While an initial non-dual recognition can turn life inside out, the separate self does not exit the premises easily. For most people there is an in-between phase where months, and years, can pass in confusion as the separate self’s world crumbles and dissolves.
Inevitably, at some point there comes the confrontation with death itself. However, although this may feel like it’s the death of the body that is being faced, it is almost always a metaphorical death that is being confronted. The death of the ego or a sense of separation.

Preceding this drastic shift in consciousness the well-known gatekeeper arises to do his job: Fear. “Go back to the world of separation. To what you know. To where things can be controlled. Turn back around this is not for you.”
Yet, non-the-less, something presses on. There is a deep intrinsic knowing that only the Truth is wanted, and only this search can be followed through all the way, everything else must fade quietly into the background.
In many cases, the body will more than likely try to go about business as usual. It will shut out this fear because it is very strong, and powerful (yet the calling is so much more powerful than this fear, if it’s a true and honestly genuine yearning for God or Truth itself) and it will attempt to maintain the dramas around its old jobs, relationships, and the beliefs about itself in order to remain in the oh-so trusted world of that which is known, familiar, predictable, and of course – controllable.
And then the ultimate test comes.
The most intense kind of fear.
A fear that ultimately confronts everything the system has ever known or believed: a direct confrontation with death.
Does the system want to abandon its world or not?
How strong is the love for the beloved?
How deep can one abandon themselves to know this true love?
How far is one willing to go?
These are tests that ultimately arise, and of course, they are no fun.
In this particular case, these shifts began with extreme paranoia, hypochondria, and also panic and terror. There were many days and nights of extreme discomfort and sadness. And of course, an ultimate confrontation with everything the body loves…family, friends, people, it’s hobbies, and its own self. It is an intense confrontation.
You see, the Self plays out the sense of separation because self loves itself. In a way, every single ego is completely and totally, naively, in love with itself, it’s suffering, it’s world of drama. It does not actually want to leave the play or the illusion. Of course it doesn’t! That’s why it’s playing out separation in the first place.
However, a deep and thorough calling will present itself at some point with a gatekeeper and require a choice. To either turn oneself over to love completely, or to walk back into your life as it was.
The choice is yours.