Love that piece of writing that you shared with us!

"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it."

So odd how that had never occurred to me until I read that line. Pondering on it a bit, I think beauty is a bit more, as well. While there may be an undertone of fear, there's also wander and excitement - the sensation of an inner battle between attraction and repulsion.

To use a likely controversial example, death is something that we fear by our very nature, yet we can't help but be curious about it, some even drawn to it - qualifying it as beauty, if one agrees with my definition.

Death, to me, is a beautiful thing. It brings us new life, by "making room" for the new and recycling the elements that allow youth to replenish. However, it's the great mystery of what death really is that imbues it with wander and, looking over the many personal accounts of men and women who've explored this question of "what is death" or have personally experienced being on the edge of death, there appears to be an unspeakable quality of peace and freedom that lies in allowing consciousness to explore that great unknown, and perhaps unknowable. Yet, we can't deny our fear of losing everything that we associate with as our personal identity (sense-world of pain and pleasure, thoughts, emotions, memories, relationships, possessions, mental states, etc.).

Many past "seekers" of the truth about life/ death have come to the conclusion that the only part of consciousness that ceases to exist at the moment of (the organism's) death is one's own ego, or sense of a personal self. They claim that the true reality is one of impersonal awareness, an awareness that identifies itself with nothing and, more pertinently, is completely detached from what, in their own claims, turns out to be only an "apparent existence" of subject/ object and cause/ effect relationships. They claim that, similar to a lucid dream, the person whom dies to their own personal sense of self (ego), awakens to the true nature of the illusion that was previously mistaken as reality (it's at this moment that the dream becomes lucid). Without necessarily coming fully out of the dream state, there's the understanding in this (lucid dream type) awakening that all experiences (both the experience and the "experiencer") are inseparable from one's own consciousness - that's to say, one doesn't experience an "objective (separate) world" in one's own dream - it's ALL THE SELF!

I used to read and listen to the words of the late Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who would often suggest his audience to "die before death", to experience true freedom and self-knowledge. He prescribed to the idea that death only happens to the ego, not to one's entire sense of existence (self).