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I like how the author says, “To embrace life I must shake hands with death.”  The author goes on to say he needs practice.  From my experience death feels like nothingness, no purpose and it creates this crushing negative self-consciousness.  Death is mean.  It mocks life and it creates this alienation from life.  In my human body death is felt as darkness and the chasm of inner darkness can be like a black hole draining life out of me.  And when death is felt as depression or despair, where there is no choices, the only choice is to welcome death.  It is a choice to merge with nothingness.  This death can be a way of saying no to life and refusing to going on being tormented. 

Because my cells do not produce sufficient energy for my muscles, creating lots of exhaustion and fatigue, death is a moment to moment experience for me.   My daily death is felt as nothing in the world to identify with, nothing true or valuable in which I can believe in.  The meaninglessness can bring about insecurity and powerlessness.  There are even points of terrifying attraction to the darkness because how I felt repulsed with my daily death.  However, lately I have begun to trust this darkness and death.  I am beginning to learn to accept my powerlessness/nothingness and of all things there is a self here.  There is a self in the void, in the darkness and in the death. 

This self within death, for me, is the heart of faith.  It is a realistic faith and is its own value without reference to anyone.  It is a point I trust, even when I cannot deal with the lifelessness anymore.  This faith ask no questions, consents to the meanness of death and learns to accept my having no choices.  I am disappointed in this dying because it has weaned me from my feelings and weaned me from my beliefs.  And yet faith being all there is left is like the sun.  It does not matter if I believe or not because faith becomes this inner Essence and this supportive Presence where death becomes life.                  

Silence use to be a raw experience for me and it communicated clearly that my thought process was complex and convoluted. I would become high-strung and my nervous system would tune to a high pitch. I hated silence because I could not repress my unconsciousness impulses. As a child I considered silence dangerous, which made my
thoughts good and safe. Because the world was threatening and unpredictable it ultimately became meaningless. It was meaningless because I thought I had to reject attachment to everything. Then when my mental connections started going haywire because of my cell disease, it felt like I had to move into silence as a way of stopping my rejection of everything.

For five years I have done my daily quiet meditation, feeling at times this glowing hateful silence and other times I could allow my thoughts to arise and disappear into stillness and peacefulness. Silence has awaken me to a deeper self beyond my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions and even my own body. This silence is this constant clarification I have had too much attachment to my thoughts. This silence is penetrating and offers this brilliant clarity, yet I also have felt stripped into nothingness. The nothingness communicated what my parents felt about me, nothing of value. So at times my silence has been perverse and dark, empty and intense, yet for some unknown reason I have found faith in this silence.

This faith tells me I no longer need to convince myself certain things are true. It is like silence can hold life and death, good and evil, love and indifference together as a verifying gift from silence. I enjoy the stillness and peace. There are also those times when I feel to overly empty and without nourishing sustenance my whole body becomes filled with horror and uncertainty. Silence to me, therefore, is like walking off the edge of the world and it takes more faith than I can produce at times. Silence is Divine awareness and sometimes can be true craziness for me, and other times my faith emerges with this unshakable confidence with this deep awareness of Presence.

I appreciate Dr. Lerner communicating, “Curing is what a physician seeks to offer you. Healing, however, comes from within us. It's what *we* bring to the table. Healing can be described as a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual process of coming home.” This coming home to me has had many dark nights. It feels like coming home to my soul rather than my egoic mind. This coming home has involved lots of metanio (change of heart).

In my soul healing, forty years, there has been lots of metanio where everything has been turned around. I started my first ten years with the sewer running out of my mouth, then ten years later snakes were curling in my stomach, another ten years of depression and alienation from myself and others, and then another ten years feeling like a bum on the street. It came to the point I thought I had no ability to function and I was doomed. I gradually let go of my tormented consciousness by releasing myself from my depression and despair, feeling inadequate and defective, even letting go of my fear that I was unimportant and undesirable. This brought me home to where I felt this deep peace, self-respect and this enormous dignity. For some unknown reason, though, I had to leave this peaceful home.

