The infinitely poignant beauty of creation is inseparable from its diabolic destructiveness.

The mind that knows knows itself knowing.

All that is subject to arising is subject to

“There is no self apart from the world.”

In so doing, the Buddha’s mother acted out an inadequacy that many a mother—like many a lover—is vulnerable to, an inadequacy fed by thoughts of doubt and fear that erode confidence and corrode connection.

The effort required to ward off the possibility of trauma—the rush to normal that the absolutisms of daily life encourages—is itself traumatic.

“Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

Clinical studies of such children reveal that a preponderance of them have parents who have related to them in either a helpless and fearful way or a hostile and self-referential one. The children of helpless and fearful parents, in particular, have a very difficult time later in life. Their parents tend to be sweet and fragile, not hostile or

Especially in situations in which unbearable emotions are stirred up, the self’s only choice is to wall itself off from whatever is threatening it, to remove itself from what it cannot regulate.