The mistake is to believe that meditation should cool you down to zero. That is to take meditation as a way of making you docile, into mere mush, a spongy pushover, just such a mellow dude and lady. I too had made that mistake, having become inordinately calm over the years. A mistake.

Now I realize–that is, feel–how meditation, so hot, is meant to wake you up. It’s intensely focused, rigorous, not without its struggles, indeed right in the midst of the inner struggles. And you know what? When you open your eyes and speak, your words are to be clear while snapping. Your words–close to crackles, bursts, snaps, claps–are to be crisp, compact, and dynamic. Very, very dynamic. Meditation, properly understood, raises your energetic power so that you can listen with the fiercest ears and speak with the fiercest tongue.

Not calming down the system but clearing out the mental rubbish so that the system can recruit all its energies and express them in every single act. The best word I have, and thus it recurs, is dynamo. To become a dynamo.

Or: to become most fully alive by virtue of intuiting what is most completely real. Don’t think that solely; be that entirely.