Fear of Death
When we scorn fears we repeatedly come up against the fear of death; and we have many practical examples of people who have faced death many times who no longer fear it. They may still feel some patterns pull at them, inviting them to death, but we only need to help each other a little bit to get rid of those recordings of long-ago times when death seemed like a way out from distress.
. . . What’s so terrible about death? I felt I was plunging into it just two or three years ago, as you know. I made earnest efforts to try to shore up [strengthen] my theoretical legacy so it wouldn’t be all dissipated by patterns disturbing it after I was gone. Yet I wasn’t very afraid of death. I was afraid of patterns taking over my work, of my work being made somewhat meaningless, and of humanity as a whole not making it [not surviving] because I hadn’t accomplished enough, because I hadn’t hung my hook high enough on the wall [hadn’t set big enough goals]. That was my fear at the time.
We’ve learned that people who have faced death, who have never heard anything about Co-Counseling . . . manage to discharge the fear of death. They never learn to like it (liking death is always a patterned thing), but they don’t fear or respect it. They could look it in the eye with fairly relaxed confidence.
From pages 7 to 8 of “The Totally Benign Reality,” in The Benign Reality
(Present Time 193, October 2018)