The Lightsaber of Love & Life
For hacking through the jungle of fear-fueled bullshit and awakening to your true self — awakening to love, light, and life.
My intention for 2021 was to become a wellspring of love, light, and life. I set this intention because I believe that I am love, light, and life — so I simply wanted to be me.
Fear was stopping me from being me — a sense of distress that had been plaguing me for many years. When I started Year 2 of Project 52 in May this year, I set the intention to digest distress and increase embodiment.
Looking back, I feel like these two intentions complemented each other well. By digesting distress I drive fear out of my body. When fear leaves, I can inhabit my body as myself — I can become an incarnation of love, light, and life.
Awakening to who you are is a violent process. Yes, it’s all about love and light and life. But that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows.
Driving fear out of your body involves cutting through the smokescreen of bullshit created by that fear — which requires a sharp lightsaber of love and life. In other words, you have to become the weapon that secures your freedom. The way I see it, this blade has three edges:
Light — to cut through the darkness and see reality
Love — to embrace and accept reality as it is
Life — to thrive and come alive in every way
As 2021 comes to a close, I feel like I have become the weapon — a lightsaber of love and life. Fear — the enemy — is on the backfoot and I am in the process of securing my freedom. I am inhabiting my body as myself — I am becoming an incarnation of love, light and life.
Every day, I am cutting through the darkness and seeing reality with increasing clarity, I am embracing and accepting all that I see, and I am learning to thrive and come alive in every way! And I am fighting this battle with playfulness and presence in every moment.
Above all else, I am grateful for the opportunity to play this game and share this experience with you. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Quotes & Reflections on Love
“As you love yourself, life loves you back. I don't think it has a choice either. I can't explain how it works, but I know it to be true.” ― Kamal Ravikant
"Love is not an emotion and it's not a feeling. When you love someone, it can make you angry, sad, happy, or frustrated. Love is an existential mode - it's a way of being." - John Vervake
They say that the universe is made of stories. If so, then the greatest story is a love story. It is a story that plays out over and over again. It is the story that brought you here!
When you love with a burning passion, you are also indifferent to everything except the subject of your devotion. Your beloved is alive and the rest of the universe might as well be dead. And in this way, love expresses itself as attention. What you pay attention to is what you love.
Extract from What is Love?
Quotes & Reflections on Light
“Light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.” — Richard Rohr
"No one lights a lamp and covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, he sets it on a stand, so those who enter can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed and nothing concealed that will not be made known and brought to light." - Luke 8:16
Everything in the light isn’t good — even God is a trickster and sometimes, he’s up to no good! Everything in the dark isn’t evil — even the Devil is an idealist and sometimes, he dares to dream.
Light and shadow are locked in a dance of eternity — a cosmic dance! This dance is also within you and me — the dance of the conscious and the unconscious, the known and the unknown, the yin and the yang.
Extract from Light & Shadow: Dance of Eternity
Quotes & Reflections on Life
“We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” — Alan Watts
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” — Soren Kierkegaard
“Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75” - Benjamin Franklin
To understand death, we have to first understand life — more to the point, we have to understand what it means to be alive.
To be alive is to be limited and localized. The one thing that God doesn’t have, which you and I do have are limitations. Aliveness is defined by limitation. In the same way that a whirlpool is a localized and limited expression or pattern that a water body makes, aliveness is a localized and limited expression that the universe makes.
So what happens when we die? What happens when a wave crashes back into the ocean? When a whirlpool loses its shape and merges with the water body? That’s exactly it.
We are already whole and complete. In death, we simply realize this fact. But it’s not necessary to wait for our physical death to discover this truth. We can die in every moment to our expectations and we can be reborn with a sense of appreciation. And in doing so, we can come alive in every way!
Extract from Life & Death: An Exploration