Even if the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will refuse to open your mind. So if you are committed to an idea about truth or to an idea about the conditions necessary for your happiness, be careful. The first Mindfulness Training is about freedom from views:

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.

knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet.

When you lose a loved one, you suffer. But if you know how to look deeply, you have a chance to realize that his or her nature is truly the nature of no birth, no death.

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

Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist teachings are guiding means to help us learn to look deeply and to develop our understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill or die for.

The meaning of emptiness here is very important; it means first of all to be empty of a separate self. Nothing has a separate self, and nothing exists by itself.

We are afraid of death, we are afraid of separation, and we are afraid of nothingness.

In the West, people are very afraid of nothingness.