It's not "me" you want (Sutras on Longing vol 6)

It’s not “me” you want

The feeling of love is the most powerful thing in the universe, and perhaps that’s why it’s also sometimes the most painful. 

Every so often, someone stirs in us this feeling of love and it is more intense than anything else we go through in this life.  We can stay up for hours, we are inspired to poetry and art, even physical pain and illnesses decrease.  

When we are in love like this, we have been given a free gift of the ability to meditate like the highest masters.  How is this so?  Because the highest masters completely forgot themselves.  They forgot to keep saying “me, me, me”.  

The “me” they go beyond is a fixed sense of who they are.  This kind of “me” can always only feel stale, because it is always behind the times.  The moment you reify some “self” -  in that very moment it has already become out-dated, obsolete.  The wisest meditators have seen this happening.  Their minds are so sharp, their laboratory equipment so advanced, that they can slow the process down and see it in real time >”I think I am a self”<  >zoooom, in comes the too-tight identity-construct to paste itself on my experience<   >”OUCH this feels terrible!”<

After witnessing this pattern play out again and again, the wise yogi makes a conscious decision to stop doing it (does it hurt when you do that?  STOP doing that!).  The person in love gets a freebie.  The glamour they see shimmering from the object of their affection has the power to completely obliterate the capacity to think about oneself.  Even a moment of stoping thoughts of “me” is powerfully refreshing.  It kicks out the stale and outmoded and plunks one straight into the cool depths of Now.

The only distinction between the infatuated and the mystic is that the one who thinks they are “in love” is having an experience that they didn’t choose.  They haven’t learned to release the grip of “me”-grasping on purpose, they are practically forced into it instead.  That means that the freshness they feel will be only temporary.  There’s a type of addiction here.  You have to get your fix from out there because you don’t know it’s coming from in here.

Something about the Beloved blasts you out of the realm of the known.  That familiarity you’ve worked so hard to build up has completely stifled you, and along comes this amazing, wonderful, super-hot being and BOOM rips the familiarity away.  But inevitably, they will leave you.  And when they leave you, unless you are very lucky, you will cling even more strongly to the familiar feeling of “me”.  

When you are in their presence, something about the magnetic property of the other siphons off the energy you could use to grasp to yourself.  But when you are away from them, all you know is that some “you” was able to change that way this “me” felt.  You don’t know that it was a release from the stagnation of self-clinging, you think the freshness came from them.

Worst is when the Beloved finally becomes familiar to you.  Because once they are familiar, no longer a mystery, they lose all power to transport you outside the realm of the known.  When the other no longer consistently gives us a fix, we get angry, sad, deprived.  Our addiction is not being served.  They were there providing the light of God to us, and now that has somehow stopped.  We are tossed straight from heaven to the depths of hell.

How simple things could be if we recognized that it’s not “them” that we want.  Wanting “them” is just a sneaky way of wanting “me” - and “me” is something we’ve already got too much of.  The beloved looks like the light of God because for some reason we are able to see the Divine in them easily.  This divine which is none other than a feeling of Communion.  This is the mystic’s secret.  Not forgetting the stagnant self in some sense of empty bewilderment or darkness, but a surrender of that self to the divine feeling of love and unity.  This feeling is available in a mountain cave, and it is available in our own families.  People have had a love affair with God while dying and others have while tending to the sick.

God is better in bed than any human mate you’ll ever find, and you can have her/him 24 hours a day, seven days a week - constant bliss.  Because the secret is that we kept waiting for someone to come along and give us that pleasant refreshment we always longed for.  But the thing seeking was the thing we sought - the minute we give, and let go of attachment to an outdated “me”, that minute we are free, blissful, and fresh.

Do you want the youthful strength of a teenager - vibrant, alive, inspired?  Have a crush on all beings, Fall in love with everything. 

Disgust (Sutras on Longing vol 5)

Disgust

Some days the world will feel totally disgusting to you.

You’ll wake up and you’ll say “What the f@ck is the point of all this?!”

You’ll look around and notice that nothing ever works.

Sure, things work sometimes, but other times, they just let you down.

And the horrible part is, you never know which one it’s going to be today.

Will this relationship be the one that works out, or will it be the one that crashes and burns, leaving you feeling like an empty wretch?

Will this meal be the one that fills you and leads to delicious post-consumption languor, or will it be the one that gives you food poisoning?

