Dear Ram,

I weep as I write this. This is not an easy admission for me, so I wait awhile, silently trance like, dry my tears and move along. It’s such a long time since I’ve trusted anybody at all. Faith is there in abundance. (Life has taught me that is all I can rely on). Trust is not. I wish I could trust though, without always anticipating betrayal.

Ram: Do you see the contradiction? You say that you don’t trust and then you say that ‘faith is there in abundance.’ The problem is not the lack of trust or the presence of great faith. The problem is confusion with reference to the ‘I’. When you write this it seems to me that you are thinking of yourself as an ‘I’ with both qualities, faith and no-faith, trust and distrust, a 'Cathy' in short. But the ‘I’ is free of all qualities positive and negative. If you are going to ‘be’ the ‘I’ that you truly are then I recommend that you disown Cathy. She is not-you. Anything that is ‘not-self’ can be discarded because it is not real. When you understand this fact you will feel slightly embarrassed and have a great laugh. You will be embarrassed because you find it amazing that you clung on to this non-existent person as if she were an existent person for so long. You laugh because it is a great joke. At some point you have to burn down the house that ego built. You cannot just carry Cathy on forever. You cannot fix her, change her, purify her, remove her attachments, improve her or give her some sort of wonderful permanent experience. You simply need to abandon her, stop bringing her along with you. You do not need her to be somebody. You do not need a story.

Love,

Ram