After a intense conversation with my friend and mentor in enlightenment Greg the Monk, I understand the relationship between passion and emotion. First, ask yourself, what is passion? The World English Dictionary defines passion as follows:

1. ardent love or affection
2. intense sexual love
3. a strong affection or enthusiasm for an object, concept, etc: a passion for poetry
4. any strongly felt emotion, such as love, hate, envy, etc
5. a state or outburst of extreme anger: he flew into a passion
6. the object of an intense desire, ardent affection, or enthusiasm
7. an outburst expressing intense emotion: he burst into a passion of sobs
8. philosophy
a. any state of the mind in which it is affected by something external, such as perception, desire, etc, as contrasted with action
b. feelings, desires or emotions, as contrasted with reason
9. the sufferings and death of a Christian martyr

So passion is an intense feeling of emotion, but can you be passionate without an object to be passionate about? Even if that object is something you create or do, such as dance, or playing music? Those are still objects, still things in the world of form. So the question really is, can you have passion without attachment? Attachment is one of the things that causes us to feel pain when we lose our object of attachment. If you are a dancer and lost your legs and couldn’t dance anymore, if you are passionate about a person and that person dies, all lead down the road to pain when you are attached. Nothing in this life is permanent. All objects, all forms, are impermanent so getting attached to things is not to our advantage as that only leads us down the road to pain, sorrow, suffering, and ultimately affects how we live and view our life. It affects our attitudes, our spirits. This isn’t to say don’t be passionate about a person or a thing, I’m saying that being attached to it to the point that you feel you can’t live without it, or if you lose it your world would end, is not advantageous to our outlook on life. This is not to say feeling sad when a loved one dies is bad, but rejoicing in knowing they have moved on to a new and different existence expands our spirit and leads us down the road to not fearing change, even when that change is death, assuming you believe in the immortality of the soul, which I do.

So the quest is to be passionate about life. Live your life deep down, in the calm of your spirit. The storm on the surface isn’t even noticed when you live your life with passion and no attachment. Be passionate about what you are doing right now, no matter what it is. If you find it difficult to be passionate in your everyday life, maybe it’s time to reflect inward and reconnect with your spirit. Maybe you’re not doing the work of your spirit. Maybe it’s time to look at what you feel your soul work is. Is your work fulfilling? Does it feed your soul and does it affect others positively? We’re all interconnected and the energy we put forth affects others.

At the end of the day, just live life to the fullest, live for the now, today, this moment, relinquish your attachments, whether to another person, or an object, or to any kind of form. I for one am convinced that is the secret to a fulfilled life. Sometimes easier said than done, but remember, we’re all practicing at being enlightened. If we were already there, we wouldn’t be here, on this earth, in this human body.

So the new year is coming, and I’ve been thinking about what that means to me. More writing, more writing, more writing. I wish I could crank them out like Amanda Hocking, she’s a machine, but I have a full time job, and other things in my life that I love to do. Writing has become a passion for me, and I want to do more. That’s all I want to do actually, so how to get to the point where I don’t have to go to the old 9-5? That is the question. Marketing. Of course it would help if I had more than one book written. People tend to not want to read a book that the sequel is not already out yet, especially by a new author. Well, it’s on it’s way. I have 76k words so far, planning on ramping that up to around 100k like the last book.

The other things that need attention in my life is the spiritual aspect of my life. Iris has found the truth, but letting go of everything you held to be true for all your life is difficult. I know what I believe to be the truth. The energy that permeates through us all is what connects us together. The universal consciousness is real, we just have to wake up and feel it. And even then, we get so involved in our lives that we forget, we fall back asleep and have to remind ourselves that life is not about things, or what we do, it’s how we do it. Do you wake up every day with love in your heart? It’s a struggle to remember every day to live in the now and not in the future. I have to remind myself constantly. Now is what matters. How I act at this very moment is what matters. I’m not as good as I’d like to be, but I am human and not Jophiel after all. I’ll continue to take it day by day. That is my new years resolution, along with all the ones related to form. Stop eating sugar, lose 15 pounds, and exercise more often, and write, write, write.

So I’ve been working on the second book since early this year and I’ve finally reached the end. However, I still have to go through editing and there are some scenes that need fleshing out and I’m thinking a few changes are in order. I can’t say exactly when I’ll have it completed, but I’m targeting April at the latest. Don’t hold me to that though, I still have a day job which gets in the way of writing. I think you’ll be excited for what’s to come, not giving away any spoilers and still haven’t fully settled on a title, though have a few ideas.

I’ve been diligently working on book 2 and all of the sudden I realized that I’m at the end of the book. I’m 30k words shy of where I want to be, but it just feels right to end when I’m ending. So now back to editing, making some scenes better, getting into Iris’ head more. She’s complex and I find her path mirroring mine in the journey to understand the soul and understand this life. Finding that living in the now is much more difficult at times than I would like it to be, and Iris still has yet to grasp that concept. Time to re-read Eckhart Tolle again and try and find my center so Iris can grow in her spiritual path. A question was posed to me by a friend yesterday which I’m still struggling with the answer to. If we live in the now, and live for now, and we don’t enmesh ourselves in planning for the future or dwelling on the what ifs of the past, we ride on top of the waves, unaffected by the events of our lives, taking things as they come, where does passion fit in? How can I be passionate if I’m calmly riding the wave of life? These extremes in emotion are what gives us hope and love, but also anger and hate. So does that make them undesirable feelings, are they addictive so we want to experience them? Or are we just reacting? Do we really need passion in our lives or is it all an illusion in the great game? These are the questions I need to answer for myself in order for Iris to know where to go next.