One day, it may well be that the wonderful things we rely on for pleasure, or to nourish our lives will be the ones that bring our death.

Elements as innocuous as water, fire, earth, air - all required for the nourishment of beings - all of them equally murderous.

Is it any wonder that some days you will awake and hate the life you are living in?

If you tell this to your psychologist, they will quickly give you a remedy certain to cover up these troubling feelings.

The problem is, on these days, you might be right.

This is not an encouragement to go out and get depressed.  Depression is the belief that these days where you see that nothing works, these moments of pure disgust, are more right than the moments when life looks just fine.

They are not more right, but neither is the conspiracy of false joy we perpetuate upon the world - seeking out discomfort and attempting to shield ourselves from it in every moment.  This campaign of division, between the "acceptable" emotions and insights, and the "unacceptable", can lead only to greater suffering because it denies an entire facet of the truth.  This life is disgusting, and it is also totally pure.  Somewhere at the meeting of these truths is beauty, art.

What art knows, or, what is known through art, is that beauty is not a thing of sharp distinctions between “good” and “bad”, “correct” and “incorrect”, “acceptable” and “unacceptable”.  Beauty is the dance of seemingly irreconcilable opposites.  

They juxtapose each other in countless ways, and every so often they merge, in a flash of light, or in a mysterious dissolution (barely noticed).

The ancient ones understood disgust in ways many of us have rarely glimpsed.  They knew that any object, thought, or feeling that hampered the ability to give one’s heart away totally was doom, death.

To these vast warriors, nothing could be put higher than Love - no images to veil the face of the divine - and so if a physical pleasure caused a contraction toward “me” vs “you”, they renounced it utterly.

But don’t imagine some sour faced oldster swearing off physical affection forever because he was burned by it once.  That’s not caring, that’s contraction too.  Think more fluid, think of catching yourself in the act of letting pampering distract you from another’s heart - and then think of expanding - immediately becoming something much greater than the one who could feel deprived.  

This will give you a small idea of the every-moment practice of the Masters.  There are no fixed decisions that will apply “forever” - that kind of safety is anathema to such a being.  There is only each moment being guided by the Heart’s true compass.

The feeling of disgust becomes a welcome friend, a trusted guide.  It tells me “I’m contracting in fear - I want to force the world to work for me rather than opening myself as a gift to the world”.  When this feeling arises, don’t be afraid to clean out your closets, gut your schedule book, and throw “safety” into the wind.  You never had any safety to begin with.  Letting go of its illusion is liberation, not a problem.

The ways we keep ourselves “safe” are shackles on the heart - a sky dragon kept in a small box and stunted.  Set it free. 

Consumers and Communers (Sutras on Longing vol 4)

Consumers and Communers

Put simply: you are not here to shop.

The sooner you recognize this fundamental truth, the sooner you can stop being miserable.

Young people are mostly cute, and sometimes annoying.

The most troubling part of working with someone going through their “terrible twos” or someone in their teenage years is that they think the point of life is to serve what they want.

The worst part is not that they cry or throw tantrums, though they do that too.  No, the worst part is you can see how much pain they are in all the time, trying to bend the world to their desire.

It’s like they make a bargain…. If I get frustrated enough and throw enough of a fit, then life will have to give me what I want.  And it’s sad, enough people do get what they want that others think generating upset is the way to do it.

We gotta make sustainability hip.  You see, consumers are operating on a system dependent on non-renewable resources.  It’s a give-and-take mentality, and underneath that is always the assumption that someone must eventually be deprived.  “Eventually, the available love, presence, and whatever else I need will run out,” we think, so we must consume all we can now.  It is very insecure.

The communer, though, is operating in a totally renewable fashion this being understands that their purpose here is not to consume value, but to generate it. 

We all actually have this understanding already , but it resides at a deep level of the mind, below conscious awareness.  It’s like there’s an ongoing tally showing what you have taken, and what you have given to the world.

For every gift, the heart softens a bit, and one experiences deeper ease.  For every act of taking, the heart constricts, and one experiences deeper discomfort.

Don’t mistake me here - when I say “ease”, and “discomfort”, I’m not talking about “success”.  There are lots of people making their way just fine in the world, apparently, who are not at all concerned with generating value.

Some of them even appear to be genuinely happy.

They, though, are missing the blessing of the mystic’s heart.  

