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This death terror is inherent in the separate self-sense, the separate subject, and it arises in one form or another wherever there is boundary. And once this death imprint awakens there are two, and only two, things that can be done with it. Men and women, that is, have two choices in the face of death and Thana-tos: they can deny and repress it, or they can transcend it in the superconscious All. As long as one holds on to the separate self-sense, one must repress death and its terror. In order to transcend the death terror, one must transcend the self. That is, there is nothing the separate self can do to actually get rid of death ter-ror, since the separate self is that death terror—they come into existence together and they only disappear together. The only thing the separate self can do with death is deny it, repress it, dilute it, or otherwise hide it. Only in the superconscious All, in actual transcendence, is the death terror uprooted, because the sepa-rate self is uprooted as well. But until that time—and to borrow Becker's phrase—''consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality.''

The death-terror, the reflex against Thanatos. But what precisely is the nature of this Thanatos? What ultimately does it signify? Perhaps we can give a simple answer in this fashion:
We saw that there are no radically separate entities anywhere —that the boundary between subject and object is ultimately illusory. Thus that boundary between subject and object, self and other, has to be constantly and unceasingly recreated moment to moment—and for the simple reason that it isn't real in the first place. At the same time, the simple force of reality, the "pull" of the Whole, acts moment to moment to tear down that boundary. And that force is Thanatos. As the individual, moment to moment, recreates his illusory boundaries, so reality, moment to moment, conspires to tear them down.
Such is Thanatos, and its real meaning is transcendence. Thanatos is not a force trying to reduce life to inorganic matter (that, as we will see, is the force of "involution"), or a repetition compulsion, or a homeostatic principle, or a suicidal wish. Thanatos is the power of sunyata—the power and push to tran-scend illusory boundaries—but it appears, to a self that will not or cannot surrender its boundaries (at any level) as a threat of literal death and physical mortality.

The point is this: wherever there is boundary, the Thanatos of one's deeper Nature acts, moment to moment, to remove it or to sacrifice it. As long as there is boundary, there is Thanatos. And one will either submit to Thanatos, sacrifice, and transcendence or one will have to find something else to do with that death wish, that self-sacrificial drive. That is, one will have to find substitute sacrifices. And, as I tried to show in Up From Eden,427 all that is wretched in human affairs, all that marks man as the most insidious of the beasts, all that brands him as a mass murderer and victimizer comes under the heading of substitute sacrifices. This was per-fectly explained by Otto 'Rank's formula, which brilliantly summarizes everything we might say on the sub-ject: 'The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed." Freud said, "the desire to kill re-places the desire to die," and Becker summarized it as "the offering of the other's body in order to buy off one's own death."

Now please notice: the denial of death (and the finding of substitute sacrifices) is part of the Atman project—we call it the negative side, the '"negative" side of the attempt to regain Atman-consciousness. We saw that once the self is created out of prior Wholeness it is faced with two major drives: the perpetuation of its own illusory existence (Eros), and the avoidance of all that threatens its own dissolution (Thanatos). On the positive side (and that does not mean ''on the good side," it simply means on the Eros side, like the positive pole of a magnet), it searches out all sorts of substitute gratifications that pretend to fulfill its desire to be infinite, cosmocentric, all powerful, heroic, godlike. On the negative side (the Thanatos side), it screens out or represses anything that threatens death, dissolution, transcendence, letting go—it then creates substi-tute sacrifices. And we say both of these drives— substitute gratification and substitute sacrifice—are forms of the Atman project because they are both driven ultimately by a correct intuition that one is indeed infi-nite and eternal. But it is an intuition that is distorted by its application to the separate self-sense, which is absolutely finite and mortal.

Thus Eros—the desire to more life, the desire to have everything, to be cosmocentric—is driven by the correct intuition that in reality one is the All. But, when applied to the separate self, the intuition that one is the All is perverted into the desire to possess the All. In place of being everything, one merely de-sires to have everything. That is the basis of all substitute gratifications, and that is the insatiable thirst lying in the soul of all separate selves. That is the positive side of the Atman project, and it is quenched only by Atman.

