Rising From The Ashes: We Can Do It

You're already a monk. Just don't settle for anything less than God, and when you inevitably meet God, don't settle for him either.

It's hard to explain, but just so you know that it's possible, I'll try. I don't have sex, I rarely even talk to men, and yet I find myself faking not having an orgasm almost every day. Men are not only useless, they are an obstacle to your freedom. And yet, the obstacle is the path. In other words, seducing the guard into unlocking the door often makes for the quickest escape.

As a child, watching someone else receive attention or love was felt as an existential threat, because for you it really was. Now, even though it makes no sense, it still feels like an existential threat. But feeling is more real than sense. Your feeling is stuck at this particular stage of development because it wasn't taken seriously then. All you have to do is take it seriously now, with attention, and with love.

The life you’re unconsciously sabotaging is a life you don’t actually want.

Baby, you can have it all, but you have to work from love. If you work from scarcity then your efforts will only generate more scarcity.

How to quit any drug is to use it until it no longer works, suffer the pain you've been postponing, and accept the duality of sensation. If you're really lucky, you will be graced with a feeling that follows no coherent causal logic, and is better than any drug could cause, at which point all drugs stop working. But only if you promise not to mistake it for love.

You're right. Hating your self is harmful to others, just like hating others is harmful to your self. There is no difference at all. As a child, you were conditioned to do whatever it is that people ask, to blindly enable self-harming behaviour. You need to first witness and accept the ways in which you've allowed self-harm, and second to grieve, in order to realise that it's okay. Here, everything is allowed and everything is okay. Disgrace is transformed into grace and back. Each transformation happens in the light.

Woke up as God, perfect instrument in my hand

No cigarettes, no amphetamines, no lustful thoughts, no clinging, no fawning, no desperate love, no pitiful love, no imagined love obstructing the love that's so obviously already encompassing me, like three meals a day served through a hatch, like silence, like distance, like privacy, like no questions asked except coffee or tea, like jasmine breath, bursting mulberry tree, like frustrated men I can no longer see. No answer, no teaching, no destiny. Only death, and in dying, what's left.

Love evades definition, by definition. It feels like we're getting closer, I know, but how could you get closer to what you already are? It is only love that's getting larger. It is only love that's speaking.

A person can only love you to the extent that they can love themselves, and they can only love themselves to the extent that they are loved. Loving yourself looks like not accepting less than love as love, but accepting less than love nonetheless. You can see the circularity. Because it happens simultaneously. Because it is a perfect mirror. Accept less and you will see that there is nothing less than perfection.

All of my boyfriends broke up with me. Looking back, I thought I was clear when I said I was an incel, grinning, blacking out from pleasure, coming to, it's a joke, I say. They're not laughing. Not a joke, I mean, it's just funny, in a tragic kind of way. I can't have sex because nothing turns me on except the vision of being in love, yet nothing turns me off quite like the reality of it. Anyway, I'm spending a week in a Franciscan monastery just so they can tell me it was Christ this whole time. I know, but I suppose I won't mention what he showed me: The world, all at once, as flimsy as a set piece.

To play the game you have to throw the ball. I mean like really throw it.

It's all already done. There is no man that can satisfy the standard that you hold him to, because there is no external condition that could satisfy the self. The self is insatiable by definition. That said, you've got to let your heart break as many times as it takes to set love free. Your heart grows a little each time, until it's as big as the whole world, and there's nowhere else he could possibly be.