The fear of death has many layers. Like all of life it has components in the mental story, the emotional resonance, the spiritual agreements and the primal physical realm. The outside layer, the straight lines and squiggles, the low-hanging fruit of our blueprint is pretty easy to see, that is, if you really want to.

It looks like denial–I am not afraid of death–but when looked at a little closer, when the body is allowed to feel what it feels, when you stop and notice the contractions in the gut, the ache in the heart, the tightening of the throat, you open into the realization that have been, that you still are in denial. The Great Unknown, the Final Embodied Adventure–Death–scares you.

What if the beliefs you’ve held tight to are not right? What if the story you’ve put all your mortal weight behind is just a story? What if you bet on the wrong horse? What–God forbid–if you are wrong?

These questions don’t pop out of the framework of denial, waving at you to gain and hold your attention. They sit silently in the corners, tucked in tight between the scraps of your life. You may get a glimpse of them, but they are rarely starkly outlined against the sky of reasoning and choice. Mostly, they appear as quick sightings that quickly dissolve into the backdrop of life, so quickly that you can ignore them entirely.

Were you willing, were you ready to see them clearly, to let the possibility of being wrong on such an important deadline as your death, you could begin a genuine search. You might be curious about the story that runs you, that determines all that falls out of that one fear, which interestingly enough, is everything.

It’s so easy to say, ‘I am not afraid of death.’ Anyone can say it. But to say it with authenticity, for it to resonate through the emotional baggage, the spiritual programs, all the way into the depths of the primal physical, that requires a wholly new interaction with the granddaddy of all fears.

In order to move beyond the fear, we must actually meet the fear, befriend it, turning it inside out and see all the shapes and forms it takes. And even so, that only opens up the realm of mental stories.

The emotional and spiritual realms are integrated and invisible. They can be felt but not seen. They can be experienced but not tamed.

Once you move through them, the body’s primal fear still remains, the automatic instinctual reactions, the physical impetus to remain alive, and you can’t talk yourself out of them. You can’t reason your way out. Your religion won’t save you.

Shortly after Kenny’s death, I became my mother’s caregiver. For a while I wasn’t sure which of the two of them would escape this plane first. As it played out, Mom was not quite a year behind Ken. After her stroke, mom became aware of a tunnel of light off to her right side. She was ready to die, asking me each new day, ‘why am I still here?’

She was a very strong Christian women who had been preparing her whole life to meet her maker, and yet, she was unwilling to enter the tunnel of light. When I asked why she didn’t simply walk right in she didn’t answer. It was months before she told me that there were snakes outside the entrance and that she was afraid.

It was such a tender moment, the Christian woman and her non-conforming spiritually molded daughter. I held her tiny hand and offered to lay down on top of the snakes, to befriend them, and let her walk over me.

Her eyes popped wide open.

You’d do that?

Of course I would, mom.

Aren’t you afraid?

No. I already met my demons years ago. Your snakes aren’t a lot different.

But she was still afraid. She hadn’t yet come to terms with the snakes, with what they represented for her. Several months later, she told me they were her sins, all the ways she had let God down. She had no idea they were there, that they were hiding in the framework of her life.

And that was just the mental emotional spiritual components of her story. She hadn’t gotten to the primal fear, to the physical recoil yet.

That part seems easier when death is physically at hand. Once she understood the snakes and their purpose, she slipped into the pink undulating waves of ecstatic embrace and didn’t look back. Life had quite naturally worn away all the remaining physical resistance.

When we die before we die, meeting the primal physical feels like death is at hand, the death of instinctual clinging to life, the death of the body or at the very least the death of clinging to the body, of clinging to being alive. It does not have the advantage of the physical death process doing the heavy lifting, of illness or age demolishing the body, of the sands in the hourglass running out, of life taking even the semblance of control out of our hands. In that way, it is more demanding.

To die before you die, that is the lesson of the mystics. It is the wisest message I know of. All the other problems we humans have stem from death denied, death negotiated, death justified, death sanitized, death unmet.

Now is the only time there is. The earth dance is filled with possibilities both limiting and unlimited. Being embodied is a gift requiring time and space. This phantasm of mind body spirit offers a freedom that is beyond all ideas of time and space, of mind and body and spirit. It is your birthright to recognize the actuality, the aliveness you are. All it asks is to die before you die.

With the craziness around us, the increased odds of a blasted ending for us all, now is a great time to die, to die before you die. Why? Because we do not truly live until we no longer fear death and wouldn’t you like to live, if only for a day or two, before you check out?

Image: Mystical Raven, Transformation

Amaya is the author of 7 books, the latest, Actuality: infinity at play.

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