Karma Yoga. Man what a trip.

What I take from your response David — as you’re my teacher in this moment and I’m the student — is this:

1. I have judged people from afar over the internet and need to be careful not to do so in the future. A post is a grain of sand on the beach of someone’s life. It’s hard to make too many conclusions about them from that grain…especially as it blows in the wind and gets swept out to sea, and isn’t really their grain anyway. I can feel this from your response. I can feel the desire to refute your, or share what I “really know” or have “really been through” but that’s all just protecting some kind of persona anyway so what’s the point?
2. It’s easy to confuse a reader with fancy stories of adventure and the intention can be lost. In this instance: the intention is to share some books that have been helpful to me and might be to others. Perhaps this post was only useful to the one person who emailed me who’s dying of cancer and thanked me for the list and could relate to my story of ego death. Her email makes the potential pain of any other kind of response worth it.
3. My desire to share what I know remains a desire I’m attached to. It’s a tough one. On the one hand I can see it clearly as a desire attached to this “teacher” or “leader” like character I’ve most often played in life — and therefore I should share/teach much less to transcend that. I deleted Snapchat, IG, dramatically reduced Twitter and FB and almost never blog. I thought that was progress. It was much less projecting out “Peter” in any way. But then the other side of this duality rears its head — which made itself evident in #3: there are moments when I can help alleviate suffering. I do it every day in person — why not try online? This post was an attempt at that. It worked. And didn’t. Which is the nature of things. So to stop teaching or sharing all together…I just don’t know that that’s the right thing. Perhaps it’s that I haven’t shared properly yet.

Thank you for taking the time to teach me something…after all “I’m am only an egg.” -Valentine Michael Smith (from Stranger in a Strange Land)