“There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed”

“There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.”

“And then came months of memories connected to nothing and telling me nothing, and in this ambiguous atmosphere I stopped thinking of him as doomed. The memories themselves were generally pleasant. For at least a week I kept reliving the time he removed a splinter from my foot using surgical tweezers. Strangely, during this same week, a black Labrador retriever was accompanying me around town, appearing out of nowhere and trotting alongside me to the subway or or the grocery store. As with the splinter memory, I had a sense of information being conveyed but through a medium too opaque to be grasped.”

“They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.”

“Evil is a word we use to describe the absence of Good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of Light or death to describe the absence of Life. Both evil and darkness can only be understood in relation to Light and Good; they do not have any actual existence. I am Light and I am Good. I am Love and there is no darkness in me. Light and Good actually exist. So, removing yourself from me will plunge you into darkness. Declaring independence will result in evil because apart from me, you can only draw upon yourself. That is death because you have separated yourself from me: Life.”

“I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated...”