What is the sound of one hand? A nonsense question. Yet if we refrain from going into problem-solving mode, and don’t try to unravel it like a puzzle, then we can allow the strange question to hover in our minds, like a full moon rising in the evening sky as sunset is darkening into night. There the hazy moon is, floating low in the sky. So the

important thing is what they lead us to, not the forms themselves.

If gratitude isn’t accessible, then pivot and see if it’s possible to feel a certain kind of humility. Recognize how all that you have in life may, in some areas, be a result of your own efforts, but so much more exists by virtue of forces far outside your control. Your life depends on a trillion contingencies. Yet it’s happening. And not just

When we see this, we not only see through the illusion of self, but we also discover that all along there has been another dimension of our experience that we haven’t noticed, in which all things are joined, as if belonging to a single fabric. It’s as if just behind our ordinary experience, there is another level of consciousness in which all

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

In other words, the sense of self appears to be contingent on brain size and on complex social systems, and is conditioned by interactions with others. It’s not the independent entity it feels like it is. It’s perhaps best thought of as one particular aspect of our conscious awareness, one that grows from it, as a bud grows from a branch. It can be

By contrast, as long as we follow our urges, we stay, as it were, on the same level on which they occur. But once we allow them, and offer them a home, then we see that we don’t actually need what they tell us we need. That’s growth and it’s a beautiful thing. It touches and opens our hearts when it occurs. And it affirms what Simone Weil meant

One hair’s breadth of difference separates heaven from earth And what that hairsbreadth of difference is, is the tiny thought of self. Nothing else changes. But with self gone, we see the unchanged world in a whole new, changed way.

Who among us would not benefit from a little pause, a little peace, and a taste of a boundless love that asks nothing of us—no beliefs, no dogmas—but offers itself freely, if we just learn to sit still and release ourselves into silence?