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The Value of Mortal Fear 31
called self. It is true, they maintained, that wherever there is other there is fear, and wherever there is self there is angst, but one can transcend fear and angst by transcending self and other. Nothing the self can do will put an end to angst, because the self is angst; rather, one transcends angst by dying to self — they rise and fall together.
Ultimate reality was therefore said to be “nondual,” which may be thought of as either beyond the dichotomy of subject and object or a union of subject and object. The point is that the discovery of this ultimate unity or Supreme Identity was a liberation from the fate of being a separate self. Seeing that self and other are one, the individual is released from the fear of living; seeing that being and non-being are one, the individual is released from the fear of death. At this point — but not before — the individual no longer needs to repress death; for “death has lost its sting.” Discovering the Whole, he or she is released from the fate of a part.
Thus, not only did the transpersonal traditions understand the diagnosis of humankind — angst, dukkha, death-terror — they went beyond the existentialists and discovered the prognosis of humankind, the cure for the disease itself. Now the word for prognosis, in Sanskrit, is prajna (prajna = pro-gno/sis), and it is prajna, or transcendent insight, that is said to smash to pieces the chains of samsara, of dukkha, of suffering and angst. And it is prajna — prognosis, gnostic insight, jnana — that is activated and engaged in all true forms of meditation and contemplation. The transpersonalists, then, went beyond but included the existentialists.5
Wilber, then, cites meditation and contemplation, while Kierkegaard identifies faith as the crucial ingredient needed for freedom:
One goes through it all to arrive at faith, the faith that one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator; that despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force.
Without the leap into faith the new helplessness of shedding one’s character armor holds one in sheer terror .... The truly open person, the one who has shed his character armor, the vital lie of his cultural conditioning, is beyond the help of any mere “science,” of any merely social standard of health. He is absolutely