Michael S. -- your book?

[Guest guest]

Could you tell me a little bit more

about your in-progress book?

 

, Michael Steinberg <mlstein wrote:

> I'll quote from a book I'm writing:

>

> The universe doesn't treat us like a lover, but when we love we live

> the life of the universe and not our own. To be fully present in

> that love is all but impossible. It demands an awesome, almost

> inhuman amount of detachment and absolute self-surrender. But even

> those of us who feel ourselves to be many lives away from

> enlightenment can recognize what that life would be like, and from

> time to time we somehow have the grace to live it. In those moments

> we are radiantly fearless, fully engaged with others, one with the

> dance which moves our limbs and our heart. We are joyously alive in

> love, and what is love but the willingness to embrace whatever

> comes? Love is not an emotion but a way of living, and we can feel

> the universe lit up by love because the way of being of love is none

> other than the universe's own way of being. Love goes beyond a cold

> acceptance of events, because it does not try to maintain a distance

> from anything; it embraces all and it makes no exceptions. Beauty,

> ugliness, joy, horror, kisses, cruelty, murder, and devotion---love

> takes them all into itself. To love is simply to live wholeheartedly

> in the fullness of knowledge, and to live fully, without any

> judgment or defense against what is, is to love the universe as the

> universe would love itself. And that is what it does in us

> spontaneously, once we allow ourselves to live as we really are,

> because we are nothing but points through which the universe, by

> some strange trick of evolution, can reflect upon and love itself.

>

> Michael Steinberg

>

>