Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

Our resting condition, or “default,” is not very restful after all. Not only do we get caught up in thoughts, but also these thoughts tend to be about the past or future, and often generate regret or anxiety. They trigger our sympathetic nervous system, and we get uncomfortably hyped up and uneasy.

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.

We just keep trying to do better while being at peace with the full range of human experience. Joy, ease, and wonder are natural—and so are sadness, fear, and irritation.

And when you feel ready, drop the phrase and rest in silence and stillness for a few

It’s not that life has no direction. It’s that paying attention to what happens along the way makes life richer and fuller. Even though we’re moving in a chosen direction, it actually matters more to us how it is here and now than how it might be down the road.

When we get right down to it, our sense of self is an illusion, like a mirage over a hot road, no more substantial than a reflection on the surface of a lake. To “awaken” is to realize this, and this book is a guide to catching glimpses of what that means.

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.

givingness of presence is love, even when the contents of that giving seem far from it.

the koan What is this?