Casting Out Fear: Shedding Your Fictional Self - Awakening Your Authentic Self

By Victor Van Valin

In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death, American anthropologist Ernest Becker notes how we all arrive on earth aware of our lonely set-apart-ness, our cosmic insignificance and the fact that one day we will die. Such pitiable, degrading circumstances generate such anxiety and fear that we deny and repress the truth of their reality and compensate therefore by vying with one another, either individually or as members of a larger group, in order to prove that we or our group are somehow special, better, more superior to others. We are obsessively engaged in trying to do something that entitles us to the admiration and respect of our peers. It is vital to our self-esteem. With varying degrees of conscious awareness, we constantly compare ourselves with others.We must know that we have not fallen behind the Joneses. To maintain our place on the social ladder, we look for things about others that entitle us to criticize, belittle or otherwise look down on them. We do so in order to maintain the pretense that we are truly somebody in the cosmic scheme of things. But such heroics eventually fail us. They do not elevate us to the "paradise" of feeling that we have a meaningful role and place in the eternal life and death processes of the universe. Nor do they assist us in coming to a graceful acceptance of our own mortality. This book elaborates on Beckers message and describes the twists and turns in the authors own efforts to discover his authentic self and find a path to such paradise. His fascinating recounting will serve as a useful guide to finding your own way to such paradise. "In lucid and engaging prose, fortified with compelling examples from his own experience, Vic Van Valin explains how mankinds awareness of death causes most of us to desperately grasp for fame, wealth and power and why a religiosity that transcends the boundaries of traditional religions is perhaps our best hope for improving the human condition." Sheldon Solomon, Prof. of Psychology. Skidmore College, NY

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1432709968
• ISBN13: 9781432709969
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Outskirts Pr
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"