 A few years later my cells stop producing energy for my muscles and I had to leave work. I had no questions asking “why me.” I just felt confused and unanchored to anything permanent within myself. Because I had no purpose from work it felt like my house burned to the ground. Then a few years later I came to a crossroad, which started placing my experiences behind me. Gradually I moved into a new home, only this house is completely empty and is a house with no doors. It feels like faith and serenity is all I have to counteract the terror and the despair.

Just lately I have felt this need to be quiet. It feels like in this place of stillness is this realization of my own value is without reference to anything or anyone. This appears to be real faith and trust. This place of quiet and stillness appears to express I am entering into non-attachment. Non-attachment is this quality where I do not cling to anything, inner or outer. Everything still touches me, yet I am beginning to feel transformed by my empty house.

The key I have found in my empty homes is learning to live by faith or trust. This offers a recognition of support and serenity, where I feel no need for effort or striving. There is this unshakable confidence to allow myself to rest. The spiritual healing of my soul is learning to be still and quiet. It offers this rest, which allows everything to arise and disappear in a state of stillness and peace.

Wow, this "not resisting resistance" truly is serenity. The sirens during meditation reminds me of my internal chaos and my needing to escape my crushing negative consciousness. In fact I have only been meditating four years because meditation would make my nervous system tuned to a high pitch. When I tired to meditate my repressed unconscious impulses would erupt into my mind and in my body. I would become burning hot, sweating, and then the sewer ran out of my mouth. I instantaneously became fatigued, terribly confused, and racked with self-doubt. Everything became so complex and exhausting.

Meditation would cause me to suddenly block all my feelings and it felt like life was being drained out of me. So I gave up on meditation many times, even from having any meaningful desires, because I did not want to hurt anymore. The chasm of inner darkness would open up inside, like a black hole draining life out of me. Meditation just became a source of torment and it felt like it was mocking me. However, I have gradually became aware I was looking for ways to do away with my tormented consciousness.

Because of physical circumstances where my cells no longer produce energy for my muscles I started meditating to learn to accept the good and the bad. It felt like there was nowhere to hide and I was forced to acknowledge disquieting parts about myself. Being sensitive to my subconscious was like a message in a bottle washing up on the shore of my consciousness. Nothingness and emptiness was the message. This place made me feel edgy, a certain death and walking off the edge of the world.

Something from within, faith and courage, began counteracting this terror and despair. Just this last year I felt this need to leap into this nothingness and to let it be who I am. And it is just lately I notice a potential here, where death and life meet together. Another way to express this is it feels like my internal silence is bowing to the external silence and these two silences are connecting. It feels like a point of death and I am surrendering to this silence and it is everything.

From this nothingness I feel like my boundaries are falling apart. The connection is my contradictions are held together in the silence. I will also say this makes my faith feel like it has no reference to anything or anyone. Faith is silence. Silence is its own value, the silence that surrounds everything and everything emanates from there. The emptiness is paradoxically creating itself, like my identity is learning to be centered in Essence. The nothingness and my empty bottle is meeting as a still point and it feels like just a place to begin.

When I read this writing "Kindness Includes Everything" I thought of a three year old child saying loud and clear, "I am and I am not." There seems to be a living spite at this age, even a malice that begins to loses contact with this inner Essence. And for me personally, because I felt deeply cut off from the Ground of Being in my early years, it now feels like I am seeking this constant support and reinforcement from the Supreme Being. It is as if my beliefs are seeking an agenda and to sustain me in a particular identity. However, because of physical circumstances, I have had to drop my beliefs and even trying to convince myself certain beliefs are true. Faith is becoming the actual support and presence. It is like the direct experience of Essence.

Breaking this boundary between what "I am and what I am not" is kindness. This kindness appears to be seeing through this boundary and recognizing the invention within my own mind. Breaking this boundary feels like simply resting in and learning to be one with my true identity. The real clarity is I no longer work at it. I feel like I am learning to surrender into being nothing and paradoxically this is everything. The down fall to this nothingness is it feels like walking off the edge of the world, my end or my death. Faith is all there is to counteract the terror and despair and at the same time it is the starting point where everything begins within this Void.

