my brother was off somewhere being a normal teenager having girlfriends or going to parties or whatever it is that normal teenagers do. I wouldn’t know. I was an indoor cat.

It’s not about certainty. Losing things, changing how and what you believe, is all part of it. It was the plan all along.

just as we could ask “Where is heaven?” we can also ask “Where is Nothing?” I don’t see Nothing. I see Everything. And if you see Nothing, it’s not Nothing if you can see it. There is no empty space. Everywhere is something, even if we don’t understand what that something is. I told him I see a universe that springs up into itself over and over

“When a chicken comes out of the eggshell,” the Zen philosopher Alan Watts said, “the eggshell is not something to be deplored. It’s certainly something to be broken, but had the shell not existed the chicken wouldn’t have been protected. So, in precisely the same way, images, religious ideas, religious symbols exist in order to be constructively

I like to think of it like this: “Pete” isn’t enlightened, but somewhere, underneath it all, “I” am. And when I rest in that “I” place, not swept away for the millionth time by my circumstances or headaches or personal disappointments, that’s just how I feel.

The only thing I didn’t try was love. Loving my embarrassing little predicament and my predictable Christian-shame psychology. The kid in me didn’t want understanding or rationalizations or techniques or even experiences. It was so much simpler than that. The kid wanted love.

It was clear all this back and forth wasn’t actually about sex or being horny. It was about fear. It wasn’t about lust. It was about my attachment to my desires, my identification with them. It was my resistance to seeing myself as a soul. It was a fear of being separate, removed from a connection with the Divine because I was always drowning in my

Having the experiences and the sensations but not identifying with them is at the core of Ram Dass’s message. He teaches that instead of saying, “I’m depressed,” you could say, “There is depression.” Like, I’m over here, looking at it. Wow. That’s a heavy one. I don’t know if people get out of depressions like that one. But he asks, “Is the part of

After all, our favorite episodes of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones are when something happens. Good or bad. Because we know this will push the character. This will lead to growth, or change, or loss. And we love it. We know that for these characters, pain is the vehicle that takes them from where they are to where they’re afraid to but need to go.