My life goes on and on and I sink back again and again into the fears and lies that surround my attitude towards death. I cannot create an experience of death-- but can I not create this separation, this moment of existing in the presence of myself? And is this separation of pure awareness from all that I ordinarily take to be myself an analogy to what has been called-- in language which we no longer understand-- the separation of “soul” and “body” in the moment of actual death at the end of life.
Here perhaps we have found an opening, a chink in the armor of the problem of death.
In (A Sense of the Cosmos) I have maintained that as scientists we regard the universe in a way a literal-minded scholar regards a sacred book. The result is that instead of experiencing the unity of reality in our being, we live among concepts which preserve the fragmented world of appearances as it is structured by the egoistic personality. We live among intellectually resolved contradictions rather than among ideas that demand for their verification a deeper contact with our own inner life. The energies in the universe therefore pour through us as through a sieve. And that is what it means to live at the level of the animal. It is also what it means to be “mortal.” The quality of our thinking has its influence upon the sort of experience we search for, which in turn eventually influences the way the forces of the universe move in us. This in turn determines whether we live the extraordinary life of a normal (microcosmic) man whose destiny, we are told, does not end with the death of the body, or whether we die as animals die.
Sense of the Cosmos, 82