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28 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
omnipotence. We’re speaking of the dynamics of transcendence—to a level of consciousness outside the domain of mainstream psychology. Becker points out Kierkegaard’s recognition of fear as being the main obstacle to, as well as prompter of, this transcendence, setting up “the possibility of cosmic heroism”:
He who is educated by dread (anxiety) is educated by possibility. . . . When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently. (Kierkegaard)1
Becker writes:
And so the arrival at new possibility, at new reality, by the destruction of the self through facing up to the anxiety of the terror of existence. The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to “die,” in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures.
This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen (Boehme) writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy. (William James)2
Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to the Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom. This is Kierkegaard’s message, the culmination of his whole argument about the dead-ends of character, the ideal of health, the school of anxiety, the nature of real possibility and freedom. (Becker)3


































































































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