Now, let's get practical. You say, "Okay, I understand what you are saying theoretically,
 but I know that I would be terrified if somebody was going to tell me that I'm 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're 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. There's
 this, when you finally realize you can't do anything about the death, you could have 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're
 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 into 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, there 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 in 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 hibijibis and the horrors." I say, "All right, so death
 is not the problem, the hibijibis is the problem. So let's deal with the hibijibis in the same
 way as with death. You cannot stop the hibijibis. You think you should." I say, "Don't. The
 hibijibis are very valuable. Not that they will stop you from dying, but because from
 them you will learn the same thing as you would learn from dying. But the social pressure
 on you to resist the hibijibis is terrific. Now why must you do that? Why is everybody
 saying these hibijibis, these fears, etc., 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 hibijibis 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 hibijibis are suppressed has more to do with its orgiastic
 aspects.
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