The Beauty and the Terror.

Since I was a teenager many friends and lovers used to give me quite precise feedback: I was intense, sometimes too intense and aggressive, at times too aggressive.

It was puzzling and unnerving and upsetting to receive it yet also very empowering as it was often a true and loving reflection. I have struggled with this and appreciated this in myself for decades. Recognizing my addiction to intensity, feeling proud of it, mesmerized by it, compulsive with it and so on.

I have also been asking myself about the source of it.

A couple of nights ago I had a very long meditation, many breakthroughs and revelations, many pieces falling in place.

The main one was recognizing that all my life I have been walking on a razor edge between Beauty and Terror. Since I was a child the Beauty was overwhelming, and being my heart very very sensitive, it often felt too much and that would trigger the Terror. For a very long time I thought that the Terror was about dying so until I was twenty-seven-year-old I kept death to my side continuously, as a reminder, a challenge, a friend, an accomplice and a confidant. Until in May of 1977 in Bali I nearly died three times. Then that part of the journey ended and, as I realized that the Terror had nothing to do with the physical death, I started chasing with total dedication the spiritual one.

However, I still had my attention in the wrong place as I imagined that the terror had to do with the dissolution of the personality and the ego identity. I was way off!

In the last couple of decades, I have been learning to consciously get out of the way.

Through my work, in relationships, in meditation, in simple day-to-day life chores and actions I disappears, and Terror is just the overwhelming presence of Beauty...and as Rumi puts it:” I am a slave of that intensity”.