When the lemon tree is in flower, you may not see any fruit, but if you look deeply you can see that the fruit is already there. You just need one more condition to bring forth the lemons: time. Lemons are already there in the lemon tree. Look at the tree and you only see branches, leaves and flowers. But if the lemon tree has time it will express

We do not have to look for God, we do not have to look for our ultimate dimension or nirvana, because we are nirvana, we are God.

If you carry within yourself deep grief, if you have lost a loved one, if you are inhabited by fear of death, oblivion and annihilation, please take up this teaching and begin to practice it.

We want to go beyond ideas to have real insight, which will burn up all our ideas and help us to be free.

To practice is not to store up a lot of ideas about no self, impermanence, nirvana or anything else; that is just the work of a cassette recorder.

Nirvana is empty of all notions, including the notion of nirvana. If you are caught in the notion of nirvana, you have not touched nirvana yet. This deep insight and discovery of the Buddha took him beyond fear, beyond anxiety and suffering and beyond birth and death.

Reality has nothing to do with existence and nonexistence. When Shakespeare says: “To be, or not to be—that is the question,” the Buddha answers: “To be or not to be is not the question.” To be and not to be are just two ideas opposing each other. But they are not reality, and they do not describe reality.

“If you are caught by the notion of being and non-being, then the notion of emptiness can help you to get free. But if you are caught by the notion of emptiness, there’s no hope.” The teaching on emptiness is a tool helping you to get the real insight of emptiness, but if you consider the tool as the insight, you just get caught in an idea.

In the West, people are very afraid of nothingness.