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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: of the theories of a future life which we have so elaborately
developed. Indeed, the psychical shrinking is really the
quintessence of the physical fear. We cleave to the abstract idea
closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego
this earthly existence than surrender that something we know as
self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot
conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's,
still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he
grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable from
himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
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