The mind that realizes its own Buddha nature is said to be like clear space – it is empty and all-pervasive but also vividly aware.

There is a hopefulness to the human spirit that will just not accept no for an answer.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

We do not get lots of realizations in our lives as much as we get the same ones over and over.

The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.

When Jack was returning to America from his years in Thailand, he sought out an elderly Western monk and asked him if he had any advice about being back in the West. “Only one thing,” said the monk. “When you’re running to catch the subway and you see it leaving without you, don’t panic, just remember, ‘There’s always another train.

The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.

Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.

The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.