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The Value of Mortal Fear
CHAPTER FOUR
IF WE have the courage to look closer, we may find that this great fear is also our saving grace. For while the delusion of separateness causes suffering, suffering prompts the search for an ultimate cure, transcending separateness. Thus fear may be a necessary and powerful spiritual insight—a beacon illuminating the path to immortality. This, of course, is much more than psychology’s concept that facing irrational fear leads to its resolution and, ultimately, greater freedom.
The spiritual message is that confronting “real” fear—the fear of facing the aloneness and isolation of duality and the even greater terror of seeking transcendence at the cost of losing personal ego identity— leads to openness, innocence . . . and immortality. And what exactly is immortality? To be very concrete, lest we mistakenly assume that it is merely some theoretical or abstract idea, immortality is a realization of our essential eternal nature, with all its inherent qualities of divinity—including omniscience, omnipresence and
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