...you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openess which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

Closing down in the midst of pain is a denial of a man's true nature. A superior man is free in feeling and action, even amidst great pain and hurt. If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one. He should learn to stay in the wound of pain and act with spontaneous skill and love even from that place.

One misunderstandin g is that if you do the right thing, then life's storms will stop. If you do the right thing, the storms actually get bigger. This is because they know they can't blow you down like they used to, and now it's going to take a lot more energy to find out if you are conscious.

Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women.

As you open yourself to living at your edge, your deepest purpose will slowly begin to make itself known. In the meantime, you will experience layer after layer of purposes, each one getting closer and closer to the fullness of your deepest purpose. It is as if your deepest purpose is at the center of your being, and it is surrounded by layers of concentric circles, each circle being a lesser purpose. Your life consists of penetrating each circle, from the outside toward the center.

In an effort to create safety and self-reliance in your life and relationships, you may have built walls around your heart and accumulated tension in your body. Although sometimes these walls of protection are useful, they can, over time, act like shells of fear that block your true love. These shells can keep in the love you want to offer fully and keep out the love that your heart yearns to receive.

As a body in a world, here is our choice: we can be more loving or less loving. That's it. We can relax as the entire moment's show of love's swirl, feeling open as all--a vicious rainstorm, tweeting birds, our lover's lips, a sense of worthlessness-- or we can close to some aspect of experience, pulling away as if we were separate.