When I was a child, I occasionally had the most terrifying feeling.  It was similar to the sensation that I think many of us have felt waking up at an odd time or in an unfamiliar place and not being quite sure just who we are.  That sensation to me is not altogether unpleasant and one at some level I feel I can take control of rather simply.  This other feeling was something different – a profound awareness that my deepest sense of me was no different than the way every other living creature feels about its own existence.  Describing it this way – as clearly as I can – it doesn’t seem to be something that should be so frightening.  In fact, on the face of it, it would seem to describe the Sense of Oneness with All Things that is supposed to bring great peace and understanding. But it was most frightening – a consciousness that totally obliterated any meaning to my distinctive consciousness and individual existence.  There are, I believe, a million ways that we learn to fear death, but this feeling became for me the bedrock of what I would call a healthy Woody-Allen level of death anxiety.

I don’t think this sensation is unique to me, but I have only read or heard it described one other time.  Probably twenty years ago the New Yorker carried a profile of an up and coming conductor of classical music.  He was apparently a huge talent and an interesting personality, and I remember an enigmatic paragraph where he described exactly in a few words this feeling I am writing about.  He found it to be a terrifying experience also.

I think the mindset of our civilization today is to pit our individual existence and consciousness literally against all the rest of time and the universe.   The futility of this point of view was what my childhood moment revealed to me – at least that is the way I look at it now.  The truly final point I want to make on this website is that I believe the Kototama Principle is the way to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between our individual consciousness and eternity.  Human expression in words, or sounds, is the universe, not just metaphorically but in actual fact.  Our bodies and the words that we speak are composed of the same elements as time and matter.  Grasping this is, I believe, the fundamental thing that human beings should do.  It doesn’t negate the fact of death (Darnit!), but it is at the very least a profound comfort.