Here are my quotes from the book. As always, skip the trash.
Stop Hoping for a Completion of Anything in Life
Your capacity to embody this profound force of presence in your gaze, breath, and action determines your perceived value, sexually and financially
Heart and spine must be united in a single man
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Most postponements are excuses for a lack of creative discipline.
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Limited money and family obligations have never stopped a man who really wanted to do something, although they provide excuses for a man who is not really up to the creative challenge in the first place.
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Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.
Live With an Open Heart Even If It Hurts
Only when the front of your body is relaxed and opened, your breath full and deep, and your gaze unguarded and directly connected with another person’s eyes, can your fullest intelligence manifest spontaneously in the situation. To act as a superior man, a samurai of relationship, you must feel the entire situation with your whole body. A closed body is unable to sense subtle cues and signals, and therefore unable to act with mastery in the situation.
Know Your Real Edge and Don't Fake It
Where do your fears stop you from making a larger contribution to mankind, from earning a higher income, or from earning money in a more creative and enjoyable way?
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As an experiment, describe your edge with respect to your career out loud to yourself.
Never Change Your Mind Just to Please a Woman
When you deny your deep truth to please your woman, everyone will feel your lack of authenticity. They will sense that your false smile hides an inner division. Your friends, children, and business colleagues may love you, but they won’t trust you, since you don’t trust your own core intent. And, more importantly, your own sense of inauthenticity will burden your capacity to act with clarity. Your actions won’t jibe with your core.
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However, if you listen to your woman, taking everything she says into account and making your own best decision, then you are acting in accordance with your core. You are saying, in effect, “My deepest wisdom is leading me to this decision. If I am wrong, I will learn from it, and my wisdom will have deepened. I’m willing to be wrong, and grow from it. I trust this process of acting from my deepest wisdom.”
Your Purpose Must Come Before Your Relationship
Admit to yourself that if you had to choose one or the other, the perfect intimate relationship or achieving your highest purpose in life, you would choose to succeed at your purpose. Just this self-knowledge often relieves much pressure a man feels to prioritize his relationship when, in fact, it is not his highest priority.
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Your mission is your priority.
Lean Just Beyong Your Edge
Once you are honest with yourself about your real edge, it is best to lean just beyond it. Very few men have the guts for this practice.
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If you are stressfully avoiding your fear, you cannot relax into the fearless.
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Your fear is the sharpest definition of your self. You should know it. You should feel it virtually constantly. Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it. Rather, primary fear shows you that you are at your edge. Staying with the fear, staying at your edge, allows real transformation to occur.
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By leaning just beyond your fear, you challenge your limits compassionately, without trying to escape the feeling of fear itself.
*****Do it For Love
The way a man penetrates the world should be the same way he penetrates his woman: not merely for personal gain or pleasure, but to magnify love, openness, and depth.
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When a man gives his true gift of sex to his woman, he penetrates and blooms her beyond all limits into love. It is the same with the world. To bloom woman and world for real takes authenticity, persistence, and courage of heart. A man must know the truth at his core and be willing to give his gifts fully. No holding back. He must be willing to dedicate his sex and his life to magnifying love by penetrating woman and world with his true gifts. This willingness is rare.
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But very few men are willing to do the deed for real, to use everything they’ve got to liberate their woman and the world into the deepest possible truth, love, and openness. Few men are willing to give their deepest genius, their true endowment, the poetry of their very being, with every thrust of sex and life.
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Neither woman nor world are predictable. They will often seem to resist your gifts and test your capacity to persist.
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If you are going to tryst with women and world at all, better to go all the way and ravish them from the depths of your true core, blooming them open with the wide gifts of your unrelenting heart. Otherwise, if you sheepishly penetrate them to gratify your own needs, your woman and the world will feel your lack of dedication, depth, and truth. Rather than yielding in love to your loving, they will distract you, suck your energy, and draw you into endless complications, so that your life and relationship become an almost constant search for release from constraint.
*****Enjoy Your Friends' Criticism
Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another. If you are at your edge, your men friends should respect that, but not let you off the hook. They should honor your fears, and, in love, continue to goad you beyond them, without pushing you.
*****If You Don't Know Your Purpose, Discover It, Now
The core of your life is your purpose. Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.
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when you know your true purpose, which is your core desire in life, each moment can become a full expression of your core desire. Every instant of career, every instant of intimacy, is filled with the power of your heart purpose. You are no longer just going through the motions at work and with your woman, but you are living the truth of your life, and giving the gifts of your love, moment by moment. Such a life is complete unto itself in every instant.
