The Fear of Annhilation

The Fear of Annihilation
No quantity of verbiage upon a screen or piece of paper nor to the ears of an eavesdropper could convey with apt precision the relief I experienced in the shower after my realization that I have processed, and thus, overcame my fears of death; Or more specifically, absolute annihilation upon the cessation of the physical body. I feel the neurotic tendencies I was expressing despite every furtive attempt in social interaction to lessen their manifestations to be nothing more than mere memory now. What a psychological cross-country race this struggle has been! An intrinsic struggle against what were at fluctuating points of time interminable increases in mental-stress elevation. This, I regret my compulsion to evoke such an unrefined unpalatable concept, instinct had always existed I am suspect, shrouded in unconscious shadow, but did not rear its heads like ghastly Cerberus until my psychedelic experience in Vallecito, Colorado at the onset of the summer of 2010. I do not insinuate here that this soul journey fractured the integrity of mental composition, but rather through unconscious exploration I have allowed myself the capability to decide whether or not to allow this drive to function behind the scenes like a dramaturgical light operator with an awry sense of humor… at times halting all my movement by blanketing me in darkness or creating the effect of light puddles, coercing me into jumping over perceived danger in sporadic intervals. Fatigued by this seeming game of playing-with-your-dinner, I tore down the first, second, and third walls. What I discovered, that which horrified me, that which dilated my pupils like those of an elk with one leg stuck in a train track, was that all around me was darkness. The walls had sensationalized the appearance of a theatrical platform. It was this ghost in the machine light conductor who choreographed my movements, and now in my flagrant conscious defiance of the script, abandoned me in the ether. What I had uncovered in that forest was a calloused knot, a knot tied millions of years ago when the psyche encapsulated the young heart of rudimentary man and his less emergent grandfathers: habilus, erectus, ardipithecus. The causative effects behind its tying lay in the predicament of Man’s environment. The sound of foreign footsteps, the waning of light and the exhaustion of wood and fuel supplies, the hillsides speckled with the campfire flickers of potential enemies. And the act of falling asleep, the greatest achievement our ancestors could accomplish in one full rotation of terra firma! The senses are heightened to a pitch! The twitch of a dying ember a sufficient catalyst for a man to jump back to full consciousness, to grab his spear and step into the unknown. In all this chaos simultaneously around him therein lies a magic, a paradox. His environment fits him to a tee, yet his day to day survival is never guaranteed. There are just too many variables which could compromise the systematic holistic functioning of his body. Nature in the raw, naked without its cultural garments, we find the law of uncertainty, that the very nature of nature is there isn’t any nature; there is structured chaos. We now approach the knot, the awkward but resilient hieros gamos of perceived opposites. If nature is the forest, then civilization is the sound of falling timber. It is the direct perception of chaos (nature is like a shriek and an explosion at once, the Big Bang resembling the screams of an incurable psychotic). Man, an inherently rational creature, effervescing out of the rocks and streams just as senselessly as the wolf tears wide open the stomach of a calf, could not function or intellectually conceptualize the uncertainty between continued survival or imminent death. In order to reconcile the paradox of structured chaos he developed the instinct of the fear of death. This unconscious propulsion technology would enable him to direct his behavior toward increasing the probability of prolonged survival as opposed to discontinuation, and thus, thus diminish partially the uncertainty of his psychotic mother nature. It is a grand irony that the manifestations of this fear, originally implemented to serve humanity can now easily be ascribed as the prognosis for his collective destruction. For we no longer inhabit the phantasmagoria of the Savanna, nor the foggy Andes riddled with ancestral spirits, but the halls and freeways of modernity. Therefore, modern civilization (or rather post-modern) is the culmination of the effect of having a fear of complete annihilation, a permanent end to subjective experience. The fear of death is not so much the fear of the process or phenomena of death, but rather the fear that one is destroyed in the process. If nature is the perceived source of uncertainty, then civilization is what has arisen between the two. The irony lies in the realization that when the fear of death is coupled with the security blanket of civilization, it is as if you have negated the purpose of the fear in the first place. For we still respond to our environment as if it were that ravenous wolf. We treat our fellow brothers and sisters still as if we are constantly stumbling into a strange tribe’s hunting grown unannounced. We have yet to realize and internalize that we have outgrown in almost every sense of the word the need which gave rise to the fear. In general if a fear is an instinctual response to an unknown determinant, and we have astoundingly reduced through this fear the uncertainty of nature, the source of the fear, there is nothing to fear. Survival until a natural death to a great extent can be assured. With our intellect we have grasped that death is an inevitability, a certainty, and since it is a fact it is not unknown. A reaction of fear then is inappropriate. Yet this fear continues to exist and operate in us individually and collectively, transmitted through all past eras like genes and language. To overcome it we must understand it, and to accomplish this one must peer directly into the eyes of the three-headed beast and experience the fear of nihilism, of chaos, of what it would be like to suddenly be ripped apart alive and to never again exist. But upon emergence from this ghastly mental hell, stroking Cerberus’ ears on the way out, one is born anew and the intellect radiates from the direct experience of the absolute truth: you never die, all is infinite, it never ends, it never ends, it never ends…..