An old Hasidic Jew called Zosya once said, “When I die, the Father won’t ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses while I lived. He’ll ask why I wasn’t more like Zosya.” Your greatest gift to the universe is yourself. It’s time to be you in a whole way. Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, said Irenaeus of Lyon, the second-century Greek Christian bishop. “The

There’s an ancient Zen poem titled “Trust in the Heart” that says: One hair’s breadth of difference separates heaven from earth And what that hairsbreadth of difference is, is the tiny thought of self.

The message of the story might be: live well, and you can live in something like heaven on earth. And it may look rather like the ordinary life you already have. That is also the message of the path of awakening. In awakening, everything is just as it was before. No difference. Except for one tiny thing . . . thoughts of self have gone, fallen back

Instead of there being an onboard witness and agent who is having our life, we feel that we are the reverse—that “agent” was a fiction, and what we actually are is all that the agent thought they were not—namely, all the objects of awareness.

And sometimes people even come to awakening through heartbreak. When we face losses and griefs that seem too great to hold, it’s not unknown for awakening to sweep in and reveal a breadth to the universe that had been silently embracing us all along. We sense a wider peace, which can come as a kind of radical answer to our pain.

To see the emptiness within things leaves us less entranced by our cravings and fears. We become less enthralled personally by the pleasures and pains of the world. A kind of bondage gets broken, a prison door unhinged. Now we see the beauty of the world more completely, the wonder that each moment arises as it does.

To parse out emptiness further: on this level, we can see either that our sense of self is a self-conjured illusion or that the world through which we move is a kind of illusion—or both at once.

The second aspect of the love in emptiness is that emptiness is not inert. It’s active. It’s generative. It is continually giving, creating, flashing into being. Every moment is its activity.

what’s behind any appearance is an all-loving, empty openness.