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On releasing fear of death

An excerpt from "There Is No Individual ?self' That Dies"
in Easy Death (pp. 25 - 26)

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: The difference between ordinary self-contracted awareness and Divine Enlightenment is that in ordinary self-contracted awareness you identify with the conventional (or phenomenal) self, while in Divine Enlightenment there is Most Perfect Identification with (and Realization of) the Divine Reality.

This is the only difference. Thus, depending on what you identify with, you will live in either one of two ways. One is the usual round of obsession, fear, and seeking — in which the egoic self is the actor and the meaning of the drama. The other is the Way of Unlimited Intelligence, Love, Freedom, Spontaneity, and Infinite Happiness.

Previous to Divine Enlightenment, you fear death — and, therefore, you want to discover something about death which can make you feel hopeful about surviving. That is why people like to study occult and "life-after-life" phenomena. They like to hear conventional religious stories, such as the legend that Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Whatever the factual or historical authenticity of such stories may be, they are all interpreted as hopeful signs for the ego. Thus, you will remain fascinated by death, even to the point of being relatively self-destructive — because (in some sense) you want to find out about it, even though you fear it.

You continue to read studies about "after-life" phenomena, always hoping to hear that it has been proven — to the satisfaction of both science and you personally — that you are going to survive death.

However, it is not the mystery of death that you must penetrate in order to be free of fear. Rather, you must transcend this concoction of ego-stress and self-contraction while alive. In order to die free of fear, you must be in a different disposition toward life altogether. Instead of presuming the ego-position, you must live from the "Point of View" of the Divine Reality (Itself).

Then both your present existence and all its future changes-and-dying will be allowed very simply and naturally — much like going to sleep at night. You will not merely have gained some consoling knowledge about death.

Fear does not result from the lack of such knowledge. Fear is caused by ego-stress — and, therefore, fear must be transcended while alive. The Spiritual process is a way of transcending the mechanism of fear (moment to moment).

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Easy Death
3rd edition
by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
544 Pages Illustrated
$24.95