letting go

          Went for Zometa today and received the word about the PSA test . The numbers are accelerating and that is a sign that the cancer has learned how to replicate without testosterone. This news comes to me and I feel a great deal of equanimity.
           I will have to face a nuclear bone san tomorrow at 8:30 and then the x-rays at noon and I don't expect a great deal of change since the PSA is beginning to rise and most of the tests are within parameters. Friday my friend Sandra and maybe Bill will accompany me to the oncologist and get her advice. Lisa who will be traveling wants to have an email sent to her which I will do.
            I have been  practicing meditation for 40 years and this is the payoff. Facing death is easier since the knowledge of no-self helps. If I thought that I am my body I would freak out.  It is dying. If I thought that I was only my mind or senses or emotions to have to give them up would leave me in terror. As it is I have learned enough not to be attached to being me or I and have more and more identified with the awareness itself rather than what the awareness is aware of.
          I have been aware of all of the ways Mara, the buddhist word for illusion, manifests and have seen through the illusion to truth. It is not a heaven or a hell but is rather a sense of being and non-being.
          My girlfriend is one of the great joys of my life and we are together now as few could ever hope to be. I would wish the beauty such a relationship be the blessing of everyone .
          Tomorrow I also see my friends from the pilgrimage who will be here in the evening.
Need to firm up the time .
          The vale of this life is becoming thinner and more transparent.
            Love is the only thing that can endure.