Now, let’s get practical. You say, Okay, I understand what you are saying theoretically, but I know that I would be terrified if there’s somebody who is going to tell me that I was going to die. And that I would look frantically around for some doctor, some sort of something. That this panic to live is in us in an uncontrollable way, and this is part of the reason why we say we have an instinct to survive. The instinct is this panic. So let’s take another step, now, in the same way as I showed you steps about realizing that you don’t have an ego.

You say to yourself, in the ordinary way, when you feel that panic, you feel a bit ashamed of it. Even though you’ve been taught that you should do everything possible to survive. See what a bind you are in here? So one feels, Oh goodness, I must face this thing calmly and bravely, and not be in this panic. But the point of the fact is, you are in a panic, and you can’t stop it! Now, that’s very important because this is another way of showing you the same thing that death is showing you: that you can’t do anything about it. Just as when you finally realize you can’t do anything about the death, you could’ve solved all that before, by understanding you couldn’t do anything about the panic.

But if you think all the time I’m supposed to stop this panic, then all that happens is you’re at cross-purposes with yourself again. The panic is, of course, put off in the ordinary way. We all know we are going to die. But it’s sufficiently far off so that we can put it out of our minds. And anybody who does put it in our minds in the ordinary way is taken to be a skeleton at the banquet—a Cassandra, and gloomy.

So that the old-fashioned preacher of bygone days who preached about death, and those monks who kept skulls on their desks—and all that sort of thing—is regarded today as very morbid. Why, in the Baroque times, it was a fashion, for a while, of making tombstones with marvelous sculptures of skeletons and bones all over them. And on the Via Veneto in Rome there is a Capuchin church where, down in the crypt, there are chapels where the altar furnishings and everything are made entirely from the bones of departed monks. Then we have, among Tibetans and Buddhists, graveyard meditations. And they have trumpets in Tibetan Buddhism made of human thigh bones. And they have cups—ritual cups—made of the domes of human skulls, richly worked in silver and turquoise. And we say all that is very morbid.

So, from this point of view you can see—first of all, theoretically—how death can solve its own problem. Now if you say, I can only see it theoretically, and I can’t go the whole way with you, then I will ask you, What is blocking you? Well, you say, It gives me the heebie-jeebies and the horrors. I say, Alright, so death is not the problem. The heebie-jeebies is the problem. So let’s deal with the heebie-jeebies in the same way as with death. You cannot stop the heebie-jeebies. You think you should. I say don’t! The heebie-jeebies are very valuable. Not that they will stop you from dying, but becuase from them you will learn the same thing as you would learn from dying.

But the social pressure on you to resist the heebie-jeebies is terrific. Now, why must you do that? Why is everybody saying these heebie-jeebies, these fears, et cetera, are not permissible? You wonder about that, and the reasoning behind all that is not very clear, because it seems to be saying, Well, if you have all these fears and things like that, you won’t be a very good soldier. You won’t be able to act competently in a crisis; you’ll get the heebie-jeebies instead, and you won’t know what to do. Well, nobody has ever really proved that. Because actually, people who we would call ‘very courageous,’ are, in fact, often quite frightened. And courageous action is not necessarily a consequence of having no fear. Sometimes it might be, but it isn’t always so. The real reason why the heebie-jeebies are suppressed has more to do with its orgiastic aspects.