Thus if passion is a great stream of life energy surging through us, its natural course is to lead to surrender, like a river that must empty into the sea. Recently I met my twin flame in my very first moments of attraction to this man, I can sense a surrender that must follow if it was to move forward. In wanting to move toward him, I felt moved, in ways I could not control. In wanting to reach out and touch him, I feel touched, in my most sensitive spots. If I opened to my passion and let it move freely in me, which I did, it would force me to let go, give in, and feel how raw and vulnerable I truly am.   Although I would liked to possess the aliveness of passion without having to go through the death of surrendering, this is not possible. Passion and surrender are two halves of one whole cycle. The river must return to the sea that is its source so that its waters can keep on flowing.  The surrender that passion calls for involves letting go of holding on. To let go in this way can feel like a death, for it means giving up old ways of trying to make myself feel alive or secure. Yet what is most alive in me wants these old ways to die, so that it can expand and move more freely. No wonder falling in love makes us rejoice and tremble at the same time: It calls us toward the death of our old self. In one of his poems, Goethe calls our urge to die and be transformed a “holy longing," likening it to a moth, “insane for the light," drawn toward the flames of a candle:  I praise what is truly alive.what longs to be burned to death And his conclusion is simple and unequivocal:  And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,you are only a troubled gueston this dark earth. 

Making love is the literal embodiment of passion turning into surrender. The whole unfolding of passion-from approach, to pursuit, to courtship, and all the rest-builds toward a moment of orgasmic letting go, in which we feel full and empty at the same time-full of life and empty of self. As we move toward orgasm we can't hold on to our partner, we can't hold on to life, we can't even hold on to our sexual excitement. We have to let it all go. Orgasm carries us across the threshold of the great unknown, beyond the mind, beyond pleasure, beyond the beloved, beyond even relationship itself. It is, as the French say, “the little death (la petite ma!!)."  

So in following our passion all the way, we arrive at the boundary of life and death; here we feel the insignificance of our small self as we enter into the greater mystery from which we come and to which we must return. No wonder we cling so tightly to our passion: It is a way of fighting off the experience of death. Yet though we may try to hold on to it for dear life, passion's aim is much larger. As the agent of love's unquenchable thirst for wholeness, passion seeks to connect us with the whole of reality, with life and death altogether.