Spirit

Happiness, and its corollary suffering, are largely childish concepts that most maturing adults at some point in their life understand to be unimportant. There is only life and my engagement with it. If I engage passively – if I let life live me – then I basically live in the past, even if that past is only microseconds past: I just don't have the active intensity to engage life as it happens. If I dwell in/on the past then I live life through the mind, and that mind can then label and categorize as much as it likes because it has the luxury of time to do so. But if I actively engage life as it happens – if I live on the white hot edge of life's keen blade, then there is literally no time and so no mind and no language and no labels. To live this intensely requires a spirit that literally burns all duality to a crisp – a fighting spirit that battles any attempt to get it down, either from within (me) or from without. To master such spirit takes a lifetime. And once it is mastered there is little point, other than to teach, in living within the body – it holds you back with its heavy and probably failing functionality, and the master will often chose to pass on to a form of existence free of corporeal trappings. This is martial spirit taken to its highest level.