Many mystics have cursed their master’s names for awakening them to deeper feeling.  You can only really engage in conventional worldly success if you’ve got good and hefty armour.  Disarm the heart just a little bit, and you will begin to grow sick with every act of taking.  

Have no illusions about it, this disarming is confusing and painful.  To feel deep sadness and not know why, to know that there’s something deeply wrong with how things have always been done, but not be quite able to put your finger on it, this throws the heart into turmoil.

But the same mystics who have pushed their masters away because of the pain, have also sung them praise-songs of gratitude.  They sing these songs because their heart has been awakened to the Real.

The soul slumbers and sleeps, waiting for a touch of sunlight, and this is the awakening Grace of the Teacher.  Your teacher doesn’t need to be a person.  They can be a dog or a flower, a river, or snatched piece of music on the wind.  

What makes them a Teacher is that they awaken you.  

When this grace touches the heart, the soul sees it’s own face.  It’s like the inherited knowledge of countless lives is granted to one - she sees what she has always known, and yet somehow forgot that she knew.

The soul recognizes herself as pure giving.  Well, this is almost the right term.  “Giving” seems to imply that theres some opposite, or that someone will be deprived.  The truth is that Giving is also a Gift for the Giver.

So perhaps we should call it “communing”.  When you eat a meal from a mind in harmony with LIFE, you are not taking, you are sharing.

If you look at all the ills in the world to day, it comes down to a lack of sharing.

Someone is depressed, because they wish they could share their heart with another

Someone is at war, because they cannot share their resources.

Someone is anxious, because they don’t know if other’s will share their burden.

We each live as lonely islands, and fail to recognize that it is we who made the boundaries.

Don’t go on some self-deprivation trip because you are trying to learn to be a “giver”.  That’s just another way to try to make yourself special and different.  You get farther away from what you want that way.

Live a normal life, but everything you do, do it to serve.  Never compromise your values - you can’t think and say you are serving, while using a product that harms another creature or the earth, it won’t work.  But just go along, don’t refuse the coffee someone offers you - accept it as a way to offer them your presence.  You can offer them the gift of seeing themselves give.  The gift of a tiny moment of connectedness in a lonely lonely world.

You can commune with the coffee - accept its gifts of aroma and savor, sweetness and bitterness.  Pull good food straight out of the dirt, accept its vitality into your own life - this is not taking, it is communing.

And go ahead and give. You can give your listening, you can give someone a ride.  You can give the special wisdom only you have.  You can give away that which you want most deeply.  You can give your very life.

You don’t know it yet, but this is actually what you’ve been shopping for.

You’ve gotten so used to the taste of aspartame, when someone offers you honey, you are not sure its right.  Something is too rich, to earthy, to “natural” about it.  But give it a minute.  Detox yourself from that which tastes sweet but offers no nourishment.  Let the richness of communing’s honey work on you.

Open yourself to the riches of the world.  That means joy sometimes, and sometimes that means pain, but it means that you will finally feel real.  You were not made to keep seeking, constantly on the prowl.  You were made to recognize that you are complete, and to affirm your completeness by offering it totally to Life.

They can never steal your destiny (Sutras on Longing vol 3)

They can never steal your destiny

The good news is that in all the universe, there is no power that can steal your destiny.

The greatest good in any person’s life is a sense of meaning.  The felt knowing that you are part of something greater than yourself.

The Warrior of Love strives to make that which they are a part of ever greater.  They don’t settle for being part of some little tribe or country - to the exclusion of others.  They find where the boundaries are, and lovingly transgress them.  An ever widening circle of inclusion.

To a hero of this sort, the only destiny is care, and ever deeper care.  This means that it can never be taken or obstructed.  

If your destiny was to have a child, many forces could keep you from actualizing meaning in your life.

If your destiny was to sail a ship, there are countless ways that this life’s essence could be missed.

If you thought some specific person was your destined mate, there’s no telling how that might turn out.

Even “spiritual” callings, like teaching, healing, becoming a clergy member, and the like are all subject to the whims of the world.

Sometimes even the weather can smash your supposed life’s-purpose to bits.

But if you find your purpose in Love, your purpose can never be conquered.  For love is like water flowing downhill.  If it hits an obstacle it just flows around.  That obstacle becomes part of the path that love takes.

When you base your sense of purpose on some exterior attainment, you must forever live in fear.  You have no agency at all.  “What if I cannot find a partner to have my child with?”  “What if I never afford a sailing ship?”  “What if no one likes me as a spiritual practitioner?”