In the same way, the denial of death (the negative or Thanatos side of the Atman project) is based upon the correct intuition that one's prior Nature is indeed timeless, eternal, immortal beyond all forms. But when that intuition of timelessness is applied to the separate self, it is perverted into the desire to sim-ply live forever, to go on going on, to avoid death everlastingly. Instead of being timeless in transcendence, one merely substitutes the desire to live forever. In place of eternity one substitutes death-denial and im-mortality strivings and substitute sacrifices. And that, again, is the negative side of the Atman project: the rancid immortality of death denial.

The separate self-sense, then, is under sway of the Atman project, the attempt to regain prior Wholeness in ways that prevent it and force symbolic substitutes. Instead of finding true Wholeness, it is thus driven by concerns over its mere existence: Eros drives it to continue its pseudoseparateness, and Thanatos involves it in death and the fear of death. And the battle of Life vs. Death, Eros vs. Thanatos, is the arch battle and the basic anxiety and dilemma inherent in all separate selves—a primal mood of fear re-moved only by true transcendence into Wholeness.

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This is the most interesting part on the topic of life and death, but the rest of the book is pretty much mindblowing and I recommend it to everyone. Being a Ken Wilber book, a quick Google search will turn up a crapload of book retailers, otherwise, go straight to Amazon.

Cheers, and please discuss.

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This was per-fectly explained by Otto 'Rank's formula, which brilliantly summarizes everything we might say on the sub-ject: 'The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed." Freud said, "the desire to kill re-places the desire to die," and Becker summarized it as "the offering of the other's body in order to buy off one's own death."

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The death-terror, the reflex against Thanatos

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Diaboleros said:

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The death-terror, the reflex against Thanatos

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This right here pisses me off for some reason.. why do people always insist in using such cryptical language and mystical words? He makes good points this Ken Wilber, but to me reading him is like translating a latin text. He uses words like thanatos which is greek for death, why not use the word death and cut the crap?

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I think the idea of total identification with the super conscious or what ever one calls it is another layer in the denial of death

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I assume that by death you mean the total extinction of the self, as in what Richard Dawkins might understand death to be like.

I agree.. sort of.

The way I see it, as you get more at ease with the finality of your own demise, you are content for less and less of "you" to live on, to persist, but you never completely embrace the concept of eternal lack of being. Our brains simply aren't wired that way.

You might start off as a child denying your own death outright.. "it will never happen, they will invent technology" then you may progress to "yeah ok I will die, but I will live on through my fame, that book I wrote" then later you may realise "fuck it there's going to be nothing left except that one time I gave that homeless guy a dollar."

Notice how the "substrate" through which "you" are meant to persist gets less and less material as I progress down the list? You start off with physical self, that's cells and molecules. Books and fame have to exist in memory, or the social sphere, or the pool of human knowledge. In the end you asymptotically approach the idea of selfless love manifested through your own actions.. and the only way you can at all see yourself persisting at that last point is by inventing the hippie "all as one."

I mean even the idea of a smile in a nursing home being all that ever matters in the grand scheme of things implies that there is some sort of "grand scheme" to begin with. And it does seem to me that consciously, or unconsciously, the mind has to see itself persisting in order to see itself; in order to exist at all.

When you finally get to the point where all your ego has left to cling onto is this vague continuum of smiles and kisses and sharing as all light fades from the universe and everything goes back to nothing, then you are within a whisker of accepting the utter finality of your lack of self anyway. In other words the "super consciousness" you trust in will contain so little of your current self anyway that you might as well at that point surrender to nothingness as its all really the same.

But it doesn't matter, because by then the hippy bullshit would have served its purpose: padded out your ride on starship earth, which is the best we can really expect of any philosophy