Those things that have to get done—don’t really have to get done. The dream that you have, which your

Formations change all the time. The joys they bring—though often wonderful, profound, and amazing—are short-lived. Even when we get exactly what we want, it gets old after a while, and we want something else.

The conscience of someone raised vegetarian recoils at the thought of eating meat; a carnivore’s doesn’t. My conscience recoils at eating shrimp, but yours probably doesn’t. The conscience of someone from an older culture might be quite at peace with war and killing in the name of honor, or tribe; yours might not. There is no rhyme or reason to the

The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once said that the mind is like fabric; it takes the color of the dye it’s soaked in. Soak the mind in a quiet, relaxing environment and it will become quiet and relaxed. Soak it in floods of Facebook and, well.…

As Joe further pointed out, “We’re navigating five different worlds at once: Traditional Buddhism, traditional Western Buddhism, secular mindfulness, hardcore empiricist neuroscientists, and neuroscientists who are into Buddhism,” each of whom may have different worldviews and operating assumptions.

life will be meaningless if you don’t achieve—let it go, too.

Every desire, every identification, every place where your ego is hiding out and saying “I’m this.” Let go, let go, let go, and keep on falling—because there ain’t no place to land. Yet this falling, I am here to tell you, is the same as flight. Because, third, the states are not the point. As Joseph Goldstein put it, “one week [on retreat] gives t

to understand, intuitively and deeply, that what Buddhists call “conditioned formations”—i.e., stuff, ideas, people, emotions, and everything else—are incapable of providing lasting, deep happiness.

I often come back to the five basic precepts: not harming, not stealing, not committing sexual misconduct, not lying, and not being too intoxicated to care.