If these and other attainments are the basis of meaning in your life, then you are continually being dangled over a pit of annihilation.  You are one accident away from a meaningless universe.  And thus, the dark longing grows and abides, just below our everyday consciousness.

If you make it your destiny to love, and love ever more deeply, the power of meaning is completely within your own hands.  Nothing can conquer you, because even if you fail, if you did your very best, if you gave your all, you have been a hero of love.  Every circumstance then becomes a teacher, like a guru guiding you toward a greater heart.

You cannot find a mate to have a child with, and the heart softens through sorrow, your capacity to care becomes wider.  Your sailing boat sinks and you learn that you can survive without it, because something deeper lives in you.  Your spiritual calling flounders, and you find a spirituality that does not depend upon acclaim, and accoutrements.  

Happiness also holds no power over you, because you are alive as a source of joy deeper than ordinary happiness.  When good things come, you accept them, with the understanding that they will pass.  But just because they will pass, you do not disregard them.  They are each one a tiny thread in the fabric of your life’s meaning.  Because your life’s meaning is an ever increasing force, there is infinite room to welcome every experience.

Super Heroes (Sutras on Longing, vol 2)

Super Heroes

The world is obsessed with super heroes

This one can shoot lightening, that one’s egotistical

This one is allllmosst invincible

That one is dreadfully vulnerable - BUT A GENIUS!

Every hero ultimately has but one quality that makes them a hero.  They give up all hope for themselves.  

People are not as obsessed in the world with Grandmothers and Dads as they are with super soldiers and power-mutants.  And yet, Grandmothers and Dads get called heroes too.

But never was there one who thought more about themselves than others, and who was also called a hero.

One cannot keep firm hold on the tiny persona, and place that above all, and expect to gain the stature of myth.  To be a being of mythic proportions is to have a mythic heart.

Every hero’s journey is inspiring, because it is our own journey.  And every hero’s journey is difficult in direct proportion to how much they are attached to their own lives.  

To the degree that they have to question “when is it my turn”, or “what about me”.  To that degree, they suffer.  Most heroes are tempted - by the arch-enemy, or by random circumstance - to take up the power the wield and use it for their own gain.

When a mythic being overcomes this temptation, our hearts leap, because a deep seed within our souls sees something familiar.

it sees the test that we are each facing every day.  Will I live for “me”, or will I use the powers I’ve been given for good?

Most of us don’t know we have powers.  We don’t know we are heroes.  And yet, consider again Grandma, Dad, a counsellor, a lover who rescued your heart, a therapy dog or cat.  They wear no cape, and yet have saved lives. It only took a moment of selflessness.

One who thinks that they are a “self” and places that self first becomes dense and opaque.  Not much light can shine through them.  But one who has lessened the torture of “self” and has reached out with their heart to others becomes like a beacon.  When you are with them, something is just different.

We are each a spark of that same light, eternally shining.  We are each born to be a super-being.  We think it’s the cape, or the powers.  We think it’s something in the voice, or the bank account, or the intellect.  It’s some genetic inheritance, or lucky timing, or even stupidity.  None of these are the essence of heroism.  The essence of heroism has only ever been love.

The heroes of old were chosen by Divinities.  They were servants of the divine.  But the divine is just the light of love in many faces and forms.  The heroes of old were all the emissaries and warriors of love.  You too can be this warrior.  You too can feel this strength and honor.  All you have to do is reach out.

Transcending Karma (Sutras on Longing vol 8)

Transcending Karma

Karma is no more complicated that cause and effect.

But you see, if you’re all wrapped up in the causes and the effects, you either get dragged down by the ball-and-chain of the past, or uprooted by the ephemerality of the future.  In either case, you are dancing with fictions.  

The miraculous blessing bestowed by real love is that it immediately halts your seeking.  Whenever we’re worried about our past or future lives, whenever we are desperately trying to manage our relationships so that they will somehow work out for the best, we’re all wrapped up in stories and self-concerns, which keep us from the ability to open.

It’s not a bad idea to understand how cause and effect works.  I mean, how can you really love someone if everything you do is random, accidental, unskillful?  It’s not a matter of “getting into the present moment” where you’re sort of an empty-headed-trance-zombi - how could that be compassionate?  How is that an integration or a transcendence?  I thought we agreed to stop trying to hide.  Sinking into unconsciousness is definitely a form of hiding, no matter whether you call it the “present moment”, or “trans-karma”, or anything else.

