Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.

As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.

In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.