reliance on meaning that has sustained us, as well. For many, physical death through suicide is a welcome relief from the fear of disintegration of the ego. This loss of identity, personal boundary and self-mastery is inevitably accompanied by a sense of utter confusion, helplessness, despair, humiliation and hopeless panic. It is to be lost in a psychedelic vision of terrifying and totally incomprehensible energies and forms. To glimpse the utter insignificance of oneself in a cosmos, which, until this moment of illumination, one was entirely ignorant of, must be a horrifying experience to one who is unprepared for it.
It is one thing to face the annihilation of our own individual existence, knowing the world will go on without us and that those we love and care for will recover from their grief to live out their own lives. After all, we know that every human being in the history of the world has met the same fate. And for some of us, there is even the hope of another kind of existence following the conclusion of our physical one. Yet still the fear and avoidance of death pervade most of our lives. How much more terrifying, then, to contemplate not just the removal of ourselves from a world that we were once part of, but the annihilation of the world itself. Not as in some cataclysmic event, but as the refutation, the negation, of everything we have known, felt, believed in and stood for.
“Oh, the horror!” said the character Kurtz a moment before his death in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The insight that all of life has been a delusion encompasses everything. Family, friends, loved ones, career, cherished traditions, institutions and beliefs . . . a l l are


































































































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