Separate self

The extent to which we identify ourselves with our bodies, possessions, and the domain of our control is also the extent to which we are afraid of death.
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I am speaking here not of the biological terror that drives any animal to struggle with a predator, 
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But to an ambient dread that drives us to pretence and hiding.
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More than any other crisis, death is the intruder whose mere approach crumbles the fortress of the separate self.
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A personal brush with death, or even the passing of a loved one, connects us to a reality beyond the constructs of me and mine.
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Death opens our hearts.
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Death reminds us, with a clarity that trumps all logic, that only love is real.
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And what is love, but a melting of the boundaries between self and other?
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As many poets have understood, love too is a kind of death.
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To a person identified with tribe, forest, and planet, the death of the body and all it controls is far less frightening.
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Another way to describe such a person is that he or she is in love with the world.
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Love is antidote to fear of death.
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Because it expands one's boundaries beyond what can be lost.
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Conversely, fear of death blocks love by shutting us in and making us small.
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And fear of death is built into our ideology.
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The self-definition implicit in objectivist science.
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Money and property simply enforce this self-definition.
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They are concrete manifestations of the separate self. 
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The self that is afraid of death and closed to love.
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Money, in its present form, is anti-love.
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But it is not the root of all evil. 
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Just another expression of separation.
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Another piece of the puzzle.
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Other systems of money are possible that have the opposite effect of our present currency,
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Structurally discouraging the accumulation of me and mine.

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Charles Eisentstein