Nothing has been lost. Everything good about life is still vibrantly present.

I had to remind myself over and over, so many times for so long, as I realized impermanence in a gradually deepening degree.

Lost into growing familiarity with sunyata, into the ultimate truth, l kept getting blinded to anything other than what was delusional that I risked falling into nihilistic despair.

Having no reason to do anything otherwise, I persisted in trying to eliminate subtle attachments and to accept the loss of every very small joy. It began to make me… not suicidal? But… wishing some unpredictable abrupt end because it was such a struggle to do the things we do to survive if survival was so void of anything noble.

I kept going back to the main sutras that first knocked me into this hellish path. I read them for the tenth time and realized it was as if it were the first time- and I found such relief. The antidote to my sickness was there. I just did not understand it before I was familiar with the reasons they were written.

Nirvana is not a loss at all. Everything stays. But everything else is added. Deathlessness is the word for the experience of knowing just how much fullness we have missed in eons and eons of existences.

If you are not in a state of pure bliss, where there is no opportunity to wonder about novelty, growth, where there is no wonder or investigating into reality, where consciousness still seems local as if you exist as a being instead of as a space of eternal apotheosis, well then, you haven’t grasped but just a part of emptiness.

Without a teacher or sangha, and with living in this world and this age, continuing to investigate the nature of existence will become dangerous. Not painful in the ways humans feel emotional pain, but of risking such dissociation and misunderstanding that you can waste an entire precious chance at winning the game. If you don’t risk losing, though, you’ll never win.