Consciousness is unaffected by experience, just like the sky. Consciousness is also compared to a mirror. A mirror reflects all things, yet remains bright and shining, unchanged by whatever images, beautiful or terrible, may appear within it.

Forgiveness is not weak. It demands courage and integrity. Yet only forgiveness and love can bring about the peace we long for. As the Indian sage Meher Baba explains, “True love is not for the faint-hearted.”

Ajahn Chah used to shake his head and smile, “You have so many opinions. And you suffer so much from them. Why not let them go?” I

After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply does not exist. —Time magazine, 2002

When you have established a sense of equanimity and peace, begin to picture, one at a time, your loved ones. Carefully recite the same simple phrases: May you learn to see the arising and passing of all things with equanimity and balance.

17 Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future.

Ajahn Sumedo teaches us to open to the way things are: “Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good

Resting in the heart, we become trusting and courageous, and our patience grows. We do not have to think it all through. Life is unfolding around us. As the Indian master Charon Singh put it, “In time, even grass becomes milk.”

A relationship matures when each partner grants the possibility that the other may be right (even though we may not always believe it).