The title of Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death reveals one of the tragic illusions that is the origin of most of humanity’s existential fear. “The knowledge of death leads to elaborate methods to deny death. The knowledge of death is seen by many psychologists as underlying almost all neurotic anxiety. Many of the terrors and irrational anxieties that plague our existence are simply displacements from the ultimate terror of our own inevitable end.”[i]
The concept of human identity is central to the Truth about the event we label death. In Simple Reality we don’t identify with our physical body; instead we say “my body will die but my energy will not end.” The importance in this shift in identity was revealed in the experience of C. G. Jung which he related after his NDE. “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return. As a matter of fact, during the first month after my first vision I suffered from black depression because I felt that I was recovering. It was like dying, I did not want to live and to return into this fragmentary, restricted, narrow, almost mechanical life.”[ii] Which version of death are you choosing, the ultimate terror or peace and fulfillment?
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Supplemental Reading:
Near-Death Experience (NDE), The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#46 The Ultimate Terror
[i] Gaylin, Willard. Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human. New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 42.
[ii] Van der Post, Laurens. Jung and the Story of our Time. New York: Random House, 1975, p. 255.
