Dangerous Ground

Everything hinges on understanding and engagement – the yin and the yang. True internal work makes your energy so active that these two meld and become what we call becoming. Understanding has nothing to do with thinking things through. It has a little more to do with talking things through: using your environment to help you channel your energy and some of its energy into the work – into the engagement. It is simply a process of whipping up some enthusiasm and spirit to use your energy more fully and more effectively than ever before: somehow seeing the next incarnation of you as a being that relates not just with others, the world and life, but with that strange pull we call destiny. Understanding provides the courage and impetus to move forwards into the unbearable – unfaceable – but always beckoning unknown. Understanding should thrust you more whole and better able into engagement. It is always self-trickery – controlled folly – an expediency to make perfection – to make the now really work. Yesterday's understanding today appears almost embarrassing simply because it has been successful – it has thrust us beyond it. My teacher's teaching and life's work pivots on one assumption – perfection is now, not tomorrow. What this has led directly to is the Third Heart, which if you like is a manifestation of the perfection of the coming together of the sum total of everything that has ever impinged on either of us – a gathering of times and connexions into something that will always cut through the linearity of time with its ever present and developing wonders. Such intensities can only be engaged if all thoughts, notions and considerations of self are abandoned. That is why I so strongly feel that the very idea of loving oneself before one loves others doesn't just put you on the back foot and disable automatic engagement, it makes you always too late for everything of real importance – especially pain: that raw edge where the intensity of life always bears in. If you are truly forward then this is where you reside – on this edge. It makes you tremble with energy and compassion. “I feel the edge is torn.” It also means you weep, uncontrollably, but that is by the by.

I perfectly understand the argument that to be strong enough to be weak – to reside on that edge – one needs to spend equal periods attending to self-centering, self-loving, and self-strengthening. In a sense this is what your solo practice – your work – is all about: getting you to such a pitch of togetherness that you can abandon everything to the engagement without falling apart. However, this understanding is that of a relative beginner to spiritual work. Mastery comes when you move beyond this understanding – when the safe and partitioned life it supposes and maintains wears so thin, and your connexion with the truth becomes so strong, that you cannot face or stomach time off. Unless everything you do exists on the trembling edge where life really happens then you just get bored.