The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

The traditional metaphor for the six consciousnesses is a house with five openings, one in each of the four directions and one in the roof. These five openings represent the five sense consciousnesses. Now suppose someone sets a monkey loose in this building. The monkey represents the mental consciousness. Suddenly set free in a big house, the monk

Fortunately, the more familiar we become with examining our minds, the closer we come to finding a solution to whatever problem we might be facing, and the more easily we recognize that whatever

Any daily activity can be used as an opportunity for meditation. You can watch your thoughts as you go through your day, rest your attention momentarily on experiences like taste, smell, form, or sound, or simply rest for a few seconds on the marvelous experience of simply being aware of the experiences going on in your mind.

When you come up against resistance, just remember the story about how the old cow pees while walking along throughout the day. That should be enough to bring a smile to your face and remind you that practicing is as easy, and as necessary, as relieving yourself.

Nirvana is a fundamentally objective state of mind: an acceptance of experience without judgments, which opens us to the potential for seeing solutions that may not be directly connected to our survival as individuals, but rather to the survival of all sentient beings.

Emptiness, or infinite possibility, is the absolute nature of reality. Everything that appears out of emptiness—stars, galaxies, people, tables, lamps, clocks, and even our perception of time and space—is a relative expression of infinite possibility, a momentary appearance in the context of infinite time and space.

The mind is always active, always generating thoughts, just as the ocean constantly generates waves. We can’t stop our thoughts any more than we can stop waves in the ocean. Resting the mind in its natural state is very different from trying to stop thoughts altogether. Buddhist meditation does not in any way involve attempting to make the mind a b

One of the most important lessons I learned during my years of formal training was that whenever I blocked the compassion that is a natural quality of my mind, I inevitably found myself feeling small, vulnerable, and afraid.

The body of meditation, it’s said, is nondistraction. Whatever thoughts are perceived by the mind are nothing in themselves. Help this meditator who rests naturally in the essence of whatever thoughts arise to rest in the mind as it naturally is.