As sweet as razor blade honey

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A friend of mine recently asked me to write about honey on the razor’s edge. He was referring to a passage of text that’s so close to my heart it’s become part of my basic perspective. It’s from the book Roaring Silence by Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen. I was introduced to it by Jake Orthwein, who is, among other things, legendary for being a one-man spiritual library. Now I will share it with you.

Being in and of the world can be bewildering, but is there a way in which we can allow that to open out into a more spacious dimension in which bewilderment might become wonderment?

Profoundly inspired human beings have peered into the question of existence since the inception of recorded history. Human genius has propounded philosophies and mystical geometries—but the question, as far as most people are concerned, remains unanswered. It cannot be said that there must be an answer. Neither can we say that there is no answer. All we can say is that we want to know, because being in and of the world is a sticky question. Sometimes the stickiness of the world is very sweet; it is like honey on the razor’s edge. You lick the blade and “Oh! how very sweet it is!” Then there is the sharpness, and the blood.

Some people would say, “Honey is a wicked and treacherous thing. It is best avoided if you want to avoid being cut.” This way of thinking sees the razor’s edge of life as undesirable. Some people would say, “Why not find a way of tasting the honey without getting cut?” This is another way of thinking that also sees the razor’s edge of life as undesirable. Some people would say, “The razor’s edge is all there is—nothing but pain; therefore extinction is release.” This way of thinking denies the sweetness of the honey. Some people would say, “The honey is all that really matters; if you’re cut by the razor’s edge then at least you will have tasted the sweetness!” This way of thinking accepts both the honey and the razor’s edge but divides the experience. But the honey and the razor’s edge are a single experience. If you manifest a human form, you taste the honey on the razor’s edge. If you live for the honey and see the razor’s edge as an occupational hazard, either your experience of the honey becomes too sickly sweet and makes you vomit or you lacerate yourself on the blade.

What is it to taste the honey on the razor’s edge? Is it to reject the experience of either or both in favor of seeking an answer in nonexistence? Or is it to accept the unified experience as being what is, and thus to be liberated from duality?

What can I even say about this, which, more succinctly than anything else I’ve ever read, points directly at the way I aspire to live. Maybe I can just give my translation.

Let’s say you have accepted that life invariably contains pain and discomfort and disappointment, that the problem of you will never ultimately be solved. Perhaps your way of accepting this is to note that pain can be ennobling, character-building. Every time you face embarrassment or pain, it trains your nervous system, gives you perspective. The wanton monster of grief is the other side of attachment; without it, there would be no stakes, no warmth, no reason to cling together in the night. Clearly, there are structural reasons for the emotions that challenge you, and thus they can be begrudgingly appreciated.

This is a fine view of things, much more functional and robust than the naive perspective that all discomfort can be avoided, or the nihilistic perspective that everything is bad because sometimes things are indeed very bad. We’re making progress. But still there’s an issue here, if we look closer. There’s an oppositional quality to this relationship with discomfort. You are looking for the appropriate exchange rate, implicitly demanding that every setback or humiliation should teach you enough to be worth it. There can be a feeling of coldly dutiful tourism to this way of approaching discomfort, like you’re taking a stinky tour bus in a humid foreign nation, and hating every moment of it, but telling yourself it’s okay because you will be wiser after taking in the ruin.

In short, you are sneakily accepting the blood on the razor’s edge on the grounds that it can be converted into future honey. Again, fine enough. But we could go one step further—we can start to see the blood and its attendant pain as itself interesting and desirable. We can enter the domain of savoring difficult experiences. This capability, which we all have somewhere, is often discovered in moments of overwhelming heartbreak. There is no strategy that will contain what is inside us, so we simply burst. And if we are lucky, we have the fortitude to notice: oh, it is really interesting to burst open. Look at all the scraps I’m made of.

Perhaps we can notice that anger has a lusty propulsion, it can become a sled that carries us through the adversarial circumstances. We can see that sadness has a glittering, glassy aspect, how it is the luminous signature of finitude. Shame, strangely, is close to attraction, and can be similarly thrilling—the blushing and tingling of crossing the social boundaries that keep us confined. And fear can be understood as awe from a different angle, the awareness of our fragility that makes us busy ourselves with producing bulwarks against time, whether in the form of another exercise routine, a dinner party, or an obelisk raised in the desert.

It’s a lovely way to be, this enjoyment of the kaleidoscopic range, gathering and appreciating all the little spherules of feeling. But this kind of connoisseurship also has its limit. Quite simply, you will not always have the inner resources required to appreciate existence. Not everything can be a lovely spiritual experience. Even the most well-adjusted among us have strong preferences, irritations, grudges. Those who claim to have vanquished their reactivity and ill will, in my experience, are often actually repressing the interesting feelings of dependency, contempt, and frailty, which they have come to reject in a stiff fantasy of Buddhahood.

So there is another level of freedom to aspire to. This is the one that’s the simplest thing to explain, but the hardest to do: accept all the ways you will relate to life, without dissociating from any of it. This includes accepting that you will be a bitch sometimes—you will grouse, you will snap and whine, you will be thirsty for approval. During the same day, you can be altered by the milky fog pouring from the mountaintop, and you can rearrange someone with your wholehearted love, and you can find yourself acting like a pretentious dickwad. There’s a perspective from which that can all be fine.

We have already taken on the somewhat heavy metaphor of the honey on the razor’s edge. Why not take on another? Occasionally, meditators use the ocean as a symbol of the absorptive power of awareness, the way that consciousness can enfold even the most jagged sensations. I like it, but not because the ocean is spotless. The ocean contains bones and garbage. It’s a gallery of heavy metals, a zoo for many-clawed slime creatures. In parts, it is unclean, hostile, corrupt. But its embrace of all the poisons is entirely pure.