Every one of us has an energetic fissure, an energetic crack below the navel. That crack, which sorcerers call the gap, is closed when a man is in his prime.

Normally, all that is discernible to the sorcerer's eye is a tenuous discoloration in the otherwise whitish glow of the luminous sphere. But when a man is close to dying, that gap becomes quite apparent.

I once say a man's gap that was wide open. The significance was a deadly one. The spirit was signaling to me that something was coming to an end. I thought it was my life that was coming to an end, and I

accepted it as gracefully as I could. It dawned on me much, much later that it wasn't my life that was coming to an end, but my entire lineage.

You bypass things like this. It's youth. So many things to do, so many people around you. You are not alert. You never learned to be alert, anyway.

To be alert doesn't mean to be watchful. For sorcerers, to be alert means to be aware of the fabric of the everyday world that seems extraneous to the interaction of the moment.

Don't hide yourself behind banalities. Stand up, assume responsibility for what you know. Don't get lost in the extraneous fabric of the world around you, extraneous to what's going on. Don't be so concerned with yourself and your problems. Watch the scenery around us: the mountains in the distance, or the riverbed, or the desert. Sorcerers do that and then nothing counts except what their eyes can absorb. In this way they unburden themselves of everything superfluous.

Sorcerers never say things idly. I am most careful about what I say to you or to anybody else. The difference between you and me is that I don't have any time at all, and I act accordingly. You, on the other hand, believe that you have all the time in the world, and you act accordingly. The end result of our individual behaviors is that I measure everything I do and say, and you don't.

You're looking for a sorcerer's medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part. You want results -- one potion and you're cured.

Sorcerers face things in a different way. Since they don't have any time to spare, they give themselves fully to what's in front of them. Your turmoil is the result of your lack of sobriety.

As for your friend, you didn't have the sobriety to thank him properly. That happens to every one of us. We never express what we feel, and when we want to, it's too late, because we have run out of time. It's not only your friend who ran out of time, you, too, ran out of it. You should have thanked him profusely. But the moment when you should have thanked him, you were angry with him -- you were judging him, he was nasty to you, whatever. And then you postponed seeing him. In reality, what you did was to postpone thanking him.

Now you're stuck with a ghost on your tail. You'll never be able to pay what you owe him.

Your friend knew that he was dying. Now you say that the weight of my words is too much for your shoulders, that you want to leave, to be in the city and get lost in its noise. You are having a taste of infinity. I know it, because I have been in your shoes. You want to run away, to plunge into something human, warm, contradictory, stupid, who cares? You want to forget the death of your friend. But infinity won't let you. It has gripped you in its merciless clutches. The only thing you can do is to keep the memory of your friend fresh, to keep it alive for the rest of your life and perhaps even beyond. Sorcerers express, in this fashion, the thanks that they can no longer voice. You may think it is a silly way, but that's the best sorcerers can do.

Sadness, for sorcerers, is not personal. It is not quite sadness. It's a wave of energy that comes from the depths of the cosmos, and hits sorcerers when they are receptive, when they are like radios, capable of catching radio waves. The sorcerers of olden times, who gave us the entire format of sorcery, believed that there is sadness in the universe, as a force, a condition, like light, like intent, and that this perennial force acts especially on sorcerers because they no longer have any defensive shields. They cannot hide behind their friends or their studies. They cannot hide behind love, or hatred, or happiness, or misery. They can't hide behind anything.

The condition of sorcerers is that sadness, for them, is abstract. It doesn't come from coveting or lacking something, or from self- importance. It doesn't come from me. It comes from infinity. The sadness you feel for not thanking your friend is already leaning in that direction.