356 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeIn our advance to a greater life, we confront an initial obstacle. Un-
less we remove or overcome this obstacle, we can rise no further. We
spend our time in a daze of diminished existence, neither awake nor
asleep. We resign ourselves to compromise and routine, seeing the
world through the categories of the prevailing culture or the methods
of established ways of thinking. We reconcile ourselves to the mutila-
tion of our experience that we began to accept when we entered on a
par tic u lar course of life. We allow ourselves to be subdued by the cara-
pace of diminished experience that formed around us, as we grew older.
For the vast majority of men and women, overwhelming economic ne-
cessity and drudgery overwhelm and disguise a stupefaction that would
otherwise be apparent. For the increasing number of people who, with
the material progress of society, are released from grinding material
constraint, there is no such disguise.
In this way, we cease to live as embodied spirit: as the context- bound
but context- resisting agents that we really are. That which is most
precious— life itself— we give away in return for nothing. We belittle
ourselves, wrongly mistaking our belittlement for a fate as inescap-
able as our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.
Th e antidote to this diminishment is to face the terrifying truth about
our situation. Our confrontation with the three great terrors of human
life shakes and arouses us, if only we could bring ourselves to reenact it,
always and to the end.
Th e fi rst terror is the certainty of death, grasped in the context of our
groundlessness. Each of us will be annihilated. None of us can, without
lying to himself, claim that this annihilation is less real or defi nitive
than it appears to be: that we will somehow live in other people in any
way other than in a meta phorical sense or as if our commitments,
attachments, interests, and ideals, defective, partial, and accidental as
they are, could stand in the place of the tremendous, unbounded, and
therefore incomparable experience of being alive. Our sense of fecun-
dity— of all that we might be and might do— collides with the awareness
that we are death- bound.
Th at we are surrounded on every side by enigma and remain forever
powerless to decipher the mystery of our existence, and of the reality of
the world and of time, only makes the certainty of death more horrify-