I am only half way through the book and although I haven't seen any specific references to this subject in ANE I do recall ET speaking about how all forms, whether they be thought forms or physical forms, come into being, persist for a while, and then pass out of being. Like the Buddha, he doesn't seem to be interested in a lot of metaphysical speculation, which I admire. He talks a great deal about Allowing and Acceptance and seems to address the subject quite matter-of-factly, that which is born, shall die. With regards to the ego, I understand him to be saying "die before you Die" which could suggest that when we die physically we will be (re)born into a new level (sphere) of consciousness (Being) (my interpretation). The best book that I have read on the subject of our impending death is "Grace and Grit" by Ken Wilber.

This, too, shall pass. However, life has no opposite. Life always is. The physical form will die, but we should not be troubled. Things come, and things go, and it's beautiful.

In October of this year my mother passed away. My whole life my mother seemed to be ill with one illness after another. Prior to her death I began to ask why. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I started with why am I having this experience? What is it that I need to learn? It seemed to have snowballed from there. I began to focus on the present. (after my moms death ,I read The Power of Now and I realized living in the now is what allowed me to understand and learn so much) I opened my eyes to a different mom than I thought I had. I stopped focusing on the physical and began connecting with her on a beautiful deeper level. I always thought my mother was a weak person because I would compare her to other moms who seemed to have it all together. All my mother knew how to do was love unconditionally and it took her death for me to realize how strong she really was. She touched so many people in this way. I am so blessed to see the truth. Throughout reading ANE, I had so many reminders of the experiences I went through with my mother, that the book confirms my experiences. I learned so much about life, through experiencing my mothers death.

Death is also Transfomation, it is not Physical death always. If the old falls away such as the old conciousness in the way that you think this too is a form of death and you are "born" into a new conciousness ---A rebirth.

On the planet Death and Rebirth are played in front of our eyes every moment of our life time it is spoken in seasons for example winter and spring. The moon Cycles each representing a death and a rebirth A waning cycle is a falling away of the old and letting go of what no longer serves us while a waxing is manifesting the new.

Physical Death is just the physical death of a body and reborn into a new form spirit and this spirit is pure energy and it has always been and always will be. The Spirit of you was and always will be and will take on many forms and play the rebirth and death in Unlimited possibilities. Why?... cause you are Unlimited. We are here for the experiences the little deaths and rebirths. Now at this moment in time We are starting to experience The Birth of a New Conciousness and the Death of the Old Conciousness while in your Physical body at this Lifetime.

Nothing of God's/the creator of all /Goddesses is ever lost.

Think of it as Transformation such as You got the best job that brings the most absoult joy, but you had to quit the old job and let it go in order to do so--Going to higher and better things even while still in your Physical body...and even after it is gone.

i havent read the book because i feel if to get answers to life questions why not go to the source that can tell you the whole truth? the holy bible only the creator of the heavens and earth can tell you lifes purpose. and answer your why questions, any one that trys to tell you about life and death other then gods do u think its his thouhgts? if so why trust it? he didnt put u here

If we are truly present and let the defensive and possessive ego go, why should we care if our physical existence is obliterated? It seems to me that believing in an "unlimited" spirit or any kind of transcendence
beyond this one life is another "immortality system", just like every other religion on earth. It would be another crutch on which we would depend and be willing to defend, ostracize and attack others. For me, this finality makes life even more precious and privileged state of being. It reminds me to make every second count especially in enhancing my self expression and the lives of others. Isn't this enough for humanity? When will we have the courage to confront life on these terms without irrational belief?

Ernest Becker's Pultizer Prize winning books Denial of Death (1973) and his sequel Escape from Evil (1975) described a sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic anxiety, even a terror, about our situation. We devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of our mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning- -if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we'd go nuts. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker's view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.

First, at the personal level, by ignoring our mortality and vulnerability we build up an unreal sense of self, and we act out of a false sense of who and what we are. Second, as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another "immortality system" (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade--preferably kill--the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute- truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.

We will defend this sense of protection and security against death through whatever means. The interesting thing here is that there is no difference between the secular, religious or the personal in regards to its function to help a person feel more protected, masterful, worthy and meaningful. This theory is an intellectual leveler of arbitrary classifications of knowledge and human motivation. It tends to subsume (not contradict) other empirical evidences of the sources of human motivation.

Psychologically, there is no difference between symbolic OR physical defense of any worldview. We protect our sources of strength, mastery and power through whatever means. Attachment to secular principles rationales can be used to justify genocide as much as Jeffery Dahmers private rationale to "absorb the life force" of his victims by eating their parts. We can get more imagined life by attaching to whatever symbol promises more of it. So, bolstering our own sense of power by belittling others and their competing symbols of meaning and significance - intelligence, beauty, social status, are as valid as generating our own realities . And we do so as a part of the very customs, manners and etiquette that orders our social world. Just as a gold fish would be hard pressed to describe water, we swim in vast ocean of culturally approved immortality symbols.

In my view, Ernest Becker was right about this core thesis. It starts with a child's overriding need for physical security and then proceeds to a inexorable bolstering of self esteem using culturally approved hero symbols. As the child's mind develops the capacity for symbolic representation of the world - simply an abstraction of reality - that activity becomes more real than actual physical mastery.

The notion of immortality systems is an especially useful diagnostic tool. It is easy to spot people (including oneself, of course) clinging to absolute truths in the way he describe--and it is not hard to understand why they do. It is not just anxiety over physical vulnerability. It goes deeper than that. We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art. I think it is accurate to say that a denial of death pervades human culture, and that it is one of the deepest sources of banal argument, intolerance, aggression, and human evil. On the other hand, it is the source of all ethical systems, mastery over our environment through science and technology and most humanities cultural achievements. But more profoundly, these ideas have provided an immense revelatory scheme of the way all civilizations were constructed and why the courage to confront life and its dangers. Even the jobs we choose, kinds of people we marry, stuff we purchase, and institutions we support are becuase of the mass tacit agreement that these pursuits contribute to our collective immortalities. The whole advertising industry ferrets out these primal needs and desires and packages them in ways that make their immortality promises more concrete.