As life unfolds, we all experience many successes as well as challenges. Sluyter warns us that “we get distracted by the good and the bad shiny objects. We get caught up in stuff and then we come to define our lives in terms of how things work out.” He reminds us of what it is that we can truly rely on, the place of perfect delicious silence, which is actually what we are at our deepest core. He gives an analogy: “All this ‘stuff’ is tossing and turning on the waves, the surface of life.” And he advises us to not try to flatten out all the waves, “That’s a hopeless task. But if you can settle down just a foot or two into the water beneath the waves, it’s already always silent and that’s what you are and anyone can access it.” He goes deeply into the concept that love is a lack of otherness and how fear and love cannot occupy the same place at the same time. He gives us an analogy of grief: “It’s as if the person that we loved was like a window through which the beautiful sunlight was streaming into us. Then, when that person dies, it’s as if the window shatters. That can seem like an ultimate disaster. But if we pay attention, we realize that the window was just the aperture, the opening through which the sunlight was reaching us and the sunlight is still there. In fact, the sunlight surrounds us.”
