Sag Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor, Mystic, New Bedford, Nantucket, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard.

You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone. What then is a Master for? To make you see the uselessness of having one. Anthony de Mello.

It’s like I can hum a few bars but I have forgotten most of the words. I can’t stand in line at the grocery and carry on a normal conversation if it gets much past the weather.

It’s very simple: If Buddhism is about awakening, people should be waking up. If it’s not about awakening, they should change the name.

When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self. that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion.

Karma and hell and suffering aren’t things in their own right but disturbances in this flimsy substance of false self. The problem isn’t in the disturbing things but in the thing disturbed. The thing disturbed is the false thing and if it weren’t there, there’d be nothing to be disturbed. Nothing to get pierced or burned or dried out. Nothing to be wounded or slain.

What do we know for sure? That’s the real question. That’s what the cogito is. That’s what solipsism is. This isn’t theory. This isn’t belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It’s all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It’s truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.

Try to take it one step at a time. Even looking two steps ahead can be very intimidating, know what I mean? Breathe more deeply, drink more water, meditate more often. Take it easy. You’re not struggling to climb from hell into heaven, you’re just having an in-the-body experience. It’s not evil, it’s just life, and when it’s over, you die; easy as falling off a log.

Who we think we are can be stripped away forever,” I make a poof gesture, “just like that. Right now, well fed, unthreatened, we have the luxury of pretending the Donners and the Nazis and the gang-bangers are someone else, but they’re not. They’re us; a veil’s breadth away. There are no good guys and bad guys. People are people, all the same; only the circumstances change.

The belief that something is wrong is the fire under the ass of humanity,” is how I explain it to Sarah.