In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

Loving-kindness and compassion are the natural expressions of awareness because genuine expressions of an open heart transcend conceptual ideas and attitudes,

Judging someone for looking unclean or smelling bad, or being loud, or anything, is a pretty neurotic way to seek happiness—but it provides a toehold to climb up from and allows you to temporarily enjoy the illusion that you are better than someone else. It’s never just: They are bad. It is also: Therefore, I am good.

As a path toward liberation, intellectual acknowledgment of impermanence must become integrated with embodied experience; then we can gain more support for giving up grasping at those things we cannot hold, whether that means our own bodies or those of people we love, or our roles, or our prestige.

with examination we can learn that there’s always a gap, a moment of space in-between those things that we assume are continuous, just as for breaths and for thoughts.

To make yourself a better person is to make the world a better place.

We inherently have free will, yet this only arises from an examined mind. Our future is influenced, but not determined or destined, by past conditioning. Until we learn how to examine our minds and direct our behavior, our karmic tendencies will compel habits to reseed themselves.

Between every breath, and every thought, gaps exist utterly free of conception and memory, but our mental habits obscure this information.

The key point is that there is no ego to kill. It is the belief in an enduring, nonchanging self that dies.

In order to break through our conditioning and confront old habits, we might deliberately reverse a common pattern, at least for a limited time:

Once we accept the fundamental transitory nature of our minds and bodies, then we can develop the confidence to dismantle our most entrenched patterns.