PracticallyPsychology

You know, one of the most interesting things that’s ever come up in spiritual conversation is this idea of the “vital shock.” People have called it different things over the years, but the basic thread is the same: it’s that deep recoil from life itself, that instinctive contraction when we realize what it means to be a vulnerable, mortal creature in a body. Some people describe it as the refusal to be born, others as the denial of death, and others still as the root of ego itself.

Back in the mid-70s, there was this seminar where Bubba Free John, later known as Adi Da, was talking with his students about it. One of them, Tom Riley, was trying to wrap his head around how the release of this shock tied in with ego death. He asked if ego death was something that happened way deeper, at the level of the heart, or if it could happen just in the release of this vital shock. Bubba told him, in a kind of matter-of-fact way, that ultimately, yes, the deepest version of it happens when the knot at the core of our being opens. But he also said we don’t need to over-mystify it. Because in a very real sense, ego death is simply the absence of self-definition.

Think about that for a second. Most of the time, we’re busy telling ourselves who we are. We’re narrating our lives, identifying as “me,” constantly meditating on ourselves. But when there’s real insight, when there’s real self-enquiry, even for a moment, that activity stops. And when it does, consciousness naturally rests in its prior condition, the condition it was in before we started carving up reality into me and not-me. In those moments, there’s no contraction, no attention fixated on being a separate someone. There’s just this radiant happiness that doesn’t need to be achieved.

Bubba was very clear that this isn’t some kind of dramatic death experience where you’re sitting in the dark feeling like someone has died. It’s not about becoming a bigger self either. It’s about falling back into what was always already the case, the condition before the contraction. He told them that a lot of people like to make spiritual life dramatic, to turn it into this heroic story filled with fear and overcoming fear. But the real thing doesn’t require that. If you actually grasp what’s going on, there doesn’t need to be any big, karmic drama at all. You don’t have to stage-manage an experience of ego death to prove something to yourself.

Now, of course, people sometimes still get caught in those dramas. They feel like they have to pass through phases, face down fear, get torn apart and rebuilt. And that can happen, but it’s not necessary. The essential thing is understanding and the actual realization of the Divine as your prior condition. If that’s present, everything else is optional.

At one point Tom admitted that he sometimes got confused in his own practice. He’d feel what he called Presence, like a clarity or a great immunity, and he wasn’t sure if that was really Presence or just some internal trick he was pulling. Bubba didn’t dismiss it. He said, yeah, sometimes we’re fooling around with little mechanisms inside ourselves without even realizing it. And he pointed out that you can sit there and watch yourself all day, analyze what’s going on, but that will only give you data, some information. The real depth comes when, at some random moment in the course of practice, it suddenly becomes clear what you’ve been doing.

That was the whole vibe of his teaching: don’t try to manipulate yourself into having some special drama. Just do the practice, live it out, and in the natural course of that, insight will arise.

And here’s where it ties back to this whole thing about death and dying. Because if you step back and look at life biologically, the body is this regenerative machine. It repairs itself, replaces cells, maintains itself until it can’t anymore. Eventually the renewal slows down, degeneration kicks in, and the body heads toward clinical death. That’s just how it works.

But psychologically, we humans are driven by this incredibly strong survival instinct. Even when the body is wearing down, the mind pushes forward, wanting to hold on. And culturally, we tend to shy away from death. We focus on birth, growth, achievement. Death gets pushed to the margins. We don’t really prepare for it, especially in modern societies. Talking about death with children is almost taboo, as if acknowledging it will somehow make it come sooner.

Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic, talked about this in terms of the vital shock. He said every human being experiences it, this recoil of awareness from recognizing the vulnerability and mortality of the flesh. It’s like a universal trauma, but one we automatically suppress. As kids, we’re encouraged to grow, achieve, become independent. Any anxiety we feel about our fragility gets discouraged or shut down. We push it into the unconscious and carry on.

But the truth is, that denial shapes a lot of our lives. We spend years building identities, achieving, refining the ego so it can have a sense of control, even though that control is mostly illusory. Underneath it all is the need to feel safe, accepted, and comfortable. Then, as we age, those illusions start to crack. Our bodies weaken, our control slips, and the reality of mortality sets in. That’s when things like midlife crises happen, when we’re suddenly forced to reassess everything we’ve built.

It can feel unfair, like losing ground. And in a youth-obsessed culture, where aging isn’t celebrated as ripening into wisdom but seen as decline, the fear only grows. People panic, resist, cling to their survival instinct harder than ever. But if you look at it differently, this descent into limitation is actually training. It’s life nudging us toward flexibility, toward letting go, toward accepting reality as it is.

And this is where Adi Da’s later talks add another layer. He pointed out that the refusal to be born is just another way of talking about vital shock. He said we’ve built our entire psychological pattern around that initial recoil. Instead of simply being the body, being alive, we pull back and make the subject, the inner self, the center of everything. That’s the whole structure of ego.

His teaching flipped that around. He said real enlightenment isn’t about escaping the body, it’s about becoming the body completely in consciousness. When you confess the body fully, you stop fearing death, because the body already knows about death. The universe knows about it. You don’t have to. The ego worries about the body dying, but when you’re simply the body, lived directly, there’s rest. There’s egolessness.

He was careful to make a distinction here. In psychology, there are plenty of arguments for the “body point of view.” But most of them, he said, don’t go deep enough. They stay on the level of low integration or even vulgar indulgence. His point was that in true realization, you become bodily the way a lover does, not the way a desirer does. A lover is fully in it, fully embodied, but without the contraction of neediness.

So in practice, that means the divisions start to dissolve. The sense of self and the body stops being two things. The body and the world stop being separate. There’s this tacit intuition that everything is the same Mystery, the same Condition. You don’t stand apart from it anymore. You confess the ego, you confess the body, and by doing so, you’re no longer trapped in inward fretting. You see the Whole.

If you step back, you can see how these perspectives all line up. On the one hand, you’ve got the biological reality: the body regenerates, then declines, then dies. On the other hand, you’ve got the psychological response: survival instinct, denial of mortality, vital shock, ego formation. And then you’ve got the spiritual teaching: that all of this can be met not with panic or resistance, but with enquiry, with falling back into the prior condition of consciousness, with confessing the body completely.

So when people talk about ego death, vital shock, fear of dying, or the refusal to be born, they’re all circling around the same thing. It’s the contraction away from reality, the attempt to protect a separate self. And the release of that contraction isn’t some dramatic end-of-the-world experience. It’s a relaxation into what’s always been true.

That’s why Bubba, back in that seminar, kept emphasizing not to force some big heroic drama. If you’re constantly trying to have an experience, you’re still just playing out the contraction. Real understanding is quieter, subtler, more absolute than that.

And when you see it, when you really grasp it, death itself doesn’t carry the same weight. The body already knows. The universe already knows. You don’t have to.

And that’s where I’ll leave it. Thanks for hanging in with me through all that depth. If it stirred something in you, let it settle, don’t force it. Until next time.