“And in this great struggle to survive as an individual entity, the soul burdens itself with all the errors and illusions of mortality. Thus it happens that though men believe in God and in a universe of infinite benevolence, they still live in fear and constant anxiety, being far more inclined to cling to this flesh to the last possible moment, than to take a chance of going into the unknown, even though they accept it intellectually as a better state. Thus the struggle for the preservation of the known causes man’s greatest confusion, for it causes him to cling to the evils he now has, rather than to fly to others he knows not of. There is a total lack of the true faith and insight that enable man to move out into space, realizing that this space is God, and that there cannot, therefore, be any evil thing in it. By faith, man should know that as surely as he himself exists, so surely is his existence essentially good, if he knows how to attain this goodness; and the evil of his existence is in his own fears and uncertainties. He is not really in danger of losing anything real, but only what he has fashioned himself, which has no foundation in reality.”
― Manly P. Hall, The Dark Night of the Soul: Man's Instinctive Search for Reality