Stepping off the Edge

EXCERPT

Stepping Off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice

CHAPTER 1 STEPPING OFF

THEY FOUND CANCER ON ONE SIDE, but they got it in time. Then it showed up on the other side. Your child was stricken with a disease so disturbing that some people still won't look you in the eye. You've battled drugs and alcohol and the results of what your fellow human beings did to you. You never talk about your life: If people heard the outlines, they'd laugh. They'd call you a victim or a tragedy queen. But you have lived every minute of it, and no one knows how hard it's been. You have done everything to change how things are, but still the pain continues: illness, trauma, loss, despair.

Or perhaps your story takes a different turn: Born to success and all the right schools, you decide it's time to make it big. For the last seven years, you've worked harder than you knew a person could; no vacations, not even a day off. Not once, but dozens of times, you've awakened at your desk to find yourself blinking in the morning sun. Hobbies, friends and family are memories from a past life. You've given it every dime you have, and signed a stack of notes at the bank. You know you will succeed––you have never failed.

The start-up fails. You're so bankrupt that you can't even cry. The Feds are hounding you for taxes.

You find yourself speaking into silence, "Why? Why me? Why at all?"

No answer.

On the other hand, some lives unfold like they'd been touched by a genie. From the kick off to the final play, everything works. In elementary school, your science project wins the Grand Prize. Sailing through grade after grade, you captain every team. After serving your country with honor, you come home and start the business. Sure, you work hard and long, but success arrives like a flood. Years pass with champagne and congratulations and another round of applause.

Until one day, you look around. Your husband or wife has passed on; the kids are gone. Younger people run your business. Something lurks out there, a terrifying mystery. You're sliding toward it with no brakes. Questions keep coming: What did I accomplish? Was it worth it? Should I have done more?

You gaze into space and your reflection looks back, a hollow ghost.

What do you do when life gives you everything you want? What do you do when you get the crud on the bottom? What do you do when living in a human body hurts too much?

You do your life.

"You do your life?" You may want to scream. "What do you mean, do your life? I just told you about my life. It's a mess. I'm miserable. Why would I want to do my life? Other lives are much better. You can see them everywhere––on TV and in the movies. Some people have skinny butts and six-pack abs. Some people have great jobs and lots of money. Some people don't have my wife. Or her mother. I buy this book for help, and you tell me to do my life?"

I'm sorry. That's the most useful thing I can say to you and the only thing you can do––your life. That's the message of this book:

Your life is your spiritual path.

It's also the ultimate truth. You life, as you complete the breath you're on right now, wherever you are, is it for you. You can't do anyone else's life, all you can do is imitate a picture your mind got from somewhere and act it out.

Live your life or be a fake. If you copy someone else's life because it photographs better, you'll destroy the one change you have at real happiness: your life. Brutal, I know. The alternative is worse:

Women with faces stretched like drumheads sport butterscotch hair and fingernails curled like beetles' backs. Puffed up men wear muscles as camouflage. Kids with moused spikes, pierced and tattooed head to heel, wag tongues with silver barbells. Guys in suits move so fast you think they're on speed. They're not: They're in the fast lane, making something of themselves .

If you look into the eyes of the people I described, people we all know, you can see who they are: living souls, the most valuable entities on the planet. Living souls longing to emerge and express themselves, souls that have always been perfect and know it to some degree. These are souls that weren't strong enough to battle the world's imperatives: You must be thin; you must be rich; you must act like this.

The spiritual path is the process of the soul reclaiming its dominion over the world's programming. Living this process feels like a battle to the death, because it is: Parts of the personality will die as other are born. The person being born and dying will feel it all.

A note from Sandy Nathan: This is the first section of Chapter One. It's not all so hard hitting: Some of the book is hysterically funny; and some isn't.