But if you take caring as a gateway to presence, you’ve slipped the door-guard of unconsciousness.  Somehow there is a “present moment” center of perspective that does not deny the past and future, but includes and transcends them.  Somehow you are aware of the impact of your actions, of the deep meaningfulness of your every thought and word, but you are not tied down and concretized by them.  Who you are becomes a being of vast awareness, that can somehow sense the most caring way to behave.  You are like a master baseball player, who can hit better when he doesn’t analyze it, but lets go and just swings on through. 

They say that for one who has opened their heart to its full potential, the workings of karma are revealed all on their own.  At that time it’s not a matter of thinking about it, thinking would be like a human devolving to a pre-human species.  If you’ve reached the point of embodied loving-kindness, you’re done reaching, you are ready to have something reach through you.

It is said that we must be the eyes and hands of the Divine in this world.  Divinity is totally beyond form, because it is the total knowledge of the implicit unity of all things and beings.  You and I are not like this.  We are not like this and that’s not a problem. Not only is it not a problem, it  is in fact ART, it is SEX, it is BEAUTY.  

Some of us don’t like so much to hear this next part, but it is only the yearning of divinity to know herself that causes all the pain in the world, and it is this same yearning that causes all the bliss.  Somewhere in the very centre of these extremes is a kind of richness.  Somewhere in that undefined and undefinable centre-point, is God-AS-Form, dancing with herself as “other”.  

It is a paradox.

You have two choices, on being confronted by this paradox.  One is to reject it, because it doesn’t quite fit into the logical mind-box that comforts you.  The other is to transcend conventional logic, and peer directly into a higher-order of reality.  

This is not nearly as mystic-unattainable as it sounds.  Some people have had a child.  Later, they chalk the ecstasy up to some endorphine-rush made by “nature” to get you to bond with the baby.  The mystic knows, though, that this is just a way of “talking yourself down” after seeing God face to face.  

The old Book says that no one can see the face of God and live.  Meaning that your concepts of yourself have got to perish.  

But sometimes we can handle it by just forgetting who we saw, going a little unconscious.  We can faint a little bit, and then the radical change doesn’t have to take place.  “What happened?  Did I black out?”

When a parent first falls in love with their child, they see Reality for a split second.  They know that they are not “different beings” with “me” over here, and “them” over there.  That’s ME over there!  In fact, that being is MORE IMPORTANT than this one I’ve been calling “me” for so long.  

This knowing is not very broad, and not necessarily enduring, but it is a taste of the pure nectar of REALITY, which completely goes beyond what one can think oneself into with just the mind.  

Love is made of this paradox, but it doesn’t stop at a single glimpse of reality.  It keeps growing and taking more and more of Life into it’s care.  In any single instant it is like love asks not only “how can I best serve this being in front of me” (Knowing them as my own other face, my very own self arising as “other”), but also, “how can I contribute to the greatest well being for as many of my other selves as possible?”, and even “what is my most authentic gift right now?”

Trying to answer these questions with the rational mind takes so long that by the time the decision is made, it is already the wrong one.  it would be like a martial arts master who paused to think about what defense might work in the midst of receiving a barrage of punches and kicks.  By the time it’s been thought, it’s no longer appropriate.

Fortunately, the heart can do all these calculations as quantum speed - so long as we have practiced getting out of the way.

It’s not that we forget about karma, cause and effect: “oh, that was a stupid idea believing in that, I was so childish”.  More, it is that we have learned enough of it that now the process is one of unlearning.  Getting out of love’s way.  It’s not a process of adding rules onto oneself

Rules can become like chains, creating a comforting feeling of weight that let’s you know “you” are still there.

Rather than chains, you can practice with the rules to get accustomed to the Reality toward which they point.  Once you see that Reality, it’s just a matter of making yourself more and more transparent to it.  A child who has internalized the feeling of comfort and security does not need to drag a special blanket around anymore.

Have you reached your edge? (Sutras on Longing vol 7)

Have you reached your edge?

Love is not fucking around.

This is not the kind of answer that makes you feel good while you are in the feel-good seminar and then leaves you hanging when you are back home in front of your TV.

This is the kind of answer that makes you feel good while it is ripping you apart.

Love will not make the pain go away, it will not even make it recede for an instant.

