Free From the Fear of Dying

"Kill out desire of life. Respect life as those who desire it."

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Take this reflection into the silence, and I'll see you next time.

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Transcript

The heart attack struck Carl Jung without warning. Switzerland, 1944. One moment he was walking near his home, the next he collapsed.

As his physical body lay dying in a hospital bed, Jung found himself floating above the Earth. He could see the planet's curvature, the blue glow of the atmosphere, the vastness of space. Then he began moving toward a massive stone temple suspended in the cosmos.

At the temple's entrance stood an otherworldly presence. "You have no right to leave," the figure told him. "Your task is not finished."

Then Jung felt himself being pulled back. Reluctantly.

When he opened his eyes in the hospital room, Jung was changed forever. The man who had spent decades analyzing the human psyche now spoke of death as a transition, not an ending. His encounter with mortality dissolved the fear that had haunted him since childhood.

This is precisely what the spiritual teacher Mabel Collins was pointing toward: "Kill out desire of life. Respect life as those who desire it."

Before his vision, Jung lived like most of us. Every chest pain became a heart attack. Every headache signaled a brain tumor. Every late-night call spelled disaster. Every plane ride promised a crash. Every goodbye felt permanent. This desperate clinging to physical existence promised protection but delivered only suffering.

The ancient precept asks you to kill this frantic grasping. The desire that transforms living into mere survival.

Jung's brush with death revealed that his essential self transcended the physical body. Death became transition rather than termination. Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, what seemed like ending revealed itself as transformation.

You might think this realization would make him reckless—if death holds no sting, why not throw caution to the wind? Instead, Jung's remaining years overflowed with creative output. He developed his most profound theories about the collective unconscious. He explored spiritual dimensions previously closed to him. He lived with renewed purpose, knowing that what mattered most about him could not be destroyed.

Jung embodied the paradox perfectly. By killing his desire for life, his desperate clinging to physical survival, he paradoxically discovered what it meant to truly live. What he thought was living had actually been a form of death by fear. Only by accepting the mortality of the body and the immortality of the spirit did he unlock authentic life. This freed him to genuinely respect life as something sacred to be lived fully and purposefully.