>“From afar shines your own height in golden light across the sea. Like the moon arising from the tides. And you become aware of yourself from afar. And the longing grips you and the will to move yourself. You want to go from Being to Becoming because you understood the breathing and flowing of the sea - leading you here and there without attaching you anywhere. And your wave flings you onto foreign shores - swallows you up and gurgles you down. You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each one. Then you felt embraced by general death, by death in the deepest place on earth. Of death in your own strangely breathing and flowing depths. Oh how you long and despair, mortal fear grips you in all this death - breathing slow, eternal flow of coming and going. All these light and dark, warm and tepid and cold waters. All those wavy, swaying, swinging plant-animals and animal-plants. All these nocturnal wonders fill you with dread and you long for the sun, for clear, dry air, for solid stone, for defined space and straight line, for the unmoved and held fast, for rules and a stated purpose, for being alone and your own intention.” > >Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book The deepest of metaphysical uncertainties is the encounter with our most formidable enemy. ***Death***. We so dread the predictable demise of our ego, that we turn away from this terror, coiled around our hopes and expectations. The mere thought of this dark omen makes us long for defined spaces, predictable outcomes, and all things permanent and unmoving. It is here that our yearning for **_certainty_** is born. This is not limited to the mortality of our bodies. It encompasses the _little death_, the irreversibility of time. The transformation of each moment of the present into an immutable past. The relentless collapse of unfolding potential into historical actuality. Our relationship with death was a topic of speculation for Sigmund Freud, who picked up the idea from a paper by Sabina Spielrein.[^1] In his early work, he gave a central role to the ***pleasure principle***. The drive toward life affirming behaviors such as survival instincts, social cooperation, and sex. But this framework was challenged by his encounters with WWI veterans displaying signs of PTSD and substance abuse. He posited the existence of an opposing force, and named it ***death drive*** (Todestrieb).[^2] For Freud, this duality of energies he called Eros (life) and Thanatos (death) better explained observations such as masochism, aggression, and the frequent re-enacting of traumatic experiences. From a modern perspective, this duality of life and death drives appears oversimplified at best. Our current understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying PTSD and addictive behavior do not require the existence of a death drive. They are the result of a complex interplay between biases in memory encoding, behavioral heuristics, and the modulating functions of neurotransmitters. But perhaps Freud's Eros and Thanatos can be a useful metaphor. A narrative that helps us grasp the dynamic, fitful, fluid, and often obscure nature of the ***Self***. An inner universe of shifting alliances full of opponent processes and balances of power. We will discover the connection between uncertainty and the Self in the branch on [agency]. For now it is enough to highlight the primordial fear of death as a source of our ***metaphysical uncertainty***. [[Two Worlds|Next page]] ___ [^1]: SPIELREIN, S. (1994), Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39: 155-186. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1994.00155.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1994.00155.x) [^2]: Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in _On Metapsychology_ (Middlesex 1987), p. 316.