Sound Bhakti

I was in the middle of writing a book. I’ve never written a book before, and I kept thinking, "How am I going to get to the end of this?" It's a huge project, and I thought of myself as being in the middle of an ocean. All I could think was to keep swimming. Just don't stop. You can't look up and say, "Oh, I'm so far away; it will never happen." You just stay right where you are now and swim. In anartha-nivṛtti, we have to do that. There are a couple of encouraging analogies: one is that when you're going to the Himalayan and you want to reach the peak, approaching the mountain range feels daunting. Anybody who’s lived around mountains—I’ve lived around mountains because I’m from Northern California—we used to go to the mountains a lot, and there are the foothills before you get to the mountain, the really steep peaks. When you're going in the foothills, there’s a lot of up and down, but as you're doing the ups and downs, you’re still gradually going up in elevation. It’s like, "Hey, we're going down now," bu