Love

And that’s the wonder and danger of love, isn’t it? We find ourselves overcome by other selves. New, strange urges. That’s why we often measure passion by the distance from which it takes us from our accepted self-concepts. Love reminds us of how little we know of our limits and how afraid we are of losing them. We are such porous creatures. We are

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But then I noticed that my feeling had stopped short. I was luxuriating in the intense pleasure of love, light, and energy. Here I was, snuffled in our bliss, as we were dying. I saw the wrinkles of age forming around her beautiful lips. Slowly her face transmogrified into an old, haggard woman, gumming the withered appendage of my moldy destined s

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This imaginative interpenetration of experience is necessary for the greatest challenge of consciousness — understanding what it is like to be another. Without it, there can be no love, for we cannot love whom we do not understand — then we are pseudo-loving a projection. A sign of healthy love, therefore, is the ability to be reliable and responsi... See more

Love demands a complete inner transformation — for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self.

In the clarity that followed, I discovered another lesson: creation cannot emerge without confronting death. Standing at the edge of the void, something new can be born. In accepting my mortality—both its inevitability and proximity—something within me softened, creating space for something unexpected. Death strips away what no longer serves us, cl... See more