During the Silent Eye’s annual workshop this April, we engaged in a discussion about fear. There was, I believe, a general agreement that the ultimate fear most people, if not all, harbor is the loss of the individual as a separate entity. We fear the obliteration of the self as we know it, because we learn to believe that there is a self separate from the Source that is all things. How can the self be separate, but whole? Or is the self that is separate really whole? The illusion of separation allows us to feel special and different from other living beings. It feeds the ego’s ideal of superiority, or at least a sense of uniqueness.
The other day, while walking in the woods back in New Hampshire, I thought about how what we fear the most is also what we most long for. It is ironic in some…