Excerpts from the unpublished journal Some Other Burning before they were edited down for Dharma Fragments:

The love had become something tangible, a glowing presence that surrounded me. It lit the dark forest, slowly drifting through the rain and fog like an apparition.

Day after day the interactions with (her) spun into a web of light that swelled to a crescendo of trembling before the One. The flow was tremendous, so hot! I was so enraptured, both with her and the final, the filaments coming together into a wondrous whole, that I feared to remove her, to return to me alone falling into the abyss. If she had any idea what I faced hour by hour, both the rapture and the uncertainty… but what joy to live in those brief moments with her.

The nest, the dream of bonding with an ideal, love, the magic love — the beat of life, the blood, the glowing light they admit, the siren song, the pattern of our own upbringing: childhood, the extended family, new and old life together — obliterated with a single turn. It couldn’t be, it would never be. She was like any other person on the street, a smile alone.

…The rhythm, the beat, the heat of the night air; restlessness, longing, pacing, long walks in solitude lost in thoughts of her, trembling and crying, forgetting the way, the swell of love imploding, cascading into the resonant field of meditation, as perfect and natural and pure as the light from the source, beating together from one to the next, a kaleidoscope of the human mind encountering its origin, holding the thing most dear; a wave of understanding, the most sincere moment. Cry, but don’t move, don’t breathe.

Everything seems to be interconnected, like a neural pattern. How does it work? So many connections and bonds, all I can see.

…such a difficult architecture: fiery, looping filaments grown into a vast network. The bonds form automatically, without knowledge or consent. It is at once spellbinding and ominous.

We think of ourselves as unique entities, but we are not. We are an amalgam of things, growing dynamically. Bonding is more than joining to another entity, it’s growing the network, adding connections and nodes.

Our attachment and desire for heightened states create closed loops, which can’t sustain themselves. The systems we’ve developed to cope with these closed-loop emotional crises don’t address the fundamental problem.

But to connect to the One Mind… It requires a deep sacrifice, a whole life… Really it’s beyond my abilities. I had to die and come back from the dead.

Now in front of me, there is only the One Mind, the human opening to the life force, aligning with it. In the One Mind, there’s only one emotion: a deep, unimaginable peace, radiant joy, love.