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.

Our part, our remembrance, our “mindfulness,” is to remember that we don’t have all the answers, that we know so little, that our life is just a matchstick tossed on the waters, and that our role is to be humble enough to let that little matchstick allow in more moisture from the surrounding waters. We have to open the pores, allow the water in.

One of the core planks of the approach to life and meditation this book offers is that we don’t need blinding revelations or massive enlightenment experiences (though they may come) to encounter an unconditional love waiting to be touched in the heart of even ordinary moments.

We sense a beneficence in the heart of every moment.

It changes nothing, in one sense. The contents of life are the same. But in another sense, it changes everything. It is a revolution in the heart, from which there is no going back. It changes our relationship to everything.

here is its treasured hothouse. Right here is where the cosmos blooms. And among the many forms in which it blooms, here is the creature—you—that has enough consciousness to be cognizant of its situation, to know how it evolved to be what it is, and to be aware of its own awareness. And to discover in its very bones that it is part of the whole of

goodness. Somehow, stripped of all its show and disguises, bare existing itself is an unalloyed goodness.

the “Four Ennobling Truths” of Buddhism: There is suffering. Suffering is generated by craving. Craving can cease. There is a path of practice that leads to the end of craving.

Logos and science seek to know through hypothesis, experiment, and evidence. Their straight gaze will never know the soul. Mythos, which is the soul’s territory, knows through glimpses and refracted glances out of the corner of its eye. It is attuned to hints and hunches, yet what it knows, it knows deeply.