The lover feels every pain more sharply.

But she does not recoil.  She does not ever feel powerless, meaningless, insignificant.  When you are love, you are willing to live at your edge.

Don’t mistake me here.  This is not about extreme sports.  This is not about martyrdom.  This is not about codependent relationships.  This is not about the kind of burn out you felt in your last job.  That shit is all too familiar.  We’re talking about the kind of edge which never feels familiar, by the time it does, you’ve already moved past it.

It’s not some kind of “push push push” thing.  We don’t have time for your self-hatred.  The world is fucking suffering and you are masturbating your mind away hating yourself?  It feels terrible but you still do it.  Why?  Because it’s comfortable.  As long as you’re hating yourself, then at least you are real.

The edge that love calls you to may feel like a cliff.  You may feel that if you take anymore into your heart, it will burst.  That if you allow yourself to care for one. more. living. being. you will collapse from the pain of it.  But you don’t collapse, and you don’t fall off the cliff.  This is the kind of edge that when you reach it, it gets a little farther away.  Your heart gets bigger the more it is used.

If you rush, you can trip yourself and fall to your death.  Love has no place for your ambition.  Never exclude yourself from your own heart.  If you can embrace yourself while embracing all beings, you can walk to that cliff and stand there, taking in the joy, the pain, the longing, the exultation, the misery, and you can be wide enough, balanced enough to encompass it.  

If you are worried about safety, love cannot find you.  

Safety is the most dangerous choice you can ever make

Of course you must eat good foods and avoid getting hit by busses.  Of course you must use a turn signal and check your blind-spot.  Perhaps even steer clear of dark alleys.  Don’t even swim until 30 minutes after your meal for goodness sake.  Of course you will take these precautions - you ARE LOVE.

But if you are trying to ultimately save yourself, you will always fail.  Life is coming to get you.  The longer you run, the more painful it is.  Your own pain, and the pain of all living beings is waiting for you, biding its time.  Why not face the music now?

Spoiler alert, I know how it ends.  The bogeyman of the world’s pain catches up to you eventually and you suffer.  Hey, don’t blame me, you knew it was coming, you knew it from the marrow of your bones.  But there’s an alternate ending - the one that the censors didn’t approve - Plot twist:  Child turns to face monster and somehow starts to GROW.  Don’t worry, it doesn’t get boring, because the monster grows too.

Pan out and the scene shows child and monster continuing to outdo each other until the fade out and the credits.  The implication here is that this will go on and on, at least until the sequel.

The coolest part is that eventually the child and the monster get tired of fighting.  They decide to become sparring partners instead.  Because you see, if the child ever overcame the monster, her purpose would be over.  And similarly if the monster got to eat the child.  HOW BORING.  No one’s going to watch this show. 

You’re waiting for the day that you’ll be big enough to handle what life throws at you.  You are praying for boredom, but you are growth.  You will always sabotage this prayer, it can never succeed.  God doesn’t let you invoke your own suffering for long, it is not in her nature.  

The lover’s mission is not to “be open” but to Open.  Not to “have grown”, but to Grow.  This is dynamic, you are a verb trying to be a noun and it just isn’t working.  Growth, Dynamism, Openness, these are not couch-potato comfortable, they are rich and alive, and they are your true home.  Who puts a potato on the couch?  What good can it do there?  Put it in the dirt, or in the oven, or in your mouth, let it live its purpose.

If you hold back from living at the edge of openness, part of your heart will remain untouched.  This part of you mourns for lack of love, it needs your presence, it needs you to step forth and embrace, embrace deeper, and then when you think you have embraced all you can, embrace more.  In embracing your heart, you embrace your own being.  You become an elite athlete, always testing the limits, and some days it feels like hell.  But you push on, because you know that on some days you transcend your limits.  Some days you forget what you knew was impossible and you soar in the fucking sky.  You are on the ultimate runner’s high.

You take the pendulum swing between soaring and being sore and you call that business home.  This treacherous edge is the safest place you can be in life - you’ve escaped the only danger that can truly hurt you - the possibility that you’ll close your heart.

When you live this way, at your edge, you can die with peace.  If there’s any single thing that should not be left in you, spend it now, you don’t know how long you’ve got.  What are you waiting for?  Strive to end this life completely spent - like a lover who has spent the night with a powerful sexual foe lies exhausted in bliss in the morning.  Ride your edge like this.