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.

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

You are here and you are not here. Both.

night after night we actually undergo a mini-death. We get into bed each night with a solid sense of self. As our consciousness diminishes, the bonds that hold the conventional mind in place become unglued.

What if, I now asked myself, we could enter relationships more like we enter a train? We know that the train will move, then stop, and move again, through changing landscapes and weather systems.

This is the great paradox of the Buddhist path: that we practice in order to know what we already are, therefore attaining nothing, getting nothing, going nowhere. We seek to uncover what has always been there.

unconditional love—for ourselves and all beings—arises once we allow for the natural flow of change, and then we can welcome the continual arising of new ideas, new thoughts, new invitations. If we do not block whatever comes our way, there is no boundary to our love and compassion.

The mere I functions without attachment; it’s not always engaged in manipulating the world for its own satisfaction.

the empty force of the empty wave has the empty power to knock over a mind that is also essentially empty but does not know it, and is stuffed with ideas.