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The superior man is not seeking for fulfillment through work and woman, because he is already full. For him, work and intimacy are opportunities to give his gifts, and be vanished in the bliss of the giving.
*****Be Willing To Change Everything In Your Life
A man must be prepared to give 100 percent to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.
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It’s easy to feel disappointed by life; success is never as fulfilling as you think it is going to be. But there is a reason for this. Successfully completing a lesser purpose doesn’t feel very good for very long, because it is simply preparation for advancing toward a greater embodiment of your deeper purpose. Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure.
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The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision.
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When it comes, it usually won’t be a detailed vision. You will probably have a sense of what direction to move in, but the practical steps might not make themselves clear. When the impulse begins to arise, act on it. Don’t wait for the details. Learn by trial and error what it is you are to do.
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You give your gift 100 percent, without holding anything back.
*****Don't Use Your Family As An Excuse
Take care of the children and the house as much as you want. Just remember that if you give up your true purpose to do so for too long, you are not really helping anyone.
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The priority of the feminine, in men and women, is the flow of love in relationship. The priority of the masculine, in men and women, is the mission which leads to freedom. Ultimately, true freedom and true love are the same. However, the journey of the masculine and feminine to this unity of love and freedom is very different.
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What is your deepest life purpose?
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When you know your direction and are living it fully, your core is alive and strong. Your children will naturally feel this. They will respond to your clarity and presence differently than they will respond to your ambiguity—an ambiguity that results from having detoured from your deepest purpose because you think it’s “right” or “fair” that you spend time with them. A short period of time with a father who is absolutely present, full in love, undivided inside, and sure of his mission in life, will affect your children much more positively than if they spend lots of time with a father who is ambiguous in his intent and has lost touch with his deepest purpose, no matter how much he loves his children.
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Children learn most from their parents by osmosis
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It is not the amount of time but the quality of the interaction that most influences a child’s growth. Children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional tone. If you are not full in your core, aligned with your deepest purpose and living a life of authentic commitment, your children will feel it.
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For their sake, your sake, and your woman’s sake, discover your deepest purpose, commit yourself completely to its process, and find a way to embrace your family as you do so.
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Be with your woman and your children without compromise or ambiguity. Don’t use your family as an excuse to be less than you can be
*****Don't cheat your family of your fullest core, and don't use them as an excuse to avoid the work it will take to manifest your highest vision.
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Don't Get Lost In Tasks And Duties
It’s great to be able to plow through obstructions and get the job done. And it’s good to keep yourself disciplined and on purpose. But if you forget your larger purpose while pursuing the small and endless tasks of daily life, then you have reduced yourself to a machine of picayune.
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The test of your fullness in every moment is your capacity to die in free and loving surrender, knowing you’ve done everything you could do while alive to give your gift and know the truth of being.
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Have you loved fully? Or, do you have unexpressed feelings that would taint your last moment with regret?
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Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness.
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You cannot do enough, nor can you do the right things, so that you will finally feel complete.
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When you do your tasks in the right way, they liberate your life energy so that you can attend to what really matters—the investigation, realization, and embodiment of true freedom.
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Have you devoted yourself to finding out the deepest truth of your own existence?
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To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers.
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You are not a drone. You are the unbounded mystery of love. Be so, without forgetting your tasks
*****Stop Hoping For Your Woman To Get Easier
Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration.
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If you are aligned with your mission, you are essentially happy, even though times cycle between difficult and easy.
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You don’t need your woman’s strokes to fulfill your mission.
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A good woman will love the childlike part of you, but she wants your life to be guided by your deepest truths, not your untended childhood wounds. She wants to feel that at your core you have grown beyond the need for kudos and million-dollar toys. She wants to feel your self-generated strength of truth.
So she will test you. She might not be fully conscious of why she is doing it, but she will poke your weak spots, especially in moments of your superficial success, in order to feel your strength. If you collapse, you’ve flunked the test. You have let your woman deflate you. You have demonstrated your dependence on her for external validation. Even if you just made a million dollars, you are a weak man. Your woman cannot trust you fully.
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It never ends. A woman will always test her man for the pleasure of feeling his strength in loving, his capacity to transcend nuisance, his persistence in his own truth, and his capacity to share that truth in love with her, even when she is complaining—especially when she is complaining. Her complaint is the beginning of her pleasure. It is not true criticism, but a test of your Shiva-hood. The criticism is entirely dissolved in love as soon as she feels your humor and happiness in the midst of the poke.
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It never ends. This is the secret.
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The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won’t settle for anything less.
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The world will constantly test your capacity to give your gift in the face of refusal.
That's it. I recommend reading the book to get better context on each of the ideas.
Love from, J.
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