The Fear Of Death

Why is the fear of death so powerful? We have constant experience of endings — tasks, holidays, feelings, days, all end — so that it should be easy to transfer that experience to understanding of our own death. But it isn’t easy. Death isn’t as simple as falling asleep and never waking up. The idea of falling asleep and never waking up isn’t strong enough or profound enough to encompass the actuality of death.

We experience those instances of falling asleep at night when there is a sudden jerking back into consciousness, a bodily spasm similar to falling that instantaneously wakes us. These moments happen instantly because the fear that underlies them, the bodily fear of death is too profound to bear for any more than a split second. But even these times — times of physical danger when there’s an adrenalin rush of physical recoil — aren’t enough to approximate the real fear of death. The fear of death is so powerful because death ends the universe, not just an individual being. At the moment I die, everything dies, not just me. The mountains, the stars, the people and places I love, all die too. This reality, only approachable in the turiya state of samahdi, is an opportunity.

The Grim Reaper

In the Ajna Chakra three states of being are symbolized: the Itrara Lingam, the inverted triangle symbolizing the shakti, and the aham-khara, the strange reality called, in the Tantras, the "I-maker." It’s the force that in Blake’s prophetic books is called the "Spectre." Its source is outside the body, yet it creates the separateness of the "I" literally in every cell of the body. It’s such a powerful force that it has to be constantly hidden from consciousness under the various sense functions. These sense functions are seen to be more and more illusory, the closer they get to the "aham-khara."

The "ahama-khara" is only experienced directly, face on, at the moment of death. But, the wonderful thing is that the moment of death is here, right now, constantly with us, because the space/time continuum is in fact nothing but the present instant. When this is seen, a strange thing happens. We realize that being a separate "I" is just a state, a mere stage of being, through which everyone and everything passes. This is the real sense in which we are all identical, as we pass through, or open, the aham-khara by means of kundalini.

This is the "one body" spoken of by Blake, Boehme, and Paracelsus, and not any identity in our minds or feelings or bodies. In fact the bigger the differences in our minds and feelings and bodies, the greater the variety, the better. It’s also in the aham-khara that a person — say a person we love, or even one we hate — becomes so much "One Person" that their stature as God or Goddess is seen, or in Tibetan terms, "Prajna," wisdom entering us from above.