The Greatest Fear

A large portion of humanity, including many bright, discerning seekers of truth, believe that the greatest or deepest fear is the prospect of non-existence or oblivion at death.  And yet, this interpretation of the fear of death doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  After all, if this complete vanishing at death were even possible, it would preclude all experience, including fear itself, and thus shouldn't be felt as any more threatening or frightening than the lacuna of sleep, or the apparent void before birth.

So, this interpretation of the source of the fear is something of a psychological red herring, a relatively superficial belief predicated on insufficient self-reflection and perpetuated in bad faith in order to distract one from the real fear.  Quite simply, anyone who believes their fear of death is a fear of not existing hasn’t gotten to the bottom of the matter. 

It seems to me that this same mistakenly displaced fear is behind the unexamined and compulsive use of both essential occupation and inessential busyness, maybe even including formal meditating, reading books on awakening and attending satsangs, to avoid boredom and genuine self-confrontation.  At the root of these and other strategies is the defensive urge to reify experience, thereby perpetuating the mirage of an experiencer first engendered during the early developmental stages of learning language and behavior. 

Since this experiencer came into being at least a year or two after birth, I believe that at some level of everyone its constructed and mirage-like nature is intuited.  That is, one suspects that there is literally nothing at the center of the cyclone-like din of thought and perception.  In addition, even the apparent substance of that cyclone is sensed as ephemeral, empty.  Thus I think that the putative fear of non-existence — which most people erroneously project onto an imagined future as ‘death’ — is really the fear of fully realizing the truth of one’s ever-present non-existence or no-thing-ness.