It’s a little like being caught up in a dream, where there may be many distinct elements. A car, a bridge, a tree, two people, and so on. Yet once we wake up, the whole of the experience is seen to have been a single dream. All the elements in it are united by the dream consciousness that held them all.

The strangest thing here is the sense that the moment has been just waiting for us to notice it. What took you so long? it seems to ask. I’ve been here waiting for you all this time. . . .

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?

We sense a beneficence in the heart of every moment.

What is it that most lights you up, that you would be most happy to have given your vital energies to, before you die? As Cat Stevens asks, “What will you leave us this time?”

These awakening experiences are of two kinds. The first opens and reveals an indescribable beauty that is utterly new yet tastes of a strange familiarity, and then it closes again, leaving an afterglow that fades in hours or days or weeks, becoming a memory.

In one koan, Yunmen Wenyan (864–949 CE) is asked, “How do you go beyond awakening?” He answers, “Rice cake.” That’s the end of the koan.

But conscious awareness of the kind we have can be thought of as a kind of computer screen or desktop, a “user interface,” as some cognitive researchers put it. In his book The Case Against Reality, the cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman proposes that various systems of the body and mind compete for airtime. Consciousness is an enhanced processi

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 koa