This place to just begin is kindness and maybe this is simplicity itself. It is where there is no artificial manipulation. It is just this place where my response to life and other people is completely sincere, direct, and heartfelt. It feels like this kindness is unselfconscious because it is one with the world. Maybe kindness can awaken this innocence, this largeness of heart, where there is no boundaries. And it seems faith, this unshakable confidence, is all that can go here where I am not bound by my beliefs, doubts, and learned procedures. It feels like kindness is truly a clarification of all my boundaries and even seeing through boundaries. This is Essence and is felt with everyone here and truly is the significance of your presence.

Making money is the means by which we become self-sufficient. This quest for success takes risks and when the risks reap financial rewards it creates pshchic rewards. There is enjoyment and high feeling when we prevail in challenging situations. There is also the enjoyment of work and work offers the arena to assert ourselves, and hence to maintain the sense of self. Making deals and taking risk is not only making money, it is a way of literally making more of ourselves.

Money is the yardstick which we measure ourselves and the success in life. Above all, money is the only thing we can depend on to feel self-sufficient. It is a source of security. Money seems certain. It is the sure means to get our way. Money is like ego inflation and once it is set in motion it is difficult to stop. So what is important about money is our ego and the other side of this coin is our pride.

The balancing between money and the ego, achieving something truly great for others, is getting past the ego. Getting past the ego can actualize an objective value, achieve real peace, or help others in concrete ways. The essence of greatness is the ability to find ways to alleviate the burdens of others and making life better for everyone. Peace and prosperity creates a common immediate circle to the world. This circle is not without ego, but the ego is in service of something outside. It influence others to obtain goals which is valuable to everyone.

The bottom line making money is empowering, and I hate to say this, but God is boring. The Psalm says, "Be still and know I am God" and to me this feels like resignation and giving up. When I am still my attention shifts away from any real needs. Ironically, I lose interest, little energy or little relating, and I drift off and others drift away. So this transcending the ego may take a high state of integration and transforming everything, but I have not adjusted to this black-hole where there is no achievement or no accomplishment. This stillness is closer to despair and depression than the glory of God.

I realize I want my ego gratified and I realize there is no making any sales pitch convincing to God to do otherwise. I just want to get out of this neutral gear and shift into overdrive of self-promotion. There is something within my ego that wants to advertise myself relentlessly and even make myself better than I am. However, this arrogant and cocky high impression never works, just as money never works to measure myself with God. I, therefore, feel bored and my experience of God is like gathering a cloud, which may produce great power or merely dissipate in the next breeze. Something is missing and I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I feel the lack none the less.

I can only say because I am not making money and I am on disability I am bored with life. Everything feels like nothingness. There is nothing to believe in, nothing true or nothing valuable. The darkness is rather perverse. There is also an underlying depths and a transformation within this nothingness that offers clarity. Yet to my ego mind I cannot understand it, so I feel boredom. Maybe there is a spiritual injunction "to be in the world but not of it" only I have not grasped this inner Essence that is beyond my ego mind. 

Sleep tight, you express “standing in the gap.”  This is a very good understanding of what I was writing.  Much of the time this “gap” feels like an existential void, meaninglessness.  Then there are those moments the “gap” creates a deeper and more essential self.  When I can be this inner-observer it seems to be a higher state, and yet this dark force within does not want me to be aware of anything higher.  The best I can tell is learning to accept the conditions I am working with, relaxing, and allowing the energies of life to flow within this darkness.  This creates a serenity within the “gap” seems to allow me to not feel separate from others.
 
There seems to be no particular image or idea of myself here.  There is just this delightful contact with you and you with me, which you express.  What is true here cannot be separated, a creative flow and cannot be otherwise.  So maybe we are learning the “gap” is the source of everything, the core of our true identity, creating and sustaining us.  It is simply resting in this dynamic force that melts down our barriers and boundaries.  This sense of separateness is dissolving, a bright light, and if I may say is your love. 
 
I hope I am not reading too much in what you are saying and truly appreciate your love itself which dissolves the sense of separation.  I could write more, yet I do not want my feelings and impulses to be unseemly and unflattering.  I just believe we are communicating in a direct way, reflecting our inner essence, and allowing it to be.  And while this is all seriousness there is also this sense that none of it is serious at all   Just a spontaneous response, an opening, and a meaning beyond what I intended to create. 
 
May inner peace be with you!