The Wise Heart: Buddhist Psychology for the West

Whatever we regularly think colors our experience—all day, every day. Once we start to watch these thoughts, we discover that most of them are reruns.

This is the mirror-like nature of consciousness: reflective, luminous, untarnished, and peaceful.

This is the unconditioned. The heart is free.” The ancient Zen masters call this the liberation of the trusting mind.

In Transformations of Consciousness, Harvard psychologist Jack Engler reports a study of Dipama and other advanced meditators. He found a degree of mental health and well-being that was the most remarkable ever seen by any scientists.

Who, being loved, is poor? —Oscar Wilde

The Dalai Lama has said that transforming thought is one of his favorite practices. He instructs, “Let yourself visualize the effects of unskillful thought patterns such as annoyance, anger, self-judgment, and so forth. Inwardly see how such thoughts affect you: the tension, the raising of your pulse rate, the discomfort. Outwardly see how such tho

This is not to suggest that such a radical intervention would be right in our circumstances. Within his cultural context, Ajahn Chah was a kind of shaman. He knew that something in this woman’s life had to die. Because Ajahn Chah knew that form is empty, he could play within it in an intuitive and wise way. Yet he never forgot the importance of hon

What we repeatedly think shapes our world. Out of compassion, substitute healthy thoughts for unhealthy ones.

“If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness. … The whole show has been on fire from the word go.”

And by resting in a non-contentious heart we become a lamp, a medicine, a strong presence; we become the healing the world so dearly needs.