EROS & THANATOS — PART I
Edited reading transcript
Owner-supplied reading text; not independently audio-verified.

One of the first things that one of my teachers told me to do was what the Buddha said his monks should do: go and contemplate death—the phenomenon called impermanence.

Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics. Every structure and system tends towards chaos and disorder—a process of decomposition.

You realise that you yourself are going there. It’s a very enlightening insight, especially when you don’t shield yourself from it, you don’t escape from it, and you don’t avert your eyes. You face it voluntarily.

You voluntarily face that entropy, that decay, and you watch it happening until you become non-resistant to it.

You realise that that’s sort of the order of things.

We are obsessed with how to live longer, how to perform. It’s fantastic, because we have the famous Eros—that desire to live, to be alive.

And so Thanatos, that death drive, is the other side of the coin.

The two are not separate. They need to be skillfully mastered with balance.

You stop making stories about that. You stop fearing it.

You look at… It’s in the perfection of things. It is in the order of things to die.

And I can tell you, it took a while.