If you go back and recognize that the best things you have done were wins for a Self, mortal OR immortal, the YOU that engineered each major triumph and win, a better perspective can emerge. In the ultimate analysis, the agreements you have made for marriage and team and neighborhood and town and nation are agreements springing from the First Headwater: the Self as You have Sourced it. From there the rest makes better sense.
It is a valuable lesson to notice that in dealing with ANY reality the reality scale holds valid. The top is experience. When one cannot exactly experience, he can make a slight effort and confront. When that effort becomes too much he can at least make the object or the reality invisible. Failing that (when the creation of the reality over-weighs his ability to ignore it) he can make it black.
And when that cannot succeed he can DUB IN realities which are not, as overlays on top of the unconfrontableness of it all.
In a sense much of our cultural conditioning is AGREED-UPON DUB-IN designed to enable us to creep along in ordinary human pursuits, watching supermarket ads and football statistics so that we can stay away from the blackness just behind those things. If we were to invade that blackness it might well go invisible; if we pursued it, what would we end up confronting? Granting that this is an awful question, a rude, impolite, vulgar and insensitive and not-nice question, does it have any answers worth knowing?
One answer lies in the fact of lifetimes.
Because so much forgetting takes place between lifetimes, it is natural that we have evolved a culture dedicated to this lifetime only, a 'mortal values only need apply' sort of culture. Immortal values -- those derived from a broader span of view over lifetimes -- get short shrift on the way to Big Bear or K-Mart.
Even as individuals in a mortal culture ,we are not too proud of our racial history. It is fine to worship the ancient blade that Ancestor Tom carried at Gettysburg or Waterloo or swung against Saracen necks in the deserts outside Jerusalem. But we don't enjoy the fact, now, that we descend from so bloodthirsty a species. Ever since our kind graduated from Advanced Chimping and took a degree in Bipedal Locomotion and Opposable Thumb Technique, we have been mounting up and running each other over, spilling blood on the moors and the cobblestones wherever there was some effort at civilization going on. We have, collectively, a pretty psychotic history, no mistake. God, how awful it would have been to have to live in those times when men burned, pillaged, raped, plundered and slaughtered on any pretext! Of course, that was before we had television.
Imagine how heavy the task will be of recognizing that those psychotic, frenzied murderous dancers on the stage of history were not 'remote ancestors', but were US! Every leper, hunchback, battle axing murderer and crazed witch burner that ever lived is probably somewhere among the ranks of today's human population. It is small wonder we prefer a mortal explanation. To have to take responsibility for descending from Khan and his hordes is tough. To take responsibility for riding with him and burning virgins is a bit more than most of us want to look at, eh?
Returning to the theme, it is useful to know that DUB-In (for example the dub-in of mortal preoccupation) can give way to blackness, invisibility, confront and experience, in that order.
This is a navigational aid in the stormy seas we encounter when we set out from the sleepy little village of Bunker, where our mothers and school mates are settling down for an evening on the telly watching advertisements for shampoo and football re-runs, and our Dads are studying share prices and military strategies. Not for them, the swell of a rising sea-change under the keel or the snap of a squall attacking the main. The discomfort, you know. Why bother?